When asked how he feels or what he thinks about prospects ahead for mankind, Rudhyar often replies that he is pessimistic in the short run and optimistic in the long run. He was among the first to realize that in this century humanity faces a major crisis of transformation on all fronts, but he has no doubt that sooner or later, in one place, century, or culture or another, humanity will meet the challenge — but the quality of the transformation and the number of human beings affected positively by it could be greatly diminished, depending on how humanity collectively responds to circumstances in the next decades. Rudhyar's overall view of human cultural development can be expressed in dialectical terms: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Tribal society — and all it implies in terms of psychic unanimity and a sense of the sacred — represents the thesis. Western individualism and the dominance of a highly intellectualized, abstract mind producing and greedily wielding a destructive technology represent the antithesis. The synthesis is yet ahead and should incorporate the basic values of the two preceding stages — but within a more inclusive (planetary . . . and beyond) frame of reference and within a spirit-oriented consciousness. For Rudhyar, much that is progressive in society today — for examples attempts to integrate Eastern and Western culture and religion, science and spirituality — represent stages in a necessary process of deconditioning ("deculturalization" or "disEuropeanization"). But deconditioning is only a prelude to transformation and rebirth: it is not itself renewal. Rudhyar's fervent hope is that new symbols and images — in philosophy, psychology, social organization, and the arts — will evoke the development of a new mentality: the mind of wholeness, the mind that "sees" rather than cogitates and argues pro and con, the mind of the Sage that allows all life, events, and relationships to pass through its structured openness and in so passing acquire meaning. This "new" mentality would also operate as the "cosmogenic mind" able to see the potentialities of and project order upon the apparent chaos of presentday social and cultural existence.