The Great New Emerging Civilization

The Great New Emerging Civilization

by

James Hilgendorf

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Published by James Hilgendorf at Smashwords

The Great New Emerging Civilization

Copyright 2011 James Hilgendorf

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Foreword

Unseen Currents

Mirrors

Amid the Ruins

Identity

Reality

Death

Nations & War

Economics & Education

The New Religion

The Great New Emerging Civilization

About the Author

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The Great New Emerging Civilization

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Foreword

The premise of this book is that there is a great new global civilization emerging on this planet, and that the foundation for this new civilization will be a great new global religion.

I am a Buddhist. I have been practicing the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin and the SGI, or Soka Gakkai International, for 38 years. I say this, because I will be weaving my experience of Nichiren Buddhism into the fabric of this entire book. At the same time, I know that neither Buddhism nor Christianity nor Islam, nor any other religion, has a lock on the Truth. Buddhism is Life. The Truth is Life. People are the components of religion; and people all over the planet are increasingly coming together in an appreciation of common ideals and a common humanity beyond borders, beyond nations, beyond distinctions, that is the future of the human race. These people are the forerunners and the seed-bearers. Their mission is immense. They can be found in all cultures and in all religions.

You may never have heard of the SGI. Today, the SGI is comprised of 13,000,000 members in 192 countries and territories around the world. It is the largest Buddhist lay organization in the United States. Wherever you go, you find people chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, the simple, yet extraordinarily profound basic practice of Nichiren Buddhism.

The ideals and dreams of the SGI are universal. They are the intent and heart of the universe itself. They are nothing separate or different from the dreams of all great religions. They are nothing separate from the dreams of ordinary people. But the SGI has found a way to make those dreams and ideals a reality in the life of anyone. The greatness of the SGI and the religion of Nichiren Daishonin is beyond the imagination of most of the people in the world at the present time. Nevertheless, its continued, explosive growth is inevitable.

So this book, by nature, is about a particular perspective, but also about common ground - our shared humanity that exists beyond all dogma or ideology. There are aspects of conventional religion today that will not hold. Of this, there is a general, growing consensus. There is a deep search under way. Our ideas, our ways of thinking have to change, and we have to confront this change head on. I am part of this change. Other people, from many different faith backgrounds, or people who have no particular faith at all, are also part of this change. And it is only through a deeply forged alliance of people of all persuasions and faith that our future - one of immense and astounding proportions - will unfold.

In this book, I speak for myself. These are my own thoughts, my own experiences. I represent no one; but at the same time, I hope this book resonates deeply with people of all walks and persuasions of life.

In these pages, I pay sincere tribute to people of many varied backgrounds, who are upholding the timeless, universal ideals of justice, equality and compassion for all of life. At the same time, I introduce the reader to the Buddhism of the SGI, which is helping to lay the foundation for a great new emerging civilization on our planet Earth.

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Unseen Currents

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In his book, Civilization on Trial, published in 1947, the great English historian Arnold Toynbee wrote:

"What will be singled out as the salient event of our time by future historians, centuries hence, looking back on the first half of the twentieth century and trying to see its activities and experiences in that just proportion which the time perspective sometimes reveals? Not, I fancy, any of those sensational or tragic or catastrophic political and economic events which occupy the headlines of our newspapers and the foregrounds of our minds; not wars, revolutions, massacres, deportations, famines, gluts, slumps, or boom, but something of which we are only half-conscious, and out of which it would be difficult to make a headline. The things that make good headlines attract our attention because they are on the surface of the stream of life, and they distract our attention from the slower, impalpable, imponderable movements that work below the surface and penetrate to the depths. But of course it is really these deeper, slower movements that, in the end, make history, and it is they that stand out huge in retrospect, when the sensational passing events have dwindled, in perspective, to their true proportions.

"Future historians will say, I think, that the great event of the twentieth century was the impact of the Western civilization upon all the other living societies of the world of that day. They will say of this impact that it was so powerful and so pervasive that it turned the lives of all its victims upside down and inside out - affecting the behavior, outlook, feelings, and beliefs of individual men, women, and children in an intimate way, touching chords in human souls that are not touched by mere external material forces - however ponderous and terrifying. This will be said, I feel sure, by historians looking back on our times even from as short a time hence as A.D. 2047.

Toynbee then goes on to theorize what historians of the future - one, two, even three thousand years hence - might look back and see from their vantage point.

He writes:

"The historians of A.D. 3047 will, I believe, be chiefly interested in the tremendous counter-effects which, by that time, the victims will have produced in the life of the aggressor. By A.D. 3047, our Western civilization, as we and our Western predecessors have known it, say, for the last twelve or thirteen hundred years, since its emergence out of the Dark Ages, may have been transformed almost out of all recognition, by a counter-radiation of influences from the foreign worlds which we, in our day, are in the act of engulfing in ours - influences from Orthodox Christendom, from Islam, from Hinduism, from the Far East.

"By A.D. 4047 the distinction - which looms large today - between the Western civilization, as an aggressor, and the other civilizations, as its victims, will probably seem unimportant. When radiation has been followed by counter-radiation of influences, what will stand out will be a single great experience, common to the whole of mankind: the experience of having one's parochial social heritage battered to bits by collision with the parochial heritages of other civilizations, and then finding a new life - a new common life - springing up out of the wreckage. The historians of A.D. 4047 will say that the impact of the Western civilization on its contemporaries, in the second half of the second millennium of the Christian era, was the epoch-making event of that age because it was the first step towards the unification of mankind into one single society. By their time, the unity of mankind will perhaps have come to seem one of the fundamental conditions of human life - just part of the order of nature - and it may need quite an effort of imagination on their part to recall the parochial outlook of the pioneers of civilization during the first six thousand years or so of its existence.

And the historians of A.D. 5047? The historians of A.D. 5047 will say, I fancy, that the importance of this social unification of mankind was not to be found in the field of technics and economics, and not in the field of war and politics, but in the field of religion.

A few years ago, I visited the Coliseum in Rome. What a mighty structure! It might have been built yesterday by today's engineers. Row upon row of heavy, stone-hewn columns, still useable today after two thousand years. Mighty builders indeed. And yet, standing there, among the great stones of that edifice, I could still sense in my blood and bones, after two thousand years, the eerie presence of what happened there - the circus of horrors, the blood feast, gladiators as heroes, and blood worship. Standing there, in the silence, I imagined the cries of the crowd, their passion for blood and death as a weekend ritual, a massive diversion. Vast money was poured into the construction of this mammoth structure as political payoff and diversion for the people. Standing there, listening, feeling the horror, the hollowness, I thought: This civilization deserved to die.

Rome, at this time, had reached new heights of power and geopolitical domination; and yet, at its core, this civilization was crumbling. I remember the guide telling of how, after the sack of Rome in the mid-fifth century A.D., this great Coliseum lay empty and abandoned, visited only by homeless people.

In the Rome of the Coliseum, people surely felt the chaos gathering. Amid the pomp and mighty structures and overwhelming appearance of power, deep in the psyche of the people an underground movement, an anxiety, a deep, shifting loss of roots was stirring. On the surface, it seemed the empire was destined to endure forever. But the gods depicted on the coins and buildings and flags were gods in name only. Still there was obeisance, still there were the many offerings at the private hearth and in broader public displays, but the gods had fled.

The spirit of Rome was dying.

Out of this disintegration was born a new spirituality and civilization - one in which we are still living. The new spirituality, of course, was Christianity, and the civilization, Western civilization. The impact of this civilization has now spread to impact most of the globe, with the United States as its leading protagonist.

In many ways, we resemble Rome before its fall. There is the hubris, the power, the arrogance that has come to the fore in our national destiny. And just as in Rome, there is a resurgence and seeking after answers, after the eternal.

Our world crashes upon foreign worlds. Samuel Huntington labeled this the clash of civilizations, a struggle for dominance. But there will be no dominance; for just as Toynbee wrote, all will be changed beyond recognition. None of the old ideas will hold. This clash is the prelude to an entirely new global civilization, and at the heart of this civilization will arise a dazzling new spirituality.

The new is slowly emerging. It is almost nowhere to be seen. Everyone senses, instead, the gathering chaos. Like a deepening darkness before the dawn, the dreams of America - the dreams of Emerson and Thoreau and Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. and millions of dreaming mothers and fathers and sons and daughters - seem despoiled, shattered, and lost. But there are new roots struggling, new sprouts, new leaves poking forth among the ruins. From America, this spirit will blossom forth.

Against the current background of world unrest, war, preparation for war, atrocities, religious strife, disempowerment, despair, loss of hope and any number of other things contributing to a deep, general malaise in the hearts and minds of people the world over, there is a new civilization being born. One is hardly aware of it at all, like the distant cry of a cock before dawn, awakening one vaguely from slumber. This civilization is now inevitable. It is something almost undreamed of. It is an awakening of the vast universe of life itself, revealing itself now here, now there, through isolated instances of people, or small groups of people. A subterranean current of life preparing to breach the surface of the earth itself.

Where is