/lit/ - Literature

>>11870854
6/7

>In Man evolution is interiorized and made purposeful; and at the same time, in the degree in which the strivings of human inventiveness need to be controlled in their operation and sustained in their energies, it imposes upon itself a moral order and "mysticizes" itself. In abstracto or in individuo, technical achievement and moral virtue, science and faith (faith in the future) may seem to be things that are not only separate but even opposed to one another. But in the concrete reality of Total Evolution, and beyond a certain degree of Complexity and Consciousness, each of necessity requires the other, because Matter, once hominized, can positively not continue the superarrangement of itself upon itself except in a specific psychic atmosphere. Thus a precise functional interlocking of physical and spiritual energy may be discerned. And thus is revealed the necessity for the Universe to present itself to our experience as an irreversible medium of personalization, if the human rebounding of Evolution is not to be stifled at birth.

>Unification, technification, growing rationalization of the human Earth: we need to shut our eyes to the spectacle of the world we live in, it seems to me, if we are to suppose that we can ever escape from these three basic trends. For how can we fail to discern in the simultaneous rise of Society, the Machine and Thought, this threefold tide that is bearing us upward, the essential and primordial process of Life itself-I mean, the organic in-folding of Cosmic matter upon itself, whereby ever-increasing unity, subtended by ever-heightened consciousness, is achieved by ever more complicated structural arrangements? We must not suppose, even at this early and half-passive stage of our hominization, that the partly enforced flowering of thought imposed on us by planetary pressure represents a force of enslavement of which we are the victims: we must recognize it as a force of liberation.

>In every sphere, physical no less than intellectual and moral, and whether it be a question of flowing water, a traveler on a journey, or a thinker or mystic engaged in the pursuit of truth, there inevitably comes a point in time and place when the necessity presents itself, to mechanical forces, or to our freedom of choice, of deciding once and for all which of two paths is the one to take. The enforced, irrevocable choice at a parting of the ways that will never occur again: which of us has not encountered that agonizing dilemma? But how many of us realize that it is precisely the situation in which social man finds himself, here and now, in face of the rising tide of socialization? Borne on a current of Totalization that is taking shape and gathering speed around us, we cannot, as I have said, either stop or turn back. Indeed, how can we even contemplate escaping from a tide that is not only planetary but cosmic in its dimensions?