Bennett and the succession of epochs
Here’s another short quote from The Dramatic Universe, Chapter 1, Vol1, page 18 (deleted…)
I think a few isolated citations from the text will in no way violate the principle of copyright that Mr. Bennett (son) has worried over here. If anything they will spark an interest in the text. We don’t plan to cite many more of these passages anyway.
Throughout the past two thousand five hundred years the spiritual history of mankind has been a quest for the Absolute…
Bennett is one of the few people who came close to see what I call the ‘eonic effect’ (but not that close), but he mixed his ideas up to the point where that perception never quite gelled properly.
He does however see that a strange succession of epochs is occurring, although he gets the dates wrong because he is still thinking in terms of the cycles of the Great Year, which is outlandish.
Still, he correctly sees that a new era is beginning with modernity, in the succession to the Axial period.
But his idea of a Megalanthropic age is all wrong. He cleverly undermines modernity by making the new epoch start in the nineteenth century, and is thus able to put the rise of modernity in a complex transition. Very confusing.
I think that it is incorrect in principle to give labels to these epochs, or to assign a key idea, e.g. that of the Absolute.
The point here is that the rise of modernity is clearly beginning much earlier in the sixteenth century, and by the nineteenth that transition is complete.
The point is important since the New Age movement is full of efforts to rig the definition of a New Age so that it includes only what various gurus wish it include, and omitting all the seminal developments up to the Enlightenment.
The whole scheme of New Age epochs is garbage.
Bennett is strangely transitional on this, and in the fourth volume begins to see the point of modern freedoms emerging.
New Man, New Age, New Socialism 