Tag: Axial

Free Download Religions of the Axial Age: An Approach to the World’s Religions by Mark W. Muesse, The Great Courses
English | July 08, 2013 | ISBN: B00DTO4CUS | 12 hours and 30 minutes | MP3 128 Kbps | 515 Mb
These 24 extraordinary lectures offer you the rare opportunity to relate your own spiritual questions to a variety of ancient quests for meaning and transcendence. Professor Muesse looks at the historical conditions in which the world religions arose and explores how they answered shared metaphysical and human dilemmas.
The Axial Age – a pivotal era between 800 and 200 B.C.E. – saw the rise of many of the world’s religions in Iran, South Asia, and China. On this stirring journey, you’ll learn about the rise of Zoroastrianism in Persia (now Iran); Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism on the Indian subcontinent; and Confucianism and Daoism in China. You’ll also see how these religions compare, contrast, and contribute to contemporary Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Through sacred texts, modern scholarship, and thoughts arising from his own personal experiences, Professor Muesse reveals what it meant to be a conscious, morally responsible individual in the Axial Age. You’ll enjoy a ringside seat as each founding sage wrestles with moral accountability, the nature of self and ultimate reality, good versus evil, suffering and transcendence – all topics that still puzzle us today.

Free Download John C. Stephens, "The World of the Axial Sages"
English | ISBN: 1527560813 | 2021 | 194 pages | PDF | 2 MB
This book presents an engaging analysis of the global spiritual changes of the first millennium BCE. Between the sixth and fourth centuries BCE, several new, revolutionary religious and philosophic movements were born throughout the world. Rather than using the well-known label Axial Age to refer to this time of religious change, the book argues that a better choice would be the Age of Awakening, since it places more emphasis upon the personal, internal dimension of religious experience lying at the core of these developments. Earthshattering spiritual encounters with the sacred led the prophets and sages of the Age of Awakening to redirect peoples attention away from the stagnant traditions of the past towards new forms of dynamic spirituality. The era saw the emergence of a variety of innovative spiritual pathways in both the eastern and western worlds. In classical Greece, Pythagoras and Plato proposed new spiritual and intellectual alternatives to the outdated religious myths and rituals of the polis. The Middle East also played a significant role in the spiritual revolution of the first millennium BCE. As early as the sixth century BCE, the Persian prophet Zoroasters revelatory visions about the Truth and the Lie led to the birth of a new religious movement known as Zoroastrianism. At the time of the Babylonian Exile, ancient Judaism underwent a process of radical spiritual renewal largely due to the inspired teachings of the Hebrew prophets. In India, the writers of the Upanishads provided a spiritual reinterpretation of many of the old Vedic myths and rituals. Sages including the Buddha and Mahavira rejected the old sacrificial system of the brahmins and asserted that liberation from the cycle of birth and death could only be found through the practice of asceticism and a general withdrawal from the illusory material world. As such, this book highlights the importance of the de-stabilizing influences of religious experience for understanding the revolutionary spiritual developments of the first millennium BCE.