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"I am saying that the bridge from the ancient to the present, which you want to see being built, already exists," I replied. "We are part of its demonstration. Nothing needs to be added. All that is required is a scientific understanding of it and an active acknowledgement of the principle involved. However there exists still another bridge that to some degree fulfills the same function on a wider scale. That bridge exists in the form of an art installation by an American woman named Judy Chicago. Judy Chicago wanted to raise the status of woman in society. For this project she got together 20 researches to select from the pages of history 999 women of achievement. Of these she selected 39 that became her guests for a dinner party. She created a triangular table to seat each of them. Every side of the table corresponds with a major period of history and seats 13 women from that period. She created an individual place setting for each of the women in a manner that represents her unique achievement and individual nature. She created the dinner plates for the place setting with an image painted on them that symbolically combines both the image of a butterfly and the image of a woman's vulva. The painted on image is distinct for each woman, but in the overall context the images evolve in depth ranging from a simple image for the prehistoric goddess to a deeply sculpted image for the modern woman fighting for her rights. The most 'modern' plate is the most deeply sculpted and also most closely resembles a vulva. And it is here, Indira, where the Dinner Party really begins. The whole of society is invited to the party where society is encouraged to 'eat' of each one the woman's plates, to eat of her achievements as a human being and to be nourished by them. Judy Chicago also makes it plain that those achievements are the achievements of women. Society is literally invited to 'eat' of the vulva. Judy Chicago leaves no room open here for hypocrisy. She gives society no option to push the women into the background, in the way women have been treated for millennia. She is telling society to be honest with itself and eat of the vulva, because that's what it has been doing for as long as civilization existed. According to submission for a survey from sexually active woman, the vast majority of respondents indicate that 'eating' of the vulva is the most valued and enjoyed sexual interaction for both men and women. On this basis Judy Chicago says to society, 'stop your hypocrisy of the social isolation of woman, and by the same token also stop the isolation of society from itself and from its humanity."
"But did her efforts meet with success?" Indira interjected.
"Oh, the show was a great success," I answered. "It became a famous show that was seen all around the world, but did it change the world with it? Nobody can answer that question, Indira. It is simply impossible to measure the result of a spiritual movement in an empirical manner. If one were to build a deep bunker and dropped an atomic bomb on it, and the people in the bunker survived, one could say that the bunker-project was successful. But Judy Chicago's work can never be judged that way. We simply have no way of knowing what the world would have been like if Judy Chicago's work had never been created. And that applies to Mary Baker Eddy's work as well. The same also applies to the work of the boy-yogi-swami who uplifted the face of India. And it applies to everybody else's contribution to the advancement of civilization. We really don't know to what degree they did change the world, because we don't know what the world would have been like without their contribution. We can only take what they have given us and move forward with it. I would even say that in most cases we haven't yet fully utilized the profound contributions that have been given to us by mankind's great pioneers. In many cases we haven't yet begun to utilize them. So how can we tell whether their contributions have been worthwhile? Mary Baker Eddy's pedagogical project is a case in point. Hardly anybody even knows that it exists. We can judge its potential only by Mary's own accomplishments a hundred years ago, and those were profound. She discovered a science for spiritual healing that was effective and had been practiced throughout the world in her time, and still is practiced to some degree. But more than that, those 44 years of her life from her discovery of that science to her death in 1910, were the years of the greatest period of peace in the world that we had since the Golden Renaissance in the 15th Century. Even during the brighter period of the Peace of Westphalia in the 17th Century, the world hadn't been totally free. The bestial Spanish Inquisition had not bee abolished. However, all of that had ended by at the time when her breakthrough discovery was made. The Opium Wars in China had ended; the American Civil War had ended; slavery had been abolished; the world was at peace, with a few minor exceptions. It was as if the train of horrors had suddenly stopped. It was as if a page in history had been turned on the new page a period of great discoveries in science began, exemplified by Einstein's discoveries. The period also unfolded as a period of great technological achievements as is exemplified by the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. The exposition was a shiny showcase of man's ingenuity and creative industry. The entire period of peace that unfolded from 1866 on until shortly after her death in 1910, was so profound in humanist advances that this period might some day be called the Third Renaissance. The train of horrors was stopped and remained stopped throughout that period until three years after her heath. Then on the day before Christmas in 1913 it was set in motion again and all hell broke loose. The train of horrors hasn't stopped since."
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