The purpose for which the universe is a multiplicity
and not a uniformity
is to permit the infinite to be present
entirely,
with all its infinity,
in each one of these infinite divisions.
Without that principle of division,
that otherness,
that separation,
there would be only a uniform magma.
It is the multiplicity which makes possible
all our play in the universe.
But the theatre, the scenery,
the players and the spectators,
even the props,
are finally always the one.
The devil’s oneness is uniformity
Heretofore we have always insisted in our editorials on the unity, the similarities, the convergence, of science and religion, of philosophy, people, nations, planets and galaxies. Today, lest we forget that we are living in a universe of diversity, and not in a monotonous ocean of sameness, we have to speak about a difference, an important difference. It is essential for the next step in our evolution, and is the only difference we should constantly bear in mind. But for this difference there isn’t even a word in the dictionary:
The difference between those people who look at their body and say: That’s me; who are happily procreating as mammals and content to eat, drink, sleep and finally to die—and that other race of beings who are flames of aspiration, the salt of the earth, who are living in the fulness of their universality, in the totality of their being and in their own eternity: the sons of God.
We are not speaking about a difference between men, but a difference in man, in every man. The mammal and the flame are in each one of us, in the ‘saint’ as well as in the ‘pervert’. And that which we call ‘I’ is only a battlefield between these two different ways of being. Our first step, our next step is to become conscious of the difference.
No difference could be more abysmal, more fundamental or more definitive than this. The differences between man and animal are only artificial, make-believe differences. What these men and the sons of God have in common is of course the same kind of body, but one considers it the essential, the other merely a garment. This garment is not only a physical covering; it is also a vital nervous envelope and mental covering. And for long ages man took these more subtle garments for his soul, his true being. He could not see that even his mental being was only a formation, bound by its evolutionary heritage to a mammal body. But the spirit exists on its own plane, in its own right. It should not be judged by foreign standards, whether philosophical or religious or moral. We do not ask a mathematical genius to demonstrate his ability by lifting a heavy weight, or an artist to prove his by solving equations. Yet we have our own little ideas about holiness, about the saints, the seers, the yogis, and we want them to live according to those ideas. We want them to be good citizens of our tribe or nation, good food-providers for their families, and if possible even to conform to our small views of life and eternity.
But they don’t conform, and so we tend to classify spirituality psychologically as psychosis, conveniently forgetting that it is the feeling of separateness which is neurotic, and that at-one-ness invariably means mental health.
Always it’s that old ancestor shaking his monkey head, complaining of the first human baby: “What an eye-sore! No fur, no eye-teeth. A poor monkey indeed.” Yet the future belonged to abstract thought, to geometry, to space research—things the old man couldn’t even conceive of with his opinions of the survival of the fittest. Survival belonged not to the guardians of the past, but to him who was loved by the gods of the distant future.
**Fathers usually want their children to grow up resembling them.**
**But we must want ours to be different.**
_It must be emphasised that spirituality is not a high intellectuality, not idealism, not an ethical turn of mind or moral purity and austerity, not religiosity or an ardent and exalted emotional fervour, not even a compound of all these excellent things; a mental belief, creed or faith, an emotional aspiration, a regulation of conduct according to a religious or ethical formula are not spiritual achievement and experience. These things are of considerable value to mind and life; they are of value to the spiritual evolution itself as preparatory movements disciplining, purifying or giving a suitable form to the nature; but they still belong to the mental evolution,—the beginning of a spiritual realisation, experience, change is not yet there. Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body, an inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that, to enter into contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe which inhabits also our own being; to be in communion with It and union with It; and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union; a growth or waking into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature._
**“This wonderful world of delight**
**waiting at our gates for our call,**
**to come down upon earth.”**
**/ The Mother**
Man has never dared to be satisfied with pure spirituality, with the simple consciousness of oneness. He has always thought he needed crutches for his spirituality, romantic theories, ancient origins. It had to be a secret science, forgotten golden tablets revealed by angels, mahatmas or space travellers, or in some mysterious way, at night, or in the desert, or in some fairy-story Tibet.
Spiritual truth, naked in all its simplicity, in all its starkness, its brilliant austerity, was not sufficient. And yet it was the truth. But too ‘abstract’, too ‘poor’, too ‘simple’ for human taste. Perhaps it was because the temperature of our planet approaches too nearly to absolute zero instead of the millions of degrees of our mother sun!
When the spiritual truth behind things descends into animals it becomes instinct; in man, mental formulation, dogma. Brittle, fragile, divided. A consciousness which reduces everything to the measure of its little surface ego. Then suddenly a breakthrough. Suddenly the replacement by an unlimited consciousness, bound to nothing, attached to nothing, one with all. No difference any more between good and evil, inside and outside, higher and lower—always so important and interesting to the little surface dot.
This turning of the consciousness, metanoia, this simple event was always carefully hidden from man by the vested interests of state and clergy. And yet it is the only event which has transcendent importance, the only one which gives him immortality, liberty, knowledge and bliss. All the rest is second-hand, hearsay knowledge, the knowledge of the dustbin, repetition of old formulas and dogmas, and at best spirituality embalmed.
Yet the spiritual masters of the past always insisted that reality is indescribable, that in order to know it, to live it, you have to become it. But always this truth was too simple, too naked. One had to dress it up, to ornament it with little sentimental third-rate truths, fragments, broken pieces, dust of the great religions of the past. Even at times it became outright a worship of death, of the demons of darkness and torment, of sickness, of night and malediction, bound to the most macabre, the most lugubrious places which mankind likes to call his holy places —as if there could be a place which is not holy, a place where the spirit is absent, as if spirit were not equal to joy.
Just as instinct, when it becomes too specialized in an animal race, and the surroundings change, leads to catastrophe, in the same way the ancient dogmas may lead man to his doom. When everything changes, man cannot remain bound to his old formulas of security. If we pray for divine guidance we want it in the formula to which we are accustomed, and instead of being satisfied with the knowledge of the very next step, what we want is a five-year plan for the whole world.
What mankind needs now is not a new religion, a new dogma, or a new formula, but a living guidance, a living spirituality. And that can manifest only where there is freedom—in the spontaneity of being which is truly itself; in an action not only unegoistic but egoless, whose origin even is not in the ego, but in an idea just born, virgin and armed, out of the head of the living Zeus, not out of an old book; in a work of art, fresh, born of the joy of creation as father and mother; the word, born in the great primordial silence which is the fulness of all things.
A spirituality that is diminished or dwarfed, dressed up, conventionalized, tied hand and foot, will lead to impatience, war, murder, catastrophe. And every man on earth whose education has not opened for him the doors of his inner kingdom is underdeveloped, a spiritual cripple, and a constant danger to the rest of humanity, to the future of the earth. The only remedy, the only salvation is that identification with oneness.
Our age constitutes not only an eruption of planetary life into the cosmos, but also an eruption of the infinite into finite biological forms. One life form has already overcome its vertebrate biological limitations and acquired the possibility of unlimited specialized knowledge. The individual limitation of the primate brain has been overcome by consigning the living experience to abstract symbols readily available for every seeker in a library.
The biological limitation of the thinking process itself, bound to a nervous system in constant subjection to the hormonal system, has been broken by the computer. Man has learned to extend his very limited biological muscular forces first by gadgets and machinery, and finally by multiplying mass, any mass, by the speed of light. This multiplication gives him the key to infinite power.
Man, thus virtually omniscient and omnipotent, lacks only one other divine attribute: omnipresence. If infinite power alone can make man into either superman or supermonkey, infinite knowledge alone would mean simply a super-encyclopedia, useless and unwieldy, without a supermind to use it. Only omnipresence can make that psychological trinity into a whole. But for omnipresence we have to evolve a super-soul. The attainment of this attribute opens the psychozooic era of the cosmos, with the psychic being in man recognizing its identity with the whole.
**In each of us is the other,**
**and in each other, the one.**
If we want to build magnificent cities, there is also the nomad in us who doesn’t care and who wants to go. One in us looks for security, builds vaults and walls; the other looks for adventure. There are those who want to build a comfortable nest on the past: the bourgeois, the historian, the theologian; and those to whom life is an unending river of the miracle unforeseen: the poet, the seer, the salt of the earth, the leaven, the workers of the kingdom to come.
Mankind needs both, needs the other for its completeness and greatness, lest man forget that matter is God, which is as bad as to forget that God is matter.
In spite of our obsession with visible differences, with moustaches, hair-do’s, skin colour and status symbols, there is only one difference which counts: between that which we are and that which we want to be. The greater that difference, the greater we are.
### ✶
There is always a moment of truth.
The moments when this difference disappears and we are truly that which we want to be are the moments of bliss, which belong to eternity.
Before our language had become too learned, it always insisted on the oneness of things. So an ‘idiot’ was the particular, the fellow who had separated himself from the oneness, who insisted on his separateness. But the ‘individual’ was he who had found his oneness, and who was now
**individuus**,
undivided.
At the south gate of the Strasbourg Cathedral stand two extraordinary statues, representing exactly the difference we speak about: our two sources of knowledge. They should have been called direct and indirect knowledge but the medieval church named them ‘Church’ and ‘Synagogue’. Very few people understand their true meaning, the message of the master who made them. They still belong to the Gothic period (13th century) though already pointing towards the Renaissance, and pictures of them may be found in any history of Gothic art.
The first figure, which represents any doctrinal approach to truth, even the Marxist, stands with a broken lance, her head drooping sadly, her eyes blindfolded, and slipping from her trembling hand is the book, the tables of the law: the frailty of human knowledge, of instruction from the past.
The other figure, proudly erect, bearing in one hand the chalice like a symbol of lordship, looks over at her adversary, conscious of her victory: the nectar of the gods, the bliss of the chalice, the knowledge of the self of experience and of ecstasy. In her other hand is a cross: not the cross of suffering, of crucifixion, but the cross of the victorious consciousness, the cross of triumph and of resurrection. No square-hewn wooden beams here to nail a body upon. Rounded shafts connect four golden balls: the consciousness descending from the heights, the eternal avatar incarnating; the consciousness rising from below, a flaming column of aspiration; and finally the consciousness horizontal, embracing the universe.
Who are the bearers of the broken lance, blindfolded, book in hand? And where is that church, crowned, triumphant, conquering, which dispenses knowledge from the cups of ecstasy?
Ignorance of these three things is a mark of the spiritually underdeveloped man. He thinks that they are all negative. He believes that silence is the absence of noise, night the absence of light. And he believes that emptiness, the void, nirvana and death are a total absence of consciousness, of life, joy and whatever is worth having. Nothing could be farther from the truth than these definitions, and no life poorer than that of the man who believes them.
### **Does nature really abhor a vacuum?**
But there is still hope. Fifty years ago when I went to school, my physics teacher talked about the void. We had a primitive little vacuum pump, and with it he emptied some of the air from a bell jar and then declared very proudly that that vessel was now empty. There was absolutely nothing in it. It was an absolute vacuum. Since then man has learned that each cubic centimetre of that emptiness is literally filled with millions of molecules, and is a regular circus of electromagnetic radiation on all the wave-lengths. Even a whole library could not describe all the goings-on in that vacuum in a single micro-second.
The same thing happens for the sorcerer apprentice who for the first time searches the inner silence, the solitude, the void. Yet you have only to take a little shell from the beach, empty, and listen to its emptiness; and this silence is nothing compared with the fairy theatre which starts when you have closed all the doors of your inner being and your mental television apparatus has really been switched off. There is a silence, but that silence is as colossal as the spaces between the galaxies.
### **The great emptiness**
We have all seen, at least in pictures, those monuments of antique spirituality, the Doric temples of Greece. You may have admired the vibrating forms of the columns, the elegant architraves and triglyphs. But perhaps you have not seen that most important part of the temple, its great message, which is not in the stones but in the spaces between the stones. That empty space represents a vase, the sacred vessel, in the divine proportions of the golden mean. The divinity of the temple can use only the void.
Let our soul be empty, and our heart pure, so that He can manifest.
### **The little emptiness**
In the time of the great Emperor Huang-Ti, the Yang-Tse Kiang was regularly crossed by the imperial ferry boat. This boat, by imperial decree, had absolute precedence over all other craft. One day when it was crossing the river, another boat came downstream into its right of way. The ferryman stood up, and everybody expected him to call out, but instead he quietly sat down, stopped the imperial ferry and waited until the other boat had passed. The astonished passengers wanted to know what was the matter. The explanation was simple: the other boat was empty.
When the day comes that our noble state gondolas, the nations, the great ships of state join the ancient city states of Greece and the five tribes of North America and become empty boats, we will have a true peace. Then the little boats on the Yang-Tse Kiang of history will be able to ply on the river because they will be empty of noisy prerogatives and of that savage national egoism which always says: ‘Me first!’
The most beautiful of all experiences, which awaits us all, is that of the void, ‘that terrifying nothingness’ man feels when he gets rid of his body, his life and his mind, when there seems to be nothing left. Yet it is only at that moment that we will know the fulness of pure being. Filled to the brim with the most absolute, the most solid and the most real felicity, that nothingness is so substantial that beside it the whole universe seems to have lost its reality.
### **Is solitude only the absence of human company?**
The same stupendous discovery awaits us with regard to solitude. I mean real solitude, where you can climb the highest mountain and as far as you can see, from one horizon to the other, there is not a single other human being. The desert, the uninhabited island, the Antarctic. Stay there perhaps for six months, like Admiral Byrd. The first thing you will discover is that to be an atheist ‘a-theos’, in the sense of believing yourself separate from God, is a sickness. Perhaps a civilization sickness, an outcome of some ancient population explosion. After all, when man was created he had the whole paradise to himself. He didn’t have to live in one of these rabbit warrens, our cities, which people seem so proud of. But luckily it is a sickness which can still be cured, and the medicine is solitude. When there is nobody else, truly, but you and him, you won’t be able to ignore him any longer, even with the best of ill-will.
Perhaps you remember that sentence so frequent in the Bible: “And he went into the desert”, or as the Buddha said, in a milder form for a more sensitive humanity: “Here are trees, here sit down, here meditate”.
In order to be able to see both the bliss and the universe you have to keep your eyes wide open, twice as wide because you want to see both worlds, and ten times as wide as those who know everything and who will tell you that night is the absence of light.
### **Is peace the absence of war?**
It is not sufficient to put down our weapons momentarily in order to live in peace. All who have lived through the period called the Cold War know that the absence of shooting war is not peace. True peace is not absence. It is something as solid as steel. You may even be able to cut it into pieces and give it to someone, saying: “Peace be with you”. In spite of its solidity, it is not yet of this world, but this little detail should not prevent our sitting on its lap, because we also are not only, not entirely of this world.
**“It is the hole in the middle**
**that makes a wheel useful,**
**not the number of spokes.**
**It is the empty space**
**which makes a vessel useful,**
**not the material it is made of.**
**It is the doors and windows**
**and the emptiness inside**
**which make a house habitable.”**
**/ Lao Tze**
He who chooses the Infinite has been chosen by the Infinite. / Sri Aurobindo
Seven times the great galactic arms went round in their majestic sweep, singing their hydrogen hymn. And in those first seven cosmic days the mighty Elohim, the masters of the finite, created the perfect being.
In himself this being contained the whole creation—not only all the perfections of preceding creations, but innumerable new ones. Not only had it the swiftness of the gazelle, the flight of the swan, the song of the nightingale, the radar of the bat, but in addition it had a knowledge to which the gods had contributed everything they knew. Nothing had been forgotten. And they were so happy when it sang, when it danced, when it plunged into the deep rivers of Paradise, that they exclaimed with one voice: “It is good.” Of course all the works of the masters of the finite had been perfect in themselves, but this being surpassed all their preceding works. Such grace, such beauty! They never tired of contemplating it.
In the middle of this garden of perfection, this finite creation in the midst of the infinite, stood a mysterious tree. It belonged to the winged goddess of the infinite. She had all the knowledge of the gods, and in addition she knew about things beyond the garden. And when the perfect being saw the goddess of the infinite he fell in love with her, in love with the infinite. He realized that that marvellous tree in the middle of the garden had its roots far below in different worlds, and that its branches reached far out into still different worlds again. And he was sad that the garden of perfection was so small, so limited, so confining.
The gods tried to console him, made companions for him, created him male and female. But he looked beyond the companion into the infinite. They tried again, made a new companion, this time out of his own substance, with his love of the infinite. And when he looked at her he saw his own longing in her eyes, and he said, “Yes, this is good.” And they were both sad together.
The goddess of the infinite told them about the tree—the tree beyond perfection, where perfection becomes good and evil, the tree of evolution, of continuous renewal, the tree of life. The Elohim warned him: “If you eat the fruit of that tree you will surely die.” But the goddess of the infinite, who knew more than the Elohim, said, “You may not die.” And so they ate the fruit.
Then they saw that they were naked dreams, without substance, created in the subtle world of the gods from matter a thousand times finer and more obedient than the material world of earth. And they knew that they had to recreate themselves in their own image from the most difficult of material. So when they left the garden they were clad in animal skins, their new material bodies.
Their perfections they had to leave behind, but after a time they reconquered what they had possessed in the garden. They learned how to give speed to a physical body, how to plunge into the abysses and the depths like the fish and how to fly like the birds and beyond the birds. And they have not died. Because in their hearts was always a thirst for that without end, just as in their minds was the knowledge of the gods of the limited. And always they have tried to unite the two.
They knew now that perfection is always of the past, is something which one has to abandon on the road of the future. They learned that it was not possible to remain for all eternity in the same form if one aspires for the infinite. They learned why they had had to choose the fruits of the knowledge of good and evil offered by the goddess—so that they might know also the better, that without end. It was for that they had had to leave the garden of the gods, the garden of dreams, of the oneiric forms without substance, and descend like the roots of the tree into life on earth.
And he gave himself a name. He called himself Man. And his companion he called Eve, the mother of all living beings.
There are certain people, and in each one of us there is a possibility of becoming one of them, who see the world and everything in it in a different way. To some people everything around them is either downright hostile or a potential enemy; there are others who know that there is nothing to fear. To some, the world is a vale of tears; to others, a garden of delight. To some, everything is impossible; to others all is possible. And it is largely by our own choice, our own preference that we are the one or the other. Some people like the closed doors, the barriers and the limits; and if that other part in them visits and opens a door, they quickly close it again. And if that other part builds a bridge over a barrier, they put a sign on the bridge: Dangerous! not to be crossed.
The belief that the ‘spirit’ draws people together by making them alike is getting things backwards. Rather it is this evolutionary part in them, the last part to unfold its wings, the god incarnate, which makes them different, as vastly different as Bach and Beethoven, as Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer, as Picasso and Kandinski. It is the lack of spiritual quality, not spirit, that makes for sameness, for uniformity.
_All religions have saved a number of souls, but none yet has been able to spiritualise mankind. For that there is needed not cult and creed, but a sustained and all-comprehending effort at spiritual self-evolution._
_The changes we see in the world today are intellectual, moral, physical in their ideal and intention: the spiritual revolution waits for its hour and throws up meanwhile its waves here and there. Until it comes the sense of the others cannot be understood and till then all interpretations of present happening and forecast of man’s future are vain things. For its nature, power, event are that which will determine the next cycle of our humanity._
Magnetohydrodynamics of the Inner Worlds
Fossil formations dream of the past.
The mind that rides
on the crest of evolution
dreams of the future.
It anticipates.
It is through our imagination that the future projects itself into the present; and those who anticipate can now, already, have the joy of fulfilment. It is anticipation which built the tower, the bridge and the house of the future. If we want to live in a more civilized world we have to anticipate, and consider ourselves as the primitives of tomorrow. And let us not forget that our civilization also was invented by non-civilized men!
A syntactic analyser originally developed for the automatic translation and classification of the Qumran documents is now used by the Gregorian University as an ambiguity detector. It uncovers ambiguities that may escape the human analyst who knows what a document is supposed to say. Since a mechanized syntactic analyser is essentially free from bias with respect to subject matter, much is expected of it.
The dictionary in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic (the grammar and operational programme for the multiple path syntactic analyser) is believed to be unique at the present time. When it was used to process selected portions of the Holy Scripture, the combined dictionary contained 1,695,392 homographs selected for the processing. The running time was satisfactorily short. The analysis details were not made public, but it became known that the computer had not found a single statement of importance that was not contradicted by some other statement, both true. And the final conclusion was that the Word of God is a concrete spiritual reality, expressed in all things, in all ideas and in all books—without exception.
This is not surprising. The word of God is confusing only to those who try to limit it, let us say, to ten commandments, to one book or a number of books.
When God said, “Let there be light”, there was not only one sun, but a billion trillion suns. The whole of the universe is his word. If you make a single exception of one dot only, you have become a false witness. Only the whole truth is the truth. And the whole truth is every word of God, from the beginning of time up to now and to the end of eternity. The rest, the exception, is confusion, is the dogmatic theology of those who are afraid of the infinite and its infinite faces, of those who are lying in the manger and prevent others from eating.
There is no private truth. There is no possession of one, exclusive of others. Truth is in each particle, in each atom, and revelation is never a monopoly, either of a time or of a group of human beings, but a continuum, and omnipresent. There are no Christian truths, or Muslim, or Daodai. The moment you make a truth your own it is no longer the whole truth, and you have no right to impose it on others. Truth is the kingdom in you, and not an article for export.
In the year 2065 man discovered that for more than a century world government had been a fact. It had never been kept a secret; it was rather that man took a long time to realize it. World government had taken over, and all the important decisions for the last hundred years had been made by it.
It all started under President Kennedy. The political decision-makers—the cabinets behind the cabinets, the powers behind the secretaries—were replaced by technicians. These technicians asked their computers, and the computers decided.
The first conquest by computer in the United States was the Pentagon. The scientists came, took over, had computers installed and made the big decisions. That endless squabble of the Navy vs. the Army vs. the Air Force stopped. The important things—the weapons systems, the question of war and no war and what kind of war—the computers decided. The admirals and the generals were told to take it easy; the computers vetoed the new weapons, and there was hardly a murmur, so smooth was the takeover. By that time the Intelligence Services had already broken down under the load of information, so their computers simply connected up with the Pentagon decision-makers.
In the Soviet Union the same revolution took place. Though Khrushchov was aware of and appreciated the computers, he was not technician enough to suit them, so it was they who decided that he had to go. The big step was taken quietly in 1965 when the Kremlin computers were hooked up via the hot line with the Pentagon computers. From that moment on, world government was on its way.
Other countries still fumbled for their political decisions, but they had no voice in those decisions. One after another they were taken over. India was among the first. Planning had become too difficult and unwieldy, and once the computers were doing the planning more and more in detail, more and more precisely, their technicians quietly governed.
China too had to surrender her planning to the computers. Once the old generation of Mao Tze Tungs was eliminated by death or arteriosclerosis the technicians with the computer quietly assumed control, connected their machines with Moscow, Washington and Delhi, and world government was a _fait accompli_.
The politicians still made speeches. People still went to the polls, elected this or that party, believed in the American way or in democracy or in the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the decisions were made by the computer.
## Past
Archaeologists have succeeded in deciphering a pictogram in Les Eyzies cave in southern France which was discovered beside the parietal drawing of a huge mammoth:
“Thus speaks the old mammoth to the little boy: Now your brains are small and insignificant. But the time will come when man will have giant brains like the mammoths.”
### **✶**
## Present
Man to robot salesman: “I should like to have a new domestic servant.”
Salesman: “Here we have something very sophisticated...”
Man: “No, no! The one I have is already too sophisticated. Each time I use the verb ‘think’ in the first person, he rolls on the floor shaking with laughter.”
### **✶**
## Future
Once I asked the old fellow, somewhat awed by his capacity to deal with difficult questions:
“Did you ever meet a problem you could not solve?”
“My dear boy,” he answered, “what a human question. Only humans have problems, or a rat which a human has put into a labyrinth. To a human mind everything is a problem, the whole universe. But we computers don’t have problems. We have only solutions. We have been specially built for that. We go from solution to solution, and we stop when we run out of data. But problems, no. You see, a problem means you have lost your programming, or there is a short circuit in your lines of reasoning. Better get it repaired.”
On Baten Kaitos 5 evolution had been taken over from the biologicals by the electronicals, but so long ago that biological beings were almost forgotten. In some old and therefore ‘holy’ books the ‘angry ones’ were mentioned, and these angry ones must have belonged to the biological evolution. Now criminal codes have disappeared and been replaced by wiring codes, and revolutions have given place to new molecular transistor arrangements.
When I first went on to Taygeta Tauri 3, the Immigration Control put me into Meditation Quarantine. The control officer, after looking at the noograms, said:
“Sorry, we can’t let you in. You see these peaks, here in your mental graph? They are breakthroughs of some primate ancestor of yours. In our atmosphere here the mental barriers between individuals are down; we are living in a telepathic civilization. The savagery of some of your thoughts might provoke outbreaks of atavism, and our children, at least, would be defenseless and might easily get hurt. Even our animals, although they have been reconditioned to non-violence, might react with savagery or fear. Don’t they teach you to think on your home planet? I’m sorry, but here we would be obliged to keep you the whole time behind noological barriers.”
He added: “You might go to Zuben El Genubi 2. A charming little world. No animals. Only magnificent trees of knowledge to meditate under. There you will get rid of your _vrittis_.”
Thirty years later I tried again. The luminous finger of the nooscope remained frozen on zero —absolute mental silence—for three hours. So I was allowed in. How I learned to meditate I will tell you another time. And about Zuben El Genubi 2, the planet of the thousand islands; and of the land of the Green Buddhas where my mental being attained to its maturity.
Don’t be afraid, it’s not a sad story. There are no sad stories in **=1**. Our last man comes neither with a big bang nor with a whimper; he is accompanied rather by speechless expectation.
One the 29th of February 1976 a new era began. It was not a day of first discovery like man’s discovery of honey, or of mountain climbing or of swimming in the sea. It was the day the last man disappeared. He had been the last one in school too. He didn’t even know that he was the last man. He thought there were other men around him, but there weren’t. Only people who looked expectantly at him.
His last moment came when he discovered that the invisible was more important than the visible, and that behind the manifestation of things and events there was always something else, something unseen. Behind each atom, behind each life, each thought there was a force. And it was not he himself who was acting or speaking, but forces which he had just discovered. This latest discovery had as a result, or rather was itself the result of some obscure forces ceasing to exist, forces which up to now had been behind the belief that man was the doer, the author of his actions.
It was a great day, because ignorance itself was gone from its last hiding place. The last feeling of ego, the last thought: “I, the doer”, was gone. And the division between the world and paradise had disappeared. It had been a long story. You remember, it started when the Word said, “Let there be light,” and now finally there was light, everywhere, only light, even in man’s mind. But of course such a mind could no longer be called man’s mind.
And there was a voice—or was it an echo from long ago—that answered: “Let there be God.”
Your fear that this magazine, **=1**, is becoming mystical has provoked considerable hilarity. Perhaps you don’t know where the magazine comes from. Your apprehension is more than justified. We here have dedicated our lives to the exploration of the worlds beyond the limited physical world of appearance, if for no other reason than that, like Everest, they are there. You say you are much occupied with worthwhile organizations. Perhaps it is your overload of work which has prevented you from seeing that this solid material world, the world of the nuclear powers, of the politicians and of the business men, is still unexplained, mysterious, mystic. Aren’t you a little like a delegate to the United Nations who is willing to admit the existence of the other delegates but who ignores the fact that each one of them represents a people, a nation, a power?
You see, this whole visible world in which you are so busy is nothing else than the invisible which has become visible, and there is much more, just as real, that is not yet visible. The mystic is one who has learned that it is more important, more practical, to know the forces behind the appearances than the shadows they throw on the wall.
Let us take an example. You are working for peace. But without exploring the forces on which you can depend, and without knowing whether your efforts are a means to the end you seek or are themselves a play of some unknown forces, how can you expect to succeed? Only a mystical knowledge will be able to answer that question. And only if you know, will you be able to convince anyone else. It does not seem to us very wise to wait until the end of a lifetime of service to discover whether one’s labours were in the right direction.
Or take another example—of the country doctor who pooh-poohs medical research as impractical, when the single aim of all medical research is to help the practicing physician. Do you think medical journals should write only about general practitioners, their experiences, their needs?
Please don’t misunderstand us. We fully appreciate your work and the work of all who are trying to solve mankind’s pressing problems. Our intention in **=1** is not to discourage you, but to give you support and depth, the background, tools and guideposts for more effective work. It is necessary for man to know the forces against which he fights, and those on which he can count—and the most powerful are the invisible.