Why do you think ancient religions are so committed to negating the worldy experience?

[Hedge90]

This question just keeps nagging at me. Both ancient Hinduism and Buddhism are very committed to the idea that people's mission in this reality is to check out of it. To awaken to its illusory nature, not just for the purpose of being able to experience it in a more level-headed way, not just for realising their inter-relatedness with others and thus to refrain from selfishness and harming others; but to really check out of it. In Buddhism the only reason for an enlightened soul to return to Samsara is to be a Bodhisattva and help new souls awaken.
Why do you think this is, and what changed with Christianity, which regards the world as God's perfect creation, which is perfectly aligned with the Divine plan?
Obviously, the first answer that comes to mind is that there are different cultural roots, but this doesn't seem satisfactory. Those who established the doctrines of this religion were both intellectually and spiritually highly developed men, who I assume have made their own realisations and conclusions, not just drew upon what had already been there.

[Lou Gold]

This question just keeps nagging at me. Both ancient Hinduism and Buddhism are very committed to the idea that people's mission in this reality is to check out of it. To awaken to its illusory nature, not just for the purpose of being able to experience it in a more level-headed way, not just for realising their inter-relatedness with others and thus to refrain from selfishness and harming others; but to really check out of it. In Buddhism the only reason for an enlightened soul to return to Samsara is to be a Bodhisattva and help new souls awaken.
Why do you think this is, and what changed with Christianity, which regards the world as God's perfect creation, which is perfectly aligned with the Divine plan?
Obviously, the first answer that comes to mind is that there are different cultural roots, but this doesn't seem satisfactory. Those who established the doctrines of this religion were both intellectually and spiritually highly developed men, who I assume have made their own realisations and conclusions, not just drew upon what had already been there.

I do not believe that ancient religions were committed to negating worldly experience, animism surely was not! The 'negation' seems to be associated with the rise of sedentary population density, the emergence of the city-state, and particularly difficult life in locales that were previously teeming with natural abundance. The tipping-point was traumatic ecological change that triggered a defensive adjustment as abundance shifted to scarcity.

[Eugene I]

It's the same in the traditional Christianity: the man is fallen and needs the divine intervention to be saved from the original sin/fall. "We know that the whole world lies under the control of the evil one" (John 5:19), "I have been evil from the day I was born; from the time I was conceived"(Psalm 51).

I guess there has been an intuition of perfection in humans from very early times and a sense that there is something wrong with the world and the men, they are somehow broken and do not match the standard of perfection. Life in ancient societies was full of suffering, brutality, wars, there was almost nothing most people could do to improve their lives, most of them were stuck in their social roles for the whole life with no improvements in personal lives and no seeming progress in the society. This psalm tells how people felt about life back in the ancient times:

"For all our days decline in Your fury; we finish our years with a sigh. The length of our days is seventy years— or eighty if we are strong — yet their pride is but labor and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away" (Psalm 90)

[Hedge90]

I do not believe that ancient religions were committed to negating worldly experience, animism surely was not! The 'negation' seems to be associated with the rise of sedentary population density, the emergence of the city-state, and particularly difficult life in locales that were previously teeming with natural abundance. The tipping-point was traumatic ecological change that triggered a defensive adjustment as abundance shifted to scarcity.

Yeah, I should've worded that better. I was only thinking of the ones that remain large to this day. Obviously ancient European paganism and animism were entirely different beasts.

[AshvinP]

This question just keeps nagging at me. Both ancient Hinduism and Buddhism are very committed to the idea that people's mission in this reality is to check out of it. To awaken to its illusory nature, not just for the purpose of being able to experience it in a more level-headed way, not just for realising their inter-relatedness with others and thus to refrain from selfishness and harming others; but to really check out of it. In Buddhism the only reason for an enlightened soul to return to Samsara is to be a Bodhisattva and help new souls awaken.
Why do you think this is, and what changed with Christianity, which regards the world as God's perfect creation, which is perfectly aligned with the Divine plan?
Obviously, the first answer that comes to mind is that there are different cultural roots, but this doesn't seem satisfactory. Those who established the doctrines of this religion were both intellectually and spiritually highly developed men, who I assume have made their own realisations and conclusions, not just drew upon what had already been there.

Hedge,

This is the topic I have also been exploring in my recent essays on "integral spiritual mythology", which generally encompasses all of the Eastern spiritual traditions, Egyptian-Persian-Hebrew, and Christianity (which is the final mythology in temporal terms, and I would argue in ideal content as well). I argue that the differences primarily stem from the human soul's changing relationship with the spiritual realms, which are reflected also in the changing relation of our perception to cognition. The spiritual which was once directly perceived from without has been, over the epochs, submerged into the collective subconscious of the individual soul and approaches us as desires, feelings, and thoughts from within. It is through the thinking cognitive element, of course, that we can even recognize any of this process occurring and come to know how it works deeply within ourselves. That is really at the core of the Christian mythology, along with the devotional, faithful, and loving commitment to the higher Thinking process which "saves the appearances" of the sense-world. These considerations simply could not exist in pre-4th epoch mythology.

That knowledge, along with remembrance of the fact that we are dealing with reality of living spiritual beings (who are now 'supersensible'), is, according to my argument, the only thing that can make sense of the good questions you ask above. In that sense, the physical world was illusory Maya in very ancient times, as there was still enough of a sensible contrast with the spiritual realms and divinities who extended into the vast stretches of the Cosmos (these are all expressions of relational perspectives). As the Spirit descended further into the sense-world, however, culminating with the full Incarnation of Spirit (Christ) into Jesus, the dynamics obviously changed. Now the spiritual realms started to become entirely supersensible and the Spirit is only to be found within the sensible forms which are imbued with their spiritual meaning by our Thinking (Spiritual) activity. So it is only through the sense-world and our spiritually-oriented Thinking that we redeem the "illusory dream" (unveil the living spiritual reality which has always existed within the "dream").

So that is my very rudimentary summary of answers to your questions, but obviously I recommend checking out the essays if you have not already.


Integral Spiritual Mythology: The Divine Song (Part I) - late 3rd epoch, Bhagavad Gita

Integral Spiritual Mythology: The Divine Song (Part II) - above continued

Integral Spiritual Mythology: Mirror Images of the Soul (Part I) - early and late 4th epoch, Greek-Hebrew mythology and philosophy, medieval philosophy

Integral Spiritual Mythology: Mirror Images of the Soul (Part II) - 4th epoch descending closer to the Center, Greek-Hebrew mythology, transfiguring threefold qualitative dimensions of Space

Next will explore the Center of the 4th epoch, which is the Incarnation of Christ where involution of Spirit into differentiated sense-world becomes evolution of Spirit towards integration of fragmented sense-world, by transfiguring the fourth qualitative dimension of Time.

[Hedge90]

Ashin, seems like you'll have an essay about any question that comes to my mind Thanks!

[AshvinP]

Ashin, seems like you'll have an essay about any question that comes to my mind Thanks!

I think that really goes to show we are on the same Thinking 'wavelength' right now. Also I edited above comment to add in a few more details.

[Steve Petermann]

This question just keeps nagging at me. Both ancient Hinduism and Buddhism are very committed to the idea that people's mission in this reality is to check out of it. To awaken to its illusory nature, not just for the purpose of being able to experience it in a more level-headed way, not just for realising their inter-relatedness with others and thus to refrain from selfishness and harming others; but to really check out of it. In Buddhism the only reason for an enlightened soul to return to Samsara is to be a Bodhisattva and help new souls awaken.
Why do you think this is, and what changed with Christianity, which regards the world as God's perfect creation, which is perfectly aligned with the Divine plan?
Obviously, the first answer that comes to mind is that there are different cultural roots, but this doesn't seem satisfactory. Those who established the doctrines of this religion were both intellectually and spiritually highly developed men, who I assume have made their own realisations and conclusions, not just drew upon what had already been there.

Religious scholar Robert Bellah thinks it arose because of the entry into religious and philosophical thought the concept of transcendence. He calls this period "Historic Religion". That was when the major religious traditions emerged and Greek philosophy blossomed. The periods prior to that (Primitive Religion and Archaic Religion) had a cosmological monism instead of the dualistic ontology of Historic Religion. Here's an excerpt from his essay on religious evolution:

The criterion that distinguishes the historic religions from the archaic is that the historic
religions are all in some sense transcendental. The cosmological monism of the earlier stage
is now more or less completely broken through and an entirely different realm
of universal reality, having for religious man the highest value, is proclaimed. The
discovery of an entirely different realm of religious reality seems to imply a derogation
of the value of the given empirical cosmos: at any rate the world rejection discussed
above is, in this stage for the first time, a general characteristic of the religious system.

[Lou Gold]

This question just keeps nagging at me. Both ancient Hinduism and Buddhism are very committed to the idea that people's mission in this reality is to check out of it. To awaken to its illusory nature, not just for the purpose of being able to experience it in a more level-headed way, not just for realising their inter-relatedness with others and thus to refrain from selfishness and harming others; but to really check out of it. In Buddhism the only reason for an enlightened soul to return to Samsara is to be a Bodhisattva and help new souls awaken.
Why do you think this is, and what changed with Christianity, which regards the world as God's perfect creation, which is perfectly aligned with the Divine plan?
Obviously, the first answer that comes to mind is that there are different cultural roots, but this doesn't seem satisfactory. Those who established the doctrines of this religion were both intellectually and spiritually highly developed men, who I assume have made their own realisations and conclusions, not just drew upon what had already been there.

Religious scholar Robert Bellah thinks it arose because of the entry into religious and philosophical thought the concept of transcendence. He calls this period "Historic Religion". That was when the major religious traditions emerged and Greek philosophy blossomed. The periods prior to that (Primitive Religion and Archaic Religion) had a cosmological monism instead of the dualistic ontology of Historic Religion. Here's an excerpt from his essay on religious evolution:

The criterion that distinguishes the historic religions from the archaic is that the historic
religions are all in some sense transcendental. The cosmological monism of the earlier stage
is now more or less completely broken through and an entirely different realm
of universal reality, having for religious man the highest value, is proclaimed. The
discovery of an entirely different realm of religious reality seems to imply a derogation
of the value of the given empirical cosmos: at any rate the world rejection discussed
above is, in this stage for the first time, a general characteristic of the religious system.

While I generally like the scholarship of Robert Bellah, I'm unconvinced by the distinction of "historical religion." Does anyone believe that old aboriginal religion has NOT -- where it has survived the conquests of dominating civilizations -- also had an evolution into so-called, 'modern times'? Consider the Kogi People of the higher elevations Santa Marta range in Columbia who chose to flee rather than fight and thusly continued to evolve their history and civilization to the point where they think of us 'moderns' as their 'younger brothers'.

[Steve Petermann]

While I generally like the scholarship of Robert Bellah, I'm unconvinced by the distinction of "historical religion." Does anyone believe that old aboriginal religion has not -- where it has survived the conquests of dominating civilizations -- also had an evolution into so-called, 'modern times'? Consider the Kogi People of the higher elevations Santa Marta range in Columbia who chose to flee rather than fight and thusly continued to evolve their history and civilization to the point where they think of us 'moderns' as their 'younger brothers'.

He states that his categories and concepts are only a heuristic and not intended to represent all situations:

Of course the scheme itself is not intended as an adequate description of historical reality. Particular lines of religious development cannot simply be forced into the terms of the scheme. In reality there may be compromise formations involving elements from two stages which I have for theoretical reasons discriminated; earlier stages may, as I have already suggested, strikingly foreshadow later developments; and more developed may regress to less developed stages. And of course no stage is ever completely abandoned; all earlier stages continue to coexist with and often within later ones. So what I shall present is not intended as a procrustean bed into which the facts of history are to be forced but a theoretical construction against which historical facts may be illuminated.