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<p class="paracenter">THE END OF A CIVILISATION
</p>
<p class="paracenter"></p>
<p class="para"> 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, opening 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.
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 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
</p>
<br><p class="pageno">Page-1</p>
<hr>
<p class="para">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 Kshattriya, the Samurai, the Knights of 
old—there has come into the field a phenomenon for which it has itself found a 
name, <i>sadism, </i>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.
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 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 
Paradise being transplanted upon earth in the shape of a happy city (the city of 
the Raghus): today we have done the opposite miracle, the devil's capital city 
is installed upon earth, or even something worse. For, in the subtler worlds 
there is a saving grace, after all. If you have within you somewhere an
</p>
<br><p class="pageno">Page-2</p>
<hr>
<p class="para">aspiration, a trust, a faith, a light, the enemy cannot touch 
you or maul you badly. You may have also around you there beings who help you, a 
teacher, a guide who is near visibly or invisibly to give you the necessary 
warning or protection. But here below when the enemy has clothed himself in a 
material form and armed himself with material weapons, you are almost helpless. 
To save yourself from a physical blow, it is not always enough to have the 
proper inner consciousness only. Something more is needed.
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> Therefore misery stalks large 
upon the earth. Nothing comparable 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.
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> Perhaps it was necessary that it 
should be so. A <i>pralaya, </i>a Deluge has to be there to end an epoch and 
begin a new one. Indeed the civilisation that man has built up for millenniums, 
that has reached its culmination in modern <i>scientism, </i>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 Greece down to modern 
America. Is it not time that
</p>
<br><p class="pageno">Page-3</p>
<hr>
<p class="para">another consciousness should intervene, other gods make their 
appearance?
</p>
<br>
<p class="paracenter">* 
* 
*
</p>
<p class="paracenter"></p>
<p class="para"> 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, 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,</p>
<br><p class="pageno">Page-4</p>
<hr>
<p class="para">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.</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> If the civilisation goes, it 
means the instrument is gone, the basis on which the edifice for the Divine 
Consciousness is to be built 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.
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 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 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,
</p>
<br><p class="pageno">Page-5</p>
<hr>
<p class="para">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 <i>natural </i>process, one has to repeat the stage of 
babyhood and immaturity, a retempering of the instrument till it is capable of 
newer uses. True, something of the experiences, their essence, is stored 
somewhere in the depth of the being; but it is not utilised fully, it is not an 
effective element in 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.</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> 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 attempted. 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 sub-
</p>
<br><p class="pageno">Page-6</p>
<hr>
<p class="para">merged urges of animal atavism are pushing and pulling man down 
to a regression, to a reversion <i>to type. </i>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 was 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, some thing almost irremediable.
</p>
<br>
<p class="para"> For here is the sense of the 
crisis. The <i>mantra </i>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 building 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
</p>
<br><p class="pageno">Page-7</p>
<hr>
<p class="para">Nature. It is true that we have gone far, too far in our <i>
revanche. </i>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.
</p>
<br><p class="pageno">Page-8</p>
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