ABSTRACT
The human condition to which all great religious leaders have addressed themselves is that we are in a position of unavoidable choice, a spiritual condition. The great religious teachers and the saints and mystics through the ages have understood deeply that the human condition is man's estate. The message of those great masters of spiritual living, the masters who arose in the Axial and post-Axial Eras, was that the human purpose is not to survive bodily at all costs. Before the Axial Era humans live in a primitive state bound by instinct to the signals of survival. The primordial struggle between good and evil that characterized this new era in human development was symbolized in the struggle that occurred within the great spiritual masters, which has continued through religious history in the lives of mystics. The 'measureless forces of the spirit' began their slow release with the emergence of primitive religion, and reached their historical climax in the Axial Era.
