There are two kinds of perfection to which all human seeking is witness. The first is a perfection of man’s own being, his nature and consciousness. The second is a perfection of man’s outer material, physical and biological environment, the equipment and instruments he uses to enhance his world-knowledge and power. The first is intended by all who turn their gaze inward to find a nobler, better and deeper law of living – the spiritual man, idealist and thinker. The second is the perfection intended by the techno-scientists who study the laws and processes that govern life and strive to control them by material means to create a more comfortable environment, a healthier life more suited to our ease and utility.
The first perfection, without the second, is like beauty draped in coarse and ill-fitting attire. The second, without the first, is like ugliness donning golden ornaments to become beautiful. The last few centuries have seen an excessive stress on the latter to the detriment or unconscious ignorance of the former. The result is a poverty of the mind and soul, a depravity of taste, an open display of all that is vulgar and brutish. We have purchased comforts of the body at the expense of the human spirit. We have advanced techniques of surgery and powerful pharmacopeias but have lost the body’s natural resistance. We have well-equipped hospitals where men with unhealthy lifestyles go for a fresh lease of stressful life. New diseases multiply along with the hospitals. Death changes its mask of name and form, as life is lived under the shadows of a hundred fears. Man finds himself trapped in a complex superstructure whose perfection has become a prison. There is no cry for the freedom of the soul, no altar raised to liberate man from himself, who has now become his own most dangerous enemy.
Worse still, science and technology have placed dangerous powers in the hands of an inferior type of humanity. And now that his coarse laughter and giant shadow looms over earth, we wonder what possibly could be wrong with our civilisation. This wrong, this ill, this core pathology is not outside, but in the very constitution of man.
The fabric of which this body is woven has the stamp of its animal past. Our cells habitually respond to animal instincts and run in small narrow grooves set by an animal nature. And if we add the considerable power of an evil mind and will to this beastly pattern, then our capacity to harm others and ourselves becomes manifold. The result is that our spiritual, social, psychological and even physical health always remains in a state of precarious balance. The scientist would agree that our problem is almost cellular. The complete freedom of man must take into account the physical body that is unable to shake off the shackles of its animal past and responds habitually to suffering, fear, rage, lust, pleasure and pain.
What then is the remedy? The outer perfection of a powerful equipment and apparatus is certainly not the remedy but even part of the problem. And if, by some genetic manipulation, we could alter our proneness to disease, the problem would only be pushed one step backward. We would still be prone to social and psychological ills and their attendant evils, perhaps even more by having a robust body at our disposal. Can we find a genetic alteration that can transmute us into a higher humanity? As long as the user of this equipment of life is still the ego-self in us, we shall always essentially remain what we are today – an animal man, a beast or brute that has shed its horns and tail and stands on two legs to speak.
Yet there is in us a soul that can replace the ego and begin to govern our nature. There is a power much higher and greater than our mind that can transmute the very cells of our body into transparent crystals of light. There is a Truth now concealed from our sight, a truth self-aware, eternal and supreme that sleeps in the atom and cells and stars, awaiting discovery. Once awake it can alter our balance in a definitive way so that our bodies become transmitters, receivers and transponders of its Light, Truth, Beauty, Bliss, Peace, Harmony and Love. It is this awakening, spreading from within outwards, that holds the key. Then can we discover matter and soul as complementary sides of the one Reality and the earthly destiny of man – a perfect soul residing in a perfected mind, body and life in the world-play.
