{"id":154,"date":"2013-07-13T01:26:15","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=154"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:26:15","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:26:15","slug":"39-the-conservation-mind-and-eastern-progress-vol-16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16\/39-the-conservation-mind-and-eastern-progress-vol-16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16","title":{"rendered":"-39_The Conservation Mind and Eastern Progress.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

\nThe
\nConservative Mind and<\/p>\n

<\/span>Eastern
\nProgress<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n                       
\n<\/span>    T<\/span><\/b>HE
\narrival of a new radical idea in the minds of men is the sign of a great coming
\nchange in human life and society; it may be combated, the reaction of the old
\nidea may triumph for a time, but the struggle never leaves either the thoughts
\nand sentiments or the habits and institutions of the society as they were when
\nit commenced. Whether it knows it or not, it has gone forward and the change is
\nirretrievable. Either new forms replace the old institutions or the old while
\npreserving the aspect of continuity have profoundly changed within, or else
\nthese have secured for themselves a period of greater rigidity, increasing
\ncorruption, progressive deterioration of spirit and waning of real force which
\nonly assures them in the future a more complete catastrophe and absolute
\ndisappearance. The past can arrive at the most at a partial survival or an
\neuthanasia, provided it knows how to compromise liberally with the future.<\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>The conservative mind is unwilling to recognise this law though it is
\nobservable throughout human history and we can easily cull examples with full
\nhands from all ages and all climes; and it is protected in its refusal to see by
\nthe comparative rarity of rapid revolutions and great cataclysmal changes; it is
\nblinded by the disguise which Nature so often throws over her processes of
\nmutation. If we look casually at European history in this light the attention is
\nonly seized by a few conspicuous landmarks, the evolution and end of Athenian
\ndemocracy, the transition from the Roman republic to the empire, the emergence
\nof feudal Europe out of the ruins of Rome, the Christianisation of Europe, the
\nReformation and Renascence together preparing a new society, the French
\nRevolution, the present rapid movement towards a socialistic State and the
\nreplacing of competition by organised co-operation. Because our view of European
\nhistory is chiefly political, we do not see the constant mutation of society\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-322<\/font><\/span>
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n
\n <\/span>\n<\/div>\n

and of thought in the same
\nrelief; but we can recognise two great cycles of change, one of the ancient
\nraces leading from the primitive ages to the cultured society of the Graeco-Roman
\nworld, the other from the semi-barbarism of feudal Christendom to the
\nintellectual, materialistic and civilised society of modern times.<\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>In the East, on the contrary, the great revolutions have been spiritual
\nand cultural; the political and social changes, although they have been real and
\nstriking, if less profound than in Europe, fall into the shade and are apt to be
\noverlooked; besides, this un- obtrusiveness is increased by their want of
\nrelief, the slow subtlety of their process and instinctive persistence and
\nreverence with which old names and formulas have been preserved while the thing
\nitself was profoundly modified until its original sense remained only as a pious
\nfiction. Thus Japan kept its sacrosanct Mikado as a cover for the change to an
\naristocratic and feudal government and has again brought him forward in modern
\ntimes to cover and facilitate without too serious a shock the transition from a
\nmediaeval form of society into the full flood of modernism. In India the
\ncontinued fiction of the ancient fourfold order of society based on spiritual
\nidealism, social type, ethical discipline and economic function is still used to
\ncover and justify the quite different, complex and chaotic order of caste which,
\nwhile it still preserves some confused fragments of the old motives, is really
\nfounded upon birth, privilege, local custom and religious formalism. The
\nevolution from one type of society to another so opposed to it in its
\npsychological motives and real institutions without any apparent change of
\nformula is one of the most curious phenomena in the social history of mankind
\nand still awaits intelligent study.<\/p>\n

<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>Our minds are apt to seize things in the rough and to appreciate only
\nwhat stands out in bold external relief; we miss the law of Nature\u2019s
\nsubtleties and disguises. We can see and fathom to some extent the motives,
\nnecessities, process of great revolutions and marked changes and we can consider
\nand put in their right place the brief reactions which only modified without
\nactually preventing the overt realisation of new ideas. We can see, for
\ninstance, that the Sullan restoration of Roman oligarchy, the Stuart restoration
\nin England or the brief return of monarchy<\/span> in<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-323<\/font><\/span>
\n 
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\n

France with the Bourbons were no
\nreal restorations, but a momentary damming of the tide attended with
\ninsufficient concessions and forced developments which determined, not a return
\nto the past, but the form and pace of the inevitable revolution. It is more
\ndifficult but still possible to appreciate the working of an idea against all
\nobstacles through many centuries; we can comprehend now, for instance, that we
\nmust seek the beginnings of the French Revolution, not in Rousseau or Mirabeau
\nor the blundering of Louis XVI, but in movements which date back to the Capet
\nand the Valois, while the precise fact which prepared its tremendous outbreak
\nand victory and determined its form was the defeat of the Calvinistic
\nreformation in France and the absolute triumph of the monarchical system over
\nthe nobility and the bourgeoisie in the reigns of Louis XIII and Louis XIV. That
\ndouble victory determined the destruction of the monarchy in France, the
\ndownfall of the Church and, by the failure of the nobles to lead faithfully the
\nliberal cause whether in religion or politics, the disappearance of aristocracy.<\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>But Nature has still more subtle and disguised movements in her dealings
\nwith men by which she leads them to change with- out their knowing that they
\nhave changed. It is because she has employed chiefly this method in the vast
\nmasses of the East that the conservative habit of mind is so much stronger there
\nthan in the West. It is able to nourish the illusion that it has not changed,
\nthat it is immovably faithful to the ideas of remote forefathers, to their
\nreligion, their traditions, their institutions, their social ideals, that it has
\npreserved either a divine or an animal immobility both in thought and in the
\nroutine of life and has been free from the human law of mutation by which man
\nand his social organizations must either progress or degenerate but can in no
\ncase maintain themselves unchanged against the attack of Time. Buddhism has come
\nand gone and the Hindu still professes to belong to the Vedic religion held and
\npractised by his Aryan forefathers; he calls his creed the Aryan Dharma, the
\neternal religion. It is only when we look close that we see the magnitude of the
\nillusion. Buddha has gone out of India indeed, but Buddhism remains; it has
\nstamped its giant impress on the spirit of the national religion, leaving the
\nforms to be determined by the Tantri-\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-324<\/font><\/span>
\n 
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\n

cism with which itself had made
\nalliance and some sort of fusion in its middle growth; what it destroyed no man
\nhas been able to restore, what it left no man has been able to destroy. As a
\nmatter of fact, the double cycle which India has described from the early Vedic
\ntimes to India of Buddha and the philosophers and again from Buddha to the time
\nof the European irruption was in its own way as vast in change religious,
\nsocial, cultural, even political and administrative as the double cycle of
\nEurope; but because it pre- served old names for new things, old formulas for
\nnew methods and old coverings for new institutions and because the change was
\nalways marked in the internal but quiet and unobtrusive in the external, we have
\nbeen able to create and preserve the fiction of the unchanging East. There has
\nalso been this result that while the European conservative has learned the law
\nof change in human society, knows that he must move and quarrels with the
\nprogressist only over the right pace and the exact direction, the eastern or
\nrather the Indian conservative still imagines that stability may be the true law
\nof mortal being, practises a sort of Yogic \u00e3sana <\/i>on the flood of Time
\nand because he does not move himself, thinks, \u2014 for he keeps his eyes shut and
\nis not in the habit of watching the banks, \u2014 that he can prevent the stream
\nalso from moving on.<\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>This conservative principle has its advantages even as rapid progress has
\nits vices and its perils. It helps towards the preservation of a fundamental
\ncontinuity which makes for the longevity of civilisations and the persistence of
\nwhat was valuable in humanity’s past. So, in India, if religion has changed
\nimmensely its form and temperament, the religious spirit has been really
\neternal, the principle of spiritual discipline is the same as in the earliest
\ntimes, the fundamental spiritual truths have been preserved and even enriched in
\ntheir contents and the very forms can all be traced back through their mutations
\nto the seed of the Veda. On the other hand, this habit of mind leads to the
\naccumulation of a great mass of accretions which were once valuable but have
\nlost their virtue and to the heaping up of dead forms and shibboleths which no
\nlonger correspond to any vital truth nor have any understood and helpful
\nsignificance. All this putrid waste of the past is held to be too sacred to be
\ntouched by any\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-325<\/font><\/span>
\n 
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\n

profane hand and yet it chokes
\nup the streams of the national life or corrupts its waters. And if no successful
\nprocess of purification takes place, a state of general ill-health in the social
\nbody supervenes in which the principle of conservation becomes the cause
\nof dissolution.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>The present era of the world is a stage of immense transformations. Not
\none but many radical ideas are at work in the mind of humanity and agitate its
\nlife with a vehement seeking and effort at change; and although the centre of
\nthe agitation is in progressive Europe, yet the East is being rapidly drawn into
\nthis churning of the sea of thought and this breaking up of old ideas and old
\ninstitutions. No nation or community can any longer remain psychologically
\ncloistered and apart in the unity of the modem world. It may even be said that
\nthe future of humanity depends most upon the answer that will be given to the
\nmodem riddle of the Sphinx by the East and especially by India, the hoary
\nguardian of the Asiatic idea and its profound spiritual secrets. For the most
\nvital issue of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is to be
\ngoverned by the modem economic and materialistic mind of the West or by a nobler
\npragmatism guided, uplifted and enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge.
\nThe West never really succeeded in spiritualising itself and latterly it has
\nbeen habituated almost exclusively to an action in the external governed by
\npolitical and economic ideals and necessities; in spite of the reawakening of
\nthe religious mind and the growth of a widespread but not yet profound or
\nluminous spiritual and psychical curiosity and seeking, it has to act, solely in
\nthe things of this world and to solve its problems by mechanical methods and as
\nthe thinking political and economic animal, simply because it knows no other
\nstandpoint and is accustomed to no other method. On the other hand the East,
\nthough it has allowed its spirituality to slumber too much in dead forms, has
\nalways been open to profound awakenings and preserves its spiritual capacity
\nintact, even when it is actually inert and uncreative. Therefore the hope of the
\nworld lies in the re-arousing in the East of the old spiritual practicality and
\nlarge and profound vision and power of organisation under the insistent contact
\nof the West and in the flooding out of the light of Asia on the Occident, no
\nlonger in forms that\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-326<\/font><\/span>
\n 
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\n

are now static, effete,
\nunadaptive, but in new forms stirred, dynamic and effective.<\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>India, the heart of the Orient, has to change as the whole West and the
\nwhole East are changing, and it cannot avoid changing in the sense of the
\nproblems forced upon it by Europe. The new Orient must necessarily be the result
\neither of some balance and fusion or of some ardent struggle between progressive
\nand conservative ideals and tendencies. If, therefore, the conservative mind in
\nthis country opens itself sufficiently to the necessity of transformation, the
\nresulting culture born of a resurgent India may well bring about a profound
\nmodification in the future civilisation of the world. But if it remains shut up
\nin dead fictions, or tries to meet the new needs with the mind of the school-man
\nand the sophist dealing with words and ideas in the air rather than actual fact
\nand truth and potentiality, or struggles merely to avoid all but a scanty
\nminimum of change, then, since the new ideas cannot fail to realise themselves,
\nthe future India will be formed in the crude mould of the westernised social and
\npolitical reformer whose mind, barren of original thought and unenlightened by
\nvital experience, can do nothing but reproduce the forms and ideas of Europe and
\nwill turn us all into halting apes of the West. Or else, and that perhaps is the
\nbest thing that can happen, a new spiritual awakening must arise from the depths
\nof this vast life that shall this time more successfully include in its scope
\nthe great problems of earthly life as well as those of the soul and its
\ntransmundane destinies, an awakening that shall ally itself closely with the
\nrenascent spiritual seeking of the West and with its yearning for the perfection
\nof the human race. This third and as yet unknown quantity is indeed the force
\nneeded throughout the East. For at present we have only two extremes of a
\nconservative immobility and incompetence imprisoned in the shell of past
\nconventions and a progressive force hardly less blind and ineffectual because
\nsecond-hand and merely imitative of nineteenth-century Europe, with a vague
\nfloating mass of uncertainty between. The result is a continual fiasco and
\ninability to evolve anything large, powerful, sure and vital, \u2014 a drifting in
\nthe stream of circumstance, a constant grasping at details and unessentials and
\nfailure to reach the heart of the great\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-327<\/font><\/span>
\n 
\n<\/font>
\n<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\n

problems
\nof life which the age is bringing to our doors. Some- thing is needed which
\ntries to be born; but as yet, in the phrase of the Veda, the Mother holds
\nherself compressed in smallness, keeps the Birth concealed within her being and
\nwill not give it forth to the Father. When she becomes great in impulse and
\nconception, then we shall see it born.<\/p>\n

\nPage-328<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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