“Unite,
and utter a single and common word,
that your thoughts achieve
a single and common consciousness”
(Rig-Veda X. 191.1,2,3,4)
ARS TOTUM REQUIRIT HOMINEM
(Art requires the whole man)
And for us, art/knowledge is an internal principle, a requirement
of existential militantism, an instrument of transformation, a process
of individualism of ‘self’, which permits us to rediscover the universal
inside the individual, the spiritual plane in physical consciousness; through
the elimination of egotism and of division… when feeling and thought become
one… going beyond appearance to the ‘real’ reality… all genuine art is
derived from this profound experience…. An experience which should be the
right and duty of all humanity… through the search for a spiritual identity,
creating a psychological one, unattached to any external intellectual movement…
a broader path, through a reversal or liberating transformation in human
nature and will… or by a quantum leap, which will produce another and more
encompassing answer to the question of human destiny.. a spiritual goal,
surpassing man himself and his earthly existence… the Archimedes’ fulcrum,
upon which the world can be levered out of it’s natural state into one
of “culture.”
The individual should be the instrument, and the principle theatre of this
transformation, but this isolated change is not enough, and perhaps is
not entirely achievable. Even if it is accomplished, this change will only
have permanent significance if the individual becomes a beacon and a focus
of power in the terrestrial environment… (’Gnosis’)… until then, any intermediate
transformation will be partial and uncertain.
So, our task is to discover art as a development of intuitive
knowledge, the basis of a new revolution in consciousness. And although
man has not yet really heard or understood the teaching of the sage, “know
thyself”, he has at least accepted the message of the thinker: “educate
thyself”; but knowledge must be ‘militant’ if it is to survive. If we allow
a general state of ignorance, we risk falling back into barbary; that’s
why we must bring philosophy and art and poetry back to their natural beginnings,
in the search for their own truth, with the goal of becoming the governors
of human existence.
Until recently, education had not freed man; it has simply engendered an
increasing number of needs. Now, however, social principles are beginning
to figure with in the realms of the possible, and they will perhaps, one
day, give rise to a hitherto unknown phenomenon: a ‘cultivated’ humanity.
When the individual lives unthinkingly, without any free and spontaneous
mental activity, even with the pretence of ‘civilised’ existence, he lives
in a prison which the human soul must break out of: the goal of education
should be to accompany the individual towards awakening: to support him
in the evolution of his psychological makeup: to guide him towards an enlargement
of his consciousness; in order to better know himself and the world; to
help him surpass himself. We are talking about an education which takes
into consideration all the dimensions of the human being: body, mind and
spirit. *
Modernity seems to deny the spiritual dimension of man, although religion
and the sacred have always been present in all civilisations, comparative
mythology has, through its lack of knowledge of this important ancestral
phase of human progress, deformed the meaning of early traditions.
Its theories fail to recognise any intermediate stage between the primitive,
and Plato or the Upanishads. The materialist, reductionist, approach
has severed man’s alliance with the universe he inhabits, and which inhabits
him. But the creativity whose raw materials, thanks to quantum physics,
find themselves newly liberated from the prison of determinism, will allow
us to examine; in a new light, all the basic problems of humanity – from
politics to economics; from culture to art, from philosophy to religion.
In our opinion, this is the key to success in our movement; and it is possible
for the movement to gain momentum and energy while it’s’ principles become
even more vital and necessary. Until the idea of humanity is imposed upon
the sentiments of man, his emotions, his sympathies and his mental habits,
as much as his intelligence, progress will be limited to superficial adjustments
ignoring the basic problem; the great challenge is to transform the idea
of humanity into something more than an idea.
External circumstance, environmental, economic or political,
can provide a framework but are incapable of creating a psychological reality
which would breathe life into it. Man must accept that in all life and
thought, a central animus is behind and is incarnated in all peoples… overarching
the idea of the ego, although not destroying individuality, without which
man would stagnate… that the principle of collectivity, of exchange in
diversity, can provide the means of expression for a complex life within
a progressive and flexible society.
A human ‘religion’ can present
itself in two ways: as an intellectual and sentimental idea, or as a set
of aspirations and spiritual rulebook. Human intellectual religion
already exists, but it is only the shadow of an attitude as yet unborn;
and if it wants to survive, this human religion should become more explicit,
more insistent, and more categorical. Until then, it cannot prevail
against its main enemy – human selfishness, whether individual, class or
national.
The weaknesses of intellectual ideas are that, even when
they appeal to feeling and emotion, they do not penetrate the centre of
the human being. Intellect and feeling are only the instruments of the
being: they can serve either the external (inferior) or the internal (superior)
one – the tools of the ego or the aerials of the soul: for example, the
18th century attempt to recreate society around the notions of liberty,
equality and brotherhood never came to fruition, despite all the progress
achieved. The freedom engendered is superficial and unreal; ‘brotherhood’
is not even considered to be a practical proposition. This failure stems
from the fact that the concept of ‘humanity’, in our intellectual age,
has had to hide it’s true self, and address the mental and physical man,
but not the inner being. This goal can only be achieved if
we start with a change in the basic nature of man, and his inner life –
because so many of us live only in the ego and in the social context, the
attempt to achieve liberty, becomes a form of competitive individualism;
that of equality, a conflict followed by the construction of an artificial
social order; and ‘fraternity’ remains contrary to our natures. Yet brotherhood
is the real key, without which freedom and equality are impossible.
Not a physical or genetic fraternity, nor an intellectual accord, but the
fusing and channelling of the human inner being towards common goals, a
common life, a unity of thought and feeling, the recognition of inner spiritual
unity – to live in one’s soul, not in one’s ego.
And this movement of ours: flux/vibration/purification/engagement/regeneration
- is the sign that a unifying force exists, and that humanity is driven
to find a form of union. The problem is that, basing itself too much on
‘rational’ external principles, this movement tends to get bogged down
in structural solutions which gradually enslave it. A free and equal union
should replace the present abnormal, irritating and false situation in
human relations. Its ultimate goal should be a global culture within which
each ethnic or national component, rather than being swallowed, can flourish
and develop while learning from and giving to its peers, the whole serving,
through this interaction, as the ideal of common human perfection.
Humanity, ‘one’ in thought and feeling – but this noble idea is afflicted
by the great weakness of being abstract. This quality makes us impatient
to incarnate the idea in concrete form. If it could believe in its
own force and be content to grow, until it has fully penetrated the human
spirit, it would end up by becoming a real part of inner human life, a
permanent aspect of psychology and thus, remodel humanity in its image.
But in our weakness, we tend to push for its rapid incarnation and establishment.
The idea launches itself prematurely into action, without really knowing
itself, and thus is the agent of its own demise; In its’ desire to succeed,
it allies itself to other movements and power – blocs whose goals are alien
and who are only too happy to receive its support. This, when it finally
becomes reality, it is in a contaminated and effectual form.
This has been the history of our ‘idea’, and thus human progress
has always seemed unreal, inconclusive and tortuous. Our material
world is thus peopled by powerful shadows, ghosts of dead or unborn things,
apart from those elements fully incarnate in the present. The ghosts of
dead things are cumbersome realities which abound at present, dead religions,
arts, moralities, political theories, all of which hang onto their rotting
corpses. Obstinately repeating the sacred formulae of the past,
they hypnotise and intimidate even the progressive fraction of humanity.
Then there are the unborn spirits, still unable to take form, but which
exist in the mental realm, as influences which we perceive and respond
to in a disorganised way. Thus we come back to education, and the
transmission of knowledge. “What does one think of in this world? Getting
rich, acquiring a reputation, becoming king, forgetting what it means to
b a man, to be a king” (Pascal) If we want to work towards an evolution
in human consciousness, education should not rest on an accumulation of
knowledge, or on scientific rationalism and competition, but devote
itself to the building of the human being, which presupposes the rehabilitation
of the spiritual dimension… that which drives the individual towards the
highest realisation of himself as apart of a collective attempt to transform
the world.
Such an education presupposes that the teacher has himself taken the path
of conscious evolution so as to become an effective mediator and transmitter
not only of his earning but of his experiences and of his essence.
The searcher, by the questions he asks, is well aware that
he is challenging certain existing dogmae. Thus, he transgresses the institutional
and confronts certain taboos, such as questions of spirituality which are
virtually never addressed in conventional education. Alongside this question
of spirituality, the whole definition of the educational sciences becomes
open to debate: should certain aspects of humanity be excluded and denied,
or should education embrace human existence in all its facets, and all
which can lead to the development of the person?
Following this line of questioning, we leave behind ‘multi-rationality’
and move towards ‘transdisciplinarity’ (Basarab Nicolescu); the ‘transpersonal’
(Marc-Alain Descamps); the ‘transversal’ (Réné Barbier) and
everything which transcends man. The dictionary defines education
as the activation of means and systems in order to assure the instruction
and the development of a human being. If the spiritual dimension constitutes
one road towards this goal, why exclude it? Why not discuss the place
of this field in education? It is not a question of a rejecting the scientific
and the rational, but of finding a balance between objectivity and subjectivity,
between the rational and the irrational, between the imaginary and the
real (Joelle Macrez, L’autorisation Noétique.)
We believe that each act: human political social, aesthetic, ethical, philosophical,
should converge, exactly in the realisation of ‘self’, the secret or obvious,
awareness of individual or social evolution.
The development of the free individual is the first condition for a perfect
society, united in freedom and diversity, breadth of knowledge, mental
elasticity, purity of temperament… towards the law of liberty and harmony…
instead of the law of discord, of regimentation, of compromise, or of conflict.
The duty of our age, (when consciousness and knowledge are becoming generalised,
when people and nations are undergoing a partial ‘rapproachment’, when
they are driven towards deeper self, and mutual self-knowledge and the
idea of self-fulfilment- which should be the duty and conscious desire
of man in this age – is becoming more and more universal) is to achieve
self-knowledge; to find the perfect law of its being and its development;
and if it is as yet incapable of following this law because of its egotistical
nature, at least it should keep this ideal in sight, and gradually find
the leans to make it the defining principle of its individual and collective
existence. But this is the most difficult of lessons, and the most
painful of enterprises…to learn from what has been, but also to know what
it can become, and to grow to that point – such is the task given to our
spiritual being.
A complete action, in harmony with a new law of being, is
always difficult for human nature, because of the blind tendency to neuter
and constrain new possibilities as they emerge from the subconscious, and
prevent them from attaining their logical goals and conclusions. These
new phenomena are allowed only a limited zone of action. A transformation
in human nature can only come about when he substance of the self is so
soaked by spirituality that all its actions become spontaneous, dynamic
and harmonious.
Only a greater, sovereign, luminous spirituality can drive away the blind
‘ananke’ of the unconscious or penetrate it entirely, transform and replace
it.