“Professor Gilbert Murray has termed the centuries between the flowering of classical Athens [circa 450 BC] and the growth of the radically different garden of the early Christian era [aprox. 100 AD] the period of the Failure of Nerve. It was an age comparable to that of India in the Buddha’s time and of China in the period of Confucius; for in each of these the earlier social structure was in process of dissolution, the centres of higher civilization were crumbling before the sheer power of comparative barbarians, and the central task of philosophy had become, on one hand socio-political, how to restore a dissolving civilization to health, and on the other, moral and psychological, how an individual in the shattering world might retain and develop his own humanity.”—Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology.

  Before we can hope in a mature manner to face the challenges piling up in front of us today we need understand where we are. And very very few people do. 

  Read the above passage again, and I am going to throw a number at you: 1000 years, approximately forty generations. The Dorian invasion of Greece which gave birth to classical Athens occurred around 1200-1100 BC, about a thousand years to the mid-point of the above Failure of Nerve period. Chariot driving cattle herding warrior peoples descended upon both India (Vedic Aryans) and China (first Shang Dynasties) at roughly the same time, approximately 1500 BC. Again about one thousand years before their own Failure of Nerve centuries. 

  In Western Europe, the birthplace of our own current civilization, one that has now spread across the entire globe, the Germanic invasions occurred between about 500 and 1000 AD, again roughly one thousand years ago. 

  My point being from the very outset we have been taught all wrong. We’ve had our heads filled with ‘ideas’ about progress and democracy, but there are deeper Truths at work here. And as I’ve said before, in the vital Living, that is organic reality world there ARE no ideas, only flow, change, and patterns. 

  The above Campbell quote is an example of a pattern. Three instances, Classical Athens, India, and China, of a thousand year old civilization experiencing what this professor Murray dude termed a Failure of Nerve. 

And then our own thousand year old civilization. 

  Hmmm, that’s not what they teach in school, is it?