*
THE DANGEROUS FORTIES IN THE LIFECYCLE OF HUMANITY
The Speed of Change
According to the generally accepted interpretation of recent archaeological and paleontological discoveries, the basic biological structure of what is now homo sapiens began to operate in the earth's biosphere several million years ago. As our modern archaeologists understand the prehistoric development of human races, the new evolutionary capacities inherent in this type of organization have been very slow to manifest. The number of human beings remained very small, and the tribes struggling with one another for survival on several continents did not differ greatly from animal societies. In the latter, a definite and often very strict kind of organization has always been at work, dominated by biological needs and the instincts required for their satisfaction; and various modes of communication should be considered real languages the language needed and effective at the level of animal consciousness.
One of the most basic differences between the human and the animal stage of living and experience may have revealed itself when human beings discovered the various uses of fire, particularly the possibility to use fire to transform materials so as to make them more satisfying. While all animals fear fire, human beings overcame this biologically rooted fear once they realized that the changes produced by fire could be not only welcome but deliberately used to improve human existence and generate a new form of power. After a forest fire, a nearly burnt animal may have shown the value of cooking living organisms, and perhaps the effects of extreme heat on pieces of matter on the ground may have suggested procedure which eventually led to the making of pots, bronze arrows, etc.
According to many religious and all occult traditions, however, the use of fire was actually taught by superior Beings, rather than discovered by ordinary men or women. But whether one scenario or another is considered believable, the picture generally accepted by the modern mind refers to a period of millions of years. During this time primitive societies succeeded one another until, some five to six thousand years ago, a clearly marked change occurred and a new type of social organization began to develop.
It is impossible to ascertain whether material changes in the conditions of life and new possibilities of interpersonal relationships impelled human beings to operate at a more complex, more differentiated and more inclusive level of organization, or whether the new societies took form because a sufficient number of people had experienced an inner "revolution in consciousness" affecting their personal and group approach to life and the world around them. The simplest answer is that the time had come for the drive toward a radical transformation to operate synchronously at both the societal and the personal-psychological (or psychic) levels, because a critical phase in the relationship of the principles of Unity and Multiplicity had been reached in the evolution of the whole planet.
The change was critical in the sense that it induced a crisis of transformation affecting all three basic aspects of human experience. It engendered new types of desires, new modes of energy (more societal than strictly biological), and new procedures for the actualization of the desires. These procedures were needed to cope with, interpret, and justify the subjective eagerness to handle, manage, and intellectually understand the operation of the new energies generated by the complex interpersonal and intergroup relationships developing in relatively large cities in which a centralized kind of power was becoming consolidated. The management of that centralizing power working on the products of human togetherness and social cooperation became the substance of politics and economics.
At the psychological-personal level, the centralizing process operates in the formation of an ego which, as we have seen, is the form taken by a human being's ability to adjust the relationships between the many drives of a human organism and complex societal situations in order to insure survival and the actualization of personal desires and ambitions. There are several points in history which should be seen as radical crises of all-human transformation: in ancient Greece, the rise of a rationalistic mind; at the same time in India the development in early Buddhism of an objective approach to the problems of human existence; then, 2,000 years later, European Humanism and the triumph of the empirical and analytical method of science. The changes in the thinking, the everyday activities and the feeling-responses of at least a minority of dynamic human beings representing the spearhead of human evolution have been far-reaching and presumably irreversible.
The speed at which they occurred gives them a startling character. Compared to the probable millions of years since the appearance of homo sapiens, the last five millennia, and especially the last two centuries, are mere seconds in the expectable life-span of a biological species. If we believe in the generally accepted Darwinian theory of evolution, what could have generated this sudden development of new or so far only latent mental faculties, and since the early Renaissance the nearly passionate urge to transform human living conditions by means of their application? Why did it not happen before? Was it the result of a basic change in the biosphere or the entire planet a change more radical than a glacial period? Geologists do not usually base their calculations on some planetary event so far-reaching that it could have affected so rapidly and irrevocably the very foundation of the way in which the human species operates. Was then the relatively sudden change predicated in the structural development of the human organism?
We can indeed find a parallel to what the whole of humanity experienced at a historical level if we observe equally rapid periods of development during the life-span of one individual human being. These normal and expectable developments can help us more easily to understand the all-human historical process and what it is meant to achieve.
Crises of Social and Personal Transformation
When a teenage boy or girl leaves a strictly religious family molded by traditions of the American South and suddenly finds himself or herself living in a very progressive university, the change can be shocking. The mind that fed mostly on Biblical imagery and beliefs suddenly has to assimilate materialistic and perhaps "far to the left" ideas. The shock can be even greater if, having shown unusual intelligence, a teenage youth from a traditional peasant European family has been sent by a wealthy American to study in the United States. Another kind of radical change may be experienced if a small-town lovely girl working at a menial job, is courted by a rich man and marries him. Her latent mental faculties may rapidly develop as she faces an entirely different kind of interpersonal relationship.
In the life of most human beings a change involving both biological and psychological readjustment can be expected after what used to be called the mid-life period. This is the "change of life," also spoken of as the crisis of the forties, or the dangerous forties. In many instances, such a crisis precedes the biological menopause in women, and it is often experienced, in some perhaps less-overt manner, by men as well as women. An ego-type of subjective consciousness and desire which had become deeply involved in biological experiences (sex, child-bearing, nurturing, etc.) may more or less suddenly feel or imagine that the years of biological youth are nearly gone and that a deep-seated readjustment is imperative, whatever one's conditions of life (single or married, with or without children, etc.) have been for many years. The development of a somewhat new type of ego may be the answer to the new situation. In other cases, an attempt may be made to transcend altogether the ego level as it manifests in our present society, and to align one's consciousness with that of pioneers in the development of a new kind of interpersonal relationship and/or societal organization.
In ancient cultures in which the life-span of a human being was divided into quite sharply differentiated periods, each with a definite meaning and function, the "change of life" after age forty often led to a basic alteration in a person's activities and feeling-responses. From a more modern psychological point of view, the change may not have such definite outer social or family implications and expected consequences, but it should be understood as a process of personal and psychic readjustment which to some extent polarizes what was experienced at the time of puberty; thus I have spoken of it as "adolescence in reverse." If the years surrounding puberty had involved a strong psychological or psychic crisis, this crisis may have a more or less related counterpart during the seven-year period from age forty-two to forty-nine. These years may witness either a tense, quite irrational and perhaps antisocial (or asocial) reaction against the set patterns of family and/or business which had dominated the twenties and thirties, or a kind of resigned acceptance of the life process. In the most positive cases, however, the crisis may be made to serve a conscious and deliberate process of transformation. The subjective desires and mental images of achievement of the individual person may be reoriented and made to resonate, however feebly, to the tidal rhythm of the Movement of Wholeness.
This crisis of the forties in a person's life may be significantly used to interpret in a broad and symbolic sense a corresponding period of tense and crucial readjustments in the long-term evolution of mankind. We are today passing through such a period. By realizing what is implied in such a correspondence, we may understand in depth, and no longer merely in terms of superficial symptoms (wars and revolutions), what has really taken place in the Western world, particularly during the last centuries. Humanity is experiencing a potentially drastic "change of life." It is experiencing it because the Movement of Wholeness on this planet has reached a new phase in the relationship of the two great principles which structure the evolution of humanity.
The correspondence is evidently not obvious if we assume the validity of the today generally accepted Darwinian theory, and we think of biological and human evolution exclusively in material and biological terms. However, if we do, we cannot answer the crucial question: Why has the radical change in the state of human society, of human thinking, and lately of the balance of forces in the whole biosphere, been so sudden and spectacular after an immense period of relatively slow transformation over millions of years?
Two answers may be given to this question. The first involves the entire planet as it moves around the center of our galaxy: the earth may have moved into a region where strikingly new energies or subtle substances are active. The second answer implies that our present humanity is only one in a series of successive developments, each of which brings out a specific range of the vast possibilities contained in the archetype MAN. Humanity was born and has been growing through definite age periods which roughly correspond to childhood, adolescence, and training for mature biological and social activity, then productive maturity. Now a crisis of transition, the "change of life" is being experienced. It may (yet need not) lead to one or two new age-periods.
If, however, we relate the sequence of age-periods in the unfoldment of an individual person to that of the vast cycles of evolution of mankind as a whole, we have to deal not merely with the birth, development, and gradual disintegration of particular races and cultures, but with altogether different types of human civilizations on more or less definable continents. We are dealing with what the most well-known quasi-esoteric traditions of our time have named Lemuria and Atlantis, and with the present spread of continental masses. Each of these stages of continental formation and the type of human beings having operated and now operating on them corresponds to one basic age period. Humanity, as homo sapiens, was "born" on Lemuria and there experienced its childhood; its years of adolescence correspond to the Atlantean period. With the gradual disintegration of the Atlantean regions (which may have ended around 8000 B.C., but had already started several hundred thousand years before), our present humanity began. Its geographical "heart center" is traditionally located in central Asia (the mysterious and invisible Shambhala), but its entire field of operation encompasses Eurasiafrica and, presumably, its geomorphic polarity, the Americas.
The present phase of human evolution therefore corresponds, in a global sense, to the period of maturity in a person's life-span (in general, between age twenty-eight and forty-two). The crisis of the forties, which presumably began several millennia ago, when large cities were built and a new type of psychological responses and ego-ambitions developed, has reached a virulent state particularly since the Renaissance, the growth of the scientific mentality, and the desires and expectations associated with the ideal of democracy and egalitarianism in all fields. Where the crisis will lead is evidently the most basic question one would want to be able to answer. Any answer, however, will be conditioned by the basic meaning one gives to the crisis; thus by the level at which one thinks and operates.
If the change is thought to refer primarily or essentially to the level of material productivity and socio-cultural and political developments, a tentative scenario for the future may be outlined. It may sound logical, but only if no spectacular cataclysm or all-out nuclear war occurs. One may also believe that the outer transformation of mankind implies, is caused by, or at least is synchronous with a fundamental change involving the way a person "feels-thinks" about himself or herself a person's self-image in relation to his or her place in the universe, or to God. Then one is confronted with a very different set of possibilities. Beyond the external social and material changes, one may perceive the rhythmic unfoldment of a process of all-human planetary transformation, one phase of which is gradually closing and another opening.
Rapid as it may be in terms of geological time, the transition may nevertheless take several millennia of historical time to be completed. Whether it is successfully completed in the foreseeable future should not be considered certain. The Greek (or Greco-Roman) culture was assuredly not a complete success. Yet it produced lasting results. It fecundated the minds of the pioneers of the Renaissance who reacted against the overwhelming power of the Medieval Catholic Order which had tried in vain to reproduce, at a new religious level, the material successes of the Roman Empire. European "humanism" led to the spontaneous but violent individualism of the Renaissance, and the struggle between gradually solidified nation-states, recalling on a larger scale the wars between Mediterranean city-states. Yes, "success" is evident if evaluated in terms of technological achievements. Similarly, the forty-year-old businessman or professional may find himself or herself in a solid social position; but his teenage children may have been arrested for the possession of drugs and require psychiatric care, while his marriage may be collapsing in meaninglessness.
Our present international world may be considered successful in what it has attempted to achieve at the level of consciousness and material welfare. But racked as it is today by psychic as well as economic conflicts, it probably has not yet reached the climactic point at which it will have fully to meet the karma of disharmonic collective efforts which produced the Industrial and Electronic Revolutions with their rapid spread over the whole globe. Whether this karma is successfully met may depend on a more realistic and complete understanding not only of the meaning of this "crisis of the forties," but of the state of being which may be at least partially reached by humanity if its planetary dharma is fulfilled, and if it moves to a new level of consciousness and activity. Our problem is indeed to realize what is possible, however lengthy the process of actualization. We need an ideal to orient our efforts.
Such an orientation may be obtained in an unexpected way if we study and really understand what the ancient system of organization in India, the Laws of Manu, established as basic periods of development in a human life. The fundamental meanings of these periods have often been misunderstood, especially insofar as the two last ones are concerned. Throwing a somewhat new light upon them should illumine our present human problems even if what is suggested may hardly seem possible in present world conditions. Conditions, however, must change.
The Hindu Stages of Life
According to the traditional Hindu doctrines, the full natural life-span of a human being is normally divisible into four stages (ashrama): brahmacharya, grihastha, vanaprastha, and sannyasa. During the first stage, the child and adolescent develops his or her innate capacities as a member of homo sapiens and of a particular culture, family, and social class. This brahmacharya process is twofold: generic-biological and cultural-mental. It ends when the human being, having "come of age," marries and devotes all that he or she has built to the perpetuation of the sociocultural and religious order according to the function that his or her birth-situation has determined the person's individual share in the karma of humanity.
During the second stage, grihastha, the mature being and the spiritual identity behind the physical embodiment are drawn into a series of organized productive activities, biological and sociocultural. These in most cases entangle the person in a web of desires and commitments in sexual satisfaction, emotional attachments or repulsions, nurturing and educational activities, and a variety of "business" operations whose central motive is the accumulation of profit. That the drive for profit operates at all levels, even those generally assumed to be spiritual, is a fact many aspirants to "higher" stages of being often ignore. During this second life-stage kama (the power of binding generic and collective desires) dominates the consciousness.
The transition from this "householder" (grihastha) stage, intent on productivity and profit at whatever level it might be, to the third stage (vanaprastha) constitutes the basic "change of life." It implies a radical reversal of the polarization of consciousness, a change from extroversion to introversion, and a reorientation of the desires, motives, and essential character of one's activities. The timing of the change has been given as when a man can see the face of his newborn grandchild. In societies where marriages are usually early, this could mean the beginning of the forties. The grandfather is then expected to enter into a new kind of relationship predicated, at least in many cases, on leaving the family home, giving the direction of his business to his son, and retiring to the forest surrounding the village or town.*
*ln the ancient Brahmanical system no mention was made of the development of woman according to such a pattern of life-span.
This third stage of life is called the "forest-dweller"; but the term leads to a misunderstanding. While the forest-dweller may have given up his family home and his personal business or occupation to live in retirement in the simplest possible way, he is also able to participate in a non-personal manner in the affairs of the entire community. He may become part of the Council of Elders, or serve in whatever capacity his personal life has trained him for. He serves the Whole of which he sees himself a part, but without remuneration. He has given up the profit motive and (theoretically or gradually) the personal ambition motive. Thus the traditional keynote of this third life-stage has been "sacrifice."
However, we have to understand that any action totally dedicated to the service of a greater Whole without any desire for profit has a sacred character. It is consecrated. The process of consecration should result from an internal or introverted experience of the reality of the life and power of that greater Whole. It normally requires that the structure and purpose of the tradition on which the operation of the Whole is based be studied and understood in terms of principles. These may be symbolized in religious, theological allegories (as in the Hindu puranas), or presented in their more abstract, metaphysical forms. Such a consecrated activity which no desire for profit incites and sustains is transpersonal. It is activity through a person but "in the name of" a Whole of which the person not only knows himself or herself to be a functioning part, but has proven to others his ability to perform that function.
A fourth life-stage may begin when even that condition of existence and level of consciousness are transcended. This is the state in which the sannyasi lives, moving over the land, beyond any attachment to any particular community, focusing wherever he or she goes what, for the traditional Hindu mind, is the light and love of the Supreme Being. Quite evidently, such a stage was, and is even more today, reserved for but a few rare human beings, women or men. In other cultures, such beings were said to have reached the Age of Wisdom which, in principle, was often related to the years after sixty.
When one deals with what is historically possible today for humanity as a whole, the transition toward such a fourth life-stage has to be considered a remote ideal. It refers to what H.P. Blavatsky evoked for a far distant future as "a humanity of Christs and Buddhas." Sri Aurobindo spoke of such an all-human stage as a "Gnostic humanity." Yet the situation mankind is now facing may be interpreted as foreshadowing the beginning of a crisis of transition which should eventually lead from the stage of productivity and profit to that of transpersonal service to the "universal Community of Mankind" (Thomas Jefferson's term). Such a transition may be successful, but it need not be. At the present time it certainly is proving difficult and dangerous. To think of it in terms derived from an old social and religious system may not help the situation. The extreme complexity of the interpersonal and international relationships acutely stressing the profit and success motives has brought to a critical, feverish pitch a restless drive for new types of thought and action. These are likely to demand palliatives and to produce antidotes along socially regressive lines. These in turn may incite violent revolutionary activities, adding new discords to a dangerously tense situation.
The ancient Hindu approach to the development of personhood and to one of the most basic crises this development may produce in a foreseeable future is certainly not to be considered a workable global solution; yet it could suggest the direction in which a rather unexpected possibility of transformation of the human situation may occur. It is at least a possibility open to individuals who have become aware of what is implied in the concept of "profit."
The ability to make a profit from an activity or process one has undertaken is not merely a concept dominating the collective mentality of any self- consciously democratic society, but in most instances it is an ever-present goal and a hoped for daily experience of the purpose of living in such a society. This ability to make a profit occupies a central position in a democratic culture because such a way of life is oriented toward "success," and success is evaluated in terms of increase in material possessions and/or social prestige and credit-worthiness. This in turn implies an individualistic approach to interpersonal relationships, and the attribution of a basic importance to the ego and its development in a family and school environment.
Service Versus Profit
An individualistic society is today a profit-oriented society, because the profit-motive is attached indelibly to the current concept of individualism and even of what is ambiguously called human rights. The individual is, as a matter of course, expected to make profits from his or her activities; and profits become the "possession" of the individual acquirer. To possess is an extension of to be; it is the proof of being, even if it refers only to the "possession" of a body. The use of the body brings profits to the being who, as an individual subject, "owns" that body a source of potential energy. But the subject has to feel somehow separate from the object he possesses if he is intended to use it. Use is understood in terms of acquired profit to the person identifying with his or her central reality, the ego. The ego I myself. Peter or Jane is the central reality in a society still dominated by an eighteenth century kind of abstract individualism, because the ego's ability to make free choices is considered the essential factor in any truly human situation. The mention of "free choice," however, is quite meaningless, unless one states the motive for the choice, and what factor in the total human situation is intended to profit from the selection of a particular approach and practical strategy.
If the human situation as a whole is clearly and irreducibly centered around the goal of increase in power of an "I" whose mind operates basically, if not exclusively, in terms of profit and increase of power over one kind or another of external entities (things or persons), the social environment which permits or glorifies such a centering inevitably operates in terms of an individualism whose end-results can only be nefarious. At an early stage of the development of personhood, and as an effort to emerge from the psychic matrix of mother and family, this ego-type of individualism is presumably valuable. But the state of relatively autonomous and self-assured egocentricity to which it leads, if considered an end in itself and given an abstract and statistically measurable value, is inherently negative and the beginning of a devolutionary process.
The ancient Manu system of personal development was open-ended, for it gave a definable termination to the period of profit-making in an interpersonal, social context The end was made biologically evident not only by the aging factor, but by the emergence of grandchildren. Similarly, according to the early Greek tradition, grandparents were (in a broadly human and evolutionary sense) re-embodied in their grandchildren. The evolutionary rhythm, however, was not reduced to the biological level because, at least in India, a fourth stage of life was possible the totally open-ended sannyasa ashrama. There was no theoretical end to such a condition of being, except an undefined and indeed undefinable state of samadhi. At the sannyasa level even the thought of profit and social success could not appear. The sannyasi's way was based on the daily experience of total service, first to the village-community where he had religious as well as biological roots, then to any larger community that could be served, but served in a transcendent spiritual sense rather than in organizational communal terms.
What is to be meant today by the word service, which has been so deprived of real value in a human, personal sense, and mainly applied to complex machines so complex indeed that they repeatedly require "service"? Can the word also be used with reference to the work of professionals or semi- professionals whose highly valued function today is to repair individual persons and help them to operate more smoothly in different interpersonal situations, or to deal successfully with crises of radical reorganization? An average person who has gone through the often intensely disturbing process of ego-differentiation and youthful self-assertion may indeed be considered (at least from a strictly psychological point of view) a complex psychic mechanism whose operations have been thrown out of balance by the disruptive pressures and unnatural demands of their environment. Service can also take the form of a special relation deliberately established by individuals who are self-dedicated to the attainment of a normality-transcending state of existence a relationship linking them to more-than-human beings already operating in such a planetary, super-cultural, and transpersonal state.
In the past, a pre-democratic, pre-American, and now pre-electronic way of living often had a highly significant place for "servants" who belonged to a class socially inferior to the aristocracy of power, wealth, or mind. Service, in this sense, implied a "vertical" relationship, the less evolved or socially favored persons being related to individuals operating at a "higher" social level.* This relationship, however, could in principle function effectively and happily both ways, bringing indispensable benefits to both levels, though evidently servants were often abused, mistreated, and humiliated by the persons served. Nevertheless, unwholesome and degrading possibilities in the working out of vertical relationships should not give an intrinsically negative meaning to this type of relatedness. We should instead understand that at each level where vertical relationships operate, they assume a different character. The vertical relationship of cells to the whole biological organism in which they almost compulsively function differs in nature from the equally vertical relationship between a citizen and its government and police force, even in our egalitarian socio-cultural system.
*The existence of vertical relationships according to a holarchic (rather than merely hierarchical) philosophy of being has been discussed in Rhythm of Wholeness, Part Four, chapter Twelve, p. 197.
The principle of service is also given a new quality in the possible but as yet rarely actualized relatedness of an individual person to the Pleroma and, in a still broader sense, to the Earth-being as a whole. At these transpersonal levels also service has a realistic meaning only if substantiated in concrete situations. It does not merely refer to ideals having the diffuse emotional character of the common type of religious devotion.
The transpersonal service relationship operates through the individually structured selfhood of a human person, but its motive is beyond the person. It is not pre-individual, as are many "religious" (or bhakti) feeling-responses, but individuality-transcending. The "Master" does not make personal demands of the "servant," because the former is no longer a person, but one of the two poles of a relationship whose essential purpose is the neutralization of karma. Any desire for, or even thought of, profit would negate not only the effectiveness but the reality of this kind of vertical service-relationship, because such a desire implies the inability to let go of the personhood frame of reference. The Pope calls himself "the Servant of the Servants of God"; but if what is being served is a personal God who demands tributes or sacrifices of one kind or another, the service-relationship is still pervaded with a feeling of profit, unconscious though it may be.
The making of profits can of course be the main aim of the activity of a collective person a business corporation, a social class, a religious institution, or a nation. Where the profit-motive appears, in however subtle and pseudo-spiritual or altruistic a form, service is associated with productivity. The personally focused desire to produce results belongs, however, to the "householder" and, to a much lesser extent, to the forest-dweller stage. A true sannyasi no longer desires results. He or she is simply a wind of transformative power scattering seeds. The sannyasi serves the Movement of Wholeness. The Movement acts through him or her. Service, in that sense, is translucency. The true "server" is an unhindered beam of light. Beyond personhood and planethood, he or she reflects and to some degree embodies the quality of starhood, though the source of the stellar radiance, may still be very remote and easily obscured.
The type of service implied in the third life-stage (vanaprastha ashrama), which theoretically follows the crisis of the forties, should not be understood solely as a vertical relationship, even though it involves the relation between a person and his or her whole community. The transition between the "householder" stage (oriented toward productivity and profit, and largely controlled by the ego) and the "forest-dweller" situation requires a readjustment of the horizontal relationship between the aging producer and the other members of his family and community. A non-ego-conditioned relationship from which the personal drive for profit and the desire to control the behavior of other people have been eliminated is still a horizontal relationship; nevertheless it moves in the direction of a new kind of achievement, that of a consensus. Competitors come to accept compromises. They may do so in terms of an extensive process of reorganization whose end-purpose may be the actual transcendence of the individualistic profit-motive.As this motive is being transcended, another quality of relatedness is likely to emerge from the harmonizing of the separate ego-wills. The individual producers may realize their joint involvement in the economic and political health of the community in which, until then, they had operated with their own profit as the only goal. As this occurs, the individual accepts and comes to desire vertical relation to a greater whole, the community, more than any horizontal relationship. This community, experienced at first as a physically objective reality, sooner or later may become not only a psychic field in which interacting personal desires still conflict, but an integral mental-spiritual organism. In due time this organism will be known as the Earth-being, and practically all limited relationships will be absorbed and transfigured into that one all-inclusive relation. Then the once conflicting ego-wills of self-assured individuals, having learned to achieve consensus, can function as distinct but centrally unified "agents" of the planetary whole in a condition of interpenetration of consciousness.
At that stage consensus becomes unanimity. Individualized forms of consciousness interpenetrate. The participants not only "sense" (or feel) together; they realize that one "Soul" (anima) operates through their differentiated fields of being. Individual or group minds may differ as to policies and methods; but these differences chord into a total resonance in which the needs of each and all are met. They are met by being transcended in a deeply-felt acceptance of the karma, to the neutralization of which every different person contributes in his or her own way.
This unanimity state may be reached in limited groups or religious communities when what other people would call a Utopia becomes, for the interpenetrating minds, a concretely perceived Presence and the effective fulfillment of a totally shared desire. But unless some drastic events occur which both radically alter the present conditions of life of mankind and enormously reduce the numbers of human beings, one can hardly think of this future stage as a practical possibility. Today, unanimity is most often totalitarianism in disguise.
To reach unanimity in any true and realistic sense, human individuals have to pass through the consensus stage which is now slowly developing. But even that stage is usually encumbered by the ghostly presence in memories of long-held individualistic opinions and egocentric profit-motives fighting crudely or surreptitiously for control of the group-situation. A significant and effective consensus is only reached when the situation being faced is felt to be of the utmost seriousness. What the consensus may reveal, however, is the unwillingness of the participants in the decision to interpret what is occurring as the indication that a radical change of attitude has become imperative.
Many human beings today are more or less clearly aware that such an indication is evidenced by the catastrophic possibilities inherent in the pollution and chemical transformation of the biosphere and stratosphere, as well as in the international war of nerves and the starvation of millions in many overpopulated and mismanaged countries. But many people, especially in developing countries, insist on believing that the Industrial and Electronic Revolutions are historical phases of a typically human kind of growth. They assume and want to assume! that the difficulties such phases have engendered can be solved without a basic reversal of personal or sociocultural attitudes. A thoroughly technologized and automated society moving faster and farther away from the archaic state of a primitive mankind bound to natural processes provides they believe the effective solution, if uncompromisingly applied. In their view, a worldwide consensus is undoubtedly needed, but we have all that is required to reach it if we keep talking, taking chances with unemployment, starvation, and limited wars, muddling through relatively small crises, and thereby avoiding the big crisis nobody wants to face or even less to understand.
According to the philosophy of Operative Wholeness, as long as the linear ideal of "progress" the nineteenth-century god! is not superseded by or integrated into a holarchic concept of rhythmic unfoldment, a crisis of reorientation of activity and revaluation of desires a "change of life" will be needed.
A vague psychic feeling of what is needed, not only for individual persons but for the whole of mankind, may be the unconscious or semiconscious cause of the recent publicity in the United States given to Christian "conversion" and "born again" experiences. Yet this emotional sentimental "return to the Mother" - which does not seem greatly to alter either the everyday way of life and social ambition or the drive for personal and group profit of those having experienced it has little to do with the transition between the Hindu "householder" and "forest-dweller" stages of life. What is needed is not a return to anything, but a basic shift in the frame of reference in which the ego and its profit-oriented mental processes operate. Such a shift occurs when the drive for productivity and profit-at the psychological as well as the material level is replaced by an uncompromising readiness to serve the requirements of the greater Whole, and to do so in terms of the most basic principles of organization the mind is able to understand and act upon.
Fundamentally, this greater Whole is the human situation on the entire planet; but few persons are called upon or able to deal with it in terms of the complex interrelatedness of all the factors involved in it. The important point is not how large the scope of the possible service and the field to which it can apply actually are. Rather, it is whether an individual human being believes himself or herself to be an essentially free and independent subject separate from the situation in which he or she is involved or whether the person consciously and deliberately attempts to deal with it and all it implies as an operative whole. Does an "I" exist outside the total experience, or is not this "I" an intrinsic part of the situation a part to which a confusing or illusory meaning is given if it is taken out of the complex interweaving of factors which, in their togetherness, constitute this situation?
This entire book refers to such a question, already posed in the first chapters. The answer being suggested is that the primary or essential reality of "being" is a cyclic series of interrelated whole situations, rather than a Gnostic drama of the Pilgrimage of an immense number of Souls. Such an answer, however, is only significant when it is made vibrant with a new approach to human experience. It is not sufficient to assent to it intellectually as a philosophical imperative. The change should be lived through in the depth of personhood.
The power of such experiences can and usually should be very profound and moving. It has to be met fully, unreservedly in all its consequences, as well as understood in its deepest roots. This requires not only a total commitment to all aspects of human experience. It demands a mature, courageous, long-sustained mind the mind of wholeness.
It is always possible for anyone to take the first steps on the way of vertical relatedness to the Earth-being. These steps have to be taken in the concreteness of the opportunities and challenges of the state of personhood. We are all concrete persons. We are concrete individual solutions to ancient failures, reawakened as karma in the consciousness and activity of the Earth-being. But in the facing of this karma, what was at first only a karma-neutralizing possibility may engender the clear realization of the place and function that each autonomous human being, in his or her individual selfhood, already potentially occupies within the planetary Pleroma. This place and function is the individual Soul of the human being as it could operate within the whole planet's Commonsoul, thus fulfilling the archetype once created by Hierarchies of the divine Mind. It could operate in this way. The place and function are here. The potentiality is present Why does the process of actualization seem to require "so much time"? The reason is that it is time. It is the waiting. Yet, even more, it can be the doing one step after another. We may refer to these steps as a series of lives, incarnations; but it is one process.
Of this process we, as embodied persons, should ask nothing. No profit is involved only to "walk on" with the rhythm of the Movement of Wholeness beating within our heart and mind, peacefully, in uttermost simplicity. This rhythm may be difficult to hear, yet it can absorb the many raucous or exalting sounds of personal relationships into the vibrations of a silence in which Wholeness experiences itself, always and everywhere.
The crisis all human beings face is a crisis of belief. Ineluctably, crucially, even if imprecisely, one great question arises out of the challenges of one situation after another: what is possible? Sooner or later, anything is possible which a focused, resolute will starts without demanding of any situation that it, and no other, actualize the potentiality. The presence of Wholeness is implied always and everywhere, at whatever level of reality a whole situation operates. But it has to be the whole situation, not merely "I" assuming the role of the experiencer and asking for profit or "spiritual" growth.
The Fullness of Human Experience
