Bewilderment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Laozi’s elliptical poems made no logical sense. He deliberately confused his readers by pelting them with paradox. He told them that the sublime was nameless, and yet a few lines later he said that the “named” and the “nameless” came from the same source. The sage ruler was supposed to hold these contradictions in his heart and become aware of the inadequacy of his ordinary thought processes. Laozi’s chapters were not speculations, but points for meditation. He wrote down only the conclusions, and did not trace the steps that led to these insights, because the sage ruler had to journey down the Way by himself, going from the manifest to the unseen, and finally to the darkest of the dark. He could not achieve these insights at second hand, relying on other people’s reports of the Way. The Chinese had their own form of yoga (zuo-wang), which taught them to shut out the outside world and close down their ordinary modes of perception. Zhuangzi had called this “forgetting,” the discarding of knowledge. Laozi occasionally referred to these yogic disciplines,34 but did not describe them in any detail; they were, however, essential to the mystical process he outlined. The only way the reader could evaluate his conclusions was to make the journey. Laozi often called the unseen reality “the Void,” because it could not be defined, a name that suggested an emptiness that the busy yu wei mind feared. Our nature abhors a vacuum, and we fill our minds with ideas, words, and thoughts that seem to be full of life but take us nowhere. In the Daodejing, however, the Void is also called the Womb of all being, because it brings forth new life.35 Laozi’s images of the Void, the Valley, and the Hollow all speak of something that is not there. Besides pointing to the indescribable mystery of being, they also point to the kenosis of the wu wei mind, once the ego has been lost. There must be a void in the being of the sage ruler. In the trance of meditation, he could experience the “emptiness” that, according to Laozi, was a return to the authentic humanity that people had enjoyed before they were infected by civilization, which had introduced a false artifice into human life. By interfering with nature, human beings had lost their Way. While other creatures kept to the Way designed for them, humans had separated themselves from their dao by constant, busy yu wei reflection: they made distinctions that did not exist, and formulated solemn principles of action that were simply egotistical projections. Laozi agreed with Zhuangzi about this. When the sage trained himself to lay aside these mental habits, he could return to his original nature, and get back on the right path. I do my utmost to attain emptiness; I hold firmly to stillness. The myriad creatures all rise together And I watch their return. The teeming creatures All return to their separate roots.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  This was an image of the unenlightened human condition in which it was impossible to see the forms directly. We were so conditioned by our deprived circumstances that we took these ephemeral shadows for true reality. If we were liberated from this captivity we would be dazzled and bewildered by the brilliant sunlight and vibrant existence of the world outside the cave. It would probably be too much for us, and we would want to go back to our familiar twilight existence. So, Socrates explained, the ascent to the light must take place gradually. The sunlight symbolized the Good. Just as physical light enabled us to see clearly, so the Good was the source of true knowledge. When, like the liberated prisoners, we saw the Good, we perceived what was really there. The sun enabled things to grow and flourish; like the Good, it was the cause of being and thus lay beyond anything that we experienced in ordinary life. At the end of its long initiation, the illuminated soul would be able to see the Good as clearly as ordinary people see the sun. But even this was not the end of the journey. The liberated men probably wanted to stay outside and bask in the sunlight—just as the Buddha wanted to luxuriate in the peace of nibbana— but they had a duty to go back to the darkness of the cave to help their comrades. “Therefore each of you in turn must go down to live in the common dwelling place of the others,” Socrates insisted. “You’ll see vastly better than the people there. And because you’ve seen the truth about fine, just, and good things, you’ll know each image for what it is.” 90 They would probably get a hostile reception. They would now be bewildered by the darkness; their former companions might laugh at them and tell them that they were deluded. How could an enlightened man “compete again with the perpetual prisoners in recognizing the shadows”? 91 The captives might even turn on their liberators and kill them, just as, Plato implied, the Athenians had executed the historical Socrates. The parable of the cave was an integral part of Plato’s political description of the ideal republic. He always came back to the practical application of his ideals, and the shadows on the wall, besides depicting the impoverished vision of the unenlightened, also expressed the ephemeral illusions of contemporary politics, which relied on coercion and self-serving fantasies. In The Republic, Plato wanted to show that justice was rational, and that people could live in the way that they should only if they were brought up in a decent society, where the rulers were governed by reason.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  "(I may here state that the word 'Ishmaral' seemed to haunt my other hallucinations, for I remember that I heard it frequently there after.) I next enjoyed a sort of metempsychosis. Any animal or thing that I thought of could be made the being which held my mind. I thought of a fox, and instantly I was transformed into that animal. I could distinctly feel myself a fox, could see my long ears and bushy tail, and by a sort of introvision felt that my complete anatomy was that of a fox. Suddenly the point of vision changed. My eyes seemed to be located at the back of my mouth; I looked out between the parted lips, saw the two rows of pointed teeth, and, closing my mouth with a snap, saw—nothing. "I was next transformed into a bombshell, felt my size, weight, and thickness, and experienced the sensation of being shot up out of a giant mortar, looking down upon the earth, bursting and falling back in a shower of iron fragments. "Into countless other objects was I transformed, many of them so absurd that I am unable to conceive what suggested them. For example, I was a little china doll, deep down in a bottle of olive oil, next moment a stick of twisted candy, then a skeleton inclosed in a whirling coffin, and so on ad infinitum. "Towards the end of the delirium the whirling images appeared again, and I was haunted by a singular creation of the brain, which reappeared every few moments. It was an image of a double-faced doll, with a cylindrical body running down to a point like a peg-top. It was always the same, having a sort of crown on its head, and painted in two colors, green and brown, on a background of blue. The expression of the Janus-like profiles was always the same, as were the adornments of the body. After recovering from the effects of the drug I could not picture to myself exactly how this singular monstrosity appeared, but in subsequent experiences I was always visited by this phantom, and always recognized every detail of its composition. It was like visiting some long-forgotten spot and seeing some sight that had faded from the memory, but which appeared perfectly familiar as soon as looked upon. "The effects of the drug lasted about an hour and a half, leaving me a trifle tipsy and dizzy; but after a ten-hour sleep I was myself again, save for a slight inability to keep my mind fixed on any piece of work for any length of time, which remained with me during most of the next day." THE NEURAL PROCESS IN HALLUCINATION.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The Warring States period had shown what happened when ambitious rulers with new weapons and large armies competed against one another pitilessly for dominance, devastating the countryside and terrorizing the population in the process. Contemplating this chronic warfare, Mencius had longed for a king who would rule “all under Heaven” and bring peace to the great plain of China. The ruler who had been powerful enough to achieve this was the First Emperor. a In this chapter, I have used the Pinyin method of Romanizing the Chinese script; I have given the Wade-Giles version as an alternative in cases when this form may be more familiar to a Western audience. b Tao Te Ching in the Wade-Giles system. 4 The Hebrew Dilemma When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, they probably did not fall into a state of original sin, as Saint Augustine believed, but into an agrarian economy. 1 Man (adam) had been created from the soil (adamah), which in the Garden of Eden was watered by a simple spring. Adam and his wife were free agents, living a life of idyllic liberty, cultivating the garden at their leisure, and enjoying the companionship of their god, Yahweh. But because of a single act of disobedience, Yahweh condemned them both to a life sentence of hard agricultural labor: Accursed be the soil because of you! With suffering shall you get your food from it every day of your life. It shall yield you brambles and thistles, and you shall eat wild plants. With sweat on your brow shall you eat your bread, until you return to the soil as you were taken from it. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return. 2 Instead of peacefully nurturing the soil as its master, Adam had become its slave. From the very beginning, the Hebrew Bible strikes a different note from most of the texts we have considered so far. Its heroes were not members of an aristocratic elite; Adam and Eve had been relegated to mere field hands, scratching a miserable subsistence from the blighted land. Adam had two sons: Cain, the farmer, and Abel, the herdsman—the traditional enemy of the agrarian state. Both dutifully brought offerings to Yahweh, who somewhat perversely rejected Cain’s sacrifice but accepted Abel’s. Baffled and furious, Cain lured his brother into the family plot and killed him, his arable land becoming a field of blood that cried out to Yahweh for vengeance. “Damned be you from the soil, which opened up its mouth to receive your brother’s blood!” 3 Yahweh cried. Henceforth Cain would wander in the land of Nod as an outcast and fugitive. From the start, the Hebrew Bible condemns the violence at the heart of the agrarian state.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  In the workshop of sacrifice, he had put together the daiva atman (divine self), which would live on after his death. By performing the rituals correctly, with the knowledge of the bandhus firmly in his mind, the warrior could rebuild his own purusha (person). The Brahmin priests “make the person, consisting of the sacrifices, made of ritual actions,” explained the ritualist. 81 The rites of passage also built up the human being. An Aryan boy had to undergo the upanayana that initiated him into the study of the Veda and the sacrificial procedure, or he would never be able to build a fully realized atman. Only married men could commission a ritual, and begin the process of self-building, so marriage was another rite of passage for both men and women (who could attend the sacrifice only in the company of their husbands). After a person’s death, the corpse resembled the exhausted Prajapati and had to be reconstructed by means of the correct funeral rites. 82 But the system did not work automatically. Unless a person was proficient in ritual science, he would be lost in the next world. He would not be able to recognize the “divine self” that he had created during his lifetime, nor would he know which of the heavenly realms he should go to. “Bewildered by the cremation fire, choked with smoke, he does not recognize his own world. But he who knows, he, indeed, having left this world, knows the atman, saying: ‘This am I’ and he recognizes his own world. And now the fire carries him to the heavenly world.” 83 The phrase “he who knows” beats insistently through the Brahmana texts. The priests could not do all the work. The kshatriya and vaishya sacrificer also had to be proficient in liturgical lore, because knowledge alone could unlock the powers of the rites. The liturgy created by the reformers must have been spiritually satisfying, or the Brahmins never could have persuaded the warriors to give up their war games. It is difficult for us to appreciate the aesthetic, transformative power of these rites, because we have only the flat statements of the Brahmanas. Before the rite, the sacrificer made a retreat that isolated him from the pressing concerns of his ordinary life; the fasting, meditation, and asceticism, the intoxication of the soma drink, and the beauty of the chant would all have given emotional resonance to the dry, abstract instructions of the ritualists. To read the Brahmanas without the experience of the liturgy is like reading the libretto of an opera without hearing the music. The “knowledge” of ritual science was not a notional acceptance of the metaphysical speculations of the Brahmins, but was like the insights derived from art, achieved by the compelling drama of the cult.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  But the region was changing. Alexander and his successors founded new cities in the Near East, which became centers of Hellenistic learning and culture: Alexandria in Egypt, Antioch in Syria, and Pergamum in Asia Minor. These were Greek poleis, which usually excluded the native inhabitants and were built on a scale never seen before in the Hellenic world. This was the cosmopolis, the “world city.” It was a great age of migration. Greeks no longer felt wedded to the small city-state of their birth. Alexander’s heroic expedition had expanded their horizons, and many now felt that they were cosmopolitans, citizens of the world. Greeks became world travelers, as merchants, mercenaries, and ambassadors, and many began to find the polis petty and provincial. Some founded new poleis in the Near East. Alexander had settled Macedonians in Samerina, and later Greek colonists also arrived in Syria and converted such ancient cities as Gaza, Shechem, Marissa, and Amman into poleis on the Hellenic model. Greek soldiers, merchants, and entrepreneurs settled in these Greek enclaves to take advantage of the new opportunities. The local people who learned to speak and write in Greek became “Hellenes” themselves, and were allowed to enter the lower ranks of the army and administration. Hence there developed a clash of civilizations. Some of the locals were fascinated by Greek culture. Others were horrified by the secular tenor of polis life, the immoral activities of the Greek gods, and the spectacle of youths exercising naked in the gymnasia. Jews were divided in their response to the Greeks. In Alexandria, the Ptolemies refused to admit Egyptians to the gymnasium, but did allow foreigners to enter, so local Jews trained there and would achieve a unique fusion of Greek and Jewish culture. In Jerusalem, which was more conservative, two factions developed. One was led by the Tobiad clan, descendants of the Tobiah who had caused Nehemiah so much trouble. They felt at home in the Greek world, and became pioneers of the new ideas in Jerusalem. But others found this foreign influence extremely threatening, clung defensively to the old traditions, and gravitated toward the Oniads, a priestly family who were determined to maintain the old laws and customs. The third century is a shadowy period in the history of Jerusalem, but it seems that at this time the tension between the two camps remained under control. Later, however, after the end of the Axial Age, there was serious conflict, when some Jews tried to convert Jerusalem itself into a polis called “Antioch in Judea.” These turbulent years affected the history of Jerusalem in another way.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The Milesians had based their philosophy on their observation of such phenomena as water and air. But Parmenides did not trust the evidence of the senses, and relied, with remarkable, ruthless consistency, on a purely reasoned argument. He cultivated the habit of “second-order thinking,” reflection upon the thought processes themselves. Like many of the Axial sages, he had arrived at a new, critical awareness of the limitations of human knowledge. Parmenides had also embarked on the philosophical quest for pure existence. Instead of contemplating individual creatures, he was trying to put his finger on quintessential being. But in the process, he created a world in which it was impossible to live. Why would anybody undertake any course of action, if change and movement were illusory? His disciple Melissus was a naval commander: How was he supposed to guide his moving ship? How should we evaluate the physical changes that we note within ourselves? Were human beings really phantoms? By divesting the cosmos of qualities, Parmenides had also deprived it of heart. Human beings do not respond to the world with logos alone; we are also emotional creatures, with a complex subconscious life. By ignoring this and cultivating his rational powers exclusively, Parmenides had discovered a void: there was nothing to think about. Increasingly, as philosophers of the Axial Age practiced sustained logical reflection, the world became unfamiliar and human beings appeared strange to themselves. Yet pure, unflinching logos could work brilliantly in the world of affairs. At the beginning of the fifth century it inspired a naval victory that epitomized the new Greek spirit. In 499 Athens and Eritrea had unwisely sent help to Miletus, which had rebelled against Persian rule. Darius quashed the rebellion, sacked Miletus, and then turned his attention to its allies on the mainland. The Athenians had little conception of the power of the Persian empire, and probably did not realize what they had taken on. But they had no option now but to prepare for war. In 493, Themistocles, a general from one of the less prominent Athenian families, was elected magistrate, and persuaded the Areopagus Council to build a fleet.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  We see this clearly in the Mahabharata, the great epic of India. 62 The story is set in the Kuru-Panchala region during the period of the Brahmanas, before the rise of the state systems, but the oral transmission of the epic started in about 500 ; it was not committed to writing until the first centuries of the common era, when it achieved its final form. The Mahabharata is, therefore, a complex, multilayered text, an anthology of many strands of tradition. The general outline of the story, however, had probably been established by the end of the fourth century. Unlike the defining texts of the Axial Age, which were composed in priestly and renouncer circles, the epic reflects the ethos of the kshatriya warrior class. The religious revolution of the Axial Age left them with a perplexing dilemma. How could a king or warrior who admired the ideal of ahimsa become reconciled with his vocation, which demanded that he fight and kill in order to defend his community? The duties of each class were sacred. Each had its own inviolable dharma, a divinely ordained way of life. A Brahmin’s duty was to become expert in Vedic lore; the kshatriya was responsible for law, order, and defense; and the vaishya had to devote his energies to the production of wealth. The renouncers depended on the support of the warriors and merchants, who gave them the alms, food, and security that enabled them to dedicate themselves full-time to the religious quest. Yet in order to carry out their duties successfully, kings, warriors, and merchants were compelled to behave in ways that were—in Buddhist parlance—“unskillful” or even downright sinful. To perform successfully in the marketplace, vaishyas had to be ambitious, to want worldly goods, and to compete aggressively with their rivals, and this “desire” bound them inexorably to the cycle of death and rebirth. But the kshatriya ’s vocation was especially problematic. During a military campaign, he was sometimes forced to be economical with the truth or even to tell lies. He might have to betray former friends and allies, and to kill innocent people. None of these activities was compatible with the yogic ethos, which demanded nonviolence and a strict adherence to truth at all times. The kshatriya could only hope to become a monk in his next life, but given the nature of his daily karma, it seemed unlikely that he could achieve even this limited goal. Was there no hope? The Mahabharata agonized over these questions, but could find no satisfactory solution.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Why should he, a pupil of Peter, record the Lord’s severe rebuke to Peter (Mark 8:27–33), but fail to mention from Matthew 16:16–23 the preceding remarkable laudation: "Thou art Rock, and upon this rock I will build my church?" Why should Luke omit the greater part of the sermon on the Mount, and all the appearances of the risen Lord in Galilee? Why should he ignore the touching anointing scene in Bethany, and thus neglect to aid in fulfilling the Lord’s prediction that this act of devotion should be spoken of as a memorial of Mary "wheresoever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world (Matt. 26:13; Mark 14:9)? Why should he, the pupil and companion of Paul, fail to record the adoration of the Magi, the story of the woman of Canaan, and the command to evangelize the Gentiles, so clearly related by Matthew, the Evangelist of the Jews (Matt. 2:1–12; 15:21–28; 24:14; 28:19)? Why should Luke and Matthew give different genealogies of Christ, and even different reports of the model prayer of our Lord, Luke omitting (beside the doxology, which is also wanting in the best MSS. of Matthew) the petition, "Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth," and the concluding petition, "but deliver us from evil" (or "the evil one"), and substituting "sins" for "debts," and "Father" for "Our Father who art in heaven"? Why should all three Synoptists differ even in the brief and official title on the Cross, and in the words of institution of the Lord’s Supper, where Paul, writing in 57, agrees with Luke, referring to a revelation from the Lord (1 Cor. 11:23)? Had the Synoptists seen the work of the others, they could easily have harmonized these discrepancies and avoided the appearance of contradiction. To suppose that they purposely varied to conceal plagiarism is a moral impossibility. We can conceive no reasonable motive of adding a third Gospel to two already known to the writer, except on the ground of serious defects, which do not exist (certainly not in Matthew and Luke as compared with Mark), or on the ground of a presumption which is inconsistent with the modest tone and the omission of the very name of the writers. These difficulties are felt by the ablest advocates of the borrowing hypothesis, and hence they call to aid one or several pre-canonical Gospels which are to account for the startling discrepancies and signs of independence, whether in omissions or additions or arrangement. But these pre-canonical Gospels, with the exception of the lost Hebrew Matthew, are as fictitious as the Syro-Chaldaic Urevangelium of Eichhorn, and have been compared to the epicycles of the old astronomers, which were invented to sustain the tottering hypothesis of cycles.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  The first principle of crisis communications is that if you have bad news to divulge, you do it quickly and completely. HubSpot did the opposite. The vague press release, the handpicked journalist, the refusal to say what happened—this all reeked of a cover-up and raised a bigger question: Why had HubSpot executives gone to such extreme lengths to obtain the book in the first place? Was there some dark secret that HubSpot didn’t want people to know about? For a few days, the story remained front-page news. I was deluged with calls and emails from reporters. Kirsner entreated me to talk to him, writing, “You are missing the greatest publicity opportunity of all time.” Friends started calling, too, wanting to know what happened. The problem was I had no idea. All I knew was what HubSpot had said in its press release, which wasn’t much. I didn’t respond to any of the reporters. I figured it was best to just keep quiet and hope that eventually the facts would come out. HubSpot alumni have a Facebook page, and oddly enough, sentiment there was that Volpe was a great guy and should not have been fired, and that I was a jerk for writing a “tell-all” book. The company’s own board of directors had fired Volpe and “notified appropriate legal authorities” yet these people simply refused to believe this could be true. They had left the company but still remained brainwashed. Someone started a #teamvolpe hashtag thread on Twitter, trying to gin up support for this disgraced executive, but only about a dozen people posted tweets taking his side. Among those who expressed support for Volpe was Dharmesh Shah, who posted messages on Twitter and LinkedIn saying in essence that Volpe was a good person who had done a bad thing. Kirsner, the chummy columnist who interviewed Halligan and Shah for the Globe , posted a tweet that seemed sympathetic to Volpe: “Q for you: if an employee had signed a confidentiality agreement, then wrote a book about your co, would you try to prevent its publication?” The stuff about a confidentiality agreement was a smokescreen. HubSpot requires new hires to sign a document saying you can’t divulge trade secrets or confidential information, but my book doesn’t contain any of those. For that matter, people write books about their work experience all the time. Focusing on a confidentiality agreement was an attempt to distract attention from the real issue, which was that a set of top executives at a publicly traded company had done something that their own board thought might rise to the level of criminal behavior. HubSpot wasn’t the first tech company to get caught doing something ugly. In 2006 Hewlett-Packard was discovered to have spied on reporters. The scandal led to the resignation of Hewlett-Packard’s board chairman and general counsel, and to hearings before Congress where people invoked the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  Across the ranks of ordinary employees, as far as I can see there are zero black people. The first time I go to an all-hands company meeting I’m taken aback: It’s an ocean of white people, all of them young. It’s not just that everyone is white, but that they’re all the same kind of white. Klan rallies probably comprise a broader swath of the Caucasian population. It’s like stumbling into some weird eugenics lab, where people get hatched from pods, already dressed in J.Crew, Banana Republic, and North Face. The women have the same shoulder-length haircut, and when it rains they all show up in knee-high Hunter boots. The guys are former jocks and frat bros, with buzz cuts, salmon-colored shorts, backward baseball caps, and boat shoes. It’s like a reunion of the Greek system from some small college in New England. It’s like Cape Cod has barfed up all of its summer inhabitants under the age of thirty, and they’ve landed in the same building in Kendall Square, still wearing their Black Dog Tavern T-shirts. From what I can tell, HubSpot employs a handful of fifty-something people, a slightly larger number of people in their forties, a few dozen people in their thirties, and then that huge army of twenty-somethings. Later I will be told by a fellow HubSpot alumnus, a guy in his late thirties, that when he left HubSpot the company had seven hundred employees, only seventy-five of whom were over the age of thirty-five. “Young people are just smarter,” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg once said, when he was twenty-two years old. No doubt after that someone coached him not to say things like that anymore. But it hasn’t changed his hiring preferences. In 2013, the average Facebook employee was twenty-eight years old, according to PayScale. Out of thirty-two tech companies surveyed by PayScale, eight had a median age under thirty and only six had a median age above thirty-five, the New York Times reported, in an article headlined, TECHNOLOGY WORKERS ARE YOUNG (REALLY YOUNG). “Silicon Valley has become one of the most ageist places in America,” Noam Scheiber proclaimed in a March 2014 article in the New Republic , aptly titled THE BRUTAL AGEISM OF TECH . The article introduces a San Francisco cosmetic surgeon who claims to be “the world’s second biggest dispenser of Botox,” and describes the plight of forty-year-old men who desperately seek out cosmetic surgery so they can hang on to their jobs. WE WANT PEOPLE WHO HAVE THEIR BEST WORK AHEAD OF THEM, NOT BEHIND THEM , reads a technology job advertisement Scheiber cites. The tech industry’s ageism is blatant and unapologetic. It’s wrapped up in the mythology that has sprung up around start-ups. Almost by definition these companies are founded and run by young people. Young people are the ones who change the world. They’re filled with passion. They have new ideas. Venture capitalists openly admit they prefer to invest in twenty-something founders.

• From A History of Christianity (1976)

  evidence of a Jesus-cult which did not have the sanction of Pope Martin V but of the anti-Pope Calixtus. We are not surprised to learn that one of the judges who originally condemned her, Jean le Fèvre, was also a judge at her rehabilitation; or that Thomas de Courcelles, who advised that she be tortured during her interrogation, was promoted to be Dean of Notre Dame the year she was cleared and lived to preach the funeral panygyric on her hero-Dauphin, Charles VII. Because the Christian society was total it had to be compulsory; and because it was compulsory it had no alternative but to declare war on its dissentients. Thus in the later Middle Ages it was weighed down by the multiplicity of its enemies. If Joachim was an ‘acceptable’ prophet, he was soon saddled with a mass of interpretations and commentaries which became the small-change of rustic millenarians and village charismatics. It was a feature of medieval prophecy that ‘sleeping’ kings or emperors would awake, and either restore harmony or rampage, depending on whether you believed the Pope was the vicar of Christ or Antichrist himself. Men claiming to be Arthur or Charlemagne or the first Latin emperor of Constantinople, or the Emperor Frederick II, appeared, raised a following, were hunted down, then hanged or burned. Disproof by events seems to have done nothing to shake men’s belief in prophecy; crucial years came and went – 1260, 1290, 1305, 1335, 1350, 1360, 1400, 1415, 1500, 1535; nothing happened as foretold, but still men believed. Many of these pretenders produced elaborate social manifestos, with an egalitarian or distributive object. Most began, or ended, in anti-clericalism. Religious hysteria expressed itself in almost every imaginable form of outrageous behaviour. Self-flagellation, for instance, had been a feature of certain sophisticated pagan sects absorbed into Christianity in the fourth century. We hear of it breaking out in eleventh-century Italy, then, on a huge scale, in the second half of the thirteenth century, after which it spread all over Europe and became endemic. The flagellants marched in procession, led by priests, with banners and candles, and moved from town to town, parading before the parish church, and lashing themselves for hours on end. The German flagellants, with their rituals, hymns and uniforms, were particularly ferocious: they used leather scourges with iron spikes; if a woman or a priest appeared, the ritual was spoiled and had to be started again; it culminated in the reading of a ‘heavenly letter’, after which spectators dipped pieces of cloth in the blood and treasured them as relics. The Church was ambivalent towards flagellants. In 1384 Clement VI had encouraged public flagellation in Avignon: hundreds of

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Everything in the world has a name, but Laozi was speaking of what was beyond the mundane and more fundamental than anything we could conceive: it was, therefore, nameless and unseen. But most people were unaware of this hidden dimension. It could be known only by the person who had rid himself forever of desire. Somebody who had never eliminated desire from his mind and heart could see only the manifestation of this nameless reality—the visible, phenomenal world. The unseen and the manifest, however, were both rooted in a still deeper level of being, the secret essence of all things, the “Mystery upon mystery.” What should we call this? Perhaps, Laozi concluded, we should call it the Dark, to remind ourselves of its profound obscurity: “the gateway of the manifold secrets!”32 Laozi revealed ever deeper tiers of reality, as though he were peeling the layers of an onion. Before he could begin his quest, the sage ruler had to understand the inadequacy of language; just as he thought that he had glimpsed the unseen, he was made aware of a still deeper mystery. Next, he was warned that this knowledge was not a matter of acquiring privileged information; it demanded the kenosis upon which all the great Axial sages insisted. He had to give up the “desire” that constantly clamors “I want!” Even when he had realized this, he was still only at the “gateway” of the final mystery. In placing the Way at the center of his vision, Laozi emphasized the fluidity of the spiritual life; the goal was hidden and inaccessible, and the path always had a fresh twist or turn, constantly urged us further, at the same time as it receded into the distance: There is a thing confusedly formed, Born before heaven and earth, Silent and void It stands alone and does not change, Goes round and does not weary. It is capable of being the mother of the world. I know not its name So I style it “the way.” I give it the makeshift name of “the great.” Being great, it is further described as receding.33 There was insouciance in Laozi’s attempt to name this elusive, recessive “thing” to which he would give only a “makeshift” name. We could not talk about this “thing,” but if we modeled ourselves upon it, it became—somehow—known to us.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Like the Milesians, Samkhya analyzed the cosmos into separate component parts, looked back to the very beginning, and described a process of evolution that brought our world into being. But there the resemblance ended. Where the Greek philosophers were oriented to the external world, Samkhya delved within. Where the Milesians still claimed that “the world is full of gods,” Samkhya was an atheistic philosophy. There was no brahman, no apeiron, and no world soul into which everything would merge. The supreme reality of the Samkhya system was purusha (the “person” or “self”). But the purusha of Samkhya was nothing like the Purusha figure in the Rig Veda, and was quite different from the self (atman) sought by the sages of the Upanishads. Unlike any of the other twenty-four categories of the Samkhya world, the purusha was absolute and not subject to change. But purusha was not a single, unique reality. In fact, the purusha was bewilderingly multiple. Every single human being had his or her own individual and eternal purusha, which was not caught up in samsara, the ceaseless round of death and rebirth, and which existed beyond space and time. Like the atman, purusha was impossible to define because it had no qualities that we could recognize. It was the essence of the human being, but was not the “soul,” because it had nothing to do with our mental or psychological states. Purusha had no intelligence, as we know it, and no desires. It was so far from our normal experience that our ordinary waking selves were not even aware that we had an eternal purusha. At the very beginning, purusha had somehow become entangled with prakrti, “nature.” This word is also difficult to translate. It did not simply refer to the material, visible world, because prakrti included the mind, the intellect, and the psychomental experience that unenlightened human beings regard as the most spiritual part of themselves. As long as we were confined within the realm of prakrti, we remained in ignorance of the eternal dimension of our humanity. But purusha and prakrti were not enemies. “Nature,” depicted as female, was in love with purusha. Her job was to extricate each person’s purusha from her embrace, even if this required humans to turn against what, in their ignorance, they regarded as their true selves.82 Nature yearned to liberate us, to free the purusha from the toils of illusion and suffering that characterize human life. Indeed, the whole of nature—did we but know it—existed in order to serve the eternal self (purusha) of each one of us. “From brahman down to the blade of grass, the whole of creation is for the benefit of the purusha, until supreme knowledge is attained.”83

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  It was called Samkhya (“discrimination”), though originally the word may simply have meant “reflection” or “discussion.” Samkhya would become extremely influential in India. Almost every single school of philosophy and spirituality would adopt at least some of its ideas—even those which disapproved of Samkhya. Yet, despite its importance, we know very little about the origins of this seminal movement. A sixth-century sage called Kapila was credited with the invention of Samkhya, but we know nothing about him, and cannot even be sure that he actually existed. Like the Milesians, Samkhya analyzed the cosmos into separate component parts, looked back to the very beginning, and described a process of evolution that brought our world into being. But there the resemblance ended. Where the Greek philosophers were oriented to the external world, Samkhya delved within. Where the Milesians still claimed that “the world is full of gods,” Samkhya was an atheistic philosophy. There was no brahman, no apeiron, and no world soul into which everything would merge. The supreme reality of the Samkhya system was purusha (the “person” or “self”). But the purusha of Samkhya was nothing like the Purusha figure in the Rig Veda, and was quite different from the self ( atman ) sought by the sages of the Upanishads. Unlike any of the other twenty-four categories of the Samkhya world, the purusha was absolute and not subject to change. But purusha was not a single, unique reality. In fact, the purusha was bewilderingly multiple. Every single human being had his or her own individual and eternal purusha, which was not caught up in samsara, the ceaseless round of death and rebirth, and which existed beyond space and time. Like the atman, purusha was impossible to define because it had no qualities that we could recognize. It was the essence of the human being, but was not the “soul,” because it had nothing to do with our mental or psychological states. Purusha had no intelligence, as we know it, and no desires. It was so far from our normal experience that our ordinary waking selves were not even aware that we had an eternal purusha. At the very beginning, purusha had somehow become entangled with prakrti, “nature.” This word is also difficult to translate. It did not simply refer to the material, visible world, because prakrti included the mind, the intellect, and the psychomental experience that unenlightened human beings regard as the most spiritual part of themselves. As long as we were confined within the realm of prakrti, we remained in ignorance of the eternal dimension of our humanity.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  These turbulent years affected the history of Jerusalem in another way. There had been very few rebellions against imperial Persia. The Persian kings had propagated the myth that they had inherited an empire that would last forever: it had been inaugurated by the Assyrians, had then passed to the Babylonians, and finally, to Cyrus. Any revolt was, therefore, doomed. But as the people of the Near East watched the diadochoi battling for control of the region, one succeeding another, their mood changed. The world had been turned upside down, and some Jews began to entertain hopes of independence under their own messiach. When in 201 the Ptolemies were ousted from Judea by the Seleucids, these hopes flared again. The behavior of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV in the second century resulted in a surge of Jewish apocalyptic passion, which drew on the ancient theology of the Davidic monarchy. But this messianic piety had no roots in the Axial Age, and took Judaism in a different, post-Axial direction. Alexander had won his empire at the peak of Greek intellectual achievement and his career marked the beginning of a new era. After his death, some poleis on the Greek mainland, including Athens, revolted against Macedonian rule, and Antipater, one of the six original diadochoi, took savage reprisals. This finished Athenian democracy. As Greek migrants and colonists settled in the new territories, Greek civilization began to merge with the cultures of the east. Scholars of the nineteenth century called this fusion “Hellenism.” The challenge of this encounter was enriching, but in the process the intensity of the Greek experiment became diluted. Spread thinly over such a huge, foreign area, it fragmented and became Greekish rather than truly Greek. Any period of major social change is troubled. The collapse of the old order and the inevitable political disruption were disturbing.58 There was widespread bewilderment and malaise. Personal and political autonomy had always been crucial to the Greeks’ sense of identity, but now their world had expanded so dramatically that people felt that their destiny was controlled by vast impersonal forces.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Every year at the City Dionysia, the polis put itself on stage. The playwrights often chose subjects that reflected recent events, but usually presented them in a mythical setting that distanced them from the contemporary scene and enabled the audience to analyze and reflect upon the issues. The festival was a communal meditation, during which the audience worked through their problems and predicament. All male citizens were obliged to attend; even prisoners were released for the duration of the festival. As in the Panathenaea, Athens was on show; the City Dionysia was a mighty demonstration of civic pride. Member cities of the league sent delegates and tribute; garlands were presented to outstanding citizens; children of soldiers who had died in the service of Athens marched in procession, armed for war. 89 But there was no facile chauvinism. The citizens assembled in the theater to weep. When the Greeks dramatized the myths that had always helped them to define their distinctive identity, they interrogated the certainties of the past and subjected traditional absolutes to stringent criticism. The tragedies also marked the internalization and deepening of ritual that characterized the spirituality of the Axial Age. The new genre may have originated in the secret mystery rites of Dionysus, when a chorus had recited the story of Dionysus’s sufferings in formal poetic language, while the leader stepped forward to explain its esoteric meaning, in a more colloquial style, to newcomers who had not yet been initiated. 90 But in the City Dionysia, the once-private rites were performed in public; they had been democratized, placed en mesoi. Over the years, new characters were introduced, who conversed with the leader of the chorus, giving a more dramatic immediacy to the proceedings. By the fifth century, the plays performed during the City Dionysia reflected the introspection of the Axial Age. They showed the well-known characters of myth—Agamemnon, Oedipus, Ajax, or Heracles—making an interior journey, struggling with complex choices, and facing up to the consequences. They displayed the new self-consciousness of the Axial Age, as the audience watched the mind of the protagonist turning in upon itself, meditating upon alternatives, and coming, tortuously, to a conclusion. And like the philosophers, the tragedians questioned everything: the nature of the gods, the value of Greek civilization, and the meaning of life. In the old days, nobody had subjected these stories to such radical scrutiny. Now the playwrights added to the original tales, embellished and changed them in order to explore the unprecedented perplexities that were emerging in the Hellenic world. In tragedy there was neither a simple answer nor a single viewpoint.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  Everything—human or divine—was somehow present in the body of Krishna, who filled space and included within himself all possible forms of deity: “howling storm gods, sun gods, bright gods, and gods of ritual.” But Krishna/Vishnu was also “man’s tireless spirit,” the essence of humanity.87 All things rushed toward him, as rivers roiled toward the sea and moths were drawn inexorably into a blazing flame. And there too Arjuna saw the Pandava and Kaurava warriors, all hurtling into the god’s blazing mouths. Arjuna had thought that he had known Krishna through and through, but now, “Who are you?” he cried in bewilderment. “I am Time grown old,” Krishna replied—time, which set the world in motion and also annihilated it. Krishna/Vishnu was eternal; he transcended the historical process. As destroyer, Krishna/Vishnu had already annihilated the armies that were apparently drawing up their battle lines, even though, from Arjuna’s human perspective, the fighting had not even begun. The outcome was fixed and immutable. In order to keep the cosmos in being, one age must succeed another. The war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas would bring the heroic era to an end, and inaugurate a new historical epoch. “Even without you,” Krishna told Arjuna, “all these warriors arrayed in hostile ranks will cease to exist.” They are already Killed by me. Be just my instrument, The archer at my side.88 Arjuna, therefore, must go into the battle, and play the role allotted to him in restoring dharma to the world. It was a perplexing vision. Krishna’s teaching seemed to absolve human beings of any responsibility for the carnage they committed. Too many politicians and warriors have insisted that they were simply the instruments of destiny, and used this to justify horrendous acts. But few have emptied themselves of the desire for personal gain that, Krishna insisted, was essential. Only the disciplined action of the warrior-yogin could bring order to a destructive world. Krishna seemed pitiless, and yet, he told Arjuna, he was a savior god, who could rescue those who loved him from the ill effects of their karma. Only people of bhakti could see Krishna’s true nature, and this devotion required complete self-surrender: Acting only for me, intent on me, Free from attachment, Hostile to no creature, Arjuna, A man of devotion can come to me.89 Detachment and indifference were the first steps toward the union with God, which could save human beings from all the suffering of life.90

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The focus was no longer on the external performance of a rite, but on its interior significance. It was not sufficient simply to establish the connections ( bandhus ) between the ritual and the cosmos; you had to know what you were doing, and this knowledge would take you to the brahman, the ground of being. The worshiper no longer directed his attention to devas outside himself; he turned within, “for in reality each of these gods is his own creation, for he himself is all these gods.” 3 The focus of the Upanishads was the atman, the self, which was identical with the brahman. If the sage could discover the inner heart of his own being, he would automatically enter into the ultimate reality and liberate himself from the terror of mortality. To an outsider, this sounds frankly incredible—a series of abstract statements that are impossible to verify. And indeed, it is very difficult to follow the teachings of the Upanishads. 4 The sages did not give us rational demonstrations of their ideas. The texts have no system and the logic frequently seems bizarre. Instead of reasoned arguments, we have accounts of experiences and visions, aphorisms and riddles that are hard to penetrate. Certain phrases recur that clearly bear a weight of meaning that the Western reader cannot easily share. “This self is the brahman” —Ayam atma brahman— the sage tells us. “That is the teaching.” 5 The Chandogya is even more elliptical: “That you are!” the sage tells his son. Tat tvam asi. 6 These are the “great sayings” ( maha-vakyas ), but it is hard to see why we should accept them. Instead of developing an argument systematically, the sages often presented their audience with a string of apparently unrelated insights. Sometimes they preferred to give negative information, telling us what was not the case. Thus Yajnavalkya, the most important rishi in the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, refused to define what he meant by atman: About this self [atman], one can only say “not . . . not” [ neti . . . neti ]. He is ungraspable, for he cannot be grasped. He is undecaying, for he is not subject to decay. He has nothing sticking to him, for he does not stick to anything. He is not bound; yet he neither trembles in fear nor suffers injury. 7 Often a debate ends in one of the contestants falling silent, unable to proceed, and this gives us a clue. The sages are conducting a brahmodya, the contest in which the competitors tried to formulate the mystery of the brahman. The competition had always ended in silence, indicating that the reality lay beyond the grasp of speech and concepts.

• From The Great Transformation (2006)

  The treatise caused an uproar. In 432, the city passed a law that made it illegal to teach such impiety, and Protagoras and Anaxagoras were both expelled from Athens. But the new skepticism remained, eloquently expressed in the tragedies of Euripides, who constantly asked difficult questions about the gods: Did they exist? Were they good? If not, how could life have any meaning? He was strongly influenced by the Sophists. “Do you think there are gods in the heavens?” he wrote at about this time. “No, there is no such thing, unless someone is determined foolishly to stick with the old fairy tales. . . . Think for yourselves: don’t just take my word for it.”23 His personal experience cried out against the old theology. Tyrants killed and plundered, but they fared better than people who lived decent lives. His hero Heracles, son of Zeus, was driven mad by the goddess Hera, and in this divinely inspired frenzy murdered his wife and children. How could anybody accept such a deity? “Who could pray to such a god?” Heracles asked Theseus, king of Athens, at the end of the play. “These tales are simply the wretched myths of poets.”24 But Euripides did not completely reject the divine. By ruthlessly questioning the ancient stories, he was beginning to evolve a new theology. “The nous [mind] in each one of us is a god,” he maintained.25 In Trojan Women, he made the bereaved and defeated Hecuba, wife of Priam, pray to an unknown god: “O you who give the earth support and are by it supported, whoever you are, power beyond our knowledge, Zeus, be you stern law of nature or intelligence in man, to you I make my prayers; for you direct in the way of justice all mortal affairs, moving with noiseless tread.”26 In 431, Euripides’ Medea was presented at the City Dionysia. It told the story of the woman of Colchis who married Jason, helped him to find the golden fleece, but was then cruelly rejected by her husband. In revenge, she killed Jason’s new wife, his father, and—finally—the sons she had borne to Jason. But unlike former heroes, Medea was not acting under the orders of a god; she was driven by her own stringent logos. Arguing against her powerful maternal instincts, raising objections to her abominable plan only to demolish them, she realized that she could not truly punish Jason unless she murdered their boys. Reason was becoming a frightening tool. It could lead people to a spiritual and moral void, and, if skillfully used, it could find cogent reasons for cruel and perverse actions. Medea was too intelligent not to find the most effective revenge and too strong not to carry it out.27 She could have been a pupil of Gorgias.