The book of Isha
The story you are going to read may make you think of other stories, which would not be surprising: many spiritual paths are identical, and this, from the beginning, a long time ago, well before writing. You know, writing appeared around 3,300 BCE, a little over 5,300 years ago. Spirituality has been around longer! On artifacts from a dig in Pakistan (formerly part of the Indies and the Persian Empire), we found drawings of sitting meditation, in lotus position, that date back 8,000 years! It was then the Neolithic, the beginnings of agriculture and the world was populated by about a hundred million people.
Spirituality existed
since long before that, we see its manifestations on the walls of
some caves. Paintings dating back 18,000 years prove that the Men of
the time lived in an acute spiritual consciousness. The story of Isha
takes place in India, at the beginning of our era, we do not know the
exact date nor how was the India of his time, kingdom of «Magadha»
or empire «Gupta». Some names of characters, cities, leave us
clues, but we were not there! The world was not like today, but the
human being has not fundamentally changed.
Isha was an awakened,
like Gautama, like other known or unknown people. Isha taught,
initiated people, little, like all awakened ones who showed the way
of the dharma. In their lifetime, no true awakened person had many
disciples. Jesus, for example, had how many? Today they are nearly
2.7 billion to claim of him, but during his known period, in the
lands of Judea and Samaria, or of what will become Israel, how many
people were they initiated by him?