A Seed


    I feel we are at the threshold of a new age and that we need now, more than anything else, a new approach to human relationships and to social organization. We need a planetary approach, we need a synthetic approach. We need something in which the individual learns his own function in the world, because if you are to have a global world, the individual has to be so well established in his own identity that he can afford to cooperate with other people all over the world, independent of their culture, their race, their traditions and so on.


    It is very important therefore, that one should learn how to establish oneself in one’s own identity. We need a new type of human being. We need something which is based no longer so much on conflict, but on a full acceptance of the total human being, body, mind, soul, feelings, everything. An esthetic approach versus an ethical approach, so that you can see the relationship in which everything stands inside of the whole, so you can look at the whole and become identified with the “ wholeness” of that whole, rather than with any particular part.


    Now this is, of course, a very difficult situation. We are certainly in a difficult time and what is ahead of us today, I do not know. I am rather pessimistic as far as the immediate future is concerned, considering the way the world is moving at the present time. But you must realize that crises are sometimes necessary to accomplish what is to be accomplished. The only problem, however, is this: something must be ready before the great crisis comes – when the new cycle begins – for it will have to begin on the foundation of those seeds which have been sown before the crisis. If you have a winter followed by a spring, but there was no harvest in the fall, no seed will germinate during the spring, and you will have to start at the very beginning into the most primitive time of manifestation.


    This is why I have stressed so much all my life the idea I call: the “seed man”. The man who is willing and able to gather within himself, as it were, the past of humanity and particularly of our western world of course, but also of other cultures, because what we want to emerge from the future – after whatever crisis will come – is a global world.


    We therefore need men of great vision, men who are not specialists (generalists as they are sometimes called today), men who have the vision and courage to wait and to, in some way, through their lives, through their example and through whatever they leave after their deaths, become the seeds of the future world.


    That is of course the great choice we all have to make and we all can make it. We can follow the mass vibration and decay, like all the leaves of the world in the fall (however beautiful the golden leaves may be), they will have to decay and become manure for the future of civilization; but it is only the “seed men” that really count and it is those you should look for, if you yourself do not feel yet to the point of being ready to become a “seed person”, because it is that only which is the insurance for the future rebirth of humanity.


    I think today it is of no use to try to look to the immediate future, because it looks very dark; but it is to look – to prepare – for the possibility that a new world may arise, if not tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. I think it is the only thing which gives value to all our sacrifice, all our courage, decisions and choices today: it is to become seeds for the development of the future world.


    So I hope every one of you, each one in his own life, in his own way, can some day soon, very soon – if you have not done it already – make the choice and become “seed men” and “seed women”. I thank you.


    Dane Rudhyar

    1973