Sentences with phrase «axial existence»

Axial existence is productive of far greater good and far greater evil than primitive existence.

A discussion of this important aspect of the Greek experience is not possible in this chapter, where attention is focused on Homeric existence as the original form of axial existence in Greece.

Cobb's analysis of the work of Christ is original, indeed astonishing.147 It includes a psycho - ontological comparison of the evolved structures of human existence — primitive, civilized and axial, and a differentiation of the basic forms of axial existence — Indian, Greek, Hebrew, and Christian.

By the time of Jesus, the Jewish people as a whole were formed by this type of axial existence.

The same could be said for personal existence and, indeed, for axial existence in general, or of civilized existence, or, before that, of human existence as such.

Hence, the following chapters are discussions of several types of axial existence.

I have defined axial existence in terms of the movement of the seat of the soul to its reflective consciousness and its dominance over the unconscious.

It implies that spiritual existence is related to other structures of axial existence in a similar way.

The widespread success of Olympian religion, in leading the Greeks into axial existence, made possible a new form of government in which the masses of free citizens participated in basic political decisions.

Cultural intermixture plus Persian influence had brought these regions to the brink of axial existence, and some universalization and systematization of myth preceded Hellenization, providing the possibility for taking the myths seriously also from the Hellenic point of view.

Old Testament scholarship is currently in a state of flux, such that any attempt to state just where and how axial existence emerged in Israel must be very tentative.

The next pages will be devoted to an attempt to explain the newness of axial existence first as individuality and then as freedom.

Axial existence requires a continual psychic effort and discipline that is extremely demanding and often inhibits the spontaneities of mutual affection and acceptance.

Not exact matches

The effective success of this effort, transforming the whole of existence, is to be found in the first millennium before Christ and is the defining mark of axial man.

This means that when the seat of existence was located in the unconscious, individual identity through time was far less exclusive than it became with the axial shift of center to consciousness.

What distinguished axial man was the new role of rationality in the structure of his existence.

Thus the form of Gnostic self - expression can be understood as a consequence of the direct impact of Socratic existence on highly civilized peoples prepared for the axial revolution, but not yet freed from the dominant power of the mythical.

Not only are the stages of preaxial development treated only formally and the axial cultures of China and Persia wholly omitted, but also developments in Greece and Palestine have been dealt with schematically in such a way as to ignore other modes of existence which took shape within them.

In all axial men, the seat of existence is located in the rational consciousness.

In so doing, he had attempted to overcome that structure of existence given to him as an axial man.

In the middle part of the millennium before Christ a new type of thinking arose, reflecting a new type of existence, called by Karl Jaspers, «axial period,» and what distinguished axial man was the new role of rationality in the structure of his existence.

First, whereas both the Indians and the later Greeks were able to analyze the structures of their own existence with remarkable detachment and philosophical skill, no comparable self - objectification or philosophical ability is to be found among the Hebrews of the axial period.

It has been emphasized that the psychic act of distancing underlay the peculiar structures of Greek existence in the axial period.

It presupposed, of course, the emergence of rational consciousness and the location of the seat of existence within it that was characteristic of all axial men.

But despite this common structural character, the axial cultures express different structures of existence.

What is common to all axial peoples is that the seat of existence shifted from the unconscious to the reflective consciousness, and that, thereby, the reflective consciousness ceased to be bound by the mythical meanings of the unconscious.

The axial religions, on the other hand, initiated a more explicit longing for a perfect reality beyond the immediate world of social and natural existence.

Even before the axial period, archaic or primal religions already had an at least embryonic sense of a sacral dimension that could interrupt life and bestow on it a wider significance than that given in ordinary existence.

In spite of the fact that the cosmos is truly our home (as we argued on scientific, biblical, and environmental grounds in the preceding chapter) our species nevertheless began (during the axial age) to feel gradually somewhat exiled from subhuman patterns of natural existence.