Sublime

15

To the primitive mind trying to figure out what caused the pain and sorrow of human existence, an obvious answer was that a powerful and unpredictable supernatural agency was responsible. It made sense, therefore, to keep it sweet by offering it gifts and tributes.

Whether he is happy or unhappy is not something which lies in man’s control; the happy man is the one who has a good daimon, eudaimon, in contrast to the unhappy man, the kakodaimon, dysdaimon. (…) A general belief in spirits is not expressed by the term daimon until the fifth century.25

a contrast life aimed at communion.

walk the earth. This literature is worthy of attention. Most of the points given in this book are drawn from the Tipitaka, which is the three-section compendium of the Buddha’s original teachings.

It varied in form, but its content was fairly uniform: it was an attempt at a ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ religion, common to all nations and cultures, available to all reflective minds without recourse to childish mythologies, ‘revealed’ truth, miracles or abstruse metaphysical systems.

This is the position of the disinherited in every age. What must be the attitude toward the rulers, the controllers of political,