It would be easy for, a generation which has seen unparalleled conflict and unprecedented evil to lose its faith in divine power or divine wisdom. This is what is happening to many people in this time; they are so preoccupied with the external circumstances of their life that they neglect its higher purpose.
Their analyses of historic events and of human evolution are either not deep enough or quite misleading. What other result can be expected from men who lack the knowledge of the spiritual laws governing the causation of those events and controlling that evolution?
The times so vividly if briefly mentioned in various passages of the New Testament are upon us. Mark how they speak of one identifying sign being the appearance of false prophets. St. Luke warns us in burning words: “Take heed that ye be not deceived . go ye not therefore after them.” The mistake commonly made in understanding these pages is to limit the reference only to religious and mystical prophets. But the teachers and leaders of destructive movements, whose dogmas have been received with emotional fervour and propagated with intellectual anaticism, must not only be included in the reference but even given first place.
They have diverted to themselves exactly the same kind of faith or devotion as that which is given to religious leaders like Muhammed.
A million people will eagerly follow a glib leader who raises contentious clamour and leads them to ultimate destruction, when only a few people will follow an inspired spiritual leader who leads them to true blessedness.
This shows the faulty sense of values which prevails among people who are entirely ignorant of the fact that if their inner attitude toward life is wrong, their outer personal, political and economic affairs will go wrong. It shows that the reason why the mass of mankind cannot make a success of their civilization is because they cannot make a success of themselves. Not having enough faith in, or leading by, higher forces, they put their faith in destructive ones.
When we hear the wonderful story of man’s long rise we know that he holds within himself the power to conquer difficulty.
He can make mighty changes and move his world forward, but he can do this in a peaceful constructive manner only if he disciplines the violence of his animal nature. Society and surroundings are the consequences of history. The past experience of the human race and the traditional knowledge it has accumulated, cannot be dispensed with. It is for us to profit by it.
Those whose metaphysical foundation is dialectical materialism, exclude from their consideration of man the great truth that he is here ultimately for spiritual development. They regard him solely as a fleshly body whose primary interests are material ones.
But the fact that they turn away from this truth does not remove them from the sphere of its operation. So long as they hold such an incorrect conception of human nature as the materialist one, so long will the illusions of extreme egoism and the evils of bitter hatred flourish among them. Under the influence of such wrong thinking and limited understanding, the naive men who engage in it are walking dangerously near the edge of a precipice. They live in a darkness to which they have become so accustomed that they believe it to be light. This puts them in a precarious situation.
The real struggle today is a confused and hidden one; it is not only the outward and obvious struggle which every newspaper records. It is between the great lie of a materialist concept of life and the great truth of a spiritual one. We call the first a lie because it asserts that we are here on earth solely to satisfy the appetites of the body and the desires of the ego.
Throughout man’s long history, his wisest seers and most illumined prophets have put forth their thoroughly tested discovery not opinion–that the forces of Nature, God, brought us here to discipline those appetites and elevate those desires as a preliminary requisite to the higher purpose of life the discovery of the Overself and the conscious union with it.
Millions have been deceived by the appearance of things into believing that their existence is physical and nothing more. Today they are eating the sour fruit of this false belief. Correct self-under-standing would have shown them that they are not only creatures compounded of body, feelings, and thoughts but also of spiritual intuitions. That is why the firmest possible foundation upon which to build any social structure is the essential ethics of all spiritual teaching.
Those ethics ultimately sprout from a mystically revealed knowledge of certain moral and spiritual laws which govern the universe. The new understanding of these old laws, which go far deeper than politico-economic doctrine, would necessarily bring about a new and better integration of society, which would then reflect ethical thought.
The impartial observer may seem pessimistic but he knows that world conferences will fail so long as statesmen go to them only to protect their present interests, to make patchwork solutions, and to avoid uncomfortable concessions. They will fail so long as rulers and peoples prefer a shallow to a deeper view.
They will prove, as was predicted several years ago in an earlier book, mere delusions so long as a loftier ethical ideal and superior metaphysical knowledge do not animate them. When a materialistic civilization becomes outwardly impressive but remains inwardly impoverished, when political relations become an elaborate façade for hiding the spirit-ally empty rooms behind them, menacing problems are sure to appear on every side. The real contemporary problem behind all the other ones is the problem of mental and moral regeneration.
Those who know the hidden powers of thought in the life and fate of man, know that external peace cannot be successfully secured while internal war rages in the heart. Until men tame their angers, discipline their desires, leash their greeds, modify their materialism, and curb the cruelty and slaughter they practice on animals, the root causes of war will still remain.
All they can do in the present stage of human evolution is to create an international institution which shall act as an international policeman. Just as the creation of city police forces has not stopped all crime but has nevertheless prevented much crime, so the creation of such an institution could not stop all wars but may prevent many wars. Every such proposal has its own special accompanying dangers.
Yet, some proposal must be accepted and realized, whatever its dangers, because in no other way can the prospect of a more peaceful life open up more quickly for humanity. If coming history should show a tragic failure to realize the contemporary proposal, that would be only because the deeper lessons of vanishing history, echoed here, have been in-sufficiently learned or wholly ignored.
But just as the grim necessities of war forced overdue changes on us only when they were no longer avoidable, so the grim necessities of peace will force upon us those personal and national changes which many are still too un-evolved to make on their own. A new and better world will come in the end and after all. But to the extent that we let it come out of compulsion, not out of volition, we have to suffer greatly during its labour pains. In the end the Word will replace the Sword.
It is questionable whether absolute harmony will ever prevail amongst men, unless and until they first fulfil the spiritual goal which God ever holds before them. Social life creates its own problems, its own conflicts of group and personal interests. National life leads to angry quarrels with other nations or aggressive invasions of them.
In the world of manifested forms, each of which is different from all others in some points, there will necessarily be friction at those points at some times. A kingdom of perfect harmony on earth is apparently not possible. The world’s nature and human nature seem to forbid it.
But what we cannot find outside ourselves, does exist and may be found deep within ourselves. When Jesus once announced the good news to his hearers and told them in plain words that “the kingdom of heaven” was within them, he meant, if he meant anything at all, that the most important and most desirable thing in life was not to be found in any external place, thing, person, or position; it was to be found only in the hidden strata of the thought and feeling of man.
The bellowing doctrinaire, who thinks otherwise, who persuades people to see only the surface of their problems, may say what he likes but a physical utopia has never existed and may never be found. It is like a mirage which draws men on only to delude them. It is either an ever-receding horizon or else a dream from which its deluded seekers must wake up.
The dream’s creator may paint pleasant pictures of an ideal society or even religious-ascetic community where all will be well and everyone will be happy, but the reality will never be like that, for it would still have to be built with the material or fallible and imperfect men.
If the ashrams, spiritual retreats of the Orient, and religious monasteries of the Occident, with so lofty and unworldly a doctrine as many of them possess, have been unable to develop perfectly harmonious and morally untainted communities among themselves, but on the contrary suffer from the petty weaknesses of pitiful human nature, what hope is there for realizing this dream outside their walls, where aspiration is less urgent and less deep? Where is the human material for such a superhuman society?
Can it be found sufficiently anywhere today? Earthly millenniums are always postponed, never realized. So it has been in the past, so it shall be in the future. Any idealistic society or colony can be only relatively good at best, good only at and for a certain time and a certain place. It can never escape from the relativity, imperfection, and transiency which permeate this world. Human nature would cease to be its present ignorant self if it were to perform the vicarious sacrifices which the social or humanitarian or religious idealist’s rosy but fallacious optimism expect of it.
The paradise men want to attain is a condition they must inwardly create by slow degrees for themselves. As soon as men make themselves spiritually worthy of a finer world, they will have some approach toward it.
A wiser practicality would not seek to establish a kingdom of heaven on earth, in the sense of a physical utopia, for its own sake. It would be too strongly imbued with the realization of transiency in all things and too profoundly perceptive of the inherent imperfection in all things to be deceived by such a materialist aim.
Rather would it seek to establish a better earthly home for mankind for the sake of using it as a springboard whence to aspire for the true kingdom of heaven, which is and always will be an inner one. It is not a spatial one.
Jesus, the skilled angler of men, warned against looking for it, “Lo here! or Lo therefore for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”
Yet not a few of His followers have fallen into the belief that this kingdom can be externalized. They believe that some kind of sacerdotally controlled utopia can be created, just as a section of the materialists believe that only a sacerdotally free economic utopia can be created.
The mystical dreamers believe that some kind of perfectionist community can be created. But a collection of imperfect human beings can never lead to such a result.
The truth here is that the external problems which torment man are really projections of the internal problems which he has failed to solve aright within his heart and mind.
There is no adequate answer to the principal questions of politics and economics without first finding an adequate answer to the larger questions of life itself, which necessarily include the questions: “What is man?” “What are the real objects for which an organized society exists?” “What are the final ends to be worked out through its means?”
Unless we lay hold of their correct answers, we shall only be working in the dark and wasting energies quite uselessly, or worse, gravely harm the human stuff out of which society is made. Ignorance of these answers is the primary cause of our present sad lot.
The distress of today grips us like a horrible quagmire into which we sink deeper with every step forward, simply because we do not know and cannot see the proper destination toward which we ought to move.
On the other hand, if we secure a clear conception of these objects and ends, we shall be able to work more efficiently, act more effectively and live more happily. But how can we do so successfully unless we know the larger direction which the evolutionary forces of life itself are inexorably compelling it to take? Without a knowledge of the divine will, we may only stumble in the dark and perhaps hurt ourselves grievously, as we have already hurt ourselves during this tragic century. Hitherto, we have fulfilled our destiny blindly and un-consciously, which means painfully and stupidly. But the policy of spiritual drift will no longer pay. We might get away with it in easier times but we cannot get away with it in these sternly critical times.
The problems which press down on humanity may be mostly political and economic and therefore should be dealt with by economic and political measures. But their background remains moral and metaphysical. No solution can be a fundamental one which ignores these two elements.
No way in which humanity can save itself from the danger which confronts it will prove satisfactory if it leaves out the spiritual way; every other way if taken alone will yield only failure as its result in the end.
Only when the politician and the economist, the statesman and the soldier will have the sense to perceive this and the courage to admit it; only when they will have the humility to declare themselves semi bankrupt and with insufficient assets can the miracle happen and the aid of a higher power come to our rescue and do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.
What is best for the individual is in the long run also best for society. Whoever surveys the unrolled picture of his own existence or that of human existence as a whole and without prejudice will find this truth irrefutable.
And if the individual can attain true happiness only by following a better way of living, society also can attain it only likewise. If easier ways are followed, then lesser results must be expected. From this standpoint political, economic, and social reforms cannot by themselves lead to the true happiness of man.
This is not to say that they are not needed, for they may lead to his partial or transient happiness. They are useful palliatives which may relieve his pain, not radical remedies which can cure his sickness.
An industrial economy which does not in practice recognize man as a spiritual being or the universe as outworking divine laws, breeds psychic perils for its people.
Even if its planners provide a more satisfactory place in which the general mass of people can live, they cannot provide the ideals for which those people will have to live if they are to fulfill their incarnation’s higher purpose, ideals which will in the end determine the fate of that place.
“Man proposes, God disposes” , may sound trite but is still quite operative. Those realists and rationalists who would dismiss the application of worthy ideals as being nothing more than dreamer’s catchwords and impracticable slogans, delude themselves.
Our failure to build a worth while society is primarily a moral failure. But before there can be moral reform, there must be spiritual reform.
This is the root of all the others. We ought not in our judgement of materialistic doctrine preaching otherwise and the misguided men who symbolize it in the world today, misjudge the masses who have been befogged into it.
We must not forget their ultimate equality, which links them with God. We must remember that in their blind unconscious way they, too, are seeking the truth; they, too, will one day stand hushed in the presence of the Spirit.
They, too, will eventually accept the saving ideal of goodwill as against the destructive ideal of hate. They, too, will learn to know that the divine love is back of all events and that so soon as men turn to look for it, they will find it moving toward them.
Our Father is still in heaven and our job is to recognize our sonship.
This single truth is at the core of all spiritual teaching.
