object:04.02 - A Chapter of Human Evolution
book class:Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
author class:Nolini Kanta Gupta
subject class:Integral Yoga
class:chapter
The March of Civilisation The Eternal East and West
Other Authors Nolini Kanta Gupta The March of CivilisationA Chapter of Human Evolution
A Chapter of Human Evolution
The appearance of the Greeks on the stage of human civilisation is a mystery to historians. They are so different from all that preceded them. There does not seem to exist any logical link between them and the races from whom they are supposed to have descended or whose successors they were. The Minoan or Cretan civilisation is said to be cradle of the Greek, but where is the parallel or proportion between the two, judging from whatever relics have been left over from the older, the more ancient one. Indeed that is the term which best describes the situation. Whatever has gone before the Hellenic culture is ancient; they belong to the Old Regime. Egypt is old, Phoenicia is old, the Hebrews are old, all the other races of the old world are old, not merely chronologically, but psychologically. But Hellas is modern. There is a breath in the Ionian atmosphere, a breath of ozone, as it were, which wafts down to us, even into the air of today. Homer and Solon, Socrates and Aristotle, Pythagoras and Plato are still the presiding gods ruling over the human spirit that was born on Olympus and Ida.
Human evolution took a decisive turn with the advent of the Hellenic culture and civilisation. All crises in evolution are a sudden revelation, an unexpected outburst, a saltum, a leap into the unknown. Now, what the Greeks brought in was the Mind, the luminous Reason, the logical faculty that is married to the senses, no doubt, but still suffused with an inner glow of consciousness. It is the faculty mediating between a more direct and immediate perception of things, Intuition and Instinct, on the one hand, and on the other, the perception given by the senses and a power of control over material things. Take Egypt or Israel or Chaldea, what one finds prominent there is the instinctive-intuitive man, spontaneousprime-sautierimaginative, mythopoeic, clairvoyant, clairaudient (although not very clear, in the modern and Greek sense), bringing into this world things of the other world and pushing this world as much as possible into the other, maintaining a kind of direct connection and communion between the two. The Greeks are of another mould. They are a rational people; they do not move and act simply or mainly by instinctive reactions, but even these are filtered in them through a light of the Mind of Intelligence, a logical pattern, a rational disposition of things; through Mind they seek to know Matter and to control it. It is the modern methodology, that of observation and experiment, in other words, the scientific procedure. The Greeks have had their gods, their mythology; but these are modelled somewhat differently: the gods are made more human, too human, as has often been observed. Zeus and Juno (Hera) are infinitely more human than Isis and Osiris or Moloch and Baal or even the Jewish Jehovah. These vital gods have a sombre air about them, solemn and serious, grim and powerful, but they have not the sunshine, the radiance and smile of Apollo (Apollo Belvedere) or Hermes. The Greeks might have, they must have taken up their gods from a more ancient Pantheon, but they have, after the manner of their sculptor Phidias, remoulded them, shaped and polished them, made them more luminous and nearer and closer to earth and men. 1 Was it not said of Socrates that he brought down the gods from heaven upon earth?
The intermediary facultythe Paraclete, which the Greeks brought to play is a corner-stone in the edifice of human progress. It is the formative power of the Mind which gives things their shape and disposition, their consistency and cogency as physical realities. There are deeper and higher sources in man, more direct, immediate and revealing, where things have their birth and origin; but this one is necessary for the embodiment, for the building up and maintenance of the subtler and profounder truths in an earthly structure, establish and fix them in the normal consciousness. The Socratic Dialogues are rightly placed at the start of the modern culture; they set the pattern of modern mentality. That rational turn of mind, that mental intelligence and understanding as elaborated, formulated, codified by the Aristotelian system was the light that shone through the Grco-Latin culture of the Roman days; that was behind the culture and civilisation of the Middle Ages. The changes and revolutions of later days, social or cultural, did not affect it, rather were based upon it and inspired by it. And even today our scientific culture maintains and continues the tradition.
The Mind of Reason is a kind of steel-frame for other movements of consciousnesspure ideas, imaginations or instinctive and sensory notions, or even secret intimations and visions of deeper truths and greater realitiesto take body, to find a local habitation and name and be firmly stabilised for experience or utilisation in physical life. There was indeed a hiatus in the human consciousness of the earlier period. Take, for example, the earliest human civilisation at its best, of which we have historical record, the Vedic culture of India: human consciousness is here at its optimum, its depth and height is a thing of wonder. But between that world, an almost occult world and this world of the physical senses there is a gap. That world was occult precisely because of this gap. The physical life and mind could translate and represent the supra-physical only in figures and symbols; the impact was direct, but it expressed itself in hieroglyphs. Life itself was more or less a life of rites and ceremonies, and mind a field of metaphors and legends and parables. The parable, the myth was an inevitability with this type of consciousness and in such a world. The language spoken was also one of images and figures, expressing ideas and perceptions not in the abstract but as concrete objects, represented through concrete objects. It is the Mind of Reason that brought in the age of philosophy, the age of pure and abstract ideas, of the analytic language. A significant point to note is that it was in the Greek language that the pre-position, the backbone almost of the analytical language, started to have an independent and autonomous status. With the Greeks dawned the spirit of Science.
In India we meet a characteristic movement. As I said the Vedas represented the Mythic Age, the age when knowledge was gained or life moulded and developed through Vision and Revelation (Sruti, direct Hearing). The Upanishadic Age followed next. Here we may say the descending light touched the higher reaches of the Mind, the mind of pure, fundamental, typical ideas. The consciousness divested itself of much of the mythic and parabolic apparel and, although supremely immediate and intuitive, yet was bathed with the light of the day, the clear sunshine of the normal wakeful state. The first burgeoning of the Rational Mind proper, the stress of intellect and intellectuality started towards the end of the Upanishadic Age with the Mahabharata, for example and the Brahmanas. It flowered in full vigour, however, in the earlier philosophical schools, the Sankhyas perhaps, and in the great Buddhist illuminationBuddha being, we note with interest, almost a contemporary of Socrates and also of the Chinese philosopher or moralist Confuciusa triumvirate almost of mighty mental intelligence ruling over the whole globe and moulding for an entire cycle human culture and destiny. The very name Buddha is significant. It means, no doubt, the Awakened, but awakened in and through the intelligence, the mental Reason, buddhi. The Buddhist tradition is that the Buddhist cycle, the cycle over which Buddha reigns is for two thousand and five hundred years since his withdrawal which takes us, it seems, to about 1956 A.D.
The Veda speaks of Indra who became later on the king of the gods. And Zeus too occupies the same place in Greek Pantheon. Indra is, as has been pointed out by Sri Aurobindo, the Divine Mind, the leader of thought-gods (Maruts), the creator of perfect forms, in which to clothe our truth-realisations in life. The later traditional Indra in India and the Greek Zeus seem to be formulations on a lower level of the original archetypal Indra, where the consciousness was more mentalised, intellectualised, made more rational, sense-bound, external, pragmatic. The legend of Athena being born straight out of the head of Zeus is a pointer as to the nature and character of the gods. The Roman name for Athena, Minerva, is significantly derived by scholars from Latin mens, which means, as we all know, mind.
The Greek Mind, as I said, is the bridge thrown across the gulf existing between the spiritual, the occult, the intuitive and the sensuous, the physical, the material. Since the arrival of the Hellenes a highway has been built up, a metalled macada-mised road connecting these two levels of human experience and there is possible now a free and open communication from the one to the other. We need not speak any more of God and the gods and the divine principles indirectly through symbols and similes, but in mental terms which are closer to our normal understanding and we can also utilise the form of our intellection and reasoning to represent and capture something of what lies beyond intellect and reason.
In India we have an echo of the transition, rather perhaps, she held up the type of the transition required. For here the evolution seems to have been more gradual and the steps are more clearly visible leading one to the other. India maintained an unbroken continuity in the cyclic change of the human consciousness. She was coeval with Egypt and Chaldea, Sumeria and Babylon: she communed with them perhaps in similar and parallel terms. And yet she changed or evolved and knew to express herself in other terms in other times. She had talked in mystic terms with the mystics and later on she talked in rational terms with rationalists. And today we see signs of her parleying with the Scientists in scientific terms. That is how India still lives, while Egypt and Chaldea have gone the way of Atlantis and Gondwanaland. For something is enshrined there which is eternal, something living and dynamic which is pressing forward to manifest and embody itself, some supreme truth and reality of the future which she is fostering within her to deliver to nature and humanitya new humanity with a new nature.
The Olympians as opposed to the Chthonian gods. The Olympians were white in colour, the Chthonians black or blood-red: the Olympian temples faced the East, while the Chthonian faced the West and so on.
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The March of Civilisation The Eternal East and West
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