The Greats that shaped history

The main thing that an honest study of history reveals to us is that certain things have always happened a certain way, in spite of how we might think they ought to go. History is humbling. It washes away our presumptions. And often we can learn what to expect in the future by looking into the past, if we assume there is a kind of shape to history.

One of the people who frontiered this thought was Oswald Spengler, the German historian and philosopher who was wildly popular in the 1920s and 30s but is mostly forgotten today. He saw what he felt were predictable patterns in history, that he compared to patterns in nature. And he felt that much like seasons, certain events repeat. See also historic recurrence.

Now there is something that seems odd, that we have many examples of repeating. It is that enormous social changes, especially religious ones, usually come down to us from a single member of the elite after having an inexplicable but honest personal conversion.

Examples include:

Cyrus the Great, the Emperor of Persia and the only non-Jew regarded as a messiah in ancient Judaism, not only freed the Jews from their captivity in Babylon, but paid for the Jews to rebuild their destroyed temple in Jerusalem.

Alexander the Great, after being privately tutored by Aristotle, had a sudden epiphany to conquer the known world and spread Hellenism throughout it. This influenced religious and philosophical belief as far as India. See Greko-Buddhism.

The Indian Emperor Ashoka converted to Buddhism on a blood-strewn battlefield, and spread Buddhism throughout the subcontinent. He built many of the original Buddhist temples throughout India.

Constantine converted to Christianity on a battlefield, and brought the Roman Empire with him, causing the dawn of a new Christian age. See the scholarly work Constantine and the Conversion of Europe by A.H.M. Jones, 1948, still used as study material at Yale University.

Charlemagne brought great reform to Christian Europe, including banning the persecution of witches.

Vladimir the Great, the first Emperor of Russia, had a soulful conversion to Orthodox Christianity, and brought his nation with him into the modern age from its Viking past.

Mikhail Gorbashev had a change of heart, that caused him to lift Russia out of the Soviet Union, beginning with his policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring).

Vladimir Putin had a conversion experience, and has gone to great lengths to not only protect freedom of religion among the great indigenous religions of Russia (Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Orthodox Christianity) but also to build and restore temples, mosques, synagogues, and cathedrals. Today only 4% of Russians classify themselves as atheists.

We are so conditioned to think that this is not how history goes, or not how it 'ought to' by some prejudice, that many today deny the sincerity of these conversions, anachronistically reading modern cynical state-craft into ancient minds. Yet history upholds these realities. History is so much more interesting and edifying when we read it, than when we read our modern prejudices into it.

Will history repeat itself? Will Baba's manifestation come about in the heart of a single person, a conqueror or emperor, someone who can change history at the stroke of a pen?

This brings us to Baba's teaching about the spiritual hierarchy, that can alter the hearts and minds of men thousands of miles away. Is that what is in store for the world in a few hundred years? Will history again repeat itself? Or will there be a new way? Only time will tell.

Constantine's conversion at the Milvian Bridge 312 BC