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.On the other hand, what Buddha and Christ brought to mankind was — stated in two different ways to fit two different types of racial-cultural mentalities — the vision of a humanity freed from earth-bondage and from the classifications required for the proper functioning of a largescale Administrative Order; freed also from vitalistic urges, sexual compulsions, and the drive for man-made comfort and sense-intoxicating abundance.Buddha taught the conquest of Nature and of the vital forces driving man to an ever-repeated round of desire, frustration, pain and more desire — a conquest through mental processes of unrelenting awareness.Jesus' method was that of total surrender to the will of God through the intensification of the basic feelings of love, trust and faith.The Hindu Krishna — a great statesman — had also taught a complete surrender of the human will to the Divine Will; but his teachings were focused apparently on action.Buddha stressed the transformation of the mind, and Jesus that of the feelings, the most powerful of these being "love".According to the Hindu chronology — which, of course, Western Orientalists do not accept, basing themselves probably on false or superficial concepts — 25 centuries separate Krishna from Buddha, and 25 centuries more bring us to the turn of this century, the key-note of which someday may be seen to be "activism".And we find today a great Hindu personage, Sri Aurobindo, stressing the need for a total transformation of human nature, even at the level of the physical body — i.e.the transfiguration of matter, and (at a collective all-human level) of society as a whole.But Sri Aurobindo, in a sense, combines the mental approach of Gautama the Buddha and the feeling approach of Jesus, as a foundation for the total transformation to be achieved through a synthesis of all the principal types of yoga devotional, mental and actional.It was in the Bhagavat Gita the teachings of Krishna to his disciple Arjuna on the battlefield where the fate of India was to be decided — that Sri Aurobindo found his central inspiration; and his influence is now spreading widely from the Pondicherry ashram where he lived for over 40 years, and, sooner or later, from the new nearby city, Auroville, in which a community of 50,000 persons devoted to the building of a future humanity is expected to live and work.The great thinkers, prophets and illumined sages of the sixth century BC began to build the foundation — i.e.to sow the seed — for a new humanity by breaking down man's attachment to local conditions (geographical and tribal-racial-cultural).They were the prophets of a universalistic order of existence — beyond boundaries and socio-political categories.But they could only address themselves to "individuals," to men able, ready and willing to take a crucial step of self-liberation and self-actualization as individuals — individuals grouping themselves, in many instances, in monastic communities on the fringe of the prevalent social order, or (as we would say today) of the "Establishment." Buddhist monasteries and wider communities were formed in Asia; Pythagoras started his famous and ill-fated community of disciples in Krotona, in a Greek colony of Southern Italy.Whatever the forms this sixth century BC evolutionary movement took outwardly, the basic fact is that it began a definite new "mutation" in the planetary Mind of humanity-as-a-whole.It built up, we might say, in seed this one Mind of planetary Man.Alas, negative trends operated soon everywhere.In India, Buddhism dried up into a kind of spiritual selfishness — a seeking for "liberation" in complete isolation from the rest of mankind — or became perverted because the lower castes had flocked to its ranks.In Greece, an extreme individualism bordering on anarchy and intellectualism for its own sake emptied the new mind of its real significance.The Greek states fought each other into subservience to Macedonian totalitarianism and to the emerging power of Rome.Rome was needed to unite the crumbling Mediterranean cultures into a vast heterogeneous empire, which brought to a material and administrative focus the spiritual ideal of the great Sages of the sixth century BC It was, alas, a way of integration vitiated in its very foundations by an extraordinary sense of cultural-social pride and by the wholesale enslavement of conquered people
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