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<font size="4">A
Chapter of Human Evolution</font></b><font size="4"><BR></font><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3 style="font-size: 11pt">THE
appearance of the Greeks on the stage of human civilisation is a
mystery to historians. They are so different from all that preceded
them. There does not seem to exist any logical link between them and
the races from whom they are supposed to have descended or whose
successors they were. The Minoan or Cretan civilisation is said to be
cradle of the Greek, but where is the parallel or proportion between
the two, judging from whatever relics have been left over from the
older, the more ancient one. Indeed that is the term which best
describes the situation. Whatever has gone before the Hellenic
culture is ancient; they belong to the <I>Old Regime. </I>Egypt is
old, Phoenicia is old, the Hebrews are old, all the other races of
the old world are old, not merely chronologically, but
psychologically. But Hellas is modern. There is a breath in the
Ionian atmosphere, a breath of ozone, as it were, which wafts down to
us, even into the air of today. Homer and Solon, Socrates and
Aristotle, Pythagoras and Plato are still the presiding gods ruling
over the human spirit that was born on Olympus and Ida.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3 style="font-size: 11pt">Human
evolution took a decisive turn with the advent of the Hellenic
culture and civilisation. All crises in evolution are a sudden
revelation, an unexpected outburst, a <I>saltum, </I>a leap into the
unknown. Now, what the Greeks brought in was the Mind, the luminous
Reason, the logical faculty that is married to the senses, no doubt,
but still suffused with an inner glow of consciousness. It is the
faculty mediating between a more direct and immediate perception of
things, Intuition and Instinct, on the one hand, and on the other,
the perception given by the senses and a power of control over
material things. Take Egypt or Israel or Chaldea, what one finds
prominent there is the instinctive-intuitive man, <I>spontaneous –
prime-sautier – ima</I></FONT><FONT SIZE=3>ginative,
</FONT></P>
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<SPAN LANG="en-US" style="font-style: normal"><FONT SIZE=2>Page
– 219</font></span></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>mythopoeic, clairvoyant, clairaudient (although not very clear, in
the modern and Greek sense), bringing into this world things of the
other world and pushing this world as much as possible into the
other, maintaining a kind of direct connection and communion between
the two. The Greeks are of another mould. They are a rational people;
they do not 'I move and act simply or mainly by instinctive
reactions, but j even these are filtered in them through a light of
the Mind of</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3 style="font-size: 11pt">Intelligence,
a logical pattern, a rational disposition of things; through Mind
they seek to know Matter and to control it. It is the modern
methodology, that of observation and experiment, in other words, the
scientific procedure. The Greeks have had their gods, their
mythology; but these are modelled some-what differently: the gods are
made more human, too human, j as has often been observed. Zeus and
Juno (Hera) are infinitely more human than Isis and Osiris or Moloch
and Baal or even the Jewish Jehovah. These vital gods have a sombre
air about them, solemn and serious, grim and powerful, but they have
not the sunshine, the radiance and smile of Apollo (Apollo Belvedere)
or Hermes. The Greeks might have, they must have taken up their gods
from a more ancient Pantheon, but they have, after the manner of
their sculptor Phidias, remoulded them, shaped and polished them,
made them more luminous and nearer and closer to earth and men.<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">&sup1;</FONT>
Was it not said of Socrates that he brought down the gods from heaven
upon earth?</FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent: 0.46cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0"><FONT SIZE=3>The
intermediary faculty – the Paraclete, which the Greeks brought to
play is a corner-stone in the edifice of human progress. It is the
formative power of the Mind which gives things their shape and
disposition, their consistency and cogency as physical realities.
There are deeper and higher sources in man, more direct, immediate
and revealing, where things have their birth and origin; but this one
is necessary for the embodiment, for the building up and maintenance
of the subtler and profounder truths in an earthly structure,
establish and fix them in the normal consciousness. The Socratic
Dialogues are rightly placed at the start of the modern culture; they</FONT><BR><BR>
			</P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent: 0.38cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0"><FONT SIZE=2><FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">&sup1;</FONT>
The Olympians as opposed to the Chthonian gods. The Olympians were
white in colour, the Chthonians black or blood-red: the Olympian
temples faced the East, while the Chthonian faced the West and so on.</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page – 220</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3 style="font-size: 11pt">set
the pattern of modern mentality. That rational turn of mind, that
mental intelligence and understanding as elaborated, formulated,
codified by the Aristotelian system was the light that shone through
the Gr<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">&aelig;</FONT>co-Latin culture of the
Roman days; that was behind the culture and civilisation of the
Middle Ages. The changes and revolutions of later days, social or
cultural, did not affect it, rather were based upon it and inspired
by it. And even today our scientific culture maintains and continues
the tradition.</FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent: 0.33cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0"><FONT SIZE=3>The
Mind of Reason is a kind of steel-frame for other movements of
consciousness – pure ideas, imaginations or instinctive and sensory
notions, or even secret intimations and visions of deeper truths and
greater realities – to take body, to find a local habitation and
name and be firmly stabilised for experience or utilisation in
physical life. There was indeed a hiatus in the human consciousness
of the earlier period. Take, for example, the earliest human
civilisation at its best, of which we have historical record, the
Vedic culture of India: human consciousness is here at its optimum,
its depth and height is a thing of wonder. But between that world, an
almost occult world and this world of the physical senses there is a
gap. That world was occult precisely because of this gap. The
physical life and mind could translate and represent the
supra-physical only in figures and symbols; the impact was direct,
but it expressed itself in hieroglyphs. Life itself was more or less
a life of rites and ceremonies, and mind a field of metaphors and
legends and parables. The parable, the myth was an inevitability with
this type of consciousness and in such a world. The language spoken
was also one of images and figures, expressing ideas and perceptions
not in the abstract but as concrete objects, represented through
concrete objects. It is the Mind of Reason that brought in the age of
philosophy, the age of pure and abstract ideas, of the analytic
language. A significant point to note is that it was in the Greek
language that the pre-position, the backbone almost of the analytical
language, started to have an independent and autonomous status. With
the Greeks dawned the spirit of Science.</FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent: 0.34cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0"><FONT SIZE=3>In
India we meet a characteristic movement. As I said the Vedas
represented the Mythic Age, the age when knowledge was gained or life
moulded and developed through Vision </FONT>
<FONT SIZE=3 style="font-size: 11pt">and
Revelation (Sruti, direct Hearing). </FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page – 221</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3 style="font-size: 11pt">The Upanishadic Age followed
next. Here we may say the descending light touched the higher reaches
of the Mind, the mind of pure, fundamental, typical ideas. The
consciousness divested itself of much of the mythic and parabolic
apparel and, although supremely immediate and intuitive, yet was
bathed with the light of the day, the clear sunshine of the normal
wakeful state. The first burgeoning of the Rational Mind proper, the
stress of intellect and intellectuality started towards the end of
the Upanishadic Age with the Mahabharata, for example and the
Brahmanas. It flowered in full vigour, however, in the earlier
philosophical schools, the Sankhyas perhaps, and in the great
Buddhist illumination – Buddha being, we note with interest, almost
a contemporary of Socrates and also of the Chinese philosopher or
moralist Confucius – a triumvirate almost of mighty mental
intelligence ruling over the whole globe and moulding for an entire
cycle human culture and destiny. The very name Buddha is significant.
It means, no doubt, the Awakened, but awakened in and through the
intelligence, the mental Reason, <I>buddhi. </I>The Buddhist
tradition is that the Buddhist cycle, the cycle over which Buddha
reigns is for two thousand and five hundred years since his
withdrawal which takes us, it seems, to about 1956 A.D.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3 style="font-size: 11pt">The
Veda speaks of Indra who became later on the king of the gods. And
Zeus too occupies the same place in Greek Pantheon. Indra is, as has
been pointed out by Sri Aurobindo, the Divine Mind, the leader of
thought-gods (Maruts), the creator of perfect forms, in which to
clothe our truth-realisations in life. The later traditional Indra in
India and the Greek Zeus seem to be formulations on a lower level of
the original archetypal Indra, where the consciousness was more
mentalised, intellectualised, made more rational, sense-bound,
external, pragmatic. The legend of Athena being born straight out of
the head of Zeus is a pointer as to the nature and character of the
gods. The Roman name for Athena, Minerva, is significantly derived by
scholars from Latin <I>mens, </I>which means, as we all know, <I>mind.</I></FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent: 0.43cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0"><FONT SIZE=3>The
Greek Mind, as I said, is the bridge thrown across the gulf existing
between the spiritual, the occult, the intuitive and the sensuous,
the physical, the material. Since the arrival of</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page – 222</FONT></P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">the
Hellenes a highway has been built up, a metalled macada-mised road
connecting these two levels of human experience and there is possible
now a free and open communication from the one to the other. We need
not speak any more of God and the gods and the divine principles
indirectly through symbols and similes, but in mental terms which are
closer to our normal understanding and we can also utilise the form
of our intellection and reasoning to represent and capture something
of what lies beyond intellect and reason.</P>
<P LANG="en-US" ALIGN=JUSTIFY STYLE="text-indent: 0.35cm; line-height:150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0"><FONT SIZE=3>In
India we have an echo of the transition, rather perhaps, she held up
the type of the transition required. For here the evolution seems to
have been more gradual and the steps are more clearly visible leading
one to the other. India maintained an unbroken continuity in the
cyclic change of the human consciousness. She was coeval with Egypt
and Chaldea, Sumeria and Babylon: she communed with them perhaps in
similar and parallel terms. And yet she changed or evolved and knew
to express herself in other terms in other times. She had talked in
mystic terms with the mystics and later on she talked in rational
terms with rationalists. And today we see signs of her parleying with
the Scientists in scientific terms. That is how India still lives,
while Egypt and Chaldea have gone the way of Atlantis and
Gondwanaland. For something is enshrined there which is eternal,
something living and dynamic which is pressing forward to manifest
and embody itself, some supreme truth and reality of the future which
she is fostering within her to deliver to nature and humanity-a new
humanity with a new nature.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page – 223</FONT></P>
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