1965-1966 - A lecture presented under auspices of the U.S. Educational Foundation in India, as a part of a Traveling Seminar on Student Personnel Services.  Published in Darshana International. 

We have come a long way from the ancient times when almost every written word was sacred and preserved.  Such books as the Torah of the Jews, the Bible of the Christians, the Koran of Islam, and the Vedas of the Hindus – to mention only a few such instances – still preserve for many of us that special character of the ‘revealed’ word given directly by God or one of His manifestations.  Many of our legends actually recount the giving of the sacred word:  Moses is handed the Ten Commandments directly; The angel Moroni directs Joseph Smith to the discovery of the gold plates on which are printed the book of Mormon;  The book of John in the Bible goes so far as to say “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God.”  Although John’s idea of the word, logos, came from that of the Platonic Greek philosophers, the ‘eternal’ quality of the revealed word must have been uppermost in his mind.  Perhaps he never consciously knew of the Greek philosophers of the previous 500 years.

The Book of Mormon was ‘discovered’ only a century and a half ago.  The vast majority of people on earth still believe and act as if these books provide the last word.  For most, the ‘last word’ is still the ‘first’ original call of the Gods.  Most of us, most of the time, act as if this were true.  Certainly almost all children do.  Most adolescents are likewise serious about the word.  How Americans laugh when they hear an Englishman or an Australian for the first time.  Many comedians still earn their living by imitating the accent of the foreigner, the stranger.  Charlie Chaplin in one of the few speaking roles he ever created, The Great Dictator, did a magnificent nonsense interpretation of the rhythms and sounds of German speech that moved tens of millions of people to the worst crimes recorded in the history of mankind.

The word is powerful and for most sacred and if not said ‘properly’ by others we feel superior.  We are embarrassed when we ourselves are at fault.  Some words said aloud produce great indignation.  Some psychologists even believe and act as if no word is ever spoken as an unmotivated mistake.  What then is to be our reaction to the billions of words we now see about us?  In which language will we choose to address each other?  What language will stand for each nation?  Can we really carry out our traditions unaltered and unmodified?  Will we continue to look at this problem as a matter of our rights vs. theirs?  Or has the problem now become so acute that a whole new kind of problem has emerged?  This problem we have come to realize as a growth of culture of explosive proportions.  This is a problem which rivals the population explosion in relatively unindustrialized countries.  Like the latter we simply do not have at hand the resources, human or otherwise, to handle the enormous changes wrought by education, science, technology, and the new means of communication both for ‘masses’ and for ‘elites.’

In more detailed form let us consider briefly just how many books – different titles, that is, not counting duplicates – are in some of our national libraries.  For example the Library of Congress of United States has somewhere in the range of 50 million volumes.  In the last decade alone about 300,000 new titles were added.  Such a collection by no means duplicates that of the British Museum, the library of France, the library of the Vatican in Rome, the treasures of the great Middle Eastern nations, the scrolls of China, the collections of sacred texts in India about which Westerners have little information, much less copies of translations.  Such a rapid change (and this really only in the last few centuries) in the number of books available at present for our consideration has created in the West a massive case of mental indigestion.  From a time only a few hundred years ago when every educated man could be expected to have read “everything” - or at least the “classics” - we have come to the point where we really do not know where to begin!

Of course some of us go on reading just the one or two old sacred books over and over again.  All very well, but I cannot help but observe that there must have been other “books” or writings before these “bibles.”  For example, the Christian Bible antedates the sacred Koran.  The Torah antedates the “New Testament,” yet the Torah is superceded for many Christians by the newer revelation.  What did the Torah replace?  We know from history that the older sacred writings were more likely to have been burnt and destroyed usually with “God’s help.”  Where are the sacred texts of Ravana’s people?  Where are the writings concerned with Baal and Astarte?  We have the story of the conquest and destruction by Rama of Lanka, of the destruction by ‘fire and brimstone’ of Sodom and Gomorrah.  But we also have the history of the sacking of the library at Alexandria by the primitive Christians and those of us who believe in the records of history see an analogy as one people replace another.  Where are the pre-Vedic writings of the Dravidian peoples?  And where are the sacred texts of the pre-Dravidian peoples?  These we can be sure existed if only preserved in oral tradition.  We all accept some idea of “progress” in our traditions in our most sacred writings even if we only say the earlier people “fell,” were destroyed by the Gods, sinned, and only now we have the true truth.  So today we feel that there in these millions of new books are new ideas, perhaps some worthy of the term “revelation,” at least as far as our own personal conduct or our group efforts are concerned.  If we do not believe this we would not be here now in this present encounter of our conference.  But which of the millions are we now merely duplicating?  Over and over again it has been too often our experience to rediscover the previously known.

If was of course once the fond hope and aspiration of the University to obviate this problem by providing each undergraduate student with fundamentals of all knowledge.  The liberal arts program still attempts to achieve something of such a balance in the student.  A great concern with “general education” has gripped educators in the United States and elsewhere.  It was considered the responsibility of the professor and teacher to adequately cover the field of his profession.  But even this is not now even remotely probably.  In my own field, Psychology, there are a total of 12 official and 55 other recommended appearing usually bi-monthly.  The Psychological Abstracts abstracts over 10,000 articles and books a year and this does not begin to cover the mimeographed, cyclostyled, and otherwise duplicated material which are now the frontier literature of a scientific field.  Publication lag and costs delay the printing by two years or more in many journals.  A professor who today claims to comprehend the whole of his field would be suspected of dangerous paranoid tendencies.  If formerly a teacher’s worth could be evaluated by his comprehensiveness, today the opposite is almost as true.

Not only is it impossible to “keep up” with one’s own field, but one also finds large proportions of one’s subject matter breaking off to set up an altogether separate profession.  A very funny satire as to what might happen in Psychology was circled in mimeographed form amongst some of the Psychology Departments of the United States.  It was suggested with tongue-in-cheek that Psychology was now so crowded by “do-gooders” and people seeking “the meaning to it all” that it was time the serious thinkers, especially the research scientists (they always consider themselves the only really serious ones) separate and establish a new profession.  They would call themselves “Psychonomists.”  It was pointed out that just as astrology never became “scientific” until the astronomer emerged from the omen and portent seekers, so it was time for the true believers in behavioral science to similarly purify their names and souls.  We laughed with the author at the time.  Believe it or not there now really is such a group.  It was founded at a recent national convention of the American Psychological Association and they do call themselves “Psychonomists.”

American Psychology has now broken up into at least two, and even in a few instances three, different professions - each of which now has different departmental structures even in the liberal arts and sciences program leading to the Bachelor of Arts degree.  This is quite a step from those departments of Philosophy, Psychology, and Education such as in Ahmedabad, Gujarat University.  I once taught in a department of “Mental and Moral Philosophy.”  It now has two departments, one of Philosophy, the other Psychology.  But at Harvard and other universities, Psychology has itself separated into a Psychology Department and a Department of Social Relations, “Human Relations” or “Human Development.”  At Harvard even the Social Relations Department is pushing the more clinical and developmental aspects of Psychology into the School of Education.  Columbia did so many years ago.  In some schools more Psychology gets taught in the Sociology Department or the Anthropology Department depending on local interest.  These have now also themselves separated from each other at most universities.  Indeed, the word university seems better replaced by multiversity, as one philosopher has suggested.  Students fresh from a major in Psychology in a B.A. program in one school are often annoyed by what they find to be taught as Psychology at another post-graduate program elsewhere, and a student must be truly wise in choosing his successive educational institutions.  (I might point out the advisable practice is for a student to get his Ph.D. in a different school from that which he obtained his B.A..  M.A.’s in the U.S.A. do not count for much in the field of Psychology although in education they are essential or at least prized.)  In this way the student gets a broader perspective on the variety of psychologies to be found and is better prepared to work at still other institutions as a professional in the field.  At my University, Brandeis, we positively forbid a student staying on in Psychology after a B.A. in Psychology except in rare circumstances.  Yet we have a great difficulty in finding an intellectually congenial university to which to send our B.A.’s considering the background we have provided.

In a similar vein, most graduate schools use some selection devices in picking among thousands of applicants.  Usually the Graduate Record Examination administered by various testing services throughout the country is employed.  For Psychology students there is a Psychology test administered in addition to the general test of verbal (literature) and quantitative (mathematics) abilities.  Some schools ignore this Psychology score on the grounds that a student who knows the kind of material tested for will not have the right kind of intellectual orientation.  Other schools insist on a high score.  Still other universities hope for both, that the student know the traditional test materials but can be educated beyond them.  And this is only Psychology.  Every field of academic discipline faces or has faced a similar crisis.  Curriculum planning at the university level now seems to be the main concern of most committees.  Some are ever trying to repackage the whole lot by some trick system of quarters or trimesters.  But the problem has grown beyond this.  There is too much to know and the specialized knowledge is growing faster than our abilities and present techniques to handle it.  Who can forget the neglect of penicillin for almost two decades after its discovery by Alexander Fleming and what it has come to mean for us today.  What else lies neglected?  One of India’s long known and used herbs has suddenly for the West enabled the psychiatrist to treat as a human being once again mental patients who often had been considered intractable, and who has been brutalized and permanently damaged by psychosurgery, chemical, and electrical treatments.

So far I have been describing only successively narrower levels and dimensions of the particular cultural explosion that one minor profession, the psychologist, faces.  Yet the problem is not dissimilar in other academic fields.  Especially is this true in the sciences and social sciences.  This is so obvious to all, I need not elaborate.  Those of you who face the budget of your new science departments know that it is only the beginning of an astronomical advance.  Fortunately “progress” has only recently involved the humanities and the arts.  The field of religion has usually been bypassed in most American universities altogether.  Yet even there a new ferment has grown around such great men as Paul Tillich, Reinhold, Niebuhr, and Martin Buber, to mention but a few.  And these have stimulated a tremendous interaction with the nearer academic departments such as Philosophy, Psychology, and a new field, History of Ideas.  Sociology and Anthropology have suddenly found a new common interest with theological explorations of man and his aspirations producing the new field of Philosophical Anthropology.  Concern with mythology and literature of the non-industrial cultures has also brought new fields, and in some schools new departments, into the humanities.  And most recently, partly as a result of the Chinese Dragon and the “decline of British imperialism,” whole courses and even departments are now being set up to study Asia and Africa.  Departments of languages, religions, literature and arts, cultural anthropology, economics and history of Asia and Africa are multiplying throughout American universities.

But the foregoing is merely academic.  Someone once pointed out that we only spend in America as much on education as we spend on advertising cigarettes and that is a very minor part of the total economy.  The really spectacular areas of growth have been in the more obvious areas of consumer goods and means of production.  Leslie White, an anthropologist, has suggested that although culture is dependent on the use of symbols for its origin, its growth has been a reflection of the energy per capita available to its people.  Since the advent of domestication of plant and animal to human purposes the available energy has been increasing.  The windmill and water wheel, slave and ox were relatively slowly replaced by coal and steam.  But now electricity and fuel oil are rapidly taking over.  The diesel has totally replaced the steam locomotive on American railroads and are beginning to do so here, much to the benefit of the becindered open window passengers.  Yet air transport has already replaced the railroads for most passenger services for the longer distances, and the bus, truck, and private car now handle the bulk of short distance travel.  Railroads have been abandoned and some have even been taken over and their road beds paved for high speed car and lorry transport.  The railroads have only been able to save their freight handling business by placing lorries on flat-bed cars.  The trailer part is usually loaded on a flat car and hauled long distances to be picked off again at the other end.  Even the loading of goods wagons is now done at the manufacturer’s and the box of the wagon is placed by a truck (lorry), removed by crane, placed on a flat car, hauled by diesel to nearest railhead destination, lifted by a crane onto a lorry, and driven on roads to an unpacking center – a retail store or another manufacturer.  The goods wagon box can now be designed to suit the mechanical loading and unloading needs of the manufacturer rather than the manufacturer crating goods to meet the needs of the railroad or shipping company.  Thus even the last remaining “Coolie” occupation of unskilled labor, that of loading and unloading ships and trains, is slowly disappearing.  Agriculture, too, has been highly reorganized.  15% of the American population grow all the food needed and in addition such huge surpluses that we have become the most shameful nation in the world as we merely destroy and waste it.  Even then, large amounts of our foodstuff end up not in stomachs but as plastics and other raw materials of industry and commerce.  One of the leading milk producers is now as well known for a milk product plastic as for milk, cheese, and butter.

But if the last sources of employment for the unskilled laborer are disappearing the merely trained intellectual worker faces an even more frightening prospect.  Just as the great machines, the “dynamo” of Henry Adams, replaced human energy, the new computers and cybernetic devices (in general automation) are replacing by wholesale lots the former source of much community stability of the commercial world, the babu, the clerk, the so-called white collar (white dhoti?) worker.  It was his personal sense of discipline and integrity which made possible accounting, banking, law, commerce, teaching, and a good number of the skills formerly thought part of education – arithmetic, penmanship, memory work were his contribution.  But now checks are read by mechanico-magnetic devices, accounts kept on tape to be read electronically, machines are guided by electronic tapes, banks mostly mechanized, insurance policies evaluated and stored by these so-called memory and thinking machines.  Recording is more accurate and error proof than ever before and many a man who rigidified his personality trying to be as accurate as a machine now finds himself unwanted and mocked for his austerities.  Typewriters make writing more legible.  Adding machines obviate to a great degree the need for the mental labor of endless columns of numbers, and now these very advances are creating other problems.  Americans are joking a great deal in their uneasiness before this latest marvel.  One story has a scientist asking his huge computers, “Is there a God?”  It replies, “There is now.”  Or someone says of a computer error, “It would take 10,000 scientists 10,000 years to make such a mistake!”  The rate of so-called advance in scientific research is immensely speeded up by all such machines.  Just as the industrial revolution replaced the puny strength of man and animals, so Norbert Weiner points out the development of the computer threatens to replace the major stronghold of discipline and traditions, man’s most fervent belief and habit and accuracy of mind and memory.  This latter is likely to have the more serious consequences.
The physical machine enabled us to attain our goals and desires more quickly, indeed immediately.  And although it often offered a few new goals – car instead of horse, lorry instead of bullock cart, ship over raft, oil over dung – such changes were mainly of degree and speed of satisfaction.  Of course, this often resulted in dislocation of considerable degree.  Thus we can see the conflict of speed rates of rickshaw or bullock cart and high speed cars and lorries.  Some cities like Rangoon now enforce rules that confine each to different streets and roads.  We were not prepared for the high traffic accident and death rate – over one million killed in U.S. alone.  But that can be helped by separate roads for each direction of traffic flow and the maintenance of under/overpass crossings.  Pollution of the air by various manufacturing plants can be stopped by control of exhausts and wastes.  Indeed many of the wastes so recovered are basic to new industries and products.  The natural gas from oil wells, for example, was first just wasted.  Now most of it is utilized for heating and cooking in our homes.  These emergent problems were still within the frontier bounds of our traditional lives.  We had dreamt of flying or leaping long distances.  Hanuman thus gets to Lanka.  Sinbad has his Flying Carpet, Vishnu his Garuda bird, Daedalus his wings.  That flight had its difficulties and brought about adjustments unanticipated as to degree is readily admitted.  But many feel this new device of the computer is going to create a wholly different kind of problem.

Communication between people and groups of people has also been brought to our attention.  Radio, cinema, magazines, and for many nations now, television have brought people from great distances into a new kind of contact.  It is a contact by picture, sound, and symbol.  We can simultaneously see and hear very great similarities yet sense a great strangeness or foreignness.  We are obviously alike yet the behavior of the other often fails to make sense within our own limited experience.  For the young person, especially, different-ness seems intolerable.  That epitome of totalitarianism, the “teenager,” can find little use for and often condemns out of hand the least sign of different-ness, at least different-ness from that often cinematic or “Hollywooden” ideal to which he aspires.  How cruel they can be to those they consider to be outmoded, different, strange!  And of course this is the group with which this conference is chiefly concerned.  I can get a rough measure of provinciality of a group of students of the Intermediate college/B.A. level just by walking past.  As I am unusually tall, the youths are likely to break into titters, giggles, and laughter as I stroll along.  This is true of every country I have ever visited, including the less populated and more rural sections of the United States or in highly isolated subcultures of the large cities.  The dynamics of the adolescent fad we neglect because of our shocked concern with its often disastrous outcome.  Yet it seems to me this faddish narrowness is the prototype of all totalitarian intolerance.  It is just waiting to be harnessed and released by some clever political manipulator as was demonstrated by the recent student “indiscipline.”  Or it is exploited by commercial interests as witnessed by the clothing fads that sweep the country again and again.  What often start as an interesting fashion among sophisticated adults is carried to absurd conclusions by the young people.  Sex clubs, sex signs, drinking fraternities are but a few of the more extreme examples.  Tight clothes of the type worn on very sophisticated occasions by parents make even the most innocent, shy teenager look like someone from the demi-monde.  Yet many a girl would almost die if not permitted to dress like her schoolmates.

This is one of the great modern paradoxes.  Vast networks of intercommunication between people, yet a growing provinciality.  One need only think of the German Youth movements, the Italian Young Fascist, and to a less organized degree the gangs of American teenagers and the ever-present student indiscipline.  To see how empty so many of the movements of national pride are we need only turn to the hollow boastings and achievements of many of the recent movements under some nationalist slogan or “anti-colonial” banner.  Mostly they achieve little or nothing for a people and cost them many lives of growing development.  The end result is seldom more than successive dictatorships, each boasting and futile in return.  Too often we see the repetitions of the almost feudal medievalism so destructive in Europe, China, and ancient India and now growing in Africa, Latin America, and sections of the Near and Far East.  Yet it is possible to telephone almost anyone anywhere and to visit almost anyone, anywhere, anytime, or at least see their image or picture in hours and minutes.  The most recent establishment of the Moscow-Washington “Hotline” is eloquent testimony both to the need and ability for such instant communication.  Yet how little we listen.  One of the greatest nations in the world has actively prevented the largest nation from participating in the only world-wide public forum, the United Nations.  The disease is world-wide.

Still another paradox is the fact that the ease with which we satisfy our needs in the more “developed” countries has often made its people more primitive in their own personalities.  The wisdom of the older cultures brought by frustration and suffering – when survived and surmounted, of course – is missing in the newly successful ones.  “Instant success” like “instant tea” or coffee is often the expectation.  And when it fails the individual falls back upon those acts which will produce instant gratification.  These are often sexual and usually appetitive in nature.  The sense of duty to the long haul which made the long sea voyages or overland caravans possible and which got one through the trials of long life seem to be disappearing.  Instead we are witnessing even religious groups experimenting with instant mysticism via such drugs as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin of the sacred mushroom of the ancient Mexican Indian cultures.  Many hope that the Soma of the Vedas soon will become available once again.  So the paradox of great success and little effort becomes more and more apparent.  Culture seems to be growing despite man.  How many of the users of electricity could reinvent it?

Still another paradox is the fact that the specialized personality because of his localized experience has become a “tourist” to most of his own life, not to mention the lives of others.  We do so much now that we have no feeling for, yet have read about, and do merely because it is possible.  A young man once said to his personnel officer that his body had flown the 3000 miles from California to Cambridge, Massachusetts and was duly enrolled in Harvard, but his spirit came like a dog walking all the way.  It arrived with its tongue hanging out about a year or so later.  The group of us here are only just beginning to feel we have arrived.  Yet how much of India do the around-the-world-in-37-days tour groups take back with them?  What can we do in our short stay?  Most of us are still tourists in our home universities.  I have lived and taught in seven states, I have been in the Boston area twelve years, yet I do not feel at home there yet.  Nor does anyone else I meet there.  And we can no longer blame this on those we used to call the Boston Brahmins, for they have moved away to other cities, other states.  Basically, the feeling of “a stranger in a world I never made” is becoming more and more characteristic of American life at least.  I know a little Psychology, but Physics, History, and Greek are wholly outside my mental horizon.  When my wife does her Chemistry I might as well be an Afghanistan.  I may watch and listen but am soon wandering back into my own world.  In many ways an Indian intellectual, especially a fellow colleague in the social sciences, is closer to me than an American railroad engineer or importer of oil.  We do not even have the reassurance that the caste system offers, that most of the others have their place hallowed by traditions.

In America most people now live in suburbs or large metropolitan complexes.  Yet despite a dreadful similarity in their existences, there seems little sense of fellowship between the suburbs.  Surveys have estimated that young people marry those who come an average of five and a half city blocks from each other.  This, despite the automobile which few families fail to own, some families having two or three.  Rather, the car serves to preserve friendship from childhood.  Should friends move apart they will drive vast distances to maintain contact and hardly speak to their intimate neighbors.  The telephone serves the same role.  One summer girls’ youth camp had a mass epidemic of some mysterious but crippling disease until some wise person installed public telephones so they could call their friends at home instead of talking to each other.  Most teenagers, especially girls, spend a large part of their lives on the telephone.

The final paradox I would like to present is a fact publicized widely about mental illness found in members of armed services during the two World Wars.  In the first war officers had mainly anxiety neuroses and the lower ranks most conversion hysterias.  In the second war almost everyone had anxiety neuroses an the hysterias were confined to the very poor, backward, and ignorant.  This was widely heralded as a triumph of public education, and it was.  One had to be quite misled as to one’s ideas about body functioning to suddenly not walk, have a hand paralyzed, one eye go blind, become suddenly sexually anaesthetic, impotent.  Better knowledge concerning biology keeps one from such intense willful gestures.  But if ignorance was largely defeated, the growth of inexperience of otherness so characteristic of anxiety is if anything more paralyzing to the spirit, more disastrous for individual and society alike.  Far from St. Francis of Assisi’s famed statement – “We are simple and subject to all” – the modern experience is subject to very small segments of the totality of possible experience.  Most experience could be and often is completely avoided as our desire for effortness growth continues.  As a result, one stands anxious, forsaken, and forlorn – to use Sartre’s expressions – before what used to be the common place, the daily events.  A few weeks ago in Varanasi, I saw a young man riding in a bicycle rickshaw, his father’s body precariously perched across the awning struts going on his way to the burning ghat.  How many American youths could place the torch to the pyre?  Few of us even experience the death of anyone close to us before late middle age and those of us who do are often shunned rather than aided as we know little to do about it.   As a result the funeral directors have piled expense upon expense to their own benefit because the rest of us just plain refuse to face the whole issue.  Practices relating to funerals have now become so absurd and exaggeratedly expensive that writers like Aldous Huxley or Evelyn Waugh find it a rich source of satire.  One of my colleagues in sardonic irony suggested in a short story attaching a mechanical device to the embalmed over-cosmeticized corpse that would cause it to sit up and wave farewell to the funeral audience as it was borne out of church in the glass hearse to the burying ground.   “He really didn’t die, did he, he is just gone away,” seems the vein hope.  We try similarly to not face most of what life brings but rather fend it off, delay it, postpone “Life” as much as possible.  Or we do only those things which come most readily to hand.  Our sex life flourishes (but not our birth rate) and most of us are terrified of overweight, gray hair, and any other non-youthful sign of middle age and maturity.  Who can forget Tolstoy’s novel The Death of Ivan Illytch and its portrait of false success?  The late Professor Carl Jung found his patients all to be in crises of anxiety as they in their middle years first faced the totality of life.  Indeed they rarely started on any road to recover until symbols of reintegration such as the Mandala so common in much Hindu and Buddhist religious art began to appear quite spontaneously in dreams and drawings.

Let me try to bring these various threads together to see if we can’t find some common problem pervading them all.  Culture seems now to be growing almost despite individual efforts.  Even though each highly-specialized individual develops his share, its consequences are often unexpected to individuals in another specialty.  The very nature of the release of added energy per capita carries much specialty often beyond its intended goal.  The problem of projection of the trajectory of any specialty becomes a new one for us to face.  Penicillin saves lives and we have a population explosion.  Mass education and research produces a surfeit of publications which no one can responsibly read and digest even a part of.  Individual lives in their very untouched success grow more narrow and have more knowledge about but little experience of tangential parts of lives that formerly were commonplace.  The value of disciplined lives so important to clerical integrity is being replaced by computer machines that do more better and promise changes even more intensive in their implications than the industrial revolution which merely added to human strength and energy.  Many individuals now feel the “old ways” are gone and they have no definite goals for themselves.  They give advice to their children but with such feeble conviction that few youths respect it.  It seldom sounds like more than mere querulousness.  Too often previous habits betray their too-specific natures and leave little room for future projection.  Religion which used to provide the main guide is too often completely tied to images which are essentially agricultural and often completely negative towards any other real cultural possibilities.  In the West religion is now an amusing specialty  which at best interferes but little with one’s main life but which occasionally comes to one’s solace in times of distress.  Curiously, many Western people are turning to the East for religious insight.  The very complexity of Hinduism, especially in Vedanta form with its underlying non-dualism, helps prepare the mind for the newly enlarged totality we face.  Ch’an or Zen Buddhism, with its emphasis on “nothing special, Zen is your everyday life” helps to take a more responsible attitude to the future in this life and remove the misplaced emphasis on the one specialty as the all of existence.  And also, the Eastern way of controlling emotions as something divine yet only one among the many helps reduce the exaggerated concern with sin that left one in an either/or dilemma in the West.  Many Westerners are now coming to Konarak and Khajuraho to gain the sense of proportion that such magnificent monuments provide.  Where erotic activities are made that public they lose both terror and allure.  Somehow one’s own emotional life loses the exclusiveness of secrecy and privacy and becomes that of one among the many, thus more accessible to responsibility.  And how much Durga or Kali, the divine mother, increases our acceptance of the all!  But although Eastern religions a broadened frame of reference that should go far to reduce the Westerner’s sense of exclusive specialization, there is little help of a more specific nature.  It is the hope of the members of this conference that some vague glimpses of light are possible.

My emphasis on what may have seemed a most discouraging picture of Western “progress” was to remind you that all of us are facing a problem that used to be the unlucky lot of the few.  Otto Rank once wrote of peoples who were tradition-bound, and by this he meant almost all us, that we were not even neurotic yet.  Most of us have taken a patronizing attitude towards those few individuals whose development failed to provide adequate guides and preparations for the future.  In American slang we called them “8-ball Charlies” or said “they were behind the door when the favors were passed around.”  The traditional attitude was that neuroses and psychosis in the extreme and emotional upsets were the sin, fault, or hereditary deficiency of a few peculiar individuals.  The more recent Marxist analysis has also called attention to failures in the overall social design to the detriment of one or more of the classes.  Both assume that relatively static factors are at work – hereditary and environmental deficiencies.  These may provide an adequate description for pre-automated societies but a better one is now needed.

Let me remind you how much tradition-oriented cultures take for granted.  How many of your streets have identifying signs to help the stranger find his way?  In Boston and other New England cities only the side streets are labeled on the grounds that anyone from Boston knows the names of the main streets.  To find one’s way is often impossible without asking people.  This is difficult to do from a fast-moving automobile.  We are painfully learning that we must make the visitor feel at home and able to find his own way.  The Westerner is totally lost in cities like Tokyo which except for a few signs left from the early days of American occupation have no signs at all.  Now with the Olympics coming, Tokyo is making haste to label in both Chinese character and Roman script all corners and subway stops.  Such a thing as street labels are elementary but yet what a difference they make in the now unprecedentedly mobile world where we are all strangers.  Most cities now make available good street maps so if you cannot read the language of the signs you can court street intersections.  Buildings are being labeled, rooms numbered.  My University, like most in America, also provides maps of the campus showing roads and building names to enable the new student and new professor to find his way.  This in contrast to Delhi University where the combined efforts of a taxi driver and myself took half an hour to find the Physics Department, asking student and faculty alike.  Most did not know except vaguely the part of the campus even where it was to be found.  It was not labeled.

Few universities now are staffed entirely by local people or attract only the students who reside within bicycle distance.  A study by Dr. Gray at the Allahabad University recommended that even this most elementary type of information would improve a student’s relation to his school.  A name on a building gives the student some degree of identification with the school just as the street sign enables the city to me mine too.  This kind of information enables the university to begin to be mine as well as theirs.  How much more pleasant and informative museum exhibitions are when adequately labeled, we all realize.  We feel we share the information displayed.  In national parks in the United States where are displayed such materials as petrified wood, rare mineral deposits, exotic plants and animals, American Indian ruins, or museum displays, little self-guide booklets are provided - so that the exhibitions become part of the knowledge of each stranger or tourist.  In this way each is to a degree involved, “invited in.”  How happy was to enter the magnificent Shiva Temple at Hindu University in Varanasi after merely looking on from the outside at all the others.  Of course I have long had some feeling for Shaivism as members of this audience may have detected, but even so how many other strangers in your land might not expand their understanding in that direction also?  Experience is rarely shared except by coincidence in traditional societies.  Yet as we specialize more and more, the need for overcoming the lack of any shared experience becomes apparent.  Although education has been the chief means in sharing experience we are now beginning to find that education, at least the traditional forms manifest by most universities, still depend upon the shared coincidences of experience for the foundation of that education of the student.  Students are expected, just as they are to share their language, to share certain orientations that make knowledge memorable.  How often students really do not understand what they appear to have memorized, we all know.  Usually we say the responsibility lies with the student.  True, that may be where the need for improvement lies.  But many times the real difficulty goes far beyond to a non-coincidental background.  For such a student, more than study and lecture is needed.  Hence the need for tutors and, even more, the reorientation of the frame of reference of the individuals concerned.  This is often termed guidance.

Historically, guidance grew mostly around the student with some seemingly exceptional difficulties not shared by others.  Often the teacher was able to help.  Or an older student acted as a special tutor.  Insofar as it amounted to an informal social institution, it was designed to “mop up” the exceptions, the stragglers.

Little by little, as the schools increased their efforts and coverage of shared knowledge, these problems now labeled as “psychological” also came to light and seemed to demand specialized help.  The larger universities had little concern for anything other than that the student made a minimum of trouble for the reputation of the institution and the peace of its members.  In the United States, the rest was the concern of parents and church.  But as the schools began to encroach more and more upon the “private” – or at least publicly unshared aspects of life – the students’ emotional problems became more and more apparent.  The very development of Psychology made it possible for all students to become concerned with those difficulties now labeled “psychological.”  In one way, the growth of Psychology created a host of what might be called hypochondriacs.  If the chondrium is the breastbone, the familiar term hypochondriasis referred to the interpretation of experiences of anxiety as physical abdominal ailments.  Instead, today many students interpret their difficulties as “mental,” in the head.  Often, the difficulty they faced was just plain difficulty, requiring effort or labor to which our very successful lives have made unused.  Thus one third of our Brandeis students seek psychological help from our clinical service department and many others express such needs to teachers and friends but somehow do not manage to get there.  In the Boston area, a recent study showed, 75% of the psychiatric time available was occupied by young, primarily unmarried girls in their twenties who apparently had little better to do than worry about their “minds.”  The entire remainder of the population of the Greater Boston area shared the other 25% of trained clinical services.

Yet many students do for greater or lesser periods find themselves truly lost and unable to manage their studies until some readjustment takes place somehow.  In one of our foremost universities this is no longer seen as merely psychological by the students themselves and large numbers are dropping their studies to go out into the world until they achieve a more adequate orientation in their own personal experience.  These are often academically, socially, and intellectually the best young people we have.  They represent for me the true vanguard of this new revolution of our cultural horizon.  Most of them return to their studies the better for their wanderings.  Their labors outside the university provide experience to give sufficient temporary insight to carry on a few years more.  Most go on to post-graduate work but not just with traditional zeal.  Rather, a growth of wisdom seems to have occurred.  These I will hope be our new intellectual and spiritual leaders of the next century.  But also these are a highly selected elite assembled from all over the United States and indeed the world.  The vast majority of our students who will fill most of the professional, occupational, and political posts in the world to come are not of that caliber.  Most will need help.

What just a few of the most specific needs are and techniques available or developing, my colleagues will present.  How help takes place, what some of the specific psychodynamics of therapy, learning, and creative insight are at present thought to be, I will leave for my last talk.  In closing I wish for a moment to call to our attention some specifically local resources of which Americans are largely unaware.  Most of your students still live at home in their families and because these are often very large, married brothers living together, the students become “family wise” in their day-to-day living to a degree far beyond that of the American college student.  The latter comes from a very private family often with little or no intimate interaction with other families.  Our ideal is a single couple in a private apartment or dwelling often miles and hours removed from brother and sister, father and mother.  Americans hence have a more specialized, restricted, and unshared experience and outlook.  On this basis, he or she is expected “freely” and unguidedly to choose a mate.  No wonder he does so in anxiety that seems of psychiatric proportion.  The arranged marriage, even if caste-bound, usually confronts an individual with a situation he or she must learn to accept and with difficulties he and she know must be overcome.  This may have a deepening effect upon the character structure of the young people.  In America young people often choose mates on the basis of a temporary identity of interest that is soon outgrown and which leaves them wanting to pursue their own interests in their separate ways.  Marriage is often for appetitive convenience at first, but soon appears inconvenient.  Strangely, our marriages have an enormous degree of endogamy of a new type.  Not only do people who marry have a closer connection as to personality traits than first cousins, but in the college group, individuals tend to marry within major interests.  Thus psychologists marry each other, similarly sociologists.  We seem to be on our way to a new caste system.  We judge the family to be the most important single background factor in our evaluations of student troubles.  Your family structure is very different at present.  Yet if you Westernize your ways may be similarly disrupted.

The other major source is your religion, which is considered by many to be the most tolerant in the world, the most truly accepting of human variation.  Of course I have been told that on the other side of this virtue lies indifference to the misery of others.  Yet, insofar as we look to the positive side, we see enormous tolerance of a concern for individual soul-searching and path-finding.  In contrast, every American is obligated to choose his role and place and if he doesn’t, is judged “ill,” in need of help.  Such services are similarly “over-organized” as we exactly classify each difficulty and therapeutic device.  We have very few sadhus wandering our streets.  The ideal of the informally chosen guru is strange to us.  When Paul Goodman suggested in his recent writings adopting similar techniques in “Education,” he was considered “heretical.”  We wait until too late and then call it “group therapy.”  You have many, many temples scattered about, some only a square feet in size.  You go to them as needed.  We have churches, regularized services to be attended and in which to be lectured at every week at a certain hour.  Yet some aspects of Hindu Revivalism may develop along Western lines.  I notice that a new temple in Allahabad has an audience hall as well.  This bodes the possibility of a service done to you Western style.  The temples of the overseas Hindu also have that newer Western character in my experience.  This also bodes the appearance of specialized priest who lectures at “tourists” to the temple.

I was most agreeably surprised to see characterizations of the temple ruins of Sarnath and Nalanda as “Universities” because this is also what our modern universities of the West have become.  Not ruins yet, of course.  The modern university has become more and more the spiritual center of the world, both new and old.  As we look at the ruins of Nalanda, Ajanta, Konarak or Ankor Wat, or the spectacular temple city complexes of the Toltec, Zapotec, Maya, or Inca peoples of the Americas, we are reminded not of our present isolated churches or temples but of our large university campuses.  We are the new spiritual leaders whether we like it or not.  If there be failures among our following, they are our failures.  It is not the responsibility of the natural government because it is our ideas they are attempting to administer and execute.  If we have a complaint it is only that they administer the budget poorly as far as we are concerned, and it is up to us to see that we get our fair share.  After all they are our elected representatives, our servants.  We are the visionaries of the future.  We plot the way.  “Space” was our invention.  The marvels of science were the by-products of our researches.  The fundamental researches basic to the growth of culture have been of our making and often to our advantage.  Certainly the predicting and creation of much of what will come stems from us.  It is the job of the universities.  Despite our multiversity we are the most universal of any of the cultural institutions.  We cross national boundaries most easily.  We are most at home in the foreign land as our knowledge of the one becomes more and more one.  The responsibility is ours to show what can be done.

In summary, the vast cultural explosion has made us strangers to our own lives.  All of us will need guidance at one time or another.  Some of us may even need guidance to ourselves.  Guidance will be an essential experience to everyone.  Yet where will it come from, but from us?  The job is ours.