The urge to associate




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Deeply rooted within human nature is the collective striving among those aiming for the same goal, to form associations.

 

 What the will of an individual could never bring about, often becomes reality through the aggregation of many wills; individual conviction gains its own pleasure on meeting the same conviction in others also.

 

 Yet the same object can be viewed from different perspectives, and very different yearned for goals seem to men worth striving for.

 

 Thus it  stands to reason that all sorts of associations come into existence, each one striving for a different goal; a full life can emerge from this diversity if it seeks again to encompass in union the separate bodies: directed towards a goal transcending the particular goals of separate associations.

 

 It is not difficult to find such a goal if it is only sought where the welfare of all teaches us to find what must be achieved ahead of all particular goals; once achieved it will also make secure its achievement.

 

 Just as so much that can be achieved through the association of many remains out of the individual’s reach, so too is there much that remains unfulfilled by every individual association which can be brought to fulfilment by a controlling ‘association of associations’.

 

 Such a gathering is rare, though it should be the rule!

 

Still far too rare are those individuals who have overcome that blind urge of the animal to fall upon the food of their own species even though in doing so they wildly trample all over the nourishment available to them…

 

Still too rare is respect for the opinion of others, – too rare the recognition that those who err can only be helped when they realise their error within themselves. –

 

 Everyone believes that he alone has the best of knowledge; he regards as his enemy anyone else who believes himself to be just as well informed. –

 

This causes dissolution and disintegration where the continuous aggregation of individual opinions alone could promote genuine value. – –

 

 

Often one associates with like-minded people just to hear one’s own individual voice a thousand times over, like an echo; – as one is not so certain of his knowledge as he often thinks and would very soon hear doubts gnawing at his certainty if the choir of the many who seek in an identical way to maintain their self-confidence does not succeed in drowning out those doubts…

 

Every other association is then despised and attacked, since their adherents have thought up a different text to the same ‘melody’ which for them is no less rich in content and well founded.

 

 

Since everyone has his own opinion, which in many ways still differs from that of apparently completely like-minded people, every association disintegrates, unless compulsion keeps it artificially together, into smaller and smaller splinter groups, until in the end the individual is only capable of “associating” with himself.

 

Only through the rule of necessity, from which no sphere of life can escape, is such ultimate disintegration prevented.

 

However, it is unavoidable that the urge to separation causes serious damage within already separated associations by blinding the associated to the extent that they can no longer recognise what association can achieve if it remains true to its given natural foundation which requires integration. – –

 

Whatever the articles of belief binding the associations may say – whatever solutions like-minded people conceive where solutions are urgently needed, – the total value of united action is

always conditional on the vital proof that the chosen means have the power to create permanency.

 

Only the continual testing of preconceived opinion can separate the wheat from the chaff. –

 

Yet this very testing of preconceived opinion becomes impossible where the urge to splinter seeks its own satisfaction in evermore novel theses!

 

And where one should only whisper, one shouts out loud; where one should carefully sift, one heaps rubble onto the vital seeds to be found in all human opinion which has been carefully ploughed by proper thinking!

 

It has been forgotten that all human association only has an inherent right to exist where it seeks to gather together. – –

 

 

If ever true communality is to come about, only the spirit-born sense of gathering together will be able to produce it in true freedom determined by necessity!

 

 In the ancient sacred account the most divine of the men of the earth says:

 

“He that gathers not with me: he scatters!”

 

If ever a word of a man was: the ‘Word of God’, here it has been uttered! – –

 

Not gathering together – not to seek to gather – is in itself already: scattering! –

 

The exalted spirit having influence on earth and comprehensible to man in his soul continually seeks to ‘gather what has been lost’. – If, what others recognise as exalted, because it comes to them so close to experience as does experience of themselves, – , is to your belief, with your limited vision rooted purely in the earthly, you must nevertheless admit that the inclination to gather together is of a higher kind than that dark instinct which always seeks to scatter again and dissolve what has been gathered organically within itself. –

 

You would recognise madness at work were someone to try to dissolve in strong acid one of those sublime marble statues created in ancient times by a great sculptor, with the justification that a new work would surely arise from the dissolved stone and quickly wipe away the pain of having lost the statue destroyed in this way…

 

What has once been formed through the power of expression matured by the spirit in order to preserve the best of earthly mankind, is far too valuable – to be surrendered to hasty destruction.

 

The things exalted human spirits gathered through the millennia are too valuable to be offered up to be scattered without terrible guilt towards all future generations! – –

 

 

Just as your fingers are attached to your hand though they can move individually, so too are we earthly men of a certain era attached invisibly.

 

Though you might flee into the desert or find a deserted island never inhabited by man across the distant oceans, you will never be able to escape this invisible attachment connecting the whole of life!

 

If you destroy all the evidence of other human life living around you at the same time, life in general will always be able to reach you through the rhythm of the most subtle vibrations which determine it; whatever you think and feel, you will never lose the mark of your age!

 

You cannot escape your own times even by ‘immersing’ yourself deeply in the feelings and thoughts of a long past era, – you will not be able to live the life of a ‘stone age man’ even if you try to withdraw from all forms of culture! –

 

Yet you can indeed chose between value and illusion, for every age allows the simultaneous growth of what furthers humanity or ruins it.

 

You must not fall prey to cosmic dissonances, even if here on earth in your own age the last echo of such occurrence is intercepted by the brains of men…

 

Similar things do not take place for the first time here on earth, but there have always been individuals who have known how to protect themselves from mad cravings which can sometimes be aroused by the circling of matter in cosmic space in the blood of earthly man…

 

Be like those with insight and maintain in the face of the urge to associate which surrounds you – your right to self-determination! – –

 

You alone will one day have to give an account of yourself to yourself about all your actions during this earthly life, – it will be of no use to you to finally realise the utter folly of throwing away your own ‘present’ for the sake of a ‘future’ which flies on with every passing day! –

 

If you are not to negate yourself, you must with self-determination ‘will’ the existence of others in forms foreign to you, just as decisively as your own existence. For every individual is defined in his time by others –  though they might seem incomprehensibly ‘foreign’ –, and he is forever attached to them. –

 

If you ‘hate’, however, what is different than you, you are unconsciously your own enemy, for only from what you are not yourself can you preserve yourself in time and eternity…

 


Bô Yin Râ