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The End of a Civilisation THE world has been going
down in its course of degradation with an increased momentum since the very
beginning of the present century. One of the great symptoms of the decline is
the prevalence of wars. It can
be said in fact that there has been no real peace or even truce upon earth
since the century opened with the Russo-Japanese War. Wars have continued since
then uninterruptedly: some part or other of the world has always been involved.
Indeed one can say it has been a single war carried on on
many fronts, breaking out at different times. Another noticeable thing about
these wars is their nature; with the lapse of time they have become more and
more extensive and more and more devastating. It is no longer now simply a clash of armies or
professionals, of that section of society whose business it is to fight. Whole
nations – literally the whole of a people including men, women, children of all ages – are now mobilised, have to take part in the
fight and share the same danger. Naturally,
war meant always killing; but the nature of killing has changed and even the
motive too. Killing is now attended with cruelty, done with methods terribly
atrocious and revoltingly ingenious. And this has affected the very
consciousness and morale of man. Not only there is no decency or decorum, not
to speak of magnanimity and nobility of attitude and behaviour – once familiar things in
stories of the Kshatriya, the Samurai, the Knights of old – there has come into
the field a phenomenon for which it has itself found a name, sadism, wanton
violence and on a mass scale. Man seems to have thrown off all mask, all the rules of civilised social life and has become worse than the animal: he is
now the Pisacha, the ghoul and the demon. He seems to have reached the bottom
of the pit.
Page – 213 We
know of worlds – vital worlds – which are made of the most unimaginable horror
and ugliness and devilry. Many have contacted such domains either consciously
in the course of their yogic experiences or unconsciously in nightmare. They
bear testimony to the stark monstrosity of these worlds – the gloom, the fear,
the pain and torture, the doom and damnation that reign there. That entire
inner world seems to have precipitated itself upon earth and taken a body here.
A radiant poet spoke of Therefore
misery stalks large upon the earth. Nothing com-parable to it, either in
quality or quantity, can history offer as an example. Man finds no remedy for
his ills, he does not dare to hope for any. He feels
he is being irretrievably drawn into the arms of the Arch-enemy. Perhaps
it was necessary that it should be so. A pralaya, a Deluge has to be
there to end an epoch and begin a new one. Indeed the civilisation that man has
built up over the millenniums, that has reached its culmination in modern scientism,
whatever gifts it might have brought to him, however great and powerful and
beautiful it might have been at its best in its own sphere, still it had and
was a limitation, acted as a deterrent to a further leap and progress of the
consciousness. It is the humanistic cycle that has reigned, from ancient
Page – 214 And
yet if the civilisation really goes, it will not be a small thing, even when
measured on the cosmic scale. A civilisation is to be judged and valued not at
its nadir, but at its zenith, in its total effect and not by a temporary phase
in its course. Civilisation really means preparation of the instrument: the
human instrument that is to express the Divine. The purpose of creation, we
have often said, is the establishment of the highest spiritual consciousness in
the embodied life on earth. The embodied life means man's body and life and
mind; individually and socially these constitute the instrument through which
the higher light is to manifest itself. The instrument.
has to be prepared, made ready for the purpose; Actually it is obscure,
ignorant, narrow, weak; at the outset and for a long time it expresses only or
mainly the inferior animal nature. Civilisation is an attempt to raise this
inferior nature, to refine, enlarge and heighten it, to cultivate and increase
its potentialities and capacities. The present civilisation, we have said, is a
growth of thousands of years-at least five thousand years according to the most
modest archaeological computation. In this period man has developed his brain,
his rational intelligence, has unravelled
some of the great mysteries of nature; he has controlled and organised life to an extent that has
opened new possibilities of growth and achievement; even with respect to the
body he has learnt to treat it with greater skill and endowed it with finer and
more potent efficiencies. There have been aberrations and misuses, no doubt;
but the essence of things achieved still remains and is always an invaluable
asset: that must not be allowed to go. If
the civilis at ion goes, it means the instrument is gone, the basis on which
the edifice for the Divine Consciousness is to be raised is removed, nothing remains to stand firmly on. So the labour has to
start again: one must begin from the beginning. The work has to be done and
will be done, it cannot be allowed to terminate into a
labour of Sisyphus. Look
at the individual. Why is there in him the life-urge to persist, to endure, to
survive? If life had no other meaning than mere living, then
the best thing would have been to drop the body as soon as it is badly damaged
or incapacitated, through illness, accident or old age. Instead, why
this attempt
Page – 215 to prolong it, to refuse to accept the present difficulties
and disadvantages? The reason is that life requires time to grow in
consciousness, to acquire experiences, to assimilate and utilise them so as to transform them
into powers of being, time, that is to say, to build and forge the instrument
so that it may house the higher consciousness and existence. In the present
make-up, the body, at a certain stage has to be given up; for the frame becomes
too rigid and stiff to keep pace with the growing and fast moving inner
consciousness. The thread is taken up again in another life; but there is
always a considerable reduplication in this natural process, one has to
repeat the stage of babyhood and immaturity, a retempering of the instrument till it is
capable of newer uses. True, some-thing of the experiences, their essence, is
stored up somewhere in the depth of the being; but it is not utilised fully, it is not an effective
element in the normal consciousness. And although one always bases oneself upon
one's past, the edifice constructed seems new every time. Yoga in the
individual seeks to eliminate this element of repetition and unconsciousness
and delay in the process of growth and evolution: its aim is to complete the
cycle of individual growth in a single life. Now
the same principle can be extended to the wider collective development.
Civilisation has reached a status today when the next higher status can be and
must be at-tempted. Man has risen to a considerable height in the mental
sphere; the time and occasion are now here to step beyond into the supramental,
the dynamically spiritual. Dangers are ahead, even around and close: all the
forces of the infra-human, the submerged urges of animal atavism are pushing
and pulling man down to a regression, to a reversion to type. The choice
is indeed crucial. If the civilisation is to perish, it means mankind has to
start over again its life course, begin, that is to say, at the baby stage,
once more to go through the slow process of centuries to acquire the mastery
that has been attained in the physical, the vital and the mental domains.
Already there have been such lost periods in man's evolution now submerged in
his consciousness and their gains are being with difficulty recovered. But a
landslide at this critical hour will be a colossal catastrophe – humanly
speaking, something almost irremediable.
Page – 216 For
here is the sense of the crisis. The mantra given for the new age is
that man shall be transcended and in the process, man, as he is, shall go. Man
shall go, but something of the vehicle that the present cycle has prepared will
remain. For, that precisely has been the function of the passing civilisation,
especially in its later stages, viz, to build up a terrestrial temple for the
Lord. The aberration and deformation, rampant today, mean only an excess of
stress upon this aspect, upon the external presentation which was ignored or
not sufficiently considered in the earlier and higher curves of the present
civilisation. The spiritual values have gone down, because the material values
came to be regarded as valueless and this upset the economy or balance in
Nature. It is true that we have gone far, too far in our revanche.
And the problem that faces us today is this: whether mankind will be able
to change sufficiently and grow into the higher being that shall inhabit the
earth as its crown in the coming cycle or, being unable, will go totally,
disappear altogether or be relegated to the backwater of earthly life, somewhat
like the aboriginal tribes of today.
Page – 217
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