Since the ancient Greeks and Romans, through the Medieval times and into the Renaissance, western society has been steadily deprived of its juice or meaning. It was really in the Enlightenment, which brought a rise in technology and the Industrial Revolution, was where western civilization increasingly moved away from religion and toward science, empiricism and human reason.
The Catholic Church had been measured and found wanting, as so many institutionalized religious practices do when obliged to be involved in worldly affairs like money and power. There are reports of it from Rome to Tibet, throughout diverse time periods. Stories of monastery heads wielding great power and wealth only to be allured by the desire to enjoy them personally, as opposed to in a mood of service.
Whether engineered atheism and crushing of religious practice by a hidden hand was deliberate or not, or whether it was simply a victim of inevitable moral decay over time and under the law of entropy, might be a worth finding out. Certainly the clergy fell from grace as science took the lead in the minds of society. Religion has been on a steady decline in the west since the French Revolution, where France led the way, and is almost complete now in the Eurocentric continents (except for the rise of Islam of course).
And with this loss of faith came loss of meaning and a general loss of direction or guiding principle in life which was unquestionable. The philosophical foundation of life crumbled under the western mindset and nothing much came about to replace it. As a result society went on evolving under the leadership of science. After all, life improved on so many levels, including medical.
However, mental health slowly deteriorated over the generations. The nineteenth century brought us Nietzche and his “god is dead” banner, along with existentialism and social alienation, especially as the Industrial Revolution pushed people off their homelands and into the city to work in factories . Ironically, by squashing people more tightly together in cities, they ended up becoming more alienated from each other, to a point where we don’t know our neighbor and our family is scattered far and wide or dying out as birth rates drop to beyond recovery levels. That is how the European gene pool is going into the history books with the other extinct gene pools. At least in its pure form.
Whatever you might think of religious myth and legend, once it was removed or taken off the altar of sanctity for society, all that was left to replace it as a source of meaning was the self and the pleasures of the senses. Moral loosening has been the steady trend for hundreds of years of global history currently. I won’t add any subjective bias by calling it degradation, or decay or worsening. I will simply admit that liberalization has occurred in what was once a more conservative society, at least in the past 2000 years, and especially more recently, particularly if we consider the ancient Vedic civilization of India, which talks of much greater time spans.
Certainly the twentieth century and ours today appear to have come to a point of absurdism, which is what we might call post-modernist culture in its more recent aspect, since it originates back in the sixties already. Camus and Satre put existentialism in the history books and since then we moved to the current absurdist state of our modern attitude to life. Our western existential crisis of meaning is part of what leads to USA’s massive pharma drug addiction problem. When a moral guiding principle is gone and also any higher meaning, then anything goes in your private life, and government or we ourselves give up caring enough about people because human life means less and less in the unfolding perception of things.
The death of religion and rise in cheap living led to a depressed and defeated majority in the west which now spreads globally in our modern global village interconnected by technology. Before, the idea of god or some divine presence gave us purpose and value. When that was removed, due to a fallen priesthood or a rise in atheistic and scientific attitudes, the masses were left to their own devices or imaginations. They looked to themselves as the focus of their reality as the greater family, as well as a sense of nationalism or any sense of belonging dwindled over time. Smaller isolated pockets of people living their private lives, sometimes alone, wondered on through time like a camel through a barren desert looking for a source of juice. Life had lost its juice or meaning and value.
Those who were fortunate to have supportive families and assets, or merely a rugged survival instinct, went on to look to themselves and focus on personal meaning or physical health and some even took to consciousness upliftment, though they were rare. Only now do we see a slight uptick in society accepting ideas which may expand the consciousness outside of the mere body and base level mindset. Shamanistic practices, as well as yoga and meditation, have become more popular in this century so some are finding meaning but the masses in the biggest cities of the world are without awareness, or perhaps technological access to such data. And even if they had access, the gems of wisdom that might uplift them are lost or swamped under the mass of other more alluring information.
In such a nihilistic and defeated mass of working class people, struggling their entire lives to survive, the mention of something higher or transcendent is too distant, especially sine that kind of thing does better when there is a living role model. For example, if there was some messianic or guru figure who performed miracles, healed the sick and never aged (like the yogis of ancient India could) then the masses might more directly be inspired to take up some self-improvement practice to learn the skills or serve the same powerful deity as the miracle worker.
And there are some coaches out there who do a good job, so nihilism is not the sole state of modern humanity. It does however, make up for a vast mass of society today, particularly i the west. The middle East, Africa and Asia have a strong mythic or religious aspect to their cultural and social construct, which presumably adds massive meaning to them subjectively, and whether you agree with it or not, it does do the job of providing inspiration if not more to those societies.
As a result family culture may predominate still and depression or alienation may be less due to a greater sense of belonging to a community and having a purpose which may be bigger than themselves alone. And more than that, some rare souls may find some sort of miracle happening in their life as they tap into the secrets that these religious teachings are trying to convey to us through their instruction, stories and pastimes. Miracles do happen when faith, conviction and knowledge combine in anyone who may simply wish to apply themselves.
Bhagavad Gita ch2:61
तानि सर्वाणि संयम्य युक्त आसीत मत्परः ।
वशे हि यस्येन्द्रियाणि तस्य प्रज्ञा प्रतिष्ठिता ॥ ६१ ॥
tāni sarvāṇi saṁyamya
yukta āsīta mat-paraḥ
vaśe hi yasyendriyāṇi
tasya prajñā pratiṣṭhitā
tāni—those senses; sarvāṇi—all; saṁyamya—keeping under control; yuktaḥ—being engaged; āsīta—being so situated; mat-paraḥ—in relationship with Me; vaśe—in full subjugation; hi—certainly; yasya—one whose; indriyāṇi—senses; tasya—his; prajnā—consciousness; pratiṣṭhitā—fixed
TRANSLATION
One who restrains his senses and fixes his consciousness upon Me is known as a man of steady intelligence.
COMMENTARY
That the highest conception of yoga perfection is Kṛṣṇa consciousness is clearly explained in this verse. And, unless one is Kṛṣṇa conscious, it is not at all possible to control the senses. As cited above, the great sage Durvāsā Muni picked a quarrel with Mahārāja Ambarīṣa, and Durvāsā Muni unnecessarily became angry out of pride and therefore could not check his senses. On the other hand, the King, although not as powerful a yogī as the sage, but a devotee of the Lord, silently tolerated all the sage's injustices and thereby emerged victorious. The King was able to control his senses because of the following qualifications, as mentioned in the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam:
sa vai manaḥ kṛṣṇa-padāravindayor
vacāṁsi vaikuṇṭha-guṇānavarṇane
karau harer mandira-mārjanādiṣu
śrutiṁ cakārācyuta-sat-kathodaye
mukunda-liṅgālaya-darśane dṛśau
tad-bhṛtya-gātra-sparśe'ṅga-saṅgamam
ghrāṇaṁ ca tat-pāda-saroja-saurabhe
śrīmat-tulasyā rasanāṁ tad-arpite
pādau hareḥ kṣetra-padānusarpaṇe
śiro hṛṣīkeśa-padābhivandane
kāmaṁ ca dāsye na tu kāma-kāmyayā
yathottamaśloka-janāśrayā ratiḥ
"King Ambarīṣa fixed his mind on the lotus feet of Lord Kṛṣṇa, engaged his words in describing the abode of the Lord, his hands in cleansing the temple of the Lord, his ears in hearing the pastimes of the Lord, his eyes in seeing the form of the Lord, his body in touching the body of the devotee, his nostrils in smelling the flavor of the flowers offered to the lotus feet of the Lord, his tongue in tasting the tulasī leaves offered to Him, his legs in traveling to the holy place where His temple is situated, his head in offering obeisances unto the Lord, and his desires in fulfilling the desires of the Lord...and all these qualifications made him fit to become a mat-paraḥ devotee of the Lord." (Bhāg. 9.4.18-20)
The word mat-paraḥ is most significant in this connection. How one can become a mat-paraḥ is described in the life of Mahārāja Ambarīṣa. Śrīla Baladeva Vidyābhūṣaṇa, a great scholar and ācārya in the line of the mat-paraḥ, remarks: "mad-bhakti-prabhāvena sarvendriya-vijaya-pūrvikā svātma dṛṣṭiḥ sulabheti bhāvaḥ." "The senses can be completely controlled only by the strength of devotional service to Kṛṣṇa." Also the example of fire is sometimes given: "As the small flames within burn everything within the room, similarly Lord Viṣṇu, situated in the heart of the yogī, burns up all kinds of impurities." The Yoga-sūtra also prescribes meditation on Viṣṇu, and not meditation on the void. The so-called yogīs who meditate on something which is not the Viṣṇu form simply waste their time in a vain search after some phantasmagoria. We have to be Kṛṣṇa conscious—devoted to the Personality of Godhead. This is the aim of the real yoga.
Reference: Bhagavad Gita As It Is, translation and commentary by Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta, original 1972 Macmillan edition (www.prabhupadabooks.com)
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