In the spiritual breakthrough of “Axial Age” or “Ecumenic Age”, the most central point is the breakthrough of the cosmological experience and the discovery of the transcendental experience as the tense structure of existence. The temporal consciousness of transcendental experience is the intersection or mediation point between eternity and time, which defines human existence as a tense structure between time with death and eternity with immortality, thus distinguishing it from the temporal consciousness of cosmological experience which only equates time with the rhythm of the universe, while human beings are only ultimately dead and belong to a different realm from God, the immortal one. While God in the cosmological experience is the supreme thing within the universe and a constituent part of the cosmic whole, in the transcendental experience God is transformed from God within the universe to the divine ground of the world and all things, and human beings can be understood as an existence that unfolds toward God on the occasion of God-man. The cosmological experience takes the symbolic form of myth because of its materiality and analogy; but with the spiritual breakthrough in “Ecumenic Age”, the locus of transcendental opening becomes the human mind, which leads to the rise of teleology in“Ecumenic Age” and“Axial Age”; and if one bears the transcendental opening with intellectual consciousness, one has the symbolic form of philosophy, as in the case of bearing the transcendental opening with spiritual consciousness, one has the symbolic form of revelation. There is a redemptive style of existential truth based on revelation, which focuses more on the upward pull or tug of the divine pole on humanity in the poles of divinity and humanity, and a humanistic style of existential truth based on philosophy, which focuses more on the search of the human pole toward the divine pole. |