We Can Begin Again Together

by Dane Rudhyar

7. The Transformation of
Human Relationship

As a society and its culture constitute a symphony of human relationship, the key to a transformation of human society is a radically new approach to the quality, value and purpose of human relationship. The character of a relationship is conditioned by the level of consciousness at which the persons being related are able to operate and by the quality of their feeling-responses to what life presents to them; nevertheless, much depends on "what life presents" to these persons born in this particular society and molded since birth by its culture.

A musical symphony is based on the relationships between tones (or musical notes) which are acceptable to and traditional in a particular musical culture. The definite scales, the keyboard of the piano exist before the composer of the symphony begins composing. He is bound by them. Likewise, the men and women of old Europe, of Islam, imperial China or caste-dominated India could only relate to each other within often very narrow and rigid social and conjugal patterns, not only of behavior but also of thinking and feeling. It is these patterns that must be transformed. Today they must be transformed all over the globe. The change in the relationship of man to the Earth which we have just discussed has to be synchronous with a similar change in the relationship between man and woman, and between the members of various types of groups, especially the family group and all that derives from it.

Since the Industrial Revolution, and the more recent spread of electronic technology and automation, interpersonal and intergroup relationships have been profoundly altered. They have lost a great deal of their biological, emotional and social stability. They have become strained and disrupted by an exacerbated type of individualism. Whereas in the past steady and unquestioned patterns of relationships to a very large extent dominated the actions, feelings and mental processes of the related persons, now it has become possible for men and women to choose the character of their interpersonal relationships. Now that they can choose, they most often are emotionally confused if not distraught by their freedom, after they have enjoyed the excitement of rebellion and of what they called "liberation."

The real problem is not what to do with this freedom to choose the character of one's relationships, but how to be conscious of the meaning and implications of available alternatives. Such a consciousness may slowly and painfully develop in the rebelling youth or the woman fighting for new rights. This is the most common way, the experimental way; but it often turns out to be an embittering and tragic process leaving many psychological or even physiological scars. The same is true with regard to social, political, economic or cultural transformations. There is, however, a more steady and fundamental way; but is one which requires a steady, penetrating and persistent mind able to pierce through emotional glamor as well as authoritarian formalism, able also to become attuned to the rhythms of planetary and human evolution, and as a result to discover basic principles, valid for our time and world-situation, but also implied in the very nature of man.

The terms "nature of man" may have a familiar, too familiar ring. They have unfortunately been used in the past by eminent Western thinkers to limit man to the level of biological activities and thus to compel their followers to consider such an activity as fundamental in all interpersonal relationships. At the same time, both for socio-economic and religious reasons, man's biological functions have been hemmed in with an immense amount of restrictions and taboos and made to conform to rigid patterns of behavior and moral feelings. Some of these were, as we already saw, necessary during the long period of human evolution which I have described as "the Age of Scarcity." Others resulted from a dualistic approach to man's total being — man being believed to be an unstable compound of angel and beast, of pure divinely created Soul and animal body heir to a mysterious original sin. The very fabric of our present day Western society has been woven out of such concepts; and because we now are coming to realize their essential inadequacy and to see the deleterious influence they have exerted — as much as because of the material changes introduced by the Industrial and Technological Revolution — we are in the midst of a radical transformation of all human relationships.

It is quite senseless to attribute the change solely to material factors. These factors — our — science and its technology — actually were the results of the development of a new intellectual approach to the facts of human existence, of a new philosophy of life, of new discoveries by far-seeing minds, and of the spiritual intuitions and teachings of a few great Personages who illuminated the consciousness of mankind, yet whose ideas soon became distorted and materialized. Man as a total person operates at several levels, but he does so as a wholeness of being. Unfortunately some of the "higher" levels are not yet developed in the great majority of human beings, partly — especially in the Western world — because for many centuries human evolution seems to have been definitely intent upon the growth of an inner realization of individual selfhood — the "I am" feeling. It is because this process very soon became deviated by the pull of animal instincts, and confused by many a philosopher and religious organizer, that an overwhelming power and importance was given to the development of the ego. This in turn has led to the quite tragic state of affairs we are now witnessing everywhere.

The ego — as many psychologists now use this term — is a necessity at an early stage of the development of the mind, just as a scaffolding is necessary for the erection of a tall building. It is useful at first because it isolates and defines a particular area of consciousness and characteristic feeling-response. It excludes what might overwhelm and perhaps tear apart the nascent mind, what the still growing personality could not wholesomely accept. The ego limits by emphasizing differences. It sets boundaries; and without boundaries no field of activity can achieve self-consciousness. Boundaries, nevertheless, need not become fortified walls shutting out all forms of relationships except a few sanctified by religion and social customs. There can be open boundaries which become zones of interchanges with other people, and not only with kin or folk. And where the exclusivism of the ego — which breeds fear, possessiveness, jealousy and aggressiveness as a psychological compensation for insecurity — is no longer a dominant feature of the personality, human life can take a wholesome, harmonic character which has so long been denied to it in our competitive and specialized society.

It is this character of openness which in recent years so many youths have been passionately wanting and searching for. They have wanted it so much that they tried to break away from all traditional constraints and from family and socio-economic patterns of interpersonal relationships. They have sought liberation from ego-boundaries in psychedelic drugs, in promiscuous sex, in Oriental mysticism and yoga-techniques; and to provide a substitute for all they rebelled against — particularly for the bitterly resented rituals of family and business relationships which they saw empty, hypocritical and essentially meaningless — they proclaimed loudly the words "Love" and "Honesty."

The early “hippies” and "flower children" have had their day; their ideals have been materialized and vulgarized by publicity, bitterly fought by all the entrenched upholders of the social and moral status quo, and shamefully made use of by organized crime. Yet, with all its vagaries and naivety, this "Children Crusade" to free mankind for the life of love and sincerity dramatically forced upon the consciousness of a vast number of people, all over the world, the realization that the hour had come for a complete reassessment of the basic values and principles upon which our Western society has been built.

It is unfortunately difficult for most people to think in terms of basic values and principles, and also to sustain an attitude of protest against injustice, oppression and psychological or ecological pollution, unless they are most personally involved; even then, they seek and find ways of evading the fundamental issues. But we are all involved in the world-wide crisis of our society. We are all compelled to deal with new problems of interpersonal relationships; yet we stubbornly attempt to forget and to believe that somehow "things will work out." And "things" do seem to work out, as our leaders tell us complacently — for instance, the Viet Nam war and the draft, the cold war, etc. But the "working out" is but a sham. Nothing is really solved; because the essential principles are not touched. The makeshift accumulates; the pressure increases. The emotional intensity of the youth may seem subdued in its most overt forms — one cannot hit one's head too long against a massive wall of power. Yet the earth-foundations of the wall are softening.

There can only be one basic solution. A radical change in the fundamental character and orientation of interpersonal relationships. A new global concept must emerge, making clear for us how the working relationship between man and the Earth can be structured so that the natural propensities of the various types of human beings can find their optimal actualization in harmonic cooperation. What is at stake is nothing less than the total implications of man's existence as a social being and as participant in the organic wholeness of the Earth in which he occupies a responsible and transforming place.

Three Preliminary Steps

Such a complex multi-level transformation obviously cannot be accomplished all at once. For whoever feels the unequivocal urge to participate in and assist it, three preliminary steps should be considered. The first one is the vivid realization that the change is not only necessary, but inevitable — the only question being when, how and where it can begin most successfully. It is inevitable, because the very power of evolution on this Earth is back of it — or at least of any honest and genuine attempt to work toward such a fundamental transformation. The second step is to open one's consciousness and feelings (or "soul") to new images and symbols taking form within the collective mind of mankind — at first confusedly and as mere emotional dreams, but now ever more clearly in terms of structural principles (or archetypes). The third step is to try to make these new images fascinating to an ever larger number of determined and totally dedicated persons.

In concrete even if psychological terms, what we must do is: (1) help make human beings totally aware, dissatisfied and indeed shocked or nauseated by the inescapable outcome of the trends of our Western society; (2) offer to these people the means to avoid total despondency and the what-is-the-use attitude through the contagious power of a stimulating open-mindedness, of vivid realizations, of love and faith in Man; (3) devise imaginative and creative ways of dramatizing alternative possibilities of interhuman relationship by projecting by words, examples and deeds stirring new images of open and warm togetherness, and of cooperation with the Earth-rhythms, so as to "fascinate" people into accepting and actualizing them.

I am stressing the principle of fascination because in times of change or crisis of growth it is precisely what is needed. The very concept of "Divine Manifestation" (Avatars) is an expression of the fact that no man will make a radical change unless he is totally desperate or fascinated by the radiance of the example given by an extraordinary personage who embodies the quality resulting from having irreversibly taken this new step. The great Avatar indeed exerts an irresistible fascination for a more or less large group of devotees who leave everything to which they were attached and court martyrdom in order to follow Him.

When, some 120 years ago, the Persian Avatar, the Bab, was finally arrested and jailed by a fanatic Mohammedan clergy, he had several times to be moved at brief intervals to a new prison by the military because the prison guards would soon prostrate themselves in front of him asking his blessings, and the people of the village would gather day and night in front of his cell window to try to catch a glimpse of his face and worship him. He was finally killed and tens of thousands of his followers were cruelly martyred. Can one call such a power of spiritual-emotional contagion anything but "fascination"? Jesus, too, fascinated his followers who left everything to walk in His footsteps.

These may be extraordinary instances of the way in which a total change of heart and mind (metanoia) is induced by the example and radiance of a divinely inspired (or some will say, God-embodying) personage; but in a less crucial sense and at a lower level, the process of creative fascination operates not infrequently. We speak now of "charisma." Ideas also can be charismatic when given a compelling form. Ideals, for this reason, must be embodied into symbols in order to be truly effective.

This is, of course, the basis of successful publicity and propaganda. The means used by Hitler, Communist leaders and Madison Avenue ad-men are indeed means by which human beings can be fascinated into obeying implicitly a political leader's directions or buying produce which they do not need, but which they feel will enhance their social status or serve their laziness. The political and economic spheres always make use of deeply valid and necessary processes in the service of materialistic and most often destructive, because selfish, purposes.

I should add here that, if one tries to evaluate historically and in terms of a long-range social process the recent use of "psychedelic" plants or drugs — some of which were known to all cultures — one has to realize that it has served the purpose, conscious or not, of helping individuals to break away in revulsion from the patterns and concepts of an established society, or in the past from a deeply rooted primitive attachment to a particular race, soil and culture. The psychedelic contagion lost most of its significance because of the pressure of publicity, collective fashion and bored affluence in emotionally empty homes; but there is no doubt that it can be interpreted on the whole as the workings of a process of fascination which led to a forcible opening of new perspective and a confused, yet nonetheless genuine, yearning for a radical transformation of interpersonal relationships, and of the relationships between the individual and his social group, and between man and the Earth. Obviously other causes have been also at work in recent years; and all these urges toward a radical change have noxious and often very destructive after-effects or psychological shadows. But the shadow cast upon the Earth and the collective mind of mankind by our Western civilization and the use it has made of its technological skills may be the darkest of all — perhaps just because of its material achievements. Nothing, indeed, can fail like success.

The Transformation of
Person-to-Person Relationship

It is widely asserted by modern thinkers that in order to change a society its individuals have first of all to be changed. This is one of these ambiguous and half-true statements which can lead to a superficial, incomplete and ineffectual evaluation of what is involved in the process of social-cultural and political transformation. Obviously individuals must be changed, but how can they be changed? By overstressing this "must" one fails to consider the basic issues — that is, what constitutes an individual, and what are the results of focusing one's attention upon this assumed "individuality" of the member of our society.

The average person, in realistic and practical terms, is not an "individual," because he is actually the product of all the images and patterns of behavior, thinking and feeling which his family, his school, his culture and social group have forced upon him. If one needs a proof of this, one has only to consider the popular polls which of late have been successfully proliferating. What the polls prove is that if one selects a relatively few persons belonging to the most characteristic classes, groups and sections of a large population of 200 million people, the opinions of these few supposedly "representative" persons will tell us how this entire population will react or vote on particularly sensitive current issues.

What this implies is that human beings, even today in our theoretically individualistic society, do not react as individual persons but as specimens of the mentality of the social group to which they characteristically belong. In what, therefore, can they be considered "individuals"?

It probably will be said that there are nevertheless individual differences, but that they cancel themselves out when an entire group having a definite social, cultural or political orientation is considered; and this is the concept on which statistics are based. But statistics negate the existence of individuality as a causally significant factor. In other words, individual differences exist, but they cancel themselves out; therefore they do not matter when the final outcome of any process involving large groups and mass-reaction is at stake. If an individual person takes a strong stand in his society it is therefore expectable that another person will be moved to react in just the opposite way. Any act of political and even cultural extremism in one direction sets in operation another extreme action along opposite lines. College riots have led to violent reactions from parents and from the bourgeois trustees who cling to the status quo wherever found. Communism in Russia led to Fascism in Italy, which in turn sent American liberals to fight in Spain against Fascism, etc.

Nevertheless changes do occur. Opposite reactions do not cancel themselves out. The popular concept of "karma" does not tell the whole story; or else there would be actually no evolution. Some individuals somehow escape from the "wheel of existence"; which means, from the potentially endless sequence of action and reaction. The question is: does evolution proceed merely because these few individuals succeed through willful actions in breaking away from the ring of fate — or rather do they find themselves spontaneously released because they have opened their consciousness to the appearance of new and compelling "great Images" (or archetypes) — an appearance which follows a cosmic rhythm that transcends the individuality of the "liberated" persons and does not depend essentially upon the individual?

Such a question raises very metaphysical and psychological-ethical issues. It evokes the possibility of the existence of two levels: one which deals with the activities of human beings who are endowed with and have developed the power to free themselves from binding action-reaction (i.e., karmic) sequences, then another level — cosmic or transcendent from the point of view of individual persons — which refers to the gradual and autonomous unfoldment of archetypal Images (or Forms of existential relationships) since the beginning of the universal cycle to which our solar system belongs.

In other words, if this world-view is valid and, at least today, represents a functional and effective concept for a basic understanding of man and his society, we should realize that the problem of a radical social-cultural-political transformation cannot be solved only — or perhaps mainly — at the level of the individual person and of his activity, for another and transcendent factor also is operating. This factor is an evolutionary process which affects the whole Earth. Because of this process new possibilities of existence are periodically "released" (probably an inaccurate term!) in the planetary field of the Earth. They become available to mankind.

They may be available; yet the inertia of the human ego and of social institutions makes it impossible for most men to be aware of this availability and even more of the evolutionary pressure which thrusts these new possibilities of activity and interpersonal relationship upon the world stage. Only a few individuals become aware, because they have succeeded in developing an open consciousness and a sense of attunement to the very rhythm of evolution — which religious persons may call "the Will of God." These individuals are the true Seers or Prophets — the visionary creative artists, the inspired philosophers, statesmen or inventors.

The moment one accepts this world-view, the basic approach to our entire world-situation changes. The first task for those who accept it is to try to free their consciousness from whatever makes it difficult or impossible for present day individuals to become aware of, and illumined by, the new evolutionary possibilities — the new Images or archetypal Forms having appeared within the planetary consciousness of Man.

The important point here is that it is an issue of consciousness, rather than of action — and the most basic, most crucial factor in the process of world-transformation is not the willful action of individuals but the appearance of new evolutionary possibilities. Then, a further question arises: how can one "open" one's consciousness, become attuned to universal evolutionary rhythms, and envision the new "truth" or dharma of mankind? Many people will answer: through meditation. But the term, meditation, can be quite confusing, because it may seem to leave out a still more fundamental factor: relationship.

Every kind of personal transformation occurs through relationship with other persons. An individual alone in the world — if he were to survive — would remain what he is. Individual selfhood has inertia; the self tends to remain what it is until it becomes related to another self.(1) All changes come through relationship. This is why the Hindu Yogi or holy man who seemingly stresses in nearly absolute terms meditation in conditions of extreme isolation from society and insulation from most types of energies, nevertheless traditionally insists upon the need of having a guru, and later on, of being a guru. This means relationship. The chela (disciple) concentrates his total capacity for relationship — thus his emotional life — upon his guru. Therefore there is no denial of relationship.

The yogi does not either repudiate the process of thinking, which also refers to relationship at the level of mental images and concepts. He concentrates it. A time comes, however, when concentration changes into identification (union) or breaks through into an open state void of previous cultural contents, a state which in turn propels one into some kind of "rebirth" — which once more implies relationship, in a "new key!"

The devotional (bhakti) approach to self-transcending and self-transformation or transfiguration also depends upon relationship — a transcendent, yet total and exclusive, relationship with a divine personage, or even a haunting idea or Image. The quality of the relationships entered upon and worked out may be very different, from the most biologically compulsive to the most transcendent; but where there is a real and not only imaginary transformation — a mere subjective illusion — the transformation is always produced by the interplay, the tensions, the pain and joy, the tragedies and rebirth of relationship. And, let us not forget, hate is as much a mode of relationship as love.

The character of the transformation depends on the nature and the quality of the relationship. Therefore the essential issue today is a necessary change in the quality of the fundamental types of interpersonal relationships — including the most primordial biological relationships: man and woman, mother and child, brothers and sister.

As we are confronted with the inevitability of a collective and worldwide transformation, this change will have to be a very extensive one. It evidently has to begin with a few "pilot groups" — a vanguard of men, women and children. But it seems obvious that if these few are not essentially "agents" of a cosmic-spiritual power — the power of archetypal Images giving form to new evolutionary potentialities — they would not be able to transform our extremely vast and complex — society. Without a glowing and contagious faith that they indeed are "agents" and that through them a cosmic-transcendent power acts, their attempts at demonstrating new modes of relationship could only appear futile.

The facts are, however, that, even when what — at least in terms of the ideal being pursued — can be considered pilot-groups are constituted, the character of the necessary transformation of the individual basic relationships usually is not fully understood or insisted upon. I am referring here to the numerous recently formed "communes" of mostly young people who — having experienced the family life of our middle class, or the pressures of living in minority-groups, and often years of college — are seeking to demonstrate the possibility as well as the validity of an alternative way of life.

The determination and endurance of the founders and the members of many of these communes are indeed remarkable, and the entire movement, now worldwide though unorganized and indeed chaotic, is significant far beyond the superficial and biased characterization of the general public and the media. Nevertheless, few among the young people, or even the just "above thirty" leaders of some communes, have a clear appreciation of what may be involved in the necessary change of quality of basic interpersonal relationships — simply because for most youths the commune way of life is primarily a reaction against the mores of our present society, and an escape from conditions they considered unbearable, empty, boring and unhealthy. They are "protesting" in every possible way, by experimenting with all that was not acceptable in their families and social environment. They want strictly to do their own thing. They may accept a group discipline obviously dictated by the practical necessities of living together; but whether they deeply realize how what is being done can be structured and given essential value in terms of a truly new way of life applicable to at least large sections of mankind, that is another matter.

Sex and Marriage

The issue of "free" love and/or sexual sharing is a significant one because it touches what I called a moment ago "the most primordial biological relationships" — and is bound to affect crucially significant psychic and ethical overtones. There are communes in which no participant is allowed to refuse sexual intercourse with another of the opposite sex. Such an approach to interpersonal relationships evidently can be interpreted as a protest against the concept that a person "belongs" sexually and emotionally to another person; it may seek to emphasize the value of non-possessiveness — as also does the sharing of communal goods and usually considered personal objects. But in actual fact it may not necessarily have such a result, because all it may produce is a kind of devaluation of what is thus undiscriminately shared.

One does not transform the individual (or the ego) by totally repudiating it — or, as Christian Science does with reference to illness, by saying "it does not exist." It does exist here and now. It is an existential fact. What is needed is to transform the meaning, implications and character of this fact; and this means to relate it to a new and broader frame of reference.

To devaluate the sexual relationship by making it an impersonal factor in the life of a human being is not the real issue. It should be given a transpersonal meaning — a functional meaning, either in terms of the procreation of a child or in terms of the transformation of the consciousness and organic state of the participants in the intimate relationship, or in both terms. Because the relationship can polarize a descent (or focusing) of more-than-individual power and/or consciousness, it should be free from personal possessiveness; but this certainly does not justify non-discrimination, thus promiscuity. Possessiveness and jealousy result either from social patterns affecting the status, prestige and worth of the persons involved, or from their insecurity as persons — thus from the fear of losing an object upon the use of which one depends for tense and insecure self-enjoyment or support. It is this basic personal fear and insecurity which needs to be overcome, or rather transformed or transmuted. The fact of "belonging" to a small group which guarantees security and a basic, creative, exalting meaning to the individual person can wipe away the sense of fear in relationship in a way not possible in the narrower relationship embodied in our — marriages.

At this time, it is essential for everyone to realize that the — type of marriage is the product of very recent social and psychological conditions. The idea that a boy and a girl come together of their own volition to form a conjugal unit because they are emotionally and sexually attached to each other, and simply in the hope that life together will give them better opportunities for personal growth and happiness — and this without parental consent and any regard to the social and cultural aspects of the marriage — such an idea was the foundation of practically no marriage until perhaps a hundred years ago.

Throughout the known history of mankind, with few exceptions, marriage everywhere has been a social matter. In all cultures, the purpose of marriage has been to insure the perpetuation of a racial group, a tribe or nation with its particular culture and religion. Marriage was usually arranged by the parents or the elders of the tribe, often in the past according to astrological connections between two birth-charts, but most of the time according to the class, rank, wealth and social prospects of the two families which the marriage of the boy and girl united. In most countries under the patriarchal system, the girl did not choose her future husband, or at best was able to reject a suitor who did not attract her. "Love" was supposed to come after marriage — a natural kind of acceptance of a relationship which could not be officially broken, and which was the inevitable corollary of living in a particular society and of fulfilling a biological and cultural function in this society.

The possible strain of such a conjugal relationship was eased by the fact that the married people and their children lived in close contact with their families; indeed, in a nearly tribal state of existence often dominated by a matriarchal or patriarchal grandparent or great-grandparent. This quasi-tribal family status brought a real sense of collective security, at least in the aristocratic and well-to-do bourgeois families. It spread also the sense of interpersonal relationship to the group, instead of it being concentrated within the narrow walls of a conjugal unit operating today within a small apartment and encompassing so-called "individuals" — children as well as parents — each of whom is fighting for self expression and power over the others. Such a situation is in an ever-increasing number of cases psychologically unbearable — thus the spread of divorce. Even in mostly harmonious instances, marriage today can hardly avoid being a tense relationship, because it relates egos with different drives within a field of relationship — the small modern family — which has an unclear, often-changing and non-organic function in a society in crisis of radical transformation, socially and psychologically as well as economically and technologically.

This analysis of the actual conditions in which most marriages exist today is certainly not meant to imply that there can not be "beautiful" marriages, and that the tensions, frictions and conflicts between the participants may not help the maturing and the possible transformation of their egos, perhaps opening new paths for the development of consciousness. I am simply stressing the fact that this — type of marriage and constricted family-life is not traditional, hoary with age and substantiated by original religious doctrines. It is a very recent development, the result of our technological Western civilization. It is therefore inevitable and justifiable that those who repudiate what has happened to our Western civilization should likewise seek new forms of man-woman and man-woman-children relationships.

What any "commune" will do with regard to such a possible repudiation of the — marriage pattern, and to the development of larger, more inclusive relationships — perhaps freer because more widely open to the universe — this is indeed a very important issue. But it is not the only one concerning interpersonal relationships in general. What is most important is whether individual persons, deliberately trying to establish on a small scale "pilot groups" in which the value of new types of relationships may be demonstrated, think of relationships in terms of their ability to induce transformations in the related individuals, or instead in terms of these individuals' enjoyment or personal fulfillment. In other words, do these future-oriented groups focus on what should be done now to free and transform their participants so that they can be exemplars and leaders for a new generation — or are they attempting to build ideal conditions of existence for a few in more or less isolated spots? Are these communes primarily places for the training and testing of individuals who will assume responsibility as leaders in a collective human metamorphosis — or simply refuges and places of safety in which harried human beings may at last experience harmony and peace within a healthful natural environment?

The two approaches are certainly not mutually exclusive, yet they must polarize differently the basic attitudes of the leaders and the participants. The first approach is, in the unsentimental sense of the word, a "heroic" (or "metamorphic") approach; the second is essentially hedonistic — i.e., it seeks peace, happiness, love here and now — at least for the few that are accepted in the community. I believe that today the young people aware of what is involved in the heroic approach, and ready to adopt it for a very small minority. Most youths are still reacting mainly against traditional patterns and simply seeking to, find living conditions in which they can find what they felt tragically lacking in their family environment.

If, on the other hand, one considers the teenagers born in underprivileged minority groups, who have had to fight since birth against dreary social conditions, hostility and/or poverty, the situation may be different. They are ready to fight for justice, social equality and perhaps a violent revolution; yet in a great many instances, their goal is actually to achieve the life of abundance, social prestige and control over their exploiters, which so far they have been denied. They are not really looking for a basic all-human transformation, as much as for power and prominence in terms similar to those prevailing in this society they despise or hate. This situation parallels the one which, generally speaking, applied to the working class earlier in the century. Manual workers having obtained high wages and bourgeois comforts have shown that what they essentially want is not to transform our society, but rather to participate in its material abundance regardless of what the end results will be to mankind as a whole, to the Earth, and even to their own descendants. They have become so addicted to modern suburban living and showy cars that collectively they now constitute a strongly conservative force, sharply antagonistic to new experiments involving a radical change in the character and quality of interpersonal and social relationships.

Catabolic Emotions and "Seed Ideas"

The transformation of human beings has often been presented as the central goal of religion but in general it has been implemented and consistently striven after by only a very few adherents to the religious institution. In present-day Christianity the ideal of "conversion" is still the central topic in modern crusades among fundamentalist Churches; but what is usually meant by a religious conversion implies in most cases simply a change of personal allegiance to a different type of collective and institutionalized beliefs. The convert gives up his old set of beliefs which led him to practice a certain way of acting, feeling and thinking, and accepts another set. He may have been totally conditioned by his atheistic, socially aggressive and acquisitive, and intellectually materialistic, hedonistic environment; and he had acted in terms of such a conditioning toward social, economic and interpersonal relationships. Then someone he meets or hears, often in connection with a sudden psychological shock — perhaps the sudden death of a young child or a grievous illness — converts him to a religious way of life. He suddenly believes in a personal God, emotionally repents of his "sins," joins a Church (or some kind of religious institution) and tries — perhaps successfully, at least for a while — to change his attitude toward other human beings.

The opposite, of course, may be the case. He may become appalled by the superficiality and hypocrisy of the religious institution to which he was made to belong at birth, and he may join the ranks of "free thinkers," scientific materialist and atheists. He also, in this case, tends to adopt perhaps emotionally an entire set of collective beliefs. The present-day teenager who, also emotionally, rebels against the empty routine and the moral or intellectual hypocrisy of a typical suburban family, can also be said to experience a conversion. He repudiates his childish allegiance to and dependence upon the beliefs, the traditional feeling-responses and the ways of doing things of the social class to which his parents more or less rigidly belong. Yet, by joining groups of equally resentful, embittered or distraught youngsters he actually accepts a collective set of attitudes and behavior; he is caught into the swirling emotional group-atmosphere of rock music performances; he uses a special language, worships the same temporary popular idols and he joins his friends in their idealistic, even if superficial, involvement in the glamour of Oriental cults or Western magic. In most cases such a process of "conversion" takes place without a concrete and articulate set of beliefs establishing a clear direction. It is a "Great Refusal" rather than a positive Acceptance. It is, paradoxically, a collective kind of individualism. Collective feelings are emphasized — and most often in a beautiful, idealistic, perhaps naive and inexperienced way — rather than structured thinking integrating minds for a concrete purpose held in common. Aggregation is not organization. A primitive colony of cells clinging to each other in shallow water is not an organism. There is no truly consistent and centralized cohesiveness, and the centrifugal forces are still mostly unchecked by a consciously accepted common allegiance to at least a principle of organization or a relatively stable form of relationship. Such a relationship could mean some kind of "ritual"; it should embody, whatever form it may take, a particular quality of order in interpersonal relationships.

It seems difficult for young people to accept a principle of group-organization because they still too vividly remember their recent experiences with the traditional and now almost totally unconvincing "rituals" of family life, business, schools or colleges, and of course religious and political institutions. "Order" is a bad word for most teenagers, because it can hardly as yet be disassociated in their minds from the "law and order" fetish worshiped by the silent majority and its mummified representatives. Yet the issue should not any longer be disorder vs. order, but the quality of the order; which means the character of the basic principles of organization.

Love alone and of itself cannot be considered a structuring factor in concrete social living. Love is a quality which may pervade, illumine and polarize a structuring principle of an interpersonal relationship. If this relationship is by its nature impermanent, it can be illumined and exalted by a love which does not require structuring because its exteriorization is only momentary and, for some reason, cannot be sustained. But any sustained relationship needs a structuring principle for its manifestation. What is to be determined is the character of such a principle and of its concrete application. How it will be applied, the type of power required for its application, the balance between flexibility and solidity in these applications, and who or what will be responsible for the maintenance of this structuring principle: these are the issues that are basic in the working of any type of interpersonal relationship and relatively steady communal operation.

The structures themselves may be, and at the present stage of human evolution, should be broadly adjustable to rapidly changing and often highly confusing social and personal situations; yet the structuring principle can remain steady in the midst of external structural changes. It can far more easily and successively remain steady if the quality of love retains its pervasive and unifying character. Yet love is not enough. All kinds of crimes have been committed in the name of love and of great "spiritual" ideals. Possessive love is the greatest roadblock to human evolution. And beyond it stands fear and a false concept of individualism — that is, an unstructured feeling for a relationship which has no functional place within a greater Whole. This greater Whole is essentially mankind, or in a more abstract and transcendent sense, Man.

It is in relation to Man, and therefore to the present-day requirements of the evolution of mankind and the possibilities of all-human transformation, that any relationship of a permanent character should have meaning; and this meaning conditions the nature of the structuring principle that is needed at this particular time. Because we are at the threshold of an era of conscious and all-inclusive synthesis — sooner or later to succeed the period of antithesis, which in turn followed the thesis state of tribal society and its compulsive bio-psychic, unanimistic type of group-relationship — the quality of "love" must be emphasized in all group-organization. But it must be an unsentimental kind of love open to the universe, a love which the lover does not consider his own, for he feels himself or herself only an agent for the focalization of this cosmic power of integration. It is universal love focused in and radiating through a person's consciousness and the person's entire being. It is not "my" love or "your" love — and at the opposite end of the spectrum, one should not even speak of hate as my or your hatred.

Though it is necessary in all such situations to rise above, but also through, the facile and anarchic individualism which has plagued various aspects of Western civilization, this does not mean a glorification of what is understood today as collectivism. What is to be reached is a transpersonal attitude; and this implies a "descent" rather than an "ascent" of consciousness and power — the wholeness of the greater whole expressing itself through the focusing lens of the individualized person, and this expression being "love."

Yet, let me repeat, love is not enough. Illumined by this love the consciousness of the individual through which it is focused, if this consciousness has been prepared for the endeavor, should be able to envision the new structures which are required for the exteriorization among men and women of this integrative love-release. To "envision" rather than to "think" in terms of strictly analytical and empirical intellectual processes, or even of what may often be empty abstractions based on the play of words, this is the key to a type of organization which always seeks to deal with the part in terms of the whole — a holarchic type of organization.

Individuals as different in cultural background as Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin, and in a somewhat different sense, H. P. Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, have stressed the importance of "seeing," in an internal process of realization-visualization rather than intellectual and dualistic thinking. What the groping youth of our day needs to structure and concretize their often inchoate idealism and their yearning for a society pervaded with love are Seers, not intellectuals; but Seers who are able to think out and articulate their seeing, not dreamers of subjective dreams replete with the antics of self-symbolizing complexes, fears or neuroses.

The four Seers just mentioned — and others could be mentioned — all stress in different ways the need for a radical transformation of mankind. However, the techniques suggested, or implied in the context of the "seeing," greatly vary. For most occultists and Indian yogis, in order to experience and to maintain a radical transformation, one must "enter the Path" — a process of increasingly more complete metamorphosis, a "heroic" and inherently dangerous process for it implies a more or less rapid acceleration of what seems to be the normal evolution of mankind.

Sri Aurobindo emphasizes the descent of transcendent energies and new modes of consciousness into the total organism — soul, mind, body — of individuals who have become completely and irrevocably polarized by an unconditional self-surrender to this downflow of divine Power and super-mental consciousness — what he calls, following the tradition of the Tantra, the universal Mother-force. The pre-condition for such a self-surrender and transformation is, according to his teachings spread out in many books and letters, the total rejection of sex.

This is the ancient monastic concept interpreted in a rather new light. It is justified on several accounts, some relating to an "occult" approach to the human body; and it is fairly obvious that the usual type of sexual relationships present the great danger of materializing images and energies which have come into the consciousness from higher levels and of letting the super-mental or mystical experiences of persons striving for a radical self-transformation become blurred by the emotional whirlpools which very often develop in vivid sexual experiences.

It is questionable, however, whether a process of self-transformation through sexual asceticism can really succeed — except probably in very special cases of birth and environment — if practiced alone, i.e., as an individual; for it may engender very dark psychological shadows. It certainly can best succeed in the collective atmosphere of what the Indian calls an ashram, presided over, if not completely dominated (in a psychic sense) by a Personage with the ability to create around himself or herself a powerful aura of utter dedication to a task which has a collective as well as individual purpose. And I am not aware that such a condition exists anywhere in the youth movement of our highly disturbed period of transition between two levels of consciousness. In the monastic communities of the past a situation basically different from ours existed — and it may still exists today in a more ambiguous form — because in such cases the individual person is completely absorbed in the psychic atmosphere of a definite religious tradition. His search is conditioned by powerful images and symbols — the validity of which he does not question, even if in rare cases he may reach through and beyond them a quasi-imageless mystical awareness of "Reality."

Today the old images and symbols are being repudiated because the type of social-political-cultural results which man's allegiance to them has produced is clearly revealed to be obnoxious and self-defeating in spite of extraordinary outer material achievements. It may indeed not be the images' fault, but rather the fault of the human beings who distorted their meaning and applied their contents in a perverted way. But this does not entirely change the situation; for it is far easier to completely repudiate a tradition and the great symbols upon which it is founded than to carefully analyze where, how and why a society and its institutions have gone wrong centuries ago — and the lack of historical sense is unfortunately greatly in evidence among the youth of our day. This could be considered an asset in times of revolutionary upheaval, because it focuses the attention upon the here-and-now problem; but it can also intensify the over-emotional contents of an otherwise most legitimate revolt against the past. Indeed this is, in a sense, what happened when the early Fathers of the Church repudiated wholesale the heritage of what became known as pagan wisdom and claimed that the coming of Christ marked an absolute dividing line between the past and the future, with the exception of the Hebraic past which was seen as a prelude to the Christian dispensation.

Whatever may happen, the fact remains that such a repudiation of the patterns of the European tradition is polarizing our society, and that this polarization has been already occurring in the cultural fields for some time, as we shall presently see. The repudiation is, indeed, an inevitable preliminary phase of the process of transformation, but only a preliminary phase. What gives it meaning and value is what is occurring at another level, the level at which the "seeing" consciousness of what I have called seed-men operates. It is the function of these seed-men, by turning inward their consciousness and their energies first step which may involve or require in some instances an ascetic stance — to bring down into their illumined and seeing mind seed-ideas; that is, new images, new values, a new sense of order, new concepts of relationship, and so on.

These seed-men, however, bear a very special relationship to the cultural past which, at first, formed their mental and emotional development. They constitute the omega condition of this past which in them finds its seed-manifestation. The past, in their consciousness, has become transmuted, alchemized into a condition of expectant receptivity to the descent of new spiritual-creative energies and of new "words of power" which can act as fecundant agencies. But act upon what? What is there to be fecundated? Where is the soil into which the seed-ideas can be sown, so that the new vegetation in due time may arise?

Any fertile soil is always the result of the disintegration of once living organisms into potentially life-sustaining minerals. It is a chaos of elements. Such a humus for the eventual germination of seed-ideas is constituted today, as I see it, by the new communes in which so many youths of America are seeking what is not only an escape from the present-day society and its conflicts, but more significantly a place where their own cultural hang-ups can disintegrate. These communes constitute the potential humus into which the seed-ideas need to sow themselves.

This is the profound, albeit in most instances, unconscious reason why the dis-organized and dis-cultured youths feel urged to experience natural living and a close contact with the soil. They seek instinctively to touch, to communicate with the very depths of man's common humanity; and thus they are inevitably drawn toward all kinds of sexual experiences and all forms of love. A vast unformed openness to whatever can disintegrate the last vestiges of family attachments, and memory-remains of the most pleasurable features of suburban living, takes hold of their minds. They crave the negative equalitarianism of the chemicals in the soil. They dream of "unity," but it is the kind of unity exemplified by the inchoate condition of the unfecundated ovum — not even prenatal, but preconceptual. This, however, should not be called unity, for there is no unity in chaos or in the black topsoil ready for the seeds; but there is immense potentiality.

The symbol which characterizes this state is the Eternal Virgin — not the Mother. The Mother has been fecundated; her task is to help what was once potential to become actual. The Mother is bound to the Child. The Virgin is free, for she can be anything. She is in a pre-conscious and pre-ordial (rather than primordial) state. What much of today's youth seeks, paradoxically as it may seem, is to become "re-virginized" through total sexual freedom. It at least seems easier than asceticism; but the two processes are in fact the two sides of the same coin — as India and America, being antipodes on the Earth-globe, are two aspects of a bi-polar and potentially all-inclusive Reality. Every truth is defined by its opposite.

This is obviously only but the first stage of the great transformation which must be a prelude to the New Age. I once spoke of the true hippies as early Christians in a Rome without Christ. The catacombs were not only a fact but a potent symbol; today we speak of the Underground. Once this Underground rises to become the expectant humus ready for the seed-sowing, the second stage of the transformation begins: the descent of "seed-ideas." Later on comes germination — usually after a wintry period of storms. But there are also, perhaps, the equivalent of planetary and evolutionary "hot houses" over which winter has no hold.

Here in America the situation is very different. While the ancient Indian civilization had been disintegrating for centuries, the American aspect of the Western civilization is still today developing itself powerfully and spreading all over the globe, directly or indirectly, economically when not politically. Thus the rebellious youth of our country is separating itself from still expanding and conquering institutions, and refusing to accept both their enticements and their ever-darkening shadows. In this sense the parallel with the early Christians of the late first century A.D. is exact, for Rome too was even then more powerful than ever. Yet the poor, helpless, persecuted Christians won.

An all-human process of transformation is needed; but because the whole of humanity has eventually to be involved in it and more or less positively and consciously to participate in it, this does not mean that this process ought to take the same form everywhere. It evidently requires a deep and radical change in the character and the basic attitudes of the individual person, but the manner in which the process of transformation operates depends upon the relationship of the individual to his society, and of the society to the individual. What is possible in India now under very special circumstances is very likely not possible, or at least should not be expected, in America, and assuredly even less in Soviet Russia or Maoist China, or even in deeply Catholic or Islamic countries.

The problem confronting man at any time of history is how far an individual or a purposeful group of individuals dedicated to an ideal of basic human transformation — be it religious, cultural or political — can pursue their work in the midst of the society they seek to transform. Individual transformation, no more than individual salvation or individual liberation (in the Hindu sense), is possible except within certain definite and limiting conditions existing at the particular time and place of the transformation. This is why the timing of the individual's efforts is such an important factor. The power of any "solution" depends on the focused intensity of the collective need. The individual can never be separated from the collection; he can only transfer the center and focus of his activities to a higher or freer collectivity.

In the Bible we find the Prophets asking their followers to break away from a corrupt city or group. Paul demands of the Corinthians that they "come out from among them and be separate." (2 Cor. 6:16) and Jesus, speaking to his disciples, told them that, though they are in the world, they no longer are of the world. To transform oneself (metanoia) and to this end be separate: this is the way every great spiritual Teacher has taught and exemplified. Nevertheless, today, the future-oriented man may, and very often must, remain in this society — where else could he go that today would offer a social situation more open to the possibility of change? — but in his own consciousness he cannot remain of this society and experience an irrevocable metamorphosis. Indeed, he is most likely to experience this metamorphosis in the process of becoming separate from the basic elements of our American society, as these elements have developed.

During the Romantic period, one and a half centuries ago, the individual transformation was presumably not so closely involved in the social-cultural and religious-ethical situation, for this situation had not yet reached full maturity. Today the challenge to the whole society as well as to the individual is total. He who does not recognize and accept it has already begun spiritually to die.

But this does not mean that he must act for the sake of acting — passionately, wildly, without ultimate purpose, just in the hope that out of chaos some mysterious process of reorganization will emerge. It is man's supreme privilege and responsibility to be conscious at least of the direction in which he deliberately moves. One may justifiably "drop out" of a disintegrating or violently reactionary order into the chaos that intensely yearns for a New Order founded on harmony, all-inclusive relatedness and nonpossessive love. This, indeed, is to become "separate" — a positive kind of alienation. But this is only the beginning. One should become open, consciously so, to a fecundant Vision, not to visions of enthralling shapes and colors or dreams of illusionary paradises, but instead to a focused experience, or at least a penetrating and unquestionable intuition of a life-purpose which indeed separates one from the purposeless masses of mankind.

One must be ready to begin again, totally, yet wherever one is — to begin, revirginized, in a basically new relationship to society. If the way ahead is still unclear, and the best one can do is to press forward in faith and with courage, then one should be willing to accept the ego-less way of true "service" to whatever or whoever is opening a path through the jungle of human fear, doubt and insecurity — as the humus of autumnal woods welcomes the seed, promise of springtime rebirth.