HISTORICAL traditions all over the world suggest that we are living at a bad time. Hindu tradition says we are in the Kali Yuga. Greek tradition says we are in the Age of Iron. Chinese tradition says Confucius lived in the period of the Warring States (and we seem to be still there). Jewish tradition says we are in the age of the destruction of the Temple and the great Diaspora. Christian tradition says we are in an interregnum between the first and second comings of the Christ and are headed toward an Armageddon. All of these traditions hold that we are in a time when things are changing for the worse.

The world in which we live is certainly changing; and it seems to be on the verge of a new major transition. I make that statement with some trepidation, because it sounds apocalyptic — like the all too frequent prophecies of California sliding into the Pacific Ocean, or the rise of Atlantis, or Doomsday and the Rapture. Yet, despite the cautionary reticence that millennial and apocalyptic frenzy should inspire, changes do seem to be happening that presage a major revolution in life on this planet. And it may not be all bad.

In The Secret Doctrine, H. P. Blavatsky foresaw the changes that are upon us. In the introductory chapter to that work, she wrote:

We are certainly in a time of settling not a few accounts. But accounts have to be settled before a new page can be opened. And, HPB says, 'many of us will witness the Dawn of the New Cycle'. Although, as Kipling says about Mandalay, the dawn comes up like thunder, that thunder is a long, slow roll, extending over a vast period in our sense of time. So you and I can still 'witness the Dawn' of a new day. If we look back on human history, we can see a pattern in the old days that events of our day seem to be duplicating.

Scientists used to believe that evolution — whether geological, biological, or human social evolution — proceeds gradually by small incremental steps. A more recent view, associated especially with the recently deceased Steven Jay Gould, but widely accepted by other scientists, is that evolution proceeds by sudden spurts. According to this view, things are relatively stable for long periods of time, with only minor fluctuations. Then suddenly (although 'suddenly' in geological terms can be a very long time in human terms — but relatively suddenly, like Kipling's roll of thunder), a change occurs that cataclysmically alters the old state of things and introduces a new stability, which then lasts for another long while, until a new 'sudden' change alters it. This view of evolutionary change is known as 'punctuated equilibrium'. It is not unlike the Hindu and theosophical view of the Yuga-s.

We can see punctuated equilibrium not only in the changing geological contours of the Earth and in the biological mutations of the species that live on it, but also in the historical development of human cultures. Looking back on human history and prehistory, we can envision a time when proto-humans had no language and hence no ability to communicate as we do. (They could certainly communicate in other ways, physical and perhaps nonphysical; but without the defining characteristic of human speech, they would not have been human as we think of humanity.) Then 'suddenly' and perhaps only once in the evolution of our species, some change occurred that allowed the human mind and brain to receive, to process, to store, to interpret, and to transmit certain signals that, collectively, we call language. Theosophical tradition implies that that change happened some eighteen million years ago, although most linguists and evolutionary biologists would date it much more recently. There is, however, general agreement that the development of the ability to use language was a punctuation in the equilibrium of human existence. After we learned to talk, life would never again be the same.

Another such punctuation came when early human beings ceased to rely on hunting and gathering as their primary way of getting foodstuffs, and began cultivating and herding instead. The practice of agricultural cultivation, in particular, converted our ancestors from footloose, if not exactly fancy-free, wanderers into settled dwellers in fixed communities. They had to sow the seeds, tend the plants, harvest the crops, and preserve the food over cold or dry seasons. The result was the growth of villages and towns, with all the associated aspects of settled community life, as well as the development of calendars, the invention of new tools, the domestication of animals, and so on. After we settled down to living in towns, life would never again be the same.

Yet another punctuation in human equilibrium was the invention of writing. We take writing so much for granted that it is hard for us to realize what a revolutionary development it was. Writing is a sort of 'external memory', to use a computer term. It allows us to preserve information in greater quantity and with greater reliability than can be stored in any human mind. It also provides 'time binding', that is, it connects the present with the past and the future. On a more mundane level, it makes possible record keeping for commercial transactions, taxation, and other governmental functions. Thus writing fosters the development of city-states, nations, empires, commerce, and civilization. After we learned to write, life would never again be the same.

Intellectual and spiritual events must also be taken into account, such as the 'axial age' around the sixth century BC, when Confucius lived in China, the Buddha in India, one of the Zoroasters in Persia, Deutero-Isaiah among the Jews in Babylonia, and Pythagoras in Greek Crotona. The philosopher Karl Jaspers has posited this period as a turning point when human beings sought ways of making direct contact with ultimate spiritual reality beyond manifested phenomena and when a spiritual impulse entered the world that still energizes human thought and aspirations.

A recent book by Binghamton University professor David Sloan Wilson addresses the importance of religion to evolution. In Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (University of Chicago Press, 2002), Wilson argues that society can be regarded as an organism subject to the Darwinian forces of natural selection and that morality and religion are culturally evolved adaptations that enable groups of human beings to function as single units, rather than as disparate collections of isolated individuals. Religion, he says, lets us achieve collectively what we could not accomplish alone.

Wilson's argument has interesting theosophical parallels. In the theosophical view, the first phase of evolution (called involution) is towards an increasing fragmentation of our spiritual connectedness, as group souls divide into ever-smaller units, until the stage of human individualization is reached. That stage is one of maximum spiritual fragmentation and isolation. Thereafter, evolution promotes the relinkage of the separate human units of consciousness into a new wholeness, in which individuality is not lost, but is tempered by an increasing awareness of our underlying unity. Wilson proposes that religion is an evolutionary adaptation promoting such linkage. If he is correct, the axial-age development of a new kind of religious orientation would have been a very significant punctuation in evolution. After we learned to look beyond the here and now, life would never again be the same.

Other such punctuating events in past human history can doubtless be identified, but these four — the development of language, agriculture, writing, and spiritual vision — are certainly major changes that irreversibly altered human life and history. Is there a comparable change underway now, even during our lifetimes? It is very hard to judge the significance of changes when you are in the midst of them, but there are clues we can pay attention to.

Change, of some sort, is universal, as both the Buddha and Heraclitus taught; and in every age, people have doubtless thought that they lived at a critically changing time. Some years ago, the New Yorker magazine had a cartoon showing Adam and Eve being forced out of Eden by an angel with a flaming sword, and as they walk away from Paradise, Adam says to Eve: 'My dear, we are living in an age of transition.' The point of the cartoon was that all of life is transitional. That is true, but not all transitions are of the same intensity or have consequences of the same magnitude.

Despite the difficulty of judging the significance of the changes around us in our time, there are clear signs that certain current developments will have major, enduring, and radical consequences. So our own age may well be another punctuation in the equilibrium of human evolution. It may be a time when we can 'witness the Dawn'. What are those signs? Many of them are technological developments with pervasive social and spiritual effects.

One such development has been in transportation. Until just a century and a half ago, transportation was primarily by foot; on the backs of horses, mules, camels, or the like; in carts drawn by draft animals; or on ships powered by sails or oars. Such means of transportation had served for many thousands of years in a strong and lasting equilibrium. But within recent times, we have seen the invention of railroads, motor cars, airplanes, and space vehicles. It is now possible to travel farther and faster than our ancestors would have dreamed possible — indeed, even to setting foot on the Moon and sending unmanned vehicles to explore the other planets of our solar system. One effect of this change in transportation is to bring people all over the Earth from one culture to another with ease, speed, and frequency. As recently as just a century ago, it took Henry Olcott and Helena Blavatsky about six weeks of sailing time to travel from New York to Bombay by steamship. Today the same trip can be made in less than fifteen hours of flying time. Today ordinary people travel more than sixty-seven times faster than they did a hundred years ago. The result is that more people from diverse parts of the world are coming together more often.

Another development has been in communication. Before the nineteenth century, communication at a distance was primarily by written messages conveyed by one of the available means of transportation. But from the early nineteenth century on came telegraphs, telephones, radio, television, and most recently, the Internet. In Olcott and Blavatsky's day, it took as long to get a letter from Bombay to New York as it did for the Founders to travel between those ports by ship. Today an e-mail message can be sent almost instantaneously. The increased ease, speed, and economy of communication across the Earth have surpassed that of transportation manifoldly.

People on one side of the Earth can now communicate with those on the other side freely and quickly — and are doing so with increasing frequency. In 1993, when I was elected to the presidency of the American Section of the Theosophical Society, the World Wide Web consisted of about 50 sites; last year a count revealed more than 350,000,000 such sites, a number that has doubtless gone on increasing at an average of nearly 40 million a year. Such increased communication potential also brings together people from a variety of cultures, exposing them to one another and forming a virtual community bound together by ties of electrical impulses.

The Internet has another salient characteristic: it is practically impossible to control. The uncontrolled nature of the Internet means that a tyrant has little chance of blocking communication through it, so it becomes an important tool for extending freedom around the globe. In the year 2000, about half a million Iranians had access to the Internet; two years later, in 2002, the number increased

more than threefold, and it is expected to increase tenfold to five million by 2007. And it is especially the middle-class young, who are most dissatisfied with theocratic dictatorship, who access the wider world by the Internet and are thus exposed to democratic ideas (New York Times Magazine, 1 Sept. 2002, 45/1).

On the other hand, that same lack of control means that an enormous amount of foolishness, falsehood, and malice can be spread, requiring the development of discrimination by the users of e-mail and the World Wide Web. The American novelist Ursula LeGuin in one of her fantasy works titled A Wizard ofEarthsea has an aphorism that is relevant to this matter; she writes, 'To light a candle is to cast a shadow.' Every progressive development has its dark side. If information can be spread rapidly, so can misinformation. If airplanes can take us from New York to Bombay, they can bring terrorists from the Middle East to New York, Washington, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere in the world, and those airplanes can be converted into offensive weapons against innocent people.

Yet, if the increased communication of the Internet entails the uncontrollable spread of misinformation and if increased transportation entails the intrusion of malign forces into our midst, that in turn calls for improved discrimination by Internet users and by travellers. And discrimination is the first qualification for entering the Path. Thus the darkness is flanked by light and by the potential for more light.

There are clearly many other developments, both positive and negative, in recent years that could be adduced as punctuations in our state of equilibrium. Together, they suggest that a major change in society is under way or will be soon forced upon us, as we witness the Dawn of a new day. Such developments include the rise of a global economy; scientific advances especially in biology and medicine, including the sequencing of the human genome and the development of therapeutic cloning; the health crisis, including the AIDS epidemic; the rise of democracy around the world; the population explosion; the exploitation of the environment; and global warming.

Various writers have noted such developments and proposed our own time as one of a major punctuation in human history. For example, Francis Fukuyama in his recent study, The End of History and the Last Man (1992), proposes that, with the collapse of the communist empire in 1989, Western liberal democracy, the welfare state, and the market economy have been left 'as the final form of human government'. On the other hand, Samuel P. Huntington in his view of the same facts, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), identifies eight current major world civilizations — African, Hindu, Islamic, Japanese, Latin American, Orthodox, Sinitic, and Western — and argues that Western civilization, with America as its principal exponent, is in a state of decline, threatened especially by the Sinitic and Islamic cultures. Whether either of these opposing views is correct, their articulation testifies to the belief that we now live in an age of transition.

Even in much narrower scenes than global culture, there is a sense that major changes are under way. Philip Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies and author of a recent book, The Next Christendom (2002), anticipates a radical re-formation among Christians. He writes, 'the twenty-first century will almost certainly be regarded by future historians as a century in which religion replaced ideology as the prime animating and destructive force in human affairs, guiding attitudes to political liberty and obligation, concepts of nationhood, and, of course, conflicts and wars' (Atlantic Monthly, October 2002, 54) — a view reminiscent of that of the Master KH, who said that 'the chief cause of nearly two thirds of the evils that pursue humanity ... is religion under whatever form and in whatsoever nation' (Mahatma Letters, chron. 88, 3rd ed. 10). Specifically, Jenkins foresees a growing split between north-hemisphere or liberal and south-hemisphere or conservative Christianities, leading to a violent break up and realignment of Christian sects with consequences surpassing those of the sixteenth-century Reformation.

But even without citing other such developments and proposals, it is obvious that certain aspects of contemporary life have changed radically from the norm that held sway for thousands of years in the past. It is, however, also obvious that certain aspects of human behaviour have not changed at all. On the one hand, the Master KH (Mahatma Letters, chron. 18, 3rd ed. 9) wrote:

... we will go on in that periodical work of ours; we will not allow ourselves to be baffled in our philanthropic attempts until that day when the foundations of a new continent of thought are so firmly built that no amount of opposition... will be found to prevail.

On the other hand, HPB in The Key to Theosophy (231) wrote:

Technologically we are living on a new continent, but we who consume the technology are still the same old bottles. And what our bottles contain is the same old wine of prejudice, selfishness, violence, and ignorance.

What does all this have to do with Theosophy and the Theosophical Society?

The Theosophical Society is, in fact, also one of those other developments that have punctuated our cultural and spiritual equilibrium. The Mahachohan said: 'The Theosophical Society was chosen as the cornerstone, the foundation of the future religions of humanity.' It is noteworthy that he did not say 'Theosophy' was so chosen, but rather the 'Theosophical Society'. Theosophy is a body of teachings, a doctrine. The Theosophical Society is a body of human beings, a community defined by its Objects.

What the developments in transportation, communication, and the Theosophical Society all have in common is a focus on bringing people together. We are living in what American President Bill Clinton and others have called an age of globalization and interdependence. We are, for the first time in human history, truly living in one world. And we are witnessing the development of a single global culture for that world. Such development cannot come without pains and strife, for old bottles do not readily hold new wine.

Modern transportation brings people together physically; modern communication brings them together through information and verbal intercourse; the modern Theosophical Society has as its first Object the formation of a nucleus of universal brotherhood, and as its second Object the encouragement of cultural exchanges. Both of those Objects are to bring people together. So, if we are in fact living in a period of punctuation separating an old divided world from a new unified one, the Theosophical Society is clearly part of the punctuation.

Theosophy can also provide guidance about how to transform old bottles into containers appropriate for a new continent of thought. For the Society's third Object is relevant to the major change our human world is going through. We are witnessing the Dawn of a new world — a new continent — but we are still the same old humans who populated the old world — the same old bottles of prejudice, ignorance, egotism, greed, antagonism, and fear. The Theosophical Society's third Object calls for an investigation of the unexplained in Nature and a development of the latent powers in us. If we understand the world around us and develop our own latent powers of insight and compassion, we will be transformed into new containers for the Wisdom needed to establish the new continent of thought — we will witness the Dawn of a new era.

As we look around us today, all over the globe we see conflict and terrorism: we see it in Africa and South America, in Ireland and Britain, in Israel and Palestine, in America and Afghanistan, in India and Pakistan, and in many other places — conflict great and small, seething and simmering. Our human world is suffering from a sickness, of which conflict and terrorism are the symptoms. The causes of conflict and terrorism are often said to be poverty, territorial ambition, social injustice, and so on. But those ills are really side effects of the basic sickness and are not its fundamental causes. The ultimate cause of the sickness that besets humanity is an ignorance of the Way things really are — avidya, as it is known in Sanskrit. And the symptoms of the sickness — conflict and terrorism — are themselves also signs of the changes that are under way, signs of the settling and squaring of accounts.

As President Bill Clinton has observed (Chicago Tribune, 13 Jan. 2002, 2-1): 'The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 were just as much a manifestation of this globalization and interdependence as the explosion of economic growth.' Conflict and terrorism are part of the shadow cast by the candles we have lit.

Lacking insight into the Way things really are, we construct imperfect substitutes: world views, systems of value, or religions that are — not wrong — but incomplete and fragmentary and that therefore lead to 'two-thirds of the evils that pursue humanity'. We ignorantly suppose that our particular world views and our values, which are our actual religions, are the only ones that exist, and so we attribute to them ultimate importance. This error in judgement — mistaking our incomplete worldviews for the one Truth, and our fragmentary values for the one Good — this error is what needs to be addressed. And the way to begin to address it is to bring people together, to inform them of how others view the world and set their values. Bringing people together is what modern transportation and communication do; and it is what the Theosophical Society has as its Objects and what it does through its actions.

Our world views and our systems of value — that is, our religions, whether sacred or secular — are especially important in determining the way we respond to others. Differences in our concepts of value will therefore aggravate any dispute we have with those whose values differ from our own. To deal with such differences, we must first become aware of them and then look for a way to reconcile or accommodate them. I have proposed elsewhere ('Four Values in One World', The Theosophist, June 2002) that, among the value systems existing today, are four that either contribute to the present crisis or can help to resolve it.

The two value systems whose conflict is the cause of part of the present crisis of violence are the Abrahamic value of obedience, expressed in its most salient form by radical and fundamentalist Islamism (which is not Islam as a whole), and the Modernist value of freedom, expressed in its most salient form by the exploitative, capitalistic, and technological West (which is not the West as a whole). The problem is that these two values, each held by one of the major culture blocs of the world, on their surface are mutually incompatible. Obedience is a limitation on freedom; and freedom is a rejection of obedience.

The leading article by Hendrik Hertzberg in a recent issue of the New Yorker magazine (14 & 21 Oct. 2002) recognizes this clash of values as the basic cause of the present-day crisis of terrorism by comparing it with the quite different crisis of the Cold War of the late twentieth century:

'Fanatic Islamist fundamentalism' is not the whole of Islam or the Abrahamic tradition. And President George W. Bush's fluctuating foreign policy is not the whole of 'liberal democracy' or the Modernist tradition (as Hertzberg points out incisively in his critique of it). Yet both the Abrahamic tradition as expressed in Islam, and the Modernist tradition as expressed in the current policies of its most powerful liberal democracy are subject to distortions. And such distortions, on either side, are the source of grave danger to the world community.

At its worst, obedience is subservience to what a person has irrationally taken as a highest good; it is fundamentalism, intolerance, and persecution of those who differ. At its worst, freedom is egotistic insistence on one's own way, a boastful determination to 'go it alone', and the exploitation of other people and of the environment, disregarding the common good. But at its best, obedience is the recognition of the existence of a higher Reality and the dedication of oneself to the service of that Reality. At its best, freedom is a recognition of alternatives and a respect for the rights of others, as well as one's own right, to choose among those alternatives in a way that does not harm the common good.

If the foundations of a new continent of thought are to be firmly built, they must rest upon a proper understanding and reconciliation of the values of both obedience and freedom. And those of us who are to inhabit that new continent must ourselves be transformed into bottles for the new wine of that understanding and reconciliation. Old bottles will not do.

The transformation that is called for requires the insight of two other value systems. One is the Indo-Hellenic tradition, whose primary value is knowledge. This knowledge is not of facts, but of who we are, where we are, and why we are here; it is the knowledge of the Upanishadic mantra Tat tvam asi 'You are That' or of the Delphic injunction Gnothi seauton 'Know thyself. The other value system needed to resolve the present crisis is that of the Sinitic cultures of China, Korea, Japan, and Annam, whose primary value is harmony. As Confucius says in the Analects (1.12, in Arthur Waley's translation): 'In the usages of ritual [li] it is harmony that is prized; the Way [Too] of the former Kings from this got its beauty.' To be in harmony with the Way, the Tao, brings balance to the life of an individual and to that of society. The means to that harmony is ritual or li in Chinese, which is essentially the same as Zoroastrian asha, Vedic rta, and Indian dharma.

Only when the values of obedience and freedom are actualized in the light of the values of knowledge and harmony will the new continent of thought come into existence and the old bottles of prejudice be transformed into containers for a new wine. Only then will we witness the Dawn of a new era, when 'accounts will be settled and squared'.

It is the calling of the Theosophical Society, in the words of its first Object, 'to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction'— that is, to bring people together. It is also the calling of the Theosophical Society, in the words of its second Object, 'to encourage the study', comparatively, of cultures and thereby to point to a way to reconcile such apparently incompatible values as obedience and freedom, by introducing such values as knowledge and harmony. It is moreover the calling of the Theosophical Society, in the words of its third Object, 'to investigate unexplained laws of Nature and the powers latent in man'. That investigation alone can transform our old bottles into containers for new wine.

In 1970, while speaking to the Australian Section about 'The Real Work of the Theosophical Society', N. Sri Ram said: 'The Society ... was founded with the exalted purpose of promoting the spiritual regeneration of man... the radical transformation of man, his whole nature, mode of conduct, and future.' The Theosophical Society is about many things, but its ultimate aim is that of its Master-founders: to build 'the foundations of a new continent of thought'; to regenerate and transform human nature so that it becomes a fit container for the new wine of the Ancient Wisdom; and to help us to 'witness the Dawn' of a new day, anew era, for all humanity.

Dr John Algeo is International Vice-President of the TS and Professor Emeritus at the University of Georgia, with many academic distinctions to his credit.