Before we can properly understand this we have first to understand a fragment of a theory which was held by the ancients throughout the world. This is the theory that history moves in rhythmic cycles of alternating life and death. This theory likens evolution to the course run by a new seed as it grows into a tree and yields fruit: it sheds its leaves and becomes barren in winter, but in the spring new green buds appear and the same course is run once again. According to the classic Chinese wisdom, every empire and every civilization passes through the varying situations of a periodic cycle whose turning begins with peace and unification, passes to prosperity and culture, moves with increasing age to decline and degeneration, and ends finally in disorder and disruption. Thus, the same wheel which lifted Rome to the height of her power and set her armed legions in control of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East dropped her, on its descending arc, prostrate at the feet of Huns, Goths, and Vandals. The rhythmic return to which this doctrine refers does not mean that epochs occur again exactly as before; for then existence would be meaningless and evolution a figment. It means that they occur in a similar yet more evolved way than before, as the twists of a spiral cover the same two dimensions of breadth and depth again but rise to a new third dimension of height. Karma has to find the best available human instruments, however imperfect they be, to carry out its will. Remove these men and you are left with steam hissing aimlessly into space, whereas they are like the piston of an engine which concentrates and applies it. Thus Alaric, Chief of the Goths, told a monk that he felt a secret and supernatural impulse which impelled his march to the gates of Rome. Accordingly, he descended on the Roman provinces when the fourth century had almost closed, and moved in triumph until his firebrands lit the proud palaces of Imperial Rome. "This may be considered as the fall of the Roman Empire," is the verdict of Gibbon upon Alaric's achievements. It is at the behest of karma that these Alarics, whatever such men may themselves superstitiously believe, have arisen to encourage mankind. Lenin, with all his distorted intellectual greatness, could only spend his powers impotently in Switzerland, unable to lift a little finger to effect the revolution he craved. He could do nothing until destiny stepped in and permitted him.
-- Notebooks Category 13: Human Experience > Chapter 4 : World Crisis > # 173
