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216 religious revolution now

cannot fulfi ll the promise of ascent in the future by keeping us alien-

ated from the present and divided, each of us against himself. Th e false

solutions of the Promethean cult of power and of the pagan worship of

being show, by their failure, the need for a more radical revision of our

beliefs and of our way of life.

Recognizing the defects in human existence

Th e religion of the future must begin as well in the unwavering recog-
nition of our mortality, our groundlessness, and our insatiability. With-
out such recognition, it cannot advance in its commitments. In par tic u-
lar, it cannot advance in the search for a greater existence.
Of all higher religions, the Semitic mono the isms are the most ada-
mant in denying the defects in human life. Th ey promise eternal life for
the embodied self, a life beyond death. Th ey claim to resolve the ulti-
mate enigma of existence in the form of a narrative about God’s cre-
ation of the world and of his redemptive intervention in history. Th ey
propose an object of our desire— God and the love of God— that will at
last quiet our insatiable longing. Th e religions oriented to overcoming
or humanizing the world are more equivocal in their denial of the de-
fects in the human condition.
In early Buddhism, the most important version of the overcoming of
the world, the denial of our mortality takes the form of discounting
individual selfh ood. Eternal life is already ours, to the extent that we
can possess it, as engagement in the one and hidden being. Only our
attachment to the illusions of distinct existence prevents us from seeing
and living this truth. Once we acknowledge it and affi rm on the basis of
it, through the practice of a disinterested altruism, our universal kin-
ship with the remainder of being, we can escape the treadmill of desire.
Our success in this eff ort depends on a correct understanding of the
world. Groundlessness gives way to a defi nitive grounding in a truth
beyond illusions.
Th at this way of denying our mortality, our groundlessness, and our
insatiability has a per sis tent logic, intimately connected with other as-
pects of this spiritual orientation, is shown by its reappearance, almost
two thousand years later, and with the use of the teaching of the Vedas