Tag: organic

Categories
- Religion - Science - Three Protagonists Development Knowledge

History of the World, Part 4

Humanity’s social life is evolving towards fruition of a world civilization.  This process is propelled by two complementary systems of knowledge and practice – religion and science.  Both of these systems advance human insights into the same reality.  Both use similar faculties of the mind and soul, such as reason, imagination, attraction to beauty, and commitment to truth.  Both have underlying assumptions, a language, methods, and both progress over time.  Science without religion becomes blind materialism, and religion without science becomes superstition.  Together, they advance civilization.  What are some examples of past societies where the two were in harmony?

The source of true religion is, has been, and will continue to be the Manifestation of God.  Thus, the ultimate cause of the advancement of civilization is the education given to humanity by the Manifestations throughout time.  They bring teachings according to the requirements of the age, and their teachings unfold progressively over time.  There is but one religion, as there is but one humanity.

We know that humanity’s evolutionary process is cyclical in nature, like seasons of a year.  These Manifestations bring periods of spiritual vigor, akin to a springtime.  We are currently living in such a transition time of regeneration, where there is an interplay of two sets of forces.  The first is the disintegrative force – bringing turmoil, suffering, destruction, and at the same time, collapsing the obstacles and breaking down hindrances on the path towards world unity.  It is haphazard and chaotic in its application, and mysterious in nature.  The other is the integrative force – systematic, steady, calm, persistent, as it gives rise to new systems founded on oneness and justice.  It is manifest through cooperation, reciprocity, and mutual aid, and through the spirit of world solidarity we increasingly see.

This cyclic, organic, evolutionary process of the advancement of civilization – propelled by knowledge, vitalized by the Manifestation, shaped by integrative and disintegrative forces – is nonetheless largely determined by human agency.  It is on the will of our three protagonists – individuals, communities, and institutions – that depends the outcome of our unfolding drama.

Categories
Oneness

Social Organization Progressively Expands and Integrates

Social Organization initiated distinctly with the consolidation of the institution of family life, moved in stages successively through simple structures of clan-based and tribal existence to the eventual emergence of a diversity of forms of urban society, coming to rest only recently in the solidification of the nation-state schema of planetary division. Relative to the one before it, each stage opened up a wealth of new opportunities and realities for the exercise of human capacity in food, health, agriculture, technology, culture and prosperity. The advancement of our species in terms of the historical progression of social organization has not occurred at the expense of our individuality. Indeed all great vistas of what we consider human achievement have been made possible by the increasing integration and complexity of human social organization. Power for good and evil has increased both for it and because of it. As social organization has increased, the scope for the expression of the capacities latent in each human being has correspondingly expanded.

Categories
Justice

Society Parallels the Individual

What is true in the archetypal life of an individual human parallels the structure and life of our global civilization. Our species comprises an organic whole that occupies the seat of the crown of creation as the leading edge of the evolutionary process. Human consciousness as a phenomenon operates through the vast and infinite diversity of individual minds and motivations. However, this diversity in no way compromises our essential unity as a civilization. Ironically, it is precisely the vastness of our diversity that distinguishes our unity from tyrannical homogeneity or uniformity. What the peoples of the world are today experiencing is analogically akin to a global civilizational maturation or coming-of-age. Through the resistless rising of our maturity the principle of our unity in diversity will find its full expression amongst our race.

Categories
- Human Body Human Nature Oneness

The body of humanity

The human body is the one analogy that points toward a convincing model for the organization of a planetary society. There is no other model that mirrors its complexity or prosperity upon which we can rely. Human society is not a mass of individually differentiated cells but of associations of tissues and organs, systems and will, intelligence and common purpose. The modes of operation that characterize man’s biological nature illustrate fundamental principles of social and civilizational existence. Chiefly, unity in diversity is championed by the existence of each and every human frame. Paradoxically, it is the wholeness and complexity of the human body–and the perfect integration of its component elements–that permits the full realization of the distinctive potentialities inherent in each cell.