XI. Chapter 2. Combating Spirituality
A popular belief has it that poor material conditions of the society invariably translate into its spiritual poverty. And vice versa: material prosperity is bound to entail spiritual wealth.
Objective historical observations do not support this thesis. Until the late phase of capitalism, wealth had been owned by the privileged classes or groups rather than the society as a whole, and the material level of these groups rather than the average wellbeing of the society had set the benchmark. The notion of the material prosperity of the society as a whole can be applied only at the late stage of historical development. One may talk about prosperity and wealth – at least, at certain time periods – of such societies as modern Sweden, Netherlands, or Switzerland. The wealth of the United States would also make the case albeit with some reservations, for income difference across different social strata in this country is immense, and far from the whole American society has enjoyed prosperity even at its heyday. With regard to countries of the socialist camp, I do not mention them here as they belong to a later period of history.
I would be quite excited to hear well substantiated arguments to the effect that the aforementioned societies featuring high levels of material prosperity, such as Sweden, Netherlands, and Switzerland, have manifested true spiritual riches alongside. It is true that they have made some contribution – and still do – to the world of science and technology. Yet, science and technology are the domain of intellectual rather than spiritual values. One is to learn to differentiate between these two types of phenomena to begin with. The mindset of a certain kind, which is quite widespread these days, cannot tell the intellectual from the spiritual. Humanities, art, sociology, ethics, religion, physico-mathematical, and biological cycles of sciences, even certain aspects of technology – all these are just lumped together. Works of Kalidas and Darwin, Hegel and Edison, Ramakrishna and Alekhin, Stalin and Ghandi, Dante and Pavlov are seen as kindred phenomena, as “spiritual” culture. This aberration may seem savagery, were it not for rather civilized and intelligent-looking people complicit in it. Meanwhile, it is as clear as day that we are dealing with two completely different kinds of phenomena: spiritual and intellectual. Nearly the whole domain of science, let alone of technology belongs to the latter. It also includes philosophical, aesthetic, and moral schemes to the extent they are stripped of any preternatural, variomaterial, otherworldly, and spiritual experiences in the truest sense of this word. In the same fashion, it comprises social movements, political programs, economical and social activities, even art and literary fiction. With regard to spirituality, it contains human manifestations directly related to the notion of multiplane existence and the apprehension of all kinds of threads interweaving the physical plane of existence with other planes, the spiritual included. These manifestations comprise religion, spiritualistic philosophy, metahistory, magic, high ethics, and the most profound creations of literature, music, and spatial arts.
If one realizes and takes in the difference between these two types of phenomena – spiritual and intellectual – it would become evident that spiritual riches are not directly proportional to material wealth. Spiritual activities are compromised only with two extremes of material standing: misery and luxury. The former makes one throw all efforts into the struggle for existence; the latter leads to chasing and multiplying riches [at the expense of spirituality] or jadedness and burnout, which cover the soul with psychological fat.
Neither Sweden, Netherlands, or the United States, but poor (from the European standpoint, of course) Thailand, Ceylon, Burma, and Cambodia, “half-barbarian” Tibet and Nepal, even downtrodden India exemplify societies wherein life is imbued – much greater than in Western societies – with artistry, routine involvement of the masses into the creation of highly aesthetical values, intense ideological searchings, and that emotional warmth, which abides only in countries featuring an agelong moral climate nourished by immense reservoirs of spirituality. We are given to focusing on the economic underdevelopment of these countries, on Indian poverty, on Tibetan illiteracy, on the primitive nature of daily life in Ceylon, on the vestiges of the Indian caste system, on the theocratic feudalism in Tibet, on the imperfections of family life. And we consciously turn a blind eye toward something else in these countries: toward those powers that had built and sustained towns consisting nearly half in stunningly beautiful and enlightening temples; toward those flights of genius which adorned the face of the Earth with delightful architecture; toward those hands that embellished the banks of the holy rivers flowing across these countries with countless monuments of human aspiration toward Spirit, light, and beauty. They forget the aspect of Indian life, without which no other people could have set themselves free from an agelong slavery by means of nonviolence – the most ethically pure method that has ever been thought up. Not intellectualism, but precisely spirituality whiffs from all kinds of manifestations of the lives of people in the Indian and Indo-Malayan metaculture: from magnificent crafts suffused with inner light; from folk arts; from the attitude of an “average commoner” toward problems of life and death; from mysteries and epics, which are performed all night long on the deplorable square in any, even the most ramshackle village; from astounding forgiveness toward recent conquerors; from insignificant, as compared with America and Russia, crime rates; from highly ethical programs of action adopted by the ruling political party; even, for example, from the type of woman prevailing in Indian society that is so graphically depicted by Rabindranath Tagore and Prem Chand.
Switching intellectualism with spirituality is so widespread in Russia, and even the West that the meaning and purpose of this are crystal-clear: to dislodge the human psyche from the domain of the highest values into the purely utilitarian sphere. This striving and its practical realization is one of the main aspects of the cultural-historical process we are living in. This is, certainly, related to the emasculation of the faraway social ideal, which I have already talked about, and to the intention to do so gradually, stealthily, so that the society would, bit by bit, emasculate itself and regenerate while being totally unaware of the forming vacuum, unaware of being stripped of the most precious of its values and fed back with other, supplementary ones.
Material wellbeing is an absolute value in itself. This is a natural, human-worthy level of outward existence. It represents a value, for it shields superficial wellbeing which enables the smooth ripening and fruition of the soul’s seeds. Yet, proclaiming material wellbeing and the outward conquest of the forces of nature, again, all for the material prosperity of humankind, to be the primary and supreme value, the ultimate purpose of the armed struggle of the masses all over the world, the ideal of social development for the sake of which entire generations and whatever spiritual values are to be sacrificed – this is either a tragic mistake, or a half-conscious deception.
Yet, precisely this erroneous thought, sometimes proclaimed loud and clear, sometimes understated, but always discernible in the complex of revolutionary ideas of our century, shapes the nature of ideals cresting this complex, so too the methods inherent to it.
The comprehensive social-political and philosophical doctrine that had been elaborated in the mid-nineteenth century in the West, and that gradually came to dominate in the progressive, revolutionary thinking, will be called “the Doctrine” from now onwards for brevity’s sake. This Doctrine is closely, “genetically” related to the preceding chains of Western philosophy and scientific thought, even Christianity. Yet, it is not hard to see that it had been elaborated with an active support of those forces which, were concerned with creating a powerful teaching to guide humanity. It led, however, down the ladder of ideological-social switches towards such a social, cultural, psychological, and technological state, which was within only a short leap from becoming the absolute, single-person tyranny. If one allows for such a supposition, the beam of the spotlight in which we were accustomed to contemplate cultural and historical phenomena, would rapidly shift. Phenomena that have seemed so well-defined would become overshadowed, whereas the things we have been clueless of would come to the fore. Ironclad, adamant, unyielding materialism was advocated literally with foaming mouth; burning, at times volcanic hatred toward everything with an inkling of religiosity, mysticism, or idealism; the complete exclusion of spirituality, equating it with the relic of the past, and asserting purely material and intellectual values; giving pride of place to the idea of the material prosperity of the majority and the approbation of any means instrumental in achieving this goal; proclaiming the dictatorship of the proletariat, then replacing the proletariat with a single party, only to be supplanted by an autocratic leader; enunciating the austere need of the subjugation of the remaining social classes and, over time, the physical elimination of all the unwanted; close supervision of the state, that is, the autocratic party, over society’s cultural “produce”; the colossal role of technology, machinery, industry, and the automatization of all industrial processes, and so too of social transactions and of the psyche itself – all these and many other things, if seen from a new angle, would take on a new, rather ominous significance.
It is highly symptomatic that the very Doctrine which had blazed the trail to the surface of the society with the help of liberating slogans and harangues about freedom started its reign from the dispersion of the All Russian Constituent Assembly, the very body it had vainly attempted to get the majority votes in. This was rapidly followed by prohibition of activities of all other parties and political organizations as well as elimination of all press except for the Doctrine’s.
From the stated vantage point of metahistory, it is also important to consider such phenomena as science, technology, and industrialization.
Human nature – this not only concerns the physical body but the whole variomaterial conglomerate of the human being – holds such potentialities which, if developed, would infinitely expand our abilities to utilize material mediums and totally transform the relationship between the human and space, the human and time, the human and nature, the human and other planes of existence. The problem of flying can be solved by other means than aviation. Combating diseases so as to prolong life expectancy can be carried out in other ways than currently used by medicine. Rapid movement across space and communication over great distances are far from being monopolized by sciences busy with perfecting transportation and all means of communication. For example, the ability to fly, to travel through space with an unimaginable speed, to communicate over great distances, to pass through the dense medium, to overcome diseases, to elongate human life expectancy two- or threefold, to meet beings from other planes, to contemplate transphysical panoramas, to replenish the life force not with food but through absorbing emanations from light-filled elementals and inhaling fragrant aromas – all these and many other abilities are deeply stored, in an embryonic state, in our innermost being. Technological achievements of our day (the mid-twentieth century, translator’s note), such as jet planes, TV sets, or cybernetic devices would appear crude, laughingly clumsy, vulgar, heavy, primitive, abominably soulless, even, however strange it may sound, irrational to those capable of foreseeing the human that wields the power of angelic flying, spiritual vision, performing instantaneous complex mental operations simply by virtue of developing the potentialities of our brain, of our physical etheric, and astral body. The spiritualized and wise beauty of bird wings is not as far from the ghastly glimmers of scrubbed airplane wings as the concrete results of going along these two contrasting paths of human development. Ancient magic and, later, certain movements in Eastern philosophical practice hardly touched upon the question of uncorking these potentialities. The path of this uncorking is little-trodden, extremely laborious, and bears fruit only as a result of many generations’ successive efforts. Its particular difficulty rests in the fact that this practice is closely related to the overall spiritualization of the personality, to the uplifting of one’s moral level, to cleansing out all sorts of murk. Ancient magic failed to make much progress on this path precisely because it underestimated the connection between the magical practice and ethics. In the majority of cases, engaging in all these activities for egotistical ends interrupts this movement altogether. Sometimes, the movement carries on, yet at the cost of the demonization of the shelt with all kinds of otherworldly ramifications.
At late cultural-historical stages, many movements and schools in the folds of highly evolved religions touched upon this problematic: as Pythagoreanism, so too the Cabbala, Eastern Christian monasticism and that of Daoism and Lamaism. It appears that Indian yoga was more intent on developing these very potentialities than others. The connection of this practice with ethics was obvious to them from the very start at that. Yet, yoga demanded renunciation of many common human needs and highly austere self-discipline, which prevented large masses of humanity from joining this movement. It is highly doubtful, however, that the only way of opening up these potentialities, regardless of the epoch and culture, has been extreme ascetism. Conditions of a new time would dictate, perhaps, not an agonizing mortification of flesh, not unlike the feats of monks in Isaac Sirin’s days or of Indian hermits, but lighter forms similar to worldly righteousness or, for instance, to daily rounds of life of Southern Buddhist communities – strict and pure, yet rejecting flesh mortification.
In the metacultures of antiquity, Byzantium included, society had not yet made the ultimate choice between these two paths of development – for brevity’s sake, let’s call one of them “scientific-technological”. The panoramic view of the ancient Roman Empire, it must be said, would reveal that the then ancient public consciousness already lacked in the ideas associated with the first way of development (ascetism, t/n). These were limited to esoteric and half esoteric societies, mystical cults, and certain priesthood circles. Yet, social-economic conditions of the Ancient Rome, Byzantium, even of the Western Middle Age could not rapidly propel the society along the second path (worldly righteousness, t/n). The borderline appears to be circa the fifteenth century – the epoch that saw the invention of gunpowder and book-printing, the discovery of America and India, and the colossal economic and psychological changes resulting from all this.
Starting from the seventeenth century, there had been the predominance of leaning toward the second way of development. The fading potentialities of the first one were crystal-clear.
The second way of development is characterized with several specificities. First, there happens a dramatic and complete divorce between science, that is, comprehension of the outer world, and whatsoever spirituality, which becomes shoved aside into the field of theology, cult, mystical philosophy, and art – that is, the field first completely disregarded by science and then, much later, is studied, again, but from the purely scientific standpoint. Second, the methodology of knowledge narrows down to the fine-grained empiricism and purely rational generalizations of the material, obtained through empirical methods. Third, scientific activities as such completely depart from any applied ethics: self-interest or selflessness of motivation, depravity or virtuousness of the scientist no longer define the fruits of his or her activities. It goes without saying that the karmic consequences of malign scientific and technological activities, for example, military innovations, are still to be reaped by all in their afterlife. Yet, these consequences are far from the compass of the scientist’s consciousness in his or her lifetime. And fourth, science essentially becomes accessible for anyone featuring persistence and diligence. The ultimate separation between the spiritual and the intellectual becomes an undeniable reality.
How to evaluate – from the metahistorical point of view – the path selection of Western humanity, which later shaped the direction of mental activities in other metacultures? Hadn’t the mission of Christ been interrupted, humanity would have received a powerful impulse to move along the spiritual path. Under that scenario alone, there would have been a possibility to discover and master methods which would have enabled the engagement of the people’s masses onto the path of spirituality, not just the select few in the Buddhist countries and India. Achievements of those generations would have proved incomparably greater and more palpable. It is like comparing the range of scientific achievements in antiquity when only few individuals had worked in a certain field to what might have been the results of the engaged millions. The one who had snatched away the life of Christ at its very beginning carried on his deeply goal-oriented and satanically intelligent activities. It goes without saying that he put much effort into extinguishing all seedlings of spirituality and saw to a vigorous development of scientific and technological thought. It is self-explanatory why he needed the former. As for the latter, without great technological advances it would be impossible for him to unite humanity into a single monolith, hence to establish planetwide tyranny – the only tyranny deserving to be called “absolute”.
Yet, unification of humanity has been a goal or, rather, intermediary step toward the ultimate goal of other-than-demonic forces. Unification of humanity is a prerequisite for achieving the ultimate goal of the Providential principle as well. For, unless the unification has become a reality, humanity will be torn with revolutions and more and more devastating wars. There would come a day when the destructiveness of wars has endangered the whole organic life on the Earth’s surface. There is no way to avert this threat outside of global political and social unification. As humanity has long, albeit unconsciously, opted for the scientific-technological path of development, as it is impossible to derail the common mindset toward spirituality in a short span of time, Providential forces, on their part, have to propel humanity along the scientific-technological path, too. Such is the metahistorical dialectic. Forces of Light are solely concerned with directing the scientific thought, as far as it depends on them, along such lines which would be least fraught with discoveries and inventions ruinous for humanity. The consciousness and will of scientists is a battlefield of Light and darkness just as everything in Shadanakar is. At the same time, while the spiritualized minds of Einstein, Planck, and Curie, who would perform feats of their grandiose discoveries, were being enlightened with daemons’ inspirations, the minds of inventors of six-barreled mortars, thermonuclear bombs, covert listening devices, and intercontinental ballistic missiles were being guided by servants of our Nemesis.
Apart from the multiplication of destructive powers of war, technological advancement has played a paramount, yet contradictory role for humanity.
Objective historical observations do not support this thesis. Until the late phase of capitalism, wealth had been owned by the privileged classes or groups rather than the society as a whole, and the material level of these groups rather than the average wellbeing of the society had set the benchmark. The notion of the material prosperity of the society as a whole can be applied only at the late stage of historical development. One may talk about prosperity and wealth – at least, at certain time periods – of such societies as modern Sweden, Netherlands, or Switzerland. The wealth of the United States would also make the case albeit with some reservations, for income difference across different social strata in this country is immense, and far from the whole American society has enjoyed prosperity even at its heyday. With regard to countries of the socialist camp, I do not mention them here as they belong to a later period of history.
I would be quite excited to hear well substantiated arguments to the effect that the aforementioned societies featuring high levels of material prosperity, such as Sweden, Netherlands, and Switzerland, have manifested true spiritual riches alongside. It is true that they have made some contribution – and still do – to the world of science and technology. Yet, science and technology are the domain of intellectual rather than spiritual values. One is to learn to differentiate between these two types of phenomena to begin with. The mindset of a certain kind, which is quite widespread these days, cannot tell the intellectual from the spiritual. Humanities, art, sociology, ethics, religion, physico-mathematical, and biological cycles of sciences, even certain aspects of technology – all these are just lumped together. Works of Kalidas and Darwin, Hegel and Edison, Ramakrishna and Alekhin, Stalin and Ghandi, Dante and Pavlov are seen as kindred phenomena, as “spiritual” culture. This aberration may seem savagery, were it not for rather civilized and intelligent-looking people complicit in it. Meanwhile, it is as clear as day that we are dealing with two completely different kinds of phenomena: spiritual and intellectual. Nearly the whole domain of science, let alone of technology belongs to the latter. It also includes philosophical, aesthetic, and moral schemes to the extent they are stripped of any preternatural, variomaterial, otherworldly, and spiritual experiences in the truest sense of this word. In the same fashion, it comprises social movements, political programs, economical and social activities, even art and literary fiction. With regard to spirituality, it contains human manifestations directly related to the notion of multiplane existence and the apprehension of all kinds of threads interweaving the physical plane of existence with other planes, the spiritual included. These manifestations comprise religion, spiritualistic philosophy, metahistory, magic, high ethics, and the most profound creations of literature, music, and spatial arts.
If one realizes and takes in the difference between these two types of phenomena – spiritual and intellectual – it would become evident that spiritual riches are not directly proportional to material wealth. Spiritual activities are compromised only with two extremes of material standing: misery and luxury. The former makes one throw all efforts into the struggle for existence; the latter leads to chasing and multiplying riches [at the expense of spirituality] or jadedness and burnout, which cover the soul with psychological fat.
Neither Sweden, Netherlands, or the United States, but poor (from the European standpoint, of course) Thailand, Ceylon, Burma, and Cambodia, “half-barbarian” Tibet and Nepal, even downtrodden India exemplify societies wherein life is imbued – much greater than in Western societies – with artistry, routine involvement of the masses into the creation of highly aesthetical values, intense ideological searchings, and that emotional warmth, which abides only in countries featuring an agelong moral climate nourished by immense reservoirs of spirituality. We are given to focusing on the economic underdevelopment of these countries, on Indian poverty, on Tibetan illiteracy, on the primitive nature of daily life in Ceylon, on the vestiges of the Indian caste system, on the theocratic feudalism in Tibet, on the imperfections of family life. And we consciously turn a blind eye toward something else in these countries: toward those powers that had built and sustained towns consisting nearly half in stunningly beautiful and enlightening temples; toward those flights of genius which adorned the face of the Earth with delightful architecture; toward those hands that embellished the banks of the holy rivers flowing across these countries with countless monuments of human aspiration toward Spirit, light, and beauty. They forget the aspect of Indian life, without which no other people could have set themselves free from an agelong slavery by means of nonviolence – the most ethically pure method that has ever been thought up. Not intellectualism, but precisely spirituality whiffs from all kinds of manifestations of the lives of people in the Indian and Indo-Malayan metaculture: from magnificent crafts suffused with inner light; from folk arts; from the attitude of an “average commoner” toward problems of life and death; from mysteries and epics, which are performed all night long on the deplorable square in any, even the most ramshackle village; from astounding forgiveness toward recent conquerors; from insignificant, as compared with America and Russia, crime rates; from highly ethical programs of action adopted by the ruling political party; even, for example, from the type of woman prevailing in Indian society that is so graphically depicted by Rabindranath Tagore and Prem Chand.
Switching intellectualism with spirituality is so widespread in Russia, and even the West that the meaning and purpose of this are crystal-clear: to dislodge the human psyche from the domain of the highest values into the purely utilitarian sphere. This striving and its practical realization is one of the main aspects of the cultural-historical process we are living in. This is, certainly, related to the emasculation of the faraway social ideal, which I have already talked about, and to the intention to do so gradually, stealthily, so that the society would, bit by bit, emasculate itself and regenerate while being totally unaware of the forming vacuum, unaware of being stripped of the most precious of its values and fed back with other, supplementary ones.
Material wellbeing is an absolute value in itself. This is a natural, human-worthy level of outward existence. It represents a value, for it shields superficial wellbeing which enables the smooth ripening and fruition of the soul’s seeds. Yet, proclaiming material wellbeing and the outward conquest of the forces of nature, again, all for the material prosperity of humankind, to be the primary and supreme value, the ultimate purpose of the armed struggle of the masses all over the world, the ideal of social development for the sake of which entire generations and whatever spiritual values are to be sacrificed – this is either a tragic mistake, or a half-conscious deception.
Yet, precisely this erroneous thought, sometimes proclaimed loud and clear, sometimes understated, but always discernible in the complex of revolutionary ideas of our century, shapes the nature of ideals cresting this complex, so too the methods inherent to it.
The comprehensive social-political and philosophical doctrine that had been elaborated in the mid-nineteenth century in the West, and that gradually came to dominate in the progressive, revolutionary thinking, will be called “the Doctrine” from now onwards for brevity’s sake. This Doctrine is closely, “genetically” related to the preceding chains of Western philosophy and scientific thought, even Christianity. Yet, it is not hard to see that it had been elaborated with an active support of those forces which, were concerned with creating a powerful teaching to guide humanity. It led, however, down the ladder of ideological-social switches towards such a social, cultural, psychological, and technological state, which was within only a short leap from becoming the absolute, single-person tyranny. If one allows for such a supposition, the beam of the spotlight in which we were accustomed to contemplate cultural and historical phenomena, would rapidly shift. Phenomena that have seemed so well-defined would become overshadowed, whereas the things we have been clueless of would come to the fore. Ironclad, adamant, unyielding materialism was advocated literally with foaming mouth; burning, at times volcanic hatred toward everything with an inkling of religiosity, mysticism, or idealism; the complete exclusion of spirituality, equating it with the relic of the past, and asserting purely material and intellectual values; giving pride of place to the idea of the material prosperity of the majority and the approbation of any means instrumental in achieving this goal; proclaiming the dictatorship of the proletariat, then replacing the proletariat with a single party, only to be supplanted by an autocratic leader; enunciating the austere need of the subjugation of the remaining social classes and, over time, the physical elimination of all the unwanted; close supervision of the state, that is, the autocratic party, over society’s cultural “produce”; the colossal role of technology, machinery, industry, and the automatization of all industrial processes, and so too of social transactions and of the psyche itself – all these and many other things, if seen from a new angle, would take on a new, rather ominous significance.
It is highly symptomatic that the very Doctrine which had blazed the trail to the surface of the society with the help of liberating slogans and harangues about freedom started its reign from the dispersion of the All Russian Constituent Assembly, the very body it had vainly attempted to get the majority votes in. This was rapidly followed by prohibition of activities of all other parties and political organizations as well as elimination of all press except for the Doctrine’s.
From the stated vantage point of metahistory, it is also important to consider such phenomena as science, technology, and industrialization.
Human nature – this not only concerns the physical body but the whole variomaterial conglomerate of the human being – holds such potentialities which, if developed, would infinitely expand our abilities to utilize material mediums and totally transform the relationship between the human and space, the human and time, the human and nature, the human and other planes of existence. The problem of flying can be solved by other means than aviation. Combating diseases so as to prolong life expectancy can be carried out in other ways than currently used by medicine. Rapid movement across space and communication over great distances are far from being monopolized by sciences busy with perfecting transportation and all means of communication. For example, the ability to fly, to travel through space with an unimaginable speed, to communicate over great distances, to pass through the dense medium, to overcome diseases, to elongate human life expectancy two- or threefold, to meet beings from other planes, to contemplate transphysical panoramas, to replenish the life force not with food but through absorbing emanations from light-filled elementals and inhaling fragrant aromas – all these and many other abilities are deeply stored, in an embryonic state, in our innermost being. Technological achievements of our day (the mid-twentieth century, translator’s note), such as jet planes, TV sets, or cybernetic devices would appear crude, laughingly clumsy, vulgar, heavy, primitive, abominably soulless, even, however strange it may sound, irrational to those capable of foreseeing the human that wields the power of angelic flying, spiritual vision, performing instantaneous complex mental operations simply by virtue of developing the potentialities of our brain, of our physical etheric, and astral body. The spiritualized and wise beauty of bird wings is not as far from the ghastly glimmers of scrubbed airplane wings as the concrete results of going along these two contrasting paths of human development. Ancient magic and, later, certain movements in Eastern philosophical practice hardly touched upon the question of uncorking these potentialities. The path of this uncorking is little-trodden, extremely laborious, and bears fruit only as a result of many generations’ successive efforts. Its particular difficulty rests in the fact that this practice is closely related to the overall spiritualization of the personality, to the uplifting of one’s moral level, to cleansing out all sorts of murk. Ancient magic failed to make much progress on this path precisely because it underestimated the connection between the magical practice and ethics. In the majority of cases, engaging in all these activities for egotistical ends interrupts this movement altogether. Sometimes, the movement carries on, yet at the cost of the demonization of the shelt with all kinds of otherworldly ramifications.
At late cultural-historical stages, many movements and schools in the folds of highly evolved religions touched upon this problematic: as Pythagoreanism, so too the Cabbala, Eastern Christian monasticism and that of Daoism and Lamaism. It appears that Indian yoga was more intent on developing these very potentialities than others. The connection of this practice with ethics was obvious to them from the very start at that. Yet, yoga demanded renunciation of many common human needs and highly austere self-discipline, which prevented large masses of humanity from joining this movement. It is highly doubtful, however, that the only way of opening up these potentialities, regardless of the epoch and culture, has been extreme ascetism. Conditions of a new time would dictate, perhaps, not an agonizing mortification of flesh, not unlike the feats of monks in Isaac Sirin’s days or of Indian hermits, but lighter forms similar to worldly righteousness or, for instance, to daily rounds of life of Southern Buddhist communities – strict and pure, yet rejecting flesh mortification.
In the metacultures of antiquity, Byzantium included, society had not yet made the ultimate choice between these two paths of development – for brevity’s sake, let’s call one of them “scientific-technological”. The panoramic view of the ancient Roman Empire, it must be said, would reveal that the then ancient public consciousness already lacked in the ideas associated with the first way of development (ascetism, t/n). These were limited to esoteric and half esoteric societies, mystical cults, and certain priesthood circles. Yet, social-economic conditions of the Ancient Rome, Byzantium, even of the Western Middle Age could not rapidly propel the society along the second path (worldly righteousness, t/n). The borderline appears to be circa the fifteenth century – the epoch that saw the invention of gunpowder and book-printing, the discovery of America and India, and the colossal economic and psychological changes resulting from all this.
Starting from the seventeenth century, there had been the predominance of leaning toward the second way of development. The fading potentialities of the first one were crystal-clear.
The second way of development is characterized with several specificities. First, there happens a dramatic and complete divorce between science, that is, comprehension of the outer world, and whatsoever spirituality, which becomes shoved aside into the field of theology, cult, mystical philosophy, and art – that is, the field first completely disregarded by science and then, much later, is studied, again, but from the purely scientific standpoint. Second, the methodology of knowledge narrows down to the fine-grained empiricism and purely rational generalizations of the material, obtained through empirical methods. Third, scientific activities as such completely depart from any applied ethics: self-interest or selflessness of motivation, depravity or virtuousness of the scientist no longer define the fruits of his or her activities. It goes without saying that the karmic consequences of malign scientific and technological activities, for example, military innovations, are still to be reaped by all in their afterlife. Yet, these consequences are far from the compass of the scientist’s consciousness in his or her lifetime. And fourth, science essentially becomes accessible for anyone featuring persistence and diligence. The ultimate separation between the spiritual and the intellectual becomes an undeniable reality.
How to evaluate – from the metahistorical point of view – the path selection of Western humanity, which later shaped the direction of mental activities in other metacultures? Hadn’t the mission of Christ been interrupted, humanity would have received a powerful impulse to move along the spiritual path. Under that scenario alone, there would have been a possibility to discover and master methods which would have enabled the engagement of the people’s masses onto the path of spirituality, not just the select few in the Buddhist countries and India. Achievements of those generations would have proved incomparably greater and more palpable. It is like comparing the range of scientific achievements in antiquity when only few individuals had worked in a certain field to what might have been the results of the engaged millions. The one who had snatched away the life of Christ at its very beginning carried on his deeply goal-oriented and satanically intelligent activities. It goes without saying that he put much effort into extinguishing all seedlings of spirituality and saw to a vigorous development of scientific and technological thought. It is self-explanatory why he needed the former. As for the latter, without great technological advances it would be impossible for him to unite humanity into a single monolith, hence to establish planetwide tyranny – the only tyranny deserving to be called “absolute”.
Yet, unification of humanity has been a goal or, rather, intermediary step toward the ultimate goal of other-than-demonic forces. Unification of humanity is a prerequisite for achieving the ultimate goal of the Providential principle as well. For, unless the unification has become a reality, humanity will be torn with revolutions and more and more devastating wars. There would come a day when the destructiveness of wars has endangered the whole organic life on the Earth’s surface. There is no way to avert this threat outside of global political and social unification. As humanity has long, albeit unconsciously, opted for the scientific-technological path of development, as it is impossible to derail the common mindset toward spirituality in a short span of time, Providential forces, on their part, have to propel humanity along the scientific-technological path, too. Such is the metahistorical dialectic. Forces of Light are solely concerned with directing the scientific thought, as far as it depends on them, along such lines which would be least fraught with discoveries and inventions ruinous for humanity. The consciousness and will of scientists is a battlefield of Light and darkness just as everything in Shadanakar is. At the same time, while the spiritualized minds of Einstein, Planck, and Curie, who would perform feats of their grandiose discoveries, were being enlightened with daemons’ inspirations, the minds of inventors of six-barreled mortars, thermonuclear bombs, covert listening devices, and intercontinental ballistic missiles were being guided by servants of our Nemesis.
Apart from the multiplication of destructive powers of war, technological advancement has played a paramount, yet contradictory role for humanity.