Collective Consciousness Moral Revolution Past and Present

As it often happens that one writing project gives one ideas for the next.  The other day I was talking about how the primary center for Humanity’s first moral distinctions came out of Persia through the Zoroastrian influences from Zarathustra, and how moral Persian influences had greatly affected that entire cosmopolitan zone including the Hebrews.   That paper was already getting quite involved and so eventually I had to cut off any further thoughts and connections and just hit the ‘Publish’ key.   But I had been doing for quite some time a great deal of thinking around the idea that there is, or could be, a tangible and accessible Collective Consciousness.   One thought I had in support of such a contention, came to me in the form that other significant Moral manifestation had been cropping up at approximately the same time that Zarathustra lived in and was expressing his own epiphany regarding Morality (that the Spiritual World was not some amoral monolith, but was distinctly divided into a Realm of Goodness and Light on the one hand, and an abyss of Evil and Darkness on the other.  Also that that the Pantheon of Gods was not so much a grouping of substantially similar Gods or Demigods, but of Angels of Light on the Side of Good and Demons and Devils on the Side of Evil.  Oh, of course the Demons do their best to appear appealing to the Humans who encounter them in Visions, but these Devils or Jinns cannot conterfeit actual Light, and so the Demons make use of polished metallic surfaces and mirror-like finishes to reflect as much light as they can.  So when appraising Spirits for their Moral Quality, one should look for Auras and Glows and intrinsic qualities of Radiance, and be very suspicious of any ‘knight in shining armor’, whose glow is only by reflected light).

Perhaps reverberating from out of the Collective Consciousness of the time we had the eruption of Greek Philosophy from out of a culture that had seemed only nasty and barbaric.  With the Greeks we had have the first Historian, Herodotus, who was also the first to ever write and speak a narrative that was often clearly morally didactic (oh, I had looked up Herodotus on line to see what I’d get and I found references to “moral relativism”.   Hmmmm.   The use of the word “moral” in “moral relativism” often does not refer to actual morality at all, that is of motivational inclinations in people either towards the Good – cooperation, empathy and a collective and civilized assistance, or towards the Bad – selfish, predatory and barbaric rugged individualism.  The phrase “moral relativism” is found in many instances to address only various social norms such as how people can properly dress, bury their dead, or which hand to use to bring the fork to their mouths, which are clearly not ‘moral’ issue.  But yes, sometimes the term “moral relativity” is used correctly.  For instance, a savage coterie of American Politicians and Government Service People believe it a virtue to torture, mutilate and dehumanize ‘enemies’(a set of policies that would assure of plenty more enemies ), a ‘moral’ stance which they have in common with some of history’s most savage Tribes of Native Americans, or the barbaric Mongol Hordes.  So yes it is a big problem for us that those who are Evil have ‘virtues’ that would make Good People shudder, which is why we need to be specific as to what we intend by the word “Morality”.)     

Also, at about the same time as the Persian and Greek Moral flowerings we had Confucius in China who did for the East what Zarathustra had done for the West, but perhaps with greater overall success.  There are two standout points regarding Confucius.  The first was that he refrained from trying to give any simple definition of Moral Righteousness, instead preferring to offer thousands of examples of Righteousness in action, which made for so many of his quotable anecdotes.  The second was his clear distinction between the Law which was merely proscriptive (all the Shall Not Does, and one can never enumerate everything that is Evil, which is why Lawyers can always find ‘Loopholes’, which in fact was the primary argument of the Confucians against Legalism even back then in an Ancient China that undoubtedly prided itself as being a Nation of Laws) as opposed to Morality which is prescriptive and affirmative.  We can see the fruits of the Confucian Influence in the high levels of Civilized Cooperation that have been demonstrated by Chinese Civilization, throughout its ups and downs.  It can be argued quite plausibly that the Moral Revolution has taken deeper root and flourished more in East Asia than in the West, where both had often been faced with barbaric reactions, which seemed to have been better resisted in the East than the West, but this may only be the fault of a Great Wall that sent the lion’s share of China’s problems to the Wild West of its day.  But, then again, the subjugation of Moral Persia by Macedonian-Greek Barbarism was well before the Wall.  So, in addition to the Eastern Hordes who found China too great a challenge, the West had and still has plenty of homegrown predators.  

Now we come to Gautama Buddha, whose lifetime may have overlapped that of either Zarathustra or Confucius, whose moral insights may have been very profound, but unfortunately their effective impact was severely crimped because an amoral Reactionary Movement set in very quickly and quashed, by co-option, the better part of his Teachings (similar to the way Paulism largely obliterated or nullified the Teachings of Jesus).  By piecing together what we can by inference, Gautama actually arrived at Morality by an indirect route.  His primary concern was in advancing a skeptical attack on Vedantic superstitions, especially the notion of Karmic Reincarnation where it is supposed that the Rich and Powerful, despite every appearance of being grasping and evil, had gotten their ascendant positions over the mass of Humanity because they had been most uncharacteristically virtuous in some previous lifetime and were therefore being divinely rewarded with births into Rank and Privilege,  and inversely that those who are born into servitude, degradation or crushing poverty fully disserve their fates as just punishments for the evil actions they had committed in prior lifetimes.  Gautama had the moral insight to see all of this as a sham and a scam for maintaining a Social Engineering biased greatly in favor of the dominant Aryan Race, that is, the Brahmins who hogged all the high positions at the time.   Buddha’s essential Teaching was therefore NOT that one had to go through any elaborate practices to transcend the hamster Wheel of Reincarnated Lives, but that people only had to realize that there was not any hamster wheel of rebirths to begin with.  If people would only shake off the Pro-Aryan Superstitions they would realize they were free and liberated already.  But Gautama recognized that the idea of Karma, in that it would promote Cooperative Behaviors over those that were purely selfish, could not be rejected entirely out of hand without substituting some moral injunction in its place.  So Gautama took the hocus pocus out of ‘karmically’ driven morality and simply advocated for “Right Living” as a Moral Duty or an Obligation to the Greater Collective Life, and not just as a means for attaining some semi-sensual Nirvana Enlightenment Experience, that is, some bliss-filled borderline orgasmic ecstatic swoon (though who doesn’t like a good rush every now and then?  There are lesser things I would pay a hundred bucks for).   

These separate pop-ups of Moral Awareness, all occurring simultaneously, in the geological sense, indicate positively for the presence of a Collective Consciousness.  But does this Collective Consciousness do the Influencing or is it in fact the Thing being influenced?  Does the control come from above or below?   

I’ve dealt with the issue before that there would have to be a distinction between a useful Collective Consciousness and a more all-embracing Consciousness of All Things which would be too much of a data overload and leads to Unforgettable but Indescribable experiences, what they call “ineffability”.   Collective Consciousness would have to have some mental and psychological compression, filtering, and organizing principle that is Species Specific.  I think we have that kind of Mental Psychological distillation of the Collective Consciousness in our dreams and visions of Angels or of the Pantheistic Gods (who are the ‘angels’ in the Persian sense).  You see, the Angels are unmistakably anthropomorphic (that is, they look like and relate to human beings).  Their concerns are for Human Beings and Human Societies.   This selection and focus within all the possible Life Consciousness Data would be very helpful if any human being could experience some kind of a comprehensible interaction with the Collective Consciousness.   Imagine experiencing  the Collective Consciousness only to be overwhelmed with the concerns of every bacteria, cockroach, corporate leader and right wing talk show host?  

Often I wonder whether it is correct to talk about the ‘Next’ Step in Moral Evolution when perhaps I should be acknowledging that the real push should be in supporting the Moral Revolution that is now more than 2500 years in the making but has still to consolidate its gains.   Yes, Modern Societies do have a certain level of cooperation, as no society can exist without some cooperation, but often the forces of Barbarism sweep back to the fore and willing cooperation is supplanted by forced subjugation.  We can see this today with the insight that the vast majority of Wage Slaves in the World would likely abandon their Jobs in a millisecond if the Ruling Class of Predatory Huns and Barbarians did not arrange to have starvation, homelessness, social ostracization and the withholding of health care as a kind of Apocalyptic Four Horseman alternative to reporting to work everyday.    Even in the individual workplaces, the Bosses try to replace the moral-social manifestations of Cooperation with ‘friendly’ competitions, which only go to show what the Bosses understand and don’t understand.  

So yes, I believe that our present Evolution cannot be separated from the First Moral Revolution.  We should see our present Moral Struggle as kind of like a Second Wave that supports the First.  Also, while it is hard to argue that the most transcendent and Unknowable God is not Eternal and Unchanging, we should recognize that the Angels are step below that unapproachable Transcendence and must be simply in order to engage with Humanity and have any Providential influence.  And part of their connectedness is that they Evolve side by side with us.   The Angels of today certainly have a more evolved outlook then those of the 5^th Century B.C.   Those of us who look for our Religions in Ancient Texts, even the Pre-Moral ones (Pre-Babylonian Captivity Hebraic, Vedantic and all of their New Age derivatives) should realize that not only has our Human Development evolved a long way since then, but that even Heaven above has evolved.   The Material and the Spiritual must be Evolving Together, no?  “As above, so below”, yes, but it is also very unlikely that Men and Women should ever develop higher moral scruples than even the Angles in Heaven without being immediately emulated for it.  We could therefore expect that any unique Act of Human Kindness would inspire even the Angels to a higher moral vision.