P.R. Sarkar sketches a daring vision of the evolution of humanity.
by P.R. Sarkar
As life becomes increasingly easy, there will be greater opportunities for intellectual pursuits. A day will come when there will be hardly any need for human beings to work. This may sound strange and perhaps we might not like to hear such a thing, but that day will surely come. Physicality will be transformed into more and more intellectuality, and intellectuality will be transformed into the culminating point of spirituality.
This movement to intellectuality will also take place in certain animals, such as dogs, monkeys and cows. It may be that in 1,000 years monkeys will reach the stage of evolution that human beings have achieved at present. At that time human beings will be making tremendous progress in the realms of intellectuality and intuition. The human beings of that future age will be very sensitive. The efferent (outward conducting) nerves will be more active than the afferent (inward conducting) nerves, and subtle experiences will be more common than they are now. Today human beings seldom have subtle experiences, but in the future they will occur naturally and spontaneously. The functional jurisdiction of the brain will also increase. Similarly, many animals will become more sensitive and their vocabulary will increase. With intellectual development vocabulary increases... The functional jurisdiction of the brain of animals will increase too.
With the help of spiritual practices, humans of the future will increase the functional jurisdiction of their brains with accelerating speed. People may think that they cannot make rapid spiritual progress unless the size of the brain, and hence the size of the cranium, is increased. But this is not so because human beings can increase the jurisdiction of their thinking. Today human beings are progressing in the realm of intellectuality. To attain the culminating point of spirituality the human beings of today have to face less obstacles than the people of the past. The development of the glands and the amount of the hormone secretions is much greater than 100,000 years ago, and the glands will develop and increase their secretions by much more in the next 100,000 years. In 100,000 years, human beings will conceive of things which are beyond their conception today...
As humans gradually move along the path of evolution, they will increasingly understand that they are more psychic than physical... With psychic changes physical changes will also occur. Humans of the future will feel strange when they see the structure of humans of today. Similarly, the humans of today would feel disturbed if they could see what the humans of the future will look like.
According to human psychology, people do not like to think much about the future. Rather they prefer to dwell on the past. The future may or may not happen as human beings plan, so there is always a risk involved in speculating about the future. One day the physical and psychic structure of human beings will become divine. It may happen that human beings will not like this mundane world anymore... They will think that it is better to merge into Supreme Consciousness and leave the world forever. This transformation in human psychology will come about through spiritual practices. So I advise each human being that as long as you are alive, you should try to build yourself in a nice way, in a complete way. But you should not only build yourselves, you should also build human society in the same way...
The satisfied physical needs will lessen the physical obstacles which inhibit human progress, and human beings will experience all-round development, especially in the intellectual stratum. They will get the opportunity to develop in the intellectual stratum without any hindrances. The truth of humanity, the veracity of humanity, will go on increasing in different areas of expression. That is why I say that there must be guaranteed minimum requirements and guaranteed maximum amenities for all human beings, and that these must go on increasing. These amenities must be good for the physical and psychic development of human beings, or at least for one of the two.
P.R. Sarkar (1921-1990) founded Renaissance Universal in 1958. This essay is excerpted from the book Proutist Economics by Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar, © 1992, Ananda Marga Publications.