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		<b><font face="Times New Roman">
		<i>The March of Civilisation</i>&nbsp;
</font></b>
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<font face="Times New Roman">WE are familiar with the phrase &quot;Augustan Age&quot;: it is in
reference to a particular period in a nation's history when its
creative power is at its highest both in respect of quantity
and quality, especially in the domain of art and literature,
for it is here that the soul of a people finds expression most
easily and spontaneously. Indeed, if we look at the panorama
that the course of human evolution unfolds, we see epochs of
high light in various countries spread out as towering beacons
or soaring peaks bathed in sunlight dominating the flat plains
or darksome valleys of the usual normal periods. Take the
Augustan Age itself which has given the name: it is a very
crucial and one of the earlier outflowerings of the human
genius on a considerable scale. We know of the appearance of
individuals on the stage of life each with a special mission and
role in various ages and various countries. They are great
men of action, great men of thought, creative artists or spiritual
and religious teachers. In India we call them Vibhutis (we
can include the Avataras—Divine Incarnations—also in the
category). Even so, there is a collective manifestation too, an
upsurge in which a whole race or nation takes part and is carried and raised to 
a higher level of living and achievement. There is a tide in the affairs not only of men, but of
peoples also: and masses, large collectivities live on the crest
of their consciousness, feeling and thinking deeply and nobly,
acting and creating powerfully, with breadth of vision and
intensity of aspiration, spreading all around something that
is new and not too common, a happy guest come from else-where.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Ancient Greece, the fountainhead of European civilisation
—of the world culture reigning today, one can almost say—</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">found itself epitomised in the Periclean Age. The light—
grace, harmony, sweet reasonableness—that was Greece, reached its highest and largest, its most characteristic growth</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">in that period. Earlier, at the very beginning of her life cycle,
there came indeed Homer and no later creation reached a
higher or even as high a status of creative power: but it was
a solitary peak, it was perhaps an announcement, not the realisation of the national glory. Pericles stood as the guardian,
the representative, the emblem and nucleus of a nation-wide
efflorescence. Not to speak of the great names associated with
the age, even the common people—more than what was</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">normally so characteristic of Greece—felt the tide that was
moving high and shared in that elevated sweep of life, of
thought and creative activity. Greece withdrew. The stage
was made clear for Rome. Julius Caesar carried the Roman
genius to its sublimest summit: hut it remained for his great
nephew to consolidate and give expression to that genius in
its most characteristic manner and lent his name to a characteristic high-water mark of human civilisation.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Greece and Rome may be taken to represent two types of
culture. And accordingly we can distinguish two types of
elevation or crest-formation of human consciousness—one of
light, the other of power. In certain movements one feels
the intrusion, the expression of light, that is to say, the play
of intelligence, understanding, knowledge, a fresh outlook and
consideration of the world and things, a revaluation in other
terms and categories of a new consciousness. The greatest, at
least, the most representative movement of this kind is that
of the Renaissance. It was really a New Illumination: a flood of light poured 
upon the mind and intellect and understanding of the period. There was a brightness, a brilliance, a happy
agility and keenness in the movements of the brain. A largeness
of vision, a curious sensibility, a wide and alert consciousness:</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">these are some of the fundamental characteristics 
of this remarkable New Birth. It is the birth of what has been known
as the scientific outlook, in the broadest sense: it is the threshold of the <i>modern epoch</i> of humanity. All the modern European
languages leaped into maturity, as it were, each attaining its definitive form 
and full-blooded individuality. Art and literature flooded in their magnificent creativeness all nations</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">and peoples of the whole continent. The Romantic Revival,
starting somewhere about the beginning of the nineteenth
century, is another outstanding example of a similar phenomenon, of the descent of light into human consciousness. The
light that descended into human consciousness at the time of
the Renaissance captured the higher mind and intelligence—
the Ray touched as it were the frontal lobe of the brain; the
later descent touched the heart, the feelings and emotive sensibility, it evoked 
more vibrant, living and powerful perceptions, created varied and dynamic sense-complexes, new
idealisms and aspirations. The manifestation of Power, the
descent or inrush of force—mighty and terrible—has been
well recognised and experienced in the great French Revolution. A violence came out from somewhere and seized man
and society: man was thrown out of his gear, society broken
to pieces. There came a change in the very character and
even nature of man: and society had to be built upon other
foundations. The past was gone. <i>Divasa gatah.</i> Something very
similar has happened again more recently, in Russia. The
French Revolution brought in the bourgeois culture, the
Russian Revolution has rung in the Proletariate.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In modern India, the movement that led her up to Independence was at a crucial moment a mighty evocation of both
Light and Power. It had not perhaps initially the magnitude,
the manifest scope or scale of either the Renaissance or the
Great Revolutions we mention. But it carried a deeper import,
its echo far-reaching into the future of humanity. For it meant
nothing less than the spiritual awakening of India and therefore the spiritual regeneration of the whole world: it is the
harbinger of the new epoch in human civilisation.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; These larger human movements are in a sense anonymous.
They are not essentially the creation of a single man as are
some of the well-known religious movements. They throw up
great aspiring souls, strong men of action, indeed, but as part
of themselves, in their various aspects, facets, centres of expression, lines of expansion. An Augustus, a Pericles, a Leo<b> 
</b>X<b>,
</b>a Louis XIV, or a Vikramaditya are not more than nuclei,
as I have already said, centres of reference round which their
respective epoch crystallises as a peak culture unit. They are
not creators or originators; they are rather organisers. A</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">Buddha, a Christ or a Mohammed or even a Napoleon<b> 
</b>or Caesar or Alexander are truly creators: they bring with them
something—some truth, some dynamic revelation—that was
not there before. They realise and embody each a particular
principle of being, a unique mode of consciousness—a new
'gift to earth and mankind. Movements truly anonymous,
however, have no single nucleus or centre of reference: they are multinucleur. The names that adorn the Renaissance are<br>
many, it had no single head; the men through whom the
great French Revolution unrolled itself were many in number,
that is to say, the chiefs, who represented each a face or
phase of the surging movement.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The cosmic spirit works itself out in the world and in human
affairs in either of these forms : (1) as embodied in a single
personality and (2) as an impersonal movement, sometimes
through many personalities, sometimes through a few outstanding personalities and sometimes even quite anonymously
as a maps movement. Either mode has each its own special
purpose, its function in the cosmic labour, its contribution to
the growth and unfoldment of the human consciousness upon
earth as a whole. Generally, we may say, when it is an intensive
work, when it is a new truth that has to be disclosed and set in
man's heart and consciousness, then the individual is called
up and undertakes the work: when, however, the truth already
somehow found or near at hand is to be spread wide and
made familiar to men and established upon earth, then the
larger anonymous movements are born and have sway.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Indeed, these movements, the appearance of great souls
upon earth and the manifestation of larger collective surges
in human society, are not isolated happenings, having no reference or point of 
contact with one another. On the contrary, they are two limbs of a global evolutionary process.
In and through them across countries and centuries the spirit
of humanity moves towards greater and greater fulfilment.
Evolution means the growth of consciousness. In man in his.collective existence the growth continues: it lies in two directions. First of all, in extension. A sufficiently large physical
body is needed to house the growing life and consciousness:</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">therefore the unicellular organism has developed into the
multicellular. In the same way, in the earliest stages of human</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">society, the light and power of consciousness, characteristic
of that age, found expression among a few only: it was the
age of representative individuals, leaders—Rishi, Magi,
Patriarch, Judge, King. Next a stage came when the cultural
consciousness widened and, instead of scattered individuals
or some families, we have a large group, a whole class or
section of society who become the guardian of the light: thus
arose the Brahmin, the <i>elite,</i> the cultured class, the aristocracy
of talents. The light and culture filters down further and
embraces larger masses of people who take living interest and
share in the creative activities of man, in the higher preoccupations of mind and thought; this is the age of enlightened
bourgeoisie. In comparatively recent times what is familiarly
known as the &quot;middle class&quot; was the repository and purveyor
of human culture.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The light sinks further down and extends still more its
scope seeking to penetrate and encircle the whole of humanity.
The general mass of mankind, the lowest strata of society
have to be taken in, elevated and illumined. That must be
the natural and inevitable consummation of all progress and
evolution. And that is the secret sense and justification of the
Proletarian Revolution of today. Although, the many names
and forms given to it by its violent partisans do not bring out
or sufficiently honour the soul and spirit that informs it.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This then is the pattern of cultural development as 
it proceeds in extension and largeness. It moves in ever- widening
concentric circles. Individuals, small centres few and far
between, then larger groups and sections, finally vast masses
are touched and moved (and will be moulded one day) by the infiltrating light. 
That is how in modern times all movements are practically world-wide, encompassing all nations
and peoples: there seems to be nothing left that is merely
local or parochial. It is a single wave, as it were, that heaves
up the whole of humanity. Political, social, economic and
even spiritual movements, although not exactly of the same
type or pattern, all are interrelated, interlocked, inspired by
a common breath and move from one end of the earth to the
other. They seem to be but modulations of the same world-
theme. A pulse-beat in Korea or Japan is felt across the
Pacific in America and across that continent, traversing again</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">the Atlantic it reaches England, sways the old continent in
1   its turn and once more leaps forward through the Asiatic
vastnesses back again to its place of origin. The wheel comes <i>,</i> indeed full circle: it is one movement girdling the earth.
What one thinks or acts in one corner of the globe is thought
and acted simultaneously by others at the farthest corner.
Very evidently it is the age of radiography and electronics.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; In the early stages of humanity its history consists of the 
isolated histories of various peoples and lands: intercommunication was difficult, therefore all communion was of the
nature of infiltration and indirect influence. The difference
between countries far distant from each other were well
marked and very considerable in respect of their cultures and
civilisations. To put it in a somewhat scholarly yet graphic
manner, we can say, the isometric chart of the tides of civilisation in various countries over the globe in those days presents
a very unequal and tortuous figure. On the other hand, a
graph depicting the situation in modern times would be
formed by lines that are more even, uniform and straight. In<b> 
</b>other words, the world has become one, homogeneous: a
consciousness has grown same or similar on the whole in out-
look and life-impulse embracing all peoples and races in a
tight embrace. The benefit of the descending or manifesting
Light is now open equally and freely<b> </b> to each and every
member of the human kind.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Not only in extension but the growth or evolution has
progressed in another direction. There has not only been a quantitative but also 
a qualitative development. Culture movements have grown in intent, in depth or elevation, in the
meaning and significance of the consciousness involved. And
they have converged towards a single aim and purpose. That
purpose is not only the establishment of the global consciousness, but the expression and embodiment of the highest, the
supreme consciousness. The process here too, as in the domain
of extension, is one of graduation, advance by stages. The
light, the light of awakening consciousness first touches the
more easily accessible parts of human nature, the higher
domains that are not too much involved in the gross material
or animal nature. It is the realm of thoughts and ideas,<b> 
</b>of<b>&nbsp;
</b>idealism, imagination and aspiration: it is man's mind, which</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">is the least heavily weighted or ballasted by a downward
gravitational pull and the most buoyant and supple—the Ariel
in him. It is his head that first receives the glow of the morning
sun.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; If we look at Europe once again and cast a glance at its
origins, we find at the source the Greece-Roman culture. It
was pre-eminently a culture based upon the powers of mind
and reason: it included a strong and balanced body (both
body natural and body politic) under the aegis of <i>mens sana
</i>(a sound mind). The light that was Greece was at its zenith
/ a power of the higher mind and intelligence, intuitively dynamic in one—the earlier—phase through Plato, Pythagoras,
Heraclitus and the mystic philosophers, and discursively and
scientifically rational through the Aristotelian tradition. The
practical and robust Roman did not indulge in the loftier
and subtler activities of the higher or intutive mind; his was
applied intelligence and its characteristic turn found expression in law and order and governance. Virgil was a representative poet of the race, finely sensitive and yet very self-conscious
—earth-bound and mind-bound—as a creative artist: a clear
and careful intelligence with an idealistic imagination that is
yet sober and fancy-free is the very hall mark of his poetic genius. In the 
post-Roman age this bias for mental consciousness or the play of reason and 
intellectual understanding moved towards the superficial and more formal faculties
of the brain ending in what is called scholasticism: it meant
stagnation and decadence. It is out of this slough that the
Renaissance raised the mind of Europe and bathed it with a
new light. That movement gave to the mind a wider scope,
an alert curiosity, a keener understanding; it is, as I have said,
the beginning of that modern mentality which is known as the
scientific outlook, that is to say, study of facts and induction
from given data, observation and experience and experiment
instead of the other scholastic standpoint which goes by <i>a
priori</i> the orising and abstraction and deduction and dogmatism.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We may follow a little more closely the march of the centuries
in their undulating movement. The creative intelligence of the
Renaissance too belonged to a region of the higher mind, a
kind of inspirational mind. It had not the altitude or even the</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">depth of the Greek mind nor its subtler resonances : but it
regained and re-established and carried to a new degree the
spirit of inquiry and curiosity, an appreciation of human
motives and preoccupations, a rational understanding of man
and the mechanism of the world. The original intuitive fiat,
the. imaginative brilliance, the spirit of adventure (in the
mental as well as the physical world) that inspired the epoch
gradually dwindled: it gave place to an age of consolidation,
organisation, stabilisation—the classical age. The seventeenth
century Europe marked another peak of Europe's civilisation.
That is the Augustan Age to which we have referred. The
following century marked a further decline of the Intuition
and higher imagination and we come to the eighteenth century <i>terre a terre</i> rationalism. Great figures still adorned that age—
stalwarts that either stuck to the prevailing norm and gave it
a kind of stagnant nobility or already leaned towards the new
light that was dawning once more. Pope and Johnson, Montesquieu and Voltaire are its high-lights. The nineteenth century
brought in another crest wave with a special gift to mankind;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">apparently it was a reaction to the rigid classicism and dry
rationalism of the preceding age, but it came burdened with a
more positive mission. Its magic name was Romanticism.
Man opened his heart, his higher feeling and nobler emotional surge, his subtler sensibility and a general sweep of his
vital being to the truths and realities of his own nature and of
the cosmic nature. Not the clear white and transparent almost
glaring light of reason and logic, of the brain mind, but the
rosy or rainbow tint of the emotive and aspiring personality
that seeks in and through the cosmic panorama and dreams<b> </b>of</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A light that was ne'er on sea or land...</font><p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman"><br>
&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
A glory that hath passed away from earth.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The Romantic Revival was a veritable source movement:</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">it was, one can say, a kind of watershed from where various
streams of new creation and fresh adventure flowed down in
all directions. Its echoes and repurcussions are met with even
today and continue. The next stage that followed naturally
and inevitably was man's preoccupation with his sense being,</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">his external, his physical and material personality. It is the age
of Naturalism, Realism, Pragmatism, Scientism: it proclaims
the birth of the economic man. From the heart and emotions
we drop down into the field of the nervous and sensuous existence, from the vital sphere into the sphere of the body. And
that is where we are today. It means that we have been made
more than ever self-conscious on this plane and of this personality of ours. We have been given and are being given greater
knowledge of its mechanism; we are intensively (and extensively too) getting familiar with all the drawbacks and lacunae
that are there so that we can remedy them—and discover new
latent forces too,—and re-create and possess a truly &quot;brave
new world&quot;.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; That is how the spirit of progress and evolution has worked
and advanced in the European world. And one can take it as
the pattern of human growth generally; but in the scheme&nbsp;
described above we have left out one particular phase and
purposely. I refer to the great event of Christ and Christianity. For without that European civilisation loses more than half of
its import and value. After the Roman Decline began the ebb-tide, the trough, the dark shadow of the deepening abyss of
the Middle Ages. But even as the Night fell and darkness closed
around, a new light glimmered, a star was born. A hope and a
help shone &quot;in a naughty world&quot;. It was a ray of consciousness
that came from a secret cave, from a domain hidden behind
and deep within in the human being. Christ brought a leaven
into the normal manifest mode of consciousness, an other-worldly mode into the worldly life. He established a living and
dynamic contact with the soul, the inner person in man, the
person that is behind but still rules the external personality
made of mind and life and body consciousness. The Christ
revelation was also characteristic in the sense that it came as '
a large, almost a mass movement—this approach of the soul
personality to earthly life. The movement faded or got adulterated, deformed like all human things; but something
remained as a permanent possession of man's heritage.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This episode links up with the inner story of mankind, its
spiritual history. The growing or evolving consciousness of-man was not only an outgoing and widening movement: it was
also a heightening, an ascent into ranges that are not normally</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">perceived, towards summits of our true reality. We have spoken
of the Graeco-Roman culture as the source and foundation of
European civilisation; but apart from that there was a secret
vein of life that truly vivified it, led it by an occult but constant
influence along channels and achievements that are meant
' to serve the final goal and purpose. The Mysteries prevalent
and practised in Greece itself and Crete and the occult rites
of Egyptian priests, the tradition of a secret knowledge and
discipline found in the Kabbalah, the legendary worship of
gods and goddesses—sometimes confused, sometimes identified with Nature forces—all point to the existence of a line of
culture which is known in India as Yoga. If all other culture
means knowledge, Yoga is the knowledge of knowledge. As the
Upanishad says, there are two categories of knowledge, the
superior and the inferior. The development of the mind and
life and body belongs to the domain of Inferior Knowledge:</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">the development of the soul, the discovery of the Spirit means
the Superior Knowledge.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This knowledge remained at the outset scattered, hidden,
confined to a few, a company of adepts: it had almost no direct
contact with the main current of life. Its religious aspect too
was so altered and popularised as to represent and serve the
secular life. The systematisation and propagation of that
knowledge—at least the aspiration for that knowledge—was
attempted on an effective scale in the Hebrew Old Testament.
But then a good amount of externalities, of the Inferior
Knowledge was mixed up with the inner urge and the soul
perception. The Christ with his New Testament came precisely
with the mission of cleaning the Augean stables, in place of the
dross and coverings, the false and deformed godheads, to instal
something of the purest ray of the inner consciousness, the
unalloyed urge of the soul, the demand of our spiritual personality. The Church sought to build up society on that basis,
attempting a fusion of the spiritual and the temporal power,
so that instead of a profane secular world, a mundane or
worldly world, there may be established God's own world, the
City of God.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The drive towards the building of Heaven upon earth and
with earth, the materialisation of the Spirit on a cosmic scale,
the remodelling of the whole human society in spiritual terms</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">was the secret inspiring the other Semitic Revelation, that of
Mohammed. The Arab Master sought to bring down and
establish and express in life-force what the Rabi of Bethlehem
saw and felt in the inner heart—one was a lover, the other
a servant warrior of God.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Turning to India we find a fuller and completer—if not a
global—picture of the whole movement. India, we may say,
is the spiritual world itself: and she epitomised the curve of
human progress in a clearer and more significant manner.
^ Indian history, not its political but its cultural and spiritual
history, divides itself naturally into great movements with
corresponding epochs each dwelling upon and dealing with one
domain in the hierarchy of man's consciousness. The stages
and epochs are well known: they are—(1) Vedic, (2) Upanishadic, (3) Darshanas—roughly from Buddha to Shankara,
(4) Puranic, (5) <i>Bhagavata</i> or the Age of Bhakti, and finally
(6) the Tantric. The last does not mean that it is the latest
revelation, the nearest to us in time, but that it represents a
kind of complementary movement, it was there all along, for
long at least, and in which the others find their fruition and
consummation. We shall explain presently. The force of
consciousness that came and moved and moulded the first and
the earliest epoch was Revelation. It was a power of direct
vision and occult will and cosmic perception . Its physical seat
is somewhere behind and or just beyond the crown of the
head: the peak of man's manifest being that received the first
touch of Surya Savitri (the supreme Creative Consciousness)
to whom it bowed down uttering the invocation <i>mantra</i> of
Gayatri. The Ray then entered the head at the crown and
illumined it: the force of consciousness that ruled there is
Intuition, the immediate perception of truth and reality, the
cosmic consciousness gathered and concentrated at that peak.
That is Upanishadic knowledge. If the source and foundation
of the Vedic initiation was occult vision, the Upanishad meant
a pure and direct Ideation. The next stage in the coming
down or propagation of the Light was when it reached further
down into the brain and the philosophical outlook grew with
rational understanding and discursive argumentation as the
channel for expression, the power to be cultivated and the
limb to be developed. The Age of the Darshanas or Systems</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">of Philosophy started with the Buddha and continued till it
reached its peak- in Shankaracharya. The age sought to give
a bright and strong mental, even an intellectual body to the
spiritual light/the consciousness of the highest truth and reality.
In the Puranic Age the vital being was touched by the light
of the spirit and principally on the highest, the mental level
of that domain. It meant the advent of the element of feeling
and emotiveness and imagination into the play of the Light,
the beginning of their reclamation. This was rendered more
concrete and more vibrant and intense in the next stage of
the movement. The whole emotional being was taken up into
the travailing crucible of consciousness. We may name it also
as the age of the Bhagavatas, god-lovers, Bhaktas. It reached
its climax in Chaitanya whose physical passion for God
denoted that the lower ranges of the vital being (its physical
foundations) were now stirred in man to awake and to receive
the Light. Finally remains the physical, the most material to be
worked upon and made conscious and illumined. That was the
task of the Tantras. Viewed in that light one can easily understand why especial stress was laid in that system upon the
esoteric discipline of the five <i>m's (pancha makara),</i> all preoccupied
with the handling and harnessing of the grossest physical
instincts and the most material instruments. The Tantric
discipline bases itself upon Nature Power coiled up in Matter:</font>&nbsp;

<font face="Times New Roman">the release of that all-conquering force through a purification
and opening into the consciousness of the Divine Mother, the
transcendent creatrix of the universe. The dynamic materialising aspect of consciousness was what inspired the Tantras: the
others forming the Vedantic line, on the whole, were based
on the primacy of the static being, the Purusha, aloof and
withdrawing.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The Indian consciousness, we say, presented the movement
as an intensive and inner, a spiritual process: it dealt with the
substance itself, man's very nature and sought to know it from
within and shape it consciously. In Europe where the frontal
consciousness is more stressed and valued, the more characteristic feature of its history is the unfoldment 
and metamorphosis of the forms and expressions, the residuary powers,
as it were, of man's evolving personality, individual and social.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To sum up then. Man progresses through cycles of crest</font>
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<font face="Times New Roman">movements. They mark an ever-widening circle of the descent
of Light, the growth of consciousness. Thus there is at first a
small circle of <i>elite,</i> a few chosen people at the top, then
gradually the limited aristocracy is widened out into a larger
and larger democracy. One may describe the phenomenon in
the Indian terms of the Four Orders. In the beginning there
is the Brahminic culture, culture confined only to the highest
and the fewest possible select representatives. Then came the
wave of Kshatriya culture which found a broader scope among
a larger community. In India, after the age of the Veda and
the Upanishad, came the age of the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata which was pre-eminently an age of Kshatriya-hood. In Europe too it was the bards and minstrels, sages and
soothsayers who originally created, preserved and propagated
the cultural movement: next came the epoch of the Arthurian
legends, the age of chivalry, of knights and templars with their
heroic code of conduct and high living. In the epoch that
followed, culture was still further broad-based and spread to the
Vaishya order. It is the culture of the bourgeoisie: it was
brought about, developed and maintained by that class in
society preoccupied with the production or earning of wealth.
The economic bias of the literature of the period has often
been pointed out. Lastly the fourth dimension of culture has
made its appearance today when it seeks to be coterminous
with the proletariate. With the arrival of the Sudra, culture
has extended to the very base of the social pyramid in its widest
commonalty.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This movement of extension, looked at from the standpoint
of intensiveness, is also a movement of devolution, of reclamation. The Brahminic stage represents culture that is knowledge;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">it touches the mind, it is the brain that is the recipient and
instrument of the Light. The Kshatriya comes into the field
when the light, the vibration of awakening, from the mind
comes down into the vital energies, from the brain to the heart
region. The Vaishya spirit has taken up man still at a lower
region, the lower vital: the economic man that has his gaze
fixed upon his stomach and entrails. Lastly, the final stage is
reached when physical work, bodily labour, material service
have attained supreme importance and are considered almost
as the only values worth the name for a human being. To walk</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">and work firmly upon Earth the Light needs a strong pair of
feet. Therefore, the Veda says, <i>Padbhyam sudro ajayata,</i> out of
the feet of the Cosmic Godhead the Sudra was born.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; That is how man has become and is becoming integrally
conscious—conscious in and of all parts of his being. He is
awakening and opening to the light that descends from above:</font>
<font face="Times New Roman">indeed the true light, the light of truth is something transcendent and it is that that comes down and slowly inhabits
the world and possesses humanity. Its progress marks the steps
of evolution. It means the gradual enlightening and illumining
of the various layers of our being, the different strands of
consciousness from the higher to the lower, from the less dense
to the more dense, from mind to the body. It means also in the
same process a canalisation, materialisation and fixing upon
earth and in the physical being of the increasing powers of
the Light.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The Light as it descends from its own home above to the
lower levels of our being expresses itself no doubt in one way,
but also gets diminished, modified, even deformed in another
respect. The work of purification certainly goes on and until
that is complete and there comes the fullest expression, it will
continue. The action of light on the physical plane, for example,
on the body of the Cosmic Being is so blurred and confusing
apparently that it looks almost like the action of Darkness.
And yet the Dark Night of the soul is not simply the obscurity
of Ignorance. It is only the mud that lay' diffused or settled
in the being which has come up in its gathered mass in the
process of churning and cleaning and appears like an obscure
screen.</font>
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