We Can Begin Again Together

by Dane Rudhyar

2. Fire Versus Seed

It has been current practice among historians and archaeologists to divide into successive Ages the period during which, according to modern scientific theories, civilization developed. These are most commonly known as Old Stone Age or Paleolithic, New Stone Age or Neolithic (which once was believed to have begun between 25,000 and 10,000 B.C., but which may well be much more ancient), Bronze Age (probably after 3000 B.C.) and Iron Age (since the time of the Hittites around 1400 B.C. or perhaps earlier). These Ages are not to be understood as sharply defined periods, but as broad and overlapping phases in the development of man's ability to use the products of his environment in order to maintain himself and to further his collective, generic evolution. The selection of typical materials such as stone, bronze and iron as characteristic factors does not imply that the use of these materials was exclusive during the Ages bearing their names, but, rather, that the approach of mankind to the problem of mastery over its environment can be conveniently defined in terms of such use.

We underlined the phrase "mastery over its environment" because it reveals the basic meaning of a historical classification which was adopted by the thinkers of a period in which the concepts of struggle for existence and/or survival of the fittest were uppermost in men's minds. Stone, bronze and iron are substances from which the essential tools of culture have been made; and tools are instruments of mastery. As such, they are used in warfare as well as in the production of goods and wares, in the arts and crafts as well as in agriculture. They serve the purpose of man's mastery over other men, over materials to be fitted for efficient use, over the products of the soil.

It is possible, however, to think of the development of human civilization and human mentality in somewhat different terms, and as a result to establish a classification of historical periods on other bases. The archaic Hindu-Greek sequence of mythological eras — Golden Age (Satya Yuga), Silver Age (Tetra Yuga), Bronze Age (Dwapara Yuga) and Iron Age (Kali Yuga), the relative lengths of which measure 4, 3, 2, and 1 in units of time — is to be understood as a "spiritual" classification. It was meant to measure, or at least symbolically to characterize, the cycles of deterioration of the creative energy of Spirit, in a cosmic sense — what today scientists call entropy, the process of running down of universal energy. Another classification is one which uses as a defining factor what might be called man's basic attitude toward production. Recent events have given to this factor such an outstanding importance that it is essential to realize what it implies and to grasp the meaning of the profound change which is even now beginning to revolutionize such a basic attitude.

To produce means, etymologically, "to bring forth." A tree brings forth flowers, leaves and fruits during spring and summer; the female animal brings forth a progeny. This type of production is instinctive and unconscious in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. It remains instinctive and most unconscious during the primitive phases of human development. The primitive or “natural” woman is known to have had — and wherever found today, to have still — an attitude toward the bearing of children very different from that of the more modern woman. The connection between childbirth and the sexual act seems remote to the primitive woman. Pregnancy appears to her as a natural mystery, a seasonal occurrence; and as her sense of causal connections in time is dim, so is the causal relation between the purely instinctive and impersonal act of mating and the slow-maturing change affecting her body. A general connection is obviously recognized; but for long ages it is likely to have been neither a personalized nor a consciously intentional one.

At this earliest stage of human development there is, indeed, no planning for production. Man gathers what he finds of use to him in his environment. He plucks fruits and nuts; he eats roots, hunts and fishes. In much the same attitude, the tribal group gathers children from the females, when nature produces them. There is no private family-unit or nuclear famly in the sense that we understand today the concept of family. There is, likewise, no sense of purposeful control over nature or guidance of natural processes. Things happen; and the problem for man is to adjust himself to natural conditions and to survive by taking from the universe whatever is shown to give man strength and the power to increase his number and his chances of collective survival.

This attitude to life of early man (as modern history pictures him) became gradually transformed during the New Stone Age. The transformation led to the beginning of agriculture, to domestication of animals, and to the eventual discovery of the wheel and of its uses. But the deeper psychological factor which made these new developments possible was undoubtedly the gradual realization that if certain acts were performed at a certain period, after waiting for what must have seemed a very long time, certain definite, expected results would occur. This meant the development of what Count Korzybsky significantly named the "time-binding" faculty — a faculty based on memory, on transfer of traditions, and, later, on the establishment of a calendar and of recorded data, from which eventually generalizations, abstractions and scientific laws arose. This meant the development of long-range purposefulness; thus, of planning.

The growth of such an attitude was furthered by the study of periodical facts in nature, of seasonal changes in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and of celestial cycles. It crystallized around the study of astrology — the study of the perfect order displayed by the motions of discs and dots of life in the sky — an order so perfect and reliable as to imply that it was the master of the imperfect and not too reliable sequence of natural phenomena on earth. The periodical motion of the sun was seen to affect obviously the yearly cycle of vegetation; the periodical changes of the moon could be referred to the smaller cycles of animal fecundity. These periods became the basis of the calendar, and the calendar, the magical symbol of this new revelation of natural order, the very key to the new human attitude toward life. Man had become a producer. He no longer lived exclusively by gathering what he found in nature. He set nature to work for him, to increase and multiply what he had found. Man had learned to use the seed, vegetable and animal. He had understood and was seeking gradually to master nature's power of increase, not only in the fields of the earth, but also in his own nature — in his women and in his psychic nature, biologically and psychically, then mentally, through soil-cultivation and tribal culture.

This great turning point in human evolution has been symbolized, according to our Western tradition, in the story of Adam and of the Fall from Eden. The Edenic state of human evolution is the state in which men are food-gatherers. They take; they do not produce (bring forth). This state is that of the child, who takes from the mother. It is an "infantile" attitude of complete dependence upon the mother — and also, of fear of the mother, when she appears in the form of the Dark Mother, Kali, the Destroyer. It refers to what has been called the Age of Innocence, when child-like men do not have a differentiated individual consciousness, and thus no real responsibility.

Adam (from the Hebraic root Adamah, red earth) is presumably a collective name for a group of people who began to till this red earth in the sweat of their brows after "eating of the tree of knowledge" and being driven from the Garden (Genesis III) — or possibly the name of a traditional personage who led his tribe along this new and revolutionary line. These people, obviously, were covered with red soil while cultivating it with their hands and chipped stone; which may be the reason for the name, Adam. At any rate, at some time, somewhere, the step was taken which led mankind from the Age of Gathering to the Age of Production.

This event of incalculable consequence may have occurred in the region south of Mt. Ararat in the Caucasus, in some of the small valleys of the. highlands where the borders of Iraq, Persia, Turkey and Soviet Russia meet, perhaps not far from Lake Uzmi and the town of Tabiz, where in 1850 the great religious leader, called the Bab, was martyred. As the Bab claimed he brought to an end the religious Dispensation which began with Adam (whom he considered as a great Prophet and Divine Manifestation), while heralding the beginning of a new one, this region may, indeed, have been a peculiarly significant focal point in the development of one phase in human evolution. But recent discoveries may indicate that some form of cultivation existed in the valleys of Eastern Africa and India — not to mention, of course, the possibility of the existence of entirely different types of humanity on now-disappeared continents.

Besides the Biblical tradition, another basic myth (found in varied forms in all mythologies) is of great significance in this connection: the Greek story of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods and gave it to the humanity he had created. For this act he was chained to a Caucasian mountain and condemned to have his liver devoured by a vulture and constantly grow again, only to be destroyed anew by the sinister bird, symbol of death and of the degeneration of all cycles. The liver was believed by many ancient peoples to be the seat of the soul in the human body. Fire, on the other hand, has been regarded almost universally as the symbol of the spirit and of the "Unknown God," the god of all transformations and metamorphoses; and the repeated rebirth of Prometheus' liver (or "soul") recalls still another myth, that of the Phoenix bird, who, though consumed in the fire at the end of every cycle, is reborn again out of its ashes.

The story of Prometheus seems, therefore, to hide a promise made to mankind by some ancient spiritual leader, whom they considered Father and Liberator, to the effect that, periodically, he would be reborn to suffer with them and sustain them in their tragic progress in the use of the Fire, until the day when a new Age would dawn, and Hercules — the symbolic name of a new solar humanity — having won by his own efforts the spiritual status of "personality" (the Hero state), would free Prometheus from his bondage to the recurrent cycle of life and death on earth, a bondage assumed in compassion for mankind.

Under this mythological symbolism one can readily discover a reference to another great event which, together with the beginning of agriculture, marked a crucial turning point in the evolution of mankind. This event is the deliberate and conscious use of fire by man. When it occurred, no one can tell; but it is logical to believe that, while early men did use burning wood to warm themselves and eventually to cook some foods as far back as there are any records of human life, the social and technical use of fire for the purpose of transforming material substances, and particularly metals, must have come during the Stone Ages — perhaps only after man had begun to cultivate the soil. The making of swords and ploughshares, at any rate, was at first the outstanding application of the new technique; and, with it, we enter the Bronze and Iron Ages. However, the softer metals, copper, silver and gold were used before bronze and iron, apparently because their use did not require as much heat, and as much control of fire. Agriculture, based on the principle of seed-increase; industry, based on the principle of transformation of matter by man-made techniques — these two basic activities of mankind characterize essentially what we have already named the Age of Production in contradistinction to the Age of Gathering (the Edenic Age). Agriculture and industry are like two parallel streams running through human history; but their relative importance and the manner in which they have affected human behavior and human mentality — thus society and civilization — have changed considerably since archaic days. Industry has gradually increased its hold upon humanity, seemingly relegating agriculture to a secondary place — at least in terms of essential value or meaning. The city has challenged the farm; the manufacture of industrial wares has grown beyond the agricultural production in determining human adjustments to life.

Fire versus seed. Two poles of human productivity — and more; for these two controlling factors in the economy of society are also vital symbols for two basic attitudes to life. Both attitudes are present at any time; yet the preponderance of one or the other has profound repercussions upon social patterns and human thought. Today, with the discovery of the use of atomic energy, not only can we foresee the beginning of a new era in production, but, deeper still, the beginning of a new type of civilization and mentality. The Age which "Adam" opened is coming to a close. The Age of Seed-increase is perhaps gradually giving way to the Age of Release of Power. This is the profound meaning of the nineteenth century's Industrial Revolution. But it is only since 1945 that we are really able to understand what has been taking place; for only since Alamagordo, New Mexico, July 16, 1945, and the later use of the H-bomb and of the principle of atomic fusion, can we begin to understand the meaning and the full possible use of fire.

According to classical chemistry fire is the product of combustion; that is, of the rapid oxidation (combination with oxygen) of some material substances — such as wood, coal and petroleum. On the other hand, occult traditions in Asia and Europe have considered fire as occurring under three basic aspects: electric fire, solar fire and fire by friction. "Electric fire" was presumably responsible for the first discovery that wood (and in general all vegetable substances) could burn and, in burning, produce heat and light. "Solar fire" was connected with seasonal changes and the growth of living organisms. "Fire by friction" was the type of fire produced by rubbing together sticks of dry wood — and, by analogical extension, it was related to the sexual act and its bio-psychological effects (impregnation of the seed, warmth of feelings, mental exaltation, etc.).

Electric fire and fire by combustion are understood now to be the results, respectively, of the freeing of electrons and of the shifting of electrons from orbit to orbit within the atom — with a consequent release of energy. In the last decades, however, the nucleus of the atom has been penetrated or smashed. Not only electrons, but protons, neutrons, mesons and a host of other sub-atomic particles have been identified. Nuclear energy has been set free, as the "binding force" holding together the nuclear particles has been overcome — and this energy. is so enormous that, even though only a fraction of it is released in nuclear explosions, what is released produces awesome results.

We can now define fire, in a general way, as a release of power sufficiently rapid to produce a noticeable amount of heat, light and rays of all sorts. We can extend this definition to the psycho-mental level and say that fire — "soul fire" — is a release of inner warmth or emotional heat, and of mental illumination. When the Alchemists and Rosicrucians of the Middle Ages worshipped God as Universal Fire, they paid homage to that ubiquitous and protean Act of Power which releases the energy that coagulates, warms, illumines and destroys all concentrations of matter. That energy, in whatever type of substance it is contained and at whatever level it operates, when released, can be called "spirit." It is spirit immanent in material systems — spirit as the essence of universal motion — spirit that binds protons within the nucleus, but also that thrusts through space these powerful particles once the magnetic shell of the nucleus is shattered.

Fire, therefore, is the release of spirit from material systems. It is the result of the overcoming of the binding force responsible for the existence of atoms and molecules by a disintegrating, catabolic, releasing power.(1) Psychologically speaking, it is likewise the release of the spiritual energy from the bonds of an exclusive focus on organic living; the release of the soul from matter-bound desires, and of the spiritual mind from the sense-controlled intellect and selfish ego.

Production, in the Conditions of
Culture and Civilization

Fire versus seed means, therefore, release versus increase. Production can operate on the basis of both. It can be "production through increase of seed" or "production through release of power" — or spirit. It is the preponderance of either of these types of production which constitutes the basic difference between culture and civilization.

A cultural type of society is one which gives a maximum of value and attention to the processes which, at every level of human activity, have as their goal an increase of seed, of concepts, of personal experiences, of bodies and of wares. Culture or cultivation — and also all religious cults refer to the multiplication or expansion of whatever nature presents to man in a natural organic state. It is based on the control of the process of organic growth — whether at the biological or at the psycho-mental level.

Civilization, on the other hand, is based primarily on the controlled release of energy and spirit from the substance of man's environment — inner as well as outer. Civilization develops as the releasing process becomes gradually more efficient, more far-reaching, more total. Fire was found in nature. Lightning and solar heat caused forest or grass fires since the dawn of human evolution on this solid earth of ours. But the controlled use of that fire (the Promethean gift) marked the beginning of civilization — and of human industry. Wood, coal, oil, gun powder, alcohol have been the main substances in which civilized man has sought for millennia to accelerate under control the haphazard or accidental process of disintegration (i.e., release of energy from matter), of which he had found characteristic instances in his environment.

The use of fermented beverages made from fruit-juices or grains is another instance of the way in which man has made the process of disintegration (or fermentation) serve his purpose. In this case the alcoholic beverage was meant to release man's consciousness from the confining routine of an earth-bound existence. Alcohol was given the name "spirits," or "fire-water"; its use was not aimed at an increase of organic substance or seed, but at the release of some kind of "spirit" or energy in man. It made men more "spirited." It gave them the illusion of freedom — for a while, and at a certain psychological level. It was a self-induced, easily obtained, foretaste of the true spiritual or mystical experience of liberation — of "psycho-mental radio-activity" the key-process to all transcendental states of consciousness. Today new drugs' and the modified use of once "sacred" vegetable substances have caught the imagination of the young and the not-so-young as they provide sudden breakthroughs into a realm of consciousness freed from the braking action and the safeguards built in by the ego and the traditions of a specific and local culture.

Atomic radioactivity is simply a further state, a more far-reaching and devouring aspect of fire. It was observed accidentally by the French scientist, Henry Becquerel, soon after studied by the Curies and by the unofficially acknowledged great psychologist-scientist Gustave Le Bon (cf. The Evolution of Matter, 1905, in which he generalized the concept of radioactivity and of what he called "black light"). It is now being used under control, just as the accidental fire caused by lightning in some primeval forest was used and carefully preserved by early man.

Radioactivity occurs in spontaneous forms in some material substances, such as radium salts; likewise, the slow form of combustion called "oxidation" — and also fermentation and decay — occurs constantly in nature. Civilization is based on an acceleration and controlled use of these disintegrative processes, just as culture is based on the acceleration and protective guidance of the process of organic increase of life, especially through seed-reproduction. For this reason civilization is consistently dealing with "destructive" or catabolic forces; while culture deals with "constructive" or anabolic forces. But these terms, constructive and destructive, are meaningless if an absolute or ethical value is given to them. They have validity only in so far as they point to the essential character — and the inevitable dangers — of civilization, of industry, and, today, of the use of nuclear energy.

Actually, the question between constructive and destructive has significance only in terms of organic, cultural and religious activities. Within the frame of reference of civilization proper, and in terms of all spiritual processes dealing with "liberation," destruction must be re-named "release." The important fact for civilized man in the shattering of the uranium atom is not that the atom (a material entity) is destroyed, but that the power held within the atomic field by the binding force is released. The important fact, likewise, for the mystic or yogi seeking at-one-ment with God or spiritual liberation, is not that the body and ego-structure of the psyche are shaken, suffer and in some cases, perhaps, as in religious martyrdom, are destroyed, but that the spirit held captive within these structures of personality is released.

There are countless atoms; and there are many human beings — far more today than there ever have been on this earth. Civilization, as a characteristic attitude to life, concentrates essentially on releasing from atoms (and, in its spiritual aspect, from human personalities) the energy and spirit bound in material entities or organic structures. It is not "aristocratic," in that it does not deal with seed — always a minority-group. It is "democratic," in that it seeks to release from every human being the potential spirit locked or latent in the structures of man's common humanity. Such a release of the spirit has been the purpose of Hindu yoga, especially of Kundalini Yoga, according to which this spiritual atom in man is imprisoned at the root of the spine and can be released and merged with the universal spirit through a long and difficult process of physical, psychic and mental awakening and control.

All such mystical techniques, practiced in small secret groups in Asia and Europe for millennia, are basically similar to the modern processes for releasing nuclear atomic energy through induced and accelerated radioactivity. They all deal with what the ancient philosopher covered broadly by the term, Fire. Fire is destructive; but so is the superabundance of seeds and agricultural products (as we learned during the Depression). Likewise, the superabundance of human beings (i.e. over-population) leads to destructive wars for new lands or new markets. Health in any organism means a dynamic balance between anabolic and catabolic forces. Similarly, health in humanity depends upon a dynamic and creative adjustment between cultural increase and the release of energy and spirit effected by the processes of civilization — and, in a sense at least, between aristocracy and democracy.

The "Culture of Plenitude" in the Atomic Age

During the millennia which have elapsed since the dawn of the Age of Production, cultivation and culture have developed on the foundations of scarcity; thus, of conflict. This made unavoidable by the fact that agriculture is based on geographic and climatic factors, and that, without the development of industry and the extensive control over Fire (in all its modes of expression), man is the prisoner of geography and climate — at the mercy of droughts, storms, floods and pestilences. He is also in a condition of psychological bondage to racial differences, tribal exclusiveness and the "infantile" state of religious dependence upon the Great Ancestor and his successors, shamans or priests.

Exclusiveness results from scarcity — scarcity of food, of wares and tools, scarcity of mental powers and of spiritual seed (i.e. of creative individual persons). From exclusiveness is derived fanaticism, the hatred for the alien and the unknown, and inordinate pride in group-achievements, in one's own religion, race, nation, class — and in one's personal ego. All typical cultural manifestations have been based so far on scarcity, exclusiveness and the pride of differentiation — on limited productivity, on unhappiness, and therefore on jealousy and ill-will toward some persons and groups of persons. And the root of all has been fear — fear born of want, lack and of a sense of guilt, fear kept alive in many cases by special groups and organizations which established and maintained their privileges by encouraging this primeval emotion among the masses — then succumbed to it also.

Religions and philosophies have given justification and significance to these facts — for it is their essential function to justify, give meaning, and help humanity to adjust itself to the facts of experience. The blame has been placed upon human nature, to which was attributed dark and negative characteristics in contradistinction to all the resplendent traits of divine or heavenly Nature. In practice and under the conditions of life to which men have been subjected in the past, these conclusions were sound and valid enough from a subjective standpoint. They may have been necessary in order to palliate and make bearable the pressure of scarcity and anxiety, the shock of constantly repeated catastrophes, wars and famines. Nevertheless, from an objective and absolute standpoint they were entirely beside the point.

Human nature in itself should not have been blamed, but rather the conditions of scarcity under which it was compelled to develop. We do not know "human nature." We know what human beings become when they operate under the law of scarcity — physical, intellectual and spiritual. But we do not know what mankind will be when all men and women can operate under the law of physical abundance and inner fullness. Fragmentary and temporary conditions of physical abundance in one part of the globe, against the background of generalized starvation, fear and mental confusion in the rest of the world, can give no evidence of what man will become when he is able to operate in total fullness of being, everywhere. The few that are favored by fortune, when the many are in bitter want, are so insecure and fearful of losing their abundance that their unconscious sense of value and their deep life-instincts compel them to regard this abundance as an anomaly, a turn of good luck in a game of chance, something to cling to and enjoy for a brief moment — or else as a God-given plan. Indeed, the belief in scarcity and war is still so inbred in humanity, so deeply rooted in the collective unconscious of the race, after millennia of justification for that belief, that "human nature" is still its slave. At the very least, it is conditioned by it.

In order to become liberated, collective humanity must first of all believe in abundance, in fullness of being. We must then overcome the habits of scarcity, the ghosts of fear and guilt, and repudiate all the institutions and crystallized traditions which not only embody the principle of scarcity, but profit from its application. We must build a new society in terms of total plenitude of being. We must build it, because now we can build it. Today man has the power in his hands; he has the knowledge in his mind; the vision of the future — dim though its outlines may be — has been presented to him by a few inspired seers. Yet all over the world people hesitate, are confused, are pulled back by memories of failure, by what their learned intellectuals bring forth as precedents, as economic laws, as political inevitabilities. People are afraid to lose their familiar pittance while reaching for what they are told is just one new phase of the old and unchallenged nature law.

Ours, nevertheless, is an unprecedented situation. All that humanity needs is to have the courage to believe it is an unprecedented situation, to refuse being dismayed and led astray by the men and the organizations that cling desperately to their ancient privileges. These had meaning in ages during which the aristocratic principle of seed-cultivation ruled society and man's mastery over Fire was hesitant, limited and insufficient. They have lost whatever shadow of significance the Industrial Revolution had left to them the very day the atomic bomb exploded in the desert of New Mexico.

Any mechanism or spiritual instrumentality enabling the control for use the release of any type of power can be called an engine. Man, as controller of energy and as dispenser-manager of power, is an engineer; and culture should be considered as the sum-total of agencies entrusted with providing the engines necessary at all levels for the social use of whatever kind of energy man has been able to release. Religious rituals and the temples or cathedrals built for their performances are engines for the focalization and release of the collective psychic energy of the people of a community — especially in times when religion is a central determinant in social living. The great myths of a culture, Spengler's "prime symbols" and Jung's primordial Images of the collective unconscious — the traditional art-forms (such as, for instance, a Sonata-form or a Fugue in music), the yearly festivals and the conventional behavior of a man of culture, the institutions of learning, the academies and the museums, the concert-halls, operas, and baseball games — all these cultural agencies are engines devised so as to control the release of human emotions and collective tensions — engines of a different character than a steam-shovel, a steel-foundry, or a uranium pile, but engines just the same, in my sense of the term.

Groups of men and women operate these various types of engines. They constitute the cultural aristocracy of a society. They control the power and the resources of the society. Until now their controls have been based upon the law of scarcity and privilege. But tomorrow new controls can be established on the foundation of abundance for all, of fullness of inner as well as outer being in whoever is able to believe in, to imagine, then to work toward such a state of human plenitude.

This change from a basis of scarcity and privilege to one of abundance and global distribution in terms of the need of each and all represents the great problem of this and the next century. If it is successfully effected, a new type of culture should be born, a "culture of plenitude"; not only agriculture but pleniculture; not only a cultivation of physical earthly seeds, but the development and increase of the "seed of Man" through an ever more abundant crop of mature, responsible and consecrated personalities. This global culture of plenitude, with roots in the soil of man's common humanity and with stems bearing fruits emits to the sun of the spirit in Man, was impossible until the fire at the atom's core was released. There was not enough energy available to animate and sustain it. It is possible today.

Power that is available turns destructive if not released through useful and constructive cultural agencies adequate to handle it. Power can destroy the civilization that set it free, as well as it can energize the mechanisms and organs of a future organic and global civilization consecrated to the fulfillment of Man in all human individuals. We have the power now; how will it be used? What kind of controls shall we build for it? Who shall build them, plan for them, use them — and for whom? What kind of society can we envision that would answer to the requirements of the new release of potentiality?

The answers to these questions will decide the future of mankind. To refuse to give an answer is still giving an answer — a negative one, which means that whoever is in charge of the present controls of society and culture today will remain in charge of the new channels for atomic energy release. But these men and groups who are now rulers of our social, cultural, economic, political engines are men trained in the tradition of an age of scarcity; people whose ancestral unconscious is filled with ghosts of cultures dominated by want, fear, greed, lust and pride; men whose intellects are shaped by "aristocratic" privilege; men whose ability to envision and to believe in the new goals of an Age of total productivity and universal fullness of being for every man and woman who longs for it is almost hopelessly clouded by prejudices and by the fear of losing their position, power and prestige. These people will not — and in most cases are psychologically unable to — relinquish their hold on the controls of a culture which atomic power and the now tangible and destructive results of our Industrial and Electronic Revolution have rendered obsolete, after a century of gradual disintegration.

Who are these people? Our political leaders , our generals and admirals, our career men and women, our big business men, bankers and Wall Street financiers, the heads of our institutions of learning and of our agencies for the distribution of cultural works and the spreading of ideas, the heads of most of our clubs and labor unions, or influential scientist and academics, our powerful CEOs and the politicians who do their bidding — and most of our religious leaders. They may be good, generous, clever, and very gifted; but they are managers and manipulators of a system that is based on a now obsolete conception of culture. Their goals are antiquated, at least in their formulation and their modes of realization. They use and distribute the new powers released by science, the new energies resulting from a globally interdependent humanity, in order to perpetuate that system and these goals — the only ones they know or can feel are worthwhile — upon a global stage in which they have collectively designed the set, written the script and direct the action of the tragic-comedy we are witnessing today.

In terms of culture, considered as an entity in itself, there is nothing wrong with these people. But culture is nothing in itself. It is not an end. It is only a means to control and to use constructively the powers released by civilization, the spiritual essence freed from material crystallizations. If culture provides controls that fit these powers — whether they be atomic or psychic — and actualizes the potentialities of human use inherent in them, culture is valid. If culture and, the people who operate its engines seek to force the new powers into mechanisms which were developed for and belong to a far less developed and outdated type of energy, then not only social but ecological catastrophes are inevitable. The problem is simple, clear, unavoidable. It is not a matter of sentiment, or of idealism. It is a question of realization and understanding. It simply is whether or not humanity is willing to face an issue which renders every other issue secondary, inconsequential and indeed obsolete.

In a sense, civilization is not to be blamed if the issue it has raised leads to a catastrophe. It has done its work. The responsibility now rests with the men and women of culture who operate its controls and who should build new controls to fit the new powers. Civilization is release of power, and power is essentially the capacity to act effectively. Power of itself is neither right nor wrong, good nor evil, constructive nor destructive. What gives it one character or another is the nature of its controls and of the people handling them. If these controlers cannot grow up to the new requirements set by the new powers available, they become enemies of human evolution. The release of power sets the pace; whoever cannot keep up with it must fall behind. When an entire society falls behind and its leaders seek desperately to force the on-surging power into inadequate engines, this society must disintegrate, regardless of whether leaders are well-meaning and their followers good citizens with "the best intentions." Intentions as such mean very little; what counts are the actual and inevitable results of the basic orientation of the whole society.

Nothing really constructive can ever be accomplished at any time unless the nature of the power necessary for the accomplishment is understood — which does not necessarily mean intellectually defined, as intellect (in the modern sense of the term) is also a cultural product, a tool; and new tools for understanding may be necessary, indeed are necessary.

To understand the nature of the new power is not enough. To construct new controls, new engines, a new culture for their fullest use is not enough. In fact, it is usually not possible, until the people who operate the old controls have either succeeded in adjusting themselves to the new rhythm of power, or been removed. And here we face once more the crux of the social, economic, religious, and political problem.

Removal through revolution is in most cases a desperate gamble, for revolution always tends sooner or later to turn into reaction; and even if it avoids this danger it sets into operation dictatorship and mechanisms of external compulsion which perpetuate themselves long after the crisis of reorientation and their usefulness in it have passed. Revolution, in its violent aspects, is indeed an expression of scarcity. It implies that the people at large are still so oppressed by lack and fear, so unawakened mentally and so rigidly controlled by aristocratic mechanisms of social, religious and economic scarcity that they cannot participate in the evolutionary metamorphosis of society except in a purely passive and blind manner. They must, as a result, be forcibly fecundated — violated, one might say — by a small group of utterly determined or passionate men who act as destroyers of the obsolete engines of culture. Through this destruction, seeds are sown, from which new forms, new plans, a new rhythm of existence will in time derive. But these new mechanisms of production will be stamped with the memory of privilege. What one destroys, one always tends to re-embody in one's own tomorrows. The new forms may differ; the spirit within them may tragically reveal the ancient ghosts in control of new bodies.

What, then, is the solution? There can essentially be no other than the radical transformation of the collective mentality of a society — which means the transformation of the great images and symbols, the taken-for-granted truths and values, and the general way of life of the culture which structures this society and the thoughts, the imaginations, the feelings and behavior of all human beings within it.

What does such a transformation entail? What is the most basic and crucial factor needing today a thorough reassessment and revaluation? This is what we have now to discuss.