The New Age - Part 4

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

We concluded Part 3 with:

 

(p.283) " Thirdly, these new values would give rise to a new type of human

community. This would be a decentralised society drawing people from large

cities to smaller towns and villages where a much more total and integrated

human life would be possible. I do not see any future for the huge cities of the

present world, London, New York, Tokyo, Bombay and Calcutta. In such cities all

over the world in every continent the population may be over ten million. Cities

of millions of people do not provide a human mode of existence and depend on a

whole economic system which will eventually collapse, for such societies cannot

sustain their economies. (p.284) So we have to look back beyond these

industrialised cities to find some kind of norm of human existence. Here I would

like to quote from Lewis Mumford, where in his book 'The Myth of the Machine' he

describes the neolithic village. This is a village the like of which lasted for

thousands of years, all over the world, and still exists to some extent to the

present day. This is how he describes it. " Where the seasons are marked by

holiday festivals and ceremonies; where the stages of life are punctuated by

family and community rituals; where eating and drinking and sexual play

constitute the central core of life, where work, even hard work, is rarely

divorced from rhythm, song, human companionship and aesthetic delight; where

vital activity is considered as great a reward of labour as the product; where

neither power nor profit has precedence over life; where the family, the

neighbour and the friend are all parts of a visible, tangible, face-to-face

community. There the neolithic culture in its essential elements is still in

existence. " That is to my mind a model of wholesome human existence. All these

elements were present in the villages of India until recently and are still

basically there although they are being undermined daily. That Indian village

life and culture which existed for millennia is being systematically destroyed,

year by year. "

 

A New Vision of Reality (Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and Christian Faith)

Chapter 13, p.283

 

Here now is part 4.

 

Enjoy,

 

violet

 

 

 

The New Age - Part 4

 

(p.284) Mumford's description of the neolithic village remains a model for a

human community. Science and appropriate technology, building on that, may

introduce improvements, especially forms of transport and communication which

may link up the different human centres, but these will be based on natural

sources of energy, particularly, the sun. Fritjof Capra considers that the new

age will be the solar age. The sun provides all the energy that is conceivably

necessary for human existence. Such a society would be decentralised. It does

not require huge conglomerations of people in cities. (p.285) The sun is

available everywhere and the energy can be made available. Also, of course,

water and the wind are appropriate sources of energy. The new society would

certainly exclude all forms of nuclear energy which is perhaps the supreme

example of this mechanistic system and the most destructive form of it.

 

Education in the new society would be basic education, as understood for

instance by Mahatma Gandhi. It would be an integral education of body, soul and

spirit, relating each person to the world in an organic way and developing their

personal capacities. Perhaps, following Rudolf Steiner's understanding, such

education would centre first on emotional growth. Steiner held that during the

first seven years the child has primarily to grow at the level of the emotions

and the education given should foster this emotional development. During the

next seven years the growth of the imagination predominates and education

centres on music, art, dance and poetry. Only in the third seven years, from

fourteen onwards, should the rational, logical mind be trained to develop

seriously. To some extent obviously it is functioning before this but in the

Steiner system the emphasis on it only begins there. The result of acting on

these principles is an integrated education of the whole person, emotional,

imaginative and rational, where each level, emotions, imagination and

rationality, is properly developed, consolidated and stabilised. This is in

marked contrast to our usual method of education, which concentrates on

developing the rational, logical mind as early as five and so often loses out on

these other aspects of human personality.

 

In medicine, rather than making use almost entirely of modern allopathic

methods, there will be a turn to alternative methods such as homoeopathy,

acupuncture, Ayurvedic and Tibetan medicine, and herbal medicine in general, all

of which are concerned with the health of the whole person. (p.286) These forms

of treatment always relate the body to the soul and the spirit and never regard

it as something that can be treated in isolation. The human person is conceived

as an integral whole, and it is seen that health, wholeness and holiness, being

derived from the same root, are totally interrelated. The health of the body,

the wholeness of the person and holiness itself are all aspects of the same

reality and they cannot be separated.

 

This leads to the third aspect. We have considered first the physical, material

growth of the world and secondly its psychological and social growth. Now we

turn to the spiritual order and the place of religion. This involves a return to

the perennial philosophy, the ancient wisdom which underlies all religion from

the earliest times. It will involve a respect for the traditional wisdom of

primitive people, the Australian Aborigines, the American Indians and the tribal

peoples of Asia and Africa. More and more today we are discovering the wisdom of

these people, the harmony they have achieved in their lives and the very

profound understanding they have of how human life is related to the natural

world about them and to the world of spirits beyond them. Generally such people

evidence an integrated, holistic view of life.

 

A New Vision of Reality (Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and

Christian Faith) Chapter 13, p.284-286

Bede Griffiths

Templegate Publishers - Springfield, Illinois

ISBN 0-87243-180-0