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TULSI-PRAJNĀ
quision of the twentyfirst century and of human destiny itself. Two approaches to liberation
On the whole two paths of liberation are open for the believers. The mystic religions of the East offer liberation through self.knowledge, self-experince, or Gnosis. The prophetic religions, especially Christianity, sees it in the historical act of God redeeming man, in the eschatological hope of world hitory transforming itself into an eschatological hope. In the one man ascends on his own, from Ego to the Self, from the mesocosmos to the metacosmos. In the other. god descends in the person of his own son and redeems man of his sin, of his fallen condition, and liberates the world. Thus these liberating visions are complementary. The one sees liberation from below, the continuation of the evolutionary process, the other is the view from the above, the atonement of evolution. The one may be seen as the individual, subjective aspect of reality, the other its objective, collective aspect.
If we go by the experience of non-Western civilisations it seems legitimate to conclude that the act of collective human liberation is not possible by subjective, i e, karmic, acts on the part of man alone. Grace is called for. History is not the sum total of all the karmic atoms. Hitory has a holographic or macrocosmic wholeness, an archetypal grounding of the Purusha-historically incaroated civilisations as a Christ, a Buddha, a Krishna, a Mohammed. The sum total of these cosmic persons is the New Man of the Omega point we are speaking about. He may be the archetypal Christ of the total human redemption. As such he may be the archyty pal Man of the United Nations- the guarant of its rights of man, the guarant of the right of world citizenship, without which the idea of United Nations is but a makebelieve.
The United Nations, founded at the chief harbour of · the New World, right at the portals of the Statue of Liberty, symbolises the passage to liberty not only of the
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