What do we call “the Golden Era”? How can we imagine this term? We can hope that this should be an entire era of peace, abundance and happiness for all the inhabitants of the Earth. An era of harmony, as for the entire planetary life, as for each and every living being.

We are used to the lines of division between the “more fortunate” and the “less fortunate” people, countries and entire continents, such as Africa, for example. Until recently, some of us earnestly thought that it was possible to separate ourselves from the hardships of the world and live a lucky life in a “lucky” country, periodically giving out a donation for the charity and being sure that everything would continue this way.

The situation has changed. The economic crisis, the threat of war and terrorism and especially the looming environmental crisis liberated us from this illusion. It appears that we are connected more than we thought before. We will either together survive, or alternatively we can destroy our planet and perish all together like the Atlanteans did millennia before us.

 If we understand that all of us on the Earth are connected and interdependent, then shouldn’t we try to, before condemning someone – a person, a nation, religion or country – to look from their point, to “wear their shoes”? As we understand, this would be the way to elimination of conflicts and wars.

 Is the “Golden Era” possible at all and where is the way? What should we do – what should we harmonize to appear eventually in the condition of harmony?

Possibly, we can find the leading thread in The Secret Doctrine by H.Blavatsky , in the diagram on p.300 of v.2. This diagram shows us the downward (Involution, materialization) and ascending (Evolution, reversion to Spirituality) cycles of the development of seven Root Races in the fourth Round of the Globe of Earth, in which we are now progressing.

H.Blavatsky writes: “…in the second half of the First Spiritual ethero-astral race – nascent mankind was devoid of the intellectual brain element. As it was on its descending line, and as we are parallel to it, on the ascending, we are, therefore, devoid of the Spiritual element, which is now replaced by the intellectual”. In fact, we can say that brain is the form, the material “device”, through which our human consciousness is working. It is like a wire necessary for electricity to flow. But the wire is not electricity by itself. And so is our brain – a condition for consciousness to be able of expressing itself, but not the consciousness.

Humanity obviously needed to develop its intellectual brain element to be able to make choices, to act and to analyze the consequences of its actions. And we see the results of the development of human intellect everywhere: in the scientific discoveries, technical inventions, in the technology and especially information technology, without which we cannot already imagine ourselves.

We are aware of the intellectual progress of humanity and count on it to the extent where the spiritual, moral, conscientious aspect seems to us to be secondary and in many cases not important at all. According to H.Blavatsky, even in her time, we have already “crossed the meridian point of the perfect adjustment of Spirit and Matter – or that equilibrium between brain intellect and Spiritual perception”.  

What does that actually mean? Let us try to have a look at our civilization from the perspective of what is defining the direction of its movement and governing the actions of its people.

The first societies on our planet that we are able to observe (the Australian Aborigines an example) were much more homogeneous than the later ones, and the spiritual aspects of life were playing the leading role in their life. Then, in all the later types of societies, we can clearly see the division: there were free citizens and slaves, knights and serfs, nobles and commoners, dictators and the people who had to obey their orders. And through all the types of societies, the social role of spirituality gradually declined, giving up its place to intellectual calculations for advantage.   

By stages, from one type of society to another, we came to the profit and productivity oriented one, where the state of economics defines our understanding of ourselves, and the market mechanism is the main global governing and balancing force.

Though in many aspects a better and more freedom oriented, this type of society is also dualistic. Where there are rich people or even countries there have to be poor ones, and further on: winners and losers, manipulators and manipulated, bathing in luxury and hungry, starting wars and suffering from war, etc. And the multitude of struggling to survive, abused and desperate people in the world – this is obviously not the society of the Golden Era.  So, what is wrong with the modern type of society and what can we do to improve it?

The market mechanism, even when it is working well, is balancing only that part of life which can be counted in terms of money. And the seemingly most important goal of indefinite “growth” doesn’t pursue any harmony of development. Where the broader picture of life appears there it creates contradictions and dilemmas. For example, what should we do: consume as much as we only can to support economy or, the other way around, reduce consumption to a sustainable level to preserve the environment?

The market mechanism doesn’t take into account any spiritual values though, as it appeared, they were very much the causes at the core of the world financial crisis. We are now hearing such words as “greed” and “lack of trust” from the state leaders and leading economists, who try to explain how and why the crisis happened. Many of them are now calling to “unity” in the face of the crises that threaten us all, be it financial, environmental or the danger of world war.

 In such a way, we see how the warning by H.Blavatsky about the misbalance of spirituality and brain intellect turns out for us at the start of the third millennium. And we have to understand that no way can we rely only on the technical and intellectual progress and deny our spiritual development.

Our brain intellect is a tool, an instrument for our free will. Where we are neglecting the spiritual aspects of life, such as harmony, conscience, compassion and brotherhood, there we are tempted to misuse our free will and misbalance everything in our power.

We see now that the governing in our civilization market mechanism is faltering. It used to work well at its earlier stages, when it was able to provide freedom of self-expression and therefore progress. People in common could exercise their free will, but they had no means or power for breaching the natural (cosmic) laws to the extent where it could lead to the extermination of life on our planet.

In our book The Laws of Life, we spoke about the similarities in the destinies of ancient civilizations: how material success and the gained power make the people of a civilization proud of their achievements and careless in application of their free will. Then they identify themselves with their successful material life, morally degrade, and destroy their civilization in this or another way. The healthy, spiritual, elements of the civilization survive and make start to a new civilization.

Doesn’t it resemble the current situation? Our civilization has accumulated immense powers in scientific knowledge, technologies, weapons, and organizational structures. And all this power is in the hands of the people who gained access to its application. What will they do with this power? In the market ideology, they will try to make profit for themselves and not care about other consequences of their actions. What will follow for the Earth and its people, if the harmony of the cosmic laws is seriously undermined?  If the Illusion of modern life supported with all the collected power and not balanced with love and wisdom, becomes unsustainable?

In The Secret  Doctrine, when speaking about the future of humanity, H.Blavatsky pronounces the word “ Kalagni”. “Kal” in Sanscrit means “Tomorrow”, and “Agni” – “Fire”. It can be the outward fire of destruction, if we become so selfish and proud, that we don’t stop exercising our free will without any attention to the possible consequences of our actions. And it can be the inner fire of our spirit, which will allow us to really build the Golden Era for humanity.

We have to understand that everything starts from the state of consciousness. We are living now in the condition of Involution, i.e. materialization. No matter how poor or wealthy we are, our attention is chained to our material condition, which we aim to improve. It is working almost automatically when we make our choices where to put our resources of time and energy. At the end, everything comes to the accepted equivalent of power - money, which we wish to gain more and spend less.

In such condition, with our materialistically aimed thought vibrations, we become magnets attracting money, some of us more and some less powerful magnets. These who pull stronger, eventually accumulate the money of those who are either weaker or not that interested in gaining. This is the common mechanism of Involution, materialization. The Vishnu Puranas predicted that this condition of human consciousness would for some time prevail and lead to countless wars and catastrophes. Is there any way out of Involution?

The circular-spiral way of life presupposes such changes and in time Involution will be inevitably replaced by Evolution. Consciousness will change its mode from the involutionary to the evolutionary, where material goals become replaced by spiritual ones. Looks as a fairy tale, but don’t we have any examples of evolutionary thinking now and before?

We know that Gautama Buddha left his kingdom for a life of a wanderer and practiced what he preached – renunciation of desires. Jesus Christ once said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the needle eye than for a reach man to reach for the kingdom of heaven. With his enormous powers, he was ready to rather suffer humiliation and physical pain than free himself through these powers’ use. And more recently, two Russian giants of intelligence and conscience, Leo Tolstoy and Helena Blavatsky, have submitted their comfortable noblemen lifestyles to work in the spiritual hierarchy and assist the spiritual progress of the people of humanity. With their spiritual ascent, they practically showed us the way to becoming a Boddhisattwa.  

These are the great examples of people who were naturally predisposed to the evolutionary mode of behavior thanks to their advanced state of consciousness, but we also know countless examples of such unselfish behavior when seemingly ordinary people just do what they understand as their duty of conscience. People volunteer to care for the orphans and disabled. Others go and aid the locals in the ravaged by war and famine places of Asia and Africa. They save lives of other people sometimes at the expense of their own health and even life.

People give up their possessions for their spiritual goals when they feel that this is that what they ought to do. And it is not about just serving at a church or aid agency. Any position can be used for service or misused for the purpose of self-gratification. This is about the type of consciousness and mode of behavior of an individual. This is about our everyday choices. We saw countless examples of such selfless and sacrificial behavior in the recent Victoria bushfires.

In many cases, it was an example of real cooperation in real situation – the moment of truth. For a moment, money lost its hold over people, and everyone just tried to do whatever they could. People understood that they depend on each other, and they cannot succeed, even survive without each other. This happened before, and happens now.

If we are inclined to assist others, we are usually receptive to their call for help, if even this call is not loud and not targeted on us directly. We establish our connection with the recipient and start helping. Very often, we experience resistance, either from outside or from within. It is because through this connection, the hierarchies of Light and of Shadow can interact. We become their representative and instrument, depending on our choices.

We become fighters “on the battlefield of Kurukshetra”, as in the Bhagavad Gita. In fact, we are fighting our own shortcomings. Discrimination is the main “weapon” “on the battlefield of Kurukshetra”. The responsible and conscious way of dealing with such a situation requires us to discriminate – when helping is right and when it is wrong and may spoil, i.e. harm, the recipient of our help; when we don’t want to help because of our greed or fear, and when we just allow others to exploit us because we are too lazy to think about our real responsibilities.

Sacrifice is another important instrument on the way of Evolution. Does this mean that with our evolutionary mood we are doomed to poverty and loneliness?

When everyone cares about everyone, poverty and loneliness disappear.  It will happen eventually. But, on the way to the Golden Era, there may be losses, and not only material ones. There may be misunderstanding of some friends and relatives. There may be suffering and pain, especially at the start where we are not used yet to our new state of mind and are constantly looking at the world like through a holographic picture: sometimes we see it from the materialistic point of view and sometimes from the spiritual one.

Living with involutionary, materialistic inclination, we are always attempting to secure our possessions and future welfare, and we remain anxious about how everything would turn out in the future. We invest in different funds and insurance companies, and use our thought energy mostly for the purpose of maximizing our future profits because we see in them the only base for our security.

Quite the contrary, when we change our attitudes towards our spiritual goals, we move our foundation towards the world of spirit. As in the Gospels: “Don’t store your treasures on the Earth, store them in the Heaven”. It seems unreliable, but if we dare to do this, only then we can notice the assistance of the spiritual hierarchy, of the Brotherhood of Light. This assistance usually comes to us at the last moment, when we have exhausted all of our own resources. It comes sometimes in a completely unexpected way, but always in a way which provides us with the opportunity, on the one hand, to fulfill our spiritual purpose, and on the other hand, to do our outmost for the spiritual ascent.

By the way, we notice that our magnet has changed, and in conformity with the law: “similar attracts similar” it attracted friendship and assistance of people with similar evolutionary tendencies. As Agni Yoga states, in the environment of evolutionary action, “we can see that people are mimicking such behavior, consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly. People start doing the same. Even the enemies, though cursing, are following their way.” (Agni Yoga , 375).
       This type of cooperation has a much stronger base than it would be if we went just for profit, and in such a collective we can completely relay on each other.  

As we understand, the evolutionary minded people and their collectives, with the assistance of the spiritual hierarchy, are tirelessly paving the way to the Golden Era for humanity. They become strong magnets attracting everything most spiritually inclined in their environment. They are also able to raise and educate children who would be naturally predisposed to an unselfish, sharing and caring, evolutionary mode of thinking and acting. Who would be able to essentially change the mass consciousness of their society and turn it into the society of intellectually and spiritually developed people.

With their combined effort (our effort!) the magnet of Evolution will become even stronger, attract more of people, and eventually prevail. Then the evolutionary way of thinking and acting will become the common way of life, and this will lead people to their Golden Era of peace, harmony and happiness for everyone.

A legitimate question arises – When will it be possible, to escape the Kali Yuga and appear in the Golden Era? Maybe, this is just a distant future, separated from our times by millennia?

We don’t know and cannot guess, but have some ideas on this subject. As we have depicted in The Laws of Life, Time is a complex category. It can be squeezed and stretched, and we are constantly changing our personal time with our actions in the same way as we are changing our personal vibrations. So, we can suppose that the Time of our modern civilization is already not the same as the Time, for example, of the Middle Ages. The inventions that have made possible travelling by an airplane and a cosmic rocket and communicating by the internet, have of course squeezed our Time. These inventions were results of creative mind and required sacrifices from their pioneers. Quite the contrary, suppression of the creative mind, greed and self-preservation, and any type of stagnation stretches the Time, as of a person as of a society in common.

So, nobody but we, the people, can answer this question – when? – with our choices and actions. It can be done en masse or personally. Or, as in the book by St. Germain, Earth’s Birth Changes, the Earth can separate into two planets, with different frequencies of vibrations (and different Times) – one of them remaining the same Earth which we know now, and another becoming a spiritually advanced planet with the Golden Era humanity. Technically it is possible, and the inhabitants of both planets will simply cease seeing each other because of their different vibrations frequencies (and confirming Times).

The example is set by the Ascended Masters, who ascended from this our planet and formed their own plane of existence, sometimes called Shambala. In the Agni Yoga, a book dictated to Helena Roerich by the same Master M. that inspired Helena Blavatsky, it is called Brotherhood.

Also in the Agni Yoga, part Supermundane 1, 127, we read, with a reference to the Puranas:

“We are sending you information about the time of the end of Kali Yuga, and many are listening. The Puranas are naming many of the observable details of the conforming world events, but the old records couldn’t point out the main conditions.  They haven’t mentioned the strain of the space currents and the search for the best people around the all-creating energy. Now, these two conditions are coming to light showing us that the end of the Kali Yuga is coming.”

These words have been recorded in the 1930th, around 70 years ago. Who knows, maybe, we are already close to the “window of opportunity” for our civilization, either in the 2012 or not far from it. It is our choice – when do we come out of the Kali Yuga; it is our karma and state of consciousness that defines our vibrations and personal times.

The Brotherhood of the Ascended Masters is encouraging us to follow in their footsteps: “The Brotherhood is no myth, and imitation of its essence will also be a decisive construction” (Agni Yoga, Brotherhood, 434). In these words, They are showing us the real Way to the Golden Era of Brotherhood.

 

 

The above is the text of a lecture presented to the Theosophical Society (Pasadena) in Melbourne, Australia on April 4th, 2009. The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Theosophical Society (Pasadena).

 

    

 

 

 

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