CHAPTER TEN
As We Face the Future - 6

An Oceanic Age
The Aquarian Age may be, far more than we think now, an oceanic Age. The Great Voyages of the fifteenth century (500 years before the start of the Aquarian Age, according to my hypothesis) were only the very beginning of the story. The Piscean Age began when Rome came to claim the Mediterranean as mare nostrum (our sea). England in her way repeated the boast last century: Pax Britannica paralleled Pax Romana. We, in America, have been trying to continue England's role after her global collapse as ruler of the seas; but this role is a trap now. We are challenged at every step by Soviet Russia; indeed we are like "Enemy Twins" scowling at each other but fated to work together, in spite of our puerile disagreements and siblings' jealousy, as we face an aroused Third World — the new "Barbarians," not only at our gates, but inside of our gates.
      All our constructions may thus, symbolically if not literally, topple down into the One Ocean; for now we should have realized, and we will have to realize, that our giving different names to various seas and gulfs is symbolically meaningless, for there is but one ocean, one planetary biospheric Womb. And we must return to it, in mind if not in our distraught and deluged physical bodies. Perhaps the new focusing of man's attention upon oceanography and the possible use of the ocean's floor for food-production and mining as well as for warfare shows the direction in which mankind is moving. Of course we are also reaching to the Moon, and eventually other planets of the solar system, but in a sense the atmosphere, stratosphere and all that ancient astrologers called the sub-lunar sphere form also a kind of ocean in which the Earth-globe as a whole is bathing.
      It is quite possible that the entire new Age, which I see rather as Phase Two of the vast Great Sidereal Year than as the "Aquarian Age," will be essentially a period during which mankind will be concerned above all with the realization of its oceanic spiritual depth of planetary being, of its fundamental common humanity. I believe that mental pictures of a New Age being spread around, either by college professors of the Rand organization type (the "prospectivists" employed by the government and by big business to evaluate future prospects) or, at the other end of the mind-spectrum, by devotees of "New Age ideals," are likely not to correspond closely to the realities of life some two centuries ahead. I would rather trust the last-mentioned group — over-idealistic as its visions may be — for it at least seems to realize that our present-day type of technology is not the answer, and that the one basic factor in the future will be a transformation of human nature and the appearance perhaps of new faculties. What we call now telepathy is only a beginning.
      Humanity, at least Western world humanity, may indeed be entering the "sea" of a far more fluid, vast and mobile consciousness. And this quite likely will involve a profound change in the social organization of mankind, perhaps in the quantity of human beings on the globe, and in its distribution upon the continents. Continents may be breaking down into smaller units. There could be unity in oceanic, sub-and supra-conscious depths of being; yet at the same time a greater scatteredness of human collectivities in close contact with the sea, yet as well in close, immediate and vital communication with each other through new forms of transportation and through a "trans-physical," mental and super-mental sharing of variegated experiences. This is, at least as I envision the future in a few centuries. But before this state is reached, the going is likely to be very rough — the oceanic state has undoubtedly many violent storms in store for mankind.
      As we reach this "oceanic" stage of geo-social development of mankind it is entirely possible that what I have presented as a wave of civilization will also be dissolved into the gradually calmed sea. We may reach a truly global condition of all-human planet-wide (and planetary) development in which there will be more than ever a multiplicity of foci of human evolution on quite a few "islands" of culture, geographically separated, but sooner or later spiritually integrated into a global whole, Man.
      If however, the wave-concept is still applicable, and my estimate of the present location of the wave-crest is correct, then we can expect Brazil to become the main, or most dynamic, focus of a more reintegrated and more closely stabilized humanity during Phase Three of the Great Sidereal Year, the so-called "Capricorn Age" which should begin in about twenty-two centuries. A few occultists have claimed recently that there was, three or four decades ago, a transfer of great beings wielding planetary power from Tibet to the Peruvian Andes — this evidently because of what they knew was going to happen in Tibet and in China. This may be occult fiction, or fact; I can produce no personal verification either way, but I tend to accept the story as referring to facts.
      Whatever form North and Central America will have at the end of the so-called "Capricorn" Age may well be then the location for the great "American" civilization and a truly new race of human beings. It will be Phase Four of the Great Year, and this "Sagittarian" Age should be an Age of concretization of spiritual values. I repeat that I tend to believe that some of the expectations people have today for the coming Aquarian Age (Phase Two) will only mature into actualities during this Phase Four. This will occur some five thousand years after the end of the 19th century, and ten thousand years after what old India believed to be the start of Kali Yuga in 3102 BC.