The Four Paths

Siddhartha Gautama once said that he saw only four types of people in the world:

Those going from-

1.darkness to light 2.light to darkness 3.light to light 4. darkness to darkness

That pretty much sums up the options for a human. You can either aspire to the light, or condemn yourself to eternal night. This whole individuality trip is a really amazing mental edifice when one considers that all evidence points to the contrary. Solitary people are just a microcosm of society. So it follows that the four types of people Buddha defined could also be used as a rubric for civilizations. Which are we? I'll have to withhold judgement till I'm a little older and more experienced with humanity. As of now I'm leaning toward #4, on account of our bloody barbaric history and the inherent soul smashing apathetic despair that life based on the self serving principles of Capitalism causes. Like I said though, I'm still far too young to really know which of the four our society is. It could just as easily be #2. Maybe all that founding fathers idealism embodied in the Constitution was totally legit and we are going through a period of terminal decline that will end in our own self induced Armageddon. Somehow I feel that our entire world is also just a microcosm of the Universe. Individual humans are about as independent as a wave on the ocean. We can never really distract ourselves from the fact that we individually, collectively and cosmically are always going to be traveling down one of these four paths.