We Can Begin Again Together

by Dane Rudhyar


3. A Reassessment of Individualism


In his beautiful and once famous book, Flight to Arras, the French author and aviator, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, wrote these words: "The individual is a path; Man only matters who takes that path." In this brief and forceful statement an entire philosophy of life and human evolution is contained. It directs us to the threshold of the New Age, the Age of mankind having realized its unity not only in a theoretical sense but in an actual dynamic movement toward the future.

The individual is a path hacked through the jungle of tribal instincts, biospheric fate and psychic compulsions. There must be such a path and, through many tragic centuries of effort and struggle against the wild elemental forces of uncultivated and uncultured Nature within and without, the guides and leaders of men have cut this path, and a few among them have pictured for us in visionary terms the wonderful clearing beyond the jungle of the untamed. We call them mystics, saints, seers or prophets; but most people do not understand their words. They are too busy raking the path, paving it with gaudy stones that shine in the night, erecting comfortable benches and gilded images of themselves. They are busy making maps of every big tree, giving names to every victory over some wild beast, every small bridge painstakingly erected over a torrent on rampage.

A path is something to move along. It has meaning only in terms of the movement which it makes possible. When a Zen master was asked to define Zen, he simply answered: "Walk on!" Something is advancing; evolution is movement. It is "Man" that advances. Man individualizes his multitude of component parts, first through compulsively organized tribal units, then through what we usually call today "individual persons." Finally, Man realizes himself as the organic wholeness of mankind living within the vast field of activities of an Earth to which he is bringing objective and creative consciousness — that is, the alchemical power to transform jungles into magnificent gardens, and wild impulses into harmonious growth toward ever more transcendent cosmic vistas.

This Western society of ours is so involved today in the glorification of "the individual" and of his rights that most people fail to understand this process of individualization in its entirety. Carl Jung, studying the development and integrations of the "personality", speaks of individuation; but even this individuation is only a phase of the whole process, it is not the end of it — if there ever is an end! It refers, rather, to the antithesis which follows the thesis. The thesis is the tribal organism operating under the compulsive rules of life; the antithesis is the "ragged individual" — the more proud, violent and jealous of his prerogatives, the more he feels isolated, alienated and insecure. The synthesis is still the future; yet there have been many anticipatory attempts, in almost every case tragically stifled by the inertia of the past. The ideal structure of the Masonic Lodge has foreshadowed (at least in the early days of the movement) the transcendent reality of which students of esoteric lore speak as "the White Lodge," usually with little understanding of what it represents. Roman Catholics have, a somewhat similar concept in the Communion of the Saints. Even the original ekklesia among the early Christians had a premonitory character of human synthesis; and, likewise, the few communalistic groups which developed mainly in terms of the Gnostic tradition in Europe, and were unsuccessfully attempted in last-century America.

When one realizes the nature of this "dialectic" process of human evolution, the concept of individualism takes on a meaning that differs greatly from that which we see extolled today, and in a sense since the European Renaissance which in turn was overshadowed by the ghosts of the ancient culture of Greece. I do not believe it would be exaggerated to say that the one great issue today at this critical time of human evolution is how to define constructively the meaning and value of individualism. What does it mean to be an individual? What should be the character of the relationship of an individual to other individuals and of an individual to his society, to mankind and to the Earth. Is the individual person more significant than the whole of mankind? Is the individualism a means or an end? Can the focusing of the mind on the attainment of individual selfhood become a self-defeating means, and the means destroy the end?

These are the most crucial questions one can ask today. They are more basic than the issues dealing with ecological destruction and the control of industrial waste products, because these issues are symptoms, not real causes. Without dealing with the causes, every remedy would likely be only a palliative. Nevertheless, one may hope that a massed endeavor to deal with the symptoms will also focus people's attention upon the deeper causes. The danger is that in the emotional ambiance of a passionate struggle to cure symptoms one may also destroy many of the positive and creative factors implied in the situation which had been producing the causes of the disturbance. This is what official medicine in America is constantly doing in dealing with patients. It is therefore essential that one should understand not only the failures but the basic purpose and achievements of Western individualism, and this on the basis of the broadest possible understanding of the whole process of human evolution.

The Individual and Society

The problem we are facing here is made difficult by the ambiguity of such terms as individual, individualism, individuality, person and personality. They have popular and political as well as philosophical and metaphysical meanings, and they are used interchangeably and either separately or in juxtaposition. Perhaps the most direct way to go to the heart of the problem is to refer first to the opposition between "individual" and "collective," for no concept can ever be clearly understood except by defining it in terms of its opposite.

When one opposes the terms, individual and collective, in a philosophical or even metaphysical sense, one speaks of abstract principles which are as universally present as, let us say, the principles Yang and Yin in Chinese philosophy. What the pair, individual-collective, means is simply the fact that no "existent" — be it an organic or inorganic entity — exists alone. There is no whole that is not a part of some "greater whole" — unless we believe in the existence of the most encompassing of all conceivable existing wholes, a Universe which is unique, both in time and space.

If a whole participates in the existence and activity of a greater whole, it does so as an individual entity in relationship to a "collectivity" of other entities. This collectivity of other entities within the boundaries of the greater whole constitutes the "environment" of the first-mentioned entity. A cell in a human body has the whole body for its environment; in relationship to this environment — i.e., to the collectivity of all the other cells — it occupies an individual place and performs an individual function. If the entire body becomes seriously ill the pressure of this collectivity surrounding the individual cell may be such that this cell can become poisoned, or it may starve for lack of proper nourishment.

The word, individual, however, etymologically means "which is not divisible." The Greek word, atom, had the same meaning; and the Greek philosopher Democritus believed in the existence of ultimate and indivisible "units of matter." Later on Leibnitz, in the 17th century A.D., based much of his metaphysics on the concept of "monads," a concept not unlike that of jivas in the Jain philosophy of ancient India. Monads, too, were thought of as indivisible entities, as "units of spirits," and Leibnitz has much trouble explaining how these monads communicate with each other.

Today we know that Democritus' atoms are not indivisible units of matter. We think of them as composed of a great many sub-atomic particles, and some physicists are still looking for what they would like to consider the simplest and primordial units of matter — while others give up altogether the concept of material unit and speak of "fields of energy," "waves of probability," or "form" requiring no material substratum. At the metaphysical level the religiously inclined thinker still believes in the reality of monads or Souls which have an absolutely individual and "eternal" character. They feel that the deep realization of "I-am-ness" which is so basic in our present-day humanity is a manifestation and a proof of the real existence of such indivisible monads or God-created Souls. It is largely on this feeling that the ideal of democracy and the belief in individualism is founded — at least, in theory.

This, then, would be the essential difference between matter and spirit — this ancient and persisting dichotomy: Matter is divisible and when analyzed far enough it eludes us and becomes structured energy; but though the human body is composed of billions of recognizable cells which each contain a multitude of atoms and sub-atomic particles, man as an individual is a spiritual entity and he has, as a result, spiritual rights and responsibilities by virtue of his being an individual.

This may be so; yet whether the human person is thought of as a material organism which has evolved during long ages within a particular planetary environment, or as a spiritual entity (monad or Soul), the plain fact is that an individual exists in relation to other individuals. No human being exists alone on this planet or, it seems obvious, anywhere else. He lives in a state of society. He thinks with a language which is the product of generations of human beings who have been more or less equally subjected to the same telluric, climatic and cultural-religious influences which formed his character and oriented his feeling-responses along definite lines. He may be an individual Soul and indivisible monad; yet actually and existentially he is, as well, a creature of his social environment. He participates in a "greater whole": his society — including in this word, family, culture, religion, nation. He faces as an individual a vast collectivity to which he "belongs."

Many persons who think along so-called spiritual lines insist that society is composed of individuals and that a society cannot be changed effectively unless its individuals are transformed. Such assertions are ambiguous and semantically unsound because they fail to define what is meant by the term individual. In actual existential fact society comes first, as it exists prior to any particular individual born within its psycho-social and cultural "womb." No human being has ever been found appearing alone on this planet, materializing suddenly from some higher spiritual realm. The newborn infant is formed by his family and society; his consciousness is moulded by the language he is taught and the examples he compulsively imitates. Genetically, his body structure and functions are determined by his family ancestry which in turn has been subjected to the influence of social ideals and practices. He is given a name which conditions to a notable extent the way he considers himself consciously as an ego.

It is only if one approaches with definite spiritual or religiously dogmatic beliefs the problem of what comes first, the society or the individual, that one can say that an "individual Soul" with a preexistent character and at a particular stage of its development "incarnates" into a human body and into a particular family and society, the characteristics of which it transcends and which he is to use for his own growth. The Soul then can be said to "be" prior to the body and society it has chosen, or to which it has been sent by God or Karma. Likewise, a child is sent to some school to gain knowledge, yet is essentially independent from the school and the teachers.

Such a transcendental concept of Soul or monad leads to an abstract, because equally transcendent, concept of the individual. It is the theoretical foundation for the equalitarian and abstract kind of democracy which developed during the 18th century. In such an individualistic democracy the individual has essential rights not because of his participation in the social whole, but because, being both superior and exterior to society, he comes into society with a transcendental status on which his rights are based. He comes to this alien earth-existence within a social-geographical environment which may teach him a great deal he needs to know, yet which is there only to serve him, as he is in essence God-created or even divine.

The Actualization of "Man"

From such a transcendental metaphysical premise an immense number of inevitable and fateful consequences are logically derived; and these have determined, at least theoretically, the character of Western society, particularly in America. But there is not only one alternative to this religious attitude, i.e., a materialistic, atheistic, and "socialistic" belief that man is only an evolved "political animal" who must serve the purpose of a particular State or identify himself with the collective mentality and the fashionable or ethical behavior of a particular culture. One may instead accept as valid and profoundly, indeed spiritually, significant St. Exupery's statement with which this chapter began: "The individual is a path; Man only matters who takes that path." This is the position taken by the spiritually oriented "humanist." It postulates beyond, yet through individuals a dynamic evolving reality, Man. The entire history of mankind represents the gradual, cyclic unfoldment of this reality, Man; Man, as an essential part of the cosmic organism of which the physical Earth is only the outer body. Indeed we shall see later on that Man can be seen to appear when the Earth becomes, through him, objectively conscious of itself.

Many readers may react to such a statement by saying that this "Man" is but an abstraction which exists only in the minds of real individual persons. But while a human organism is indeed a concrete fact — a real entity able to perform a great number of activities, one of which is thinking — giving to this human organism a character which isolates it in an absolute sense from its whole species is indeed a process of abstraction. A transcendent supernatural "I" is "abstracted" from the total human organism and given an other-wordly character which places it in a most special relationship to Nature, to the Earth, and even to all those human organisms who, in one language or another, say and think "I am."

Giving an absolute kind of "rights" to individuals just because they are human beings is an ambiguous procedure. If the rights actually depend on the fact that the organism of the newborn is human, then "human-ness" is the essential factor, and one has to define precisely what constitutes this human-ness. It cannot be the fact that a human being is simply alive, for plants and animals in our society are not given such individual rights. Is it the fact that the organism can think objectively and "rationally"? This would seem to be the case, because children, before a certain age, and insane persons are not considered to have many "individual" rights; yet they have a few elementary rights; even a human embryo is often said to have some rights.

The only rational answer to this ambiguous situation is that a human being has rights as an individual because he belongs to a particular kind of "divine creation" which guarantees that every human body is endowed with an individual Soul or monad regardless of the state in which the material organism is. However the validity of such an answer is a metaphysical or religious issue. If a social system is based on this kind of metaphysical postulate, it can only be considered a particular system related to a particular phase of human evolution and, at least until now, to a particular geographical region.

In other words, the concept of the individual as an isolated and independent entity is an interpretation of existential facts and of psychological feeling-experiences. It can, indeed, be seen to be the answer to a very basic yearning in human beings belonging to a specific category of societies and cultures; but it was not present in the human beings constituting archaic tribes — certainly not as it has taken form in modern Western man — and it may not be inevitably present in human beings of future civilizations. The sense of individuality can exist and yet be given an entirely different meaning — that is, not an absolute or even a primary meaning. It can be a secondary meaning subservient to a larger realization, which is just as a spiritual realization founded upon a deep experience of the primacy of Man over the individual person.

We could very easily interpret even the first two chapters of Genesis, and many ancient Scriptures, in such a way that God — or any Creative Mind or process — produced Man rather than individual Souls. It is Man who may be the Image of God rather than any particular individual man. To consider the Biblical Adam as a particular individual man poses rationally insoluble problems; and in the mystical philosophy of India, even in the magnificent modern reformulation made of it by Sri Aurobindo, the self of an individual person is considered to be only a fleeting aspect of the one Universal Self. Modern Theosophy, as propounded by H. P. Blavatsky a century ago, speaks of "monads" but also states that actually there is only one Monad. There are many numbers, but every number is only an aspect of one. It is one which, adding itself to itself, plays at expressing itself in an infinity of ways; this is the Lila (play) of the Universal One.

Unity is the Root of all there is. All cycles begin in unity, but the one Root-power differentiates into many energies, the one Creative Mind into many minds and forms of existence (archetypes). The world-process of existence moves on as a vast tide — one vast evolutionary tide, one elan vital (to use Bergson's term). The universe is a whole. The primal unitarian energy differentiates into an immense variety of specialized forces and capacities, but the multitude of existential wholes that are formed and eventually disintegrate remain parts of the evolving Whole, as wavelets are parts of the advancing tide. Each wavelet may reflect the sun, and thus there appears to be a myriad of suns, but there is actually but one tide and one sun.

As we pass from the cosmological level to that of the Earth's biosphere, we also should think of the "Life wave" as a whole. The one Life differentiates into myriads of vegetable and animal species; and at what may be the crest of the wave — but are we even sure that it is? — Man appears.

We may interpret this appearance by saying that the emergence at one or several points of the Earth's surface of human organisms able to demonstrate new powers in their relationship to their environment was the result of the purposeful release by some divine agency of a new wave of creative energy; or we may speak of a spontaneous biological mutation — the cause of which, in the last analysis, cannot convincingly be explained. The simple fact is that a new type of organism emerged which has proven itself able very gradually to actualize a new set of potentialities — the most central of which Teilhard de Chardin calls "reflective consciousness." This new set of potentialities is what I mean here by Man. Man is essentially the potentiality of a consciousness which, turning back upon the organism producing it, becomes focused at the center of this organism. It is this feeling-experience of conscious centering which gives to every man the realization that he is "I," or rather an "ego."

Through the archaic ages this ego-experience had only a secondary and superficial character. The primary fact of consciousness was the bio-psychic unity of the tribe, which moreover identified itself with its geographic environment and the collective characteristics resulting from life in such a closed field of activity. The new potentiality, Man, was focusing the process of its actualization upon the tribe as a whole. It was a bio-psychic focusing resulting in a collective as well as compulsive type of individualization which was symbolically projected upon the tribal mind as the Great Ancestor and the tribal God. This God was the Soul of the tribe, the guarantor of its integral wholeness and of its subsistence on a motherly local environment.

We might say that the tide of Man's actualization was as yet but imperceptibly rising over great depths of un-intellectualized consciousness filled with bio-psychic images and identifications with elemental forces glorified as "spirits." When this tide came very near to the gently sloping shore, the shallow water increased the speed of its apparent progress toward the land, and the tidal flow became waves. A multitude of rocks were hit producing much spray and foam. Then, a myriad of droplets reflected the Sun-disc or refracted the light-rays; the one Man-potential was being actualized as a multitude of individual persons.

Obviously such an illustration has only a most general and symbolical validity; yet it may evoke much that is significant to the open mind. What causes a particular human being to become individualized is at first the force of resistance he has to the tide. It is his difference from the collectivity and the earth-environment out of which he springs forth, often with "foam"-producing motions and a loud voice. Yet to say this does not give full comprehension of the process which leads from Man's wide-focus actualization through a tribal whole to the appearance of men of great spiritual and mental stature in whom the Man-potential is focused in a sharply individualized and unique manner. Another kind of illustration, often used in the past, but not too often clearly understood, should be of great value in elucidating this point.

Man, defined as an emergent set of evolutionary potentialities on this Earth, can be compared to the germinating seed still hidden in the ground. As the germ pierces through the crust of the soil and grows, leaves and branches unfold, actualizing some of the potentialities that were latent in the seed; but this occurs only after the roots have developed downward. These roots, the stem and early leaves symbolize the first types of human society — some deeply rooted in the soil and in local conditions (archaic tribes and their modified prolongations in our more recent history), others developing sunward, i.e., stressing a devotional aspiration toward the One Source of all existence, A time comes when the basic unitarian power that beats in the roots surges forth through stem and branchells to bring about a myriad of flowers. These are the individuals in their functions — the "men of culture," the artists and philosophers, the scientists who provide ingenious means of trapping the pollenizing bees of knowledge.

When the seed begins to form within the flower, a new phase of the plant's life begins. The unity that was in the beginning (the seed of yesteryear) has become the much-multiplied harvest of the end — the omega state of the closing cycle. Many seeds, yet each totally consecrated to the whole species — "seed men" each of whom is a "Son of Man," a more or less perfect actualization of the original Man-potential.

It is in the light of such a symbolical analogy that we can truly understand the meaning of St. Exupery's already quoted statement. The individual is only a path, somewhat as the flower, beautiful as it may be, is only a way that leads to the seed. "Man," the drive toward the final harvest, takes the many paths built by individuals. Alas, there are many, many flowers which produce no seeds. Many beautiful and talented egos are fruitless; they contribute nothing to the final stage of the cycle of Man.

All the "seed men" are one; in them the Presence of Man should be felt. In "the end of times" mankind will be a world-wide society of seed-men and seed-women, or at least a society which will be organized and "inspirited" by seed-men through whom Man can speak. It will be a society of "persons", the most responsive of whom will become "personages." Every true seed-man is a personage.

Person versus Individual

In my opinion it is very unfortunate that the words "individual" and "person" are used interchangeably. The concept of individual actually is an abstract concept with a transcendental background. On the other hand, a person is a field of more or less closely integrated and harmonic human activities — an existential whole with many parts and functions operating at several levels, a whole actively related to a larger whole.

A real person is not isolated, and does not consider himself alienated or Earth-transcending. He accepts and welcomes integration in a larger whole; but this whole does not need to be — though of course it can be and in most cases today is — a particular and local society, with its culture, religion, and political institutions. A person's allegiance can experience a basic "mutation" from the local whole (a particular tribe, nation, culture) to the global whole. Eventually it might even be allegiance to the entire solar system and the galaxy, when the time comes for men to travel through its vast spaces; but such a travel would certainly not be by the kind of means devised by our present science and based so far on the destruction of matter.

A school of philosophy has been developed in Europe and in the United States, which, under the name "Personalism," is stressing constructively the distinction between the person and the individual. Unfortunately, in my opinion, its adherents, in trying to substitute a universal pluralism to the monistic and theistic world-view of most theologians, tend to think of the spiritual reality of the universe in terms of an immense number of monads with an absolute character of separate individuality. The great issue in Personalism is whether the person is a permanent, timeless, and absolute essence, or whether it appears at a certain stage in the "cyclo-cosmic" process of existence in order to focus into a multitude of sharply defined, structured and centered fields of consciousness and activity the diffuse consciousness and activity of the One Power that is the source of the cyclic process.

I have called this unity aspect of the cycle, the Eon (cf. The Planetarization of Consciousness, Part Two) : One Eon, and a multitude of persons, microcosms of the universal Whole. In the symbolic Heart-center of every person the Eon is an active and conscious Presence. It is an immanent Presence. It simply "is"; and this "is-ness" operates in the dimension of unity, which is the real fourth dimension. In this fourth dimension all persons know and feel themselves interrelated, and indeed interdependent. They are focused in the three dimensions of our individualized consciousness and of the world of seemingly separated entities; but they interpenetrate in the "dimension of unity."

Focusing does not need to deny interpenetration. Likewise, "being a person" does not deter from the precisely definable character of a man's individual consciousness and of his activity in the three-dimensional world. But a true person is not deceived by the illusion of separateness; he does not succumb to the despondency produced by a fallacious sense of isolation and alienation. He simply and undramatically knows that, while his character and his destiny may focus his consciousness and activity in a direction which makes him a stranger among the people around him, nevertheless he is not "alone" because individualized beings are "all one" — one actually in terms of their common humanity and potentially persons. The true person is not only "rooted" in man's common humanity — he is not only biologically a member of homo sapiens with an erect spine and a highly developed forebrain controlling hands that can transform and mold what they touch; he is also a phase of the cyclic process from the One-in-the-beginning (alpha state) to the Multi-one Pleroma (omega state), the harvest of the planetary or cosmic cycle. He knows himself to be one among a multitude of conscious units in each of whom the One is being focused for a well-defined particular purpose — each unit, a single aspect of the original Unity.

Once the person clearly and ineradicably knows this, his ego-individualism is no longer an obstacle to the effectiveness of the Presence of the One within his "Heart." He becomes an agent for this One — a "personage," i.e., the clear embodiment of a planetary function in terms of the wholeness of mankind. Through him Man acts. He is indeed a "path" which Man takes. He lives a transpersonal life.(1) He has "authority" — the kind of authority derived from the fact that he acts not as an individual, but as an agent for Man.

"Doing My Thing"

If the above statements are well understood and accepted as a valid principle in human affairs, several far-reaching consequences can be derived from them; and these consequences, which will be developed in several chapters of this book, have a most crucial importance during the present period of transition between two eras of all-human and planetary unfoldment. Indeed, such a period can, and I believe should, witness the change from a theoretically individualistic type of society to new forms of social organization. These may be called holarchic,(2) for they will be based on a holistic world-view, that is on the fundamental concept that the whole is prior to the parts, and thus that Man is prior to individual human beings — provided, of course, that one gives to the term, Man, the meaning defined in the preceding pages.

Such a basic approach to life and, in particular, to the value of the individual may seem not only to run counter to the democratic ideal — which we so often extol in words, while modifying it in practice to suit our individual interests and prejudices — but also to oppose the often passionate demand of our youth to be allowed to "do my thing." This would be a false conclusion. What I have said concerning individualism does not imply a denial of the rights of today's young rebels to do their thing; in fact, the teen-age revolt is against a social order which in so many ways is obsolete. It is essentially a revolt against the hypocrisy inherent in our Western concept of democracy. It is a revolt against the assumption of the posture of authority both by parents who fail to understand what is happening in the world and refuse to alter their egocentric and self-indulgent stance, and "democratically" elected political figureheads, puppets of the real rulers of a society controlled by greed (disguised under the "profit motive") and by the craze for productivity and expansion at any cost, especially the cost of human-ness, spontaneity, integrity and love.

In other words, the rebellion of youth — particularly true “hippie” youth — is not against Man, but essentially for the eradication of a deceitful and inevitably self-defeating social order based on a number of false interpretations of fundamental concepts. These social-political concepts had to be promoted as temporary means which mankind required to pass from the tribal level (thesis) to the global level at which the operation of "world-harmony" (synthesis) is possible; but only, at least in their present-day applications, as temporary means — somewhat as a scaffolding is a temporary structure required for the erection of a large building.

To emerge from the compulsive psychic state of unity within the tribe is an evolutionary necessity. This necessity requires the production of "individuals." It turns out to be a tragic necessity if the broader and all-encompassing concept of Man and the realization of an essential relationship between Man and the planet Earth are not impregnating and pervading the principle of individualism. The three greatest Spiritual Personages of the last twenty-five centuries — the Buddha (at the level of mind), Christ (at the level of the feelings) and last century Baha'u'llah, 1817-1892 (at the level of the actual organization of mankind-as-a-whole in a global society) — brought to human beings, who were beginning to emerge from local cultures into a global civilization, the message of world-harmony. It is too soon to be sure of what will happen to the Baha'i Faith which has already experienced some predictable transformations and will no doubt pass through others if it is to achieve its essential goal; but it is obvious that the message of both the Buddha and the Christ have been deeply misinterpreted and often totally perverted by Buddhists and Christians.

This was inevitable, for these great personages come to humanity when only the threshold of a new era of evolution is being reached. They are seed-men of the highest planetary type. They both close one period and open another.(3) Indeed, the seed can be said to kill the plant on which it grew and matured. The herald of tomorrow is new global Age of all human unity.

It is stated in India that the work of the highest Avatar, Krishna (as a statesman of consummate skill) was to bring together on the vast battlefield of Kurukshetra, in two opposing armies of equal strength, all the Warrior clans that had ruled India. The result was a battle of annihilation. The Warrior caste as a whole could not recover and the Brahmin caste henceforth assumed power. This made possible the great Indian Age of Philosophy which lasted in India until after Gautama the Buddha.

How similar this may be to the present world situation in which the opposing forces have taken the official appearance of the two seemingly antagonistic ideals of "individualism" and "collectivism"!

Indeed, the revolt of the youth may be a worldwide means to even out the power of contestants on the symbolic battlefield of Armageddon — which need not mean that we are facing a wholesale nuclear holocaust, for undoubtedly there are other possibilities. However much certain local regiins and populations of the globe may suffer from human or telluric upheavals which seem impending, the real battlefield is the mind of man. In 1915 Gustave LeBon predicted that ours would be a century of "wars of religion." I have long ago spoken of our conflicts as the Civil War of Man. It is a war of ideas; and the whole of mankind will be, and actually is already, facing its "moment of truth." And the one great truth we have to face and totally, irrevocably, accept is that "the individual is a path. Man only matters who takes that path."

Let me repeat that this does not really counter the deep urge in the youthful rebel to do his thing. It is the purpose, of the "doing" which counts; it is that to which it is related, that in which it is meant to fit. What matters is the spirit in which any man or woman expresses his or her self, the quality of the action. The confused youngster, revolted by what understandably seems to him the quasi-insanity of the society which is seeking often viciously to mold his growth, may not even really appreciate or understand what is essential and world-shaking in his longings and hopes. He is nevertheless, at least in a collective sense, the agent of a worldwide evolutionary purpose. He may be unconscious of this fact; he may be bewildered and strike in anger. But he holds the future in his hands; and if the hands tremble it is because his elders have heaped chaotic and conflicting notions upon his still adolescent mind and driven him to cathartic escapes.

Instead of condemning the chaotic elements in the youth's crisis, men whose mature age should have brought them a mellowed and objective wisdom, based on the often repeated facts of history, should work as companions with the brilliant young men and women who scorn the arid intellectualism of our educational "factories of knowledge" in a last-moment attempt at effecting a thorough reassessment of the very principles on which Western society was based. Officially and publicly the Establishment worships these principles, yet much of the time it acts in reckless and frightened disregard of the faith in Man, once embodied in terms of the social realities of the time.

It has been said that a conservative is a someone who does not believe that anything happened for the first time. But in our present period of worldwide upheavals almost everything is happening for the first time. Everything, therefore, needs to be reassessed. A century ago a tragic genius, Friedrich Nietzsche, asked for a "revaluation of all values." This was the time to perform such a revaluation. Now it is late already, very late; yet perhaps not too late. The first thing to reassess is our individualism and the false abstract equalitarianism which theoretically has been associated with it.

Unity Versus Equality

When all men and women will indisputably and irrevocably know that they are focal points from which Man operates in a multitude of functional aspects to meet the myriad of needs of the planetary Whole in which we live, move and have our being, then their experiences of unity should give a new meaning to the abstract concept of equality.

What do we mean by "equality?" Only "individuals" who are legal abstractions can demand an equally abstract kind of equality. The idea that "all men are created equal" begs the question: in what sense equal? Certainly not physically or intellectually. It can be only in the sense that all men have in common their "humanness." But to say that all men are human is a tautology. No two "persons" are ever equal, because persons are real concrete beings, and in existential terms nothing is actually equal to anything else in an absolute sense. Everything has a function to perform by virtue of the time and place at which it comes into a relatively individualized condition of existence. Every function is ever so slightly different from any other. All are important and necessary to the harmony of the whole. But by the term "whole" I do not mean here a particular local society jealous of its prerogatives and intent on maintaining and expanding a complex schedule of operation according to a rigid sense of value and self-identity.

The battle-cry of the French revolution in the late 18th century "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," is a most ambiguous slogan. Actually, it meant liberty from a tyrannical political and social regime, equality before a legal system that would not be subservient to vested interest, and the ability for all men and women to meet spontaneously as "human" beings instead of according to the codes of behavior of separate and antagonistic social classes.

At the time of any radical crisis of evolutionary unfoldment, certain needs suddenly attain a state of glaring prominence. They are the needs of the time and of the particular social-cultural, political, or religious situation. It is often merely a local situation, yet certain basic principles are most often at stake which can well have an all-human, worldwide relevance. They are proclaimed under particular pressures and stresses, yet the needs to which they answer may be so widely experienced in one situation or another by individuals and groups that the proclamation of such principles make history and are adopted as valid bases for action and social organization in many places, and perhaps — in theory at least — everywhere. But "everywhere" does not mean for all times! This is the central fact, though obviously it is not a fact acceptable to people who have been taught to take for granted the universality and the absolute validity of these principles.

Here we face a most fundamental question: Are there "absolute" truths? Is what the 18th century called — in reaction to the enforcement of Church dogmas during the preceding millennium — "the natural law" a fundamental reality for all times and places? I have discussed this question before (in The Planetarization of Consciousness, ch. 8 and 9), and if I bring it again here it is because it is deeply related to challenging the validity of the very foundations of a social system which has produced the dire, and perhaps eventually catastrophic, situation now confronting us.

The gospel of an individualism referring to free and equal citizens may appear to many minds as a social concretion of the very basic Christian doctrine that every human being is essentially a God-created Soul and that the "living God" dwells within every man. But, as I already pointed out, this is a metaphysical statement and it seems clear that — according to the very words attributed to him — Jesus apparently wanted to impel a few human beings around him to emerge from the social world still deeply rooted in a rigid tribal tradition and in the partriarchal system, and to proclaim to all men that the time had come for a total cathartic transformation, for this was the "end" of the archaic world of local cultures and tribal or imperial religions. Jesus refuted the basic premises of such a world, but he did not want to attack frontally the social consequences to which they had led — Roman imperialism as well as the obsolete doctrines of the Jewish Establishment of his day. He cared little for general social symptoms but greatly for their essential cause: the bondage to tribal consciousness. He sought to free a few emergent individuals who could respond to his vision of the future so that they, in turn, might go on freeing many others who might then be reborn in the "Kingdom of God".(4)

Except, perhaps, when he chased the merchants out of the Temple, Jesus did not fight openly against the old laws of the Hebrew tradition. He showed how secondary and quite inessential they were by stating that only one law mattered — the law of love and mutuality. If every man could love his neighbor as Jesus loved — i.e., with the quality of his love — then there would be no basic need for social laws and regulations. These would be only a social convenience in dealing with abnormal and sporadic cases. If all men deeply and totally realized in feeling and thought that they are one, the very concept of rigidly enforced laws and of equality before the law would become irrelevant.

The Western worship of the Law and the equalitarianism of our theoretically democratic society are necessary principles of social organization only because this society is thoroughly pervaded with an essentially anarchic and violent type of individualism. Western individualism is based on the demands and claims of the ego. It manifests as uncontrolled expansionism and pride, as greed for power and prestige, as competition for success and fame. It is rooted in egocentricity and in the frustrations of the ego. We are a society of egos, organized by power-hungry egos, for the greatest satisfaction of ego-wants. Such a society would be a chaotic jungle without laws and punishments. It could be a tyranny or a ruthless aristocracy if the principle of equality before the law were not accepted in theory at least. It is obviously not applied in practice even in the United States; witness the treatment of black people, and in general of the poor, and the multitude of devices that can be used by some people to evade laws.

If Jesus had prophetic vision, he no doubt could see what the ever-increasing individualism of men in future centuries would produce. He accepted this fact of evolution, but he tried to polarize it by giving a radiant example of all-inclusive compassionate Love — the Christ-love that by accepting identically all individuals, dis-individualizes them.

Jesus spoke of this love as the love that the Father had for him, and he had for his disciples (John: 15-9). It is a love which reveals to all men their oneness in the Father and blots out and absorbs their individualism. In the state of unity there is no need for laws as such, because there is essential unanimity. Jesus spoke of his Father. I have spoken here of Man. Perhaps it would be relevant to quote here a beautiful sentence written by the pioneering American philosopher Oliver Reiser: "When God is known he becomes Man." Human individuals yearn for God because they are often desperately seeking to surrender their egos as well as their fears to some great Power and Presence that would absorb and redeem them in His Love. The "Practice of the Presence of God" of which the medieval monk wrote so beautifully can become the realization of the constant Presence of Man, when the individual is about to cast off his individuality and emerge as a true "person," entering the companionship of all other persons who have realized, quietly but efficaciously, their place and function in mankind — and embracing more than mankind, in the still greater Whole of the Earth, in which Man is the capacity for "reflective consciousness."

In that realization there can be no sense of competitive equality, but instead a sense of "belonging" to a field of globally structured activity, harmonic in all its aspects. Harmony means literally "becoming one." It is a dynamic process of integral and integrating cooperation pervaded with a deep superconscious (rather than subconscious) feeling of unity.

We have seen that at the tribal level of group-organization, unity is a compulsive bio-psychic fact which no one can successfully challenge or fail to obey. At the individual level, unity means isolation, integration within the narrow and insecure boundaries of a psycho-physical organism controlled partly by automatic instinctual drives, and partly by an ego which itself is based on socio-cultural patterns usually acting as noisy brakes to these drives. But for the person who has realized fully his belonging-ness to the planetary whole, of which Man is the centralizing consciousness, unity takes the form of companionship, of a communion in seed-being. It is no longer only unity, but rather "multi-unity." And there is no one to compel, because unanimity can be reached. The particles — photons — have become a wave of light.

Yet there are differences: difference of function, of skill, of dynamic intensity, of specialized orientation. There is also inevitably an order of procedure and degree of wisdom, as there is in a Masonic Lodge. I speak therefore of holarchy. The principle of wholeness acts in every part. "Man" acts in and through every human being to achieve total multi-directional fulfillment at. several levels. Because of this there is harmony, and there is peace — a peace which passes the understanding of men proud of their own achievements — competitive and violent men torn by conflicts and for whom peace is only the cessation of war.

Jesus said: "My peace I give unto you." He must have seen what this would mean as his Love embraced the many generations of human beings whose exacerbated individualism and denials of love were to be the perhaps inevitable consequences of the Great Mutation leading us slowly from the tribal state of archaic eras to the still far-distant Age of world-harmony. This Mutation constitutes a "critical state" for mankind. But perhaps it is only a relatively brief phase of Man's total evolution, brief, that is, in terms of the total length of this evolution, as the crisis of adolescence is brief in relation to a fully lived human life. It can undoubtedly be a "tragic" phase; but we or our descendants may not have to experience the devastating possibilities which today seem so menacing.

It may not be too late for a collective and worldwide repolarization, but every opportunity lost by any individual today most likely will not appear again for centuries. Every new local crisis and every new conflict pitting individual against individual is an opportunity to break away from, to overcome or transmute some aspect of our dependence upon idols we have been conditioned to worship. Not long ago these great images and premises of our Western world presumably served as indispensable beacon lights orienting men's struggle against oppressive doctrines and self-complacent and self-perpetuating aristocracies; but now, in the hands of a new class of de facto rulers invested with awesome power, they have become tools to confuse our search and to bind us with sentimental attachments and poignant fears to the obsolete past.

Let each of us "do his thing," but let it not be a thing suffused with maudlin immaturity, sensuous idealism or a confused escape from reality. And by "reality" I mean here the new reality to which all of us, young and old alike, have now to give our all, if it is to emerge from the battlefields and the tortures of this age of blind or sadistic individualism into the quiescent splendor of a regenerated Earth. Let each of us do his thing, but concentrating on the "doing" rather than on the "his”! — joyful and at peace in the realization that it is Man that acts and achieves, through him.


1. It is perhaps unfortunate that a group of psychologists is now using the term, transpersonal, in the sense of "beyond the personal" and thus equates it for all practical purposes with "mystical." For some forty years I have used the word, transpersonal, giving to the prefix trans its most basic meaning of "through." I used also the word "transnational" in the same sense. The action "through"refers to the focusing of the consciousness of the One through a one. It indicates a descent of power. The example in the Christian tradition is the Pentecost.    Return

2. From olos, whole, and arche meaning "principle," or in a more concrete sense, "primordial order."    Return

3. In the Baha'i Movement, the Bab (1819-1850) is said to have closed the Islamic era and, after his martyrdom, Baha'u'llah to have opened the new global Age of all human unity.    Return

4. See Dane Rudhyar's Fire Out of the Stone: A Reinterpretation of the Great Images of the Christian Tradition.    Return

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