How Best Evaluate
Mankind’s Present and Future
Carlos Cardoso Aveline
Part of human population behaves like Freudian
patients, prisoners of their own artificial cycle of personal desires and
frustrations, with the difference that they are not even trying to understand such
a closed circuit.
Citizens of goodwill, on the other
hand, look beyond petty preoccupations. They transcend fears and hopes of
personal nature. They see their intimate relation to the stars in the sky, and
feel secretly co-responsible for the state of the world, and for its future.
This
is a disquieting perception in a way. There may be
a sense of uncomfortable void if it is seen from the point of view of one’s
attachment to short term “personal” things.
Once
personality cycles are taken aside and the citizen gets fully available to work
for mankind, the challenge is to identify the best way to be effective in one’s
good-willing efforts, and to avoid some of the mistakes made by previous
generations, while following their good examples.
How
then can one properly understand the present moment of humanity?
For
those who wish to see the sort of difficulties and opportunities that lie
ahead, there is a question that can be asked within oneself and to friends and
colleagues around. One can put
such a question to anyone, from a colleague to a friend or relative. One can
also directly research on the topic. It will have no easy answer, for one thing
is reality, and another is the perception people can have of the reality. Also,
human evolution is complex and multi-layered, and it is subject to sudden
changes.
In
the history of civilizations, disaster results from lack of ethics. Therefore the
fundamental karmic question is:
*
Do I think that as time passes persons and citizens are getting more
trustworthy, honest and sincere, or the other way around? What has the tendency
been in the last 20, 30 or 50 years?
Testimonies
could be gathered. Examining the question in its multiple possibilities is
perhaps more important than arriving to any “final” answers. In case too many
people say human beings are becoming morally
worse, one must remind oneself of a few things:
1) The
external, authoritarian ethics based on superstition and fear of false gods has
disappeared. Some time is now needed for the Ethics of the Heart, which comes
with individual self-responsibility, to emerge in a natural way.
2) In the first
part of 20th century, “Christian” Europe physically destroyed itself twice in World
Wars, just as it had done already in previous centuries; and it lived a Cold
War from 1947 through the 1970s. Now that the Vatican loses influence and paganism
is back, there is peace in Europe. The culture of hatred loses strength. A
cultural revival is slowly underway.
3) True, materialism
and an adoration of financial deities are still largely dominant. A blind feeling
of attachment to outward comfort is stimulated by the media and dominates many
a nation. Ecological conditions are uncertain. Climate change is a fact. There
may be karmic changes of ecological, military and/or financial nature. This is
the therefore perfect time for wisdom to emerge in a quicker though gradual way,
and to help people understand the next step in evolution.
Such
awakening is the common task of citizens of goodwill, and they do not need to
be too numerous to obtain a victory.
Into
the extent that even a slowly growing number of human beings get internally better
each day and act well, a good karma is being planted which will be harvested in
due time. Self-examination, individual and collective, leads to self-knowledge [1], and self-knowledge liberates one to live in the boundless
territory of self-forgetfulness and altruism.
NOTE:
[1] Self-observation
must be practiced from the point of view of our sacred potentialities. Such
seeds and possibilities are well-described in classical esoteric philosophy. Their
blessed development is unavoidable and is taking place according to karma.
000
In September 2016, after a careful analysis of the state of the
esoteric movement worldwide, a group of students decided to form the Independent Lodge of Theosophists,
whose priorities include the building of a better future in the different
dimensions of life.
000
