Races and nations as functions of the world whole

fashionable or incomprehensible today, when we can read in the illustrated supplement of a Sunday newspaper: ‘In the West, the intellect rules and dominates. But the African goes about understanding differently, and bides his time’?.

Mitrinovié had written, in 1933,

‘The Soul of Man is also an organ of knowledge, not only his intellect. For Destiny can be understood by intellect and mere forms of things can be analysed; but Providence can be known only by the heart of humans, by our emotions, desires, will; by our soul. Now it is this very heart, the over-ruled human heart, the intimidated human soul, which is rebelling against the spirit-killing dictatorship of the intellect and its technology and its purely formal knowledge of the mechanism of things. Our inwardness, our subjectivity, our spirituality demands the restoration of justice . . . and it will be the task of intuition, of spiritual cognisance, to liberate human culture from its stronger oppressor and save humanity from the mirage of scientific dictatorship.’

If we accept the thought that the life of the human world can be compared to the life of an individual, then we may see that as ageing and death are in front of us individually, so are they also before Humanity as a whole. So the qualities most evident in an ageing person could be the qualities most required for the settling of our world today. Older people need peace, they require tranquility to interiorise and to assess their past, to come to terms with their life and the prospect of death. Jung has laid great emphasis upon the first half of life as the outgoing, the acquisitive, and the last half as the time for returning to the fundamental values that make life rich; and this same realisation is found in the ancient Indian tradition, with the notions of Pravritti and Nivritti?. Jung’s experience has called attention to the problems arising in individual life at the age when there are values which we find to be more important than worldly acquisitions, on which we may have concentrated when younger. Humanity

1 John Heilpern; ‘Observer’ colour supplement, 25th September 1977, p-37-

2 ‘The Message of Bhagavan Das’; H. C. Rutherford; 8th New Atlantis Foundation Lecture, 1962, p.8.