TODAY the crisis of modern civilization is in a very precarious state since this book was first published in 1989. Fragmentation is getting worse at all levels: political, economic, social, cultural and, most importantly, at psychological level. The binary divisions mentioned in the first edition, say domination vs subordination, man vs nature, self vs the other, you vs me, self vs society, and so on, are so much accentuated that the very existence of not only humankind but all of nature and in fact the very existence of the earth is on the way to extinction. Entropy has set in.
Very little attention is being given to this disorder in the brain itself, as all attention is focused on the externals and very little to any inward movement in order to understand the movement of the mind, and to such crucial question as "who am I?". This psychological disease is not being addressed as to what causes this crisis of fragmentation of modern humankind. All solutions are directed to the external conditions, misleadingly labelled as "progress", "development" and so on, sans human face, and focused within the concept of linear time. Critically these concepts have been reduced to technological and commercial (consumerism) "growth" as indicators. This overemphasis is at the expense of even Nature, which is at the receiving end of all man-made disasters. Man is the only species that kills its own kind which no other species has done so far, and that too by killing millions, and is using warfare as a means to make profit. Most of all it is being used in the outdated concept of nations or nationalism, controlled by the industrial-military complex run by the corporates under the garb of political governance. All these enterprises and concepts continue to dominate modern civilizations with their outdated and outmoded notions, to repeat within linear time and binarydivisions in opposition rather than living in cooperation.
In short, in the context of the brain which is in disorder since the left analytical brain hemisphere dominates. This is at the expense of the right hemisphere which has the intuitive brain that sees the world holistically and is the domain of love, beauty, compassion, sharing and caring via experientially, having an insight. This creative domain produces painting, music, poetry, non-verbal manifestation, oral history and such manifestations, storytelling and narratives wherein they are a participatory community and a participatory universe as well.
In the absence of coordination and cooperation between two spheres say the metaphor of Yin and Yang or Siva and Parvati, etc.-that all destructive movement is happening and it is obvious in climate change expressing itself in all the violence that we see all around. This had its beginning psychologically. Clearly, in this disorder there are no signs of even any moral indigination as integrity and authenticity are absent, which are the core features a human being. That is why all relationships are transactional in nature, there is no faith or trust any longer.
In other words, the crisis is a psychological disorder, and as Gandhiji had summed it up: "There is enough for one's need but not enough for one's greed."
These crucial issues, which were seriously addressed in the earlier edition, are still valid today, provided one cares to read the book seriously. The earlier diagrams have been elaborated and described afresh in the text and hopefully will help the reader in understanding the main emphasis of the book.
I am grateful to Shri Susheel Mittal of D.K. Printworld who has taken a bold decision to bring out this new edition.
Evolutionary Perspectives
THE cosmos, as one knows, is a system which comprises thousands of millions of galaxies, each galaxy in turn being made up of thousands of millions of stars and their satellites in different evolutionary stages. The light which one sees raying from these stars and galaxies is often fossil light or light of those celestial bodies that may no longer exist. Towards the outer rim of one of these galaxies - the Milky Way is a star of only medium size, and of moderate temperature, already yellowing into old age, the sun. One of the several cosmic fragments circling the sun is our planet earth, and living on its very thin crust are we, and our fellow companions -the animals and plants. The earth's core is simmering with intense heat. In other words life is so precarious that even a slight fractional change in temperature, or in the gravitational field, etc. will snuff it out at once.
The earth is at least ten thousand million years old, while the earliest forms of life appeared some three thousand million years ago, though today we can only reconstruct one-third of this evolution. Both organic and inorganic evolutions indicate similar developmental processes, of which the themes of diversity and unity are characteristic. Diversity is very obviously exemplified by the two million or more different varieties of organisms that are living today and the many more that existed in the past. But the basic unity of fundamental life process from viruses to man-is not as obvious, since it is expressed by such processes as autosynthesis, reproduction and adaptation. Moreover, one of the achievements of twentieth-century science has been to show that living systems are the consequences of an extremely complex organization of non-living material which continues to operate in accordance with the same physio-chemical principles in organic material. For example, the composition of genetic material is a good illustration of this coordination of physio-chemical processes that control living organisms; it is the infinitesimal biochemical structural features which control organic life. Thus, today, we know that man, life and the earth are part and parcel of the same systems of energy and matter which are spread out sparsely in the vast universe, in the form of planets, stars and galaxies that travel around like excited molecules and atoms in many ways reflecting the microcosm.
In the long history of the earth, man just appeared about a little over a million years ago, he of course belongs to a group of mammals known as the Primates and in which are included monkeys and apes. The direction of human evolution has exhibited the same pattern of divergent evolution and extinction which holds true for other animals. But the commonness is not merely in terms of biology, since such aspects as sociability, hierarchy and territoriality also exist in non-human primates; features of social groupings which until recently were thought to belong exclusively to man. Nevertheless, man is not merely a biological creature. The shift from the earliest ape-man, at least 2-3 million years ago, to modern man, in the short period of a million years amply testifies to the selective advantages gained because of trends in the area of culture (Washburn 1961).
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