We Can Begin Again Together

by Dane Rudhyar


5. Quality Versus Quantity


Our entire Western society today has become pervaded by the doctrine that quantitative measurement can solve practically all problems — not only social and personal problems but also the problem of knowledge. Majority-rule, popular polls, questionnaires, intelligence and vocational tests, decisions arrived at by adding up the several pros and cons whether in a person's mind or in a committee meeting are all quantitative methods. Likewise, we find today science basing its research and judgments primarily on intricate measurements, statistics and computer models.

Intelligence is thought to depend on how many problems you can solve and in how many minutes. Speed, frequency, and size — all quantitative indications — tell the story of nearly everything. Our democratic system extols competition — competition between individuals who are regarded almost exclusively as abstract entities, as numbers on a score-board. Success for a nation is defined by the size of its Gross National Product, how much it has expanded, how many more things — useless, perhaps — business firms have sold to how many people in so many days or months. The rate of increase or decrease, the percentage of profit or losses, and recently the most gory, the "body count" in the Vietnam war — the competition to kill more so as to advance faster in the ranks — all these much-publicized facts every day filling the mind of the average person testify to the worship of quantity in our evermore automated and computerized Western world, in our increasingly dehumanized and confused society.

The ability to measure is fundamental in the development of an objective consciousness of external reality. You can only measure that from which you have become separated; and the measuring act requires (1) some kind of measuring activity and (2) a standard of measurement, i.e., an at least relatively permanent value with reference to which the measuring takes on significance.

Einstein stressed the importance of yardsticks and clocks in all physical measurements, and of course many more refined methods of measuring length and frequency have been devised in atomic physics. The statistician, likewise, uses a concept of "norm" or expectation in relation to which the accumulated data are either significant or without significance; this norm is his yardstick. The selection of a few thousand people to whom specific questions are asked in social or political poll-taking constitutes the establishment of a special kind of norm, that is the concept, apparently valid in most cases, that a certain class or group of people have collective opinions which vary only slightly from individual to individual person, so that the opinion of a few members of the group reveals the manner in which the whole group will choose between alternatives and act accordingly — a fact which, assuredly, tends to mock our modern kind of individualism and democracy.

What is probably not too clear to most people is that the very act of measuring implies inevitably an intellectual process which can only exist if a specific kind of mind is operating. The "measuring mind" is a definite type of mind in which a particular kind of consciousness is active. This objective kind of consciousness is certainly not the only one. As I have stated in a previously mentioned book(1) , consciousness in the broadest sense of the term, as understood particularly in Asiatic philosophies, exists wherever the Principle of Wholeness operates in the universe. There is consciousness not only in animals and plants but also, in a most rudimentary form, in molecules and atoms. The Hindu philosopher, poet, seer and yogi, Sri Aurobindo stated that he could feel and experience most definitely an ocean of consciousness enveloping him and pervading the whole universe. Each existential whole is able to absorb, assimilate, and focus in expression only an aspect of this diffuse cosmic consciousness; it does so according to the specific capacity of its system of existence.

In plants, consciousness is presumably what we describe as "sentiency," an ability to react to stimuli and to certain environmental situations — thus (according to recent experiments) to feel pain, anguish, and sympathy with other living organisms. However, such a type of vegetable consciousness, and most likely the consciousness existing in animals in a wild natural environment, should not be called objective consciousness — at least not as we understand the term in an intellectual sense. The plant grows, and leaves and flowers take form according to what we call harmonic laws, the Golden Rule proportion, and so on; but the plant does not "measure" with any kind of ruler the exact places at which the leaves or the flowers, stamina are to appear. Beautiful geometrical patterns are produced, but probably not with the extreme accuracy which modern engineers require in the building of very complex electronic instruments. Something is acting within the plant, and there is no logical reason why we should not speak of a "mind" at work; but it is not the mind of the man measuring the trajectories of particles in instruments used in atomic physics, or even the mind of an automobilist consulting his speedometer and his wrist-watch.

The activity of the objective and analytical intellect of modern man is essentially a measuring activity. We live in a society which is in the main oriented toward quantity because this society has focused the most evolved portion of its collective mentality upon the development and extreme refinement of its analytical and conceptual faculties. If ever a future society, as the result of a variety of traumatic and cathartic events, were to feel that our present emphasis on the analytical intellect and its quantitative methods of measurement is unsound and has to be drastically downgraded so as to allow another kind of mentality to develop and mature, it is evident that the orientation of this future society would be altogether altered. This is indeed the crucial issue which mankind has to face in the decades ahead.

This does not mean that measurements of all types would cease to be required. In a very vast area of everyday human activity, dependence upon measures and standards of measurement will remain inevitable. No one in his senses would want to do away with all forms of technology; and technology is based on measurements and quantitative standards of value. The development of the modern scientific intellect has been a remarkable achievement; yet it seems now evident, judging by the actual facts confronting our society and our culture, that this achievement has been bought at a tragically high cost. What is needed is a radical reorientation of the collective mind of mankind, away from quantity and toward quality.

This reorientation cannot operate in only one field of activity, let us say in science and industry. It has to affect every field. Our economy and our politics assuredly must be revalued and, at least in some of their aspects, revolutionized. But such a reorientation and revolutionizing could only be superficial and impermanent — or even lead to perhaps worse results — unless mankind experiences at the same time a revolution in consciousness.

The early pioneers of such a revolution in consciousness have already come, and many, many more are appearing. Unfortunately, there seems to be an inevitable tendency in the human mind to react against an extreme by advocating emotionally the opposite extreme. It is therefore essential that we try to reach an objective awareness of the process of man's evolution as a cyclic whole, with periods of emphasis in one direction being succeeded by periods of emphasis in other directions — which does not have to mean, necessarily, in the exactly opposite direction. Black-and-white judgments and decisions may have to be made at moments of great urgency, but they are never truly satisfactory, just because they imply too strong a polarization and too emotional oscillations between opposite extremes. Quantity and quality are not to be considered as mutually exclusive opposites, no more than individualism and socialism, democracy and holarchy, free enterprise and collective planning — and, metaphysically speaking, multiplicity and unity, matter and spirit.

The Meaning of "Quality"

In his most significant book, Accent on Form, the British scientist, Lancelot Law Whyte, points out that "since the time of the ancient Greeks thinkers have shown a tendency to fall into one of two camps which for convenience can be called the Atomic School and the Holistic School. . . . The classical atomistic doctrine asserts that the universe is made up of ultimate particles, each of which is simple, indivisible, and permanent — that all observable changes are due to the reversible spatial arrangements of these particles resulting from their motions and mutual influences." He writes further that according to the holistc view the universe is "a great hierarchy of wholes each following its own path of historical development. Each pattern, whether it is a crystal, an organism, a community, the solar system or a spiral nebula, possesses its own internal order and is a part of a more extensive order, so that the universe is regarded as a System of systems, a Grand Pattern of patterns. . . . The holistic thinker's model of the universe as an organism in which every part is harmoniously related to the processes characterizing the system as a whole."(2) He adds that while the atomist finds perfection in analysis, precision and quantity, the holist seeks it in form, order and unity.

L. I. Whyte is only one of a number of scientists who, in Western Europe and in the United States, have been stressing the validity of the holistic point of view, some of them associating themselves, in a modernized way, with the basic Pythagorean ideas of harmonic form and proportion;(3) and it was the great statesman-philosopher Jan Smuts who popularized and perhaps coined the words, holism and holistic, in his important book, Holism and Evolution (Macmillan, London, 1925).

In the above quotation I would particularly stress the phrase, "an organism in which every part is harmoniously related to the processes characterizing the system as a whole." The recent emphasis on "process" and "system" is well known. What may be less evident is the fact that when we speak significantly of "quality" — and also of "authority" in the deepest and truest sense of this much abused word — we are referring to the harmonious or disharmonious relationship of a part of an organic whole to the processes characterizing the system as a whole, far more than to the character of some individual unit "which is simple, indivisible and permanent." An individual displays certain qualities only in so far as he relates in a specific manner with other individuals; and this relationship acquires its real existential meaning only in terms of some greater whole which encompasses these interrelated individual. We may say that an individual "possesses" certain qualities, but these are merely potentialities as long as they are not actualized in some mode of relationship.

The quality of existence which we call "love" may be taken as an example. Can there actually be love if there is no relationship between human beings who are related in terms of this quality, love? And if we give a positive moral value to love, and a negative one to its opposite, hatred, is it not because of what love and hatred bring to the processes at work in a human community and in human evolution as a whole?

We can, of course, generalize the concept of love and speak of it as a cosmic force or as the quality which most essentially characterizes our universal feeling-concept of God; but whether we speak of human or universal love we speak of a quality of relatedness fundamental to the harmonious operation of some "whole" operating as a system of interdependent activities. Indeed, we can generalize the qualities of love and hatred, and consider them as the two poles of the very process of existence; and existence implies relatedness. The qualities represent more or less universal modes of operation. Love has meaning beyond individual entities that love; it reveals and focuses itself in all the beings who love.

It is not the lover who produces love; it is love that takes hold of men and women who in certain circumstances and at certain periods of their existence, become open to the most intimate feeling-experience of the essential relatedness between themselves and other being and eventually between every existent and all other existents. The lover personalizes this power and quality of universal relatedness; he gives to it an individual character and rhythm. He does not "create" this force of love; he resonates to its harmonics. It is only man's ego that cherishes the illusion that he creates love as an individual, that it is his love. As a result this all-too-human love becomes a possessive, exclusivistic feeling — the insulated attraction of an individual to another individual — both of whom are more or less alienated from the whole. The man who truly loves allows the universal quality of love to pervade his total being. Love flows, sings, radiates through him. This love has no individual source. It is everywhere. It is the very quality of universal relatedness. He in whom this quality colors and irradiates every act, feeling and thought reaches perfection of human existence, the "divine" life. Where the opposite quality prevails, failure and disintegration sooner or later inevitably ensue.

In making these statements I am not implying that love, hatred, greed, ambition and beauty, truth or goodness are abstractions or archetypal realities in a divine Mind transcending existence. I think of them as fundamental characteristics of the very process of universal existence. They are modes of existential relatedness within wholes (or system of activities) operating at various levels — microcosms and macrocosms, cells and galaxies.

The person who sees around him nothing but existential wholes within and through which a vast, yet relatively small, number of simple universal processes are at work lives in a world of qualities, far more than of quantities. In a sense, it is the world of men with a myth-making and poetic vision. But these men are not to be considered "primitives" because of this; nor is their world an essentially "subjective" world. It is, in a philosophical sense, no more subjective than the world of the scientist whose postulates and great theories can never tell more about "reality" than what his senses and his intellectual reasoning allow him to apprehend and perceive.

Man at the vitalistic stage of his development has a holistic conception of the universe; he sees the universe as a living organic whole in the activities of which he participates; he adjusts himself to the natural environment in which, and out of which, he is born, and seeks power and fulfillment by attuning his will to the superior wills of "gods" in whom he personifies the basic rhythms and functional operation of Nature. To every living whole — be they animal species, plants or stars — he gives essential qualities expressed in specific features which he interprets as "signatures" of these qualities. But is this naive and childish? Or are we not rather the naive ones — we technology-worshipping individuals — who proudly believe that not only can we master any environment, rule Nature and colonize barren planets, but that this is — as someone stated — the "divine Intention" for us?

Archaic vitalistic man did of course use quantitative measurements for practical purposes; yet his concept of quantity differed from ours. "Number" for him had a meaning foreign to our official mentality. Each number was a quality, because he always related the numbered entities to his personal experience and to some kind of cyclic process, for instance, the annual process of vegetation or the years of a human life. He did not consider numbers as abstractions with no reference to the living, reality of his experience — as something to play with intellectually in all kinds of complex calculations. As he lived in relatively small groups and with a quite limited type of experience susceptible to be counted, he did not have to deal with millions or trillions — i.e., with figures the scope and meaning of which he could not integrate with his personal experience and his local environment. What was beyond experience and environment he considered a mystery.

Now, of course, many are those who believe that science has done away with mystery. Everything can be, or at least will be sooner or later, analyzed and explained. Will man be the richer and happier for it? One wonders if this belief is not the acme of naivety; in fact, it may be a proof of a basic, withal mostly unconscious, lack of intellectual honesty, for it ignores the fact that what we perceive of the universe around us is conditioned by our senses and by the structuring character of our intellect. Not only do we observe only what our senses and their mechanical extension can apprehend, but all scientific observation "is theory laden, and all scientific experiment is devised, conducted and interpreted in the light of a theoretical (or conceptual) scheme which is prior to observation.... Science is throughout, from its first beginnings to its most abstract and mathematical formulations, an amalgam of observation and theory, neither of which could be what it is without the other. Our knowledge of the world is not, and could not be a picture constructed piecemeal out of isolated sense-data. It is at all stages a structured totality in which sensory elements are organized, and so rendered intelligible, by conceptual principles."(4)

What this means is that the universe we know is merely our human universe. Knowledge, as we understand the term, is anthropocentric — inevitably so — unless we are willing to accept the possibility for a human being to attune his consciousness and resonate to the consciousness of a "greater Whole" in the field of activity of which he is participating. Unfortunately, today the academically trained mind is unaware of the real character of such a participation, or at least of its meaning and of the possibilities it presents. Our modern intellectuals scorn the idea that an individual person may be able so to attune his consciousness to that of the greater Whole, Man — that he may at least reflect on the calmed surface of his mind the consciousness of the planetary or cosmic Whole in which we live, move and have our being. He may not only reflect this vaster and "divine" consciousness, but the latter may take control of his mental processes, or focus itself deliberately through a mind which has become like a translucent crystalline lens.

If such a possibility is laughed at by the modern college-trained and individualistic members of our mechanistic and gadget-oriented society, it is because they are actually insulated within the sphere defined by their intellectual approach to what they assume to be reality. The intellect operates successfully by taking for granted that reality is composed of infinitely divisible entities behaving in quantitatively generalizable ways which it can formulate as laws. The intellectual lives in an atomistic world, and his knowledge is derived from the analytical and quantitizing operations of a consciousness which has essentially "ab-stracted" itself from man's direct, spontaneous, organic and holistic experiences — experiences generated by an open relationship with whatever touches, affects and stirs his total bio-psychic organism, i.e., himself as a person.

But it is these experiences which convey to the person the direct realization of quantity, of value and of meaning. There is meaning in "frequency 631 trillions vibration per second" but there is vital, essential meaning and value to the quality "blue" of the sky. By abstracting a certain numerical frequency the physicist may be able to pin-point the character of a certain action taking place exactly at that frequency. He may be able to do something with it. Can he quantitize the living experience of a prisoner who after years in a dark cell suddenly sees the blue sky? Is "doing something" the ultimate condition of man's existence?

Besides, one does not exist as an isolated individual. As a person he participates in a community, a culture, a society of others; and this participation enables him to communicate what has emerged within his total being from his direct experiencing of other persons, living things and natural phenomena in his immediate environment. It is on the basis of such capacity to communicate with others that we are able to develop a group-culture which is built gradually by generations of "communicators." What is communicated is organized by the group-interplay and in terms of the needs, or the desires, of the group — then transferred to the new generation which in turn passes it on to its progeny.

The question is how this communication between human beings living together within a more or less limited field of collective activity is to be achieved, and how the information communicated can be transferred from one generation to the next. The method of communication is indeed all-important. As this method varies, so does the character of the culture of the society. It is here that we see the role of intellectual processes, a role which has increased enormously, particularly in our Western society, during the last twenty-five centuries. the development in these individuals of the ambition to gain not only emergence of "individuals" out of the matrix of local tribal societies — and this increase has largely been due to two related factors: the emergant organic kind of prominence within a homogenous local society, but power over whatever this individual relates to.

Prominence within a social organism with well defined boundaries is accomplished in terms of qualitative values. Where there is more or less widespread sharing the question of quantity does not readily arise. It is not the amount of fruits harvested which is considered, but rather the quality of living which a good or bad harvest will bring to the human beings in the community — i.e., to the "communicants." If a tribesman, by intuitively attuning his consciousness to that of the annual process of vegetation, has "seen" a better way to cultivate certain plants and a larger harvest is the result, he achieves prominence; he is the agent of the god that watches over the tribe. Every tribesman is less hungry, more satisfied, stronger, happier.

These are all qualities. Of course a modern intellect would reduce them to the quantitative facts that the Tribal Gross Product has risen by a certain percentage. Trying to discover how the "intuition" of the developer of the new method of cultivation can be reduced to basic factors through a kind of "system analysis," and how these factors could be isolated and combined in a still more productive way, a modern technologist would achieve a more impressive success in terms of a greater quantity of products. But what then happens? The consciousness of the technologist ceases to operate within a community which has an organic rhythm of growth, and within the ecology of a natural environment to which this consciousness is no longer attuned. The technologist has ab-stracted (i.e., taken away) from this environment and as well from the real organic needs of the community certain procedures which he has analyzed and reduced to what, to his intellect, seems to be the essential chemical factors. But essential in relation to what? Is it essential that the tribe should have more food than it can healthfully assimilate?

Of course the tribe could give it to a less favored tribe; but it could also sell it! — and this eventually means some sort of "power over" that less favored group. Let this process go on for centuries and you end with our anarchic market economy and a free enterprise which is based on competition and on the will to achieve regardless of consequences to others, and to the well-being of the Earth environment, thus always on the drive to power over what is not oneself. This drive obviously leads to isolation and feeling of alienation, to an exacerbated type of individualism and to constant war and self-destruction through inner conflicts.

Knowledge vs. Wisdom

This condensed analysis of the social process whose result is our present social chaos may show to the perceptive mind that the problems of knowledge and of communication are at the root of this long series of developments. How did the first tribesman who started this series "know" what to do in order to improve the method of cultivation? The answer is: not by empirical observation alone, but by a kind of "sympathetic resonance" to plants and in general to natural processes.

A few years ago I lived during the summer in a small, quite primitive village in the mountains of French Switzerland. Around the sixteenth-century tower which had been renovated and where I stayed, a fairly large vineyard was being cultivated by the old villagers. I saw them repeat at one week intervals two kinds of painstaking operations on the vines which my intellectual practical mind thought could have been performed at the same time, saving labor. I mentioned this to the old lady who cleaned my rooms, asking her why the two operations could not have been done together. She seemed surprised by the question, hesitated, then said: "It has always been done that way." After a moment of what seemed to be hard thinking, she added: "The vine likes it better this way."

A knowledge of the way a species of plant, and nature in general "likes it better" is a kind of knowing very different from our modern technological type of knowledge. It is a qualitative, not quantitative, type. It is a "feeling-knowing." It does not reduce the situation to some chemical quantities and to a series of measurements on the flow of sap, or the influence of heat on tissues, and so on. It is based on a living, organic kind of empathy between man and nature — man within the biosphere in the activities of which he participates. It is the quality of this participation which is the basic factor in success or failure — but success or failure at an organic or holistic level, in terms of optimum and not maximum values. In this we can see the contrast between knowledge and wisdom; for knowledge is essentially quantitative, wisdom qualitative.

The matter of communication comes into this picture because it is relatively easy to transfer knowledge, while it is difficult to communicate wisdom. The moment the transference of knowledge is seen to be the most valuable factor in a human society, and it becomes increasingly difficult for the wise men of this society to communicate wisdom, at that moment quantity begins to take the place of quality, and the development of the analytical and abstract intellect brings the acquisition and communication of wisdom to secondary role in the life of the society.

The transfer of knowledge seems of great importance to man at the individualistic stage of his evolution because the time has come in the whole evolutionary process of the planet Earth, and of Man within its biosphere, to experience what I have called in the first chapter of this book the Great Mutation from a local to a global level of existence, and from the compulsiveness of "life" to the special freedom and independence which self-consciousness and mental objectivity brings. The archaic type of wisdom is rooted in the collective experience of the tribe-as-a-whole. It individualizes itself through a particular person, but it is not an exclusive product of the person's mind. This particular mind simply had the kind of openness which was required for the new solution of an old problem to take form in it.

What presumably happens, however, is that the inspired (or "inspirited") tribesman, flattered by the attention given to him, by praise and perhaps by the love of the most desirable girl of the tribe, comes to feel very "special," different in quality from the other tribesmen. Pride individualizes, and separates; then eventually alienates. The individual who has learned something special which possibly saved the tribe from hunger — or the war-chief who devised an ingenious way of defeating a superior force of invaders — separates and isolates from the collective wisdom of his tribe the new type of behavior revealed through him. He is proud of it. He wants to transfer it to others, to formulate it so that it can be taught to the future generations. Wisdom has then become individualized by being attached to the name and memory of a particular person and formulated into an easily transferable way; it has become knowledge.

The inspired tribesman probably could not tell exactly how the novel idea "came" to him. When a thought or act of wisdom becomes rationalized and the possession of a particular individual person, it becomes an object of knowledge. You can transfer, pass on and sell this object. At first you pass it orally to others, perhaps under an oath of secrecy; later on, when the knowledge is made widely available in books, you copyright it. It is "your" knowledge. The concept of exclusive possession individualizes both the possessor and the possessed. This leads to our competitive free enterprise and market economy — and our impending state of social chaos and ecological disaster.

This undoubtedly has been and perhaps for some time still is a necessary phase of human evolution. It calls nevertheless as soon as possible, now indeed, for a reversal of values. The only question is when this reversal will gain sufficient strength to challenge successfully the present state of affairs at the psychological and philosophical as well as the political and economic level — i.e., what is now called the Establishment, and the "silent majority," the traditional attitude of which it reflects and codifies.

It seems evident that the process of reversal has already begun at all levels. What remains to be seen is how it will work out; that is, essentially, whether it will be through a gradual transition, or after a violent revolution perhaps caused by some telluric upheaval or worldwide disaster. Revolution alone cannot solve the real, basic problem: i.e., how to regenerate knowledge by a new accent on wisdom. A more conscious and more widely transferable type of wisdom is required — a wisdom in which eventually all human beings can share, because mankind will have become a consciously harmonized, though multilevel and multidirectional whole, on a humanized, but not despoiled Earth.

I may be asked to define more precisely what I mean by wisdom. Wisdom is intelligence raised to the level at which everything interpenetrates everything else — and by intelligence, I mean essentially the capacity in any living organism to adjust itself to its environment so as to enjoy at any level optimal conditions of existence. Wisdom is the faculty in the human mind which realizes the purpose of a whole in any of the interaction of its parts, which deals holistically with always new relationships between forever transformed existential wholes. Wisdom is the ability to see and to meet every situation as a whole in the context of a still larger whole in which this situation fulfills an always meaningful, withal temporary, role. It is peace through, as well as beyond, conflicts transcending yet including all struggles away from and toward the dynamic equilibrium of the universal Whole.

Authority vs. Power

There there is no wisdom there can be no real authority, only power. It is indeed tragic that today these two words, authority and power, are so often used interchangeably. Authority resides only in the whole. It can manifest temporarily in and through one person who acts for, and as the whole. Whenever one can speak only of a collection of more or less independent individuals, no one among them can possibly have authority, unless in time of crisis and utter confusion these individuals forget their individuality and feel themselves to be only members of the human species, thus becoming receptive to the guidance of "Man" focused through a particular personage.

It is only because of this focusing of the whole into a part that this part acquires a delegated kind of authority. But this delegation of authority does not come from "the people" considered as a collection of free and equal individuals, each having his opinions and his separative approach to existence; it can only come from Man — as I have defined this term in the third chapter. A conglomeration of voters in a parliamentary election operating on the principle of majority-rule can delegate power, but it has no authority to delegate. All that the voters can delegate are their fears and their hopes for individual security — throwing their fears and hopes into the lap of an individual who, for a number of possible and often irrelevant reasons, they imagine is able to take care of deeply disturbing problems affecting their group, class or environment.

Authority, literally speaking, is the status of being an author. If a man is the author of a book he has the "authority" to copyright it. He may not have the "power" to do so if he cannot pay the copyright fee. For the deeply religious man or woman, God, the Creator who made everything on earth or in heaven, is the only source of authority; the inspired Founder of the religion received his authority from God and transferred it to his successors — this is the doctrine of the Apostolic Succession, which in a more or less literal or occult sense is found enthroned in many religions; and it is reflected in the concept of the divine right of Kings. In many societies, the supreme authority in the State has been dual: King and High Priest. Trouble inevitably began when both personages sought to translate authority into power, and the power was used, not for the sake of the whole kingdom but mainly for the satisfaction of the passions and the proud and possessive ego of the person wielding it.

Here again we are faced with the same difficulty as in the case of the distinction between knowledge and wisdom, or between quantity and quality. Just as it is far easier to set down knowledge in transferable terms and intellectual formulas than to communicate the qualitative values manifesting wisdom, likewise power is quantitatively measurable; a definite amount of it can be transferred to this or that agency. On the other hand, authority cannot really be transferred by intellectual means or legal agreement. The assumption that he who receives power can translate or transmute this power into authority is basically erroneous; even though a person invested with power can eventually become — if he is spiritually open, thoroughly honest and humble in the use of power — a channel through which authority may radiate.

Here also the rather mysterious factor of "charisma" enters the picture. The charismatic person has the ability to make people receptive in an often naive and totally irrational way, to his claim for authority. Somehow he is able to touch in the psychic nature of other people an area where there exists a strong need for believing that someone will be sent to answer a deep-seated longing of which these people are at best only partially aware. The charismatic person meets and fulfills this unconscious yearning or zone of emptiness — in some cases perhaps an animus or anima complex, to use Carl Jung's terminology. He may not "know" how he does it; and, in that sense, he displays a kind of innate intuitive wisdom. The acutely sensitive politician "feels" his way to he heart of the people who are hoping for just that kind of person to solicit their vote or claim their allegiance. He does not need to exert power to make them subservient to his will; he has won their support — an almost compulsive kind of support — because he embodies, for them, authority. He may succeed in making them whole, in healing them of their anxiety, in giving them something which makes life worthwhile. He becomes the agent of the "god of their tribe," appointed to save them.

In politics the man who has this rationally indefinable charismatic quality has often to wait for some specific national event or crisis to make the subconscious need of the people, to which he is a potential answer, intense enough. The timing is all-important, because his capacity to appear as a figure of authority cannot operate only on an individual basis. He cannot make himself authoritative. It is the need of a particular section of the population — whether a potentially dynamic and creative minority or a "silent" insecure and frightened majority — which, at a certain time, and under particular circumstances, gives him authority. This collectivity of individuals may be outwardly amorphous, yet psychically united by a common sense of frustration and insecurity, or by the sheer inertial inability to conceive of any type of order which is not the one with which these individuals are familiar and which seems to ensure comfort and solace to their egos.

The French poet Victor Hugo wrote that nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come; but one might add that no man can wield greater power than he who can appear to his people (or to the whole of mankind eventually) as one who acts, not as a powerful strong-willed individual but rather as the personification of a transforming Power that transcends human beings, yet also encompasses them if only by having created them. This Power is usually thought of as God. It may be identified as the irresistible evolutionary tide which inevitably will sweep away the obsolete structures of the social past. That irresistible force acts through the man of authority, not from him. Individuals proud of their right to have their own opinion will accept unreservedly only what does not seem to them to come from a mere individual like them. He who is accepted as having real authority must at least appear to be more-than-individual.

Even at the lesser level of being "an authority" on this or that matter, a person is an authority not mainly because of the quantity of his knowledge, but of the quality of his knowing. In any particular situation in which his advice is asked he is an authority only if he can encompass by his mind the whole situation, and, in a symbolical sense at least, become fully aware of what the situation "likes."

The Swiss peasant of whom I wrote was an authority on the cultivation of grapes in his limited environment, because he was able to "feel one with" the vine. He was wise to what the situation needed in order to reach a fulfilling conclusion. In a broader planetary and all-human sense the great Spiritual Teacher or Avatar is the answer of the Earth-as-a-whole to, the human situation in the midst of which he is born. He has authority, because of himself he has no power. Because of this he has authority.

The True Meaning of Sacrifice

I will here quote at length from my book The Faith That Gives Meaning of Victory, published in New York in the summer-fall, 1942:

"All authority resides in the whole. No individual has authority unless he acts, or appears to act, as the mouthpiece of the whole — or of a God . . . transcendent to, and creator of the whole. A society in which the principle of authority is not operative in a normal, consistent manner is an inorganic society, already condemned to disintegration — however power-full it may be, however vociferous its individuals in proclaiming their freedom. . . . There can be no effective authority where the common life is not recognized as the root from which stem all the differentiated expressions of individuals. There is no authority where there is no common consent to some basic premises of life — to a cosmology, a life attitude, a sense of fundamental values. There is no authority where there is no common faith; not essentially faith in a set body of dogmas, but faith in an integrating principle of being and an integrating purpose. And at this stage of human evolution this means faith in Man, or else faith in a God Who, by becoming human, makes man divine.

All authority presupposes the utter consecration to the whole, if not the complete sacrifice, of him who assumes it. . . . No individual gains authority by becoming a `bigger and better individual. He has no authority by reason of his individual-hood, but in proportion of his proven identification with a need of the whole and his ability to gain the relatively unanimous respect of his group, or rather of that which, in every man, is a common factor. Authority, in the last analysis, is to be exercised by those individuals whose conscious and intelligent sacrifice creates Man, the Seed. They are the Mothers of the Living Civilization. Through them the human kingdom acts in a spiritual, because conscious and individualized, way. But no one can act as such a 'mother' except it be on the basis of an identification with man's common humanity, with the Root-power which is pulsating, dimly and unconsciously though it be, within every member of the human species.

In the formally religious and dogmatic type of authority, the individual embodying the principle of authority does so either as the .temporary mouthpiece of a god or God, or else as one identified in essence with a divine Personage. . . . The new type of authority of which I speak here should be the result of the identification of individual persons with Man. Moreover, if authority is to be established as a normal and consistent factor operating at the very core of all social processes, it follows that such an identification should not be unpredictable, intermittent and undependable. It should be organized — and yet, by its very nature, defies organization. There should be a way in which individuals could prove themselves embodiments of authority; yet such a proof cannot be bestowed by any kind of diploma, nor by the voice of a majority of those who have not reached as yet the level of consecration to Man and perhaps not even the level of truly individualized selfhood. The sphere of authority has nothing essentially to do with parliamentary procedure. . . . It has to do rather with common consent — and the problem of bringing about common consent or unanimity among 'free' individuals seems an insurmountable one to the modern mind.

What is implied essentially is a new attitude toward the individual and toward society, a new attitude to life ... and a new practice of human relationship. Men today come together in terms of their differentiated traits — in emotional love, in fear, in argumentative discussions. When they will come together, first of all, on the basis of their common humanity, their common will or need, and their eagerness to find a common Purpose undertoning all their individual purposes, then the idea of unanimity in individual freedom will not seem an unrealizable dream. It will never become a concrete fact until human individuals come to believe that Man is the ultimate goal for them concretely to achieve; that this goal cannot be achieved without the readiness in every individual to consecrate to the creation of Man the power, which, in the last analysis, he has gained from collective sources.

When individuals learn to meet and to discuss on the basis of their common humanity and when they have identified themselves ever so little in consecrated service with the need and the evolutionary Purpose of humanity as a whole, then they will gain the power to recognize those few embodiments of creative wisdom who are unreservedly dedicated to Man. In these few, Man speaks and acts. The whole becomes focused in the part and acts through that part.

This is what the mystery of the Incarnation means in a human sense. Through this Incarnation of the whole into the utterly consecrated parts the common humanity of man comes to fruition and to seed, as an all-inclusive consciousness, meaning and purpose. The life of the whole converges in those who, creating Man through their lucid and inclusive sacrifice, fulfill the highest potentialities of the human kingdom. They are individuals, creative and free individuals; but because, in freedom, they choose to be creative, they accept the unavoidable sacrifice of the creator to the created. Creation is an act of Sacrifice, a gift of self. . . .

It is Man that creates through all individualized men. That creation is vital and fecundant only as the individual opens himself to the descent of Man at the core of his selfhood; only as the individual offers his tools to Man for Man to use. This is the consecration of the individual to Man; and many times, especially today, consecration implies sacrifice — the complete gift of all, even of life.

Sacrifice: how misused and abused this word has been! As Antoine de Saint Exupery says so simply and accurately: 'Sacrifice is the gift of oneself to the being of which one forms a part. But there can be no real or truly valid sacrifice if he who offers the gift of self does not realize to what he offers the gift; for it is then no longer a gift, but only a compulsive action without creative meaning and without love. Unless the individual feels in his heart of hearts the reality of Man, unless the wholeness of him offers itself to the greater wholeness in which he knows and experiences himself as a participant, then sacrifice is but a spiritually empty gesture.

There is no creative sacrifice where there is no prior self-consecration. Only as the individual lucidly consecrates himself to Man does he become ready to perform the sacrifice which builds in reality and in actuality the Living Civilization that is the "mystical body of Man." But there is so little sense in expecting individuals to perform sacrifices when they do not feel themselves participants in the wholeness of a greater organism. The concept of true sacrifice does not fit in the realm of atomistic democracy. First, man must lose his sense of atomistic individualism in order to will to sacrifice — or he must willingly surrender it in his consecration to the greater Whole. How many individuals today feel the reality of such a consecration? And besides, is not Man alone worthy of the consecration — or we might also say, God? He who today dies for his nation, without having seen at the core of his dying the reality of Man slowing emerging from his and like sacrifices, does not die as a true individual, but as one still bound t6 a collective womb. The fully individualized human person sacrifices his being to Man only, even if the gift is to be transmitted through the intermediary of a nation which is at best a path to the realization of Man. Man alone is the ultimate reality.

This does not mean that the phase of individual development can be skipped. We are not speaking of the compulsive sacrifice of devoted slaves to a totalitarian state or to any particular group, even a religious group. We are discussing the relationship between conscious and free individuals and Man. Indeed, there can be no validity to the concept of Man unless it be made a concrete actuality through the consecration and sacrifice of fully individualized and conscious personalities. There can be no seed without flowers, no Living Civilization without the creative geniuses, the seers, the adepts, and even the anonymous individuals who, in creative freedom, are building this Living Civilization out of their consecrated gifts, and whose ceaseless vitality feeds the continuous growth of Man.

Again, when we speak here of Man we are not referring to an abstraction or a mere generalization. This Man is a concrete, encompassing reality which has substance, as the seed is substantial within the flower and the fruit, though it may remain unseen until the days of the harvest. This reality, Man, is rooted in the common humanity of all human beings, but it is not that common humanity itself. It is not a common denominator. It is the seed-consummation. It is not either a mere sum-total of parts. It is a synthesis of individual gifts, the quintessence of the being of individuals who have allowed the forming organism of Man to grow from their sacrificial gift of self, and to express His being and purpose through them.

Man's common humanity is the Root. The genus, homo sapiens, is the Root. The human body is the Root. These are the foundations, not the cathedral above the ground. These are sources of power, not of consciousness. It is the task of individuals to raise the cathedral on these foundations, to transform Root-power into Seed-consciousness. The Seed-form of Man may be considered to exist as a blue-print, anterior even to the laying of the foundations. It is logical to assume that the Root — man's common humanity — has come from a prior Seed, itself the end-result of some previous cosmic cycle. Yet, in a sense, it does not matter. This Root-energy and substance is that which we, individuals, once we have ceased to be identified with it, can and must use for our creation of Man. Man is the creation of individuals; and individuals feed their creation out of their sacrifice. Man advances; and His steps are individualized lives which have surrendered themselves to Him while creating Him. The individual is a path. Man takes that path, yet He is the synthesis of all those paths which He takes toward His ultimate fulfillment.

This is the 'creative Doctrine of Man.' Every fulfilled individual is a creator; but his sacrifice to that which he creates alone is creative. He dies as an individual in his creation, but all that he built while an individual and as an individual remains, potent and clear, fecund and immortal, in the creation. He surrenders only his ownership. He gains his immortality in Man, for the reality of Man bestrides cycles, as does the seed which ends a cycle yet begins another. This is individual immortality in a concrete sense: immortality as participant in the creative communion of the seed.

The individual, therefore, is fulfilled in and through his sacrifice to Man. The individual is not an end in himself; but neither is he a means to some external and transitory ends conditioned by geographical, racial, or ideological boundaries. He is not only an end, but he is creative of the end. In that sense only is the individual not an end in himself. Again, confusion arises in the minds of men because they make the futile attempt of solving an either-or dilemma. The individual is neither a means to an end, nor an end in himself. He is a means which creates its own end, and an end in the process of being formed out of the means for its creation.

. . . . What must be done is for the individual person to meet every other person on the basis of their common humanity, and then to become absorbed as individuals into the joint creation of all individuals: Man. Such a procedure is impossible in an atomistic democracy living by the tradition of rugged individualism and isolationism. It requires the existence of a new kind of democracy: holarchic democracy. It requires a new sense of relationship of man to power, a new type of social organization which the tremendous changes brought to men by modern technology and machines make indispensable. In such a type of social organization all opposites are found in their proper perspective and integrated, because in it all levels of human activity are included — the common and the unique, the collective and the individual. It includes all and gives value to all in reference to Man.

. . . We have today a choice: we may seek for the embodiment of the principle of authority in a new divine Revelation more inclusive than any one as yet known, but which will compel us from within to believe — or we may consciously and freely look for those few individuals who, because they have become utterly consecrated to and renewed by Man, have the authority to speak in the name of Man and to guide spiritually the process of building a Universal Community of Man.

The two alternatives could be combined ... but the spiritual quality and dynamism of either one or the other must dominate. In either case, the principle of authority must be reintegrated in the substance of human society. Mankind can no longer operate without it. Machine-power and the ever expanding horizon of modern technology cannot be utilized constructively without some kind of authority checking their spread. The modern individual has become dehumanized by the pressure of too much power, by the compulsion of irrational cravings aroused by the nearly infinite productivity of the Machine. All lesser boundaries and restraints, from old religious traditions to nationalism, must collapse before the sweep of a power which has made all human beings inescapably one in their experience of the Earth. Only big issues, total and global realities, are now and henceforth acceptable. Only a new surge of divine glory and authority, or a vital and concretely efficient realization of the organic wholeness of mankind and of the planet on which we live, can bring order to our chaos and re-humanize modern man.

Religious God-given dogma or creative human freedom: these are the alternatives. We must choose. We are choosing, whenever we refuse to see any further than the individualism of our democracies; and that choice means the irrational sweep of religious conversion for humanity. If modern man cannot create authority by his consecration to Man, then he will have to bow before authority. This does not mean an alternative between democracy and totalitarianism or authoritarianism. It is an alternative between two ways of re-instating authority at the core of the social process.”


It must be reinstated. Mankind can no more operate without the constant "Practice of the Presence of Man" — a Presence within the inner life of all men, and in the midst of all decision-making committees and worldwide Congresses — than it can continue to exist under the compulsion to gain ever more knowledge for the sake of quantitative increase in production, consumption and intellectual accumulation of un-integrated data. If the only way to emerge from the age of quantity and atomistic individualism into that of quality and world-harmony in wisdom is a global crisis which would shatter the inertial power of the ruling groups in all countries, then this perhaps would be the sacrificial offering necessary for the rebirth of mankind within a convalescing Earth.

But how sad it is, from our "human, all too human" perspective, that such a sacrifice cannot take place in silence and in peace within the hearts of men! Yet, the stars in their millions of years long revolution around the core of our galaxy may smile at this human sadness. In their light, how puny our struggles must appear! Yet they are our struggle, here and now. On this date, at this place in our solar system we can embody the power of the entire universe. It can focus itself in us, act through us — because this universe of which we are parts is a whole. The wisdom and the authority of the whole can always express themselves through the mind and soul of whoever unreservedly and beyond all individual concern consecrates all he has, all he is, for the sake of the whole.



1. The Planetarization of Consciousness, page 129.    Return

2. Lancelot L. Whyte, Accent on Form, New York, Harper & Row, Inc., 1954, p. 52.    Return

3. For articles often dealing with such an approach, the reader is referred to Main Currents in Modern Thought, the remarkable journal of the Foundation for Integrative Education (Henry Margenau, president) and to the works of Oliver Reiser, Donald H. Andrews, and many others.    Return

4. Errol E. Harris, Reason in Science and Conduct, a paper presented at the Conference on "Human Values and Natural Science" (April 1969) and printed in Main Currents in Modern Thought, March-April 1970.    Return

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