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World Crisis
Crisis and visible effects
The intellectual event which announced the opening of the modern era was Francis Bacon's publication of Novum Organum. The age of hearsay, guesswork, and fumbling ignorance was rung out in the search for facts and the sharp reasonings of science. The religious event which announced it was Martin Luther's proclamation of independence which he nailed on the church door at Wittenberg. The age of soul-crushing churchianity and sanctified superstitions was rung out in the recognition that the only representatives of Christ are those who do what he taught. The historical event which announced its arrival in the clearest possible words was the French Revolution. The age of feudalism and slavery was rung out in blood and tears. The industrial event which announced it was Watt's invention of steam engines. The age of hand power was rung out in factory whistles and whirring wheels. Thus this momentous epoch, which is beginning to witness a veritable reconstruction in human existence, struck down the human arrogance which barred its way and broke through the human ignorance which failed to perceive its inevitability.The widespread character of the present world ferment proves that it is a historical necessity and that a new epoch is about to dawn. For the generation which grew up after World War I grew up also in search of a fresh ideal. What happened here yesterday and what is happening here today has surprised and stirred before. The human race is indeed at a fateful turning point of its history. The shape of its physical, mental, and moral life for at least the next thousand years has been and is being effectually decided by the meteoric decade in which we live. Every successive stage of the immense drama which has unfolded itself before our eyes has proved this.
No crisis which humanity has faced in the past is comparable with the present one either for spiritual gravity or physical consequences. When we speak in our writings of the war's general effect, we refer not only to the period of actual fighting but also to the confused periods of so-called peace which precede and follow it. It is only for the sake of literary convenience that we lump the three periods together, either under the short term "war" or under the more descriptive term "world crisis." This preamble will help to make clearer our point of view. "Crisis" is derived from the Greek word meaning "to decide." I fitly used the term in the title of my last book [The Spiritual Crisis of Man--Ed.] because a decisive turning point had been reached in human history, forcing two alternative directions for an inescapable movement. The crisis which has been growing within humanity will open completely in this century. It is an inner crisis, and its meaning is that humanity can go no farther in its downward path into the lust of the senses and the intellect into the forgetfulness of its innermost divine soul, without the most dangerous consequences to its future, without losing the very thread of the possibility of one day recovering its spiritual memory. In today's world there is such indifference to the things of the spirit, such moral lethargy, that the higher power is forcing us either to call a halt or to perish. We see before our eyes that the world is changing, that society is moving, and that men and women are debating most things and affairs as never before. Some of this is bad, some good. Our times are noteworthy for their supreme suspense, for the unpleasant chaos which grips now a country and then a continent, and for their state of continued crisis. Everywhere frictions and oppositions prevail between groups, classes, religions, races, and the upholders of different political, moral, social, or aesthetic ideas. This ferment of questionings and disputes, attacks and revolts, only underlines the need to invent a new civilization. The overpopulation explosion is worsened by the exhausted soil, the poisoned environment, and, worse, the poisoned mental and emotional climate. The crisis I alluded to in The Spiritual Crisis of Man, written more than a quarter of a century ago, has not only worsened but spread everywhere. A civilization which has magnificence without significance cannot endure. Its very lack of soul is as much a threat to its existence as the tail of a burning comet could be to our own. The situation has not improved with the years; it has deteriorated. This alone should be interpreted as a warning that the road taken was a wrong one and that fresh thinking is needed. Lunacy and violence are not the only things in modern life. They are present, but the ferment and discussion of new ideas, the interest in the knowledge and betterment of life are also there. The meaning of our age puzzles the thoughtful man and perplexes the religious one. A static condition of society has never really existed. Change has always been there, even if slight and unnoticed. The struggle between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, old orders and new ones, has never come to an end. But today we have not merely changed, we have rapidly changed. The transitions are sharper and quicker. No other epoch of history ever offered so much opportunity to create a worthwhile everyday life for all humanity. No other ever delivered so terrible a warning about the results of failure along with the opportunity. Time flies so fast these days that no matter how much one does, too much is still left undone. The pain of humanity in world war is appalling in its scope and depth. It is not possible for the limited human mind to take in more than a tithe of it and still retain its sanity. As a matter of fact, millions of people are today mentally unstable as a result of these events. That we live in an age of insecurity is evidenced by the flourishing business done by those who profess to foretell the future. Astrologers and clairvoyants abound in the larger cities. The vogue for fortune-tellers is natural during a period of widespread unsettlement and warlike upheaval. Continental Europe experienced a similar vogue during the Napoleonic period. We live in a society driven by compulsive restlessness, knowing no peace either on its surface or at its centre. People feel the confusion and unrest of our times and need someone to help or some book to guide them to the Truth that God exists and that the divine existence can be made to uphold their individual lives. A fuller realization of the horrible nature of the world's crisis than that experienced by the masses--constant thought about it and acute sensitivity to it--has deeply affected a small minority of mystics, writers, artists, and religious fanatics. This has paralysed their ambitions, frozen their creative powers, petrified their hopes of happiness, and nullified their zest for living. Amid the perplexities and monotonies, the wars and calamities of our times, some may well ask themselves whether what they do in life is worth doing at all, whether it is all futile or worthwhile. Never before have there been seen so many evil tendencies and yet so many idealistic ones as in recent years. This commingling of extremes, or rather conflict of extremes, is a characteristic indicator of the forces loose among us. There is uneasiness in every land, even alarm in some lands. There are fears and crises, anxieties, and menaces everywhere. Most people who are at all thoughtful or sensitive have the feeling that they are living today in a squirrel's cage. The free space in which they can move physically is extremely limited. They constantly find themselves stopped short by its bars, in whatever direction they may turn. For world conditions dominate national conditions and thus predetermine everybody's future as they have never done in the past. Mental freedom is hampered by individual helplessness in the face of humanity's dismal condition. In these tragic times, men have not only public anxieties pecking at their minds, but also the personal problems resulting from them. The future is so doubtful and confused that the very thought invokes worry and incites fear. But if pessimism can be rejected, optimism cannot be justified. Spiritual teachings of doubtful quality are well mingled with the others of much higher value. The confusion of the two has always been present but hardly ever has it been so great as it is at present. Unbalanced religious theories and personalities and materialistic dogmatic slogans abound today. They are signs. There is more ferment on both sides than ever before, more violent discussion of such ideas, more verve in the interest shown. Bernard Shaw once put forward the theory that this planet is the lunatic asylum for the whole solar system. Nobody took his theory seriously, and everybody complimented him on his wit and humour. I, however, have long held a kindred theory that the human race is evolving from insanity to sanity and that except in a few rare individuals--the sages--it is far from the goal. The dangers of expressing this view are such that I have hitherto held my tongue along with the view itself. To question the mental status of so many millions of people would have been an open invitation to be incarcerated without delay in an institution for the mad. But I am at last emboldened to say all this because a scientist, Dr. Estabrooks, a professor of psychology at Colgate University, has pronounced a similar judgement and even dared to put it into print. The widespread area and enormous volume of pain and sorrow which have made themselves such front-rank features of human life in this generation have also made more people think about this side of the problem of their existence than ever before. The pain of the body, the sorrow of the emotions--these two dark shadows of their lives have been the subject of terrible contemplations for millions of suffering men and women. It has been hard for many of them to sustain belief in divine goodness, or at least in divine mercy. The optimistic blindness to plain appearances which would say with Browning that "all's right with the world" and see only the truth, beauty, and goodness everywhere, the intellectual one-sidedness which would prefer to hide from unacceptable realities, must have received a severe jolt in many parts of the world during the war. The mood of total pessimism may easily be engendered in those who concentrate on the state of crisis which has held the world for several years. This much is certain, that the crisis situation does not permit people to stand mentally still. They are compelled to form views and make decisions about the direction they want to take. These experiences of crisis or war become, in their totality, the door opening to a new era of thought for many persons. Some seek new paths to spiritual salvation and are prepared to welcome unfamiliar and unorthodox influences. The realistic view has become so unpleasant that worldly minded people look for some able leader and spiritually minded people look for some inspired prophet, both groups seeking from him a message of cheer or hope about the world crisis and the war's menace. The immense industrial expansion which has taken so many millions out of the open spaces of nature and cramped them in town apartments has also stimulated their intellects.Causes, meaning of crisis
It is not only a spiritual crisis for mankind but also a spiritual opportunity. The nations need collective outer peace, but men themselves need personal inner peace. The two are related. The sufferings imposed by the last war were terrible, but those who found a deep religious or philosophical support within themselves were better able to meet them. In the coming age which will dawn soon, the working classes will come into their own, culturally speaking. It is therefore important that they should learn to understand the inner significance of life and not be led by merely superficial doctrines. The ultimate purpose of life here on earth is a spiritual one, and this must be remembered. Any new order which offers to fill stomachs and actually empties hearts is but a mockery and a danger. If we are not to be obliterated, a new way out will have to be found. The political way is a failure. It has been tried since the last war, and the nations have not been able to get any agreement, much less harmony, on the disputes that divide them about particular places or peoples, or on those that ought to unite them, like stopping nuclear tests and achieving disarmament. But the political way is not the only way, as the political leaders naturally and pardonably believe. There is an alternative one--the spiritual way. Jesus showed it to us and Buddha stated it. At this late hour, it is indeed the only practicable way. Any other will lead inevitably to obliteration, because it will fail to lead to peace. The divine law which controls destiny points brusquely and uncompromisingly to this single path. If we fail to obey, the punishment will be severe. If we heed it, the consequence may be unpalatable in the beginning, but it will be sweeter in the end. The world crisis as a sign that mankind is passing through a spiritual turning-point includes truth-seekers also. It is time for them to stop living by other men's spiritual experience and to start living by their own. Let us not waste time looking for a mastermind to straighten out the tangled threads of human misery with magical overnight suddenness. The conversion of mankind to better ways, like everything else which is worth having, must be worked for and won. Through all this range of experience, human consciousness is evolving, is coming closer to the level where it will be able to take the next step forward and upward. This can be a false pretentious "mind expansion" got artificially and perilously through drugs, or it can be the real thing. It is needful to note also that the forces which are operating are altogether beneath the face of the human psyche. There is a deep incentive in the inner being of modern man towards a more conscious, more illumined life. Only the unveiled perception of what is going on in the interior world of man's being can render plainer the answer to the riddle of the twentieth century. The spiritual awakening can come to mankind only as it comes to individuals--after it is strongly desired by the individual himself; and it will be desired only when all other desires have been tried and found wanting. A sage, looking at the world-situation today, might declare that its issue will be neither all black with evil nor all white with good. New elements wearing both these colours will begin to appear, but the balance which will be struck between them is not easily predictable. The tremendous tension within the emotional nature of humanity, the enormous pressure suggesting a purely materialistic reading of life, the vast conflict and disharmony among men themselves, the wide mental ferment which has made serenity almost impossible--all these constitute for an appreciable number of people the labour-bed upon which the infant of a divine intuition is being born. This intuition may manifest itself in different intellectual forms, but its essence is always the same: that life has a meaning and a purpose beyond the sensuous and the selfish, that it is ultimately spiritual. You raise the question whether the present world conditions will not result in a quickened progress of seekers. I hardly think so. They will quicken the progress of humanity, as suffering, impoverishments, uprooting, and deaths will teach the old but ever-new lesson of inner detachment through the emotion of being tired of such unsatisfying life. But in the case of the few who have already been striving for self-enlightenment, the disturbed physical conditions and the undesirable emotional atmosphere will tend to interfere with their efforts. The seekers, however, will be able to progress quickly when the present upsets come to an end, as you will one day observe. In the individual life it mostly happens that grace descends only after a period of great suffering. In humanity's life it is the same. Only when war and crises have run their course will new spiritual light be shed on us. The kingdom of heaven will have to be established in men's hearts, for it can be established nowhere else. All attempts to better the world which do not better the basic element in the world situation--the human entity itself--are narcotic drugs, not radical cures. If it is a materialistic exaggeration to assert that social improvement is the only way to individual improvement, it is not less a mystical exaggeration to assert that self-improvement is the only way to social improvement. Both methods are indeed necessary. The psychological forces at work in the crisis and the spiritual laws of life itself must be understood if the crisis itself is to be understood. Without that perspective of evolutionary and karmic movement which the study of philosophy bestows, we look in vain for the deeper meaning of historic trends, crises, and culminations. Every doctrine which disregards this human need of finding a relationship with what is beyond the merely human will fail to understand the present world situation, and every doctrine which repudiates this need will consequently fail to offer any real help in dealing with such a situation. Other forces are operating in the world-crisis which are quite beyond the knowledge, experience, and perception of most people. They are certain spiritual forces of destiny and evolution. The ancient attitude, still much alive in the Orient, ascribed the horrible results of famine, the dread travels of pestilence, or the bloodied course of warfare to the scourging hand of God. Where it saw the presence of a punishing deity, the modern sees only the presence of man's handiwork. But philosophy sees the presence and action of both. Both destiny and man are back of the tremendous happenings of our times. Both superhuman directive and human will are working behind them. A physical reconstruction which is rotten at its moral centre, try as it may, can never bring more happiness. It will succeed only in bringing more misery. Our victory on the military level is a good augury for humanity's victory over the grave problems which present themselves with the coming of peace. But just as the military victory came only after critical hours when we skirted the verge of disaster, so it may well be that the other will take a similar course. Just as in World War II the collapse of France in 1940, the blitz over London, the approach to Moscow, and the naval destruction at Pearl Harbor in 1941, the cutting of England's sea lifelines, the invasion of Egypt, and the conquests in the Far East in 1942 were grave crises of great danger that did not prevent our eventual triumph, so the difficulties and defeats of peace are not likely to prevent humanity's victorious solution of its worst problems. It will be a fateful period, but there is reason to believe that the attitude of despair is unjustified. Thus the struggle against the forces of evil, aggression, violence, hatred, and selfishness may be severe, yet there is good hope for eventual triumph over these things. But in the end, humanity will not be able to evade the challenge of Jesus. There is no salvation ultimately except through the spiritual way. "In all that he sees he beholds a preacher of God," wrote German Jacob Boehme. Note the word all. For in the most revolting personal crimes and terrible international or civil wars, he sees the negative results of godless, or pseudo-godly, living. In the benign philanthropies and tolerant sympathies of the benefactors of the human race, he sees the positive results of godly living. A pretentious society whose members are fakes and phonies despite their wealth, a closed world where snobbishness and insincerity are rampant--in such a society and such a world there is no room for a genuine spiritual aspirant. A world humiliated and chastened by world war may be more ready to receive the world teacher when he comes. That alone would be the appropriate hour. If enough men and women were to try to better their characters and discipline their lives, we might expect a new and better world. Otherwise we shall have the same bad old world, if not a worse one, with nothing new except perhaps its political and social clothes. It is true that clothes influence the man, but they do not make him--whatever the proverb may say. If enough men and women could be aroused from the stupor induced by materialism, if a new reverence could be kindled in their hearts, then there would be hope. For a world governed by a working team of reason and reverence could quickly be made worthwhile. If the tragedies of two world wars and the distresses of two peace periods are not to go in vain, the human race must loosen its ego's grip. The harder it clings to its old selfishness, the worse its insanity will become. The madness which drove Germany and Japan on their self-destructive course was a direct consequence of their rabid defiance of spiritual laws. If the symbols of this madness, the Swastika or the Rising Sun, did not fly in every capital, this was only because the intuition of most other nations led them to respond, in varying degrees, to the new and higher ideal fate had set before them and thus to keep saner than the other. A shift of emphasis away from excessive egoism has become indispensable if humanity is to keep its balance. The old doctrine of karma is quite correct in explaining present-day world suffering, but not all of it. The explanation is too complicated and must be left for the future. However, it may be said that the one lesson humanity is compelled to learn is that of its interdependence and hence of its ultimate unity. The sufferings and unsatisfactory conditions of one nation affect distant nations also. The sufferings of the world can be removed only by removing their cause. But ignorance of this condition is so widespread that it is a sign that there are practically no sages active in the modern world. On The Christian Paradox by Cyril Scott: The theme of this book is that world conditions are the accumulated result of following principles at variance with those enunciated by all the great Sages of the past, especially by Christ. By restating the esoteric truths which the churches deliberately suppressed, he exhibits the teachings of Christ in a new light. Not only is the whole world faced with eventual war but large areas are already threatened with the collapse of their social structures, the crash of their economic systems, the half-starvation of their peoples. The quest for salvation from these perils goes on but only momentary palliatives are found. Civilization is wearing a garment consisting wholly of patches. Nothing can save it from progressively falling to pieces except getting a new garment. Nothing can save it from apocalypse except bringing to the surface the hidden truth about itself. No economic reform, no political change can save the human race today. Those who believe otherwise have been disillusioned in the past and are being disillusioned today, even though they often fail to see it. The only salvation which will be effectual must come from within, must reform and ennoble character. It must change thought and rule feeling, for then only will conduct and fate also change. We must view this episode in the wider perspective of philosophy. If we do this we may learn a most important lesson. It will then be seen that the law of compensation takes account not only of sins of commission but also sins of omission. For we were in the position of a man who could see from his window that a householder in a distant street was being attacked and robbed with brutal violence, a man who wanted to help the victim but hesitated to interfere because he loathed fights and wanted to live a peaceful life. Thus he sways between two contending emotions until one or the other finally overcomes him. We had reached the latter part of this internal conflict and would undoubtedly have yielded to her better self and gone to the rescue of endangered humanity before long. But we were moving a little too slowly, hesitating a little too much, and the karmic consequence of this was tragic. It was the terrible price which had to be paid for delay in doing the right thing. Other peoples had to pay karmically for the same mistake but they paid far more heavily because they made the mistake in too many directions and for too long a time. There was a clear duty in this inner-dependent age to help actively on the right side. The world distress is mostly due to karma. But we need a broader interpretation of this word. Many of us may be good and innocent but we have to suffer with all others, not for what we have done but for what we left undone. Today sorrow misses nobody. This is because humanity is completely interdependent. That is the lesson we have to learn; that we let others remain in woe or ignorance at our own peril. We are one. Much of the pollution problem on earth and in air, river, and sea is blamed on technology. But the latter's expansion is itself in part caused by something else: namely, overpopulation. And not only pollution but also other evils derive from it, such as unemployment, violence, riots, food shortage, and insufficient income. The matter does not stop there. To what is overpopulation itself due? The first answer is not the only one: overindulgence in sexual relationships, whether within or outside marriage. There are also some other causes. In the end it all sums up to spiritual ignorance. In all parts of Asia until recent times the way of life for the masses was prescribed for them by authority, whether the authority of the state or of the church. They could not be kept forever at the same low level but have to grow up--and they have been growing and thinking, but only at a very juvenile level. They have still a long way to go in development. The violence and discontent and rebellion which we see in all parts of the world is a symptom, however unpleasant, of the beginnings of this growth. We see it also in the demands for freedom from those who are still too uncontrolled to have full freedom, but who need to be given a little freedom at least if they are not to be repressed forever. What kind of a civilization do we have? It has become top-heavy, lopsided, unbalanced, and therefore dangerous to the healthy development of the human race. Its intellectual and technical advance is indeed tremendous, but faith, intuition, and the moral virtues do not find in this iron-hard framework enough freedom for their operation. Indeed, they are being stifled. Such a course if continued can only end in their complete suffocation. Man is in danger of becoming a merely mechanistic, merely physical, and merely selfish entity. This is not in accord with the higher meaning of his life, and since civilization does not give sufficient signs of its willingness or evidence of its ability to correct this unbalance, since the valuable services which it has rendered in the past are coming to an end, Nature is no longer giving it the protection which it might otherwise have had against the destructive forces within itself. Between the incessant turmoil, the incessant multiplication of wants, the incessant physical and intellectual activities, the incessant stimulation of emotional desire, and the constant appeal to egoism--between these things and the inner voice that calls men back to the deeper things of spiritual life there is a hidden conflict which really exists under the obvious one. So long as man does not know what the world really is, he can hardly be expected to know what he is talking about. And so long as his word lacks truth, so long will society lack worth. Chaos abounds everywhere because nothing else need be expected from a race which knows much about momentary affairs and so little about the Real. Universal affairs must first be understood properly before human life can be made worthwhile. Large groups in the human race are trying to continue the old life in forms that belong to outgrown stages of their development. The effort is a misdirected one and brings confusion, strife, or self-injury as the penalty. Although all leaders admit the annihilatory character of nuclear war and agree it is unthinkable, yet their actions reflect nineteenth-century thinking, as if pre-nuclear conditions still prevail. With both sides spending more and more on defense every year, the situation becomes utterly illogical. The pity of it all is that despite these fantastic expenditures we are no nearer any real peace than before. A social danger which should be foreseen and prepared for, because it hinders the onset of abundant living, is the uncontrolled expansion of population, more especially in the Far East. Such rapid growth will make the maintenance of peace between nations a harder task. It is ironical that the poorer classes should also and everywhere be the prolific classes! The less food, the more babies!--such seems to be mankind's strange maxim. It is still more ironical that the Japanese could have claimed that they needed more living space after having encouraged their people to be the most prolific in the whole world. With similar logic they tried the bandit-like method of stealing it by brutal violence. Less brutality and more birth-control would have been a wiser policy. While the human race persistently overbreeds itself, it will continue to breed some of the causes of war, unemployment, famine, and epidemics. With a world in such a tragic condition and such a doubtful future, it is hardly fair to bring more and more children into it. Both ethics and reason would indeed counsel that we bring fewer and fewer children into it. The notion that a people should breed prolifically was wisely inculcated by the religious law-givers of antiquity when the race was still in its infancy and the land was sparsely inhabited. But times have changed and such self-multiplication has become senseless. If nations whose lands which are already swarming with men, women, and children insist on increasing their number instead of decreasing it, what other consequences may be expected except more disease and more conflict? By reducing the size of their families, they will reduce the discomforts and miseries of many parents and more children. There is nothing wrong or evil in the development of Power, the spread of Prosperity, or the fostering of Education. The wrong comes in when these things are not utilized with wisdom. Not to recognize his obligation to attend within his capacities and circumstances to this higher purpose of life is a criminal omission. That is why he is being punished so drastically in this century. He may have sinned in this manner to keep his life simpler, less complicated by further duties, as well as easier, less burdened by new disciplines. But he has failed in obedience to the law of his own being. The world has foolishly made a fetish of organizations and institutions because it has undervalued the reality of thought, the power of character, and the potency of truth. What is the use of idealistically proclaiming the illusion that the world is one and indivisible when everywhere we see that it is many and divided? We should be better occupied in proclaiming the truth, which is that humanity's real welfare is one and indivisible and that reason and circumstances are moving it in the direction of realizing this fact, but that it is still at so low a stage of evolution as to be generally unready and often unwilling to resolve correctly the resulting mental conflict within itself. In earlier times man had to seek and find protection from Nature. In our own times he has to find protection from himself. His power is now too frightening. The misuse of Nature, the spread of materialism, and the upsurge of negative emotion have led to our present plight. The experiences which the human race has gathered during the past few hundred years have supplemented its knowledge, enriched its culture, and improved its environment. But they have done all this at a price. For they have increased its intellectual vanity, impoverished its religious feeling, and unbalanced its values. So long as any civilization plays the hypocrite to its best beliefs, so long as the inner life does not matter while the outer life can give it all the satisfactions it seeks, so long may one predict with full assurance that the arc of its history will sooner or later take a downward plunge into disaster. Why this should be so is no mystery if one understands that God has set man upon this earth to fulfil and realize obscure higher purposes as well as the obvious lower ones. Man evades the challenge only at the risk of unwittingly calling into existence destructive forces that will terrorize his civilization and frighten him into remembrance of what these higher purposes demand of him.Historical perspectives
The history of a nation is really a translation from the history of its soul. History returns periodically to the same basic problems, the same fundamental crises. Where a whole people has failed to solve them, or tried to solve them in the wrong way, they are brought together again by reincarnation and presented with a fresh chance to make good or suffer the same consequences. It is absurd to talk of humanity as though it presented a uniform psychological pattern. On the contrary, it presents a particularly uneven one. It is indeed a conglomeration of groups in various degrees of development. Some are intellectually advanced whereas others are intellectually backward. Some are very near to the noble in ideals whereas others are very far from them. All that can be said about their psychological situation is that the forward movement of evolution may be a halting and lagging one but it is a certain one. It is a fact that all men are at different stages and see life in different ways or under different limitations. Their experience is always relative to their standpoint. Hence it is wrong to declare any man to be ignorant, for usually he does know what is proper to his own level. Though I criticize our present age, do not imagine I would enthusiastically care to return to an earlier one. The few who talk about the good old days are welcome to them! Those were the times when heterodox men who dared to publish their free and independent thoughts were rewarded with the rack and the thumbscrew. In The Spiritual Crisis of Man, I put forward some arguments in defense of older nations, peoples, or races who preferred a simpler life to the technological civilization of the modern world--and especially the modern Western world. This did not mean--as I hope was made clear in the book--that we, too, should revert to their attitude and become, as it were, disciples of Mahatma Gandhi. No, I have always advocated that we take what is useful from the past, what is wise and practicable for us, and leave the rest. In short, I spoke more than once in favour of an East-West civilization. I agreed with René Guénon that we had given too much weight to a utilitarian civilization and too little to the higher forms of culture, by which I mean philosophical, mystical, and the basic foundations of religion. Indeed, I criticized the ascetic regimes and asceticism generally when pushed to extreme, and pleaded for the conveniences and comforts brought in by modern ideas. But it is the extreme unbalanced one-sided forms of either the simple life or the materialistic life which I opposed. A sensible balance which enables us or rather helps us to keep mental and emotional equilibrium, inner calm, is the desirable thing. To turn our gaze to past times and look for similar situations in them and then to observe what happened thereafter, will not avail us today. For such a situation has never before existed. It is without historical precedent. We do not reincarnate only to continue or finish learning the same old lessons--much less to repeat them--but also to start learning new ones. Life itself demands of us that there should be a definite progression to a wider and higher level. Those who want blindly to imitate only what people did five thousand years ago, show their ignorance of life's requirement. This earth exists to enable man to progress from lower to higher levels and from narrower to wider areas. The planetary spirit is accelerating its own development and this necessarily accelerates the development of all living creatures--plant, animal, and human--which dwell upon it. This is why man's experience crowds into one life what formerly he crowded into a few, and why world history crowds into one year the events which formerly took several years. If this increase in tempo has also accelerated human suffering by crowding it more closely together, it has also paradoxically increased human pleasures. The era of dynamic democracy is at hand. If you look back over the tremendous change which has come about in human society and civilization through the activities of science, invention, exploration, commerce, manufacture, and art, you will find that the period covered is roughly about three hundred years. The movement for religious freedom started about the same time, after a thousand years of religious straitjacket upon the human mind. Such freedom became necessary to prepare the way for the next great religious teacher, and his coming would be useless if men did not have enough chance to seek truth and enough freedom to choose their faith. We have entered a period rarely seen before, a period that comes cyclically about every two thousand years. Great changes accompany it, on physical and cultural levels: it is also an avataric period. It is an old doctrine among most of the Orientals and even among the early Greeks as well as the Roman Stoics, that the world comes to an end at certain long intervals of equal duration. This periodical death, which is always followed by a rebirth, is held accountable for such catastrophes as the sinking of Atlantis and the destruction of Lemuria. When the earth's axis last moved its direction to the one it now occupies, bringing an end to Atlantis, the length of the year was changed in consequence by an additional five days. According to this doctrine, these great changes in the global crust are due to a declination of the plane of the ecliptic to the plane of the equator--that is, to a change in the angle which the plane of the ecliptic makes with the plane of the equator. The larger this angle formerly was, the warmer were the polar regions, so that there was once a time when human and animal beings were living there in numbers and in comfort. As the planet moves in its curved orbit its cosmically preordained destiny moves on with it. Ideas which belong to an age that is passing away are themselves doomed to pass away. They become barren and ineffective. We must try to unlearn them. Even certain mental attitudes which suited past epochs have now become retrograde. Emotional reactions which were correct in primitive peoples have now become impediments. The procession of false prophets, self-styled Messiahs, and publicized Christs who have come and gone since the last century have served but to add to the bewilderment and uncertainty of the age. The confusion arose simply because the seekers after a spiritual prophet have tried to find him in a human form, and also prematurely. The true saviour was then and is still to be found only in the inner sanctum of men's own hearts. Christ--the true esoteric Saviour--is, since the death of the earthly Jesus, no man, but the divine self in every human being. Hence men who look outwards for him, whether in so-called reincarnations, organizations, or buildings, look in vain. He is not there. Nor is there any other way to look inwards than the way of the mystic quest. On the second count, that men are expecting him prematurely, it is true that we are approaching the end of an era, the close of a long cycle. The signs of this transition are everywhere around us. They are as vivid and pointed as they were when the last great era closed with Jesus' coming two thousand years ago. However, the destined hour when the next major prophet is to appear among us has not yet struck--indeed will not strike in this century. Certain events have to happen first, events involving tremendous changes in the life of earth and man. Not before the middle of the twenty-first century will the proper conditions exist for his coming. Meanwhile, minor prophets will appear and are appearing. Humanity, so far as it must seek outwards because it is unable to seek inwards, may and should draw what comfort and guidance it can from them. One great error which is found alike among the Christians, the Jews, the Muhammedans, the Buddhists, and other religionists is the belief that the next avatar will appear only to enable the dogmas, hierarchies, and institutions of their particular religion to triumph over all others. The avatar is never exclusively their own because he always comes to bring a fresh message and sow new seeds. This was always historically true but it is most emphatically so today, when he has to speak to the whole world. Where so many creatures are at early stages of descent into ego-experience and ego-development, it is foolish to expect them to respond to teachings suitable for advanced stages alone--where the need is for growing release from the ego. The first group naturally and inevitably has different, even opposing, outlooks, trends, ideas, beliefs, inclinations, and desires from those of the second one. It wants to fatten the ego, whereas the other wants to thin it down. To condemn it as wrongly directed is ignorant, impractical, and mistaken. If the history of mankind has teemed with war and bloodshed in the past, part of the cause can be found here. But that same history moves also in cycles. We stand today between two cycles, two eras, two cultures. The next one will not only be new; it will also be brighter and better in every way.(P) While the race was still infantile, both intellectually and ethically, it had to be instructed in a kindergarten method. Truths had to be explained in a picture-book manner, spiritual instruction given through symbolic plays, through rites, processions, and ceremonies to appeal to the show-loving childish imagination. But now that it has grown up into adolescence it is ready for a higher kind of religion. A new religion will be born in this century because it is a historical necessity. It will grow and thrive at the expense of the older religions. And all indications point to the fact that it will be born in the West and thence spread to the East and over the whole world. Religion will always remain. It is only the ecclesiastical bonds on us which may have to be loosened or even thrown away. The priest will not disappear altogether in the new age but his status and duties will be transformed. In the past he claimed to be a mediator between God and man. Now he will be content with the less ambitious role of a teacher of men. In the past he exercised power in the government of society. Now he will be satisfied with demotion to being a counsellor of society. We of the modern world have a cultural inheritance which takes in the religious, artistic, and intellectual products of all historic periods and all continents. The sane reaction is to accept it; the insane one is to reject it. All the world's literature is now before us. What men have found, seen, reasoned, what has been revealed to men whose different levels of understanding and character stretch from the primitive to the profound, is now accessible to all seekers. The human situation is the final resultant of various forces whose play and counterplay make it up. It is packed with complexities. The doctrinaire who oversimplifies it does so at the price of imperilling truth. Let us note two out of the several factors which control it. If every event were to be completely predetermined by karma, there would be nothing for us to do. But if every event were to happen exactly as we willed it, the universe would become a chaos. All rules and institutions, habits and traditions should be adjustable if they are to remain relevant to actual needs. Though the modern mood is impatient of theological theorizing, it nevertheless accepts the emptiest of all theories--that Matter is the be-all and end-all of life--and it indulges in the most superficial of all speculations--that which puts the world of the Skin far above the world of the Spirit. As a result, we witness Europe and America hanging the names of their politicians high in the heaven of emulation, but thrusting their mystics behind the hedge of contempt. Not until the modern era were those who wanted freedom from tradition able to seek it so freely and find it so easily. If men will not break away from what is bad in their past--as, for instance, the fear, suspicion, and distrust which develop between two races or two nations through their historic relationship--then Nature (that is, God, Life, call it as you like) will do it for them forcibly and violently through natural disasters (such as earthquakes, floods, climatic extremes, drought) or through merely presenting them with the fruits of their own thinking crystallized on the physical level--that is, with their karma in the form of war, revolution, and so on. Progress seems to carry both good and evil along with it. If philanthropy now takes more numerous and thoughtful forms, so does crime. The present revival of church-going religion has its parallel in the thirteenth century's vast increase of world-renouncing European monasticism on account of the end of the world being then expected. The same threatening situation existed in the fifth and sixth centuries, when thousands upon thousands joined the monkish ranks for the same reason. Abraham was told that if only ten good men could be found, the civilization of Sodom and Gomorrah would be saved from destruction. This word "good" must be interpreted aright if the promise is to have any real meaning. For only men in whom the higher spiritual nature was sufficiently active and dominant to attract supernormal forces could bring about such a result. So long as a nation does not accept the guidance of inspired or intuitive individuals, so long will its history repeat the age-old blunders. It is more useful to follow the history of ideas than that of persons. Some cynic has said that we learn from history that we learn nothing from history. This is because our cynical friend's knowledge of human history is too short. The few thousand years about which our scholars can talk--what are they in comparison with the millions of years during which man has played his little game on this planet? History's first task will be to get a group of superior men who are dependable enough to carry out these aims faithfully and who are disinterested enough to carry them out selflessly. It is from such a group that there must arise educators of future generations. There is a ridiculous notion among some mystical circles that new spiritual faculties are being unfolded in our time. The truth is that there was, proportionate to total population, a larger number of spiritually perceptive persons in ancient times and even in medieval times, than there is today. This was inevitable because external conditions were simpler and less filled with allurements and entanglements, and because intellectual development was in harmony with and not, as with us, away from the inner life. What, however, might be stated with verifiable truth about our own times is that a new kind of mentality is being evolved. We shall synthesize and harmonize the scientific, the metaphysical, the religious, the mystical, and the practical without falling back, as the ancients did, into monasticism and asceticism. Formerly it was right and proper for man to think exactly as his ancestors thought. Today it is right and proper for him to think independently, as an individual. We must be careful not to confuse inevitable developments with evolutionary developments, events that just have to be with events that better the preceding ones. A trend of world history may be powerful and triumphant. Its consequences may be undesirable yet seem inevitable. But this does not mean that they must be God's will in any other sense than a karmic one. The Greek states saw the value of arbitration not less than the World Union, and provided for it in their treaties. Yet it failed to keep the peace between them and broke down as a means of keeping out war. The trouble then was precisely the same as the trouble today. It was not in defective arrangements but in defective character. It was moral. Those who, like René Guénon, nostalgically advocate a return to "tradition" usually mean a return to the social cultural and religious life of the Middle Ages. They do not see that such a return could only be possible by including the obsolete economic environment of the Middle Ages also. Consequently it would mean the reappearance of such social relics as feudal lords and feudal serfs, the disappearance of machines and the electric powerhouse, the reversion to an agricultural and pastoral activity, the use of simple methods of production and primitive methods of exchange. Much the same diagnosis and remedy as René Guénon's were put forth by T.S. Eliot in the world of poetry, but with more success and with the emphasis on mystical religion rather than on metaphysics. Eliot deplored the chaotic plight and sinful condition of modern society, the exaggerated individualism of modern literature. He demanded a return to tradition, a recovery of the sense of history and community, a submission to the Church in culture and morality. Granted that the unsatisfactory spiritual conditions of today point to the necessity of moving out of them, but the Guénons and Eliots seek to escape them by moving backwards. The wiser ones seek to overcome them by moving forward. The first group find comfort in a decayed past because they lack vision to enter an unknown future. The second group accepts the duty of hard pioneering and labours to create a new and better kind of life for humanity. If it be asked, as I am often asked, how it is that the Japanese, a professedly Buddhistic people, could have taken to such un-Buddhistic ways, it must be replied first, that all institutionalized religions are nowadays largely rendered ethically ineffective because they have become matters more of social convenience than of personal conviction, and second, that after the great historical revolution of 1868, when the entire feudal system of government was abandoned, Buddhism also was largely abandoned with it. The new government disestablished it as a state religion, took possession of thousands of Buddhist temples, stripped them of their Buddha-images, and turned out their priests. Thus Buddhism, a religion of earthly renunciation, was discarded. A religion of earthly aggrandizement, combining feudalistic Shinto Mikado-worship with a feverish industrialistic ambition, replaced it. With this death-blow, the seeds of potential spiritual greatness were cast out and replaced by the dry-rot of a materialistic ambition. With it was lost the opportunity of becoming the torchbearer of a new and dynamic reform for the backward countries of Asia. This was because Japan, of all the Oriental nations of that time, was the only one wise enough in her unique religious vision to take the serenity and mind-control gained in inward contemplation and express it in the outward version of inspired action. The Japanese were provided with this striking opportunity during the nineteenth century to rejuvenate the vast continent of Asia in the right way and thus become its recognized leader. This would have prepared the way for the introduction of that new East-West spiritual-material civilization of which the whole world is unconsciously or half-consciously in desperate need. Had they lived up to this opportunity Japan would quite properly have earned our profound respect and all mankind's gratitude. But unhappily for themselves and unfortunately for us, the Japanese lost their moral and mental balance in the vast turn-over which they carried out and became the votaries of sordid materialism and ruthless militarism instead. The purifying fires of self-earned suffering became their lot for failure to grasp this grand opportunity and accomplish a truly divine mission. Prior to the transformation of which we speak, the ancient Japanese conception of life possessed a virility all its own. It was infused into the Buddhistic wisdom which they absorbed from India by way of Korea, because the negative quietism, trance-seeking yoga, and sepulchral asceticism of India did not suffice to satisfy them as a complete goal. They used these things, therefore, and refused to let themselves be used by them. They brought the study of truth and the practice of meditation into relation with the need of practical life and social existence, which meant that they brought these treasured gems across the walls of cloisters within which they had previously been confined into the wider world. With them, penetration into the deeper significance of human life ceased to be a preoccupation for lethargic monks who lacked the opportunities to put their learning into practice, and became the inspiration of active men engaged in the work and turmoil of earthly existence. They turned a metaphysic which usually ended in logical abstractions into a gospel which ended in inspired actions. They made bodily experience, rational thought, and aesthetic emotion combine to proclaim truth with united voice. This was the gospel of Zen, as it was called. But alas! we speak here of old Japan, of the land which had not yet been opened to the West and not yet been dazzled by its industrial prosperity and material achievements, a land which has vanished and now exists no longer. In a world where no great event happens by chance, where even the tiniest seed sprouts under an all-governing law, the destruction of a whole continent such as Atlantis is full of significance for humanity. It means that Nature, which is but another name for God, could not proceed farther with its evolutionary purpose for the inhabitants of that continent without a fresh start, without a clean break from old ways which had exhausted themselves. If you wish to study history properly, you should first study human nature, of which it is partly a reflection. History brings many changes in the course of time, many new developments, many displacements of settled persons and a coming to the front of fresh ones. The same happens in structures, organizations, geographical situations, and even climatic ones. We must beware of making custom habit or convention too rigid a thing. For if this epoch particularly shows anything at all it shows that the world moves on, that change never ends. It is the principle that is more important, not the event. For the latter passes, the former remains. I like to reckon time as a wise history reckons it, not by the meaningless counting of calendared years. I look for the rise and fall of civilizations, for the birth and death of races, and above all for the grand manifestations of Himalayan men. Nietzsche put Emerson's idea in another way. He wrote that a whole nation is a detour to create a dozen great men. Such being the actuality of present conditions, the opening of a new channel between finite man and his infinite source has become essential. This means that a new religion must be born. The war and its aftermath have created conditions suitable to the establishment of a new faith. Therefore, if it be true that a sudden and widespread revival of the old conventional dogmatic beliefs after the war is unlikely, because orthodox religion in its present familiar forms has lost the inspiration and purity necessary to make it effective, it is equally true that with the coming of peace there will be more people ready for a new religious revelation than there have been at any time during the past hundred years.The intellectual and spiritual requirements of one epoch are historically different from those of others. Human society changes, evolves or degenerates: it cannot stand still for long. Hence, it finds for itself in every epoch either a modification, alteration, and adaptation of traditional systems, or--if it is sufficiently creative at the time--gives birth to entirely new systems altogether. The truth of this statement has been attested to by every age of mankind and on every continent from ill-fated Atlantis to thriving America. To hold, as the representatives of vested interests and orthodox institutions usually hold, that a particular system is suited to all the needs of all humanity for all time and therefore cannot be replaced or should not be replaced by another system, is to write a full stop to human evolution. It is a senseless view, as historically unjustified as it is philosophically untenable. No revelation is or can be the last one, nor the exhaustive one. Now that we live in a time when so many of the old systems have exhausted their best possibilities and fail to meet our newer needs, those who have turned aside from them yet are unwilling to remain spiritually unnourished should not be blamed if they are willing to enlist as followers of a more vital, more timely, and more satisfying faith.
A divine man, born to fulfil a large and special religious mission, a man like the founders of the world-famed religions, not only has this educational task but he also reveals the Karmic will and expounds the evolutionary standards set for the coming age.
All civilized societies and all cultural forms of the past have shown that they are inexorably subject to a rhythm of birth, growth, and decay. They have their ardent springtime, their luxuriant summer, their cold autumn, their withered winter. Today, we witness the same storms of destructive events and the snows of miserable failure. Those who are not too timid to face the unpalatable truth know that this has only one meaning. We are at the end of an epoch. The old world is dying before our eyes. But death is only a transition--the joyous springtime of vital renewal always follows the freezing wintertime of outlived forms. A new epoch is indeed at hand, with fresh ideas to lead us and fresh ideals to sustain us. Only the mentally blind now fail to anticipate it.
It was a new comet which came to warn mankind that the old era was about to be liquidated and it was another comet which came to notify them that the new era had begun. This was no more a coincidence to those who understand the hidden workings of Nature than was the fact that all the three leading Axis powers--Germany, Italy, and Japan--started their nationalistic careers in the same year: 1871. The first harbinger appeared in the skies in the autumn of 1929. When the great economic blizzard hit America and thence spread to the whole world, it forced millions to realize that the old order was exhausted. Every country was affected by economic troubles with all their political, social, and cultural consequences. None escaped. Each reacted in its own way. Japan's reaction was shortly to plunge desperately into international robbery by invading Manchuria. If with the facts now at our command we think back, we shall realize that the Second World War really started in 1931 with this invasion. For the line of continuous fighting against Japan in China down to the time of America's involvement after Pearl Harbor was paralleled for three years on the other side of the world by the civil war in Spain, where not only the Spaniards themselves but also Nazi Germans and Fascist Italians battled against Red Russians.
Thus, the earlier comet indeed prognosticated the coming world war, and the second comet, which showed itself towards the end of 1942, heralded its closing. The military turning point of the world war was coincident with its appearance. For the great series of democratic nations' military victories began about this time. But the second comet's special association was to act as the harbinger of a new age. These victories not only brought about the external liberation of millions of people from militaristic oppression, but were the prelude to the entire liberation of all mankind from every form of social and cultural oppression by the past. The new age could not fail, therefore, to be a new religious age also. Thus the new universal spiritual enlightenment was dated by the second comet. Whoever perceives this cannot but believe that when the need is so great, the yearning so widespread, the urgency so sharp, the divine wisdom which holds this earth within its grasp will not fail to inspire the most evolved human being available with a universal Messianic mission of uplift, instruction, healing, and awakening. And nobody less than such an august being could undertake the responsibility of so tremendous a task, which will specifically be directed towards the masses, towards millions of people. Nothing truly great can be done without great men.
There must be a visible focus among us, even for the boldest of ideas. There must be a great leader. The spectacle confronting us today is the spectacle of a planet that is spiritually leaderless. We are told, "The hour produces the man." The hour is here, we believe, but we look around and see no Man. Spirituality is waiting to find its voice. Its reality is here, but its spokesman is not. Every half-baked cult and worn-out creed possesses its ambassador, but the ineffable divinity remains unvoiced. Nevertheless, we wait patiently for that one to come who shall utter anew the Christ-message to mankind. And his voice will not be as yours and mine, but will be a regenerative force which will startle the sleeping world. The world is in upheaval for a deeper reason than it suspects. For at a time of religious chaos and popular bewilderment, of world agony and human distress, such as the present, his coming is in perfect consonance with the fact that supreme intelligence rules the cosmos, that truth shall be uncovered once more for the sake of those who need it. However, it is not through any one prophet alone that the new dawn will be ushered in but through a planetary outpouring, which flows through every useful channel it can find. In this complex epoch, its manifestations are as complex and varied as are the needs of mankind. There will be different prophets bearing different messages to differently-delivered groups of people, but all will be inspired by one and the same timely power.
The human race has long been preparing for manhood. The end of war marks its crossing of the threshold. Now it must exercise manhood.
If the progressive character of the reincarnational chain be true, then we must grant that there are men half in and half out of the animal kingdom. They are clanking reminders of all that still has to be done still before a deep spiritual awareness of its best self becomes natural to the human race. In the old days barbarians came down to civilized cities on foot or horse. Today they still come, but in machines. We moderns have discovered how to release atomic energy. The ancients always knew, as the mystics still know, how to release spiritual energy. History will show those who cannot otherwise learn, which discovery is more important and most beneficial to mankind. The Middle Ages of Europe produced many more saints than the modern epoch has been able to produce. Those who refuse to turn the mind towards the centre of harmony within themselves do so because their experience of what is without is not full enough nor reflective enough. Lao Tzu lamented the fall from simple living into extravagance and luxury during the period from primitive Chinese history until the highly civilized China of his own days. Juvenal criticized the same deterioration among his fellow Romans. Does this not illustrate two things: first, the inventiveness of the human mind, and second, the desires of human nature? These are innate, and will last as long as history itself. It is somewhat ironic to write that what we regard as medieval, so far off in time as to be a museum-piece, was regarded by its own contemporaries as quite up-to-date, the very latest in thought and fashion! Erasmus, writing in 1514 about the various early Church Fathers' Greek sermons, commented, "Ambrose is not altogether appropriate to modern times"! The longing for the triumph of goodness in world history is in most hearts. We may translate this as we wish. The Oriental mystic is indifferent to world history because he is indifferent to time. It is doubtful how far we have progressed, and even whether we have progressed, in the art of living, despite all our science and knowledge. We have only to remember those Greek colonists in Italy who banished all noises from their city to raise this question. History traps the individual in its implacable movement. There are occasions when the corruption of society is so high, its values so low, that the prophet must make a stand and challenge it. Ancient cataclysms have buried whole continents, engulfed entire races, and hidden the evil horrors of man's own making. The progression of human intellect is attended by the regression of human character. It was not possible for earlier generations to crowd so much experience into so short a period of time, so much compulsory thinking about events into so many events themselves. Those alive today have the chance to make more quickly a forward move in spiritual growth, to learn certain lessons in which they have been laggards, but which Nature is determined to enforce. Here and there doors are being opened through which the light needed by our darkened times is beginning to flow in. Considering the world's nature and man's character, there has not yet been and there is no likelihood of ever being a Heaven on this earth. But much can and will be done to improve the one and exalt the other. As he lay dying, H.G. Wells discarded his belief in the inevitability of progress and even felt that everything might end. History is both a record and a confirmation of the transience of men, of the immutability of their civilizations and the evanescence of all their other creations. If there is any moral to be drawn at the end of every history book, it must surely be the old Latin one, "Thus passes the glory of the world." The mastery of philosophy increases the capacity to interpret history correctly. Because the social strata were too rigidly organized, because they did not permit the upward passage of worthy or gifted individuals, they provoked resentment and, in the end, rebellion. Democracy became the karma of aristocracy. In this democratic age we preach equality but continue to practise, if and when we can, the contrary. We can hardly do otherwise. Social distinctions appear because there are differences of economic background, of upbringing and ways of life, because refinement does not easily mix with vulgarity. If each is the end product of a series of reincarnations, the differences in nature and experience are certain to show themselves, giving rise to social differences. But this is no excuse for exploitation and snobbishness in the more fortunate levels of society, or for rancour and class hatred in the less fortunate ones. The hierarchical marks of class patterns, the differences of caste quality, the contrasting grades of status, prestige, culture, value, and refinement are blurred today, mixed up. The philosophical group may have wisdom and character but despite this they are a small factor in such a large situation, being hopelessly outnumbered by all the others. The philosophic minds are so heavily outnumbered that the world's fate is decided by the others. The sage kings assumed the prerogative of their office not by heredity but by inner worth. They were kings of the mind before they became kings of men. Neither historians in the Near East nor writers in the Roman Empire showed the slightest recognition of the coming power and eventual significance of Christianity during its first century of life. Is this an astonishing fact? The Roman legions fought their way across Europe not merely to aggrandize the power and wealth of a city on the Tiber River, but unwittingly to lay a path through which the message of Jesus might spread. The new religion should speak to the masses with more clearness and more common sense than the existing ones. When we consider that two discoveries alone, electricity and the petrol engine, have shaped entirely new environments for the human being, we may well marvel at the kind of world in which mankind will live a hundred years from now. These ideas are becoming vivid in the minds of so many persons not because of the activity of one man but because evolutionary forces from within and environmental ones from without have prepared and developed these persons to receive and appreciate them. Had this man never lived, they would still have been received and appreciated. Nevertheless it is also true that such a man brings the movement to a clear head and provides it with an impulsion along a definite road which he cuts for it. The advent of a new era is now inevitable but the advent of a better one is not. This dread of humanity's future spiritual destiny, this fear that without a powerful religious recall it is doomed, this belief that a lame external activity is needed to bring about such recall, this desire to set humanity on a quest beyond its own wish and strength--this is unfaith and unwisdom. In all the history of man was there ever a period like this? Yet, although man has changed himself and his environment in every way, he has failed to change in the most important ways--morally and spiritually. Who has the hardihood to declare--in the face of the bestiality and cruelty which have appeared during this generation--that there is less evil abroad in the world now than formerly? And who has the equal hardihood to declare--in the face of the religious, mystical, and philosophic testament in writing which has come down with the centuries--that we have more intuitive knowledge of the eternal truths, more personal communion with the spiritual self, than the men of antiquity? Unfortunately the land which produced a great psychologist like William James and a grand mystic like Ralph Waldo Emerson seems to have exhausted its resources with them. Its materialism has stemmed from the early needs of the nation, the inexorable necessity of firmly establishing a physical civilization before a cultural one could be established, the gathering together of ambitious, optimistic, energetic, determined, and enterprising men and women from the Old World. There are repulsive features in its culture still, and grave problems to be solved. The human race has evolved to a point where its condition of receptivity to these teachings is more favourable than at any previous time. New viewpoints develop among humanity as it passes through different historical phases. Sometimes they are merely revisions, developments, or improvements on the old viewpoints, but sometimes they are really fresh and notably different from the old ones. When we compare the earlier mental condition of mankind with that which prevails today, we are immediately struck by the enormous increase in the opportunities of the masses for education and enlightenment, together with the advance in knowledge of every kind. The result is seen in the changed outlook upon several departments of life, the widened views which have come to us. The contrast between human life of today and human life of a single century ago is vast and startling. In clothes, food, fuel, light, homes, cities, and social conditions on the external side; in literacy, journals, books, art, entertainment, discussion, standards, and intellectual development on the internal side, we see that an era of ferment has really come upon us. New ideas in religions of an advanced and idealistic character which, a generation ago, were furtively discussed only by a mere handful of people are now freely and widely discussed. It is not the funeral of civilization that we are witnessing but the funeral of an outstanding phase of civilization. The belief that the human race is improving requires careful definition and particularizing, for it is certainly retrogressing in some ways even though it is improving in others. Before we can properly understand this we have first to understand a fragment of a theory which was held by the ancients throughout the world. This is the theory that history moves in rhythmic cycles of alternating life and death. This theory likens evolution to the course run by a new seed as it grows into a tree and yields fruit: it sheds its leaves and becomes barren in winter, but in the spring new green buds appear and the same course is run once again. According to the classic Chinese wisdom, every empire and every civilization passes through the varying situations of a periodic cycle whose turning begins with peace and unification, passes to prosperity and culture, moves with increasing age to decline and degeneration, and ends finally in disorder and disruption. Thus, the same wheel which lifted Rome to the height of her power and set her armed legions in control of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East dropped her, on its descending arc, prostrate at the feet of Huns, Goths, and Vandals. The rhythmic return to which this doctrine refers does not mean that epochs occur again exactly as before; for then existence would be meaningless and evolution a figment. It means that they occur in a similar yet more evolved way than before, as the twists of a spiral cover the same two dimensions of breadth and depth again but rise to a new third dimension of height. Karma has to find the best available human instruments, however imperfect they be, to carry out its will. Remove these men and you are left with steam hissing aimlessly into space, whereas they are like the piston of an engine which concentrates and applies it. Thus Alaric, Chief of the Goths, told a monk that he felt a secret and supernatural impulse which impelled his march to the gates of Rome. Accordingly, he descended on the Roman provinces when the fourth century had almost closed, and moved in triumph until his firebrands lit the proud palaces of Imperial Rome. "This may be considered as the fall of the Roman Empire," is the verdict of Gibbon upon Alaric's achievements. It is at the behest of karma that these Alarics, whatever such men may themselves superstitiously believe, have arisen to encourage mankind. Lenin, with all his distorted intellectual greatness, could only spend his powers impotently in Switzerland, unable to lift a little finger to effect the revolution he craved. He could do nothing until destiny stepped in and permitted him. That prehistoric cataclysm--the sinking of Atlantis and the swallowing of its millions of inhabitants--affected the human race psychically and mentally. We live in a word-culture where meaning does not sink deep enough to give inner experience but remains shallow and fugitive. We have only to probe the truth out of history--a feat which requires almost philosophic impersonality and impartiality and research--to find that stupidity too often masquerades as patriotism or religion or some other unquestioned tradition or modern belief. We complain about the disorderly conditions prevailing today. We do not realize that they would be considerably worse if the wise, the saintly, the inspired, and the prophetic had not lived among us. In this context, we may remember the words of a Chinese, Mo Tzu: "To give peace to the world is a function of the sages." It would be more correct to talk of historical movement rather than historical progress. The movement has always been slow, often erratic, with many relapses and much hesitance; but taken as a whole it has nevertheless been a forward one. The old way of evolution led through a blind self-interest. The new way will lead through an enlightened self-interest. There is a vast difference between the two.New era in evolution
All this unrest, disturbance, and violence which is going on in the world is a symptom of discontent with the kind of life into which materialism has precipitated so many members of the human race. It is also a symbol of the settling of karmic accounts which happens during the transition period in history from one zodiacal sign to the next. It is true that the destruction, violence, and upheaval which have marked the last half-century are signs of the liquidation of the old era. This may be painful but at the same time heralds and overlaps the rise of a new era, the Aquarian age. With the appearance of the atomic age it is not only the Christian era which is coming to an end, but also that of the Hindu--and all the others--as well. The world crisis will not come to an end for some years. The whole religious outlook, as well as the cultural and institutional order of modern civilization, will be changed during this century. Only after these changes will the new spiritual forces become manifested. It is not however the mechanistic nightmare which Marx dreamed of, nor the diabolic one which Hitler patterned, nor is it going to conform in the end to either. Both these men were too lopsided and too devoid of philosophical perspective to comprehend the proper significance of the mighty universal change whose coming they saw and sensed but whose meaning they grotesquely misinterpreted. Mankind's spiritual forces could not be genuinely mobilized under the old order, which was mortgaged to antiquated theories and which could not struggle on indefinitely under such a burdensome load. As we approach the close of this epoch, the tempo increases, the chaos spreads, the egotism waxes, and the face of evil smiles more and more triumphantly; but like the intersection of two arcs, a new epoch opens. If exhaustion and darkness have spread over the world scene, they have not spread alone--mingled with them are the beginnings of anticipation and light. If materialism has soaked so deeply into mass thinking that men and women tremble for their own future, spiritual truth has entered the minds of some who have resisted it, but because the old epoch has been with us so long and the new one is just being born, these latter form at present only a negligible group. This condition of destructive criticism and hostile denunciation, of general tearing-down, exists partly because we live in an end-period, in a time of liquidation. The end of a vanishing old arc is crossed by the beginning of the uprising new one. Hence the few hopes amid the many despairs, the few lights amid the wide darkness. Alas! it is not a new age that is here, not even its beginning, but only the dawn before the beginning of its beginning. The great changes in human thought and society which marked the birth of the Christian epoch in the West, find their parallel in the great changes that are even now beginning to mark the coming birth of the next epoch. The labour pains have already begun, but actual birth will not take place until the next century. This evolutionary change, this redirection of the ego's forces reflects itself in the chief events of the world crisis. But it would be naïve to expect such a colossal change to mature and bear all its fruits within our own lifetimes. It will need a hundred years at least for even the first small fruits to appear and ripen. Both the opening of such a transitional era and its close are marked by a stupendous crisis. With them, not less than with the whole stream of events between both, the law of consequences punishes wrong-doing, expiates sins, strikes balances, and grants justice. Thirty-three years ago, in The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga, it was said that we were living in a period of accelerated change. The acceleration has been plainly visible and increasing ever since. It is going on not merely in one particular department of existence, but in all departments in all ways. The nations are faced with the challenging sword of repentance. They will eventually accept it and be blessed, or reject it and be struck down. Meanwhile, the business of the mystically sensitive is to open themselves up by prayer, meditation, study, self-improvement, and surrender to this divine force, not only for their own spiritual benefit but also for humanity's benefit. Their thoughts and deeds must bear witness to the fact that they are seeking to respond to its holy presence. These are assuredly the "last days" of which the New Testament speaks. The opportunity, choice, and responsibility which lie before us are all highly critical and decisive. An all-around overnight moral change in human nature seems highly improbable. But if these divine forces are really in our midst a quickened moral development in human nature is not at all improbable. The point now attained in human evolution by the ego offers us the key to a correct understanding of the world crisis. The human entity's present evolutionary position is just about midway in the whole journey through its own kingdom. Although it is true that humanity is everywhere found in different stages of spiritual evolution, that some peoples are more advanced and others more backward, it is also true that a broad band of average condition comprises the greater part of those incarnated today. And it is this general average which will be most affected by the ego's cosmic change. The important change will not be undergone by all the egos but only by the general mass of them. There are, of course, in every land a few who long ago passed this point in their development and more who have recently passed it. They are the pioneers, sensitive to spiritual ideals and struggling to follow them. But now the challenge has been issued to humanity as a whole. Its unseen guardian has issued an ultimatum. It must make the passage and will not be allowed to delay any longer. If, with ordinary sight, we look at the contemporary scene, there is little to keep us from despair. But if we look with philosophic sight there is nevertheless something to give us hope. The terrible curse of the war may be converted into a blessing if it arouses man from materialist pursuits and turns him to the quest of the eternal intangibles. The fatuousness of seeking for true and lasting happiness in the unstable affairs of material life is being etched deeply in his heart. He is being taught the wisdom of seeking to live in the consciousness of the Christ within him.The notion that humanity will have bought a new and better world at the heavy price of the tragic war years is true in the sense that an unheard-of opportunity has been presented to humanity to make a new and better world. That some advantage will be taken of this opportunity is certain, but that sufficient advantage will be taken of it to create a vastly different world is quite uncertain. The selfishness, the greed, and the hatred which hinder human advance are not likely to disappear overnight; despite the forced social adjustments of the war period, we have a very long way yet to travel to catch up with the golden rule. I do not therefore share the intemperate enthusiasms, opalescent visions, and unrealistic hopes of well-meaning political, religious, and mystical reformers. Neither do I say that we should all sit down with folded hands and wait a few more million years while evolution does its grim work of instructing men through constant suffering to cease their conflicts. If a perfect new age is far from fulfilment, an imperfect new age can, nevertheless, be had. Let us have it, then, by all means. For unless we strive to move even one inch forward we shall not move at all. We must set up ideals and we must work for their realization. We must try to make even a little part of our visions come true. If we take a pessimistic view of the possibilities of elevating mankind, then no effort will be made and no progress can be expected. But if we make a start and do what little can be done then some progress will be made. There will be this difference, however, between us and the impractical idealists, that whereas they believe all their visions can be materialized today, we are more prudent, more scientific, but nevertheless not a bit less visionary. The difficulties of making a new and better world are frighteningly formidable. But the difficulties of carrying on the old and bad world are also frighteningly formidable. If the sufferings of war awaken the conscience and purify the desires of mankind, its leaders may endeavour to atone for their errors and omissions of the past. Thus only can they go forward to meet the coming age and open a path to a better life for all mankind.
We are passing through a disheartening period of violent and unprecedented storms, but if we have learned the single lesson of hoping on and holding on, we shall win through into clear weather. The spiritual possibility of man's improvement will be realized through the pressure of forces working both within his entity and within his environment. But it will not be realized smoothly. There will be lapses, setbacks, and retrogressions, albeit temporary ones. The world's need is not new doctrinal fads, but new life, new inspiration, and a new heart. It is clear that the crisis will not be overcome unless we acknowledge the worth of moral values above those which have hitherto reigned in actual practice rather than in hypocritical theory. That such an acknowledgment has begun to shine in the hearts of some powerful leaders is good, but it will have to shine in the hearts of several more if a successful result is to be attained. A section of people has vaguely felt this already, but it will become creative in their minds and lives only when it is clearly formulated. This century will not have much use for any gospel which keeps the worldly life and the spiritual life mutually exclusive. It is a good thing in ordinary times to go back to the past for its spiritual treasures casketed in fine books. It is then a privilege and a satisfaction to find that they have come down well-presented and quite safe through century after century. But these are extraordinary times, urgent times, filled with pressure and crisis. The voices we most need to hear are living ones, speaking from out of the same circumstances as those amid which we dwell, continuous and contemporaneous with us. If God can speak to one man he can speak to any other--if to Jesus' and Muhammed's times, then to our own times also; if in Palestine and Arabia then in Europe and America also. Help for modern man can best come from those who understand the modern mind. Man's environment alters with the course of time and so does man's mentality. A simple repetition of what he was in former centuries or a mere revival of what he knew in former centuries is not efficient today. There is no traditional form of this teaching which will hold good for all time. This is always true but it is particularly true today, when we live in the middle of a general transition from the separative cycle of evolution to the unitive. During the period of human evolution in which our generation lives, it is unwise retrogressive and inexpedient to look only to ancient sources for inspiration knowledge and revelation. The inner wisdom itself, being out of time and space, does not and cannot vary, but the outer forms under which it is found do vary. This is not only because of the geographical and historical differences which condition those forms, but because an evolutionary development is also affecting them. This is an important reason why the coming era must find an inspiration adequate to its more progressive needs, must add new truths to the old ones. Only that nation will act wisely in this critical phase of human history which acts on the recognition that this is not the medieval world, not the antique world, but the nuclear world. This is a new era which demands a transvaluation of values, method, and even men! Humanity still clings much too strongly to its egoism in most matters, despite the tuition of war crisis and upheaval; this is the very standpoint which must be abandoned, or at least markedly modified, if humanity is not to pass through further large-scale suffering. And this in turn must itself be the fruit of an awakening to the higher purpose of earthly life--it does not matter whether or not such an awakening takes place through or outside the church. After the war's end, we had to wait a couple of years for the situation to clarify itself and for the uprising tendencies to show themselves. Those who insist on this excessive adherence to materialistic thought and refuse to recognize the new evolutionary current of stimulated intelligence and spiritual individualization are trying to live in the modes of the past and have failed to find the purpose of their present incarnation. Such is the swiftly moving time-spirit. It will not be denied, none can successfully impede it, and it must be accommodated. It is a challenging demand that human life be deliberately hooked to a better ethical basis, that the continuance of materialism is insanity. The only effectual way to meet this crisis is the way of recognizing that an era of materialist error and extreme selfishness has come to an end, the way of wiping the slate of old wrong-doing quite clean, the way of making a complete break with the past, the way of doing the large and generous deed as a start-off for the new era. There is no third way open to us. The world is rapidly moving into a new age. We may either cling to the remnants of the age that is vanishing or we may meet the age which is coming. We must make our choice. We have had enough and more than enough of the high-sounding platitudes of babblers. We need now some concrete expression that will be more truthful and less talkative. For the problems will stand squarely confronting them and cannot be avoided or evaded as lesser problems have often been. If the crisis can force enough men to acknowledge their own insufficiency, if it can bring them to recognize that the old ways of living have led to a dead end, and if it can arouse them to search for higher values as well as newer paths, it will be passed successfully. If enough people in positions of power and authority were persuaded that a change of direction must be taken, the solution would be simple. Or if enough of the masses were persuaded of the same thing, here again the solution would be simple. In both cases, the risky path of new direction would have to be accepted. In practice we know what to expect of the rulers and politicians of today. And we know what to expect of the multitude also. There is little room today for servile accommodation to conventions. Necessity forces us to rip through red tape. A colossal revision of attitudes is called for, an abandonment of outmoded ideas which belong to the story of the nineteenth century and which create self-deception when carried into the mid-twentieth century. Ideals must still be given to the world, even if they seem quite impractical and even if the giver is crucified as Jesus was, or shot as Kennedy was. They are needed to offset the egoism and materialism which come so much more easily to most people. Struggling students must make the best of this dark age, and while deriving inspiration and guidance from the texts of dead sages learn to think and act for themselves as children of the twentieth century should think and act. It would be foolish to turn our backs entirely on the past. And it would also be foolish to fail in the comprehension of what we have to learn from it. But this does not mean that we are to live in it. Not to feel the clamant urgency of the present is to fit one's eyes with blinders. There is only one way whereby we can bury the troubled mental pictures of an unhappy past and an uncertain future, and that way is to create a worthwhile present. It is needful to comprehend that there is no other way open for humanity except to make the creative effort needed to start a genuine new life. If it starts a pretended new one or a camouflaged old one, then all the troubles which it is seeking to escape will once more descend on its head. To look backwards for guidance will be to look for trouble. The old passé point of view was good for its period but has now fulfilled its function and lost its creativity. It must be displaced by a timelier one. Humanity must look forwards and let the dead bury the dead if it is to save itself. The problem today is not how best to return to the customs and complexes of a past phase which was long ago finished with, but how best to advance to the creations and visions of a new one. Humanity is called upon to keep in mind the inner developments, the outer events, and the spiritual significance of what is happening everywhere. And this can be done only by appreciating the inner significance of this sensational epoch. It provides an opportunity for mental expansion which may be accepted comprehendingly or rejected ignorantly. Acceptance may be a bitter drink at first but will be sweet in the end, whereas rejection may be sweet at first but will certainly be bitter in the end. That is why humanity must be realistic while not renouncing its ideals and must do the utmost that can be done under the circumstances, fortified by the knowledge that an upward movement will quite quickly attract divine support. Indeed, it is moving at a speed that makes a dramatic and dynamic changeover in this direction from materialistic ideas urgent and imperative. The picturesque or exquisite survivals of a feudal age may continue for longer periods here or shorter ones there, but change is working and necessity is pressing: they will crumble away. The old formulas will not fit the new conditions. Renaissance, not retrogression; forward to new achievements, not back to old decadence. Mankind must be flexible and adapt themselves to new times, accommodate themselves to new necessities, or else they will suffer. There can be no creeping back to the ignoble. The powerful tide of evolution will catch and drown all those who make such a foolish attempt. It is cowardly to flee backward into the familiar past because the present is too hard for our weak souls. It is foolish to lag behind the century's needs. It is courageous to move forward into the unknown future.New age directions
In The Wisdom of the Overself it was briefly hinted that the twentieth century was the era of universal human enlightenment. I have been asked to expand upon this point. Just as the nineteenth century was the era of scientific enlightenment, so our own is the century of universal enlightenment. This is taking three forms. First, general education, intellectual knowledge, and scientific discovery will continue to spread throughout the whole world and will not reside mainly in the West. Second, they will become available to all classes and not be confined mostly to the middle and upper classes. Third, religion, mysticism, and metaphysics will reveal their realities and shed their superstitions, will be made more rational and thus will no longer be regarded as being displaced by science but rather as being necessary to complete it. Furthermore, the philosophy of truth, which is the highest kind of enlightenment possible to mankind, will become as easily accessible as it was remotely hidden in former centuries. Because we are at a cyclic turning-point, this is the century when truth will be let loose on the world. Not only ultimate truth which philosophy reveals for the few but also political, economic, social, religious, and scientific truth for the many. The falsehoods which dominate human society, the illusions which individuals and groups hug so fondly, and the lies under which society lives are being--and, we venture to predict, will be still more--shown up for what they are. This is one reason why we saw the phenomenon of a Nazi falsification of every branch of cultural and practical facts on a scale unheard-of in history. For it represents the scum which rose to the surface so that it might be cleared entirely away, the night which attained its darkest pitch just before the first ray of dawn. It also explains why we are seeing a second and similar falsification being attempted by the hierarchs of Communism. It is certain that if the Nazis had conquered, this world-wide illumination could not have spread but instead humanity would have been plunged into a new dark age far worse and far more materialistic than anything it had hitherto historically experienced. The danger of falling into spiritual eclipse was therefore real. We moderns have striven for power. We have gained it but lost peace. Even the power itself has run riot in our hands and half-destroyed our lives, our cities, and our societies. If we are to restore contentment to our hearts, we must restore balance to our strivings. The time has come when education should re-educate itself, when medicine should give Nature's herbs their due and demand that all foods be rid of their added poisons, when the body-soul relationship should be correctly revealed by psychology and psychiatry, when for their health's sake and their soul's sake human beings should stop devouring corpses. The events and changes which have come on the world scene since the turn of the century stagger the mind, but those which will come before the end of it will be even more startling.(P) The sooner utopian dreams of perfectibility of the human race are dropped, the less disappointment there will be. The sooner we find out what measure and what kind of transcendence we can realize, the more contentment we shall attain. The first is an unanswerable question because at that level there is no individual. To reject modern civilization and its culture utterly--to condemn its faults, sins, errors, and evils to the point of refusing to have anything more to do with it--is to end in nihilism. This helps no one, not even the nihilist. Nor are sensualism, drugs, or suicide ways out. Those who say that a man cannot keep his moral integrity, cannot honour his conscience and still take part in the present culture, are not right, though they are not entirely wrong. A mystical purpose must be introduced into our common life to balance the mechanical principle that now sways us. Then the State will become a sacrament. This is not to say that we need a new state religion. The less the state tries to impose a religion on the people, the better for that religion; it will then have to develop a real life of its own from within. This is simply an intimation that the ordinary institutions of our society should be so arranged and so balanced as to permit men to face Mother Earth, Nature, more often, and to enable them to turn their minds towards the couch of repose more frequently. Twentieth-century man has to find a way of solving his problems, not of evading them. It is not only capitalism which is being seriously threatened by its own defects or deficiencies, but also Communism. Both must not only reform themselves, but also modify one another, if they are not to break down. It is true that a state which combines the practical, the modern, and the scientific with the spiritual (by which I do not mean the ecclesiastical) has yet to rise and seems unlikely to do so. But that is no reason why it should not be tried. The beginning can best be made by a few pioneers, on a small scale, and in the relative freedom of private effort. The kind of unit which philosophy advocates in the political and economic, the national and international realms is a co-operative and not compulsory one. The higher ideal of complete world unification is beyond the understanding and hence the practice of humanity at its present stage of evolution. Man's dependence on the earth for fuel such as wood, coal, oil, and gas, will give way in the future to dependence on the sun. Its rays will give him all that he needs for this purpose. The world could be improved but it could not be turned into a Utopia. As Ramana Maharshi once said when dissension arose within his ashram, "There will always be complaints!" But let people try. They may make things a little better, but fundamentally they must make themselves better first. History alone teaches that. Hope easily deludes us, especially the idealists and optimists. In the end we must work on ourselves. As we grow better the world can get better. An ideal solution would apply only to ideal people. All external attempts to unite the different sects within a single faith are a pitiable confession of their failure. Such an artificial federation will not achieve much. Union must come naturally and spontaneously from within, from the innermost heart, or it had better not come at all--and because religious organizations are basically in competition with each other, this will not happen. The keynote of yoga for this coming age should be divine immanence--that which is in oneself, in others, and in Nature. Democracy--the unification of society--will triumph. The opportunity to acquire knowledge will be freely available to the lowest. This includes mystical and philosophical as well as worldly knowledge. The racial prejudices, the political separativeness, and the religious preferences which assisted human progress at a former level of evolution but which now hinder it and cause strife and conflict will be broken down. Destiny is compelling us to think internationally, which is the way a philosopher always thought without destiny's grim compulsions. The problem of a common world language is an interesting and important one. Out of the crucible of war only two of the existing languages will emerge with any likelihood of leadership. They are English and Russian. And of these two, English will count most in a general reckoning of their pros and cons--chiefly because it is already in world-wide use. Therefore it would seem a safe and sound counsel to affirm that in addition to his or her mother tongue every pupil throughout the world be taught English as a secondary and universal one. But the matter is not so simple as that. For an age when so much will have to be constructed anew and when so many defective ideas will have to be replaced by better ones will find it more profitable to construct a better means of intercommunication also. Such an endeavour must be made. For the foreigner finds certain avoidable difficulties in his way when he seeks to learn English. These difficulties can be got rid of if England has the courage to cast convention to the winds and boldly inaugurate some much-needed changes in its tongue. English must first be simplified, regularized, and phoneticized. Such an auxiliary language will then become the supreme medium for international culture and commerce, travel, and conference. Books and magazines of planetary importance will appear not only in the language of the country of origin but as quickly as possible, if not simultaneously, in the language of the whole race too.The chief advantage of Esperanto over English as a means of international intercourse is that it can be mastered in one-twentieth the time. This is a tremendous advantage. Those who have seen at first hand what difficulties foreigners encounter in the study of the complexities and confusion of English can alone appreciate it.</