Up until about 2,800 years ago, 800 BC, old world thinkers tended to interpret all of human suffering in terms of the wrath of the gods.

In other words, up until about 28 hundred years ago, human beings were of course extremely susceptible to floods,

droughts, poor harvests, and so very much spiritual practices and philosophy concerned itself with how can we appease the gods

so that they won't cause hardship and suffering.

And so the early Hebrew texts and Brahmin texts

really folk. and Brahmin texts really focus on the sacrifices necessary to appease the God. If you think of the Book of Job or Abraham, people who had to lose or be willing to sacrifice families,

the early exoduses and mass migrations that are pretty much found in every old world philosophy,

the sacrifices of goats in long rituals and in old world philosophy the great

sin of human beings was hubris, the idea that we could somehow in any way hope to master our faith

or take the place of gods or in any way hope to control or conquer nature. And so Hubris was punished in all of the

mythologies and the early religions. Then about 2,800 years ago what starts to happen is the

arriving of a merchant class and the ability to stockpile foods.

So, and the development of cities

and what people begin to experience is for the first time a sense of a lack of vulnerability, continual vulnerability to nature, to calamities.

And with that, we start to have a arrival of all around the same time, a bunch of thinkers known as the Axial Age.

And these thinkers, instead of saying that human suffering is caused externally by wrathful gods or by an indifferent or violent These thinkers, and we're talking about the writers of the middle Hebrew script such as

the Book of Daniel, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, Taoist philosophy like Lautzay, the early Hindu

texts and of course the historical Buddha.

And these thinkers all said that our suffering is caused by how we use the mind,

not by so much external gods, but actually the focus has to shift to within.

And suddenly the great sins are no longer hubris, which is the belief that we can conquer

nature, but actually the sins of craving and hatred, which are taught to be humans great flaws that continually push us out and focus our attention on the world around us and don't allow

...