EWS #37: On the spiritual life of nations, China and the Middle East (1)
Aug 10, 2019
Topics:
Narad (0:00:33)
Namaste. Welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. Today we're going to take up the spiritual development of nations, I think. It would be a good topic. Where all these nations are in their spiritual development. And I think, Joel, you had a question about China.
Joel (0:01:16):
Yes, so I was a bit intrigued. So in previous talk we spoke about India and Pakistan and a fifth of the planet is the Chinese population. It's a regime who doesn't accept any religious or spiritual development and I was wondering and I know that the government feels threatened by the Tibetans, the Uyghur, Falun Gong, democrats of Hong Kong. So I was wondering how you see this nation evolving. And can a country have its population, spiritual aspirations suppressed and still evolve as a nation, and as a soul, and as a being or do you need also the population to be awakened for the soul to grow?
Sraddhalu (0:02:08):
Actually before we can address the issues you have raised which are so important, we have to understand the concept behind what is meant by nation-soul and evolution of a nation-soul and it is something which is so distinct to Sri Aurobindo's perception. We do not find it anywhere else. No other tradition, no other culture, no religion has this so clearly articulated and with a clear sense of evolution at the level of a nation. There have been perceptions of the nation as a being, as an identity of a being, but then it stops there. But the fact that that being can evolve that is something unique to Sri Aurobindo and it has a direct representation from the human experience to the national, that within us there is a double evolution. There is an outer evolution of the surface personality which includes the biological basis for the person and then there is an inner evolution of the soul which is evolving and the two are going parallel the soul needs an instrument which is sufficiently conscious and plastic through which it can have an experience to evolve or express itself through it so human soul entering an ape body would not get the necessary support of its instrument on the other hand an external evolution taking place without the soul evolving would simply seize the powers which come with the evolution and subject it to not the soul's value but its ego. So there has to be necessarily a parallel development of both. That this takes place in the individual is reasonably clear but that it takes place on a collective level is not so obvious to people because we have many collectivities and to the human perception these collectivities seem arbitrary. Each one of us today is actually intersecting between several identities. I have for example a family identity perhaps a relation to the state and the language linguistic content of that state. I have affinity to the community in which I grew up. I have an affinity to the collective space in which I have my job perhaps. I have a national identity and then a human species identity and within that there are interest groups. I have my technical online interest group where I am a part. I have my political affiliations interest group where I am an activist and the cultural interest groups. I am a music aficionado for a particular style of music and then I have my little personal group of friends where also I have a collective bond. There are so many collective identities which intersect. So it feels as if all these collective identities could be arbitrary. Where is the soul? You can see the collective identity is formed by the sum total of the individuals in it and it reflects always the grade of individuals. But the insight Sri Aurobindo brings in is that nature has been developing not only at the level of the planet but at the level of nations within the planet. Even as she has developed tribal identities which don't necessarily have a high spiritual content or identity, a spiritual identity which is also building and growing. In some sense it was already there and it needed the basis of an awakened collective to be able to express itself directly. So for example, mother makes the statement, India as a conscious being. He says India is conscious of her mission in the world but she is awaiting the external means of manifestation. Now that means what? Here is a conscious soul but the vehicle is not yet ready. What is the vehicle made of? Well the people, their lifestyle, their values, their thoughts and their spiritual development Each nation in this way has a particular quality or aspect of the spirit which he or she expresses which is that nation's gift to the whole of humanity and the growth of the world. Sri Aurobindo lists various civilizations of each of these nation identities, the Greek civilization and the values which it brought and particularly the vocabulary he uses is the sense of the beauty of form and elegance of thought. These are the things which have typified the Greek culture. So you see Greek statues entirely obsessively focused on a perfect representation of the physical form. Greek philosophies being thoughts for the purpose of thinking and play of thought and the joy of thinking possibilities. The Roman civilization primarily expressing the aspect of discipline, order, structure, organization, hierarchy, a mentalized organization particularly. particularly and then he observes that the Europe of today is largely composed of these two influences blended the Greek values and the Roman values which make for the character of the European civilization today and through Europe it's imprint on the whole world. So if you see what Greece originally manifested as her nation spirits expression while it may have spread locally at that time, today has spread all over the world and a large part of the modern thinking is imprinted or rooted in the Greek values articulated then where is Greece today in this? Nowhere, it is serving no purpose almost it's almost as if regenerating waiting for a new expression or a new form. Japan is particularly expressive of the love of art and everything it expresses is artistic expression. If you're drinking tea it has to be an artistic expression. If you're wearing clothes, the way you wear them, not only the form of the clothes, the way you wear them has to be artistic. Your social engagements have to be artistic. And I don't know if I mentioned here before, but of all the countries I've been to, I don't think there is any other except Japan in which the government gives you a national holiday when the trees are in full bloom. So that the common man can sit in nature and breathe in the beauty and I saw this in Japan it was at a time when they were in the holiday for the flowering season I saw an old man in quality of consciousness he did not have any unusual development he sat there in the park and he was gazing at the beauty of the flowers and you could feel as if he was breathing in the beauty of the flowers that's it. That grade of consciousness is so developed it doesn't matter if other levels are not so developed the intellect, emotions but that perception and appreciation of beauty and mother spoke of Japan as the teacher of beauty for the world.
Narad (0:09:55):
It's a beautiful haiku of Busan I believe, 'Under the flowering cherry trees none are strangers there'.
Sraddhalu (0:10:07):
Interesting as if that beauty unites us. So the picture Sri Aurobindo gives us is that every nation has something distinctive to express but also in its expression it is as if sharing it with the world. So this is the soul of the nation which is evolving and the people of the nation are as if reflecting the soul's aspiration. Equally as the people evolve the soul has a more and more effective instrument for its expression. So we have the place of India which is the ideal of the civilization is spirituality and Sri Aurobindo takes pains to identify the form of spirituality it's not an ascetic spirituality it's not life renouncing but it is life embracing life transforming imprint which you can trace back to the Vedic age which is the highest imprint of the spirituality and so in a later phase when you see this life renouncing spirituality which comes with Buddhism, it did not align with the Indian civilizational ideal and therefore there was this very special embodiment, a is in the form of Shankaracharya who drives out Buddhism using its own terms to defeat it. So he goes around all over India literally all over India he makes is one of the very few saints to have walked barefoot all across India. He goes to every great center of teaching and through a series of debates defeats Buddhism and literally drives it out with this tremendous vitality and Sri Aurobindo says for that purpose, for that mission of driving it out, he had to become half a Buddhist himself. So he leaves an imprint of an otherworldly spirituality, life-renouncing spirituality, even though he removes Buddhism from the space. And so subsequent to him, there is a whole series of corrective measures with Madhvacharya who comes, which says all this is also Brahman and after that a series of transitions where the aspect of the heart, the love for the divine, the bhakti which have to be imprinted all over India and all this is happening and it's part of the spiritual evolution of the civilization in the direction of the soul's aspiration of the civilization building the instrument of its expression in the world. So when you look at this development of civilization from such a perspective, you see that there is something much more profound than external socio-economic political causes. Otherwise everything in the history as we are taught has been reduced to these three – social causes, political causes, economic causes and somehow these three define everything. And Sri Aurobindo points out to certain key transitions in history, he says there are certain transitions where you find no external cause and yet the transition takes place and it is the most important, the most radical transition and he says if you study that then you'll find the key to what makes for the evolution of a nation and without saying it, he is implying that the key is actually on an inner level and it is the soul choosing to assert itself or to push forward in a certain direction which is truly guiding the evolution.
So back to Joel's question about China. China is something unique because unlike other civilizations where there was a distinct form of the soul, what you see in China is a very powerful intellectual base a philosophical base and even its own way of relating to the divine through its own philosophies, Taoism and others and mother speaks of this when on the boat when she was traveling to Japan there was a Christian priest who was going to convert people in China and she said you're going to try to convert people who are far more evolved than you in their concept of God. But there is a problem there, that is the character of the civilization itself and Sri Aurobindo pointed out that although externally you will see China undergo many changes, internally it tends to remain the same. and it is such a prophetic and profound observation in today's context. You see China always had a great emperor. Emperor was a link point which held the whole identity of the civilization and the collective and the emperor was always gigantic in the scope of his form of life, his place in life of the people and so on. And it seemed as if after communism the Emperor was removed. It seemed as if the Communist Party replaced the Emperor. Party as an abstract entity was now the ruler. Everyone said the party has decided. Who's the party? I'm a member of the party but the party has decided but I don't know it. How is that possible? It was as if an abstract entity but which had no human representation and that can't last it was still emperor now without a form and then you find a couple of years ago now that the Chinese premier changes the rules and now declares himself premier for life now the emperor has come back the party has an identity it has a human form and representation and instrument. So the fear in this highly centralized civilizational structure is something else that might shift the power center. And you listed various of these groups, Falun Gong or the Tibetan, or the Taiwanese, Uyghurs, what was the fifth? Hong Kong. Each of these is as if potentially a power center or a value system which could take it out of the centralized frame and that's what China most fears. And its attempt therefore is to remove by force anything which might contradict the centralization of the emperor identity or co-opt it and make it a part which is brilliant in the way it has done as far as Christianity is concerned. Instead of allowing the churches to allow to take allegiance to the Pope which would be an extra national authority, they simply said if you want Christianity well you have to have a Chinese church and all the symbols should be written in Chinese, not in the language of English, Christianity or Latin. And the same they are doing now for Islam. They said, remove all linguistic forms and representations of Islam and write it in Chinese characters. It has to be a part of this centralized identity. And so it's interesting to see how China is able to function. Because of its high centralization, if the center decides to do something good for the people, there's a massive impact and overnight you have change everywhere. Because now it's a machinery, hierarchical, which implements this decision made, but the problem of course is it does not allow sufficiently the freedom of diversity of the units and so it tends to always repress freedom. There is always a kind of an undercurrent where, yes you can do what you like but stay within this umbrella, the umbrella may seem to be abstract, you may not feel it in your daily life, but it's always there. If humanity has to truly evolve freely, Sri Aurobindo points out, in the spiritual evolution, you must have even the freedom to make mistakes. Otherwise you cannot have a real creative evolution and a real expression of possibilities. So in China necessarily that problem will remain for a while. Either people will accept to be subjugated or there may be a revolt and reaction and frequent passages.
Narad (0:19:00):
You told me that when you were in China you felt fear in people.
Sraddhalu (0:19:07):
Yes, it was quite an unusual experience. It was in Hong Kong, the first time. I went maybe three or four times to Hong Kong and once in mainland China. It was something quite unusual one was the sense of fear of something unknown I Approached somebody in the street casually asking for directions, and there was such a fear Because it was I don't know something too different not part of the collective consciousness and the second experience I had was that the collective consciousness was very strong the individuality was subjugated to such a degree that sometimes you couldn't perceive it so it was on Chinese New Year's Day I was in the street I was crossing the street and everybody was full out in the street walking around young couples, young people, all young people you see very few old people at that time at least and I crossed the street and I stood in the center there was a raised portion and I looked and I could just see this sea of humanity and then suddenly I realized there was no individual. The whole collective mass was the person and I felt a deep fear. If it turned against me the whole mass would move as one and just knock me out. And that's when I had this touch of fear. I said, wow, this is something unusual. And I left in a bit of a hurry. But this is something quite unique, perhaps because of the way the Great Wall of China was built. A decision made in the center and the machinery is put into place, people are driven and the machinery completes and this kind of mass level of action is I think unique in the world but it is still the same it You still have the emperor.
Narad (0:21:13):
But you feel it will evolve in time, although it may take a long time.
Sraddhalu (0:21:19):
Mother made this observation that China would be very receptive to Sri Aurobindo's thought because it has a very high intellectual development. And so it seems as if China's first entry to the spiritual will be much more through mind than through the heart. The psychic influence is not so prominent. The mind understanding and accepting is its way to the spirit. And so that again is something quite distinct. In most other cultures you will find a mix of mind, heart. Here it seems to be in a very large part the turn of the mind. But it will grow.
Narad (0:22:01):
What about the Middle East? Because I know I'm opening a Pandora's box. But it's a big factor in the world today.
Joel (0:22:07):
Can I just finish with China and then go to Middle East. I want to add something in the question regarding China. It is in fact the country where atheism is supposed to be the rule. So you were saying that they have a spiritual tradition. So is those spiritual traditions still alive in the common people, and they can breathe through it in some form? Or are they completely suffocating because there is no space for religion or spirituality? And then, second point, the fact that if they can recover more freedom of spiritual practice will that help the evolution and the growth of the soul of China? Or is also the soul of China suffocating because there is no space for that freedom?
Sraddhalu (0:23:07):
It's a difficult question because if you see when communism came into China it was replacing a feudal structure which was oppressing common man and that was the hierarchy of the Emperor's rule and you know you go down a few layers Emperor is far away he's an abstraction although he's a very powerful influence but you never meet him but the person representing the Emperor can do what he likes in the name of the Emperor and so that was of something which had to change and the Chinese Revolution and the turn to communism was that very positive intentioned change. In practice though as Sri Aurobindo warned the party becomes the authority, statism replaces the equality and there is the center which is somehow more powerful, less equal and so on. And this is the aberration which is somehow inevitable in the form of communism. But subsequently what happened is again the same hierarchy formed with the emperor in the center. So I don't see much change through the communism itself. At best what it did was now to make more accessible to the common man, things which earlier were held by an elite. And so it had a good result. You go to China, until recently, they had no first class, second class, third class of trains or planes. Everybody in one monotone class. There is only one class, no hierarchy.
And then when more recently, is it 20 years now, they turned to a capitalist form within their communist party. They allowed for classes. They said, okay, let people pay more if they want extra facilities, which made, which released somehow something which was somewhat oppressive. You could not have a different quality of service even if you wanted, because everything was flattened by communism. So it served a use. But afterwards when it bounces back and rebuilds the possibility of many levels or hierarchies and allows individual enterprise, you have the capitalist benefits equally flowing in but with the party holding it all together. It did create a great freedom and the freedom is there. People can do what they want. But that kind of a periphery, a boundary, party and the rules of party which allow you to stay free within this boundary that seems to remain in the spiritual evolution though the Taoism, if you take that as a character of the Chinese spiritual aspiration that has not gone in fact in the return post communist phase, there is an attempt even to bring that back with greater form, with the mix of the Buddhism and so on and what Taoism has given is to make the people extremely practical and they are proud of that identity. Some of them will actually say we are a very practical people talk to us common sense and we will deal with anybody and so if that's the kind of talk you get when you have to meet on a political or diplomatic level. That practical value of the spiritual is there but it does not have the high turn of spirit. It is always turned to how can this help us, how can this make our life better, how can it turn to material result. Buddhism brought something of that, higher even movement of withdrawal but in the form in which Buddhism has been accepted by the state it still here's a religion you can practice freely keep it private don't make a public exposure of it practical again so I really can't say what form it could take in the future but if the soul of the nation does push forward, then it might take a higher form, maybe the state itself, the party will recognize that the pure spirituality is not so threatening after all.
Sraddhalu (0:27:27):
In any case, the beauty of the spiritual turn is that it is not bound to any form. It can exist, it can flower irrespective of whatever external limits are placed what it will do when the spiritual turn takes a strong enough force it may change completely this current arrangement or it may just fill it and give to it a new meaning that's to be seen what we do see though is a tendency for increasing control this is recent, it's in the last couple of years. They are giving each person social points according to your behavior. And according to how many social points you have, you will have facilities or not. So now every street corner has cameras which are tracking with face recognition everybody. Any accident you may have, any conflict you may have, you will lose social points and if you lose them enough you cannot own property, you cannot travel or whatever other restrictions. So that again creates a climate of fear, you are being watched, you are being measured and it is not a healthy thing for the free movement of the spirit and maybe it won't last, maybe it will, it is an experiment but it is very unusual. Mother spoke about this in a kind of a warning. She said that if China ever overran the world, it would consume everything and make earth barren. And this is a real danger because of this centralized machinery which just bludgeons its way to serve its immediate practical need. You don't find, for example, in Chinese cities, you don't find birds except in zoos or cages. They get eaten up. Very few animals in the streets, they'll get eaten up. So there's a tendency to just use up for the practical benefit of the moment. It can go to any extent.
Narad (0:29:36):
Is the law still about only one child?
Sraddhalu (0:29:39):
That law has been removed, I think. But the result of three generations of only one child meant that something of the emotional bond of siblings was lost for three generations. That's very big. You don't have uncles and aunts by the way because your parents don't have brothers or sisters. Right? So who are you? You are an individual with parents but no uncles, no aunts, no brothers, no sisters. So when you have a marriage between two people, who is the family? Just parents on both sides, that's it, nothing and it goes back three generations. So even on the grandparents side there is nobody else. It makes for a very strange collective collective consciousness and it has led to a certain exaggeration of individuality in a way which may not be healthy. But its idea was population control. Yes, but again centralized population control means bludgeoning and so it has this effect of damaging the social fabric. How it will bounce back from this damage that's to be seen. Whether nature brings back the strong emotional bonds of siblings and rebuilds family units in a larger form that's to be seen.
Narad (0:31:06):
Can we take the Middle East for a few minutes.
Sraddhalu (0:31:09):
Yes, I have experience with two countries in the Middle East that I visited and had some interaction with people there and then I have had meetings where people from countries from the Middle East came. So there, of course it is a very narrow selection and I have not been to their spaces. What I saw was our picture of the Middle East as it comes in the media is not quite true. The media again tends to create a monolith appearance because that's how Islam wants to represent itself. The Ummah, that is the family of Islam is the ideal and so as long as you belong to the Ummah you are all equally the same. No, but that's not it because the cultural basis has not really gone, whatever the veneer or form of Islam may have come. So what I could see was people coming from each of these different countries or spaces had very different temperaments and the cultural content was so different. What has happened as a result of Islam is it has been extremely conservative to protect the values of tradition and not just Islamic tradition but whatever was the original tradition which got identified with Islam to those people were protected as if they were protecting Islam. And sometimes it is nice to see them. They are sometimes so gentle, so polite, so caring. the family units are so strongly bonded and when they come from some old culture where those elements were strong, they have managed to survive in a way which is quite remarkable and even a pleasure to see compared to what you see today in a large part of the westernization which has flattened out, respect or broken many of these values of family.
And so one of the problems of the Middle East is they passed through colonization and it was not so nice. Large part of it was first Islamic colonization and subsequently European colonization. But the last part of European colonization when they left, they basically drew lines based on which country owned what patch. And so these lines which are now called countries are not the original nation states. And so often they don't quite work. Iraq for example is just a territory which one of the European colonizing countries left with demarcations of which patches they controlled, but internally seems to have three very distinct cultural identities and sometimes overlapping with another country and which makes for very complex border issues and identity issues. So I don't know how it is going to resolve, whether the nation identity will form itself to fit the border or whether the borders will rearrange to recover the original nation identities. Not all nation identities are as mature in their individuality. Some are still very fragile in formation. Some are still weak, although formed, but weak in ability to express. There is one particular community, for example, in Lebanon, the Druze, is it they call them? Druze? Yes. The Christian communities. Something remarkable with them. I was in a conference where there was one person from the Druze community and I was speaking of the yogic perspective regarding climate change, forests, our relationships with nature and so on and then he came to me privately and all others were from Middle East countries which were largely Muslim, they represented Muslim values, he was the only one from the Druze community, so it was Christian but in a Lebanon which is Muslim, Christian and then he came to me and he said you know in our community we share exactly these values and we believe in reincarnation. Here is a Christian group which believes in reincarnation. And then he said something very interesting. He said through the centuries there was attempts by the Islamic colonization to convert them. They chose rather to die than convert Because they believed in reincarnation They protected their spaces. They protected forests as if the forests were their brothers and sisters, their family and as a result that's the only patch where the original forests and the original trees have survived because of this particular bond and intimacy they have. So it was fascinating to see that here's a patch of culture and values which goes back to a time which although Christian in form, remembers its pre-Christian Christian heredity of reincarnation, still holds and protects. And one of the things they did was they never marry outside their religion. So they have retained that cultural value and yet been able to protect themselves from invasions. It was quite remarkable. I wanted to study deeper their tradition and meeting the person and the way he spoke of things almost feel the energy of that culture still alive. So that's what I meant by the identity of that nation or that group is still strong, it has survived, it has been able to protect itself but it has not been able to project its values into the global arena. It is still fragile, it is still weak in its ability to project. This is an interesting observation.
Sraddhalu (0:37:10):
On the other hand, other spaces like Iran have much more strong ability to project and impact their environment. Iraq is a confused identity because it seems to be three pieces and so you always had some dictator dominating to artificially and Saddam Hussein was in fact a very good ruler he held together all his people made sure everybody had equal opportunities there was no allowance for any religion to dominate others education was open to all in fact it was considered to be a model state for the Middle East, for secular society and it's only when he made the mistake of declaring that he will sell oil not in US dollars, but in euros that the United States Army stepped in, toppled him, replaced his currency with the US dollar. And Again, you have a dictatorship which has to control these pieces. So unfortunately, it's a place of much suffering, much conflict and something of that seems to go back to a karmic period many thousand years ago. I don't know whether one should speak of these very openly but there was a period when that region had a strange rule of energies, asuric energies which dominated and held people under sway in the name of being Divine beings. And so you had this very oppressive hierarchical dominating energy and that's why you see in the Abrahamic traditions, this concept of many gods and my God is greater than your God or God says I am a jealous God, you will not worship other Gods and these were actually Asuric beings who presided over large groups or subgroups and enslaved parts of humanity. You will see in the Persian space there is the inversion of vocabulary from the Vedas so they had the Vedic tradition which was still practiced there. Vedic tradition had a very wide spread. So they had the fire and the ceremonies around the fire. But they inverted the vocabulary. Deva, which in the Veda is light being, became for them the demonic beings. And Asura, which is in the Vedic vocabulary the vital or anti-divine Asuric beings, becomes for them Ahura which is God. And so the head of the religious form is Ahura Mazda meaning great Asura, but it is now great God; keeping elements of the fire ceremony of the Vedic phase but now inverting the relationship. And so there were many places like this you will see even in certain parts of Orthodox Judaism, Yahweh was the four elements YHWH which represent the four elements and the one who has mastered four elements. So anybody who had acquired the great power to rule by magical power of mastery of four elements was a Yahweh. And so you have the Yahweh who says you will not worship other Yahweh and the plural of Yahweh. So Mother makes this observation that this was an Asuric influence which had taken over. And so what has happened is in many of these traditions there is this strain and then there is this strain which is earlier which has the memory of a more direct alignment to the Divine will and the two are conflicting, colliding which makes for a very strange mix and some of it as I said has a karmic remnant of that mixture.
Audience (0:41:33)
But the idea of god being jealous, they are in many cultures.. Even if you look in Greek mythology, they get jealous, they also get pain, Indira got jealous..
Sraddhalu (0:41:40)
Yes, but you see in Greek mythology, they are not gods as Supreme God. They are deities, powers and they are like a whole pantheon family and then they have conflicts and all but here the concept was the God, one God says you won't worship other Gods because I am a jealous God and that's kind of a confusing idea. Similar thing happened in Egypt. There was in the very early phase of Egypt, the line of worship of the Divine which gradually in the declining phase of the Kali Yuga now takes on forms of worshiping intermediate deities and eventually going to very low deities. it turned almost to a form of, very crude form of black magic and a lot of occultism and conflict because of that. And that leaves its imprint, karmic imprint into those spaces and the attempt which was made in between by Akhenaten to bring back worship of the one supreme divine, the sun worship as a representation was an attempt to get back to that. It made a push but it couldn't last and again there was this mix and then Islam comes and as if wipes out all this confusion. But the patches remain and that's again interesting. I had occasion to visit in Egypt the Coptic Christians. And they were the original lineage of the Saravanic tradition which survived in the form of Christianity until Islam came. And while the rest of the population largely was converted to Islam, this subgroup survived to this day, still retains. And I had some fascinating interactions with them. I think I mentioned some of this in an earlier discussion so I won't repeat. But they retain the ability to read the old pharaonic texts, hieroglyphs as it was. They have maps which describe underground passages under the great pyramid and the sphinx, which was for them the temple complex. But all that knowledge still survives in this little patch always under assault by the surrounding others.
So it's strange how in nature, in evolution and Sri Aurobindo maps this out beautifully. There are these movements which rise and then there are large movements which come in as if obscure, mix blend overthrow, replace Or if nature finds something valuable she protects it in a little patch to be brought out again in some form or to blend in a different way to create a more rich culture or identity. And when you start looking at history from this perspective, it almost feels as if as inside the human being we have energies which rise, interests, needs, powers which rise, develop with specialization and then replace with another specialization and then work to blend to create an eventually a full rich individuality. So planet Earth seems to have on her entire surface these patches of civilizations, cultures and the blending and developing of specializations to create the fullness of her multifaceted expression of individual or collective humanity and within that, the nation-souls are special aspects. That's the big picture if we can look at the world in this way.
Narad (0:45:30):
To mention two books of Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity, would be good reading for everyone.
Sraddhalu (0:45:42):
And again there is no equivalent view of history in any culture, any tradition, in any other book. The way he gives it to you, showing these deeper motive forces which determine history and the evidence. Not only first of all the way he presents it, it is rational, you understand and it is obvious even when he puts it in those terms you say, ‘oh yeah, of course’. But the evidence of how accurate his observations are is when he wrote these books now a little over a hundred years ago, he not only describes the past sequence which has brought us to where we are at that time, but he describes what is to happen next. And that movement of what is to happen next, he reviews in 1948 I believe, 48, 49 and he says since it pretty much everything has gone the way I anticipated there's nothing to add really, but he just makes certain observations of what has happened in between and how it can move forward, that's it. And subsequent to that 1948 we are now what 70 years later, you can see everything unfolding the way he described including the unification of Europe, into the vocabulary he uses is, United States of Europe, they call it European Union, close enough. He was not really trying to describe vocabulary, he was describing the concept. Similarly when he spoke of the Soviet Union, he said as a structure it had to break down and come into a more federal framework and you had subsequently the Commonwealth of Independent States, CIS, which was the framework in which they tried to unify the erstwhile USSR. And there is a suggestion as if China has three distinct parts, it's not one nation, it has three distinct identities held under one unit. And so the suggestion is it might just eventually resolve itself into three different parts. You see the Mongolian region has a very distinct identity culturally even one could say it is a nation-soul in itself. So what we have, China is really three parts or three aspects.
Very well. Namaste.
Narad (0:48:02):
Namaste.