RISING AND FALLING

I'm reading Glimpses of World History, by Jawaharlal Nehru, written in the early 1930s when he was in prison for agitating for India's independence from the United Kingdom. In 1947 he became India's first Prime Minister. The book consists of letters to his teenage daughter, Indira, who later also became Prime Minister, as Indira Gandhi.

Early in the book Nehru emphasizes that throughout human history many great civilizations have risen and fallen. He recalls the Median, the Babylonian, the Persian, the Greek, and Roman, as well as the ancient great empires and societies of China and India, and others. Great civilizations and empires seem inevitably to collapse for two main reasons.

First, citizens of dominant societies grow soft, lazy and unwilling to make personal sacrifices for the common good, at which point another set of people hungry for various combinations of plunder, fame and power replace them. A second cause for collapsing civilizations is the universal fact that "It's easier to destroy than to build." Throughout history much less developed but more violent and aggressive groups have replaced larger and more advanced ones for this reason.

Why should reality be structured so that not only great civilizations and empires inevitably fall, but also humanity's main belief systems and manners of behaving, and all the Earth's ecosystems, and us individual living things as well... all eventually being replaced, the replacement process often accompanied by all kinds of hurt?

The only answer I can think of is, that the Universal Creative Impulse is obsessed with evolving things, and evolution is by definition one thing replacing another -- things "rising" and things "falling." And of course lots of things that have risen don't want to be replaced, so plenty of violence and hurt feelings are part of the equation.

Thinking like this, if only to keep from getting depressed, it's good to remember that we humans can manage our minds and feelings in ways that -- as long as there's clean air, water, nourishing food and adequate shelter -- we can be happy, even joyous, though we wear rags and be outcasts.

Along with the Creator's passion for evolution, there seems to be another passion for spawning mentalities able to transcend the realities of the physical Universe. Throughout human history there have been mystics and prophets who radiated peace and joy no matter what misfortunes their bodies endured. Mystics and prophets become who they are by using their minds in a certain way.

Exploring, discovering, and managing our own minds is possible for all of us. Certain gurus can teach us techniques for doing it, but in my experience the forests and fields are the best gurus. Intimacy with Nature is the main path by which the human spirit can rise above the disharmony and misery attending a Universe of inescapable, unending cycles of all kinds of rising and falling.

Nature teaches without words, but you must be receptive, and not be hurting or being distracted. Silently you experience, you feel, you know, and then you are happy.

Simple as that, even in a world busy with risings and fallings.