With our species on the edge of extermination

I really enjoy yoga – it’s not something I have generally admitted to people until now, but over the last 6 months or so I’ve really been getting into it. I was kind of embarrassed to admit I did it - there isn't that manly ring to it, like heaving and sweating in the gym or playing competitive sports, but just recently I’ve become more ashamed of the fact that the principle of yoga (seeking a path to enlightenment) has been around for six to seven thousand years and its only recently (strangely enough around two thousand years ago) that it lost its appeal as a worthwhile pursuit in the west.

I find myself imagining those changing times, with whole swathes of people sitting, enjoying life in the moment, grooving with the eternal now. Perhaps, with a respected elder, who could drift into a meditative trance for days at a time and return with visions and philosophies his people could learn from and be inspired by. Then one day this thug, bully-type character comes along calling himself Alexander the Great or Atilla the Hun or something ridiculous and hearing of this great guru who tells everyone the light of eternal happiness and joy shines from within, promptly lops his head off with a dirty great sword exclaiming, “Now that’s what I call enlightenment!” or words to that effect.

Now, his people do not mourn him - they know he has experienced an infinity of eternal nows and life is but a dream etc - but they are concerned at this lumbering idiot stomping about the place demanding people serve him or he’ll get a bit spicy. So, they play along with the oafish moron, with the hope that they’ll be able to educate him in the true joy in life and perhaps he’ll become a more compassionate, chilled-out kinda guy. They teach him about how he can achieve God-realisation within himself, but this backfires and he believes he is God and becomes enraged when they try to tell him everyone can achieve enlightenment and sets about more of them with his mighty sword of truth and justice. They soon realise this guy is a bit of a lost case, but unfortunately (perhaps they are a little too enlightened) they don’t try to kill this bumbling buffoon, they just let him get on with ordering them about and use their yoga training to transcend the hardship he is inflicting and keep their yoga practices to themselves, but always with the vain hope he would grow up a bit a take heed of their teachings.

They’d continue to serve him and try to satisfy his petty demands, like building him a palace and bringing him fine foods and fabrics, but because of his amoebic worldview he would quickly become bored of this situation and would demand yet more stimulation “Why isn’t my palace built? I want a blue orange?” and he would start to pry more and more into their lives and see they were still wasting time with this enlightenment guff and realising all this grooving with the eternal now wasn’t getting his palace built, he would crack yet more skulls, thus pushing the old teachings further underground. Teaching the old wisdom to the young would become near impossible. The elders would try to communicate the old ways to the fresh young minds, but they would have to use metaphors and allegories so that the doofus wouldn’t catch on. The upshot of this though, was that the young were not too bright and hence took these metaphors literally - hence a Judeo-Christian theology was born.

The only positive to all this was that before the imbecile, who started us all on this ridiculous materialistic spiral, died (probably at the hand of one of his own pitiful brood), thanks to the teachings he’d ignored his whole life, he probably realised the true meaning of enlightenment in his last few seconds of brain consciousness and that he’d been an absolute c*nt.