THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION --- THE BEGINNING OF OUR RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS by Karen Armstrong. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006
    CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF MAPS AND PLANS (pvii)

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (pix)

    INTRODUCTION (pxi-xviii)

        Perhaps every generation believes that it has reached a turning point of history, but our problems seem particularly intractable and our future increasingly uncertain. Many of our difficulties mask a deeper "spiritual/religious crisis." (pxi)

        During the 20th century, there was an eruption of violence on an unprecedented scale. Sadly, our ability to harm and mutilate one another has kept pace with our extraordinary economic and scientific culture. (pxi)

        Unless there is some kind of "spiritual/religious revolution" that can keep abreast of our technological genius, it is unlikely that we will save our planet. A purely rational education will not suffice. Religion, which is supposed to help us cultivate an attitude of the sacred inviolability of every single human being, often seems to reflect the violence and desperation of our times. (pxi)

        An increasing number of people find tradtional religious doctrines and practices irrelevant and incredible, and turn to art, music, literature, dance, sport, or drugs to give them the transcendent experience that humans seem to require. We all look for moments of ecstasy and rapture, when we inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and feel deeply touched within and lifted momentarily beyond ourselves. (pxi)

        We are "meaning-seeking" creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we cannot find significance and value in our lives. Millions, if not billions, of human beings are looking for new ways of being religious. For more than half a century, since the end of WWII in the mid-1940s, there has been a "spiritual revival" in most parts of the world. And the militant religious zealousness of the extreme "fundamentalists" in all the Axial religions is only one manifestation of our modern quest for meaning or enlightenment. (pxi-xii)

        The pivotal period of religious or spiritual development of humanity was called the "Axial Age" by the famous German philosopher Karl Jaspers. That 700 year period of history, from about 900 to 200 BCE (Before the Christian Era), was the beginning of the six great religions. Those religious traditions that have continued for about thirty centuries to nourish humanity came from four distinct geographic regions of the world: namely, Confucianism and Daoism in China; Hinduism and Buddhism in India; Egyptian-Judaic-Christian monotheism in Israel; and humanistic rationalism from Greece. (pxii)

        This was the historic time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and Jeremiah, the mystics of the Upanishads, Mencius, and Euripides. During this time of intense creativity, spiritual and philosophical geniuses pioneered an entirely new kind of human experience. The Axial Age was one of the most influential periods of change in recorded history! There has been nothing comparable to it in world history except the changes of the last 300 years in Western countries that have thrived with the discoveries and inventions of science and technology and democratic values. (pxii)

        But how can the sages of the Axial Age, who lived in such different circumstances, speak to our current condition? Surely a study of this distant period can only be an exercise in spiritual archaeology, when what we need is to create a more innovative faith or philosophy that reflects our own modern humanistic scientific world. (pxii)

        All the traditions that were developed during the Axial Age pushed forward the frontiers of human consciousness and discovered a transcendent dimension in the core of their being. In fact, most of the sages did not regard their spiritualism as being supernatural and many refused to discuss that issue. What mattered most to the sages was not WHAT you believed but HOW you behaved! (pxiii)

        Before the Axial Age, ritual and animal sacrifice had been central to the religous quest. The devout could experience the divine in sacred dramas, like a great theatrical experience today, that gave them another level of emotional exhuberance. However, the Axial sages changed that primitive religious practice.

        The sages still valued ritual, but they gave it a new ethical significance and put morality at the heart of the spiritual/religious life. The only way you could encounter what they called "God," "Nirvana," "Brahman," or the "Way" was to live a compassionate life. Indeed, their "religion" was compassion for their own kind! (pxiii-xiv)

        You cannot appreciate the achieements of the Axial Age unless you are familiar with what went before, so you need to understand the pre-Axial religion of early antiquity. (pxv)

        Animal sacrifice wa a universal religious practice in the ancient world. This was a way of recycling the depleted forces that kept the world in order ("in being"). There was a strong conviction that life and death, creativity and destruction, were inextricably entwined. People realized that they survived only because other creatures laid down their lives for their sake, so the "animal victim" was honored for its self-sacrifice! (pxv)

        Ancient religion depended upon what has been called the "perennial philosophy" because it was present, in one form or another, in most premodern cultures. Every single person, object, or experience on earth was a replica --- a pale shadow --- of a reality in the Divine world! The sacred world was, therefore, the prototype of human existence, and because it was richer, stronger, and more enduring than anything on earth, men and women wanted desperately to participate in it. They fulfilled their humanity when they ceased to be simiply themselves and repeated the gestures of others. (pxv-xvii)

        Human beings are profoundly artificial. We constantly strive to improve on nature and approximate to an ideal. Even at the present time, when we have abandoned the perennial philosophy, people slavishly follow the dictates of fashion and even do violence to their faces and figures in order to reproduce the current standard of beauty. The flourishing cult of celebrity shows that we still revere models who epitomize "superhumanity."

        Nevertheless, in contrast to its great achievements, the Axial Age was not perfect for all human beings, since it had a major failing in its indifference to women regarding their political and economic rights, which were largely nonexistent. The Axial religions nearly all developed in an urban environment of city life dominated by male values of military power and aggressive commercial activities, where women tended to lose the high status they had enjoyed in the more rural ancient economies. When the Axial sages spoke about the "great" or "enlightened man," they did not mean "co-equal men and women." It was not that the Axial sages were out-and-out misogynists, like some of the Fathers of the Christian Church, for example. However, they were men of their times, and so they were preoccupied with the aggressive behavior of their own manliness that they rearly gave women a second thought. (pxvi-xvii)

        Finally, we cannot follow the Axial reformers slavishly since that would violate the fundamental spirit of the Axial Age, which insisted that strict conformity to social customs or ceremonial habits trapped people in an inferior and immature version of themselves. What we can do as liberated modern critical thinkers is to extend the Axial ideal of universal concern to everybody, including the female gender. Thus when we re-create the Axial Vision in our own lives, we must insert the best insights of modernity into each discussion or negotiated deal among and between the sexes! (pxvii)

        The general development of the Axial Age gives us all some insight into the spiritual evolution of this important universal ideal. This book will follow this developmental process chronologically, charting the progress of the four Axial continental peoples side by side, watching the new vision gradually taking root, rising to a cresdendo of activity, and finally fading away at the close of the third century BCE when the original ideas were diluted by diverse cultural customs. (pxvii)

        The pioneers, the Axial sages and their immediate followers, had laid the foundations upon which others could build. Each generation since has tried to adapt the original sacred insights into the spiritual/religious nature of human beings to their own peculiar circumstances. That must be our seminal survival task today! (pxviii)

      1) The Axial peoples --- c. 1600 to 900 BCE (p3-48)

      2) Ritual --- c. 900 to 800 BCE (p49-85)

      3) Kenosis --- c. 800 to 700 BCE (p86-124)

      4) Knowledge --- c. 700 to 600 BCE (p125-166)

      5) Suffering --- c. 600 to 530 BCE (p167-201)

      6) Empathy --- c. 530 to 450 BCE (p202-244)

      7) Concern for everybody --- c. 450 to 398 BCE (p245-288)

      8) All is one --- c. 400 tp 300 BCE (p289-330)

      9) Empire --- c. 300 to 220 BCE (p331-366)

      10) The way forward (p367-399)

    NOTES (p401-426)

    GLOSSARY (p427-433)

    BIBLIOGRAPHY (p435-446)

    INDEX (p447-469)

    PUBLISHING PERMISSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (p471)

    A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR (p473)

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