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The mature mind has liberated itself from the imperious rule of those secondary determinants of activity that we call appetites and passions, has made contact with its primary determinant, its enharmonization, and is perpetually sensitive to this influence. Such a mind has constantly before it the ideal of an inclusive harmony, which is a truer, safer, and more authoritative guide than are rules imposed from without. As parents feel that they have not fulfilled their duty to offspring until they have prepared them to live without parental guidance, so it should be the aspiration of society to produce men and women who require neither external pressure nor coercion to conduct themselves as befits a free, moral intelligence. Only by such people, who need no external governance, will society ever be adequately served or governed.

The Travail of Creation

Our survey of the disorders and excesses of nascent intelligence brings poignant awareness of the almost insuperable difficulties that harmonization has had to overcome. In the beginning was the problem of gathering matter in masses that would permit some of it to participate in those higher formations of which all matter seems to be potentially capable. To start this synthesis, matter had to be condensed into bodies neither too great nor too small, at temperatures neither too high nor too low. For this a planetary system was needed; and of the difficulties involved in the construction of such a system, the small proportion of the resulting planets that in any epoch are likely to offer favorable conditions, I told in Life Ascending (1985).

When, finally, life arose on some of these planets, it ran into trouble by its very exuberance, which gave birth to organisms in such prodigious numbers that they clashed together and destroyed one another. An avenue of escape from this deplorable situation lay in endowing them with foreseeing minds, which, by taking a comprehensive view of the total situation, might so control the numbers and activities of living things that each could fulfill its own nature without impeding the similar striving of those around

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it. But to develop an adequate intelligence turned out to be one of the most difficult and hazardous of all the creative tasks; so that even today it is doubtful whether human misuse of mind will not finally ruin the living world, which intelligence might so greatly benefit.

To develop high intelligence or rationality is not enough; unless well integrated with other aspects of minds, it may be more harmful than beneficial. What we need above all is spirituality, which might be defined as the interpenetration of emotion, reason, and volition. In the spiritual person, feeling is profoundly modified by knowledge, intelligence is stimulated by the affections, and the will is guided by the perfect blending of the two. In him or her, the quality, or at least the desirability, of sensations is strongly influenced by their perceived relations, so that the most pleasant sensation becomes abhorrent rather than delightful to one who knows that it is bought at the price of suffering by other creatures, in the past or in the future. Understanding fortifies the spiritual person's determination to achieve a more harmonious life, while love intensifies the desire to understand.

The disproportionate development of one of these three aspects of mind has disastrous consequences. Intelligence divorced from love or swayed by hatred is more dangerous than blind force; an unbridled will is the cause of endless evil. What we most lack is spirituality. The increase of intelligence or intensification of feeling will benefit us only if they interpenetrate more thoroughly than at present.

Sometimes, contemplating the strife, the waste, and the pain involved in the creative process, we are filled with dismay. But what should impress us even more is the urgency and intensity of the striving for beauty, joy, and understanding that this aeonian process revealsan