We Can Begin Again Together

by Dane Rudhyar

1. The Achievements and Failures
of Western Society

An all-important question today divides men's minds as they give to it opposite answers. Is our Western society and its culture, which has spread over most of the globe, passing through a period of readjustment on its progressive path toward an ever more successful demonstration of man's ability to control his environment, satisfy his legitimate wants and deliberately improve his genetic possibilities — or is it facing disintegration and collapse, because it has failed to fulfill what it was potentially able and destined to achieve, and it misused the powers which the new evolutionary development of its mind had released?

Everything that we do and think now and in the coming two decades depends on which of the two answers we, individually and collectively, consider correct. The way in which we evaluate our traditional way of life, our deepest responses to the social and political events and trends in the midst of which we live, and even the basic psychological attitudes upon which our spiritual beliefs rest — all these and our planning for the coming years depend on how, instinctively or intuitively, we answer the above questions.

It is evidently possible also to believe that mankind is still able to counteract what many today feel to be a powerful trend toward various types of disintegration and that, through an almost sudden "change of mind," as the result of some divine or extraterrestrial intervention, our society will be basically renewed without having to experience a wholesale breakdown. The questions in this case are: Is there still time? Has our civilization not already reached a point of no return where the momentum of past failures and irreversible choices can no longer be stopped? And is it right to expect that our society will be saved by such an external intervention; indeed, is our society, as it operates today, worth saving?

Lest I be misunderstood, let me categorically state at once that when I speak here of Western society, I am not thinking primarily of the individual human beings who live in this society. When a society breaks down, as it has happened many times in the historical past, many of the human beings who are born and die enfolded by its archetypes as well as by its concrete institutions suffer grievously; but for those who survive, this collapse of the Establishment which has ruled over their lives, their thoughts, and often their feelings may prove to be a liberation, or at least a most valuable catharsis.

Moreover, even if there should be a thorough breakdown of the institutions, the way of life, the class-system, the economy, and the cultural traditions of our Western society, this does not mean that the fruits of the past centuries of human efforts inevitably will be destroyed. The collapse of the old Roman Empire did not do away with what the Greek and Roman culture had brought to mankind at the level of mental and spiritual development. It became at least partially absorbed and assimilated by a new type of human being developing under new conditions in a new or transformed environment. Nothing is essentially lost; but the existential forms and types of collective responses which characterize a whole society can disappear — and, if rediscovered and externally copied in a later period, they lose the specific cultural and religious or emotional potency and the meaning which they had.

There is no need for us to despair if a society is nearing a state of disintegration, no more than to lament the passing away of an old person. Death is implied in life, and life in death. What is sad is that death comes very often after much suffering, yet the pain of body may be needed to repolarize our consciousness away from the limitations and failures of our bodily existence. Likewise, the tragedy of revolution, defeat or disaster may be required to force the people of a particular society to realize that they have held on too long and too obstinately to existential values and to religious, cultural and social institutions that have become nearly empty shells. This is particularly inevitable when a frightened aristocracy or a middle class confronted with basic changes in their social, economic, cultural, and religious patterns of life, project upon the stage of history leaders who, by rigidly standing against the great stream of human and planetary evolution, and cementing around them an inert mass of human fears and invalid hopes, are able to use the very power of this evolution in a negative manner by opposing it.

Eventually the dam must collapse. This is the tragic way. We have seen it happen time and time again. Could it be the way ahead for our "Western society?"

The Origin of Western Society

To answer this question one should go back twenty-five hundred years to the sixth century B.C. This was a most important period in human evolution, and we can date from it the beginning of a historical epoch which seems about to close. How it will close is the great issue of our day. It seemed possible, just after World War II, that it could close with a gradual, but relatively smooth transition to a new epoch during which what were mainly great ideals and a new quality of human behavior, thinking, and feeling would become living and concrete realities in a world-wide all-human society. But today, as one looks at what has been happening for years, at the confusion and the fears of our people, and at the exacerbated passions of the underprivileged and undernourished two-thirds of mankind, it is difficult not to wonder whether the possibility still exists. And history offers too many parallel situations which ended in tragedy to be comforting.

But must we be comforted? Should we not face squarely the human situation and, accepting what may well be inevitable, orient ourselves and our acts constructively toward it, so that we may not be swept away meaninglessly and uselessly in the tide of disintegration? Death can mean rebirth. We can assume a positive stance. We can opt for rebirth, as "seed men" upon whom may rest the tragic burden of the fatherhood of a new society — not tomorrow, but the day after many a tomorrow. We can open our whole being to the "vision" of the archetypes of a new era. These archetypes are not far removed from our mind, if our mind is clear and unobstructed by prejudices, obsolete values, and emotional insecurity or fear. They have been envisioned by a few. They stand at the horizon of our consciousness. All we need to see them is to have the courage to see, and take nothing for granted.

Sixth century B.c. was the time of Gautama the Buddha, of Lao Tze and Confucius, of Solon and Pythagoras, of Zoroaster — a period in which historical events occurred having long-lasting consequences — for instance, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, the beginnings of the Persian Empire under Cyrus, of republican Rome, etc. It is always difficult to date precisely the inception of great historical changes, yet certain basic rhythms can be observed which suggest a definite wave-structure in the development of mankind. One cannot refer to the cresting of such waves in terms of a particular year or even decade, but if we consider a century as a whole we can readily see that very important changes occurred in the centuries which began with 600 B.C. Following the sixth century, a 500-year historical cycle stands out: 100 B.C. (the Roman Empire), 400 A.D. (the collapse of the Roman Empire), 900 A.D. (the beginning, according to Spengler, of the Medieval European culture), 1400 A.D. (Humanism and the appearance of the concept of "nation"), 1900 A.D. (the beginning of the atomic or electronic Age, and the breakdown of traditional patterns of organization all over the world.(1)

In various writings during the past fifty years I have spoken of what occurred in the sixth century B.C. as "the Great Mutation"; and in that I merely followed an old occult tradition which even referred to the year 604 B.C. as "the end of the archaic ages." What is to be understood by such a mutation is the beginning of a long evolutionary process operating at the level of man's consciousness, a process of mental — and as a result, emotional — transformation. The great leaders who appeared around that time sought to effect what amounted to a fundamental repolarization of man's mind. Human consciousness, which until then had been operating almost exclusively at the level of "life" (the level of all tribal forms of group-organization and religious experiences), began then to refocus itself at the level of "mind" and of "ideas."

Gautama the Buddha brought to the culture of India a doctrine of mental objectivity which it most likely had never known. He was probably the first modern psychologist, in that he sought to break down and transcend man's spiritual identification of his "I"-sense with a universal "I" — i.e., the identification of the individual atman with the universal brahman. And we must not forget that "atman" referred in older times to the breath, and that the older Hindu texts speak of spiritual development in terms of vital forces and what we should call "vitalistic" practices. These practices included the ability to deliberately experience death and to return to life — that is, the realization that life and death are inseparable and that human consciousness can establish itself at a level where it encompasses both.

With Pythagoras and Plato a new awareness of what they experienced as objective mental realities — numbers, proportions, archetypes — began to fecundate the Western world. A new sense of form and of beauty developed through the Hellenistic world. The seeds of a "scientific" approach to natural phenomena were sown. They germinated during the European Renaissance, but unfortunately under pressures which denied them a wholesome development.

When Buddhism spread over India, its repudiation of the caste system brought into the fold millions of men and women of the lower castes whose minds were presumably unready to understand new values presented to them. Buddhism degenerated and was eventually chased from India, yet still remained the dominant force in Ceylon, Indochina and China, Tibet, and later Japan. A reform of Buddhism took place in Northern India, and while Southern Buddhism (Hinayana) stressed the ideal of individual liberation, Northern Buddhism (Mahayana), perhaps in contact with the White Huns invaders, extolled that of total compassion and the sacrifice of the individual to the whole — thus paralleling a little ahead of time the love-doctrine of Christianity in the West.

If Buddhists, most probably misunderstanding the original teachings of Gautama, chose the path of individual liberation regardless of what happened to humanity as a whole, likewise the Greek Sophists apparently lost themselves in pure intellectualism and specious arguments. One can certainly speak of the failure of the Athenian Society. In one way or another, what was attempted by the pioneering minds of the sixth century became in the main perverted. The Great Mutation changed many basic factors in the collective mentality of mankind, but in its first stage it could not be widely accepted, and especially understood in its essential character, by the vast masses of people; and we are meeting today the Karma (or repercussion) of this failure.

An inevitable reaction followed; but this reaction — whether in an India swept by orgies of devotionalism or in the Mediterranean and European Christian world — had at its roots something of the greatest value, which definitely complemented, though seemingly opposed, what had been brought out by the great men of the sixth century B.C. "Reason" and objectivity must always turn negative and lead to egocentric pride and a sense of futility unless they are balanced by "Love" (agape) and self-surrender in total dedication to the Whole — to humanity.

Jesus' gospel of Love could only win the hearts and imaginations of a disintegrating Mediterranean world and of rough and violent Germanic races by being overly dramatized by Paul and many a spiritually ambitious Father of the Church. The doctrine of the Redemption of Sins by the vicarious Atonement of a Son of God had a fascinating appeal; but it led to the uncontrollable and irrational development of devotional fanaticism — and a similar process occurred in Medieval India through the bhakti period.

A reaction followed in Europe with the struggle against the all-powerful Catholic Church and its Inquisition — a Church which had made the perhaps inevitable, yet tragic, mistake of becoming a fully armed worldly Power and, what is still worse, of using religious sanctions to enforce political ambitions. After the fall of Constantinople and under the inspiration of the recovered treasures and the written works of the classical Greek period, the Renaissance gave a strong momentum to the already starting development of the scientific spirit. But the Christian traditions, in spite of, and in a sense because of, Luther's Reformation, were still dominating the collective mentality of Europe just as in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. the Great Mysteries in Greece were powerful institutions affecting the collective unconscious and semi-conscious mind of the people of the Hellenistic culture.(2)

What happened in such a dualistic situation is that the newly developed movement mobilizing the conscious activities of a new group of thinkers and leaders found itself limited in operation by the traditions of the past which were still dominating not only the masses of the people but as yet extremely powerful social-religious institutions. As "modern science" developed, it self-consciously had to limit itself to relatively safe fields of enquiry and research, i.e., to the material sense-perceived world which could be approached through strictly empirical methods — through "safe" methods which did not encroach upon the prerogatives of the Church. The Church felt more or less secure in the realm of the "soul," the religious inner life, the emotions — of all that was an intimate part of the human being and related to his divine origin and special status in the physical world. This realm was forbidden to the new scientific spirit; besides, it did not lend itself at all well to the new empirical methods based on sense-observation and the cataloging of large amounts of data easily verifiable by any trained observer.

Thus such a dualistic situation was built in our Western culture. The development of objective thinking and empirical science together with other social and economic factors led to the development of a kind of extreme individualism — which, in a sense at least, has implied a narrowing down, if not in many cases a perversion, of the earlier forms of humanism. Because of the striking results of the use of the empirical method when coupled with the ambition-drives of an increasing number of "individuals" able to shake off traditional moral restraints, the dichotomy between religion and science became acute. The Industrial Revolution brought immense changes of status to millions of people. Technology increased the scope of wars and the insecurity, conscious or subconscious, of nearly all the people of the world; and we have our present-day chaos — chaos and conflicts within individuals as well as in the world of nations, classes, and proliferating groups bent on trying out any conceivable means of escape from a generalized catastrophe menacing mankind.

The Ecological Issue

As I write these pages (early April 1970), the "ecological problem" is being widely publicized and taking hold of people's imagination. A sense of generalized anxiety and, indeed, of impending chemical-biological doom, is adding itself to the fear of a nuclear holocaust which could destroy the greater part of mankind. We seem to have to choose between being burnt alive — totally, or what is much worse, partially — by H-bomb explosions, or choked to death and poisoned by the waste products of our industrial productivity and our utter lack of care and self-restraint in consuming these products. But let us not be deceived! Atom bombs, smog, and the disruption of the healthy processes of Nature in this planet are only symptoms. The roots of the "sickness unto death" afflicting mankind — to use Kierkegaard's phrase — are to be found in the basic Images and archetypal values which constitute the very core of our Western society, of our Hebraic-Christian religious tradition and, at least to some extent, of the legacy of ancient Greece. Removing the symptoms will most likely not cure the real disease; indeed, it may not even be possible as long as the basic attitude of Western man to life and the universe, and the way he considers himself, are not radically transformed.

John the Baptist preached metanoia — which does not mean "repentance" but a fundamental change of mind. We need a total transformation of our consciousness far more than did the people in his time. This means first a repudiation of our most basic beliefs and traditions. It is they that have poisoned our collective mentality as well as our natural environment. If we have not the courage and the clarity of mind to uproot at least the perverted aspects of these fundamental beliefs in our Western civilization, no amount of limitations imposed on producers and consumers can be really successful. Of course, these limitations are necessary in order to put strong brakes on our mad rush to the abyss, but the brakes may not hold. Likewise the limitation of armaments will be effective only if the ecological and anti-war crusades somehow bring to large groups of people, especially young people, the deeply experienced realization of what it is within every man, woman and child which led to this total crisis. It is our entire Hebraic-Christian tradition — as it has developed during the last twenty centuries — and our whole Western culture which are on trial.

It is possible that such a "deeply experienced realization" will have to come to the masses of the "silent majority" through a wholesale tragedy. It seems, indeed, that in most instances the human way is the way through tragedy — the via negativa. The greatest, noblest concepts and images arising within man's soul and mind must apparently become perverted, at least to some extent and in some manner, before we are able to realize completely their meaning and their total implications. When such great concepts and images reach man's consciousness, the mental patterns, which once were valid but are now made obsolete, have such an inertial strength that they at once turn the new realizations to their advantage — and the outcome sooner or later is catastrophe and chaos.

It was once valid to believe that it was "God's command" to increase and multiply within a biosphere to which man brought a powerful reflective type of consciousness and the capacity to control the wild elemental energies of "life" by the willful concentration of his mind. What happened, however, was that the new mind-power was made subservient to the biological instincts and the compulsive drives inherent in "life" — just as recently the technological mind and the powers it released were made to serve the greed, the lusts and the pride of the old aristocratic class and of those men whose one ambition was to reach the highest level of the social Establishment. The "rags-to-riches" syndrome demonstrates the relative "openness" and dynamic character of our society. These qualities are theoretically most valuable in terms of the development of the individual person, yet they have become destructive because misapplied, because the society was inherently aggressive and predatory in spite (or because?) of its external religious foundation.

Only, perhaps, in the Quaker movement and in a few ill-fated communal groups has the Christian and Western ideal of "individualism" been applied in a peaceful and communal sense, in terms of the welfare of an all-inclusive social whole. In the mainstream of our American life what has been called "rugged individualism" has actually been made up of aggression, greed and ruthless competition; and the so-called success of America — this America which visionaries and poets dreamed of as the "New World," the "Land of the Free," etc. — has been founded upon the deliberate and continual deceiving, spoiling and killing of the Native Americans, and the often brutal use of African slaves. On such a social-political foundation, individualistic self-expression and success can only lead ultimately to wholesale tragedy — as we should know by now.

This obviously is not peculiar to the American colonies and the United States. One could say that it indicates the evolutionary level at which mankind tends to operate when the powers of the analytical mind find themselves structured by separative and insecure egos; and this tendency seems to be the expected and natural first stage of the development of the objective, reflective mind. But the American society came into existence at a time when the technology based on empirical science and a totally unbridled search for knowledge — knowledge that is at once applied to power — were developing at a tremendously accelerated pace. Isolated from the pressures of older nations and with immense open space to work on, the American man became drunk with the "Frontier spirit" of rapine, murder, spoliation, and waste. And we are now facing the results.

The Anglo-Saxon empirical mind and the Germanic tenacity and industry, plus the inventiveness and financial skill of the Jewish immigrants, have been the driving power behind the larger part of the success of the American enterprise. Success, yes, but are we not told that "nothing fails like success"? The Romans, too, succeeded in conquering and intelligently administering the Mediterranean world. They contained what they called the Barbarians, hardly regarding them human. But they did not have the power to poison and lay waste the whole Earth. Our Americanized modern Western World has that power. Thus, we no longer have any escape, in spite of the recently publicized and typically American idea that mankind's destiny is to conquer other planets and to let the Earth go to its doom — an unrealistic projection of the Frontier way of life and of colonialism into a cosmic future for the sake of bigger and better egos enhanced by genetic control and the use of electronic slaves. Will man never learn?

Knowledge is power; but power which is relentlessly used by the separative and rigid egos of ambitious and aggressive individuals whose desire only to feel powerful and masterful leads inevitably to tragedy, however long the final breakdown may be delayed. It is true that it is basically unwholesome to legislate against the unlimited search for knowledge. For who should be entitled to make the decision of where to set the limits? Nevertheless, knowledge cannot be separated from the knower and his ability to constructively use it for the sake of the whole. We deceive ourselves grievously if we think that an unlimited and irresponsible search for knowledge does not cause serious problems.

This problem can be solved only when we realize that it is a part of a much larger issue. The issue refers to the relationship between the individual and the community, between man and the whole Earth; it deals with the function of man in the universe and the place which present-day man occupies in the evolution of life, of mind, and of states of consciousness which perhaps transcend what we call the mind. The tragic possibilities of wholesale destruction which mankind is now facing are the direct results of the manner in which we approach this basic issue — of how we define mankind and the vast process we call existence.

To redefine man and his relationship to the Earth and existence-as-awhole is today our essential task; but it is a most controversial undertaking and one bound to generate deeply rooted and probably violent resistance, because it involves challenging the validity of concepts, ideals and sacrosanct formulas or institutions constituting the base of operation of Western society.

This is not to say, however, that our Western heritage does not contain a great deal that is fundamentally worthwhile and should be retained; but it should be thoroughly re-examined, re-assessed, and transformed to meet the needs of a new period in human evolution which calls for a new kind of society. In re-examining the traditions and the basic concepts of our Western society since the Athenian period, and especially since the European Renaissance, we should avoid sentimentality and a superficial evaluation of ideas or ways of life to which we have become attached. We should try to isolate what has been and still is the truly essential achievement of the European-American civilization.

We can only evaluate properly and functionally the achievements of mankind during the last twenty-five centuries if we realize that this period marks a dynamic transition between two fundamental levels of human activity — the biological-tribal level and the "ideo-dynamic" mental level. I have discussed the character of these two modes of activity in my book, The Planetarization of Consciousness, and it may suffice to say here that these two levels refer not only to human activity making use essentially of either life-energies or mind-power, but as well of activity in terms of either local or global conditions.

A tribal type of culture is one based on and limited by local geographical, climatic and ecological features. It is bound to a particular land, and originally limited to a particular racial type, or at a later date to a specific situation which isolated within a limited environment a definite blend of two or three racial groups. A particular religious attitude is passed from generation to generation; specific forms of activity in common — sacred rituals and social festivities — are carried on uninterrupted. The tribe is a psychic and biological whole. It constitutes the basic unit of human life.

A tribesman is not to be thought of as an "individual" in the real sense of the term, because the tribe is an organism. Men, women and children are functioning cells within this socio-biocultural organism. As every cell of a human body carries within its nucleus the same genetic code determining the place and function of every cell of the body, so at a psychic even more than at a physical level every human being in an archaic tribe carries imprinted at the core of his whole being the "root-pattern" of his tribe and culture, and is powerfully linked to his particular tribal land by a kind of psychic umbilical cord.(3)

Spirituality in these archaic Ages was essentially different from spirituality today. The experience of "Self" (atman) in India which produced the great Upanishads differed in character from that of the revelation to Moses of God as the absolute I AM. What the Mosaic story reveals, symbolically and mythically, though presumably based on an actual event, is the first deification in the Western world of the process of individualization which had begun to form within societies which were still basically tribal in character, even if this character was becoming altered wherever large cities were developing. The Mosaic episode can thus be called the "conception" of individualism; "birth" occurred perhaps five centuries later in the sixth century B.C., especially in Athens. Then too our Western society began. It developed on the basis of both the Hebraic and the Greek traditions. The former was potentially transformed, dynamited and universalized in the Pauline interpretation of the life and teachings of Jesus; the latter was reembodied in and theoretically universalized by the Rome of the Caesars.

The great achievement of our Western society consists essentially in the ideal of universalization which it fostered. It made it possible for man to actually transcend the "localism" of the tribal state of collective existence, and to function in terms of a "global" or "planetary" type of social organization in which all human beings could participate productively and significantly. For man to overcome his archaic tribal dependence on local conditions of land, climate, race, folk-culture and to be able to include in his consciousness his actions and his feelings — thus to live, feel and think in terms of all countries, all climates, all races, all cultures and all religions of the Earth — this is the great achievement of the Western society. Everything else is secondary; and, in a very definite sense, it occurred because it was necessary for this planetarization of the lives and the consciousness of men everywhere. Everything else, including the stress on individualism.

In order that man's consciousness could be sufficiently broadened to encompass the whole Earth and to realize that mankind has a definite function to perform as an "organ" within the total organism of the planet, men had to become individualized, i.e., freed from psychic bondage to local geographical and tribal conditions. Men had to develop a conscious and objective type of mind in order to pose pertinent questions to Nature and to learn its laws and cycles. People had to find means to travel across continents and oceans, and finally through and beyond the atmosphere, in order to experience the totality of the globe and to meet the multiplicity of its telluric and climatic challenges. But man, alas, felt that he had to make wars in order to have slaves to operate rudimentary machines and means of travel; and he was perhaps psychologically obliged to think of himself as a proud agent of a personalized God who had commanded him to master all that was in his environment, because he felt so weak and insecure, once uprooted from his tribal land and his familiar and emotionally satisfying way of life.

Western society "achieved" great things. It made the whole Earth known, at least potentially, to all men. Social structures which had prolonged the ancient tribal patterns through the centuries of European and early American culture have been challenged and transformed to allow for new incentives and a broader view of existence. The entire globe is constantly circumnavigated, investigated and, alas, ransacked and poisoned, for these great achievements of our Western society have the darkest shadows; and mankind now cannot help facing the murderous darkness. Why these shadows? Because the one thing that could have moderated and led into truly constructive and harmonious channels the wild power of man's individualism — the example and teaching of Christ — became perverted, tribalized, hierarchized, and used to feed ambition for power.

Jesus' Gospel was directed to these myriads of emerging individuals let loose by the breakdown of the many Mediterranean cultures and cults. Jesus spoke of the love that alone could have softened the egocentricity of rootless and confused men seeking escape in lust and cruelty — the love that can draw men together in the togetherness of the spirit, in the joy of productive cooperation. But Christianity failed. Its Churches fumed into a coercive force as rigid and cruel as the old tribal taboos. When finally the reaction came with Humanism and Renaissance, this reaction, too, developed along rigid and destructive lines, seeking power from the destruction of matter.

Yes, science achieved at least potentially its goal of destiny. It developed in spectacular but terribly wasteful ways the means for every man to become fully aware of all other’s lives, feelings and thoughts. But these very means may well negate the hope they evoked. At the threshold of the realization of the oneness of mankind we may find ourselves fated not to cross the threshold — and, like Moses, not to enter the Promised Land; because as a society and a culture we have collectively failed. Our rugged, proud individualism has failed just because it proved so one-pointedly, so tragically successful.

It may be that it is not too late for a collective "death-bed repentance"; but perhaps only individuals and groups who have refused to accept involvement in such a heroic yet ghastly success will be able to cross the threshold that should lead to a New Age, to the realization of world-harmony over a slowly purified Earth. We may face purification by fire, because we have played wantonly and in sheer pride with the fire of Prometheus, the fire of self. We have dared to release the fire within the atom, by breaking the "binding force" that makes matter solid and structured, at the same time as we exported all over the world our anarchic and egocentric individualism, causing people everywhere to destroy also their solid traditions and religious-cultural restraints.

Result: everywhere, at all levels, a general breakdown. It may mean freedom. It may mean chaos, and through chaos rebirth; but only if one is not afraid. And people are afraid. They do not understand why such a success which our society and our technology have wrought can mean failure. They do not want to recognize, to accept failure; it would mean personal dying to the familiar and the comfortable, self-emptying, utter insecurity.' Then what? Rebirth? But how, when, where?

Stifled by technical know-how, soul-empty, our Western society is dying of achievement.

Who is Responsible?

Is science responsible? It all depends on what we mean by responsibility. Obviously, if we had not developed the type of technology which enabled us to pump oil from the depths of the soil, to burn it in cars and to transform it into thousands of products, we would not be stifled by smog. One may answer that it is not scientific knowledge that is at fault but the unrestricted and profit-haunted use man has made of it. But scientists, engineers and corporations have accepted this use, have profited from it in money, fame and social power — and they have wanted these rewards, not because they were scientists, but because they were the products of the particular collective mentality of Western civilization and businessmen. "Knowledge," in an abstract sense, is not at fault, but the kind of knowledge made possible by the kind of questions we have asked of Nature and how we have gone about seeking answers. This empirical, analytical knowledge of which we are so proud, our materialistically and comfort-oriented inventiveness and its rich social rewards, our determination to seek power by destroying matter, rather than by adjusting to the energies of Nature, as the sailboat adjusts to the wind — all this methodology of Western science has been responsible for both the success and the failure. Successful achievements cannot actually be separated from the use to which they were put by politics and business, from the profit motive or the thirst for social power, class-domination and the demands born of our particular philosophical and religious approaches to existence, to city living, to all kinds of interpersonal and group relationships. What we can do, and we must do for survival, is to make this separation now. And this is almost certain to be a tragic and cathartic process. Are we ready, willing and able to see it through relentlessly, irrevocably? This is the question.

It can be done. The true “hippies” have done it, confusedly aware that a new society has to start from the very beginning in communal groups close to the soil. The means they have used to break away from the family comforts and the social traditions are no doubt dangerous and most likely in the end self-defeating; but can we not realize that, if they have turned on to drugs, it is because they were born in a drugged society — in a society feeding on chemicals and poisoning everything it touches in the name of a materialistic ideal of progress and of a greed-infested life of abundance? Who taught the youth to use mescaline and LSD as a way to reach transcendent experiences? Who was eager to write books and grant to a press avid for sensationalism interviews which obviously would produce a wide response in a youth fed up with the hypocrisy of their elders and instinctively rebelling against the senselessness of wars for prestige and big business profit? At first, intellectuals trained in the tradition of the proud nation who not long ago waged war on China in order to continue selling opium to the once "Celestial" empire.

The formation of small communes of struggling and all too often confused and mentally insecure youths is obviously only a small beginning. But it is also a challenge and a hope. It should reveal to the dull, automatized and self-complacent "majority" that young human beings can take a bold, totally self-transforming step into a future free from social and interpersonal ways of life that have become largely meaningless in their present hypocritical form. Instead of encouraging and helping this dynamic minority to become fully aware of the total implications of their break-away advance into the future, the greatest number of our intellectuals and of our leaders do all they can to harass these seekers of a new life.

This is, of course, understandable. Most people can only cling to their hard-won gains or their inherited privileges. They try to delay the hour of reckoning until their children or grandchildren can take care of the ever-worsening situation. It has almost always been the way of any dominant class. But we are facing now an unparalleled situation, because it is world-wide. It is no longer the case of a French or a Russian aristocracy being challenged, within well-defined and relatively isolated boundaries, by the people it oppressed. It is not only an American youth challenging the ways of life and the dominant power of the American Establishment and of the "silent majority." It is the youth of every country rising against various kinds of nationalistic Establishments which, besides, are at war with each other. And what happens anywhere is at once known and arouses instantaneous responses over the globe. The days of local events and localized cultures are over; and this is the one great Western achievement.

In this there is hope, yet a tragic hope, for mankind is now able to destroy itself almost totally. Everybody knows this to be a fact. They have heard it stated dozens of times. Yet so few comprehend or want to think of what it actually, precisely means. None is so deaf as those who refuse to hear. It is easier to believe that man will be saved by some miraculous intervention. "Let someone else do it. Let God do it." And the four horsemen of the Apocalypse are riding on, and on — gradually closer, more menacing, nearer to a horizon filled with the monumental wonders of the very achievements which are destroying us, in body, in mind and spirit.