The Notebooks of Paul Brunton 09 - Human Experience, The Arts in Culture by Paul Brunton

Author:Paul Brunton [Brunton, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy
Published: 2018-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

4.3 Historical Perspectives

85

The history of a nation is really a translation from the history of its soul.

86

History returns periodically to the same basic problems, the same fundamental crises. Where a whole people has failed to solve them, or tried to solve them in the wrong way, they are brought together again by reincarnation and presented with a fresh chance to make good or suffer the same consequences.

87

It is absurd to talk of humanity as though it presented a uniform psychological pattern. On the contrary, it presents a particularly uneven one. It is indeed a conglomeration of groups in various degrees of development. Some are intellectually advanced whereas others are intellectually backward. Some are very near to the noble in ideals whereas others are very far from them. All that can be said about their psychological situation is that the forward movement of evolution may be a halting and lagging one but it is a certain one.

88

It is a fact that all men are at different stages and see life in different ways or under different limitations. Their experience is always relative to their standpoint. Hence it is wrong to declare any man to be ignorant, for usually he does know what is proper to his own level.

89

Though I criticize our present age, do not imagine I would enthusiastically care to return to an earlier one. The few who talk about the good old days are welcome to them! Those were the times when heterodox men who dared to publish their free and independent thoughts were rewarded with the rack and the thumbscrew.

90

In The Spiritual Crisis of Man, I put forward some arguments in defense of older nations, peoples, or races who preferred a simpler life to the technological civilization of the modern world – and especially the modern Western world. This did not mean – as I hope was made clear in the book – that we, too, should revert to their attitude and become, as it were, disciples of Mahatma Gandhi. No, I have always advocated that we take what is useful from the past, what is wise and practicable for us, and leave the rest. In short, I spoke more than once in favour of an East-West civilization. I agreed with René Guénon that we had given too much weight to a utilitarian civilization and too little to the higher forms of culture, by which I mean philosophical, mystical, and the basic foundations of religion. Indeed, I criticized the ascetic regimes and asceticism generally when pushed to extreme, and pleaded for the conveniences and comforts brought in by modern ideas. But it is the extreme unbalanced one-sided forms of either the simple life or the materialistic life which I opposed. A sensible balance which enables us or rather helps us to keep mental and emotional equilibrium, inner calm, is the desirable thing.

91

To turn our gaze to past times and look for similar situations in them and then to observe what happened thereafter, will not avail us today. For such a situation has never before existed.

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