An Axial Alternative
In trying to stretch the way I think about things, I’ve been trying to see if I can find any other ways to think about the Axial Age.
It occurs to me that perhaps the AA was not the emergence of something new. Perhaps it was the re-emergence of something old in a new form.
In reading about Robert Wolff’s Original Wisdom, I came across these quotes regarding his experiences with the aboriginal Sng’oi of Malaysia:
“When I leaned over to drink from the leaf, I saw water with feathery ripples, I saw a few mosquito larvae wriggling on the surface, I saw the veins of the leaf through the water, some bubbles, a little piece of dirt… How beautiful, how perfect… The all-ness was everywhere, and I was a part of it… I could not be afraid - I was a part of this all-ness.”
We can know neither how much of his experience came from the Sng’oi nor how much the Sng’oi’s perspectives might resemble those of pre-agricultural animists, but that passage sounds very much like a description of an experience that could be considered to be grounded both in mystical monism and the macrocosm of love relationship.
If we assume this is the case and further that it bares some relation to ancient ways, then the AA becomes not a discovery but a sort of reformation. After thousands of years of forgetting that we belong to the world and not the other way around, sufficient tension built up to burst through our conditioning and allow us to see the Sacred again. But this time we interpreted that experience through a radically different filter; through the eyes of civilization builders. Which is to say through the eyes of people for whom it was a given that their role in the world was to be above it.
And so we constructed elaborate philosophies which placed us in a hierarchy: the world below, us in the middle, and some sort of transcendent reality above. Our role then became to disdain the world, to escape it, to be saved from the alienation of the mundane and released into the bliss of the Sacred.
Of course, the trouble with that is that we created the alienation within ourselves. In actuality, there is nowhere to escape to and nothing to be saved from. There is only the immediate reality of this world which is the body of the Sacred. Our reformation was very skewed.
Obviously this is an exercise in wild speculation, but it feels like it could have some elements of truth in it.