The 16th century was a huge turning point for the human race, this was the period where the world moved from the golden ages where we were connected to the spiritual world to one that is driven by reason and sense and with that direction it has brought us to this day in the 21st century.
In the old ages people viewed the world as the centre, we’re the centre of the universe and the sun, moon, mercury were thought to be revolving around the earth, this was all based on what they could see when they looked into the sky, they had no telescope, they had no complex mathematics to calculate the projection of the stars and planets.
People during that time of what we call the golden ages in Rome, Greece, China, middle empire of the arab world viewed themselves as being part of nature, in tune to the rhythm of the seasons. They viewed the world by first understanding their inner self, they were subjective and full of sympathy and fantasised and dreamed, they walked among the gods in their own spiritual world. The art of that time distinctively represented this mindset of people of that time depicting goddesses and angels, they believed that they were part of the cosmos among the goddesses and gods and are one with nature.
During the turn of that century from the 1500 to the 1600, 3 distinct events happened in Europe that changed the course of human development forever.
Copenicus and his discovery of the cosmos and how all planets revolve around the sun, the earth was no longer at the center and all that was thought of before where god was supposely suppose to reside is now revealed to be of nothingness, in 1543,
Mercator developed the first atlas and created the first view of the world, a few years later
Vesalius dissected the human body and documented it into a book, we were now seen as blood vessels, bones and muscles and have proven that we no longer posses a spiritual soul in our chest. These 3 development brought a new age of reasoning, gods and spirituality was being questioned, it has become a world dictated by sense and logic, people started to view the world from the outside in, no longer concerned about their inner being, but driven by objects and antipathy observing things from a distance hoping to form an exact view of something, never getting too close for any sympathy. This in turn brought about the age of science and the world as we know of today.
Something changed in the 1500, humans started to lose their inherent connection to the world and to nature. Has science and the age of reasoning really brought about progress? How do you define progress? Has this progress caused an in-balance in the world we live in today?
Osho says:'in this age of reason, we are masters of knowledge, but orphans in wisdom" humans have evolved now to the stage where we use our upper cortex of the brain more - the reason brain. and left the lower cortex, the feeling brain behind. We have to re-connect and achieve an equilibrium as floating too far right or too far left has it’s own circumstances; seen in
Goethe work of
Faust and
Werther.
Perhaps this so called progress of the internet and mass communication would be a tool that would help the human race reach enlightenment quick enough to get us out of this mess and maybe bring warmth back once again into our lives.
