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Directives for New Life by Dane Rudhyar.

DIRECTIVES FOR NEW LIFE

Dane Rudhyar

First Published
1971



This long out-of-print booklet essentializes much of the material from the larger volume We Can Begin Again - Together. Written in response to the pressing needs of the emergent "counter-culture" of the 1960s-70s, this engaging short work explores the deeper side of issues dealing with individualism, group and interpersonal relationships, education, ecology, social activism and more.


DIRECTIVES FOR NEW LIFE










Directives for New Life by Dane Rudhyar.

Chapter One
A Reassessment of Individualism and Freedom

Men, women and children living in the Americas, in Europe and in many lands once colonized by Europeans are thinking, feeling, behaving and experiencing in terms of the basic concepts, feeling-responses, attitudes and beliefs of "Western civilization." Whether they are aware of and like or dislike this fact, they live within Western civilization as much as fish live within the ocean; unless they have made sustained and often strenuous efforts to at least partially emerge from it, in so far as they are able to do so while still inhabiting the countries dominated by the Western way of life and its laws.

Why should one want to strive after such an emergence, or as people say today, to "drop out"? Obviously because one is dissatisfied, or even appalled by the conditions of existence today and the prospects of a further development of Western ways of thinking, feeling and behaving — and especially by prospects of an increased control of everything by scientists and technocrats in association with the so-called "industrial-military complex." Problems related to the growth of the corporate state, of industrial production and forced consumption, of population explosion, etc. — plus the possibility of an ecological disaster or of nuclear and biological warfare have been analyzed convincingly in recent books. Attention has been paid to the rise of a "counterculture," to its causes and its present day characteristics; but these studies do not go far enough. They do not thoroughly and clearly deal with what is basic in Western society and its official culture; i.e., with many things which even young rebels still take for granted, yet which, if they remain as they are, make a truly new society or "New Age" humanity practically impossible.

Above all these books do not present fundamental principles upon which such a new society should be built, and they say little about how we today could start giving a constructive form — tentative though it be — to these principles.

This is therefore what remains to be done. And the first thing is to make up our mind what our attitude toward Western civilization as a whole should, or can, be today. This Western civilization means that we have to answer a basic question: Is the present period to be seen as one of readjustment, following the rise of electronic technology and related scientific-industrial procedures — a period which can and hopefully will lead to a glorious technological future; or else, has our Western civilization already proven obsolete and catastrophic because of its misuse of the powers generated by the evolutionary development of the human mind?

In other words, should we try to work within its present structures (social, economic, political, religious, cultural) hoping to transform them radically by pervading them with a new spirit — or is it not more constructive to try to start work on the preliminary phases of the building of a new society?

This does not mean that all the values and achievements of Western society should be repudiated and forgotten, but that new foundations of human thinking, feeling and behavior should first be established. After they are established, at least in seed, then we could use these Western achievements, but only for a specific, limited and controlled use.

But what do I really mean by Western civilization? Our answer in this small book will have to be very brief. The beginnings of Western civilization can be traced to around 600 B.C. — the time of Gautama the Buddha, Lao Tze, Solon and Pythagoras in Greece, Zoroaster in Persia, and also of the destruction of Jerusalem, the beginnings of the great Persian Empire under Cyrus and of Republican Rome. I have called this period that of the Great Mutation which put to an end the Archaic Ages. It marked the (at least external and social) beginnings of a process which stressed in man the development of the consciousness of being an "Individual," relatively free from the until then quasi-absolute domination of the all-enveloping tribal psyche with its traditions and taboos.

In order to become an "individual" man must develop an analytical and objective mind. He must give up his quasi-infantile dependence upon tribal religion, ritual and tradition. He must not only think for himself, asking endless questions, analyzing every claim to authority with a keenly analytical mind, but he must also feel and act with self-reliance, self-confidence, and at least relative originality. If he does not, then he is not an "individual"; but only a "specimen" operating according to collective traditional moulds.

The nearly worldwide, even if uncoordinated, Movement of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. became perverted in many ways. As a compensation for its intellectuality and its use of the new mind as a servant to old emotions and social ambitions, we see emerging in the first centuries B.C. and A.D. religions of compassion and love — mainly Mahayana Buddhism in Northern India, Christianity in the Mediterranean world. And Christianity too became perverted through over-dramatization and the Pauline idea of guilt and divine atonement. Jesus had sought to establish a foundation of spiritual individualism — the God within idea, the feeling of "divine sonship" for every individual human being. But a powerful Church deified him so that it could act as sole and exclusive intermediary between sinful man and God; and it even became a political and armed power.

What the Western world experienced since the early Renaissance in the 16th century has been an attempt to integrate Greek intellectualism and formalism — operating now in a new empirical manner with sharpened tools of analysis with a dogmatic Church-controlled type of moral humanitarianism. This type of integration had to proceed through the efforts of individuals still dominated by dogmatic concepts, even in the "New World" and in a revolutionary Europe extolling abstract concepts of liberty and equality and a very limited sense of fraternity — i.e., fraternity within a socio-economic class or national boundaries.

The Industrial Revolution in the first part of the 19th century and the Electronic Revolution in the 20th, simply exaggerated and spread over the whole globe motives and values which were inherent in the very fabric of Western civilization. These values more and more came to dominate men and women whose lives and activities were molded by the characteristic approach of the Western world to individualism, equalitarianism, freedom, achievement, progress, morality, religion, citizenship, etc.

This being so, it seems quite naive to believe that by improving certain methods of operation, passing a few more laws and changing leaders, the perversions and misuse of new energies, the violent and deceitful political approach, the greed for money and social power, the prejudices, ambitions, fears and hatreds, and the pollution of the entire Earth can be brought to an end. It is the total attitude of human beings which has to be changed, and this means the attitude toward other people — especially loved ones — and society in general. But this is not all, for the attitude of men and women toward the Earth and toward nature and natural processes of life and death has also to be utterly transformed, if we are to avoid an ecological catastrophe and over-population.

We deal today mostly with symptoms, at best with diseases which can be made into entities and named — and this not only in medicine, but in every area of human existence. Nothing can be done unless one meets in a straight-forward manner the whole situation — and this means Western civilization as a whole and all the values it has accepted, officially or unofficially. This does not mean that this Western civilization has not produced great achievements; but these are not the ones that have been considered most important.

The basic achievement resulting from the Great Mutation that began some twenty-five centuries ago is that human beings — or at least a very large number of them — have emerged from the strictly biological, tribal and static level of archaic societies to the individualistic and mind-oriented level of a highly dynamic civilization. Because of this change of level of consciousness, societies and cultures which were based almost exclusively on local conditions have been superseded by a now world-wide global civilization. This means that for the first time mankind-as-a-whole is now an experienceable fact. Every man can know and, in a sense at least, meet every other man; and the Earth-as-a-whole can be experienced in all its varied life-conditions and climates by every individual person. These are the great achievements of Western society; and the ability to be actually mankind-conscious, instead of tribe conscious or nationalistically conscious, represents an immense evolutionary step. All other benefits of technology are relatively secondary, even if they are the cause of greater comfort and more leisure.

Unfortunately every achievement has its shadow, and the shadow of our Western civilization is immense. It is darkening all aspects of man's nature, and the whole globe. The ability to communicate with all other men and to feel one with them could conceivably lead to absolute communion in a total nuclear war catastrophe. Men can become one in death as well as in life. We must opt for life. How?

We will not achieve this purpose by placing the blame on scientists as men of science, nor on politicians as such nor by fighting against men who simply act according to the way their society has conditioned them to act — whether they be policemen, generals, salesmen or gangsters. What must be changed are the basic taken-for-granted values according to which these people operate. And the most fundamental of these values are those which deal with our glorification of "the individual" as a separate entity unrelated to his environment, yet having to "prove himself" by achieving "success" in terms of what he can show to impress this environment, thereby boosting his ego-pride and satisfying his possessive and accumulative drives. We must reassess our Western concept of Individualism.

The French aviator and author, Saint-Exupery wrote in his beautiful book Flight to Arras: "The individual is a path. Man only matters who takes that path." But what does one mean precisely by "Man"?

In order to understand it one has to realize that the development of individuality in the human kingdom proceeds along a dialectical sequence of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The thesis is the tribal organism which operates under the compulsion of "life" — i.e. of biological instincts and psychic drives linked with them. In the tribe there are actually no "individuals"; there are only many human beings having superficially distinguishing personal characteristics, yet essentially united within a psychic "womb" out of which they have not been really born, born as individuals.

The antithesis phase of human evolution represents the process of individualization, which produces under certain circumstances the "rugged individual," the totally self-reliant, aggressive, fundamentally isolated and insecure person who does just as he wills regardless of consequences to others and especially to all sub-human living organisms. In a more strictly socially organized environment the Frontier-man or the robber baron becomes the average man of business or professional man oriented toward wealth, success, prestige, and with a minimum of social consciousness, except in official occasions which requires the use of standardized phrases and "noble sentiments."

The phase of synthesis is still mostly in the future, yet there have been many anticipatory attempts, in almost all cases stifled by the inertia of the past. A number of "communalistic" groups or brotherhoods — but not communist in the Marxian sense — have existed for a time in Europe and even in America, but usually bringing together men with a definite religious background and under the leadership of a powerful Father-figure or Prophet. The essential point to consider in such groups belonging to the barely beginning phase of "synthesis" is whether the participants in the group come to it as individuals or merely as devotees of a charismatic and perhaps God-manifesting (or so he may claim!) personage. During the "antithesis" phase of basically unrestricted individualism there had to be polarizing and complementary social movements, or else pure anarchy would have been the result; and when the biological instincts operate with an admixture of sharpened intellect and dynamic inventiveness, and the human group lives in a harsh climate, the ideal of spiritual anarchy is obviously unworkable. Thus religion, and the emotional cement of cultural and in most cases political nationalism, are required to keep individuals within productive patterns of order. The larger the group, the stronger must be the requirement for "law and order" — at least until a basic change of consciousness in a great number of individuals makes possible the more or less spontaneous and natural harmonization of individual differences, so that a social organism" can come into being.

But what is an organism? It is constituted by a vast number of units (cells) which fulfill, each in its own place, a specific function in relation to the Whole. In the following chapters we shall present a much clearer picture of what is involved in this concept of "organic individualism"; but the point to stress here is that it is a concept of synthesis. That is to say, in it we find reconciled and transformed (or is it ,"transfigured"?) the principle of biologically and physically compulsive tribal unanimity, and the principle of autonomous and self-reliant individualism.

Whenever there are existential wholes — at whatever level, cosmic, biological, social or personal — one can always see two principles at work: The individual and the collective. These two principles operate very much as do the Yang and Yin in Chinese philosophy. No individual can exist alone and unrelated to other individuals. There is a tendency which brings every individual into some kind of collective pattern, and any collectivity can only survive by allowing some of its members to emerge out of its matricial psychism as creative individuals.

In physics today, and indeed in every field of thought, we find a struggle between an "atomistic" and a "holistic" (from olos, whole) approach. Atomism has dominated the official thinking of Western thinkers and particularly of modern science, but holism is now in slow but gradual ascendancy. The two approaches are complementary just as tribal consciousness and individual consciousness are. What we need, in the days and centuries ahead, is a dynamic solution to the problem of harmonizing in a steady society the requirements of both the individuals and the community.

American democracy was a noble attempt to perform such a feat; and within the pattern of small town living for which it was conceived, it might have been ideal if what was back of the institution of slavery (i.e. economic profit) had not been allowed to retain its stranglehold on a society of abstractly "free and equal" individuals. When immense new powers were unleashed and the wasteful exploitation of the continent began, every negative feature of individualism became monstrously exaggerated. Nothing can be done to really stop the exploitation and pollution of Nature, and of human nature as well, unless the ideal of uncontrolled, proud, success-hungry and self-righteous individualism is radically transformed.

The glorification of the individual by a religious philosophy which tells that every man is a totally individual and unique Soul, who does not really belong to the Earth, but is sent into this "vale of tears" to learn hard lessons and to rule over every living creature introduces into the social ideal of the self-sufficient, totally responsible and free individual a higher dimension which makes the transformation of man more difficult. In a subtle way it makes it more difficult, even though it was meant to help a race of human beings with a tough temperament, violent drives and ambitious minds to refine and spiritualize their cravings for individualized power and conquest. If every man essentially is a strictly individual Soul, a "monad" living more or less in spiritual isolation from other monads, then "Man" is atomized. The one being of Humanity is divided into a myriad of independent units, the essential task of which is to "return" to the original and undivided One. But this path of return does not lead through communion with all other beings, but rather it consists in total surrender of individuality to the One, i.e. to God.

This at least is the more mystical concept. In practice the Church, whether in the Christian or the Mahayana Buddhist ideal, is understood to be a mystic community in which all believers unite in their aspiration toward Unity. But this is mostly a transcendent Unity; it does not refer to the wholeness of a functional organism. What is needed today at the threshold of the evolutionary phase of synthesis is an organic sense of community; and this community can now include all human beings in a global organism, Man.

An individual person may have potentially within himself all the powers of Man; but he can actualize only a limited number of them, and indeed he can hardly actualize any of at least the higher powers without the support and cooperation of other men. The biblical Adam should not be considered as a man, but instead as an allegorical representation of Man. indeed, our entire Western society has to learn not to take symbols as literal facts; and this applies to many things indeed.

We have also to realize that the basic factor in society is not the "Individual", but instead the "person", in the deepest sense of the term. A person is a human being who, accepting his place and function in society — or in any limited community — realizes his individuality in function of his relatedness to all men, or more abstractly, to Man. A person is a focalized expression of certain aspects of Man. He does not exist in vacuum, in isolation. He and all other human persons are related fields of activity and consciousness; Man operates through all of them and in their interrelatedness.

The religiously inclined or mystical mind may think that I am here only substituting the word Man for God. But, if substitution there is, it is a very significant one, because it makes God real here and now, as a fact upon which one can build the future community of Man, the global society. We are entering an Age in which spiritual concepts and utopian dreams can become concrete realities. We may have to give up the special formulations of great spiritual ideals to which, personally or as a group, we are so emotionally attached, in order to allow these ideals to become universally real — real for every human being on this Earth.

We may have to give up our worship of the individual because it is based on a false concept, or rather on a concept the value of which has been to give form to a necessary revolt against and an emergence from the compulsive power of the womb-like tribal state. I repeat that in the archaic tribe there were no individuals — to be an individual has meant historically to have emerged from the binding envelope of the archaic community. In recent days it has meant to have become free from the less absolute, yet still very dominant power of a particular culture, family and traditional way of life. One is an individual against some kind of bondage. One becomes a true "person" in relation to and for the actualization, together with other individuals, of some of the immensely varied potentialities of Man.

Young people insist on "doing my thing", but what they mainly mean is not doing what their society insists they should do. When they have dropped out, they very often do not know what to do with their "freedom". They are not free; they are "out of gear". You cannot drive a car in an out of gear condition, unless you are on a steep slope; and the end result many times is catastrophic.

The ideals of freedom and equality are worshipped in name by our supposedly democratic society; but like many forms of worship this one works only on special occasions and is denied, or leads to patent absurdities, on "normal" working days. Our Constitution proclaims in its Bill of Rights a few basic freedoms of — speech, assembly, opinion, etc. President Roosevelt spoke eloquently of four freedoms from especially tragic conditions. But few indeed are those ready officially to speak of freedom for — yes, for the accomplishment of the basic purpose of one's existence, viz. the actualization of one's innate potential as a focal point through which Man can express an aspect of himself.

To give human beings freedom "of" and "from", while making it very difficult to realize what they should be free "for" — this is almost criminal. It is a subtle glorification of purposelessness, which in turn makes it possible for strong individuals to enslave — spiritually and mentally at least — the less "free citizen", the "liberated" woman, and the child able to respect no one and none of the values hypocritically praised by his elders. Is there really freedom in being able to do whatever you want, yet being unable to want anything in particular? One may call this the freedom to be bored; and our technological society's approach to the increasing leisure time of its citizens is rather appalling. T.V. watching and golf playing as a standard diet spiced with card-playing, aimless driving and a generous dash of sex-play: what a program!

If we had a real, encompassing and evolutionary sense of history we would realize that the cry for freedom is essentially a form of protest against a kind of social order which has become oppressive and unbearable to dynamic groups or intense people who feel intuitively that any form of allegiance to the traditional status quo is destructive of the germs of a greater life ready to break through the collective inertia of the vast majority of the people. The yearning for freedom if it be a yearning for freedom presupposes oppression; or, from the compulsive power of so-called animal instincts and destructive emotions or psychological complexes, it presupposes the realization that a new and higher step in personal evolution is about to be reached, and the struggle is against the inertia of one's own past habits. But the longed-for condition of freedom is always desired or imagined in relation to and in protest against the feeling that one is bound or stopped in one's process of growth.

Real freedom consists in the full ability a person has to change his allegiance. It is the ability to choose that to which one feels the need to commit oneself. There is no life without some kind of allegiance or commitment; only, for most people, the nature of the allegiance and what they give allegiance to are unconscious, taken-for-granted and compulsive or automatic factors. A person pays allegiance to his family tradition because it is his family. He is unfolded within it; he has not emerged from it, so that he has no objective view, no true perspective on it. Yet for him there is no question of "freedom" until he becomes aware that he is bound by this instinctive bio-psychic and cultural allegiance.

It is senseless for a colonial power to bring the brighter colonized natives to its capital and to send them to college where they become aware of the noble democratic ideals the country professes in theory. The colonially oppressed person becomes then aware not merely of the difficulty he faces at home, but he interprets these difficulties as an arbitrary form of oppression rooted in the less than noble yearning for power of the economic and political rulers of the colonial nation. This is of course what Marx clearly saw to be the self-defeating factor in capitalism; the ruling class had to educate the people it needed in order to have them perform technical operations, but this education makes the working class and the natives of colonies aware that they are in bondage, thus impelling them to want freedom. What Marx may not have foreseen is that, once the proletariat gains freedom of a sort through economic power and enjoys an average kind of affluence, they become attached to the values and social concepts of their former oppressors. They turn out to be new "bourgeois" and bitter enemies of anyone who seeks to change the capitalist-democratic stem. Thus the hatred of "hard hats" for the protesting long-hair youth.

All this is certainly not to say that freedom of itself has no value. It is necessary to go out of gear when you go from one gear to another; but the problem, when you go out of gear, is to know where the position of the new gear is and to move unhesitatingly and with a precise gesture from the old to the new position. The old allegiance has, however, a great deal of inertia, and I am not speaking here mainly of the social, cultural and political inertia of a national collectivity (or of any institution and even of any ideological or "esoteric" group), but of the psychic and mental inertia which a man has to overcome within himself before he can become wholly attuned to the quality of a new allegiance.

It is a matter of quality of living which in turn is the expression of a quality of being-ness. How one reaches a new allegiance may depend on purely individual problems and circumstances, and the seemingly worst methods may in some cases produce very valid results. It has always been stated by men of great spiritual stature that there were many paths leading to the ultimate Reality. There are many types of individuals, and each one represents one kind of path. "The individual is a path; Man only matters who takes that path." The only real freedom is that of being able to take a path as an individual — it is the freedom to be reborn.

It is essential for young people to realize that the freedom to do nothing or to drag a purposeless existence is a most negative kind of freedom. One should not yearn to get out of gear "just for the fun of it". One should change gears because there is a voice, or definite urge within, which not only impels to change but states that there is a new gear to get into a new allegiance, a new work to do, a new life to experience.

I have spoken of the "transpersonal way"; but in using the term, transpersonal, I am referring to an activity that is focused through the person, not merely to a reaching out beyond or above the personality. It is a life so totally consecrated to Man (or let us say also, God) that Man acts through the person. Such acts have a character of sacredness in the sense that they are both creative and necessary.

They are "creative" because they are attuned to the vast tide of human and planetary evolution; they are small or big crestings of that tidal movement; they represent each a step forward — whether it may appear to us as constructive or destructive in terms of our cherished ego-centered and culture-centered notions. They are also "necessary" because, in this transpersonal way of life, freedom and necessity become one. One can indeed truly state that when a man hesitates between two courses of action which he is free to take, and tabulates in his mind the pros and cons of each possibility, he is not truly "free". He is only free when the whole of himself spontaneously acts in a particular way because his whole being cannot take any other course of action. He is so irrevocably committed to one mode and quality of being, thinking, feeling and behaving — his dharma — that he cannot make any choice that does not fit in with his commitment, his total allegiance.

The essential point, however, is that this commitment is conscious; it is made as an individual. An animal's actions ruled by instincts are unconsciously motivated; the moves he makes are made by the species, not by himself as a particular specimen. This is the difference between the "thesis" and the "antithesis" phase of organic evolution — the difference between unconscious compulsions and conscious attunement. The stage of individual hesitancy, intellectual argumentation pro and con, and egocentric decisions — even if the ego is eager to reach beyond its sociocultural limitations and personal hang-ups — refers to the "antithesis" phase of evolution of human consciousness.

Today we are coming — at least a great many dynamic and "in-spirited" human beings are coming — to the beginning of a world-wide state of synthesis. This is the basic fact. The development of the intellect and of the proudly (or dejectedly) isolated ego, of an either-or kind of rationalism, and of an earth-bound narrowly personalistic and materialistic (or ,scientific") humanism have been indispensable steps; and they may still be so for a vast number of human beings. But much of what they produced in terms of social, religious and cultural values is now obsolescent, if not obsolete, because loaded with the potentiality of world-wide destruction of man and nature.

The real freedom for men and women who are open to the great evolutionary rhythm is to be so totally committed that there can be no hesitancy, no ego choice — that it is no longer they who act as mere individuals, but Man that acts through them. What these acts are do not matter — they are what circumstances need them to be. What matters is the quality of the action.

This quality can be likened to that inherent in the very nature of seeds, for in every seed it is the species that acts; and because of this, the seed is victorious over the processes of autumnal disintegration, decay and death. The seed remains through the death of the yearly vegetation; but all that is of the nature of leaves inevitable disintegrates. Seed and Leaf: a most significant and today crucially significant dualism.

Have you consciously opted for life in the service of Man, and become like a seed — or have you passively accepted the fatality of decay together with the vast majority of the human beings existing at the close of this present evolutionary cycle? This is the ultimate question now. It is first and last a question of quality of being, or thinking, feeling and behaving.

Our modern society has stressed in the most extreme manner, quantity and all quantitative values. It had to do it, just because it had built its concepts and its technology on the basis of intellectual analysis, ego-individualism, and of an atomistic approach to knowledge divorced from any relation to the quality of living of the whole, i.e. of mankind and the Earth. Thus our modern mentality, our science, even our psychology and our news-reports are sick with quantitative data — indigestible, because meaningless in terms of the life of the whole. They confuse all issues because they never reach the essential values, the inner knowingness that deals with quality, not with quantity. They deal only with competition between forces, with binary yes-no, either-or judgements, with a world of false choices which never go to the roots of any matter and do not touch the wholeness of any whole, because all that matters to modern man is the behavior of parts, and the "how many" of everything.

Quantity deals only with abstract entities considered as units in a statistical type of score. The individual in our democratic system is such an abstract entity, the citizen, valued only in terms of his computerized votes and of how his supposedly "own" opinions enter as units within a percentage proclaimed by influential polls. In our world increasingly dominated by the military and the industrial-commercial elites, what counts is the number of casualties in Viet Nam, the amount of profit, the Gross National Product, the interest rate — and how many more human beings will predictably crowd our polluted biosphere and atmosphere. Everything must be measurable in order to be accepted by the high-priests of our official knowledge which destroys reality in order to measure it.

Of course our Western technology has produced amazing results and in relation to its premises great achievements; but at what cost? It is highly questionable whether this Western technology is the only possible kind of technology, whether our quantitative scientific knowledge is the only possible kind of knowledge. Modern man has released power by destroying matter, and this seems inevitably to leave waste products which, when accumulated, will destroy as well all life.

This is the method that fits the era of atomistic individualism, analytical research and mechanical inventiveness. But we are close to another era and, while the development of the mind and of the sense of individual responsibility has obviously produced permanently valuable results, the value of these results must now be thoroughly reassessed. They must be reassessed with reference to far more important values than a human pride of achievement, a sense of mastery over inanimate materials and the ability to cure ailments many of which are the results of our technological activities and our poisoning of all that we touch, breathe and eat.

As already stated, the greatest human achievement of science is that it enabled every man to be aware of the existence and ways of life of all men, and thus to experience Man in concrete reality and in relation to the whole planet, Earth which, for the first time, became also a concrete reality in cosmic space, an organism in which mankind has a definite function, to perform.

We cannot understand and evaluate this function in terms of quantitative knowledge, for what counts is the quality which mankind represents in the all-inclusive wholeness of the Earth-organism. This quality is not a measurable factor, no more than one can measure love or beauty — though modern scientists eagerly try to do so and in the process, through the popularization of their measurements, help in the degeneration of the qualities they touch with electronic fingers and cold computerized minds.

Knowledge is not everything. Indeed, unless the condition of the knower and the results it will inevitably bring to those to whom it is transmitted and for whom it is applied are taken into consideration, knowledge can be destructive, just as intellectual pride is in most instances. What is needed today more than ever is "wisdom"; and wisdom arises in the "heart- mind" of men and women who have become attuned through love to the great rhythms of life and of the universe. Wisdom is intelligence raised to the level at which everything interpenetrates everything else. It is the faculty in the human mind which deals holistically with always new relationships between forever transformed existential wholes. It is the ability to see and to meet every situation as a whole, in the context of a still larger whole in which this situation fulfills an always meaningful, withal temporary role. It is peace through, as well as beyond conflicts between individuals transcending yet including all that struggles away from and toward the dynamic equilibrium of the universal Whole.

Where there is no wisdom there can be no real "authority", only the exercise of power; for authority resides only in the whole. It manifests temporarily only through a person who acts for and indeed as the whole — a person whose entire life is dynamized by an irrevocable commitment to serve the purpose of evolution and to allow Man to find in himself a focus for creative transformation.

Such a life is, in the deepest sense of the term, a "sacrifice". It is not lived for the self; its depths are untroubled by the vagaries and surface storms of the ego. It is, as uniquely as possible, simply what it is. It acts as a catalyst to human transformation, and if it pays the price so often exacted by the inertia of society and the fears or envy of ego-men who will die the inevitable death of autumnal leaves, this too is accepted as a function to be performed.

In this, authority may be revealed clothed in wisdom; as seeds too accept the death of germination, fathering forth thereby the birth of new life.

By permission of Leyla Rudhyar Hill
Copyright © 1971 by Dane Rudhyar
All Rights Reserved.





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