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Does Consciousness Evolve?, p. 3 Hence the Puranic doctrine of the four cycles of time is not intended to be a merely mathematical system of computations subject to a purely quantitative determinism. What it demonstrates is a qualitative contraction of time which follows precisely the progressive contraction and diminishment of the human being in its passage from the original solar state of self-originated and self-realized individuation, what I have called the men and woman of the solar type, to the increasingly collectivized type of the mass mind, the tribal man, the fragmented man of the "majority," a type which definitively emerges in the fourth cycle of the kali yuga as we have just seen. That is why the fourth cycle (the kali yuga) is precisely only one fourth the length of the first cycle (the satya yuga) as the possibilities of man become more and more limited and increasingly mechanical. Therefore it is precisely and only in the terminal phases of the fourth cycle that history becomes predictable--although never absolutely so--because it corresponds to the ascension of the unconscious man of the "multitudes." Never absolutely so, I have said, because even in the twilight of mankind consciousness can never be completely extinguished from the universe; even in the gathering darkness men and women of consciousness flash forth and alter the course. In a previous essay entitled "Dethroning The Gods of the Religions" it was shown that so-called Creator Gods, in order to achieve authoritarian control of the collectivities to which they had attached themselves, must make time and space begin with themselves and suppress or deform all forms of knowledge that suggest otherwise. Hence the tendency to destroy all that came before them and the necessity for destroying all rival religions or perspectives; hence also the indispensable role of dogmatic proclamations, "immutable" and "infallible" traditions and the importance of the notion of "heresy" as a weapon of automatic negation and excision of an opposing position. In effect, the true objective of a dogmatic perspective is the suppression of free inquiry into the nature of existence and therefore the suppression of consciousness itself--for the identification of the real is what constitutes the very nature and proper function of human consciousness. But consciousness would have posed no threat to such Gods if the claims made for their existence were indeed real. Hence the historically significant fact that the reign of authoritarian Gods precisely coincides with the emergence of collective man and the assault by force on consciousness.[6] It could be asked what was the psychological condition and circumstance of European man that made the Darwinian thesis not only necessary but readily and almost uncritically received by the men of his time. The answer to this is not difficult to discover: after centuries of the debilitating mental oppression of Christianity, its development and dissemination was indeed an impulse towards health and freedom, namely the liberation of man's mind from the transcendental despotism of an authoritarian Creator God and from the superstition of creationism. But tragically man already carried in his body the millennial legacy and inheritance of the transcendental Creator Gods: the reduction and weakening of his faculties, the suppression of the life-principle and the complete obscuration of his real origins. The mid-nineteenth century was characterized by a decisive historical event in the course of human development, something altogether unprecedented that had profound consequences for the terrestrial world and it was the de facto fall or precipitation of mind into matter and this precipitation coincided precisely with the definitive emergence of modern evolutionary scientism as the dominant model and theory of life. The entire sphere of mind and life was now regarded as a secondary derivative of matter on which man now became wholly dependent and in which he had become wholly enclosed, with no awareness or continuity with anything beyond it or apart from it. All hyperdimensional windows and portals were henceforth closed. With
the epicenters of this dimensional collapse of the mind located in Western
cultures, it quickly engulfed the rest of the world thanks to an aggressive
militarized economic machine which insatiably consumed all it could
grasp. This critical cosmological event, the materialization of mind,
and all that it implies has transpired almost unnoticed since it was
and continues to be initiated under the banner of "progress," "civilization,"
and "democracy." Its result has been the virtual sealing off of
the whole material dimension to interferences or influences from any
other dimension outside of it and the creation of a form of life which
ignores or aggressively negates every value except those that arise
out of this perspective of monistic materialism. |
