We are more interested today in twentieth-century man's search for life's meaning and not with second-century man's search. The goal of both is the same because the Overself is timeless; but the way to it cannot be the same, for not only has evolution changed his environment but it has also changed the man himself. We have to find a new approach to an old objective. A Teaching must be related to its times. It is not enough to give us today what helped a few thousand Hebrews or a few hundred thousand Hindus, all mostly living a pastoral life thousands of years ago. Give us that, yes, but give us also what will help two thousand millions living all over this planet under postwar conditions. We cannot go back to live under ancient skies except imaginatively. That we live in this amazing twentieth-century is itself sufficient ground for a way of thought and life which shall have twentieth-century inspiration. Spiritual illumination comes to lead us forward, not backward. When today all mankind are on the move after their greatest war, when the most drastic upheavals and the most dramatic changes of their whole history are occurring, how can the quest of man's divine self-fulfilment remain static, immobile, and unaffected? To believe that after these unheard-of experiences, intelligent men and women can be induced to go on facing twentieth-century problems with second-century attitudes is merely to deceive oneself. That there are still some mystically minded persons and enthusiasts for Oriental monasticism who think otherwise merely betrays, first, their lack of intelligence and, second, that the war passed over their unreflective heads as though they were sleeping Rip Van Winkles.
-- Notebooks Category 15: The Orient > Chapter 1 : Meetings of East and West > # 167
