“The coming of a spiritual age must be preceded by the appearance of an increasing number of individuals who are no longer satisfied with the normal intellectual, vital, and physical existence of man, but perceive that a greater evolution is the real goal of humanity, and attempt to effect it in themselves and lead others to it and to make it the recognized goal of the race. In proportion as they succeed and to the extent to which they carry their evolution, the yet unrealized potentiality which they represent will become an actual possibility of the future.”

Sri Aurobindo

My recurring theme is that our culture, by turning its back on its spiritual roots, has lost contact with the reality of spiritual (that is, non-physical) life. In so doing, it has lost contact with reality, for how can you understand the meaning of things if you systematically disregard a significant portion of what exists? And how can you know who you yourself are, if you systematically discard millennia of tradition and scripture designed to teach that aspect of things?

In reaction to our culture’s downgrading of spiritual knowledge, some have turned to fundamentalism: blind belief. But this won’t do either. If you don’t know, you don’t know, and neither blind belief nor blind disbelief substitute for knowledge. And our culture is not teaching that knowledge, because it has forgotten where to find it.

In short, materialist civilization is lost, and those who are fated to live in it are lost too, no matter how intelligent, no matter how insightful, unless and until they free themselves from this delusion. As an example, I offer a long quotation from Hemingway’s posthumously published True at First Light, which was pieced together by his son Patrick.

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Years and years ago, I was entranced by James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. (It was to continue that story that I wrote my own novel Messenger.) It has seemed to me that much of the essence of that book can be deduced from these two quotations:

First, the high lama saying to Conway, “Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue.”

Second, the narrator saying of Conway, “… he was doomed, like millions, to flee from wisdom and be a hero.”

The history of humanity … evokes the picture of a creeping vine. If its prop is pulled up or broken, the plant creeps along the ground, unknowingly seeking a new support, another occasion to raise itself above the weeds, and as soon as it has found one it clings to it in an unconscious but untiring effort toward the light. It is sometimes mistaken; its choice may be bad; the branch it has adopted may be rotten; that is not its fault. The human flock obeys an obscure order: it must rise, and it cannot do so without a leader. Thank God, if there have been evil influences, they have been counteracted, on an average, by that of certain rare privileged men, comparable to the transitional animals who were in advance of their time. These men attained a higher stage of evolution, and had a great part to play, a high duty to fulfill, namely, to orient the march of humanity in the path which leads away from the animal. Strange to say, in spite of their handicaps, of the fact that the doctrine they taught was less pleasant and demanded sacrifice, it is they who gained the higher prestige in history, and their teachings outlasted and outshone all the others.

Lecompte de Nuoy, Human Destiny, p. 110-111

Mark Morford is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle’s website SFGate. He’s often a little over-the-top but often entertaining and usually pretty right. This is from http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/04/23/notes042308.DTL&type=printable

How to sing like a planet

Scientists say the Earth is humming. Not just noise, but a deep, astonishing music. Can you hear it?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

This is the kind of thing that, given all our distractions, our celeb obsessions and happy drugs and bothersome trifles like family and bills and war and health care and sex and love and porn and breathing and death, tends to fly under the radar of your overspanked consciousness, only to be later rediscovered and brought forth and placed directly in front of your eyeballs, at least for a moment, so you can look, really look, and go, oh my God, I had no idea.

This is the kind of thing we forget.

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In human terms, how are we to describe… our own Western civilization, or any other of the 10 or 20 civilizations which we can count up on our fingers? In human terms, I should say that each of these civilizations is, while in action, a distinctive attempt at a single great common human experience, or, when it is seen in retrospect, after the action is over, it is a distinctive instance of a single great common human experience. The enterprise or experience is an effort to perform an act of creation. In each of these civilizations, mankind, I think, is trying to rise above mere humanity — above primitive humanity, that is, — toward some higher kind of spiritual life. One cannot depict the goal because it has never been reached, — or, rather, I should say that it has never been reached by any human society. It has, perhaps, been reached by individual men and women. At least, I can think of certain saints and sages…. But if there have been a few transfigured men and women, there has never been such a thing as a civilized society. Civilization, as we know it, is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor. No known civilization has ever reached the goal of civilization yet. There has never been a communion of saints on earth. In the least uncivilized society at its least uncivilized moment, the vast majority of its members have remained very near indeed to the primitive human level. And no society has ever been secure of holding such ground as it has managed to gain in its spiritual advance.

Arnold Toynbee, Civilization on Trial