Many say the time of the guru is past. This is true, but it is not something to celebrate, because the guru function is necessary—it must be fulfilled for any society to be sustainable. Because the guru function can no longer be fulfilled in the society at large, the culture is falling into its final death throes. The loss of the guru function is part of the inevitable decline of values and power of the human spirit, a decline that has been prophesied by the same gurus who are now derided as being obstacles, rather than portals, to spiritual renewal.

The fall of the guru as a living presence in high culture is part of the general movement of consciousness into materialism and away from spirituality—indeed it is a part of the loss of high culture as a whole. Religious organizations and lineages have lost credibility not only because the culture has marginalized them, but more importantly because they have failed to live up to their own teachings. Corruption has destroyed the religions of the world.

No doubt it is news to no one that planet Earth is in a period of escalating interlocking crises. We need a response that addresses all the hidden as well as the obvious dimensions of these crises—before they spin out of control into irretrievable chaos. (For the moment, let us leave aside the geophysical crises, including climate change, increasing seismic activity, and the ozone holes, as well as pollution, radiation poisoning, mass extinctions of species, increasing solar flare activity, and the like. They cannot be dealt with effectively so long as the current political system endures.) The system is in process of collapsing of its own weight, its own internal contradictions. At the same time, spontaneous social movements are arising on a global scale that are confronting the system and increasing the level of stress to the breaking point. Our concern is to assure the optimal outcome of this titanic face-off.

The crisis we face at the sociopolitical level is one of legitimacy of authority. The OWS movement (Occupy Wall Street) and the Indignado movement in Spain and other anti-austerity movements all over Europe, following on the so-called Arab Spring, not to mention student movements and general protest movements in many parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, are simultaneously rising to a crescendo.