The great late social commentator Neil Postman holds up the 18th Century as a model example of enlightened thinking and living, and suggests that we look to that past as the model for our future. I agree that rich veins to be mined can be found there, riches that we once possessed but were lost along the way. Somewhere along the path to the present society took a wrong turn and we now find ourselves in a place that doesn’t, and indeed, cannot, serve humanity properly.
Postman brings up the confusion and troubled thinking that “postmodernism,” and “deconstructionism” have wrought, especially on innocent college students who try to wrap their head around those (non)ideas, and then live their lives with such (mis)guidance. He cites a number of Humanities writers who describe this abyss: T. S. Eliot who wrote of the hollow men occupying a wasteland, Auden who wrote of the age of anxiety, Vachel Lindsay describing leaden-eyed people who have no gods to serve. And he cites a new one for me, a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, from her book Huntsman, What Quarry? that I find charmingly clever:
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts … they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric.[1]
So much information that tantalizes the mind to create infinite possibilities of combination and permutation, but in the end, void of any real meaning, mirroring Lord Krishna’s statement in the Bhagavad-gita that the material energy is endlessly mutable.
It’s all so tantalizing for those mesmerized with it, as the dead souls Schwab and his sidekick Harari seem to be, but for normal human beings, although briefly titillating, it is soon found to be empty and void of meaning.
Of all of those who have tried to open humanity’s eyes to the errors of their ways, Nietzsche’s Madman is still my favorite. Unfortunately everyone is happy to grab one line from there out of context, but they grab the wrong line! The point he is driving home is not that “God is dead,” but rather, that “we have killed Him!”
And Nietzsche, not even 42 years old at the time, realized the consequences that the little scientific understanding gathered by the end of the 19th century had on small minds, leading them to think that they had it all figured out, and that God was no longer needed to explain the world. “We have it: Evolution! Yes! It all happened by the blind forces of nature over eons of time and here we are now – WALLAH! – the pinnacle of evolution!”
To give Nietzsche his due, here’s The Parable of the Madman in its entirety. It’s quite short:
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!" — As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? —Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried. “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.”
Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern to the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”
It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several churches and there struck up his requiem aeternam deo. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of God?”
Indeed, deeds though done require time to be seen and heard. And now, as the world sits on the threshold of a mere 8-minutes of showers yielding total anhiliation, can we understand what we have wrought by disconnecting the earth from the sun? By thinking, like a petulant adolescent, that we are now mature, and no longer need to depend on a God to explain the world? All of the trouble of our times stems from this action, and all of it can only be repaired by resurrecting the Lord and establishing Him in His proper place. Yet, many, if not most, cannot see it, preferring to live in their bubble of illusion.
Having no spiritual understanding, and thus no moral rudder, our world is now careening through the black void of empty space with no destination, people living pointless lives having no better idea of themselves than pleasure machines. So-called great thinkers have no idea who they are, yet they presume to guide society. And thus teenagers, and even children, being taught that humans are a blight on the world, see no reason not to remove that burden by suicide. Into this emptiness and void Schwab & Co. carry out their plans to reduce humans to programmable and controllable machines to complete the nihilism.
My spiritual master has described this condition of the world as nirvishesha sunnyavadi, voidism and impersonalism, which accurately describes the unfortunate condition of any person, or culture, that rejects a connection with God.
But everything has its time as we are reminded by Ecclesiastes. The end of the Piscean age was a time of widespread material opulence, but we are moving into a time of spiritual opulence. Spiritual truths that previously were hidden, including the spiritual Vedic worldview, are sprouting. That Truth is fully satisfying to the intellect, as well as the heart, and which thoroughly answers every existential question, and is the basis of this work. These truths lead away from voidism and anhilism to the very highest state of personal spiritual bliss:
The stage of perfection is called trance, or samadhi, when one's mind is completely restrained from material mental activities by practice of yoga. This is characterized by one's ability to see the self by the pure mind and to relish and rejoice in the self. In that joyous state, one is situated in boundless transcendental happiness and enjoys himself through transcendental senses. Established thus, one never departs from the truth, and upon gaining this he thinks there is no greater gain. Being situated in such a position, one is never shaken, even in the midst of greatest difficulty. This indeed is actual freedom from all miseries arising from material contact.
Rest assured, there is a better way to live.
[1] Postman, Neil. Building a Bridge to the 18th Century (p. 9). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.