From the moment a child is born, it is systematically trained; that is to say, that habits are introduced. The purpose of this habit induction, this very effective brainwashing is to see that the child becomes a viable and useful slave for the maintenance of all that is old - old age, old traditions, in short, all that enables a repetition of yesterday, a repeat of the miserable story and history of the race.
Then, art, poetry, philosophy and psychology and physiology fill libraries confirming that man is only an ape, the tragedy of man helplessly tied to the wheel of birth and death, and so on, elevating this systematically induced backward look to the dignity of laws of nature and of human behaviour.
Unfortunately for the human species, a prolonged infancy and childhood inflict a long period of helpless physical dependence, which is used for deeply embedding in the child ideas of a fatalistic vintage. Man will become old. He will die. He must have three meals a day, he must have sex. He must have this and he must have that. He must do this and that in order to grab this and that. Even his revolts and revolutions are a mirror image of his yesterdays.
There would have been no other species besides ants if the ants fully succeeded in remaining ants building ant hills. We would all be dinosaurs if dinosaurs completely succeeded ias dinosaurs.
The law of gravity is first of all a habit of the mind. Practical necessity drove man to see the limitations of this habit and to search for more liberating habits, enabling the discovery of other laws. Look through the pages of aviation history and see to what extent the degree of mental gravity and rigidity had to be overcome and what heroism was needed to overcome this fundamental gravity of mental habit. Man may fly to the moon, but layers of mental gravity of behaviour remain, and even on reaching the moon, his objective is how best to plunder the moon for bread and uranium, how best to deceive and bomb one another, and such other traditional aims.
Ramakrishna once said that the vulture may soar very high, but that its eyes are on carrion.
Even his objective senses stem from this gravity of habit. He must eat three or four times a day. He must store and sell. He looks for alternative foods: it is not encouraged to see if there are alternative sources of energy other than food itself, and if there are not such mechanisms already available to him. The science of botany becomes the art of growing bigger and fatter potatoes; the science of zoology, the art of growing bigger and juicier pigs.
Man must defend himself. The science of physics is the art of combining things to produce poisons and bangs which kill others with maximum efficiency.
The central point in evolution is that the existing form and function experience inadequacy in dealing with the ever changing environment: changes in form and function in mutual dialectic unity and conflict emerge slowly over the ages or rapidly as mutants on occasion. The new emerges out of the old, and that inevitably introduces a drag on the full development of the new.
With man, the element of self awareness arises. This awareness can help him to throw himself backwards or propel himself forward on the slopes of evolution: to the maintenance of the old or appearance of the new. He will not be allowed to rest. He must first become aware of what is essentially new in him, instead of multiplying data and statistics to prove the wholly self evident truth that he is an animal and that he has a biological origin. Why stop at that? Why not say that man is a mass of assorted electrons?
The evolutionary battle towards a more harmonious existence can first of all take place only in the individual using all his total bodily resources in the conscious drive towards a better specimen of existence. But first of all, there is the gravity of perception that ties him down to the idea that he is the summit of evolution, that the stars rotate on their courses because of his discoveries, and that elephants exist because their name is found in the British Encyclopedia,that he is destined to grow old, and draw pensions, or that he can have a transplanted heart to enable him to continue his old round of habits.
This gravity of habit must be transcended and it will be transcended, with or without his blessings. If he cooperates he is likely to have a more harmonious and healthy driving on the road of life, not necessarily comfortable and painless. This first of all appears or manifests itself as an individual adventure, of one or many who like the first space men, determine to transcend the laws of gravity.
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