 Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House!
Chapter 4: The Culture of Eternal Life The War between the East and the West
The separate cultures of East and West express the self-divided quality of the human individual. When the individual is self-divided, then he tends to function obsessively, in a single and exclusive direction, and on the basis of fixed ideas, so that he destroys the true or dynamic play of his own existence. Only the native Unity of Man is the proper basis for a human world-culture. Therefore, it is not appropriate for us to fix upon or idolize the cultural products of Man in his self-divided enterprises. Rather, we must criticize and understand the unique and exclusive motivations in Man that have created and continue to create destructive and deluded personal and cultural divisions. Neither the East nor the West is precious or sufficient in itself. We must each become awake to our inherent personal unity in Communion with the universal Light of Life, and, on that basis, we must recreate the culture of mankind as a new, living, and benign unity of superior human beings. Therefore, we must examine and criticize the basic cultural motives that divide the traditional East and the traditional West. The mystical enterprises of the cultures of the East are presently in a temporarily depressed state, because the technological and scientific culture of the West has been on the rise for several hundred years. However, the mystical cultural movements of the East are, along with the collectivist political motives of the East, beginning to reappear, even within the Western nations themselves. Thus, in recent decades, we have seen the beginnings of the profound influence of oriental mystical philosophy all over the Western world. And the rise, in the West, of the political motivation toward forms of socialism and even communism is also an expression of a more “oriental” tendency than has typified the West in the past. Just so, the West has invaded the East with all of the social and cultural influence of materialistic science and technology-and traditional men and women of the East feel just as disturbed by that invasion of their domain as do traditional Western religious and cultural leaders who are faced by the invasion of their domain by oriental mystical trends and other tendencies offensive to traditional Western individualism. The truth of the matter is that we are already witnessing the inevitable breakdown of the ancient traditional divisions between the East and the West. And this process is a good sign! It is a sign that Man, incarnated as the men and women of the generations now living and about to be born, is moving out of the ancient traditional mode of self-division and of cultural exclusivism. This unifying cultural process has, until now, been largely involuntary. For this reason, the world seems to be trapped within a design of inevitable conflict – as if East and West must someday confront one another in a last great battle. But neither East nor West can or should win. Neither East nor West is the “good” side. The origins of the separate cultures of East and West are in the self-divided and self-possessed mode of human development. To say that one or the other is “good” and must triumph is like saying that one or the other hemisphere of the brain must triumph-or one or the other division of the autonomic nervous system-or one or the other of the two sexes. No, neither must triumph. Rather, Man must consciously transcend self-division and the self-possessed (or anti-ecstatic) strategies of personal and cultural enterprise. We must each observe the inevitable trend toward self-transcending unity in our own person, and, on that basis, we must each begin consciously to serve the self-transcending unity of mankind.
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