The real work of every man is then to build. The challenge is upon us. This is the task to which all valiant souls must set themselves. We are to rise from one mastery to another. We are to be no longer satisfied with the pace of a merely fortuitous progress. We must know now that we are coworkers with every process of creation, that our function is as important as the power which keeps the stars in their orbits. We are creators here and now. We are not in the anteroom of our real life. This is real life.
We cannot, however, mould our lives each by himself; but within every individual is the power of joining himself fundamentally and vitally to other lives, and out of this vital union comes the creative power. Revelation, if we want it to be continuous, must be through the community bond. No individual can change the disorder and iniquity of this world. No chaotic mass of men and women can do it. Conscious group creation is to be the social and political force of the future. Our aim must be to live consciously in more and more group relations and to make each group a means of creating. It is the group which will teach us that we are not puppets of fate.
Then will men and women spend their time in trivial or evil ways when they discover that they can make a world to their liking? We are sometimes told that young men and women working all day under the present very trying industrial conditions live in our great cities a round of gaiety at night. Go and look at them. It is a depressing sight. A tragedy is a tragedy and has its own nobility, but this farce of a city population enjoying itself at night is a pitiful spectacle. Go to clubs, go to dances, go to theatres or moving-pictures, and the mass of our young people look indifferent and more or less bored—they have not found the joy of life. Play, as useless idling, does not give us joy. Work, as drudgery, does not give us joy. Only creating gives us joy. When we see that we are absolute masters of our life, that in every operation, however humble, we are working out the fundamental laws of being, then we shall walk to our daily work as the soldiers march to the Marseillaise.
We know what happened on that lonely island in a distant sea when the young Prince came to the people of the Kingdom of Cards, who had always lived by Rules, and taught them to live by their Ichcha, their will. Images became men and women, rules gave place to wills, the caste of the Court cards was lost, a mechanism changed into life. The inhabitants of the Kingdom of Cards, who had never thought, who had never made a decision, learned the royal power of choosing for themselves. Regulations were abandoned, and the startling discovery was made that they could walk in any direction they chose. This is what we need to learn—that we can walk in any direction we choose. We are not a pack of cards to be put here and there, to go always in rows, to totter and fall when we are not propped up. We must obey our Ichcha.
Already the change has begun. I have said that we are beginning to recognize this power—there are many indications that we are beginning to live this power. We are no longer willing to leave human affairs to “natural” control: we do not want war because it is “natural” to fight; we do not want a haphazard population at the dictates of “nature.” We no longer believe that sickness and poverty are sent by God; people are being taught that they need not be sick, that it is largely in their own hands, their own collective hands (social hygiene etc.). Modern charity is not aimed at relieving individual poverty, but at freeing the individual from the particular enslavement which has produced his poverty, in freeing society from the causes which produce poverty at all.[[33]]
Our once-honored blind forces are more and more losing their mastery over us. We are at this moment, however, in a difficult transition period. We are “freer” than ever before; the trouble is we do not know what to do with this freedom. It is easy to live the moral, the “social,” life when it consists in following a path carefully marked out for us, but the task given us to-day is to revalue all the world values, to steer straight on and on into the unknown—a gallant forth-faring indeed. But conscious evolution, the endless process of a perfect coördinating, demands vital people. War is the easy way: we take to war because we have not enough vitality for the far more difficult job of agreeing. So also that kind of religion which consists of contemplation of other-worldliness is the easy way, and we take to that when we have not enough vitality deliberately to direct our life and construct our world. It takes more spiritual energy to express the group spirit than the particularist spirit. This is its glory as well as its difficulty. We have to be higher order of beings to do it—we become higher order of beings by doing it. And so the progress goes on forever: it means life forever in the making, and the creative responsibility of every man.
Conscious evolution is the key to that larger view of democracy which we are embracing to-day. The key? Every man sharing in the creative process is democracy; this is our politics and our religion. People are always inquiring into their relation to God. God is the moving force of the world, the ever-continuing creating where men are the co-creators. “Chaque homme fait dieu, un peu, avec sa vie,” as one of the most illumined of the younger French poets says.[[34]] Man and God are correlates of that mighty movement which is Humanity self-creating. God is the perpetual Call to our self-fulfilling. We, by sharing in the life-process which binds all together in an active, working unity are all the time sharing in the making of the Universe. This thought calls forth everything heroic that is in us; every power of which we are capable must be gathered to this glorious destiny. This is the True Democracy.[[35]]