America in the Crucible of Restructuring – Part II

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In the August 1992 issue of VISHAAL, I drew our readers’ attention to the intriguing emergence of a third element in the up-coming presidential elections. To summarise the point I made then, America is simply responding to the great shift in a subtle dimension which brought the binary creation to an end and established in its place the unitary system. This meant that as of 1983-4, a process was set in motion which would result in a new world order.

This is a phrase easily bandied about these days by politicians, diplomats, policy makers in various fields and of various hues. But none really appreciate the import or the responsibility which comes with that statement of fact. For indeed we, as a global society, are feeling the effects of this new world order. In this initial stage these effects are, on the whole, negative. But they are negative simply because the human being is lagging behind in the process. Instead of rising to the occasion, expanding one’s consciousness and cooperating with the movement, we find a reaction setting in, a closing up rather than the desired expansion of consciousness. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the United States of America and centred on the presidential campaign now in its last leg.

The third element is once again affecting the contest. This independent candidate has added an unusual, unpredictable ingredient to the affair with perhaps far-reaching consequences which may not be immediately evident. Indeed, the election falling on 3.11.1992, a day of 8 number-power, indicates that there will be something inconclusive about the affair. But for our study what is more significant to note is that this three-cornered contest, unlike any other in the history of that nation, is simply America’s response to the ‘new world order’, or the shift from a binary to a unitary system. The nation is being forced to exceed its habitual pattern and make a quantum leap into the new and the unknown. However, this is not easily appreciated, and the result is that irrelevant issues are displacing real issues.

What I will now state I realise is going against all political analyses regarding the American campaign. In my view the REAL issue and the one which should be central to the campaign is precisely that new order. Instead we find the American people unconcerned, oblivious even of the totally new world ‘out there’, beyond its borders.

For the truth is, America’s internal economic difficulties are entirely due to that great shift which affected and continues to affect the whole world. One of the key features of this shift is, of course, the collapse of the opposite end of the pole upon which the binary system found its incomplete and unhealthy balance – i.e., the USSR. The result of the end of the cold war has been a dramatic reorganisation of America’s economy and the attempted shift to an economy not based on the manufacture of armaments, with all its innumerable ramifications throughout the system. Indeed, the economies which were not founded on the arms race are certainly in better condition than the American for the present.

A weapons-based economy does not lay centred on the actual production of weapons, war planes, missiles, and so forth. It is widespread. Countless smaller industries rely on contracts sometimes very indirectly connected to the weapons industry and which might seem far removed from the manufacture of those weapons. In many cases, the producers of nuts and bolts and whatnot, may not even be aware of the actual part they play in that larger industry. The producer feels the squeeze only when, like now, the economy which was formerly bolstered by the manufacture for itself and sale of weapons to others begins responding to a shift on the world stage. Science and technology are also affected by the shift.

Thus, America’s woes are in large part due to that new world order which she herself helped to introduce. Yet the American people and their representatives in Government are being encouraged to view their internal plight as something somehow disconnected from that new order and from which they can detach themselves and concentrate on ‘the real issues’, – i.e., their collapsing economy. The result will be an even more rapid collapse, unless a leader emerges who can rise to the occasion and deal with America’s internal economics in the context of that larger new order. Failing to do so will create tremendous impediments for the new order, with the result that old patterns and policies will be resorted to. Even, it is easy to predict, there will be an artificial situation sought to be created whereby those old patterns can be ‘legitimately’ restored. In such a scenario, America will have to create a binary partner and attempt to impose the old order so that she may feel comfortable with the known and tested system of the past. The manufacture of weapons on an even larger scale can then readily serve as the main prop of the economy, as it had done in the past. The American people will have their jobs restored and revel in the joys of the tested consumerist society which is the hallmark of that nation’s economy. In other words, if America does not move boldly forward and meet the future with a new vision, she will lead the world into a regression (not recession) by the turn of the millennium. This means a radical reversal of the process of establishing a unitary and global world outlook, the basis of the new world order.

Due to the intrusion of the third candidate, the presidential campaign, we are informed, is now to be centred on ‘real issues’. I consider that those real issues are fictitious unless they are seen as part and parcel and inextricably linked to the larger world order and the dramatic end of the binary system with all its inevitable ramifications.

The leader of nations in the new millennium is going to be that nation which can and will base its actions and policies on the principle of unity. This means that the nation which as a whole, leaders and populace, can see itself always at the centre and inextricably connected to the periphery, and steadying itself on this higher and broader vision. That is, it has a vision of the whole, the parts, the centre and the periphery always. And ALL policies evolve from that superior perception and perspective.

America is struggling to come to terms with a responsibility placed on her shoulders which she cannot sustain alone. She is meant and destined to be aided by India – the nation which is that Capricorn centre. This, it must be stressed, is not a new version of the old binary structure. It is a unitary system, spheric  in essence, bearing a ‘centre that holds’. For that ‘centre’ America serves as a bridge to the periphery, a leader indeed in that larger body but dependent upon the Centre to provide that global consciousness and vision.

Born under the zodiacal sign Cancer, America will always respond under pressure with an isolationist attitude: the Crab which, when faced with danger, closes itself within its shell. Similarly, this sign easily succumbs to the temptation of comforts and material security. It has great difficulty in ‘sacrificing for a greater cause’. True it does often rise to the occasion at crucial times, but this is explained by the Cancer episode in The Magical Carousel, Chapter 4. In ‘Cancerland’ the Queen of Night is easily moved to compassion and sincere concern. She wants to nurture and care for all those whom she feels are in need. There is indeed a motherly quality to the sign/nation, but it is limited in its scope; for which reason it is often submerged in a sea of sentimentality. It nurtures by covering with comforting veils – more and more soothing veils rather than their removal, or the crutches which such motherly comforts may provide.

India, on the other hand, is ruled by Cancer’s opposite sign, Capricorn. It is equally a sign of the Mother. But in The Magical Carousel’s Capricorn chapter (10), we find that same Mother portrayed as the Universal Shakti, not offering any comfort at all but rather the extreme difficulties of an initiation whose aim is precisely the removal of all props and illusions and ‘veils’ until the subject stands utterly alone before the truth of his or her inner being and faces Time and Destiny in that bare and unencumbered condition. Having successfully achieved this state, the initiate may then rise to the summit of the mountain and the coveted vision of Omanisol, the Universal Mother, who presides over the whole evolution from her position above it all, yet one with the All.

America cannot be relied upon nor expected to play the role of the Universal Power. But she can fulfil her destiny serving as the material bridge by which the vision ‘from the mountaintop’ can be transposed onto the world scene. However, if America continues to close out the tremendous relevance of the changed world scene and its impact on internal conditions, she will not be fulfilling her destiny but rather taking recourse in the now outdated attitude of closing herself within the boundaries of her Cancer shell.

This will no longer suffice. World conditions will force America out of that shell. But the simple fact that this most important presidential campaign has thrown up the old response causes us to wonder what lies before the world. It certainly boggles the mind to observe how the man under whose tenure the principles for which America had been struggling for decades have triumphed – free-market economy and democracy versus the Soviet model of socialism and communism – can have become so unpopular with the American people in a matter of months after this unprecedented development. The entire world stage has flip-flopped during his presidency. And yet these spectacular gains of a most definitive nature, seem to have no impact at all on the present campaign. Rather, they seem to be calling upon the incumbent president the wrath of the people and the accusation that he was too concerned with foreign policy and not enough with domestic issues, – ergo, their livelihood and well-being, for and within themselves. This, it has to be noted, is an attitude which by itself suggests that America cannot be expected to be the leader in the new times to come. She must follow, and she must follow that nation and her people who have been prepared throughout the millennia for the difficult, demanding and self-sacrificing labour of transcending the personal (Cancer) in favour of the universal and global (Capricorn).

The actual third candidate reveals himself to be an ideal instrument for the task allotted to him within the framework of this cosmic vision. He seeks to focus the campaign on the real issues, this is true; but there is something far more significant in his participation. He draws the campaign away from the personal, so much a characteristic of America’s ruling sign, Cancer. His intervention forces a more impersonal approach, without a focus on certain petty and irrelevant considerations regarding the personality and personal lives of the candidates.

But of far more importance, this third element is ideally suited to forcing an expansion by focussing on the inadequacies of the system. Indeed, the USA is struggling to overcome the binary imprint she has been obliged to follow for almost two centuries. The third candidate is constantly emphasising the immediate need for a reform of the system which he feels can no longer ‘deliver the goods’.

This is entirely true insofar as the collapse in cosmic terms of the binary structure has resulted in this unexpected (though predictable) desire for a system which will allow it to handle adequately the needs both of the American people and their obligations on the world scene.

In this sense, the real issue is indeed the system. But seen from a cosmic perspective, it is a struggle to experience an expansion and subsequent adjustment within a new system which responds to a triadic play of forces and no longer the binary. This indeed is the task of the third force in any comparable situation. The third candidate in this campaign offers the student of the new cosmology an excellent example of the quality of that force and its role in the enhanced harmony being established in the world.

To be honest, the problem does not lie with America, for indeed the reaction of her people was predictable and truthful. The problem centres on India. There is no superior vision gaining effective ground, no attempt even to come to terms with a higher destiny for the nation. India, I repeat here as I have stated elsewhere, is caught in the periphery. She has been dislodged from the centre which is occupied by the Usurper and the nothingness of the Void. And while India continues to occupy a position which is not hers by destiny, America cannot be expected to fulfil a role for which she has not, by destiny, been prepared.

I am writing these lines as Kuwait goes to the polls, the country which was the focus of the Third’s War, commonly known as the Gulf War. There is much criticism within America and throughout the world of the role of the western democracies in that conflagration. But again people fail to recall conditions in the Middle East before that war, or the impact the fall of the binary system had upon the forces in that arena. There was an almost complete realignment, the result of which has been that for the first time leaders of almost all the Middle-Eastern nations have been periodically gathering for talks to achieve some sort of peace settlement. Whether or not they will be successful is not entirely the issue. For the point is that prior to the Third’s War such meetings were unthinkable. The shape that conflagration took was the result of the collapse of the binary system (see VISHAAL, 5/6, February 1991). In my opinion, the fact that the American people, and the whole world by and large, can overlook these irrefutable gains and cast them off as meaningless in face of the ‘real issues’ of one’s daily bread and butter, however painful their lack may be, is an indication of how small the average consciousness of the human being is and how unwilling and incapable the human species on the whole is in coping with ‘a higher cause’.

Nonetheless, Cosmos and Time continue to bear witness to this ‘higher cause’ and controlling power. Today, as Kuwait elects its parliament and brings a certain phase to an end regarding that most important turning point in world history, and opens a new chapter, we note that the date is 5.10(=6). 1992 (=3) – or the numbers of the Third Power: 5.1.3 (=9). It is also the Navami of the Durga Puja, the Navaratri or the Festival of Nine Nights. The Navami is the 9th night when the Asura is slain by the Goddess. This year the harmony of the festival’s timing is especially important in that its culmination falls on October 5th, which is an exact 9 months from 5th January, the most important date in the scheme of India’s higher destiny. It is significant that this happened to be the date chosen for the Kuwati poll.

The introduction of the new, or a true change, is always the contribution of a third force. Without it there can be no renovation or expansion. In the new cosmology, this is made abundantly clear through the Gnostic Circle, the diagram describing the system’s cosmic foundation. Three powers contribute to its harmony and compelling force for change. For example, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s work, bereft of that third element, would have remained deadlocked and imprisoned within the old boundaries. The truly new conditions emerged at the third stage and became the foundations for the NEW WAY. Similarly, the American political system is now seeking to be released from the binary two-party deadlock by a third candidate because, after the new alignment and the unitary new world order, a third can now surface with the power to introduce that change. No independent candidate prior to this cosmic shift had made a similar impact on the American system.

Truly, there is nothing like a Third to make life interesting!

 

P.N.-B

 

5 October 1992
Aeon Centre of Cosmology

at Skambha

 

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