THE LOSS OF SPIRITUAL WISDOM
Yet neither the original science nor the civilizations founded upon it were destined to last forever. The sages predicted that their spiritual wisdom would eventually be lost. Anticipating this event, the Hermetic sages cried out:
O Egypt, Egypt, of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tale, which thine own children in time to come will not believe; nothing will be left but graven words, and only the stones will tell of thy piety.
And in that day, men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and of worship.... No one will raise his eyes to heaven; the pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise.... As for the soul, and the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain to immortality, as I have taught you—all this they will mock at, and will even persuade themselves that it is false.5With the advent of the modern era, the memory of the ancient spiritual science began to wane. It was replaced eventually by modern physical science, which has little, if anything, to say about the immortality of the soul. In fact, the modern objective paradigm suggests that consciousness does not and cannot survive the death of the body.
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