Spirituality Guide

By Seeker

Were the people of olden times any happier than we are today? (if, that is, you can describe the modern condition as happy) We have no direct evidence of those times, and from the Vedic tales from India, the Pyramid texts from Djoser’s tomb in Egypt, and the later fragments and myths from Sumer, Egypt and other locations, we find that those civilizations fell from three main causes.

1. Disaster. Flood and Deluge mostly. Empires at their height, brought down by ‘the Gods’ for hubris and arrogance.
2. External nations. People dying out or moving away (taken into captivity) because of strife with warlike neighbours
3. God-strife. The ‘Gods’ misbehaving like the worst of spoiled brats, causing internal strife and bringing down their own empires.

Over and again in the historical evidence we find civilizations that came from nowhere, full-blown in skills, lived pretty much as is with little later innovation except for growing in size, then suddenly vanishing from the record with no trace.

Whatever the reasons for the demise, (and it seems often associated with climate change as the Earth warmed and changed after the end of the Ice Age) what we don’t see in the record, with extremely rare exceptions, is the population revolting against their governments.

It is a truism that people get the Government they deserve, but when things get bad enough, recent history has told us the people get up in arms and revolt. What they get may not be much improvement, but they will storm the cannons barehanded if needed to replace what they see as unfair.

The White and Red Russian parties started a bitch-fight to see who would rule Russia and their depredations were so intolerable, the people brought in Communism – yet at the start of the violence, there were maybe 80,000 communists in Russia. It cost 20 million lives but the people got, in spite of what the West saw it as, a better regime than what the Tsar gave them.

So it seems, the people not only didn’t suffer enough to revolt, but they gave wholeheartedly to projects that must have required massive commitment and resources from everyone in the nation or empire. How many of us would give up our TV’s to fund a giant statue, accept a reduced ‘standard of living’ to help George Bush find immortality or even stop buying imports so our country could build a monument to stand down the ages so people knew we had been here?