Democracy must be conceived as a process, not a goal. We do not want rigid institutions, however good. We need no “body of truth” of any kind, but the will to will, which means the power to make our own government, our own institutions, our own expanding truth. We progress, not from one institution to another, but from a lesser to a greater will to will.
We know now that there are no immutable goals—there is only a way, a process, by which we shall, like gods, create our own ends at any moment—crystallize just enough to be of use and then flow on again. The flow of life and we the flow: this is the truth. Life is not a matter of desirable objects here and there; the stream flows on and he who waits with his object is left with a corpse. Man is equal to life at every moment, but he must live for life and not for the things life has produced.
Yet while it is true that life can never be formalized or formulated, that life is movement, change, onwardness, this does not mean that we must give up the abiding. The unchangeable and the unchanging are both included in the idea of growth.32 Stability is neither rigidity nor sterility: it is the perpetual power of bringing forth.
Writers are always fixing dates for the dividing line between the ancient and the modern world, or between the medieval and the modern world. Soon the beginning of modern times, of modern thought, will, I believe, be dated at the moment when men began to look at a plastic world, at a life constantly changing, at institutions as only temporary crystallizations of life forces, of right as evolving, of men as becoming.
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
