WHAT IS HINDUISM?
history itself. They dwelled in a much broader ‘time-space’
of awareness than we do – one in which ‘dead’ ancestors,
for example, were experienced as being as alive as ever, and
in which a living memory was maintained of the emergence
of the Earth itself out of the divine awareness itself – in
particular through the higher awareness of ‘gods’ whose
reality was still experienced directly by human beings, not
just in their inner life but in their outer world itself. Cosmic
bodies such as Sun, Moon were not just interpreted
intellectually as symbols of conscious divinities but
immediately felt and sensed as shining divinities (the very
words divinity, deva and devi having their root in the Sanskrit
word for ‘shining’). What we take as a purely ‘outer’ world
of objects in space-time was experienced much as we now
experience the ‘inner world’ of our dreams – for it had not
yet taken on the same degree of ‘objective’ fixity as our
current waking reality. Instead, that outer world retained a
subjective, ever-shifting or dreamlike character, one not yet
experienced as separate from the dreams and ‘inner’ life of
human beings.
Human beings can fly in dreams but they cannot
actually capture, kill or eat dream pigs, let alone flying ones.
The development of ‘ego-awareness’ came about because
of what it essentially was – a new capacity of human beings
to contract the fluid, dreamlike character of the time-space in
which they dwelled, one that enabled them to precisely
focus or target their awareness ‘in’ time and in space. Only