There is a harmony of animal life. It is a double harmony. On the one hand, harmony between the life-force and the material substance of the animal body. On the other hand, it is a harmony between the organism and the natural milieu in which it dwells. This harmony has been established for the species by Nature since a long time. Provided the species does not venture too far and into unknown territories, it remains safe and healthy.
Some human beings also have this kind of early harmony between the individual currents of life and the universal life around them. Their life is simple, with few wants beyond the needs of the body and in spontaneous attunement to nature’s rhythms. They live happily and remain healthy within their limits.
But with the birth of thought and the advent of thinking man this first harmony is disturbed. The mind begins to feed upon the life-force; it also disturbs the spontaneous natural balance by trying to understand the environment around it. To re-establish its lost natural health it must re-create a new and a higher harmony than that of animal life and of early primitive man. This it can do by an increasing understanding of the idea of ‘right place and right time for everything’ that comes within its purview. For this, it must make use of an enlightened reason and live by a law of balance and moderation. It must discover the right measure and the just use of everything in its subjective and objective world. It is a life of ideal ethic, a regulated life lived within the safe limits of reason, governed by some principal of a golden mean which can ensure it whatever happy harmony and health that is possible, within the human limits. This too has been achieved by Nature, at least partially, in some individuals and even as a group in certain ages of mankind. Yet, like the animal harmony, this kind of human harmony too, sets a limit for the human being beyond which he cannot venture. Thus far and no further, as the law says.
Now there is a still greater harmony possible, a harmony more complete, more true, more integral than that of the animal and the human type. This greater harmony will allow the free play of higher energies and vaster levels of consciousness. It will make matter itself perfectly plastic to the divine forces. It is with this aim in view the Nature has broken the established order and whatever possible harmony there was between man and his environment. The very pace of life, the accelerated speed of our mental evolution, the dizzying rate of outer progress, the progressive dislocation from our natural environment and our adaptability to it, the multiplication of challenges, diseases, disorders as well as the discovery of novel methods to tackle them, the many old and new problems and the fresh new solutions, the breaking of barriers of thought, the conquest over time and space, the narrowing of distances, the widening of outlook, the crumbling of all inner and outer boundaries—social, ethical, religious, moral, emotional, ideological, geo-political—even, at another level, the heightening of the general tension and the confusion and hardening of some rigid pockets of strong resistances, are all clear enough signs. It is as if a giant tsunami has passed over man’s psychological being throwing everything in turmoil and out of gear. Yet, if we look deep enough, we shall see in this sudden outburst of an immense creative energy on the one side, and the dance of death on the other, the beginning of a new age when Nature withdraws her sanction to the old laws, habits, customs, ways of being, breaks their safe limits and enters into a mode of experimentation so that out of the great churning of the human consciousness, new and deeper possibilities may emerge and evolve. Indeed the churning itself is a necessary part of the process. It breaks the settled order no doubt and raises up a lot of storm and mud that lay hidden in our subconscious parts for centuries and millenniums. But once the storm settles and the winds have swept away the dirt and the mud, we shall see in the great daylight the birth of a new being, with a new mind, a new life-force and a new body, mind of light inspired by wisdom’s occult plane, a heart of love no more cabined into narrow ego-centric feelings and thoughts, a life that is the spontaneous expression of the Divine will, a body that is the living tool and conscious instrument of the Infinite.
The long and hazardous experiment of earthly life has arrived at a breaking point. Out of the shattered moulds of the past there must emerge the being of future who would live by a higher harmony and a greater freedom. Embodying a deeper, truer and vaster consciousness, he would live spontaneously, one with the law of truth and the natural intuitive harmony and perfection of a higher order that arises out of it.
