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The
purpose of civilization is not the progress of science and machines,
but the progress of men.
-Alexis Carrel
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The Twilight Club is a philosophic movement whose main theme is
eloquently expressed in the immortal sentence of Edwin Markham: “In
vain do we build the city if we do not first build the man.” The Greek
philosopher Heraclitus said, “A man’s character is his destiny.” We can
say the same about the destiny of a civilization: “The character of a
civilization is its destiny.” The original intent of the Twilight Club
founders was to alter the very character of our civilization by
building the character of men and women through the practice of
universal ethical principles, and thereby to make an impact upon its
destiny.
The new Twilight Club inherits this original intent of the founders,
and gives it new expression, befitting to the new century, and to the
new millennium. In fact, at the dawn of the Information-Knowledge Age,
the immortal message of the Twilight Club is becoming more relevant
than at any other time in the past to the well-being of humanity and
its civilization.
As the world becomes reconfigured in accordance with the logic of the
Information-Knowledge Age, the originality or the genius of an
individual will become more and more valued. In an age where
information is readily, abundantly, and instantaneously available, how
original a person’s information-based creation is, to a much greater
degree than ever before, will determine his or her success in the
world. Thus, the question of self-knowledge and original thinking will
become one of the most critical career and business issues throughout
all industries.
Also in keeping with the nature of the Information-Knowledge Age, the
value placed upon social and commercial intercourse will become
increasingly more metaphysical, and the degree of materiality will
steadily decrease in all spheres of human interchange. (Information or
knowledge is metaphysical, because it is formless, weightless, and
beyond the physical.) The degree of materiality is inversely
proportional to the degree of spirituality. Therefore, the
metaphysicalization of human interchange, and the concomitant decrease
in the degree of materiality, betokens the trend of the
spiritualization of humanity.
Further, as the world moves deeper into the Information-Knowledge Age,
the “faster-than-light” compound increase in information will effect a
geometric increase in the rate of change. As this occurs, the state or
nature of change itself will change, and the phenomenal world will
become qualitatively more relative and unpredictable. Thereupon,
humanity will start looking into that which is eternal, immutable, and
universal in establishing its standards of value, of action, and of
knowing and thinking.
Combined with the spiritualization of humanity, the whole human
discourse will shift towards that which is eternal, immutable, and
universal—in which context only can we truly understand, create, and
adapt to unceasing change. The Information-Knowledge Age will thus
progressively evolve into the Kosmic Age in which materiality and
spirituality converge, the physical and the metaphysical sciences
integrate, and balanced human unity is actualized through
self-knowledge, eternal truth, and universal principles.
All this, however, is not a prediction, nor is it an historic
inevitability, but it is a possibility that is attainable for the first
time in history, if there is sufficient collective will for its
attainment, and if there are effective channels for its manifestation.
The Twilight Club is uniquely qualified to be such a channel, with its
distinguished history of service, and with its distinct body of
knowledge developed over the last 120 years by some of the greatest
thinkers of all times, such as Herbert Spencer, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Walt Whitman, Alexis Carrel, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas J. Watson, and
Walter Russell.
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