Forgetfulness?

     Chapter 7 in Mircea Eliade's Myth and Reality, focused on how different cultures viewed forgetfulness, memory, sleep, death, awakening, and history. The first part of the chapter looked into the Buddhist view of these ideas. Last semester I was in a class that looked into the Buddhist ideology. I could understand most of what he was talking about in connection to Atman, ones self, and how ones self could achieve complete freedom through awakening or nirvana.
      I really began aware of how many cultures view sleeping, being confused, nativity, and drunkenness as the same thing. These things create a void between the person and some sort of god figure. All of the previous listed things were related to death. To avoid death people have to come out of this stupor of any of the four things already stated. You need to be awakened and brought into the light. In a lot of creation stories beings or the earth itself was first in total darkness. And through some mythic action they were brought into the light. The light is always described in such a way that it seems divine.
      Throughout the entire chapter Eliade explained how all cultures are trying to figure out the original myth, or how the world(as we know it) came to be. He has concluded that most of the Western world believes that they are here because of some Supernatural Being. Other cultures such as Buddhist aren't trying to figure this out. What they truly care about is learning how to achieve nirvana through total lose of Atman.