Humans being the fallible (perhaps fallen) creature they are, tend to create societies based on greed, hate and delusion, the “three poisons” at the hub of the Buddhist Wheel of Life. I call this Babylon.
Perhaps there was a happy paradisaical state of human society in a past golden age, perhaps not. But at some point, human beings became accustomed to life in Babylon, that is, a collective life of greed, hate and delusion.
The history of the world is a history of Babylon in all its multifarious guises. However, there is also a parallel history running beneath the surface events, of the violent rise and fall of empires, which is the resistance to Babylon.
A potted history of this resistance progresses through a Hegelian dialectic of three stages. It begins with a return to Nature, which develops and matures in the human imagination by means of poetry and myth. This is the thesis.
The conceptual limitations of poetry are then countered by philosophy. For example, the pre-Socratics, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle reacting to the mythos of the ancient poets Homer and Hesiod. This is the antithesis.
When philosophy fails to satisfy the emotional and spiritual longings of the human heart, people turn to religion, as happened in the Hellenic world of late antiquity with the move from speculative philosophical monotheism to the living God of the Jews and Christians. This is the synthesis.
Poetry, philosophy and religion can (and are) co-opted by the dominant forces of Babylon. Thus they become tools of further oppression and control. However, there is always a hidden stream which continues to liberate people from the “mind-forg’d manacles” of Babylon.
This stream becomes sullied with time. As religion grows stale and tired, it loses its regenerative and vivifying force and people lose faith. But the stream can be purified and flow clear glittering crystal again.
Return to Nature. Remember poetry. Rediscover philosophy. Revive religion. This has always been the way out of Babylon and always will be.
bread of life 