Page 7 - All India Magazine May-2024

Yugadharma
There is such a thing as yugadharma, the right institutions &
modes of action for the age in which we live. For action depends
indeed on the force of knowledge or will that is to be used, but
it depends, too, on the time, the place & the vessel. Institutions
that are right in one age are not right in another. Replacing social
system by social system, religion by religion, civilisation by civilisa-
tion God is perpetually leading man onwards to loftier & more em-
bracing manifestations of our human perfectibility. When in His
cosmic circling movement He establishes some stable worldwide
harmony, that is man's Satya Yuga. When harmony falters, is main-
tained with difficulty, not in the nature of men, but by an accepted
force or political instrument, that is his Treta. When the faltering
becomes stumbling and the harmony has to be maintained at ev-
ery step by a careful & laborious regulation, that is his Dwapara.
When there is disintegration, & all descends in collapse and ruin,
nothing can stay farther the cataclysm that is his Kali. This is the
natural law of progress of all human ideas & institutions. It applies
always in the mass, continually though less perfectly in the detail.
One may almost say that each human religion, society, civilisation
has its four Ages. For this movement is not only the most natural,
but the most salutary. It is not a justification of pessimism nor a
gospel of dumb fate & sorrowful annihilation. It is not, as we too
often think in our attachment to the form, a melancholy law of
decline & the vanity of all human achievements. If each Satya has
its Kali, equally does each Kali prepare its Satya. That destruction
was necessary for this creation, and the new harmony, when it is
perfected, will be better than the old. But there is the weakness,
there is the half success turning to failure, there is the discourage-
ment, there is the loss of energy & faith which clouds our periods
of disintegration, the apparent war, violence, ragging, tumult &
trample to and fro which attends our periods of gradual creation

All India Magazine, May 2024 7