<\/b><\/p>\n
\n <\/p>\n
\n M<\/font><\/span>ANKIND<\/font> \nPage-316<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>\n<\/p>\n \nPage-317<\/span> and <\/span> <\/p>\n \nPage-318<\/span> immobility <\/span><\/p>\n <\/span>\n<\/p>\n \nPage-319<\/span> for <\/span><\/p>\n \nPage-320<\/span> to \nPage-321<\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Conservation and Progress MANKIND thinks naturally in extremes or else reconciles by a patchwork and compromise. Whether he makes a fetish of moderation…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16","wpcat-5-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nthinks naturally in extremes or else reconciles by a patchwork and compromise.
\nWhether he makes a fetish of moderation or surrenders himself to the enthusiasm
\nof the single idea, the human being misses always truth of vision and the right
\npitch of action because instead of seeing, feeling and becoming in obedience to
\nhis nature like other animate existences he tries always to measure things by a
\nstandard he has set up in his intelligence. But it is the character of his
\nintelligence that it finds it an easy task to distinguish and separate but is
\nclumsy in combining. When it combines, it tends to artificialise and falsify. It
\nfeels at ease in pursuing a single idea to its logical consequences and in
\nviewing things from a single standpoint; but to harmonise different ideas in
\naction and to view the facts from different standpoints is contrary to its
\nnative impulse; therefore it does that badly, with an ill grace and without
\nmastery. Oftenest it makes an incongruous patchwork rather than a harmony. The
\nhuman mind is strong and swift in analysis; it synthesises with labour and
\nimperfectly and does not feel at home in its synthesis. It divides, opposes and,
\nplaced between the oppositions it creates, becomes an eager partisan of one side
\nor another; but to think wisely and impartially and with a certain totality is
\nirksome and disgusting to the normal human being.<\/p>\n
\n
\n<\/span>All human action as all human thought suffers from these disabilities.
\nFor it is seduced by a trenchant idea which it follows without proper attention
\nto collateral issues, to necessary companion ideas, to the contrary forces in
\noperation, or else it regards these merely as enemies, brands them as pure
\nfalsehood and evil and strives with more or less violence to crush them out of
\nexistence. Then it sees other ideas which it attempts to realise in turn, either
\nadding them to its past notions and possessions or else rejecting these entirely
\nfor the new light; it makes a fresh war and a new clearance and denies its past
\nwork in the interest<\/span>\n<\/p>\n
\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\nof a future attainment. But it has also its repentances, its returns, its recall
\nand re-throning of banished gods and even of lifeless ghosts and phantoms to
\nwhich it gives a temporary and false appearance of life. And on the way it has
\ncontinually its doubts, scruples, hesitations, its pretentious assumptions of a
\nsage moderation and a gradual and cautious advance. But human moderation is
\nusually a wiseacre and a botcher; it sews a patch of new velvet on old fustian
\nor of new fustian on old velvet and admires its deplorable handiwork. And its
\ncautious advance means an accumulation of shams, fictions and dead conventions
\ntill the burden of falsehood becomes too great for life to bear and a violent
\nrevolution is necessary to deliver the soul of humanity out of the immobilising
\ncerements of the past. Such is the type of our progress; it is the advance of an
\nignorant and purblind but always light-attracted spirit, a being half-animal,
\nhalf-god, stumbling forward through the bewildering jungle of its own errors.<\/p>\n
\n
\n<\/span>This characteristic of human mentality shows itself in the opposition we
\ncreate between conservation and progress. No<\/span>thing
\nin the universe can really stand still because everything there <\/span>is
\na mould of Time and the very essence of Time is change by a movement forward. It
\nis true that the world\u2019s movement is not in a straight line; there are cycles,
\nthere are spirals; but still it circles, not round the same point always, but
\nround an ever advancing centre, and therefore it never returns exactly upon its
\nold path and never goes really backward. As for standing still, it is an
\nimpossibility, a delusion, a fiction. Only the spirit is stable; the soul and
\nbody of things are in eternal motion. And in this motion there are the three
\ndetermining powers of the past, future and present,<\/span> \u2014 the
\npresent a horizontal and constantly shifting line without breadth between a vast
\nrealised infinity that both holds back and impels and a vast unrealised infinity
\nthat both repels and attracts.<\/p>\n
\n
\n<\/span>The past is both a drag and a force for progress. It is all that has
\ncreated the present and a great part of the force that is creating the future.
\nFor the past is not dead; its forms are gone and had to go, otherwise the
\npresent would not have come into being: but its soul, its power, its essence
\nlives veiled in the present<\/span>\n<\/p>\n
\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\never-accumulating, growing, deepening will live on in the future. Every human
\nbeing holds in and behind him all the past of his own race, of humanity and of
\nhimself; these three things determine his starting-point and pursue him through
\nhis life’s progress. It is in the force of this past, in the strength which its
\nhuge conservations give to him that he confronts the unillumined abysses of the
\nfuture and plunges forward into the depths of its unrealised infinities. But
\nalso it is a drag, partly because man afraid of the unknown clings to the old
\nforms of which he is sure, the old foundations which feel so safe under his
\nfeet, the old props round which so many of his attachments and associations cast
\ntheir tenacious tendrils, but also partly because the forces of the past keep
\ntheir careful hold on him so as to restrain him in his uncertain course and
\nprevent the progress from becoming a precipitation.<\/p>\n
\n<\/span>The future repels us even while it irresistibly attracts. The repulsion
\nlies partly in our own natural recoil from the unknown, because every step into
\nthis unknown is a wager between life and death; every decision we make may mean
\neither the destruction or the greater fulfilment of what we now are, of the name
\nand form to which we are attached. But also it lies in the future itself; for
\nthere, governing that future, there are not only powers which call us to fulfil
\nthem and attract us with an irresistible force but other powers which have to be
\nconquered and do not desire to yield themselves. The future is a sphinx with two
\nminds, an energy which offers itself and denies, gives itself and resists, seeks
\nto enthrone us and seeks to slay. But the conquest has to be attempted, the
\nwager has to be accepted. We have to face the future\u2019s offer of death as well
\nas its offer of life, and it need not alarm us, for it is by constant death to
\nour old names and forms that we shall live most vitally in greater and newer
\nforms and names. Go on we must; for if we do not, Time itself will force us
\nforward in spite of our fancied immobility. And this is the most pitiable and
\ndangerous movement of all. For what can be more pitiable than to be borne
\nhelplessly forward clinging to the old that disintegrates in spite of our
\nefforts and shrieking frantically to the dead ghosts and dissolving fragments of
\nthe past to save us alive? And what can be more dangerous than to impose<\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\non that which is in its nature mobile? This means an increasing and horrible
\nrottenness; it means an attempt to persist on as a putri4 and stinking corpse
\ninstead of a living and self- renewing energetic creature. the greatest spirits
\nare therefore those who have no fear of the future, who accept its challenge and
\nits wager; they have that sublime trust in the God or Power that guides the
\nworld, that high audacity of the human soul to wrestle with the infinite and
\nrealise the impossible, that wise and warrior confidence in its ultimate destiny
\nwhich marks the Avatars and prophets and great innovators and renovators.<\/p>\n
\n
\n<\/span>If we consider carefully we shall see that the past is indeed a huge
\nforce of conservation, but of conservation that is not immobile, that on the
\ncontrary offers itself as material for change and new realisation; that the
\npresent is the constant change and new actual realisation which the past desires
\nand compels; and that the future is that force of new realisation not yet actual
\ntowards which the past was moving and for the sake of which it lived. Then we
\nperceive that there is no real opposition between these three; we see that they
\nare part of a single movement, a sort of Trinity of Vishnu-Brahma-Maheshwara
\nfulfilling by an inseparable action the one Deity. Yet the human mind in its
\nmania of division and opposition seeks to set them at strife and ranges humanity
\ninto various camps, the partisans of the past, the partisans of the present, the
\npartisans of the future, the partisans of all sorts of compromises between the
\nthree Forces. Nature makes good use of the struggle between these partisans and
\nher method is necessary in our present state of passionate ignorance and
\negoistic obstinacy; but nonetheless is it from the point of view of a higher
\nknowledge a pitiably ignorant struggle.<\/p>\n
\n
\n<\/span>The partisans of the future call themselves the party of progress, the
\nchildren of light and denounce the past as ignorant, evil, a mass of errors and
\nabuses; their view alone has the monopoly of the light, the truth, the good <\/span>\u2014
\na light, good and truth which will equally be denounced as error and evil by
\nsucceeding generations. The partisans of the present look with horror upon all
\nprogress as an impious and abominable plunge into error and evil and
\ndegeneration and ruin; for them the present is the culmination of humanity, <\/span>\u2014
\nas previous \u201cpresent\u201d times were<\/span>\n<\/p>\n
\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\nall the preceding generations and as the future which they abhor will be for
\nthese unprogressive souls if they should then reincarnate; they will then defend
\nit with the same passion and asperity against another future as they now attack
\nit in the interests of the present. The partisans of the past are of two kinds.
\nThe first admit the defects of the present but support it in so far as it still
\ncherishes the principles of the high, perfect, faultless, adorable past, that
\ngolden age of the race or community, and because even if somewhat degenerate,
\nits forms are a bulwark against the impiety of progress; if they admit any
\nchange, it is in the direction of the past that they seek it. A second kind
\ncondemn the present root and branch as degenerate, hateful, horrible, vicious,
\naccursed; they erect a past form as the hope of a humanity returning to the
\nwisdom of its forefathers. And to such quarrels of children the intellectuals
\nand the leaders of thought and faith lend the power of the specious or moving
\nword and the striking idea and the emotional fervour or religious ardour which
\nthey conceive to be the very voice and light and force of Truth itself in its
\nutter self-revelation.<\/p>\n
\n
\n<\/span>The true thinker can dispense with the <\/span>\u00e9clat
\nwhich attaches to the leader of partisans. He will strive to see this great
\ndivine movement as a whole, to know in its large lines the divine intention and
\ngoal in it without seeking to fix arbitrarily its details; he will strive to
\nunderstand the greatness and profound meaning of the past without attaching
\nhimself to its forms, for he knows that forms must change and only the formless
\nendures and that the past can never be repeated, but only its essence preserved,
\nits power, its soul of good and its massed impulse towards a greater
\nself-fulfilment; he will accept the actual realisations of the present as a
\nstage and nothing more, keenly appreciating its defects, self-satisfied errors,
\npresumptuous pretensions because these are the chief enemies of progress, but
\nnot ignoring the truth and good that it has gained; and he will sound the future
\nto understand what the Divine in it is seeking to realise, not only at the
\npresent moment, not only in the next generation, but beyond, and for that he
\nwill speak, strive, if need be battle, since battle is the method still used by
\nNature in humanity, even when all the while he knows that there is more yet
\nbeyond beside which, when it comes<\/span>\n<\/p>\n
\n
\n<\/span><\/p>\n
\n
\nlight, the truth he has seized will seem erroneous and limited. Therefore he
\nwill act without presumption and egoism, knowing that his own errors and those
\nwhich he combats are alike necessary forces in that labour and movement of human
\nlife towards the growing Truth and Good by which there increases shadowily the
\nfigure of a far-off divine Ideal.<\/span><\/p>\n