The Narrow-Minded People, Dinosaurs of Human Evolution

After a time of silence, during which I happened to read quite a few blogs that were forcefully (and rightly) denouncing all the injustices and unnecessary cruelties born of the many prejudices still existing in our societies, I want to openly join them in accusing the simple root-cause of all those terrible remaining human problems: narrow-mindedness.

The important point to realize about this narrow-mindedness, though, is that it used to be a normal thing among human beings, a limitation we were unaware of because it was shared by practically all of us everywhere – hence all the constant quarrels and fights and wars about everything since ever, that before seemed quite natural to everybody, because of the very way we human beings were built, with a mind as our main tool for our existence and our understanding of things.

It is the Mind Power in itself which tends to function in that narrow manner, seeing only the differences and all that potentially opposes or divides. As a Universal Power whose role is to give the capacity to distinguish and differentiate everything and put everything in neat order, in our heads too the Mind keeps trying to put everything – including human beings – into categories, classes and boxes of all possible kinds, so that our world may seem to be as much ‘in order’ as we can make it look reassuringly to be.  

That would be all right if that dividing tendency was counter-balanced in us by a capacity also to see wide and large, to perceive wholeness and wholes instead of just the scattered parts, the full organisms instead of just the separate organs, the full picture instead of just the opposing points of view.
Alas, in all our evolutive history until now that capacity of vaster view, and the wisdom and universal love it brings with it, haven’t been there yet among us humans, except in very rare individuals… who, because they were too different, most often ended up put to death by the angry crowd of the others.

But let’s not despair: this situation is changing!…
Spreading more and more, freeing more and more human beings from that terrible narrowness of perception that is in-built, so to say, with the ordinary Mental Power, a new step in terrestrial evolution is now taking place, with the growing influence upon earth of a higher Power beyond the Mental one: a ‘Supra-mental’ Power which is gradually giving us this much needed capacity of vaster and truer perception, that we then find more and more natural now as a species.

Hence the increasing feeling of absurd anachronism many of us have when we look at the still existing wars and social injustices all around us, that we don’t understand how some other people still deliberately perpetrate them, and often with no sense of guilt whatsoever. How is that possible, we wonder?…

The problem is that some of us humans have compounded the already bad enough old ‘normal’ narrow-mindedness, with some religious beliefs that were extremely judgmental and dogmatic about what is right and what is wrong, supposedly as decreed by ‘God’ Himself. The resulting total self-righteousness is what gives to those people in the ‘Bible Belt’, for example, and to others of other obedience elsewhere, their so dangerous illusion of being not only in their right, but also in the Absolute Truth, with all the prejudices they have and proudly profess about others in the name of God, Allah or whatever their name is for That.
They don’t realize yet at all that they are rapidly becoming the dinosaurs of human evolution, an increasingly antiquated part of our species – which would be okay for the others, if that part of humanity weren’t still trying to keep its power on everyone else.

Of course they cannot really succeed – who can stop evolution?… – but they definitely can build, even in a generally progressive country like the USA, many dams ‘holding back’, as one blogger said so correctly, ‘the progress of our wonderful species’.
In all other countries as well, there is a similar struggle between those who are open and indeed changing, thanks to the influence of that new, vaster and truer, ‘Supramental’ way of perceiving things, and those who blindly and desperately try to keep our world as it used to be when we were all like them (yes, let’s remember we all have been like them, earlier in this lifetime, or in a forgotten previous one… so let’s not judge them!)

As soon as anyone’s heart/soul is awakened and becomes our inner guide, the feeling of unity with all grows very strong, and whatever some old scriptures may say, all the present horrible situations are seen for what they are: terrible injustices, that one would like to correct at once. But those with still a closed heart and sleeping soul have a hard and narrow mind still too, they cannot yet see or receive the vaster Truth shining above them and trying to widen the limits of their understanding. We can hope and pray for them that it will happen to them too some day, but in the meantime we cannot allow them to imprison their whole society in the concepts, structures and laws that everybody else has overgrown.

Just as I am writing this (July 24th, 2011), the world is still under the shock of the Oslo shootings in Norway: a fanatic who believes himself to be a Christian and prides himself on that name killed nearly ninety people in cold blood for the sake of his faith, in his eyes attacked by the Muslim faith. This is the chilling kind of events, of mounting absurdity and horror, that we are now faced with. The wild insanity of such individual or group actions reveals the incapacity of their authors to cope with the changes urgently required from them by the evolving humanity around them.

All fanatics of any creed (including Materialism, the present scientific creed) are actually crippled in their mind, the first victims of their own mental inability to evolve beyond the wrong beliefs they have imprisoned themselves in at some point. Humankind as a whole goes forward, more and more aware of its own Oneness, enriched by the immense diversity the narrow-minded find so threatening and try their best to eliminate as dangerous.
The only real danger is this very Exclusivism, this fatal narrowness of the mind, that makes each religion claim to be the only true one, each creed claim to be the unique and absolute Truth.

The only real Truth is the one vast enough to include every aspect of the Totality, every piece of the complete Puzzle, that the Truth actually is. When the Exclusivism is at last gone from all of us, we can finally all co-exist in peace as a first all-important step, and later in the joy of our conscious complementarity and mutual appreciation within our many-hued Oneness.

So, although in this blog I will not often voice my deep agreement with those everywhere who fight for the Human Rights of all, and for a Peace based on that true Equality, I want it to be clear that:
1/ my very presence in a place like Auroville is my way of joining that fight in every instant of my daily life, in this challenging Indian context so representative of all the problems humanity is facing; and
2/ the Conscious Evolution this blog is about, is the most efficient way each of us as an individual anywhere can really help eradicate this dreadful narrow-mindedness, not only in themselves (it lingers for long in unexpected ways), but gradually also perhaps even in those who have unwittingly become the human dinosaurs of our time, but remain essentially free souls, for whom sudden progress is always possible…