"The teachings of the mystery schools understand history in a very different way. That way can best be understood through the same Law of Evolution that governs the spiritual ripening of the individual soul. Each human society arises out of the chaos left behind by some previous society, and it takes shape in response to whatever challenge the older society could not meet. As it emerges, the newborn society struggles to adapt to the challenge that brought it forth, and it finally achieves a stable adaptation that will allow it to reintegrate into the whole systems that surround it. It endures for as long as environmental conditions and its own limitations allow before finally disintegrating in the face of some new challenge that brings a new society into existence in turn.
"These cycles of challenge and adaptation can sometimes add to the sum total of human knowledge and insight, and in this sense, at least, human societies can be said to progress. Still, it is unfortunately common for the people of one society to ignore the hard-won wisdom of older societies and to suffer as a result. Our own age is a case in point. Modern industrial society has parlayed its mastery of a handful of technical tricks into the most complex technology in recorded history, and it has learned many things about nature that other human societies never knew. It has achieved these things, however, at the cost of ignoring many lessons about humanity and the world that other ages knew well.
"Our blindness to our own dependence on nature's cycles and resources is one result of this ignorance, and that blindness promises to make the lifespan of industrial society far shorter than that of many other human societies of the past. This does not mean that we are facing the sort of apocalyptic fantasy so popular these days. What it means instead is that our future will likely follow the common trajectory of civilizations in decline, though that trajectory will he made somewhat rougher by the side effects of the very technologies that helped us rise. As the ancient philosopher Heraclitus taught, 'The way up is the way down'; it took some three centuries for modern industrial society to rise out of its preindustrial origins, and it could well take another three centuries for it to decline to a postindustrial world, where many of the technologies that now fill our lives will have become the stuff of legend.
"The teachings of many of the mystery schools hold, curiously enough, that something very like this happened to human beings long ago. As mentioned earlier, an extraordinary amount of nonsense has been written down through the years about the lost continent of Atlantis. Sweep away the wilder speculations and the more obviously symbolic tales, though, and the old story bears a crucial lesson for us here and now.
"The Atlantis legend claims that humanity, at one point in the distant past, created a society as complex, as powerful, and as arrogant as our current civilization. It also claims that this society attempted, as we are attempting, to make the world obey its desires without paying any attention to its own dependence on the cycles of nature. According to the legend, the people of Atlantis ignored the laws of spiritual ecology, and by the time those laws finished with them, nothing remained of Atlantis but gray waves rolling across empty ocean."
