=1 "The rhythm of human fulfillment"
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The rhythm of human fulfilment
by Dane Rudhyar
As long as people do not consider themselves FIRST ‘human’, then secondarily American, English, Indian, Russian, etc. they will not possess an adequate frame of reference for the various experiences provided by intercontinental travel and even by T.V. or moving pictures of news. As long as our intellectuals make philosophy begin with classical Greece, and music with Gregorian plainchant or Renaissance polyphonic forms – as long as the adherents of any religion or cult are taught, from birth on, that their beliefs are the exclusive revelations from God – as long as every man and woman cannot feel that their one common home is the Earth, and that their ancestry joins them with the historical past of mankind’s evolution toward a state of global interhuman consciousness, then our new personal experiences will not have the frame of reference required for their assimilation, and we will be poisoned by the new facts of our daily living. As long as national or class interests are given priority over the welfare of mankind, as long as cultural habits and religious taboos stand in the way of the human race, as long as commercial values and the rugged individualism of by-gone days are allowed to stand against the fervent dedication of every conscious and responsible human being to the wholesome cultivation of a rich harvest of truly human and planetary values, these values, left uncultivated, will turn destructive; and perhaps the earth itself will rise against its blind despoilers.
We may quite soon have factual and incontrovertible evidence that there are in the universe other ‘humanities’ living on other planets. Such evidence would indeed do more to unify mankind than any other fact or concept; for it seems clear, as we study history, that in almost all cases, groups of men have integrated into larger communities and nations only when confronted with other integrated collectives. We will be inwardly pressured into stressing our status as ‘Terrans’ – i.e., as component parts of the total field of our planet, Earth – when we face people who belong to some other planet.
Always the basic problem is a change of ‘image’. We are what we image ourselves to be. In one case we see ourselves as bio-physic egos conditioned by our environment; in another, we feel that deep within our total being there is a power which constitutes the foundation and vibrating core of our individual selfhood. If we can change our picture of ourselves from socially conditioned ego to fundamental self we transform thereby our frame of reference for the psychological contents of our being, the meaning of our experiences, and the quality of our relationships to other beings. It is what we see ourselves as, and what we are dedicated to (consciously and semi-consciously) which gives direction, meaning and purpose to our life, our search, to all our responses to experiences of relationship.
But a psychological transformation of our basic image of ourselves is not enough; unless we can see and feel the place and function of this new self within a cosmological, all-embracing existential frame of reference that is structured in time and space – thus, within a ‘cyclocosmic’ whole of existence – our new sense of self will but float helplessly on the waves of circumstances, buffeted by every passing current of collective opinion and every group-ideology we encounter. A great mystical experience or illumination, or the fascinating insights which L.S.D. may give to some minds, will not be truly assimilated and built into our field of consciousness and our whole psychic and nervous system unless we can fit these experiences into a working model giving us a sense of direction, of stability and purposefulness.
In the past the socio-cultural-religious framework of a tribe, then a village and finally a national community enabled the men born within its sphere of influence to give meaning and functional purpose to all their basic experiences – birth, education, parent-child relationship, love and marriage, profession, illumination perhaps, old age and death. These spheres of influence were at first rigidly bounded and defined by means of taboos, laws and punishment, moral codes and religious sanctions and cultural traditions. The history of mankind is the history of periodical emergences from a smaller to a larger sphere; and each emergence has produced a crisis of readjustment. Today we are all compelled by the facts of our revolutionary century to emerge from the national to the global or planetary sphere. Yet we still do not really understand what this quantitative expansion will qualitatively mean.
What is truly at stake is not only a larger scheme of integration, a step from small organizational patterns to a larger one in which human beings thinking, feeling and behaving as we do will find an adequate living space and a social function. When the medieval village constituted by an aggregation of closely knit people and houses on some safe spot of land under the protection of castle and church was left for the big city, a profound bio-psychic qualitative transformation of the human beings involved inevitably occurred. We are facing today a similar process; but we are as yet very unsure of what is at stake in this new crisis of emergence. We have as yet no really valid new image of what the planetary stage of man’s evolution will and can be, largely because we have no satisfying cosmic frame of reference within which such a new image of planetary or global man will find meaning and purpose.
There is nothing more important today than for human beings to take a step in what their total being has come to experience as the right direction.
What does a person actually mean when he says ‘I’? What is the I-feeling? Is it inborn or does it develop through infancy? Does it really mean the same thing when said by a primitive tribesman or by a Hindu holy man, by a boisterous child or an illumined mind? Is it really a primary human experience?
To most people in our western world it seems evident that when they say ‘I’ they speak of that which is the basic fact of their existence. Of what could I be more certain, they say, than of the fact that I am? I know I exist, with a knowing which requires no intellectual explanation or justification. How could I doubt my own existence? How could any assertion I make not include a fundamental a priori feeling-intuition that ‘I’ exist – I who am speaking, thinking, living?
The real question, however, should be phrased differently. This feeling-intuition that ‘I’ am is a manifestation of consciousness.
‘Open to the universe’ we must be; but there are two fundamentally opposite types of openness: one that is passive and provides lovely or rapturous dreams for the ego (including dreams of absorption into an egoless expanse of feeling and light); the other, which is active and implies an unceasing state of ‘attention’ and awareness, a steady but rhythmic ‘piercing through’ the basic facts of existence in an effort to see them as they are in their total interdependence and within their largest ‘holistic’ frame of reference in time and space. The first type of openness leads to one of the many kinds of mediumship, the other to what may be called adeptship.
Modern science is based on a strenuous collective attempt to follow the second path; but I see it as a one-pointed and exclusivistic (and perhaps ultimately self-defeating) endeavor, conditioned historically by the cultural situation in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. It has produced extraordinary results and most valuable means of enabling man to build a global all-human civilization; but these means, under the control of the ego, will destroy the end they were meant to achieve, unless humanity can reorient its collective mind and find in a new picture of the meaning of existence – a cyclocosmic picture – the symbolic tools it needs to dig down to deeper and more solid foundations. Upon these foundations a truly ‘human’ and holistic culture can be built that would blossom forth in the spiritual solidarity and harmony of a regenerated humanity able to fulfill its essential function within the total field of activity of the planet, Earth – and perhaps eventually of the solar system.
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