We Can Begin Again Together

by Dane Rudhyar


12. The Road Ahead


As I bring this book to a close, I will restate my deep-rooted conviction, held for the last sixty years, that our Western civilization has reached the fall period of its cyclic great year. Its basic beliefs, its way of life, its institutions are disintegrating and the seed-ideas of a future global society are falling and have fallen to the ground amid the decaying leaves. The only issue, as I see it, is whether the transition between the closing cycle and the future one can be relatively smooth, continuous and peaceful, or the momentum of our ancestral and recent collective errors and misdeeds, plus the psychological state of the vast majority of human beings, will force a global tragedy, whether in the form of an all-human catharsis and partial self-destruction, or of some telluric or cosmic development which will alter more or less swiftly and sharply the continuous existence of mankind.

The events of the past decades and the apparent level at which the mentality and emotional nature of the vast majority of human beings still operate today leave relatively little hope for a smooth and constructively gradual transition. The road ahead for most of mankind seems to be a rather tragic one, in the sense that it is dominated by issues which require a complete reversal of the momentum of what we, in the Western world, have naively believed to be "progress." There is progress if we can see the cyclic picture as a whole, but this is not a one-directional straightforward ascent. The spiral, not the straight line, is the symbol of this progress; and this spiral does not appear to be a smoothly unfolding continuous line. It makes, in our world of materiality and emotional conflicts, sharp turns. It is more like the act of walking, i.e., a series of falls and recoveries.

We are not living, at least today, in a symbolic land of perpetual spring. There are autumns and winters. It is foolish not to accept their rhythm, just because we are drunk with intellectual skills and technological achievements, and we are dreaming of a life of ecstasy. We should rather learn from the wisdom and the compassion embodied in the ideal of the Bodhisattva who, though ready to enter Nirvana, vows to remain in the world and to serve mankind until every sentient being can reach the ecstatic state of all-inclusive "unity." And this means the willingness and readiness to remain an effective presence, a promise of futurity, a "seed," through the storms of fall and winter.

I am not implying that humanity will have to pass through a thousand years of disintegration and darkness. The yearly cycle of the seasons is only a symbol. While it seems evident that every past civilization or society has had a cycle of growth, maturity and disintegration, what was a time of death in one part of the world has been birth or maturity in another. If, however, we have reached the threshold that leads to a global society including all human beings, we are facing an unparalleled situation; but we are also confronted by the need for a most fundamental change of state of consciousness and of habits of thinking. It makes little sense to suppose that such a radical change will take place easily and suddenly, just because we have developed all sorts of new instruments and we can travel to the moon or perhaps alter the cells' DNA. What has to be transformed is far deeper than cells; it is the shadow of the human past. It is the deep-rooted inertia of the human material, the collective memories of failures and hatred, the fears of the dark, the insecurity of billions of little egos.

Such a transformation is possible, and I would say inevitable; but it is naive to believe it can be easy and instantaneous. It can never fully take place in a steady, consistent and permanent manner unless the irreducibly dualistic concepts and the competitiveness on which our crisis-civilization is based are overcome and superseded by new realizations of cosmic order and of harmony through functional and multi-level diversity. It cannot take place on an Earth from the total being of which man has become alienated, an Earth which he is polluting, poisoning and raping for the satisfaction of his insane ego-pride. If our Western civilization — particularly where it appears in its most extreme aspect, in America — cannot be humbled, then it inevitably will have to be humiliated.

I have tried to show in the first part of this book that the initial step toward humility for Western men and women requires of them that they transform their blatant individualism, their longing for out-of-gear freedom, their false sense of equalitarianism, their today unrealistic because abstract and unbalanced concept of democracy, their acquisitiveness and competitive spirit, their insistence upon quantity rather than quality — upon analytical thinking instead of holistic perceptions and intuitions — and their disregard for the true principle of authority.

What is needed, I repeat, is a radical reorientation of the consciousness — of mind, feeling and behavior; and this assuredly demands of us a deep-seated and irreversible refusal to remain identified in spirit with the ancestral traditions and concepts of the past millennia, even if the necessities of existence compel us to "render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar" until the time comes for the germination of the seeds within which the patterns of the future are locked. Such a refusal can be deeply instinctive and quite blind, as is so often the case with our rebellious youth; but in order to be fully effective and constructive it should be based on a clear grasp of the basic meaning and historical value of the premises on which Western society has based its deepest beliefs and its institutions.

These premises are philosophical and metaphysical, religious and psychological; and I have discussed them in my recent book, The Planetarization of Consciousness. In it, I have sought to present a general world-view (or cosmology) and the broad outlines of a psychological, epistemological and ethical approach to human existence which, if fully accepted and implemented, would provide a foundation for a new and global society. The manner in which this world-view could be applied to the "New Order" has been suggested in the preceding chapters.

In closing, what I wish to stress again is the fact that the time for outer action has not yet come for the men and women who see themselves as seeds for a potential future. Spring is not around the comer. What is required is not the type of public and forceful action which can only lead to violent reactions, as long as the greater part of mankind is not yet ready for a fundamental change of consciousness and it supports the institutional basis of our Western society. No doubt there are men and women who, because they have been forced since birth to live in nearly sub-human conditions, can no longer wait for a slow improvement and the so long postponed fulfillment of half-hearted promises. Yet the result of violence is always at best ambiguous. Revolution at one level leads to reaction at another — as the example of the Russian revolution has well shown; the oppressed masses once in power have demanded the very type of culture which their oppressors enjoyed a century ago. Even the Marxist ideology is, after all, a typical product of the German and Hebraic mentality, that is, a product of Western civilization and its intellectualism and materialism. The revolution cut the branches of the tree, but left the roots and the trunk intact.

This is not the solution, even if in some respect it heralds some of the features which may be integral parts of a truly new and global society once the quality of the consciousness behind these features is renewed and transfigured. Nothing really valid and permanent can be accomplished without a re-conditioning change in consciousness. To use once more the seed analogy, this is the time for the mutation within the seed, not for germination. To fail to understand this point is to fail to think, feel and live in tune with the real need of the time. And today this may be very difficult. It requires more wisdom, patience, perseverance, and even courage to live the life of the mutating seed than to embrace with emotional fervor and excitement the activist's cause which may lead to martyrdom.

In the fall of the year catabolic processes are inevitably to be expected and endured, polarizing an anabolic, future-oriented mutation in consciousness and in seed. Everything has its place. The momentum of past failures — of omission as well as commission — is irreversible. Our nation cannot avoid the karma of slavery, of the wanton destruction of the Native American and of the waste and pollution of natural resources, of the failure to act for world peace and of Prohibitions which fostered the growth of criminal elements in our society. But at the threshold of a global society there are no longer only national karmas: an all-human fatality is confronting us. The ghosts of millennia of conflicts, of violence, of rapacity conditioned by scarcity and institutionalized inertia, are crowding upon us. The road may indeed be tragic; but the light shines ahead, in the distance. How distant depends on the clarity of our thinking, the faith in our heart, the unpossessiveness of our loves, the breadth of our vision, the strength of our determination.

What is at stake is mankind — not institutions or ideologies, traditional worship or ruthless revolution. It is humanity that must be transformed. Man is the measure of all revolutions.

What any one of us may have to do outwardly, socially or professionally, in order to keep the light burning is not important. Events are not important; death is not important. We are being tested by our dedication to the New Order that is to come — that will come. We may be tested anywhere, in a factory, an office, in a college campus. What is important is how man — you and I, and ail of us — meet the challenge to transform the quality of our response to any and all events, the challenge to be more than we ever have been.

Perhaps there will be global wars, perhaps telluric upheavals, perhaps visitations by more advanced and wiser beings from other planets who will humble our enormous pride; perhaps it will merely be a long, tedious, harassing series of small crises, local wars, revolts stifled in blood, and the slow process toward a hesitant, incomplete, potentially frustrating because only superficially “new world order,” breeder of still more karma. Perhaps also a new “god-man” will appear to fascinate the masses into following him; but to what end? No one can really tell.

What matters is that individuals who can steadily think, feel and reorder their lives in terms of a concretely realizable harmonic ideal of all-human existence on a regenerated Earth should actually bring to birth within themselves and within small groups and communities — or even perhaps in larger cities the new consciousness which alone can father a new humanity and a new society. The call for rebirth and transubstantiation indeed is upon us. Who is listening — now? Who will answer?

(Summer 1970)



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