The Second Axial Period of History

In history there are occasionally fault lines which appear in the narrative of history, marking a major change in the order of life. In our relatively recent history, the first and second axial periods have been detected. By recent I am referring to the last six thousand years. From four to one thousand years before Christ, apart from the relatively large kingdoms of Egypt and Mesopotamia, life was tribal, mythic, and ritualistic in behaviour. Worship was externally orientated, sacrifices were made, and actions dominated. In the years 800 to 200 BC, the first of the axial periods emerged. Attitudes became far more personal, and individually reflective as witnessed in the works of Jeremiah, Isaiah and Amos. But this was not the only place. It was the areas of the great Greek philosophers, the Asian religions such as Laotze, Confucius and Mencius in China, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism in India, and Zoroaster in Persia, all devised some form of the golden rule, to love one’s neighbour as oneself. It was the birth of the introspective.

With advances often come the disadvantages. Prabhu in the forward to Panikkar’s book, The Rhythm of Being writes.

While this shift of consciousness away from the tribal and ritualistic to the individual and moral brought the growth of “interiority,” and psychological and moral ideas of authenticity, and autonomy and integrity, and opened up many possibilities, it also closed off others and had some negative consequences. It produced, for example , many of the dualisms that we live with today between body and spirit, earth and heaven, individual and society, transcendence and immanence, the so-called secular and the so-called sacred.

One area in which this affected Christianity was its propensity for dualism. It is apparent in scripture. The early days of the church saw the first Christians suffering great persecution. Their withdrawal into enclaves of support affected the writing of scripture. All that can be said is that the scriptures present one version of Christianity. The question must be asked, how did the persecutions affect the purity of the gospel as preached by Jesus?

The next major event that exacerbated this problem was the conversion of Constantine and the turning of the Roman Empire into a Christian empire. The result was a shift from localised dualisms to the distortion of Christianity into a national endeavour.

The atrocities committed in the name of Christianity were horrendous. The Crusades, the inquisitions, and the colonisations of the world have been long told stories, but in more recent years the support of the gun lobby in the United States by the Evangelical right, and the MAGA party of the Republican party similarly supported by the Evangelicals has born witness to the worst of Christianity. Of course, the sexual abuse cases, predominantly by the Roman Catholic Church, although not restricted to that denomination, have testified to the Church as having lost its way. Since the conversion of Constantine, the church has been increasingly shaped by its culture and it has increasingly failed as an institution.

The second Axial Period has developed since the beginning of the 19th century according to Jean Gebser, with the French Revolution and the ‘Death of God’ declaration by Nietzsche, before really taking hold at the beginning of the 20th century. It constitutes the emergence of the integral era. All things are perceived to be inter-independent according to Raimon Panikkar. This reading of history began with the printing press, continued with the discovery of the telephone, then all forms of media, the internet and the computerisation of society, progressing on to the creation of artificial intelligence. This is a result of the new field of quantum science essentially outlining that all reality is energy. We live in a world that is interrelated.

The heart of the integral is found in the people. The transformation of the population from 2 billion at the beginning of the twentieth century to approximately eight billion at the beginning of the twenty-first century has changed the world dramatically. Business movements, immigration, refugees, and tourism have changed the face of people's movements around the globe. There are approximately 8ooo planes flying in the skies each day. In many places worldwide neighbourhoods are now multi-cultured. As a result, people are learning to live with one another across cultures. These are all the components of the integral world; the growing world of technology, the new world of science and the growth in the multicultural population. The world remains fragmented on the surface but the integral calls people to discover a deeper form of unity where the non-dual world is apparent, the world where one-ness is to be found, with unity in diversity.

The emergence of the integral era marks a major shift in the gospel narrative from the historical person of Jesus to the cosmic Christ, that world where the focus is upon the Cosmic Christ, the all in all. The historical Jesus will always remain a core point of reference but the message is now global, in fact universal. We must find the Christ that emerges from the depth of all people seeking that hallowed life that Jesus lived from within their tradition. The Christ of creation was the incarnate presence of the divine innate within all ‘that is’. This same Christ has been working in different ways in all traditions. Christians see that this same Christ did appear as Jesus in the historical context of two thousand years ago. But this does not mean that he has not been working subtly amongst all peoples in, albeit their faltering culture, just as the Christian culture was horribly faltering. The search to find the unifying Cosmic Christ or the Holy Spirit of all humanity is the unifying principle that is awaiting all humanity as we enter the integral non-dual reality.

Panikkar, Raimon. The Rhythm of Being. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2010.