There was a time, before Time, when thought did not exist. A time will come, after Time, when thought will no longer be. Before, there was silence. There will be Silence after. There was ignorance before. And the universe did not exist. There will be knowledge after. And the universe will no longer be. Before, no form perceived the universe. One form, after, will extend beyond the universe.
For what we call the universe is but a manifested form of what we call God. It corresponds to thought. What does not think cannot perceive it, but perceives something else and obeys other laws. What no longer thinks will no longer perceive it, but will see something else and be governed by other laws.
It is said that we live in a material universe. Matter, however, is itself but the way in which thought seizes upon a reality of which we have no idea. It does not have the same value for the species which went before us or which surround us. And, contrary to what one might believe, we already discover that Matter is Energy— without imagining what that actually implies. What would a universe be like which appeared to us in the form of pure Energy extending to the infinite? And, to begin with, what would the Earth be like?
Or, more precisely, what will it be like? For the moment the mystery of the primordial transmutation of Energy into Matter is scientifically accepted, the doors are opened onto a future in which, for a form of consciousness higher than our own, Matter will spontaneously be transmuted into Energy. But this will not take place, as today, on the level of the atom and thermonuclear armament, an initial and faltering stage on a path of which we know nothing; a path which, with growing illumination, must lead us beyond our present perceptions, beyond this universe and the Death which governs us. This will come to pass on the plane of our very being.
No doubt much time will be required and many discoveries will be made before another nature of the world is revealed, not in the graphs and equations of our intellect, but in the immediate play of our senses. Gradually, we shall cease to see what we at present see. All that which our race has patiently recorded since its birth will
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gradually attenuate. The Earth where we toil in exchange for a fragmented and dubious happiness, the cosmos whose vast scintillation fills us with wonder, the miracle of a flower opening after rain, the weightless flight of millions of galaxies—all this will gradually change in meaning and appearance, and will fade away. We shall not disappear from the universe. The universe will disappear from us.
When we imagine the future of the planet, we see ourselves such as we now are, in a milieu which has scarcely changed: harmony between peoples, new arts and sciences, new conquests of Space. But we do not conceive of the changes which will take effect within us. We envision nothing beyond that harmony, taking it to be an end in itself, whereas it must be the means of opening ourselves to a consciousness and action by which our personality, of its free will, becomes indistinct in the interest of a harmonious collective individuality of which, until now, totalitarian systems have given us but a distorted idea. We shall cease to think in terms of me and mine; this will occur naturally and not, as today, by means of coercion. Our spirit will change and, over the course of centuries (which, perhaps, will be calculated quite differently), we shall discover that the external unity of the world to which we so much aspire, and which is precluded by our present constitution, will only be the reflection of an inner unicity of life on Earth. We shall not only share among ourselves the riches which we shall have acquired, whether material or spiritual. We shall not simply live beyond the notion of property, the mark of individual or collective ego. Our very being will be shared. This will not, however, be done according to extraneous codes, as since the time of Moses, or more precisely, since Leviticus, when for the first time in the history of mankind a law of love was decreed, to be taken up again and exalted by Christ, while in Asia the Buddha taught compassion. This will not be done in the name of a moral doctrine or under the rule of priests. This stage will necessarily and irreversibly be traversed: the course of evolution will carry us to increasingly pure and luminous horizons. This will take place from within, just as naturally as, without needing to think or to trouble ourselves, we see many things which, in the absence of the perceptions we have, remain unseen by animals, or in any case which are not utilized as by us. We shall thus experience an osmosis of the soul by
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means of which, while being this individual or that, we shall be the others. We shall perceive in ourselves all beings—of mankind and of other species, as well as, by degrees, of the various dynasties of Space.
This is what we must learn to visualize, it is in this we must henceforth put our faith. We must no longer believe in paradises which, should they exist, nevertheless remain inaccessible to our material frame, refuting the necessity of the latter, rather than explaining it. On the contrary, we must believe in the sanctity of the material world and in a day, which will unfailingly come, when it will be given us to live a new life on Earth. Not on the socio-economic plane, but in the very apprehension of what presently in our eyes remains an inextricable and distressing mystery. It is in this that we must believe and in the name of which we must speak when we lend shape to dreams of the future. New arts and sciences, new conquests of space? Doubtlessly, but the motive will no longer be that by which we are now led, and the effect will differ. For our consciousness will first become another, and with the emergence of new faculties within us the future will become apparent.
Our first dream of the future, and the most constant, concerns without question harmony among men. However, this cannot be Firmly established unless the instincts of war and domination, the sentiments of superiority of one race over another, or of the human species over others, fall from us like leaves from a tree. There can be no definitive peace on Earth until the poisoned sources of violence, which is the incapacity to understand the truth of others, have first dried up within us. We cannot become united by way of coercion. We must begin by loving one another. An elementary truth which our politicians assiduously avoid mentioning, as if it would be a matter of something shameful or outdated. But, how shall we set about effectuating this fusion of ethnic groups if we reject the sole power which might help us? Do we not see that, if we retain in our hearts ferments of rancour or rivalry, real peace cannot be established here on Earth? A truce, yes, while awaiting new outbursts of hatred; not, however, the abiding harmony towards which we aspire. It is a matter of first mastering within ourselves the forces which, until now and notwithstanding the ethical precepts set forth by our greatest teachers, we have blindly followed—
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for moral principles affect only the surface personality and not the depths of being. They mark out the retaining walls and low lands of our consciousness, but do not dispel the beguiling darkness of our subconscious, or of that which perishes there unbeknown to us. From the law of love we must proceed to love itself, to the sentiment of love. Not to be accomplished from one day to the next, a long and patient labour doubtlessly awaits us, during which we shall purify and refine our psychological being and the movements by which it is animated, so that the harmony, liberty, equality and fraternity of all mankind become truly possible.
The way in which we define ourselves in relation to ourselves and in relation to others must as a consequence be the first to change. This has nothing to do with political systems or the creeds of churches. Both have been of valuable service, providing succour as well as leading us astray. It is now for us to discover a formulation which reaches to the roots of our being, awakening there a new sensibility, of which we yet have no intimation. It is a matter, in effect, of entering into ourselves to the source of life, and of unsealing the fountains of serene and invincible potency. Only then can there reign peace on Earth: from within our being, not from without, by an irresistible inner act, rather than by the incoherent fury of an external act.
The time will certainly come when we shall be capable of this, as it is certain that the conflicts in which we confront each other only serve to prepare in us the matrix from which a new light must appear. The blows which strike us are like those of the sculptor who shapes from unhewn rock the dream of a beauty which would otherwise remain underbodies. But the time will soon come when the shaping hand will no longer deal blows and begin to caress us—when we shall be ready on all levels of our individual and collective being to live in peace.
That is our first dream. There is another, born of this century, its fervour rekindled each day. Often linked to the idea of harmony between peoples, it is, like the latter, yet obscured by the arbitrariness of our habitual reasoning. We are correspondingly less able to decipher it the more it intoxicates us. And we invest our energies in it without imagining what its realization may imply.
We speak of exploring and conquering Space without any notion as to what space really is. We believe that it will suffice to launch
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increasingly powerful rockets and to discover the means of voyaging in space without aging, as we formerly launched ships to sea in search of hypothetical continents from which to derive new riches. The sidereal empire appears to us as a vast Eldora do where, waging battles against celestial savages, we shall be able tomorrow, as impenitent colonizers, to extend Earth's power, unless the savages prove stronger than us, or unless we should vanish in the attempt.
But this idea of waging a war of appropriation against the stars is linked to an obsolete mentality which would entirely disappear with the establishment of peace on a planetary scale. A world government whose only objective were to be the heightening of our appetites and their fulfilment, to the detriment of other beings in Space, would in no way be a government founded on the ideal of that peace we endeavour to achieve. Should we indeed realize peace on Earth, it stands to reason that we shall be at peace with all that exists in the universe. There can otherwise be no true peace; for, world peace must be the result of a complete mastery of our brutal hungers and our tormenting fears. It must translate outwardly an inner state which, as improbable as it may today seem, is nevertheless that towards which humanity gropingly progresses.
Given these conditions, it is futile to imagine a conquest of cosmic scope by means of force. This relic of our ancient barbarity must be struck from our plans. It is but a habit of thought, an antiquated tendency of our nature for which there will be no place when we really are able to reach the stars, a science-fiction phantasy, probably with the sole objective of inducing the collective consciousness to acknowledge the existence of other thinking beings.
In fact, however, we know nothing about the way of thinking of those beings. We do not know how they view the universe. We readily ascribe to them civilizations which, although perhaps in certain respects more advanced than ours, only reproduce our values by magnifying or repudiating them, whereas they may be governed by other planetary laws, by another vision and utilization of the. universe. That being the case, how could we be so childish as to want to confront and subjugate them? We shall only be able to cross certain cosmic limits when we have first surmounted certain limitations of our own nature.
The secrets which scientists will in the future discover go hand in hand with the changes which are at this moment being prepared
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in us. They will contribute thereto, on the one hand giving rise to them, on the other, resulting of them. And these secrets will become less and less equivocal, will bear increasingly less the mark of the desire which leads us to see ourselves as the centre of the universe and incites us to take up arms and impose our abusive conviction.
Just as there will be no true harmony between peoples until a harmonization of our inner being has first been achieved, there will be no veritable access to stellar depths without our having changed significantly within. We are at present still too superficial to view more than the surface of things. Entering more deeply into ourselves, we shall discover the region of the heart, and inevitably our view will be different. Rather than taking a stand against the universe, we shall quite simply feel love towards it; rather than uniting ourselves against each other, we shall love each other, living, thinking and feeling in a light whose gentleness and radiance will gradually dispel the inner night in which we have wandered for millennia.
A new mode of thought must therefore appear—not merely a new social, philosophical or religious system, but a new manner of employing our intelligence, the efflorescence of a new comprehension of the world and ourselves. It is this inner development which we neglect to consider when we endeavour to see further than the actual state of our progress. We view the future in our image, rather than viewing ourselves in the image of the future. We doubt that the state to which we most aspire will ever come to pass: how, being as we are, shall we succeed in embodying the prophecies which inspire our advancement and the promises we repeatedly make to ourselves? We disregard what is most important: why would we continue forever to be what we are? On the contrary, does not all evidence show that we have never remained the same and that we have not ceased to grow and develop our faculties? If this were otherwise, no new stage would have been reached since the birth of homo sapiens and the history of the Earth would have ended in the Neanderthal age. Do we really believe that there would be no difference between Neanderthal man's understanding of the world and our own, that his sensitivity and manner of expressing it would be comparable to ours? There is no doubt that
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we share with him certain elements of our nature, as he is our point of departure on the path of the mental development. But the movement which carries us is ascending and even should we still bear resemblance to Neanderthal man, he is no longer our equal. The powers latent in them, in particular the power of thought, have developed in us, thereby creating an irreversible distance. In like manner, the powers which are latent in us, the images of which appear before us in the form of nostalgia or hope, must in their turn develop, rendering possible in a natural way what we could never realize with our present means: an unfailing peace on Earth, a serene communion with the cosmos.
One speaks in this regard of mutation, believing that it will begin now and asking how to set about it, whereas we have never ceased to be involved in this process, believing that the transition is taking place now, whereas the voyage began with the beginning of things. If today the goal is vaguely evoked, it is because we have a premonition of it, or rather, because it is taking shape in us, interwoven in all that we are, issuing from all that we have been. We need not really change, for we have always been in the process of changing. Rising out of ourselves, of what we take ourselves to be, we shall be transformed and look with the eyes of truth on all that is on Earth and in Space.
Thus, what we must first know—and acknowledge—is not only that things will change because we ourselves shall change, but that we are changing at this very moment, that our entire history and, in fact, the entire history of the Earth, is one of perpetual change. It is in this sense that Paul's statement to the Corinthians (I, 15, 51), "...we shall all be changed", should be understood. This does not mean that a metamorphosis must occur in a brief space of time in some distant future, but that we are all in the process of being transformed. A time will come when we understand this, for we shall then see how different we are from man as he now is and recognize that this difference has resulted of a very patient work of which we are today largely unaware.
We bear the seeds of an apotheosis about which we have no idea, but which prefigures even our most insignificant individual and collective acts. Whatever we may do, we advance towards this apotheosis, for all lives lead to what we call God, to His birth in
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this world and through His birth to the transfiguration of what we call the world.
But the birth towards which we work is not, as formerly, that of a son of God, of an avatar, a messiah. It is the advent of a new species, of a divine race heralded by the messiahs. It is not the appearance of man as god or of god as man which we must expect, but the manifestation of humanity as god. For that is what we bear in ourselves and its embryo has been growing over the centuries. That is what is taking form in us and, in order to grow, nourishes itself on us and increasingly suffuses us. But, we are no more able to view God in the womb of humanity, than the child in the womb of its mother can be seen with the naked eye. We see the womb of the woman fill out and know from experience when she will give birth. But, there is no comparable experience for humanity and the hour of its deliverance. And then, the mother gives birth to a being similar to herself and the members of her species, whereas humanity must bring forth a race which will bear no such resemblance.
Upon reflection, the problem appears insoluble—even though nature provides no dearth of examples of manifestations extending over several stages in which life assumes one form after the other before becoming firmly established. (But, does life ever become definitively established?) However, just as a butterfly dreams in the chrysalis, in the same way a being in us dreams of the light, a being which, although different from us, will be our fulfilment— and which will perhaps in its turn continue in another form. A single law presides over the conception and the flight of a butterfly. Why should we consider it to be impossible that an analogous law—or the same law applied to another level of being—would preside over the conception and flight of the luminous mystery dwelling in us?
The goals we pursue are implicated in this change. They are its precursory signs. But we can no more reach those goals in our present state, than the butterfly can fly within the chrysalis in which its wings are spun. We can only foster the dream until it becomes so poignant as to awaken us. Just as the butterfly must change in dimension to become complete and liberate the flight which was until then sealed by the obscurity of the chrysalis, we must change in dimension for our present goals which now appear as indistinct
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glimmers from beyond to become realities. We capture the luster of our future through the darkness which covers us. We give it names which are so many watchwords to orient our growth. But we cannot define this future truth of our being towards which we progress. And the names by which we think it can be designated have meaning for us only in our language and we remain unaware of what they mean in themselves.
Although, for example, harmony between peoples and the conquest of space have many images which come to us from the future, we do not know their future reality, what they represent and how they will then appear. Their both ineluctable and impossible character shows, in any case, that they fall within the province of a nature which differs from that which at present encompasses us, and once we have crossed the boundary which separates us from them, they will appear in a different light.
Our socio-political or scientific formulations are but attempts to circumscribe a goal which is neither socio-political nor scientific, but pertains to the mysticism of evolution—which itself has but little to do with our religions and spiritualities. Through our faith in God we, in effect, strive towards a future state of our being. What we call God and what we worship according to one Scripture or another is only an appreciative perception of the consciousness which develops in us, as within a chrysalis, but which can only unfold beyond our present obscurity.
However, to envisage this harmony between peoples as something beyond us in our present state must not prevent us from aspiring and working towards it. Simply, the time has perhaps come in which we must understand the nature of what separates us from it so as to remove it. The obstruction does not lie in our ideals, or in their lack of breadth, nor does it reside in their incompatibility, which sets us against each other. That is only the surface of the question, for there is something else at the root. And if we do not strike at the root, the same phenomena will continue to repeat themselves in the name of one creed or another. If we aspire to a change of states, we must change in nature.
Our aggressiveness is a legacy of all that has gone before and constitutes us: animal ferocity, the raging violence of the forces of Nature. If we go beyond Nature and the animal, if we go beyond the planetary genetic code, we shall be the vessels of an immutable
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peace. All our pacifist dreams are fatally shrouded in the carnivorous shadows of the terrestrial past. How is it that we do not see that we must first leave the darkness before hoping to realize genuine harmony?
It is thus not through non-violence that we shall resolve the problem of our innate violence. For non-violence is a form of retaliation, a more subtle form of violence: it attempts to obtain through moral force what is generally achieved by the exertion of physical force. It covers the adversary with contempt by showing him that he takes recourse to unjust means. It condemns him, degrades him to an ethically inferior position. Consequently, how can non-violence ever result in peace, which necessarily implies the nullification of the alienating hierarchy according to which nations exist in relation to one another and in the unspoken name of which some endeavour to rule the world, while others are lowered to the status of servants, if not slaves? The gulf which is opened between the just and the unjust, the distinction imposed between superior and inferior, run counter to the goal of which non-violence would claim to be emissary, if not incarnation. Non-violence is neither peace, nor the spirit of peace. There is no love in it, only a noli me tangere which accompanies the challenge: I will allow you to strike me, I will even allow you to assault and kill me, but you will be punished by God and will be the shame of nations. Where is the love in this morbid narcissism? Where is the basis of a true peace, of a veritable union, in such a haughty alienation?
One should not forget that ours is a double nature. And as long as we live in duality, as adroitly as we may disguise it, we shall be divided against ourselves, divided between the shadow which we cast and the sun which illuminates us from within. And as regards our societies, we shall continue to follow the Roman adage: "If you want peace, prepare for war", whether this be carried out on the psychological or the material level.
This does not prevent us from truly aspiring to peace, from imagining a golden age in which our perpetual dissensions would finally be quelled. But this harmony between peoples such as we dream of would rest upon a superior code of ethics, the secret of which we have not yet found and the goal of which would be the improvement of our nature. In reality, however, it is not a question of improving our nature, but of transforming it if we wish to
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achieve a true peace. Further refining ourselves, this code of ethics would only succeed in refining our aggressiveness; it would not eliminate it. For we would still be compelled by the commandments of universal nature, the first of which we know to be the struggle for life, whether on an atomic or a cosmic scale. There are what astrophysicists term cannibal galaxies, and the hypothesis of the black holes in which all utterly vanishes is another example of this value which we find in ourselves in the form of conquering fervour and blind rage in which some are exterminated and others subjugated.
There is no doubt that we have progressed much since the plundering forays and acts of vengeance of our first tribes. But it is still the same movement which prevails in our contemporary genocides and persists in the name of this higher morality. All would appear to be pacified, although only suppressed, continuing in a more deceptive light, to ferment beneath benedictions and one day erupt, carrying everything away.
Regardless of how fine it might be, a moral formula would, therefore, not suffice. It is necessary that our entire being become involved, not merely our intellect. For this, a change must occur in the elements of our being, a change which is scarcely dependent on ourselves, but rather on the law which presides over evolution, and consequently on God as expressed by that law. It is necessary to dominate the universal nature in us if we wish to accede to that which surpasses it. We must be given the means to leave it behind, to wrest ourselves from its fundamental bipolarity, to extricate ourselves from the chrysalis in which we doubt our future flight.
As long as we are enclosed in the chrysalis and unable to fly, we shall only be able at times to sense the growth of our wings and to suffer all the more for not being able to open them. As long as we are men and governed by mental laws, and thus are based on duality, we will not know the peace to which we aspire to raise the world and will continue to be haunted by its elusiveness.
Peace is not inherent to human nature because it is not a part of universal Nature. This our reason must accept if we really want to know peace and find the path leading to it. We must discover the quality of another nature in ourselves and let it act in us so as to become other than we now are. It is the stage which follows the
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chrysalis. Or, to take up Plato's image of the cave, it is the light from outside upon which Nature compels us to turn our backs. To free ourselves from the shadows which beset us, we must leave the cave of thoughts based on illusion. We must either emerge into broad daylight, or the light must spread in us, dispelling the shadows and illuminating the place we live.
Religions and spiritualities have until now provided us with a presentiment of the mystery, enabled us to consent to, or at times to escape from it. But, for all that, nothing has changed. For the cave still holds us captive; we are still enclosed within the chrysalis. Or, more precisely, our perception of the world remains the same, even though our conceptions of it have differed over the centuries. This means, first, that our brain is still the same as at the appearance, some forty thousand years ago, of homo sapiens sapiens.
For, the brain is the cave, the chrysalis. Consequently, it is the brain, the mental, which must know the revolution from which ensue the changes which we are at present powerless to initiate. The main and centralizing instrument of our perception of the world, it is probable that it is in the brain that the initial movements of our mutations are localized. It is even certain that a spontaneous activation of the cells of our brain—of which only a very small percentage is now utilized—will entail a considerable upheaval in our manner of comprehending space and time, and in our self-perception. An artificial activation, such as, for example, medicine and chemistry make possible, would entail uncertain results, as there would not necessarily be a correspondence with the psychological development which must serve as the basis of transformation. That is like wishing to contain the ocean in a vase; the vase would shatter and the ocean remain unknowable. And that is indeed the point: we wish to attain to a state of being and consciousness so as to embrace the infinite, something that is only possible at the conclusion of an organic process, and not by way of stimulation by scientific means.
Far from discouraging us, this perspective should awaken a new confidence. For if nature has been able to work out the means of advancing consciousness from the homo sapiens (Neanderthal man) to the homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon man), clarifying the mental perception of the universe, there is no reason why it should not proceed to perfect the means of progressing to another sphere of consciousness.
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The complexity of our brain is no impediment and does not preclude greater complexity. Beyond the investigations of material science and the explorations of spiritual knowledge, we must now learn to discern a new horizon attended by neither mantra nor equation.
Equations and mantras have indeed their utility and even respond to an absolute necessity of our being. Through them we become conscious that there lies at least one other dimension beyond those in which we live. They cannot, however, establish this dimension on Earth. Their power, which in itself is considerable, goes no further than the possibility of giving us a general idea of another, more real, form of Reality to which we are subtly brought nearer. They develop our capacity to make an inventory of the workings of the universe, whether on monitors in laboratories or on the inner screen of our psyche. However, as high as they may enable us to raise ourselves, they cannot transform us. Mantras and equations only prepare us for change, the first effects of which could make themselves felt in the human brain by gradually organizing a new apprehension of the universe.
Believers await the coming of a God who will exalt them to his Kingdom, not conceiving of the manner—if we wish to retain the image of this hope—in which He will lead them there. It is from within that He will act: by touching and casting more light on the cells of our brain. Otherwise we could not discover His presence. Lacking the appropriate sensory instruments, we would be unaware of His coming, of His actions, and would continue to blindly mark time at the gates to His Kingdom.
An activation of the cells of our brain would doubtlessly have as an initial result the establishment of silence in our mind, which today is as confusingly boisterous as an Oriental bazaar, a silencing of the incoherent voices which speak to us and claim to be ours. We would receive the waves of another frequency which, informing us differently regarding the world and ourselves, would change our view, that is to say our consciousness
Let us pause a moment at this contingency and describe the possible effects. Without yet leaving the mental world, we would be detached from it and, consequently, would think of it differently precisely insofar as thought would be different and we would receive
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and express it differently. The ties would be naturally and definitively severed by which we are presently bound to an entire system of sensations and thoughts expressing only desire or refusal, avidity or dislike, attraction or fear and repugnance. These are the permanent themes of our existence, and as long as their iron rule over us does not slacken, we cannot imagine that we shall ever be able to elude them.
That, of course, can only be accomplished once we have acknowledged that we are not the true authors of our thought, but merely the medium for waves emanating from a universal Intelligence or cosmic Mental which thinks the world in its wholeness and in its least significant elements as expressed through our intervention and that of all the innumerable forms of the whole, whether infinitesimal or immeasurably large. There are, in effect, no isolated phenomena. Everything is interdependent at one level or another, as contemporary Science has begun to acknowledge and prove. But we must go further and think, as it were, that we do not think ourselves. This step must be taken in order to emancipate ourselves from the yoke of the deceptive mentality in which we involuntarily take ourselves to be the authors—the accursed authors—of our thoughts, sensations and acts, or even of our physical appearance, when, in truth, we are woven in the single universal fabric.
Without leaving duality, the basis of our mental perception of the world, we would no longer live in terms of division, but of complementarily, and the peace between peoples would inevitably follow. Having eluded us as long as we were restricted to a divisive mental consciousness, an ineluctable and sovereign peace would prevail as soon as we entered a unifying mental consciousness, of which that peace would be the symbol and the embellishment.
It is most probably for this reason that in many traditions peace reigns on Earth only at the end of the world, in other words: after the perception which we presently have of the world has been surpassed. But, until now it has been impossible for us to imagine anything other than a miraculous occurrence, both frightful and sublime, a sacred cataclysm, an apocalypse, to raise before us the symbol of our mutation. Because events are confused in our vision, we have believed that it would take place in a single day, whereas the activation of the cells of our brain may well take centuries
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before linking us to a higher plane of universal consciousness from which, without ceasing to be human, mental creatures, we shall perceive the universe from within. Dominating the continued double current of desire and refusal, we shall live in detachment and equanimity, the first expression of which will be peace.
No longer stimulated by desire and refusal, the relationships which we shall maintain with beings and things will no longer be the same. Psychologically, we shall effortlessly experience the detachment and equanimity from which our present wisdom makes the impossible substance of the only real source of happiness. We shall no longer communicate in the same manner with the world or with ourselves. A barrier will be removed against which we now continually collide, and we shall partake of an outer and inner freedom of which we yet have no concept, although it is prefigured in the serenity to which men of God, seers, yogis, raise themselves. Were these latter not the heralds of what must happen to us (the reason for which their teaching moves us so much and shapes us), they would only be aberrations of Nature.
The world as it is today, no longer speaking to us, will have lost all power of attraction, both positive and negative. Disparate voices will no longer be heard and we shall then be detached- Our vices and virtues will vanish. We shall live beyond what we call Good and Evil, not to commit with impunity what would today be viewed as culpable by our courts of law or supraterrestrial judges, but because, oriented towards other values, these things, whether good or bad, will no longer tempt us.
Once our brain has begun to function differently, other laws and another instinct will govern us and our participation in the cosmic manifestation will change. Detached from its present expression, we shall decipher a higher, although not ultimate, expression according to superior means. It would be futile to attempt to define the latter, which elude our thinking, but one may nevertheless assume that they would be founded on a transparency of being, as transparency is the mark of detachment. And the affect of that transparency may be physical as well as psychological. If, in effect, one can consider any given object—an idea, a sentiment, a material thing—without experiencing desire or refusal, without existing in relation to that object, the inner transparency which one then experiences can extend to the outer being, to the physical
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body, and subtly lend it the meaning of its non-existence as an individual entity and its boundlessness as a conscious element of the Infinite. That, moreover, is the avowed objective of ascetic disciplines. It is this state of consciousness to which ascend the true yogis who, because without ego in their realization of the truth of being, are the unknown heralds of the future of humanity.
Given such conditions in which the groundwork is done by those souls consecrated to spiritual research, it follows of itself that peace, the embryo of which grows in us at the cost of our suffering, is inevitable and that it will greatly surpass our ideals. It is born of an inner peace which nothing can trouble, of a beatific detachment in which one experiences neither desire nor fear, where duality continues to reign, but without entailing discord: a duality at the background of which unity can be anticipated. This is the same unity as found in the Indian archetype of Purusha and Prakriti, of Spirit, the immovable witness, and active Nature. In Purusha, the work of Prakriti is reflected without troubling his peace or obscuring his transparency. The soul contemplates the universe and contains it.
Advancing one stage, a yet higher mystery is revealed: the soul is only the imperturbable witness of the works of Nature, it is the will which animates Nature, Nature is its executrix; Spirit and Nature are one, two coexistent aspects of the One. In the course of another stage of evolution, it may be possible that this mode of consciousness will develop on Earth in such a way that there will exist beings for whom the cosmos—what is mentally perceived as cosmos—will truly appear as the radiant body of God.
But we must first complete the stage in which, as our consciousness detaches itself from the objects which presently obsess it, we will become the silent and blessed witnesses of the universe and will learn the language of transparency. Enlightened by the activation of the cells of our brain, we shall no longer see that which today enchants us, or indeed hurts and so strictly limits us. The cosmic plan will appear to us clearly. The goal of life will be luminous, and we shall advance without fear or desire for ourselves or for anyone. Something else will see, will aspire and live. We shall know the transparency of the Spirit. We will be the immutable witnesses of Nature in an ecstasy which will both contain and surpass all.
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Such is doubtlessly the next stage of earthly existence, of which our dreams are but a feeble premonition. We believe to work here to establish a durable peace amongst peoples. This peace which so many of us judge to be utopia is, in fact, but the distant echo of what is being prepared in us and which depends not on a socio-political process, but on the slow and patient movement in which our faculties are being perfected without our knowledge. Peace will come, and will forever be. Nothing will be able to depose it when once, through the play of evolution, we will have climbed to a new level in the consciousness of the world and enlightenment of the mind.
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The first problem to arise thus concerns the organization of peace and the form of national and world government which will be established. The response to this problem is, in fact, simpler than it would initially appear to be. More and more children endowed with faculties superior to what presently represents our highest intelligence are bound to be born in the coming decades. Geniuses? If one wishes, although the term refers to the notion of exceptional individuals—Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Mozart, Napoleon, Einstein—in whom the collective unconscious culminates, without the individual members of the collective being able to equal them. In this case, on the other hand, the men of a new kind will be the prototypes of the humanity to come.
Externally resembling the rest of the collective, they will surpass it, or more precisely, will be able to carry it along to what are now inaccessible, even inconceivable, heights. They will be the first to leave the chrysalis, and nothing will be able to prevent this from taking place. Nothing will be able to countervail this luminous outcome of our evolution in the darkness. Their ideas will revolutionize our way of seeing and will have a character of indisputable evidence which today no idea possesses, as the networks which we must follow to express them most clearly are still too obscure and too ponderous.
The networks among these new men are bound to have in part disappeared, or have been purified, and the thought to which they will give voice will possess an irresistible brilliance. Their understanding of the social world and of the sidereal universe, as of human nature and what fetters it, of its powers and its aim, will be more complete. Being more intuitive, this thought will have no need to undergo the scrutiny of reason. It will encompass a larger number of elements at the same time and will henceforth no longer be subject to doubt, nor coupled with general ignorance. Certainty will characterize it, as well as what one might term neither modesty nor humility, but luminous effacement: the natural effacement of personality to the advantage of the truth which formulates personality, of the imperceptible origins of this truth and of the greater, as yet unmanifested truth.
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This luminous self-effacement will doubtlessly be the distinctive mark of these new beings. The will to power will be replaced in them by the impersonal will of love and truth, as is the case for the great spiritual masters whose examples punctuate our history. Not that power must be refused them or contested, on the contrary. They will simply have truly begun to think in a different way, to express by their acts and their words the state in which they will live and which we might describe as a state of lasting grace.
This can easily be inferred from the behaviour of beings who over the millennia have appeared in the world in order to enlighten us as to the profound meaning of our fate, and whose lives and teachings have given rise to our great religions, without our having yet understood that they were above all the pioneers and bards of a purely solar consciousness which must pervade us and gradually lead to our transformation.
What should we expect of these beings whom we shall engender? Having arisen of us, and thus like us, they will nonetheless be open to higher truths, to those truths which our best teachings endeavour to inculcate and cultivate. This will naturally marginalize them—and it may be that in the beginning some will have to suffer a general lack of understanding, or attempted repression. However, that which will function differently in them will, in fact, protect them from any lack of understanding shown by their milieu, in such a way that they will be able to manifest with increasing freedom the new consciousness of which they will be the instruments.
It is probable that, in the beginning, the wave which will bring them to the shores of our humanity will not break, shattering all our structures, but rather will slake our thirst and assuage us, even if it proves to be disconcerting. Comparable to the first rays of dawn, they will infiltrate us to provide us with a new vision. If they were to express at once all that onto which the doors of our being will be opened, we would no more be able to follow them than Neanderthal men could have followed Christ if the latter were to have manifested himself among them. We would perish beneath the deluge of future splendour. Our night cannot be abruptly superseded by the solar zenith. The light must subtly spread and assert itself following the same rhythm as the day. We must therefore understand that their acts and thoughts, as disconcerting as they may
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appear to us, will have a balsamic effect and gradually prepare in us a greater receptivity to the Light.
No doubt there will be something of a maternal nature about them, even though they will be our children—the influence of the Mother Goddess, as we would express it in today's language—for them to turn their attention to us, to prepare us for their vision and enable us to realize it. For they will have a perception of the world and earthly existence which has never been described and which will naturally exceed that which has been recorded by the most inspired men. But they will differ from the latter in that they will not have to take recourse to asceticism to attain to and maintain a higher consciousness. The catharsis of which visionaries have made a strict rule has, in effect, as objective to enable them to raise themselves above Nature—while in the case of the new beings this perception will be purely and simply replaced by another, more complete and true. It will therefore not always be necessary to take recourse to the stimulation of the inner being by psycho-physical practices in order to open oneself to this dimension, as yogis currently do. This dimension will no longer be occult. It will be part of the spheres of external consciousness for those new beings who, from then onwards, will change its significance in our eyes.
Always reserved for souls of fire who dedicate themselves to God, to the elect and extremely rare beings who, from generation to generation maintain, usually well away from the world, the flame of a sacrifice to what we call God and which we distinguish from the world, the opening of this dimension will be a spontaneous phenomenon, free from both outer and inner rites. It will not be attached to religions—of which, however, it will be the supreme accomplishment. And this is doubtlessly why nearly everywhere the bell of our beliefs seems to be tolling, and also why we have a premonition that no new creeds will succeed them.
But this end of religions, this twilight of the gods, does not open, as we imagine, onto the great deserted night of atheism or agnosticism. On the contrary, a more luminous form of knowledge must then come which will not have need of scriptural support, but will be, as it were, the continuation and confirmation. It will also not need to propose new religions, because it will not limit itself—and will not limit God—to the religious and spiritual plane alone.
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The first major change will no doubt consist in that. For these new beings will be born everywhere; we do not expect them to only appear in ashrams and temples. They will be born of us on all levels of society, will be raised by us, will grow in a human environment and will not have need of the propitious climate of reputedly holy places to cultivate in themselves a consciousness other than our own. They will not even need to believe in what we call God, to want Him and live Him. More precisely, let us say that they will not need to reject this world, because their understanding will be of a different order and they will be able to work in it differently.
First of all, as their consciousness will be vaster, the present foundation of personality will be abolished. Contrary to what we might believe, their difference—their "superiority"—will not be expressed by the expansion of the mental being, or the inflation of the vital being in the limits within which we are presently confined, but in the surpassing of these limits. No exaltation of the ego, therefore, but its quashing. If they are to be greater, this cannot happen by being struck by gigantism in the framework of our present faculties, but by surpassing that framework and availing of other faculties.
This will even involve the loss of the sense of ego, to the extent that the restrictive framework in which our days are passed is delimited by it. It is possible that during the childhood of these new beings, that is, precisely during the period in which the ego is crystallizing in us, the meaning of a new dimension will become clear to them and curb the crystallization process. One should understand that this would be comparable to removing the supports of a plant, or the scaffolding of a house, and that the being must be of an exceptional inner vigour to not collapse, his consciousness must be able to pilot the ship of life without recourse to the instruments to which we are accustomed. The ego is the hub of our days. If we were to be deprived of it too early, we would collapse. Another axis must have been gradually created in the course of our lives for us to be able to dispense with this backbone of our psychology.
For this reason we must envisage that there are certain beings among us who over the millennia have sufficiently developed so
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as to do without what for us remains indispensable. Returning for a new life and awakening among us, they will bear an outer resemblance to us, but will be internally constructed according to another plan in order to open a new era and to carry us along towards a new phase of earthly and cosmic manifestation.
Free of the sense of me and mine, they will seek nothing for themselves, but will be the docile and blessed instruments of the Force which they will sense in themselves. Their works will inspire in us a different behaviour in all spheres. For they will appear in all spheres at the same time and, which should be emphasized, not only in the religious sphere where the doors will be unbolted for them, the axis of aspiration to God having been replaced by that of his realization in all.
This rendering sacred of the profane will fill the chasm which separates Science and Knowledge, which is only a consequence of our mental duality. The same purity, the same light and intensity which today seems to be the prerogative of the mystics will be regained through them in all areas of life and its human expression.
If it is logical to imagine that the first to be born among us will necessarily be those who in past times attained, or at this moment attain to, the plenitude of their being through the spiritual knowledge of the Transcendent, who have instilled, or are in the process of instilling, in themselves the permanent sense of this transcendence, it is also logical to imagine that it is this sense which will activate the cells of their brains and characterize all their undertakings.
Whether they devote themselves to social or technical matters, whether they be politicians, develop an entirely new astrophysics or invent new forms of knowledge, create new forms of artistic expression, advance medicine and the mastery of the laws of Matter (the last two are related because the knowledge of the body goes hand in hand with the knowledge of planetary substance and cosmic material), it is always and only this sense which will be manifested by the ancient hermits, sages of the past, all those beings who, withdrawn from the world to mountains, forests or deserts, continue to work as they formerly did and are still end eavouring to fix in the collective consciousness the elements of its superhuman future.
One must imagine a thousand Christs or Buddha's or Krishnas being born on earth at the same time, possessing a more complete
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wisdom than that which the Buddha, Christ or Krishna formulated, living with us on all levels and in all possible contexts. And, one must also imagine that these thousands will become tens of thousands and thousands of thousands. Their growing numbers will suffice to prove to us that we shall also attain to their state and thus radically overturn our view of life.
It will be comparable to an invasion of the Earth by supra-terrestrial beings who will teach us by example to live as they do in order to give us the freedom of the Eternal and Infinite. Thus will the prophesy of Sri Aurobindo be realized. The soul will take control of life on Earth, progressively establishing the Kingdom of God.
Initially, we shall perhaps not understand, believing in a simple perfection of our best qualities in these beings, and shall err in regard to them. But they will be prepared for this. Then, seeing them born from us and multiplying and fostering a truly new world, we shall pass from incomprehension to wonder. And without putting forward our habitual feelings and thoughts, no longer bound to our traditions, we shall abandon ourselves to their vision and allow ourselves to be carried along by the Force which we recognize in them.
What is more, if these beings are to be born tomorrow, they are now already very near. Without our imagining it, the vision of this future is being instilled in us and taking hold of our dreams so that we may recognize it when it is realized. A presentiment dwells in us and in some an awareness is beginning to develop. Through them, the way is being prepared for the manifestation, while behind the veil in the matrix of the future, the new beings who are to incarnate are organizing themselves. Thus, one might qualify them as supra-terrestrial: they are as above the Earth, to which they belong.
At this very moment they are marking out "above" the course they will follow here on Earth. They are there, behind and beside us, guiding us towards their appearance. There are now among us those who, whatever they do, are visited by certain details which they transcribe in all ways accessible to them. As if endowed with more subtle and more powerful receivers, they receive the waves of the future—a sign that Time is reversing, for until now we have always
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lived in the cult of the past. The notion of Time is reaching its outer limit in them. Observing the change which takes effect in themselves, they automatically infer that there will be a greater change in the future. And in them the curtain is raised to reveal something other than what we foresee. These are the first messengers.
It is not necessarily a question of the disciples of Sri Aurobindo, whose teaching has begun to influence the faith of the world by turning no longer towards the reality of an immutable beyond, but towards the realization here on Earth of that beyond—no longer towards the transcendent Spirit, but towards the transcendental spiritualization of Matter. In fact, it is not here a question of an intellectual adherence or of a conviction of the vital which is provoked by the power of his word. If his action is still involved, it is in a much more subtle manner.
The concept of a divine evolution on Earth which he champions is, in effect, general; whereas, what is now happening is particular and, providing points of detail, does not exactly correspond to the idea. It is like a change of code which takes place in some. Images permeate them, mingle with their ordinary mental activities and gradually replace them. They appear to be indestructible; whatever the outer being might do, they resist anything which would formerly have obscured the psyche. They come from the future and are instilled in the collective unconscious. And, as no movement of the individual external nature can any longer submerge them, no movement of the collective nature is able to destroy them. There is something irrevocable about them. They are the beginnings of the future we shall know, whatever our present may be, whatever the conditions of human life on Earth may be today. And we know that these conditions are indeed the worst.
If, whatever they do, the details of the vision imprint themselves more and more clearly in the external consciousness of these men, if they become stable and an integral part of their daily thoughts, it necessarily follows that the same phenomenon can—and must— be produced on a world scale and that nothing will prevent the future from dawning in the collective consciousness, even though we believe all prospects to be doomed.
This is of capital importance, and we must not hesitate to emphasize it and draw the necessary conclusions. It suffices that at this time other images of the future than those of our annihilation
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are inscribed in the consciousness of a handful of men for humanity to be saved. It is, in fact, the sign that we are reaching a threshold and that the entire race, from which these men differ not at all, has become capable of living something else.
The waiting has come to an end. The eternal Future is at our doors. At the time when the end of the world is being announced, there are among us those who see and experience that something else will begin. This is for them neither an idea nor a belief. It is fact and reality. In them, the future projects itself in advance. Greater than the union with the eternal Present, which is the actual summit of consciousness, and reposing on it, they discover the union with the eternal Future. Without inevitably forcing themselves to exercise an asceticism to attain it, they will find themselves in yoga not with the eternal Present which we call God, but with the eternal Future, to which we have as yet given no name. And, it is this spontaneous yoga which will enable them to observe without trembling our preparations for the end of the world, and to see therein something else.
The end of the world is an ineluctability if the world is governed by Death—which no one would contest. Had we lived in an entirely different manner from the beginning of time, raising other civilizations, discovering and exploiting other material resources, vital and mental, glimpsing with other eyes the faces of the Divinity, we would nonetheless have been driven one day against what now lies before us.
We must not tell ourselves that the end of the world is the punishment for our ignorance and mistakes. We must learn to discern therein the limit which we have been called upon to reach once a certain space of terrestrial consciousness has been prepared. All that we have experienced and all that we live is exactly what leads us to this line of demarcation: beyond it another world extends— another understanding of the world. We shall go beyond the end of the world. The world of Death will come to an end, and we shall enter the world of Life. Everything leads us to the goal determined by God, which is to recognize Him and to become Him. No other path can lead us there. For all other paths would necessarily pass by the same frontier which is the end of the world, and we would see the old structures characterized by Death collapse and germinate new seeds of the future governed by Life.
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Whatever we may have done, or would be able to do, we should understand that a limit has been set on our odyssey. We can thus imagine an entirely different history for our race, can go so far as to model it on a living allegory of virtue, or of vice (improbable in this sphere of duality), the end of the world will nevertheless be there, just as Death lies in wait for saint and sinner without distinction. Not that it is a matter of a perverse game or of a demiurge who would impose on us a collective limit after having limited us individually—even though this would be the idea which we form and would in fact be the role assigned to and by Death—, but because, if we are to ever go beyond the state of imperfection in which we find ourselves, it goes without saying that we must first reach the limit.
What limits us is in itself limited and can only disappear. If, in fact, the limit was not limited, how would it set limits? So it is with Death, which is our supreme limit. And that is why it will disappear.
If the end of the world were only to be what we negatively foresee, alarming symptoms other than the thermonuclear menace would appear. To begin with, our capacity to project ourselves forward would run dry. Irrespective of level, we would gradually become incapable of conceiving of even the most insignificant new idea. We would no longer be able to either invent or discover. We would not even continue to have desires for the day to come. We would no longer dream and at the same time our memories would weaken. We would be buried alive in a deteriorating consciousness. We would regress into the Night. Our ossified intelligence, its energies depleted, and everything else in us would diminish, to the point of asphyxiation. This would be an inwardly experienced end of the world, much greater and more disastrous than the outward end we foresee. The breath of cosmic Life would little by little withdraw from us. Thought would be eliminated, feelings and emotions would become dull, matter would decompose. All would be paralysed in Death—or, more precisely, in a lower form of Life-consciousness: the same consciousness in which animals live. Man would no longer exist.
The contrary, however, takes place. Even should thought appear to founder, our capacity to conceive of new perspectives has never been greater. Although our sensitivity is becoming atrophied, our
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senses have never been more refined. Even though Matter is disintegrating, it has never been more plastic, or more generous. These are so many signs that another, higher, breath is at the same time entering us. One world recedes, another draws near.
There are still more evident signs. The fact that a voice was raised—that of Sri Aurobindo—at the very time as Night spread over the Earth, and that this voice said, in substance, "Fear nothing, a new day will appear", is a point which has not been sufficiently examined. We have not yet taken note of this synchronization of facts. A being, held by his disciples to be a divine incarnation, has prophesied a higher state of terrestrial life just when all portents of the end of the world come together before us. Fear nothing. Something else is being prepared. That which is to disappear does so only to initiate you into a vaster future.
It matters little if he is forgotten tomorrow, or whether one celebrates him and makes him the Messiah of the End of Time. The real question does not reside therein, and Sri Aurobindo himself was not at all concerned that one glorify him, but only that his vision be embodied. He was the first vessel. It is for others in whom his spirit dwells to receive today the waves which he began to receive and transmit. And beyond the faith which increasing numbers of disciples throughout the world have in his word, there are some who enter into contact with what is at the origin of this word, who, without being aware of it, suddenly find themselves united with this source and traverse dazzling intuitions in which the future appears to them in an entirely different light.
In them, the human vessel is already rounding the cape of the end of time. For, the future is at work in them, and this they discern. According to what they observe in themselves, which need not be accompanied by any fanfare, they know that something else is in movement. Divested of any desire, even the highest, that of merging with the One, removed from the world which they nevertheless inhabit, they find themselves naked, anonymous, impersonal, all together similar to us, were we to combine the worst among men. They are sufficiently submissive to accept to lead, without understanding, any kind of life whatsoever, even should they have to endure the lowest of hells. Not to be sought on our traditional summits, they can be found also in the ranks of the reprobates, doing nothing to attain to God, but allowing God to reach
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them in all. This is perhaps much more difficult, for it requires that one conceal nothing from the Light which descends and to which one offers whatever one does, even should it be a matter of the worst ignominy—which is soon changed and, not having lost awareness of God in what is inconscient of Him, one's being is purified.
A wild dream, or necessity? It may appear improbable to us, but there is nevertheless a strong chance that it is real. Once the process of mutation has begun, there will be absolutely no question of instantaneous metamorphosis, neither for the individual, nor a fortiori for the race, but of a slow and patient work, of which the first signs would have to appear at this time, perhaps where one least expects them. For, they do not involve what one customarily terms spiritual research, but something of much greater vastness, the rendering sacred of the profane, to which allusion was made earlier.
Not that spiritual research must be abandoned. But a new field of exploration opens in our consciousness just where the boundary fades between the profane and the sacred, while awaiting the disappearance of the boundary which Nature has traced between Spirit and Matter. It is important that we accept the idea that God is free to work where He wants and in the manner He chooses, and that this is no longer a time of rituals which sustain our thinking of Him, but that the latter prevail only in the context of the forms of faith which they foster. We must understand that a new era is beginning in which, breaking the dams of religions, He spreads everywhere, nourishing those parts of our being which we did not know could be dedicated to Him, just as we devote to Him the flame in us we call our soul which bows before Him as it rises to Him.
There are too many signs attesting to this bursting of the dams of our religious consciousness for us to dispute it, even though we do not discern towards what it is directed and see therein rather an accident which imperils our civilization. For the fissures are not recent and have become breaches and the entire edifice of religious thought is ready to collapse. What we retain behind its ramparts will surge towards us, submerging us just as a new Deluge.
What is held captive behind the masonry of our intellect is God in His unknown truth. And, if there must be a Deluge, it will be of
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his Light. An inner Deluge, therefore, which will completely change the countryside where our psyche moves. Our ideals and the means of realizing them will be upset in the same way as that which the lower Nature has bequeathed to us, as well as that which is executed through our agency.
Our Good and our Evil must be wrested from us, although they have always allowed us to advance, and even though we cling to them in order to define ourselves and what surrounds us. We must be shorn of all which presently constitutes us and finally appear completely naked before the deluge of the newly rising Sun. This can only be done, in human terms, with an inexhaustible perseverance covering a long period of time, even should the action possess the brightness of lightning for a higher consciousness.
We can doubt or deny, nevertheless, things will be accomplished. We who today attempt to confine Time in mathematical formulae live, as it were, in slow motion what, with another consciousness, appears in another rhythm. This is not to be accounted to our mistakes, but is simply a matter of different planes of consciousness. We live thus in slow motion what is seen in advance by eyes other than our own. We are the content of the vision. And the vision takes place within us in great detail without losing the sense of its totality. Whatever may be the pace at which things occur, it is, one might say, in both cases the same film.
All that we do is, therefore, ineluctable, because seen and experienced in advance, just as the result, unforeseen by us, is ineluctable. The consciousness which perceives things in a different rhythm than our own knows without error what must come, knows that it is a transformation in which we shall become more luminously conscious. All the images are linked together in it and are projected in us. Nothing can be avoided because what we experience comes to us from the Future, and because the interval is due to an acceleration or to a slowing down of the modes of conscious perception.
If we speak today of the acceleration of History, it is because the time draws nearer in which our conception of Time must shatter. We do not suspect what underlies the speed with which we are today progressing in all domains, whereas we formerly crawled along the paths to our discoveries. Or, we speak in frightened terms of a race to the abyss which nothing can bring to a stop. Like
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bolting horses, we appear to rush with increasing vehemence towards our annihilation. If we take note of the inventions and conquests of this century and compare them to those of all other centuries together, we experience vertigo. What does the coming century hold in store for us? What yet more daunting adventure must it set before us? Because this acceleration is continuous, there is reason to imagine that we shall smash down a barrier, demolish a limit in us, and that our greatest future discovery will be related to the nature of Time and to our conception of it.
Formerly, we found but one thing after another and at long intervals. Then, we quickened our stride and found more, discovering things more quickly and at farther reaches, higher and deeper. The movement has not ceased to expand. Now, succeeding the lethargic linearity of former times, there will be a stunning near-simultaneous ness which will necessarily bring about a radical modification of our consciousness. In any case, this is the real significance of the acceleration of History of which we so readily speak: a complex reversal of our consciousness of Time, which will be the ecstatic sign of what today still appears to us as the curse of the End of Time.
Consequently, intensification and multiplication of our Science and Knowledge must characterize the new era without, however, our purely human limits again being crossed. Our power to contain the energy which sustains the universe, to respond to it and to translate it, will increase, and our present structures will be modified.
Ever more things will subsequently happen and their greater significance and number will leave us ever fewer means of recourse to our old structures, or to our present modes of action and reaction. As a dying man gradually and naturally detaches himself from things and penetrates the meaning which had always eluded him, we shall detach ourselves from our values by acquiring others which are superior and bring about a new view of the world, a view which understands and loves. For, everything must be explainable. Everything has a raison d'etre which we shall bring to light. Everything must be able to awaken love. We shall become able to purify our movements of fear, dislike and rejection which prevent us from really knowing ourselves or the universe, or from communicating with the truth of things.
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To the extent to which accelerating Time is shortened, we shall have a better understanding of things, and it will transport us like a river hastening to plunge into the ocean of Eternity. All that we today accomplish and plan testifies to this. We want to know more about our origin and what encompasses us, whether it be called God or not. Nothing suffices us, nothing has ever sufficed us and will not until we have reached in ourselves the point of no return in the knowledge of reality. The secrets will then be revealed one after another. And this must not awaken fear in us. It is necessary that we attain to the requisite inner maturity so as to tolerate knowledge of them. What has been prepared in obscurity will be brought to light, and knowledge will fill us. Within the chrysalis, the butterfly wings have begun to unfold.
What is now taking place behind the planetary scenes is still more difficult to imagine than what will later transpire when things have begun to manifest, when the supraterrestrial actors enter the scene and the first new man appears. For we are at the stage of germination. And no more than we are able to see fiber for fiber the delicate and tenacious spreading of roots in the dark earth, but perceive only subsequently the growth of the plant from the soil, we do not see the network which is being created in the shadow to support tomorrow the birth of a new tree of life.
However, if this tree is to one day rise from the Earth, higher than any which has gone before it or those which will surround it, it is natural to infer that at that time the seed will germinate in our subconscious and that, as we have suggested, the work is already perceptible among some of us. They are the messengers of the Future and are scattered in the four quarters of the world. They take cognizance of the episodes of the mystery already indicated in them in the course of experiences imposed by what we term Destiny, which is, in fact, the meaning of universal Destiny. A Force affects them without having been sought by them. A power supports them without having been invoked by them. An unformulated certainty inspires them with a temerity enabling them to tear away all the masks which comprise the persona, to dismember themselves or even sever heads as did Chinnamasta, the Mother Goddess in her most terrifying Indian representation. For a task falls to them which they are unaware of having chosen but for which they were
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born, namely to destroy everything in themselves in the name of the future humanity, to wipe out all edifices of the past so that only the future may be, to set fire to their conscious and unconscious being, to what they are individually and in relation to the collectivity, to all images without exception of what both stimulates and limits our thinking and sensibility in such a way that subsequently, as the collective unconscious enters through the breaches they have made in their consciousness, we might be able to in turn go beyond the bounds which restrict our perceptions of ourselves and of the world.
Until now such work has fallen to anchorites and yogis. Depersonalized through ecstacy, they could suffuse the collective unconscious with light until its brilliance raised them up. God would appear before them in one form or another and, concentrating on that aspect, their souls united with ours, they would impregnate humanity. The latter, discovering in itself the transcendent truth of the words liberty, or service and sacrifice, activated unknown to us the power which henceforth radiated over the Earth. In effect, a fully awakened consciousness comes into contact with something which has not yet been expressed, awakening it and causing it to shine forth. In the luminous silence of their meditation, ascetics have thus discovered and pressed the keys which trigger off in the collective unconscious to which they were still linked an irreversible process of realization of what those keys represented— once unknown ideas which have become elementary in the succession of Time, solar seeds, larvae of diamond, to which they were to wordlessly give life amidst our tumult and darkness.
There are doubtlessly still today—and perhaps more than before—hermits with closed eyes who with their inner sight contemplate fixedly the abstraction of the truth to come, compelling its embodiment, without concern as to the body it will assume. But the new means will no doubt correspond to the newness to come. And one can certainly presume that beings also exist now who call the future down from celestial heights in ways which are clearly not a matter of religion or spirituality.
One might suppose that certain beings like the bodhisattvas in Buddhist tradition, having attained liberation in other lives, have been reincarnated among us to lead an existence the same as ours. Their former asceticism enables them to reach without harm a new
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level of consciousness more vast than ours, the light of which is used by them to dispel from within our obscurity which they choose to assume. To begin with, they therefore live together with us in the ignorance of the reality of things. Then, they extricate themselves without, however, leaving us for solitary retreats. They accomplish all our actions, recognizing in them a value which differs from what we accord them. And even should we be judged as the worst, by ourselves or by others, they would nevertheless carry out our actions and raise them to the Light.
They know that it is no longer a question of saving humanity, in the way we now understand, and in the way they themselves may have once understood, but in the sense of giving humanity knowledge, the sense of the Eternal and Infinite on Earth and not beyond, to give humanity the eternal Future. This is why the ways they follow are our own, and why they remain at our sides, in our Good as well as in our Evil.
It is also necessary to seek them in domains which do not at all fall within the province of spirituality, the latter being closed to the majority among us. While very certainly a few invoke the future from their retreats, others, perhaps the most numerous, and in any case the less recognizable, share our misery and transform its meaning and import by calling down into themselves the Force of the Future.
They are conscious of the Force which fashions us so as to bring forth what must be born, in such a way that it can more freely act in their being and through their agency. The Force has begun to awaken in them other perceptions which enable them to follow its working and submit to it. They know that it is by means of this Force that they act, regardless of what they might do, feel, think or say. When what is termed the Good is demanded of them, they appear at the side of the Good; if the Force ordains what is named Evil, they appear at the side of Evil.
But, in both cases, their consciousness is identical and the Force fills them identically. It is the Mother of the universe who endlessly creates worlds, to speak in the language of devotion. Or if one prefers to speak more abstractly, it is the creative Energy, conscious of its perpetual creation and instilling a perpetual growth in consciousness. Whether we ascribe to it a human or superhuman
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image, or whether we prefer to contemplate it without features, it exists and nothing would be without it. The Force engenders in these beings the presentiment of what will be in the future and the manner in which things will take place.
There resides deep within us the diabolical idea that God turns away from the condemned. As a consequence, their entire lives seem to represent a defiance of God to proclaim the contrary. They kill God in themselves in order to live Him in His reality, and following them, even the worst among us can know Him in the heart of their negation of Him. Of all the images enclosed in the sarcophagus of Night we make the splendour of Day; they put them to death one after another so that only God would be. That is why they do not fear, when necessary, being among the condemned so as to receive and propagate the divine love.
In fact, it has always been thus across the centuries and millennia. From religion to religion, we have broken the tabus of the past, and those who have done so have been counted among outlaws before having become living idols. But the phenomenon can only increase today and bear the mark of the acceleration of History. Religious thought no longer governs us. Doubtlessly it is not a question in the case of these messengers of the Future of transgressing the commandments of God, but rather the present Law of men, to replace it with a greater and more universal rule.
Nothing serves in the attempt to foretell how this will take place. What is demanded of us is indeed rather to understand that, if a day is to come when, according to the process of evolution, a species superior to our own will appear on Earth, the first elements of that species are already to be found among us concentrated in a few beings who occupy strategic points in our individual and collective lives in order to spring the locks of the doors which confine us.
We shall take but one example, perhaps the simplest and most shocking which might today occur. It is probable that a being of light, an ancient rishi, a venerated spiritual master, ancient prophet or yogi forever united with the One, has consented today to be reincarnated and contract AIDS, that is to say, to first live in the conditions enabling him to be prostrated by the most dreadful scourge which can strike our body, and that he consented to do this in order to deliver us by engaging in a battle in himself which, outwardly, must lead to victory.
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Viewing matters directly, we may ask who among us is prepared to see in his life the execution of the divine Will? Supposing that we would come to understand that such an action as described above is possible, it would appear too impure to us, we would definitely not view therein a sacrifice, whereas precisely the acceptance of impurity on the part of an enlightened soul appertains to sacrifice.
It is necessary to renounce the Light, wisdom and peace to descend into the abyss. And many of the inner sites formerly conquered must be abandoned, delivered to the enemy, as it were. This cannot proceed without conflict and suffering. In fact, all the beauty which has been revealed with such difficulty in the course of earlier asceticism, and perhaps during a catharsis in this life, must be renounced to the advantage of ugliness, without, for a long time, this man alone in our night knowing why he acts as he does, or if his loss is not at an end.
Assailed by interdictions from all forms of spirituality which have existed or still exist, his spiritual being revolts and trembles. But what causes him to gasp also obliges him to descend farther, always lower, and to tear away by shreds his ancient cloak of virtue—and at the same time it supports and vivifies him, irrigates him like a serum. As a result, he senses that the deeper he falls, the more he, in fact, rises. The more he dies to his most sublime self, the more he is born to a yet more ineffable reality, and what he believes to commit against his soul only renders it more vast and more divine.
After having struggled, he discovers that the Force whose pressure he senses in his body not only does not abandon him because he behaves socially and spiritually as an outlaw, but, on the contrary, guides him in his apparent degeneration, the stages of which it in reality orchestrates in minutest details. And in the depths of our night, the Sun which must illuminate us then rises in him.
On our behalf he learns that to consider himself guilty is to separate himself from God, and that the only Evil is to believe that Evil exists, at least as such. The Force initiates him each day. And, as if he were in the body of someone else, he assists in what is accomplished—in what the Force accomplishes through him. If we were to meet him, we would perhaps see him go from body to body and we would turn away from him, while, in fact, he is with the Force alone and turned only towards it.
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And thus it is until the day he becomes infected and learns thereof without flinching. Where the terror invades him, he is filled with joy. He has reached the bottom of the abyss and discovers there his mission. Finally, all becomes clear. That is why he was born. Like Shiva who, in the Indian legend, when the ocean of milk was churned, drank the poison which arose before the nectar of immortality could appear, he has absorbed the current planetary poison. And his role at present is to allow the Force to work in him in the living laboratory he has become, so that in his cells the Force gradually brings about the remission of the malady, not so much for himself as for all the others suffering from it and to whom he is impersonally linked.
And it is possible that his death (or his spontaneous recovery) will coincide with the discovery of the cure, setting an end to the horror which today engulfs tens of thousands of beings and menaces the physical equilibrium of our entire species. The oblation will have been consummated, its outward manifestation will make a staggering leap, not only in medical research, but in the knowledge of Matter and thus open new, still unsuspected, perspectives for earthly life.
This is, of course, only hypothetical. But there is no justification for rejecting it under the pretext that it offends our sense of propriety, or that it shocks us in our idea of religion, spirituality and, Finally, of God. Why would we not want God to be personally concerned with AIDS, or that He only acts from a distance, from the summits of heaven, without dirtying his hands? Is it because we think that His role is to punish us and because many of us view AIDS as a chastisement? If we look in ourselves, this is the response we may find. But another answer is taking shape which, discovered by a few, will cause the edifice of centuries to shake. To believe in Evil is to adore a false God. All future morality is no doubt found in these few words. Because, for God, and presently for Him alone, neither Good nor Evil exists because, in Him, all is one.
In other words, we must first attain to divine consciousness before going beyond Good and Evil which, paradoxically, is all that separates us from God. It is not by committing Good and Evil without knowing what they effectively are that we shall be able to go
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beyond them, but rather by going beyond ourselves who commit them in ignorance. For want of which, the worst nightmares of this century, caused by the experience of dictatorship under possessed leaders, would be repeated and magnified, and the Earth would be transformed into a vast extermination camp. This, moreover, is what we dread, citing such-and-such scriptures or referring to the law of entropy. But such is not the vision which animates the new seers who abandon the consciousness of their union with God to act as they do, as contrary as their life may be to our moral code.
On the plane of consciousness which circumscribes us, we must therefore show extreme prudence regarding new manifestations of power and genius. To promote the truth of the future, these manifestations must be devoid of all personal ambitions, emanating from men who seek nothing for themselves, neither here nor beyond, but whose destiny is to submit themselves to, and become a conscious receptacle of, a Force which, not mental, transcends all duality—that of I and not-I, of Good and Evil, of Life and Death and, finally, of world and God.
Thus, it is given to them alone to partially open the window of our vision onto the world and ourselves.
Participating in the same being as we, they work towards our metamorphosis by submitting themselves as the first to the dissolution of the personality, as the Force working in and suffusing us requires. Whatever they do, it is this Force—Mother's Force— which they must always feel. For them and by them, the words of Sri Aurobindo must be substantiated: this consummation is "fully possible only when the desire-soul in us has submitted to the Divine Law.... This will be done, not for the personal satisfaction of the ego, but that the whole may constitute a fit temple for the Divine Presence, a faultless instrument for the divine work. For the work can be truly performed only when the instrument, consecrated and perfected, has grown fit for a selfless action.... Even when the little ego has been abolished, the true Spiritual Person can still remain and God's will and work and delight in him and the spiritual use of his perfection and fulfilment. Our works will then be divine and done divinely; our mind and life and will, devoted to the Divine, will be used to help fulfil in others and. in the world that which has been first realised in ourselves..." (The Synthesis of Yoga).
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Reading these lines, it would be an error to believe that in order to be in yoga with God, one must have the serene manner of a yogi, or of a saint who imparts blessings, or that one must confine oneself to what our mentality ascribes to the expression of spiritual life. It is doubtful that Sri Aurobindo would have proposed such a restricted objective. The greatest interpreter of the Gita, in which Krishna assigns Arjun, his disciple and friend, the horrible task, goram karma, of massacring his family on the field of battle, Kurukshetra, has put before us as the only law the supreme word of the Gita: "Abandon all dharmas and take refuge in Me alone. I will deliver thee from all sin and evil, do not grieve". Scarcely conscious of the Divinity within us, it delivers us from the sense of Good and Evil, as from any other duality, and it is the divine which acts through us.
Henceforth, we must face the occult obviousness (if one can thus term what is obvious for the soul and occult for the mentality), that there are now among us those who, spread over the world Kurukshetra, exist where things are worst (doubtlessly telepathically linked among themselves without knowing each other) and who accept physical or psychological torture in order to transform it by giving themselves without reserve to the Force which, if a new world is to ever be born from ours, is presently in the process of shaping it in us. It is thus that the messengers of the future age take on the obscurity which devours us—not from sublime heights where nothing would reach them and where perhaps the devotion of followers would surround them, but from the bottom of the abyss where we shall suffer and die, attracting the Light to the abyss called AIDS, or death camps, or anything else repugnant to us. Formed from the same clay enveloped in darkness as we, possessed by the sky illumined by the Infinite, they share our lot until the end, lying on the sacrificial stone and allowing the work of destruction and regeneration to be accomplished in them so that it reverberates in us and, eventually, transfigures us.
How could it be a question in their case of morality or even of spirituality? Having abandoned all dharmas, even the highest, they are part of God and, like Arjun who waged war against his own, crushing them, they throw themselves into the battle for the Future, with no other concern than to feel increasingly the all-powerful Force vibrating in them, the all-luminous Consciousness called the Mother.
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Their names will undoubtedly not come down to us or our descendants, and need not do so, for they belong only to God. And beneath the horror masks and the shame which some accept to bear, their faces shine. Their eyes fill with the vision of the world which comes from the place to which their being is dedicated. They only prepare the way for the true beings who will come tomorrow. This they know and they rejoice, foreseeing that only a beauty even greater than that which floods them within will, through the same, be accessible to us. The knife of the high priest plunges into their breasts. A love of which we have no idea causes their hearts to beat and suddenly immobilizes them in an ecstasy in which the eternal Future has already begun.
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The world is an enchanted place where we forget who we are. But the memory is returning and, released from the spell, we shall enter the real world. The signs are multiplying; it cannot be otherwise. If a race superior to ours is to appear on Earth, there is, as we shall see, little chance for this to take place without the preliminary stages which trace the indispensable evolutionary path leading from us to the race to come.
It is, no doubt, not entirely impossible for a superior race to materialize without following the natural graduation which seems to occur. But, if it is to embody our greatest hope—peace on Earth, which cannot exist without recognition of the unicity of Life and beings—, it is hardly probable that it would do so by introducing a schism between it and us. The difference would be much too great: on the one hand, our ignorant and dolorous humanity, doomed to Death, incapable of going beyond its condition; on the other hand, this super humanity full of wisdom and beatitude, escaping Death. There would be no link and nothing would enable us to see in the new species the result of our own development. We would continue to be enclosed in the chrysalis—this time without even a dream of ever leaving it—, while around us a butterfly from somewhere else would circle.
Even though this would today be an idea widespread in a confused manner, it has little meaning. Among those who believe in the coming of the superman, there are many who imagine that he can be created in that way, that he will suddenly appear and the whole world will be astonished. But the superman is not a fairground attraction; his manifestation is connected with planetary life and the collective progress of humanity. This manifestation can certainly not be an aberrant and isolated phenomenon. If it were not to involve us in any way, we would not be able to conceive of the idea. This is because something in us obscurely harbors the promise that this idea comes to us on the religious plane, through the Apocalypses of Isaiah, Hosea and John, or on the scientific plane, and now, following the teaching of Sri Aurobindo, on a plane which refers neither to science nor religion.
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Everything, therefore, leads us to suppose that, stage after stage, we shall follow a path which will take us without interruption to the ultimate goal. The messengers of the Future must now, as we have indicated, already be at work. The first, they are oriented— and orient the progress of the Earth—in the direction in which tomorrow's Sun must rise, the first faint light of which illuminates them within. And, as we have also seen, it is in no way necessary that they make themselves known. Glory is not their goal, no more than the crowning of any of our criteria. Otherwise, there would be no purpose in their being sent to reconnoiter the paths of our metamorphosis. We must recognize their presence without lending it a name. Just as we render homage to the unknown soldier, symbol of countless men who perished fighting to save us, we shall have to pay respect to them inwardly, soul to soul, without a single word being addressed to them. For just as the unknown soldier is part of us, and we of him, just as his action does not prevent ours, but on the contrary intensifies it and gives it meaning, these men yet unseen by us although among us, are part of us—and vice versa—, and their action and ours are based on a single action.
Those among them who do not live apart and whose task is not to trace more clearly the silhouette of spiritual summits, those with whom we are unknowingly in daily contact, cannot but influence us—by the pure freedom of their words, sentiments and thoughts, even should they not be understood or shock us. And no doubt their physical presence itself must awaken in us an echo. For they are the vessels of the Force which transforms the world, and it is sufficient for us to be touched by them for something of this Force to penetrate us: in a diffuse manner in most cases, or concentrated should they see that it is necessary, or that a possibility exists in us to receive more, as in the blessing which the man of God gives to his disciples. But, through their intercession, the blessing is anonymous and requires none of the preambles to which we are usually subject in order to render ourselves worthy of it—if we were to believe even a little in his power, which is to energize consciousness. In the midst of our most mundane acts, or the least noble, thanks to them, because we work or journey with them, eat or entertain ourselves with them or make love with them, the blessing of God can physically spread over us unexpectedly and daily, and gently instill in us a new energy which will enable us to know our-
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selves and the world more clearly, and consequently to aspire to a new future.
Our atmosphere is, therefore, in the process of changing—under the general action of the transforming Force, as well as under the particular pressure which it exerts on those who are conscious of its work in them. In fact, everything which indicates a perfection of the powers of consciousness is at the same time an indication that this Force is at work. Everything which enables us to capture better the image of the world is a sign that a light does not cease to grow in us and that it is increasing our strength.
To take only one example from among the most commonplace, the manner in which electronics today intervenes in the arts, causing us to plunge visually into other dimensions and enabling us to explore new fields of sound, and which almost falls within the province of magic, is indisputable proof of this intensification of the powers of consciousness—the power to perceive and the power to create, which are ultimately a single power. And as we can well imagine, this is indeed only such a very banal beginning in our eyes that we do not think to detect therein the rendering sacred of the profane, to which was alluded earlier.
We continue to live according to the idea that God is a person, or a supra-person, inseparable from the majesty of his palace or his paradise beyond. Despite the revolutions which have shaken the world, we continue to carry in ourselves, and to fear, the image of a crowned potentate. We have not yet guillotined God, even if we claim to be atheists. We have not yet gone beyond the patriarchal image of the Divinity and are thus unable to recognize the divine work in the acoustic and visual games made possible by electron7 ics, even though the refining of consciousness which they imply is a mark of a divine process. Where consciousness is expanded in whatever manner it may be, where, regardless of how little, it becomes capable of a more complete perception, there the acting Presence we call God is to be found, pure Consciousness, eternal and infinite, meticulously recapturing itself through us and the incalculable rest of manifestation.
But these are only words which risk irritating us all the more because we suspect that they nevertheless convey an essential truth to our being. A purely gut reaction which causes us to miss
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the most evident meaning, that of an expansion of consciousness—an expansion by virtue of which we will gradually understand and experience its content.
It is not even a question of faith, but only of logic and reason. From mineral to man, is there or is there not an evolution of consciousness? From Neanderthal man to our humanity? From the men of the last century to the men of this? If we answer in the affirmative, we can only conclude that there is an uninterrupted progress in which consciousness expands, becomes stronger, more rich and clear. And, we can only infer further progress by means of which what we do not understand today will gradually become evident to us. And thus it is regarding the recon quest of self by the pure Being which projects itself in its apparent opposite—the flight of the One to the One of Plotinus, the adventure of Consciousness of Sri Aurobindo.
And this is precisely that to which the world is now awakening, but so slowly, notwithstanding the acceleration of History, that it appears to us that nothing is changing, that nothing under the Sun is ever new—which amounts to saying that a part of our being enveloped in darkness will never join God, that He will not have the means to do so, is not all-powerful, that His being is not eternal and infinite, despite what seers have declared, and is thus tantamount to saying that He does not exist and that the world is an accident without cause and nothing governs its course, that it can only collapse without reason. The sense of the absurd has marked our times too much to require emphasis. And the sense of evolution is a sufficiently formidable response to the agony to which it bears witness to gradually enlighten us.
It is in this respect that the messengers of the future have now begun to assist us: by embodying a confidence which did not previously exist, the certainty that something else will necessarily appear, the seeds of which they bear. For their part, they know that the entire universe is carried by this movement and that in the midst of us they are not on foreign ground, but in the framework appropriate to their role.
There is not, and cannot be, a real difference between them and ourselves, other than in the vibrant intensity of their consciousness. This identity between them and ourselves is essential for the execution of the work confided to them by the Force of transformation.
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It enables them to immediately communicate the effects to us. The new techniques to which they directly or indirectly contribute, the new ideas they propagate or influence, everything now taking place is preparing the arrival of those who will begin to be truly different and whom, with new characteristics, they will later join.
This is tantamount to saying that the time is near when those will be born among us in whom the activation of the cells of the brain will result in an entirely new natural behaviour. Their increasingly numerous presence among us will constitute the proof that evolution has reached a new stage and that further stages will not fail to unfold, extending to the infinite the field of powers—of perception and creation—of embodied consciousness.
The first difference resides in the fact, which has already been mentioned, that they are born in union with God. What until now has only been possible at the conclusion of a long asceticism, representing the ultimate objective of the great Yogas, will be their natural state from the moment they come into the world. The psycho-physiological modifications which at the cost of intense inner battles are daily fought in men of God will be inscribed in these new beings from the beginning, for they will also, in other bodies, have been involved in these battles and will have succeeded in attaining complete union with God, a merging with Him in which one is no longer a person, but only a channel of His Force. It can also be said that they will be born enlightened and that the luminous charge of this Force will be activated and will further activate the cells of their brains.
For the present, we are born unconscious, as it were, and have no memory of our true origin, nor of the places we have traversed before assuming a body. This is the case because our consciousness is not sufficiently developed and because we can only avail in this life of the ordinary materials allotted by terrestrial Nature. But in their case it will be different, inasmuch as their consciousness will be fully awakened to the true Reality of the world, they will not sink into amnesia when assuming physical form. A being of light will each time take control of the material envelope and, from the beginning, bring about the development necessary for a new expression of life.
According to religious traditions and devotional legends, the birth of Krishna in India, and of Christ in the Occident, would
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have been similar. But it does not appear that we can view therein historic reality. For that would have entailed a much greater change in the race than the very significant ethical and spiritual change brought about by Krishna and Christ—the first having taught the adoration of God at a time when only ritual sacrifices and techniques for meditation existed, while the second, as is known, enriched Mosaic law by love for the next. We should rather recognize therein the presentiment of a reality which was at that time impossible, but which collective progress and the action of the transforming Force have now not only made possible, but inevitable.
There would, moreover, be no need to dream of a second advent of Christ if he had come to Earth the first time in all his power and glory. From the newly-born of Bethlehem to the god of the Parousia [the coming of Christ as judge on the last day], the entire human trajectory is outlined. There is nothing apocalyptic about the birth of Jesus, which does not refer to the notion of the End of Time, but to the idea of human unity and divine unicity. The Nazarene embodies, in our eyes, above all love. And if it is true that, as thaumaturgy, he performed numerous miracles in order to open spirits to the possibility of the supreme miracle for the Jewish people, namely the end of Death as indicated by the resurrection of Lazarus and his own, it is also true that this miracle is reserved for the End of Time and will be marked by his return, that is to say, by a birth which in itself will be a transfiguration. But then, it will be a matter of beings assuming bodies of immortality. And, expressed in these terms, the announcement can scarcely affect us. Directed towards a too-distant goal, it concerns us only insofar as we have a sufficiently strong and narrow religious consciousness to blindly believe and to separate our faith from our reason, which can only create a split in our personality.
We have today a glaring image of this split personality. On the one hand, we have developed all the powers of reason to a maximum; and on the other, we have preserved, most often without knowing it, all our naivety pertaining to the beyond. Our mentality has hardly evolved in relation to Death. How could it have been able to change respective of immortality?
We should also not be astonished to see around us childlike dreamers imagining that supermen will at once populate the Earth,
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which is likely to exasperate those for whom faith is a vain ornament of sensibility—while it suffices to apply the most rigorous scientific reasoning to the study of an eventual superman to discover the process of his appearance and, going beyond faith, to possess the certainty that a mutation will effectively take place and that, everything considered, this is no more unrealizable than the emergence of the different planetary reigns or the birth of the Earth itself in the cosmos.
Thus, what has been recorded in various hagiographies will be progressively realized in us. And it is in this sense that one may speak, for tomorrow, of the birth of a thousand Christs or a thousand Krishnas. But we must be careful not to forget that, in the case of both Christ and Krishna, there could in truth be no question of a birth different from our own. As underlined by Sri Aurobindo, the divine incarnation, the avatar, the God-man, takes upon himself the obscurity in which we live. He shares entirely the conditions of our existence—beginning with the unconscious in which we are the ultimate reality of the world and of ourselves. His life would be nothing other than a conjuring trick in which, while feigning to resemble us, he would follow laws which, different from those of our nature, would exempt him from the very suffering which he comes to alleviate. If Christ suffered, it is precisely because he was subject since his birth to the same dictates as we. Had he been born different from us, had he been born enlightened, consciously united with God, something in his physical nature, in the nerve transmission of his being, in the cells of his brain, would have been inevitably different, according him the supreme detachment which, on our behalf, he patiently conquered in the course of his entire life.
No avatar has been, until now, born in such conditions of beatific illumination. All have, by hard-fought struggles, achieved victory over Darkness. To each went a different trophy, expressed in his particular teaching. None came to the world with this trophy in the cradle. No god-man has seen the light of day knowing himself to be God. All were first men like us. Human consciousness could dominate them for a very long time, and it is clear that they retained something of that consciousness until the end, even after divine consciousness had descended in them.
That which is to take place, on the other hand, is of an entirely different nature, as enlightenment will not be the fruit of a more or
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less long and severe asceticism, but the natural result of the evolution which, rather than occurring in beings made according to the mental perception of the universe, will be the state of consciousness at birth, on the basis of which the quest for pure Being will follow under new banners.
The perfection of those to come will, therefore, be very superior to that of Krishna or Christ and all the other avatars, as the greatest accomplishment of the latter will be the point of departure of the former. On the other hand, the fact that, appearing uninterruptedly, they will be so numerous in so many different domains will indicate that we shall have entered the messianic time. It will be the era of the collective avatar.
Just as during prehistory, when individuality was not yet clearly constituted, there could have been scattered incarnations of the Divinity to assist in the birth and progress of humanity, the same phenomenon will be able to repeat itself at a higher level so as to strive to go beyond individuality, ego and the dualistic consciousness of the world and to facilitate the birth and progress of a more sovereign race than our present humanity.
For us, supposing that we would believe it to be possible, the divine incarnation generally belongs to the past, where it appeared every now and again and in exceptional cases in order to constitute the lines of what were to become the great religions of the world. Since then, nothing. And, we would not have the idea to seek new messiahs to enlighten us—even if, in India, one sometimes notices the opposite tendency: the disciples of some gurus, authentic or myth maniac, are inclined to consider them as living gods and forget that the role of the avatar is primarily to bring about man's progress by initiating him into an aspect of the eternal and infinite Consciousness which no one had yet brought to light.
Their adherence, in terms of our psychology, to a distant past underlines the mythic character of the avatars and renders their presence among us anachronistic, with greater reason if we are to no longer envisage a sporadic wonder, but a natural and regular efflorescence. It is, however, such an efflorescence that we must consider if world evolution signifies anything whatever. Our reason may doubt (that is its role) and our old religious behaviour may rebel, it is nevertheless certain that, if a superior race is to
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appear, it will inevitably surpass the highest consciousness which has until now been achieved by the great teachers of mankind.
To imagine a superior species which would not be endowed with at least the power of perception of Krishna, Christ, the Buddha and others, has scarcely any meaning. First of all, that would imply that the summits which they represent are forever inaccessible to us, even though they have only shown them to us so as to encourage us to raise ourselves to them. For, following them, there have been thousands of men throughout the world who have over the centuries climbed the levels of Transcendence indicated by them. Then, as their teachings are directed in one way or another towards the effacement of the limitations of the ego and its dissolution, we must not fear to continue to the end of the vision which ensues and to suppose that, if there exists a state without ego in which limitations are no longer felt, this state, ruler than being the monopoly of a few elected individuals, will one day belong to all. Finally, it would be evident to us that this natural absence of ego indeed represents progress compared with our present condition, for, eliminating all limitations, it liberates us and makes us conscious of the true reality of Being.
It is, therefore, in terms of evolution and no longer of mysticism that the first distinctive character of the new beings will reside. They will have no ego. And this is why it can be said that, from the first moment, they will be united with the Eternal and Infinite, conscious of Him, enlightened. The divine plan will be read in them as on a screen capturing the images of an unimagined dimension. They will cause the gods to descend to Earth. Each will be, so to speak, the seed of a god. And none will have pre-eminence over the others. All will participate in a single work, which will be to increasingly enlighten us and increasingly enable the materialization of the eternal Future.
As was said earlier, our understanding will certainly not be immediate. It may even be that individual and collective opposition will be aroused and that a climate of conflict such as we have never before known would result. But this reaction of our native ignorance will be quelled by the peace ensuing of the knowledge which is promised to us. Thus, we shall accept the evidence and allow ourselves to be guided by the shining multitude of the beings we will have engendered.
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Once again, their number and their ubiquity will be the most manifest signs of new times. If there were to be but a single divine being incarnating among us, and even were his stature to greatly surpass that of our greatest avatars, one could not really speak of a new phase in the history of evolution. We would receive a new spiritual teaching which would enable us to continue our journey in the name of an ideal more elevated than all those we have heretofore conceived. And, this would already be a great deal. But that is not here the question. It is a matter of the spontaneous opening of a higher level of consciousness in the human species. It will no longer belong to the Son of God to lead us towards this or that dwelling place in the house of his Father, and our spiritual goal will no longer be situated after death. We shall see the manifold birth and growth of God among us. The meaning of the revelation made to us will change insofar as it will no longer be asked of us to believe what we do not see, or acknowledge a reality which nothing proves. On the contrary, we shall see everywhere the Spirit opening out in Matter and shall understand that the same fate is reserved for us and that a still higher destiny is to be fulfilled on Earth.
So many domains will be affected by this new form of intelligence that our entire mentality will be transformed. To say that new technologies will appear, more subtle than those we have until now developed, that new arts will illuminate our lives and new sciences overthrow our mastery of the secrets of the universe, is only to state a truism. And this truism itself is only a facile half-truth. Even if the elements of a superior race did not, in fact, manifest among us, the curve of our progress would want that it be thus.
We must, therefore, consider matters on a different level—not in the results, but at the roots: in the absence of ego which will define the new beings from their birth. For, this implies a view of the world, its first cause, its movement and destination, which is entirely different from ours, an entirely different understanding of Life and Death, an entirely different perception of Space and Time.
If we should want to imagine what the future techniques, the arts and sciences of the future, will resemble, we must orient our dreams in that direction, not simply by conceiving of an improvement of those achievements we have already made, or even of an
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addition of disciplines on the same level of our consciousness (even though this improvement and this addition must take place), but by opening ourselves in some way to a higher imagination in which things proceed according to laws other than our mental norms.
In fact, and because it is a question of the activation of the cells of the brain, it is herein that the major change lies, which we can and must await: in the gradual emergence of another guiding principle of Life, in the elaboration of a new instinct and its instruments, in the modeling of a personality which is impersonal within and transpersonal without, linked in a radically new manner to the universe and to its in temporal origin and projecting itself differently on the social world and its aims.
It is, therefore, with the foundations of personality that one must begin if one wishes to have an idea of what the humanity to come will be like. The sense of ego—individual and collective—enables us to presently clarify and impose our existence—individual and collective—in a world which, as perceived by the mental consciousness, is governed by duality, restricted in all parts, subject to the idea of beginning and end, and consequently to that of birth and death, as well as to the sensation of I and not-I.
The declared goal of yogic asceticism is the destruction of the mechanism which registers this sensation and this idea—to dissolve the sense of ego and thereby to expunge the duality which obsesses us, to extirpate not only the image of Death, but the imperfect perception we have of Life, to abolish all spatial-temporal, as well as social, religious or simply psychological limitations, to open ourselves to the sense of the Eternal and Infinite—not only in the sense that there exists an eternal and infinite Being, but in the unquestionable sense that we ourselves are eternal and infinite. This is what the systems of yoga term liberation. And it is precisely the state of consciousness in which the new beings will be born: they will be born free, eternal, infinite.
We should understand that it will not be solely a question of psychological change, itself already considerable, but of a biological metamorphosis. To the activation of the cells of the brain must correspond an entirely new organization of cerebral mechanisms. And this organization must itself find expression in terms of a radical newness. The entire human adventure since Neanderthal
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man ultimately amounts to the establishment of the dwelling place, both palatial and prison-like, of reflexive thought which is only possible because we maintain subject-object relations with the world and ourselves. This separation entails a fundamental sensation which we cannot even imagine calling into question: we are within our body, defined—thus limited—by it.
Were our consciousness to be extra-corporeal, separation would no longer exist, duality would vanish, we would live with a more or less clear awareness of the unity of beings and things and of the unicity of Being. This, in fact, would be equivalent to the dissolution of the ego such as proclaimed and demonstrated by the great yogic ascetics: equivalent to the effacement of the individual frontier symbolized outwardly by our body, to this transfer of consciousness, its expansion and diffusion, as well as to its universalisation beyond corporeal limits and the more subtle limitations of the vital and mental being. Rather than consciousness being contained and restricted by the body, the body is contained in consciousness. The body thus becomes in consciousness a tranquil instrument which consciousness guides unfailingly, as from the omnipresent and transparent centre of the world. And this is precisely what the new beings will experience from the time of their birth. Their consciousness will not be in themselves, but they will be in it, and through it they will be limitless.
Consequently, it would not be difficult to represent to ourselves the enormous inner difference that will exist between them and us, and to understand that everything they touch will be illuminated. Instinctively possessing the sense of the One and seeing in everything and in everyone only the manifestation of the One, the relations which they will maintain with us, their understanding of the universe, the form of beauty they will create, will be marked in a recess of this unicity. And it would also not be difficult for us to see into what the entire socio-political character of our life will be changed. Divine unicity will quite naturally be expressed in human unicity, and our aspiration for harmony among peoples will become reality, because the new beings will participate in the conduct of political affairs, and the world will thus be governed by seers and sages. Nothing will prevail against this peace, which will correspond to the growth of universal equilibrium. For things are linked and there is an interaction between one and the other. At the
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moment when we find the means to definitively establish peace on Earth, we shall discover new laws relating to the preservation of the universe, that is to say, to its constitution and perpetual evolution.
The reason is very simple. The universe as we perceive it is the image of a reality unknowable by our senses. Because the cells in the brains of the new beings will be activated, the senses, the images of which are relayed by the brain, will be exalted to a superior sense, or in any case very superior to those of which we avail— precisely the sense of the silent extra-corporeal consciousness in which they will live from the time of their appearance in the world.
Their field of vision, to take one example, will no doubt be more developed than our own. Our vision, which is limited to the screen formed by our two eyes, will in their case be freed from all hindrances. Not only will they capture a greater part of the space around them, such as cosmic Space, but they will compass distant images and thus see beyond appearances. And one may suppose that our other senses will be freed in a similar manner from what today limits their power, and that their functioning will have a unitary quality, each type of perception being naturally associated with the others, stimulating them all together, like the diverse vibrations of a single superior sense.
As a result of this sense, they will be able to receive the waves which escape us and decipher the universe in a more accurate and complete manner; they will discover the Infinite in the finite and thus permit of a heretofore unattained cosmic equilibrium. As a result of this, their role will no longer be planetary, but sidereal, as they will give birth to the harmony of the heavens and of Earth. For the heavens are no more at peace than is our Earth. The powers which move the cosmos are everywhere and always in confrontation, and their conflicts resonate in us. That is why the forces which are opposed in us will be placated by these new beings in Space, in such a way that the galactic whirlwind will be calmed for our understanding and, as things become transparent, we shall be capable of a deeper understanding of the universe.
Thus, two of our three dreams will be realized: peace on Earth and the conquest of Space, which are actually the same but appear on different scales. The third—immortality—is related to another
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perception of Time, indeed to its nullification to the advantage of the natural perception of Non-Time, or Eternity. And it is from this other perception of Time, or from the perception of Non-Time, that the new beings will derive all their strength and knowledge. For the inevitably extra-corporeal sense of Eternity is the result of the absence of ego. It is the sign of God on the creature, the indication that, conscious only of Him in all that is, one is linked to His omniscience, which one gradually displays precisely insofar as He prescribes and where needed.
To the absence of ego also necessarily corresponds detachment, which one customarily holds to be a virtue difficult to achieve, and as a result of which one no longer attributes any value to personal pleasure or pain. But that is only the moral and psychological aspect of a state of purely spiritual consciousness. In fact, it is essentially a question of breaking a spell. We are hypnotized by our mental perception of things. Detachment, therefore, consists in extirpating this perception and all it implies, so that Silence alone may be, which because it is infinite, dissolves the finite personality. There is no true, deep and lasting detachment without complete inner silence. One might speak of it as a change in wavelength, or as an upward shift in the level of consciousness. One no longer perceives thought, but something beyond words which is in close contact with the truth of things. Silence engenders vision. And all gradually becomes knowledge.
In the same way, a movement formerly took effect in the animal consciousness to modify perceptions in such a way as to establish the network of thought of which we believe ourselves to be the origin, whereas we in fact only receive certain currents particular to the Earth. More vast than that of animal perception is the orbit of human mental perception. More vast than that of thought is the sphere of Silence. It is alone the entrance to this sphere, major octave of planetary consciousness, which one can call detachment. The being is as a ship which, having left its mooring, sails on the ocean of another dimension where all is to be rediscovered in a different way and where the sense of universal manifestation in its entirety, as in its least elements, is more rich and certain—more luminous: for there is a light in Silence. If consciousness is there more developed, if doubt no longer divides it, if it escapes the con-
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traditions of duality, it is because it sees more and better, and because a light more intense than that of thought accompanies it.
Inner Light and silence will thus be natural attributes of the new beings, enabling them to become increasingly vast and impersonal. Once conquered, the absence of ego must penetrate to the most remote domains of being. We imagine that the ego is limited to our conscious and subconscious individuality. But it is really much more important than that, which is why its dissolution is so difficult.
There is not only an ego which rules over our thoughts, another which directs our sentiments and sensations, and another governing our body; but more subtle and imperious, there is a family ego, a social ego, a national ego, an ego of the times and environment, a political or religious ego. And all these egos which are organized by the actual functioning of the brain must be dissolved and surpassed. There is even a terrestrial ego: the sentiment of belonging to this planet and no other; an ego of the solar system, of the Milky Way, and an ego of the cosmos such as we perceive it. And to each, from the smallest to the largest, a law corresponds which protects us and assists our growth, and which, at the risk of losing ourselves, we must one day contravene without fear if we want the multiple deposits of our personality to be illuminated in a manner such that the Impersonal transcending all these states would shine in us.
As high as the sages, seers and even avatars may have until now raised themselves, none of them would appear to have surmounted the walls of the enigma which defines us on all levels of manifestation. Nothing would be more certain than that they would be founded on the One, united and identified with the One. The-teachings attest to this. There is also no doubt that they would have had a presentiment of the character of the Impersonal. But it is evident that, externally and to a certain extent internally, they continued to have an ego, to be men as we are, living in the same way and in the same universe. As great as they may have been, as completely depersonalized as they may have succeeded in becoming, they were nevertheless earthly creatures whose days were inscribed in the rhythm and structures of the universe such as perceived by our ego.
There have nevertheless been for a very long time dazzling insights into an architecture in which the cosmos appears in an entirely
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different light. The Vedic rishis speak of a triple mode—the True, the Right, the Vast—of this other manifestation. John, in the Apocalypse, evokes for the future a new Heaven and Earth where neither lamp nor sun will be needed to light the way. In our times, Finally, Sri Aurobindo has provided us with the keys to this double vision and has announced the imminence of a new creation. He even came into contact with the principle of this other universe and caused its descent into the framework of our world. Since that time, with him and by the action of the Force which he called the supramental, we have been entering into a dimension of cosmic Being in which all gradually undergoes a metamorphosis: ourselves, our immediate environment and the sidereal empire.
This complete revolution of consciousness to which he initiates us is the ultimate objective of his teaching and, in fact, only becomes apparent for those who, beyond words, find the vision which brought them forth: one must have seen in order to understand. And what is to be understood is precisely this mutation not only of our race into a superior species, but of our universe into a supra-cosmos in which the Vedic presage and the oracle of John are realized and in which spontaneous, natural and permanent perception necessarily corresponds to the effacement of the ego on all possible planes. Even the sentiment of belonging to this universe must disappear if a being whose view encompasses something other than this universe is on the point of being manifested.
The inevitable concomitance of cosmic and human changes implies a natural process (belonging to a superior Nature), a methodical and graduated growth, of which nothing holds the verb which releases it and its results. We can foresee its stages, but neither enjoy them in advance, nor precipitate their development. Many things will happen in the human consciousness before perceptions will have been radically and definitively transformed. The establishment of an extra-corporeal mechanism for the consciousness is, in fact, only a first step in the comprehension, today unthinkable, of the transparency of the universe.
With these things the new beings will write the second part of our history, and will bear witness to the surmounting of limitations which we presently do not even imagine. For in them the absence of ego will be absolute, or more exactly, if it were not so from the
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beginning, it would progressively become so until, after many centuries have passed, something different from our universe would appear, and its present laws would no longer be applicable.
The first non-individual layer of the ego which the new beings will eliminate is today represented by the family. The cerebral constitution of the new beings, which will enable them to be conscious outside their physical envelope (no longer feeling the weight of the vital and mental sheaths), and which will make them different from their parents, can only act in this sense. However, this does not mean that things will take place in a moment. Too many thousands of familial habits of one type or another lie behind us for them to disappear at a single stroke. What will happen will be rather a kind of natural erosion, our psychology will change insofar as we understand and accept the significance of their appearance and their multiplication among us. They will not decide that things must be changed. They will not dictate to us to their own advantage. Their way of being will simply mark such a difference from ours that, even though issuing from us, relations of a new type will be naturally formed between parents and children, and these will have immense repercussions on the larger collectivity which society is, from the organization of studies to the conduct of political affairs.
For it is obvious that a new system of education will appear, as well as a new political system. How would we be able, in fact, to raise from birth and govern beings greater than ourselves? Can we imagine Cro-Magnon man teaching and governing Moses or the Buddha? Nevertheless the difference is less between the former—who were forty thousand years ago the first artists, navigators and astronomers—and ourselves, than between ourselves and the beings to come. This is so because the brain of the latter will function differently from ours, whereas our brain continues to function in the same way as did that of Cro-Magnon man.
Everything will, in fact, depend on the terrestrial conditions where the first of these new beings are manifested, on their number in the first generation and, subsequently, on the manner in which we become aware of their presence and on the time which we give to it. Above all, we do not know if, as was always the case in the past when Nature gave rise to a new species, their birth will be accompanied by a catastrophe on a planetary scale, if it will be
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a natural cataclysm against which we shall not be able to protect ourselves, or a conflagration in which a part of the world will be destroyed.
We do not know if this toll, which has always been required so that, becoming hardened, a new species could survive and a higher law reign, is to be demanded of us, or if it will be abolished through the very intercession of the powers which cause these beings to be born of us. Bearers of the Unlimited, they will not have to pay any right of passage in order to cross our borders.
We dread the outbreak of an ultimate war and do not see that it would only reproduce in our language the conditions decreed by Nature so that the new forms are incarnated—that it would, therefore, in no way be a sign of God's wrath against our poor misdeeds, regardless of what many of us may think. But we do not have the least idea of what God has decided for us. For the pure Being, in which duality is impossible, it cannot be a question of viewing us as sinners, of destroying us in a premeditated attack of infantile anger. If we must still for some time to come threaten and exterminate each other in the name of moribund values, it is necessary for us to learn to see through the veil of warlike conflagrations with which we are burning the Earth and to view something other than retribution—we must contemplate the new Earth which is being prepared to receive us and where men of a new kind are to be born.
Accepting that we shall remain in ignorance until the end: will the new men be born among ruins, or on a flourishing Earth? We shall not know until the last moment. The only thing which can be asked of us for the present is to believe in their arrival and in the fact that nothing will be able to prevent it.
Thus, whatever may be the conditions which precede it, a Golden Age will begin on Earth. Should the world collapse, the new beings will help us to raise it again on a more certain basis. And those among us who perish, regardless of how numerous, will be reincarnated. For all which dies returns to life. If the passage from one creation to another must not be paid by any major destruction, the new beings will hasten our progress. In any case, they will be among us and their task will be to raise us towards an increasingly clear and strong consciousness in all domains.
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The development of their consciousness will awaken confidence in their guardianship. And although they guide us, they will not appear to us as leaders. Even if, by their constitution, they are superior to us, they will claim no superiority at all. They will be inclined towards us, will protect and love us. And we shall see in them what we ourselves shall one day become. We shall gradually be filled with a sense of the Future. In place of our present horizon, which appears to us to be barred by individual and collective Death, we shall see, through them, that we are promised always more life. That which they will be, we ourselves shall become. That will be the basis of all our certainties.
If, at that time, a new religion will be necessary, it will not be one such as we now understand. It will not be centred on the beyond of Death, but on the beyond of Life. Not on what happens to us when we leave our bodies, but on what happens in the world and on the manner in which we return to it and will always return to it. And, finally, it will be a religion centred on the likeness we bear to those who will have shown the way and will have given proof of the eternal return and of evolution.
From the state of a simple and nebulous belief, reincarnation will become a touchstone of an entirely different mentality in which the notions of Good and Evil will gradually wane. Reincarnation which, having become an established fact by virtue of their presence, will abolish the arbitrariness of a judgment as to our good and bad actions. Relative to time and place, the latter will not entail any definitive retribution. In the absence of a judgment, we shall begin to understand what the new beings will spontaneously know: that nothing in Time and Space results of nothing; contrary to what the mental imagines in the linearity of its perception, all is a single movement which goes beyond Space and Time.
As long as we believe that we shall be judged, we take ourselves to be the authors of our acts, none of which, not even the most insignificant, is wanted or formed by us alone. If there had been a single thing which we would have been capable of doing personally—that is to say, by separating ourselves from the rest of the universe—, and if it were only the batting of an eyelash, the universe would be destroyed through the sundering of the unity, or indeed the unity of the universe, rendering the act impossible, would destroy us.
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The first great innovation of this religion, if it must come to be, will therefore reside in the absence of the judgment of our acts, in terms of the Christo-Semitic mentality, or in the annulment of karma, in terms of Oriental thought. Which is to say, it will propel us beyond Good and Evil, meaning not towards a hypertrophy of Vice and Virtue, but in the direction of the union of each being with Space-Time: with the cosmic universe as with the terrestrial environment and what takes place there, and also in union with what is to happen in the future, with the eternal Future.
It has sometimes been asked what will follow monotheism, and one might respond as follows. Monotheism issued from the vision of the One, of the eternal and infinite Present we call God. But it does not suffice to see God. One must see what He sees; one must view the world with His eyes. And that represents the next stage in the ascent of human consciousness.
Until now, the perception of the Eternal and Infinite has been the highest realization in our entire history, the most elevated degree to which, with the intercession of seers, we have been able to raise ourselves. It was the secret heart of the Veda, before being the source of the revelation of Moses—and neither Vedic polytheism nor Christo-Semitic monotheism exhausts the content. According to time and place, it has assumed one aspect or another, each of which is only a facet, both perfectly exact and inevitably partial, of a Reality which thought can neither seize upon nor express.
Various forms of wisdom and religion appear to contradict each other in the definition which they offer of that Reality, even though they complement each other and still leave unformulated the essence of what our soul, founded on the One, knows and is—of what we in truth are.
The imaginary character of this world which brought forth Buddhism at the same time as it declared the Void alone to be real; the impregnation of the universe by Tao; the one God apparently distinct from his creation of Judaism and later religions—Christianity and Islam—; the supreme Being, Purushottama, who, in the Gita, is both the immutable Being and the mutable Becoming—all these definitions result of the same vision, which has been for millennia at the root of our religious, or anti-religious, attitude.
These definitions have established in us the notion, today verified by Science, of a unique Existence upon which we are entirely
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dependent, whether we want or not. They all contribute to the formulation of a definition as complex and precise as possible of our origin. But they have not done, and cannot do, anything more than that. They are associated with a certain period of our growth: the discovery of the One. They proclaim that there is That, as designated by the Upanishads, or they lead to monotheism, and everywhere cover themselves with cultural ornaments which conceal what they would want to raise.
The ornaments fade and, today, fall to dust. But That remains, which we shall approach from a totally different perspective. After having conquered and popularized the sense of pure Being, we shall enter an unimagined depth of consciousness in order to discover there what is viewed by God in His contemplation, and in which the seer is immersed. This is why we could have the presentiment of something which must come after monotheism, without being able to determine the turn which our faith will take. That is tantamount to asking ourselves what can be greater than God—or, at least, greater than our conception of God.
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God is perceived by seers as the eternal Present, not as the eternal Future, even though it would seem inevitable that He would be Becoming as well as Being. And it is in this lacuna of our highest perception that the solution is to be found. A comprehensive understanding of what we call Time is thus at stake, and to that understanding the new beings will have to provide the key. Born in yoga with the pure Being, conscious of the Eternal and Infinite, they will quite naturally have a sense of the Present which nothing limits or distorts. But living among us a life which is perpetual unfolding, they will also have a sense, today inconceivable, of this unfolding, of its significance and objectives, the sense of a Future limited by nothing.
Even if we conceive of God not only as eternal Being, but as perpetual Becoming, as the Gita teaches, we only envisage this Becoming in the frameworks of our humanity and of the cosmos as perceived by our senses. Despite innumerable mutations which have led to our appearance in Space and on Earth, we are mentally constituted such that we limit Becoming according to our form of being and its perceptions. Even in our most inspired moments, or in our most vertiginous visions of future times, it is still an image of ourselves which we discern, and not that of beings who, having reached a new stage in evolution, avail of other means of knowing themselves and the universe.
We raise to dogma what we are unable to understand: one day we shall see God. Death will disappear from this Earth and will be replaced by eternal Life. Nothing is more imposing than this unsensible creed. Nothing would be more against the avarice of our reason and our petty-minded everyday experience. Nothing would be more impossible and, yet, nothing more realistic. For, although it is true that we are unable to perceive God in our present incarnation, it is just as true that, should we further evolve, a day will come when, in our physical form itself, we shall be equipped to perceive Him spontaneously. And it is this evolutionary movement which must take us beyond the notion of the eternal Present to that of the eternal Future: the integuments around us must be pierced so that Time may appear to us in a transparency through
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which, unencumbered, the future becomes wholly apparent and opens without end onto itself.
The new beings will have this sense. Or, more precisely, they will incarnate the Future. In the beginning, they will constitute a minority in relation to us. But this minority will represent what is reserved for humanity as a whole. And it will increase from generation to generation without, however, humanity having to disappear. As observed by Sri Aurobindo, the first seer to have gone beyond the eternal Present and set into action the consciousness of the eternal Future, man such as we now know will not disappear from manifestation, but will represent an indispensable rung in the development of terrestrial being towards always higher and more radiant summits.
This continuity is essential, enabling the creative act to be in some way entirely visible and, through the same, making it possible to elude Time. In fact, this is already the case, as we are surrounded by what has preceded us, for the earlier reigns of planetary creation did not vanish at our birth. But we are not yet conscious of this continuity and permanence, our mentality compelling us to dissociate ourselves from all which we believe not to be ourselves. The rule of the ego having been rejected, we are, on the contrary, highly conscious of the evidence of the unity of all that exists. Projected in Time, this unity necessarily becomes permanence and evolutionary continuity, a fusion of Present and Future in a time which our words are quite unable to encompass.
Before attempting to imagine what this may be, we must thus consider that from their birth the new beings, descended from us, will differ from us: by an absence of ego which is not only an effacement of the limitations of I and not-I, but a surpassing of the signs of Time, not only the experience of the unicity of Being in all its manifestations, as well as beyond manifestation, but the enchantment of Time by the consciousness of Eternity.
Such a difference can only have incalculable results, and its establishment therefore requires patience and care which will enable us to move without conflict into this new sphere of manifestation. It cannot be a question of Nature implanting in a single day a race of impersonal beings for whom Time does not have the same value as for us. Too many related achievements must mark the path of this realization. This new form of terrestrial consciousness must
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gradually develop, produce its work, open its own perspectives, make its discoveries and create its language—all of which imply an unfolding which must, even if Time is experienced differently, occupy it little by little and not at a single stroke.
We have already seen that the notion of family would eventually be modified. That is to say that the foundations of society as a whole will change. The reason for which is evident. The family is the first form of union with an entity greater than our own individuality—which it shapes and on which it is nourished. It suggests and, in fact, imposes the sacrifice of oneself to a greater I, the dissolution of the personal being in a more or less ramified community being. Since the dawn of human times (and even since the appearance some seventy million years ago of mammals, to which we belong, and whose manner of child-feeding is at the origin of family links and of their permanence), its objective, as imprecise as it is peremptory, has been to put the individual in yoga with what surpassed it and on which it depends.
But such an objective will no longer hold for the new beings who will reverse the terms of the situation. Their being will go beyond the family, as well as any collective unit which will consequently depend on them, on their counsel, experience and wisdom. The sons will guide the fathers. The children will govern in the name of a vision which will prove to be superior. Not only the family will be modified—supposing it remains the framework, it will necessarily lose its overly exclusive personal character, its ego, to the advantage of a less clan-like and more impersonally communitarian psychology—, but also society, which reposes on the family, and finally humanity as a whole. Superior forms of collective spirit will emerge in which the movement leading us towards the definitive and complete loss of ego and the conquest of the Impersonal, the Eternal and Infinite, will be more clearly seen.
If, in the beginning, the notion of race still prevails, it will no longer act, as it does today, to divide and oppose ethnic groups, but to create a contrast between traditional humanity and the new beings who, engendered by the former, will be superior to it. It may be that a fearful hostility will be unleashed at the outset and that we may attempt to take measures to eliminate this parallel species. But it is not said that the new beings must live together in a particular
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place in the world under the government of the best among them, even should the latter exist and be recognized by them as leaders. Such a concentration would only reconstruct the tribal ego in an only slightly different light, and would be contrary to the nature of these beings and the reasons for their existence. It is, rather, to be supposed that, for their action to be integral, they will be everywhere and will propose to us new forms of being and knowing on all levels of our life. It should be added that to shut them up in camps or to eliminate them would serve no purpose, because others would be born, always elsewhere and more numerous. Which is to say, nothing will be able to prevail against what they will have come to accomplish among us.
Having got over the moment of surprise or incredulous, perhaps sanguinary anger at their appearance, we shall understand that they are only for a time to remain superior to us and that we in our turn shall be like them—that we shall become superior to ourselves. Learning under their guidance, we shall progress more quickly towards the state in which we shall resemble them, while they will raise themselves higher, opening themselves so as to complete the transformation which they, in fact, will only prefigure. For something beyond the first horizon of the eternal Future must be achieved, the seed of which they will carry in themselves, but the germination of which will still require a very long time after they have begun to multiply among us.
The most developed can already imagine, and accept, this evolutionary curve. But the superiority which we are likely to recognize in advance in these future beings will only reside for us in our norms of quality or quantity. We would not be able to conceive of a superiority born of a system which makes it possible to apprehend the world differently.
We are not equipped sensor ally to perceive the truth. Within the limitations of our constitution, the unicity of Being, which is this truth, is only an intellectual inference. It is not a physical or vital sensation. And although it appears to us that we could renounce the latter without forfeiting anything, it is, in fact, a question of the very essence of things. We derive the idea of the unicity of Being from religious or scientific systems which certainly help us to advance, but never entirely satisfy us. We lack something and only have a fraudulent right to God.
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To repeat: it is precisely herein that the new beings will differ from us, and it is thus herein that what we are unable to understand lies. They will be in conscious and permanent contact with what animates the universe. This will be the innate form of their sensibility, which will be founded on inner silence. From this they will no doubt derive new words of wisdom, new gospels, new ideals more sublime than those we have hitherto known, new conceptions of social and political man, artistic expressions which will link us directly with planes of a still unformulated beauty and truth, rendering audible the music of the spheres and tangible the sidereal harmony, concretizing the magic of other worlds to which we still have but furtively access. They will also derive new theories of the universe, in the face of the increasing subtlety of which the boldest conceptions we today set forth will pale. Neither relativity nor quantum theory represents the last word in Science, and what must leave them behind will induce us to make a prodigious leap towards the Eternal and Infinite. This, however, can only come from a consciousness visited by a vision, inhabited by a Force which, from the most infinitesimal to the most gigantic, moves all things both in their apparent independence and their real interdependence, by knowing perfectly what each must do so that their totality will be an indivisible unity. And, as one imagines, a new language will be derived to formulate all these innovations which will owe nothing to epistemology or semantics, but will be created on the basis of new powers of consciousness, of the soul's wish to express more perfectly the silence from which it shines forth.
Even though very incomplete, this enumeration of the first changes to come would suffice to convince us that they will not take place overnight. Much time will be needed, but it would be futile to try to determine just how many centuries. A new page must be written in the book of the History of the Earth. And not a single line will be missing, not a word will be left out. To calculate that two or twenty centuries will be necessary is all the more frivolous because, as already noted, the most important change will pertain to Time, the consciousness which we have of its flow and its continuity, and the opening which will progressively take place in us to the eternal Future.
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But what should we understand by eternal Future? It is another consciousness of Time and its direction, assuming that there would be but one. For us, Time passes from the past to the future. Beings of memory and not of presage, we are conscious almost only of the past, to a small extent of what we call the present and almost not at all of the future. Our mental nature arranges things in such a way that we perceive them separately, one after the other, in Space as in Time. But we can very well imagine another disposition which does not associate things in the same manner, nor assign to them the same significance.
In particular, the principle of causality which governs our comprehension of the universe—but which the subatomic world eludes—and, consequently, which dominates our sense of Good and Evil and retribution, extending to the notion of the Last Judge ment and the "End of Time"—are purely and simply a matter of our sensory instruments. It should be stressed that the latter would have a different orientation and would function at a different rate and with a greater intensity. We would perceive the universe in quite another way. It, the universe, as well as what takes place in it, would have a wholly different value in our eyes.
The linking of things, whether physical or not, is thus a necessity of our mental nature, and is not uniquely and absolutely essential for all forms of consciousness, whether on a planetary or sidereal scale. In other words, what we call Time is one way of expressing something much more vast and complex. What Science today expedites leads only to scientific conclusions. It is, in fact, our entire being and not only a branch of our knowledge which will be called into question as soon as we discover that the Time we experience, which always circumscribes a double horizon, extending behind and before us, really exists only for us.
If Time can be captured and interpreted according to norms other than those of the terrestrial mental, it follows that everything which belongs to the terrestrial and, in the final analysis, to the cosmic mental, can change value in our eyes. There is, to begin with, the principle which apparently obliges us to do things according to what we have previously done and, consequently, to be punished or rewarded here below and beyond (although there must have been a time when, not existing, we would have done nothing, and the first thing we did do, from which all other things would develop, would in no way have depended on us).
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The idea of this law is the very basis of all our individual and collective psychology, of our religions, morals and politics. We can do nothing, neither feel nor think, without this idea raising its blind voice in us and attempting to convince us that this is Good and that is Evil, as if these were absolute in themselves, when it is only the transcription—and how precarious it is—of our perception of Time. But for whomever has gone beyond this form of consciousness, the voice falls silent. And one says that one is free, that one has no more karma. One has become a yogi, or a seer or sage, because Time is no longer the same and one has been unfettered. In the course of one's asceticism, one merged in the Eternal and Infinite and brought back a light which, slowly or in a single flash, consumed the manuscripts of memory. One has, therefore, ceased to react as previously to the passing of things, or more precisely, things have ceased to pass. One feels bathed in Eternity and everything appears to be illuminated by this knowledge which is more than intellectual knowing and more than sensory impression, for it is the direct and incontestable perception of something else—or, the natural and utterly different comprehension of the same things.
Acts continue to be committed, but they are no longer subject to any mental regulations, they elude the inexorable course of Good and Evil. They simply are, and nothing else is to be said about them. Or, indeed, must it be said that, and were they the worst, they are acts of God? Verily, a discovery which tears away a last veil of consciousness—or plunges it into night, which bestows wisdom—or gives way to madness. For it implacably refutes all human experience. And man can only die mentally from the discovery in one way or another, depending on whether he has the strength to tolerate the shock.
In fact, very few among us would survive psychologically the sudden manifestation of this divine truth according to which nothing has ever been evil. All has been wanted and accomplished by a supremely conscious and free Being for whom Evil does not exist. Scholars are far from realizing this, although it is therein that Time must necessarily end. Behind all this uninterrupted flux, there is something which does not move, which sees, knows and desires, and with which we attempt to establish a conscious link as soon as, wanting to define Time, we endeavour to master it and go beyond it. God? Let us retain the word if we wish, but divesting it of the
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religious artifice which removes Him so far from us, whereas it is in ourselves that we must find Him. It is only thus that our enigma becomes comprehensible to us, for it is from within that knowledge must come to us, like an organic growth.
Going beyond the consciousness we have of Time, we find ourselves beyond Good and Evil. We are also in the spontaneous perception of unity and everything appears as an act of God. He alone is the author of what takes place in the universe, irrespective of scale. He is the master of this dimension superior to Time on the basis of which He has always projected Himself, and always will, in the form of myriad creation. Thus, it does not suffice to say that all is an act of God—our ignorance, our stumbling, our hopes and aspiration, as well as the scintillating stars. It should be added that the All is a single act of God. For, what would another act be?
Clearing the barriers of Time entails still another result which corroborates the two preceding. If the universe is one, even though it seems to be innumerable—while nothing there can be separated from anything else—, there exists only one Being in which we inevitably participate and which just as inevitably it is our task to increasingly express as we approach the plane of consciousness on which it becomes perceptible to us.
It is in this progressive expression of the Ineffable that the sense of the eternal Future is found. And millennia were required for its formation. Since Vedic times and the Mosaic era when man was capable of perceiving what transcends Time, of having a foreknowledge of the mystery of the Eternal and Infinite, of uniting with the One, it has been necessary to pass through many stages before recognizing the evidence. Humanity, overwhelmed in the souls of its seers by the vision of the fire of pure Being, has for a long time dedicated itself to defining the stranger par excellence God represents for all, although He is in everyone, as the nucleus is at the centre of the atom, and although the more one believes to determine His ineffable character, the more, like the atomic nucleus, it escapes towards a previously unimagined ineffable.
Let us go over this point again. What has dominated the perception of seers of the One is the sense of an immutable Present, without beginning or end. An experience which, at the cost of their methodical efforts, is recorded in the register of the collective unconscious.
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As a result of those efforts, we are all virtually in a position to merge one day in pure Being, to exchange while in a state of ecstasy our arid sensory system for a solar perception of reality. But what has been inferred from the experience of even the most enlightened person only succeeds in fixing the idea of the eternal Present, or of the both supra- and omni temporal dimension, compared with which the dimension in which we live becomes unreal, as in the Buddhism and Mayavada of India, or is looked on as a poor relative. And thus, as we have already mentioned, even when those who were inspired—in whom the highest faculties of the entire human species were then concentrated—succeeded in evoking the notion of a perpetual Becoming coinciding with the eternal Present, they did not go beyond the framework of our humanity, or of the cosmos such as apprehended by our senses. This amounts to saying that the concept of the eternal Future is perhaps the most difficult which has been given the human intelligence to grasp.
This concept necessarily stems from a twofold transcendent perception: that of pure Being and its manifestation. If the Spirit is eternal and if Matter is the expression of Spirit, there must ensue from the latter a state which expresses this eternity. For the moment, the antinomy seems to be complete. The experience of the world contradicts and negates that of God, and conversely. But this is only because of the imperfection of the instruments by means of which we experience things. And after all the millennia of ecstasies and visions in which sages have perfected these instruments, it has become possible to approach matters in a different manner.
Sri Aurobindo stressed this simultaneous twofold reality of Matter-Spirit, to which the Gita gives the name Purushottama, the Supreme Soul. And his teaching as well as his yoga repose on the prescience that the two must ultimately merge so that man and the universe would be conscious expressions of God. This natural fusion must also be integral. A being must gradually manifest, not only whose consciousness will be deified by its union with the Eternal and Infinite, but whose very substance will be deified, whose physical envelope itself will be conscious of the Eternal and Infinite and will express Him. Which is equivalent to saying that a time must come when our entire being, and not only our soul, will go beyond Time and will enter, without disintegrating, the primordial Light.
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This next stage in evolution represents the stage of the eternal Future. Evident and inevitable, it is, however, only possible if one is first firmly anchored in the Eternal and Infinite, if the notion of Time, such as we understand it, completely dissolves. What happens then? To begin with, everything takes place in the present, which is the time of the Spirit, and the past no longer exists even in the material world. For if we do not have a past, we do not have an origin and nothing has a beginning. And the future is without end. It is to establish this idea, in itself quite simple, yet very difficult for thought to reach, that seers and yogis have relentlessly driven their disciples for millennia, perhaps believing to seek for them alone a more complete beatitude, but in reality opening for the entire race the immense field of the collective unconscious, which they impersonally cultivated, giving rise to what today, for a few pioneers, may appear to be rudimentary, but will tomorrow be the status of the new beings.
For them, the past will not at all exist. Nothing will have ever begun. The infinite future will alone be real. The mystery of the creation of the world will be dispelled in their eyes, as they will not dissociate Spirit from Matter. There will be no here below, no beyond, but a single state on the basis of which they will elaborate the lines of what must come after them, the new creation as announced by Sri Aurobindo.
Their work will no doubt be very long, for they will together have to establish definitively the level of consciousness at which the activation of the cells of their brains will enable them to live, and to bring everything into play so that even this level can also be surpassed. It goes without saying that it is not by means of dogmas and institutions that they will achieve this, but by a constant action, by a way of life which, while being far superior to ours, will still be human. These will be enlightened men, not supermen. Becoming increasingly numerous, they will one day be counted by the thousands, and the next by the tens of thousands, forming in our multitude an ecstatic rosace.
Not having a past, they will possess a vision of the future which nothing will affect or limit. They will know exactly which path to follow from one point in Time to another, more distant point, and thus what must be done to realize the advent of a superhuman race. As Eternity is always new and always identical—this union of two
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contradictory values is the very content of the yogic vision—, they will recognize God in all and, in all, will progressively reveal Him. Bearers of absolute knowledge, they will, however, only discover and disclose it at the rhythm at which the planetary consciousness will be able to assimilate it and the human soul express it in terms of life.
But we must henceforth understand that, in its least details and on all levels, this life will be increasingly different from what human life presently is. Thus, for example, it is possible that the first physiological modifications could appear, a long, yet indeterminable succession of which must lead to the full and entire manifestation of a super humanity which, in its very substance, will differ from us.
The new beings would not only be endowed with a brain much more richly equipped than ours, but would have a different respiratory rhythm. This should not be surprising, as from one species to another variations are sometimes considerable. It therefore seems natural that in the course of this decisive stage of planetary evolution such a change would take place. All the more so as the role of respiration in the awakening of visionary faculties is undeniable, as is evidenced by the respiratory discipline and breath control which form an integral part of certain systems of yoga.
If one is able to maintain in oneself an embryonic respiration, whereby the heart is like a distant chamber at the back of the chest, and the breath cuts powerful channels of energy in the being, striking the frontal lobe, one can open oneself to worlds of inner vision and, if need be, leap through the fontanelle outside one's physical envelope and merge with the Eternal and Infinite. There is, thus, a strong chance that these new beings would not breathe in the same rhythm as we. This occurrence, which would have to accompany the activation of the cells of their brains, may then suffice to make them appear exceptional in our eyes. Being material, this change is more comprehensible for us than the immaterial results, beginning with the different perception of the universe which it will necessarily entail.
Nevertheless, it is with a view to establishing this perception that this change will take place. It is in order to change the face of the cosmos that things will henceforth be organized differently in man such as he now is, and not so as to add a further nuance to our
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present psychology. Change will be effectuated so as to obtain the means of a deeper understanding of Being. To breathe in a different rhythm, or to have more cells which function in the brain, is not an end in itself, but only the physical expression of a process of consciousness in the conquest of its in temporal origin.
It happens that these minor, but essential, biological modifications would suffice to establish in us the natural and permanent sense of another temporal dimension, of the unicity of Being (of which all voices are the voice, all faces the face) and, eventually, of the not only spiritual immortality such as yogis and sages have been able to experience, but physical immortality as represented in the apocalyptic writings and in the vision of Sri Aurobindo.
In fact, the mission of the new beings will be to establish this sense of physical immortality in terrestrial consciousness. And that implies a work of such amplitude that it must be evident to us that centuries on end will be required. Because it will be necessary—is necessary—that everything in us, including our most material covering, believes in God, turns towards and dedicates itself to Him, loses itself in Him, so that the adventure of metamorphosis can be undertaken. We are still very far removed from that, for we must first expunge our sense of the past and the fact that this sense governs us today and will continue to govern us as long as we perceive Time as we now do.
The perception of the past belongs to Death, not simply to the physiological phenomenon of dying, but to the being, to the cosmic power which Death is, and in which some traditions see one of the great powers of Darkness, a formidably conscious Being whose function would appear to be to negate the divine state, the immortality of pure Being, and to prevent us from ever attaining to it.
Nevertheless, as everything is the Eternal and Infinite, Death can only have something of the nature of the One, can only be an essential part in His cosmic manifestation. Death exercises its empire only within the limits of the perception of Time. It corresponds to a level, or to a series of levels, in evolution. All dies, it is said. And there is no doubt that until now all, in fact, do die, for we have not yet reached the level, or levels, at which consciousness, no longer limited, will no longer perceive Death.
Death is the ultimate limitation of the mental. Our mental cannot grasp, our thought cannot discern, what waits beyond. Consequently,
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it is Death, the sentiment we have of it, which changes in us the perception of the totality of Time into the fragmentary sense of the past, and which, blocking our view when we want to see ahead of us, precludes the true prescience of the future and changes what must materially come to pass here below, or what is accomplished in other spheres, but in relation to the framework of our existence, into a physical and psychological beyond.
For one might say that the entire movement of evolution consists in giving form here below to what is beyond. Each image of life is the beyond of the previous. This is true of terrestrial kingdoms and species, as of our most insignificant acts, sentiments and thoughts. All is secretly the negation of Death which itself is overtly the negation of Life, or rather of Being which is manifested as Energy, Matter, Life and Mind, as far as we are able to understand it, and, in all probability, has innumerable other means of manifesting itself.
But these means themselves are concealed from our intelligence. They are beyond thought, and thus beyond Death. This is why they do not exist for us. And when we cross the threshold where our view must change and finally see the opening of vaster horizons, it appears to us, on the contrary, that all will vanish utterly, that there will be nothing, or that in any case we shall no longer be, as we must traverse Death itself in order that we would be given new eyes.
Whatever transpires, these eyes will indeed one day be ours. To begin with, they will be those of the new beings, enabling them to not only perceive the past, but the future, and making it possible for them to live, and teach us to live, in an entirely different manner. For Death, having been traversed, will no longer have the same ascendancy, will no longer assume the same role in our consciousness. It will lighten its rule, then recede. Such must be the natural tendency of things once the perceptions we now have of Time have been overcome. Everything will gradually escape Death and be suffused by the light of the Eternal and Infinite.
The new beings will above all dedicate themselves to the progressive elimination of our sense of Death which, dating from the Neanderthals, serves as a basis for the entire edifice of humanity, and, by way of example, to our initiation into the perception of the future. One should thus not believe that their task will be easy, not-
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withstanding the superior faculties of which they will be the vessels. It will be incumbent upon them to reverse our consciousness of Time in such a way that the sense of the future—of the eternal Future which nothing can conceal and whose expansion cannot be hindered—may belong to our natural perceptions. In the absence of which, they themselves would be unable to proceed further, to advance towards new discoveries on the way to the complete transfiguration of our species. For their progress is linked with ours. And as long as we have not found in ourselves the message they will bring, they will be able to prophesy no more.
This perception of the future which, under their aegis will be the basis of future civilizations, this new temporal consciousness will thus be the increasingly luminous mark of our humanity. We shall no longer live in relation to the past. Our acts will no longer have the same value, and we shall feel ourselves to be free of their consequences. And freedom will grow in us. Lightness and transparency of soul will pervade us. Nothing will any longer be behind us to hold us back, nor will anything loom in front of us to impede us. And Death itself will no longer prevail against us.
The fear of death will be the first to disappear. Then, Death itself will disappear. In contact with the new beings, who will explain to us the process and will themselves, through their growing number and their wisdom, be proof of what they advance, we shall inwardly change our attitude towards what has since our appearance haunted and brought us down and against which we have over the millennia undertaken to raise the protective ramparts of religions and philosophies, without having for all that attenuated our dolour and anguish.
Thus, there will henceforth be men among us who are more developed than ourselves and who will see more and farther. They will render the reality which is today denied us perceptible—and accessible. The long advance of our species from the funeral rites of the Neanderthals will finally assume its meaning. We shall not have wandered in vain. We shall no longer ask ourselves in the same manner the question we asked when digging the first graves and placing there with the body flower offerings which testify since prehistory to our presentiment of a mystery surpassing that of the arrest of breathing and rigor mortis. We shall no longer ask ourselves if there is something afterwards. We shall no longer ask
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ourselves if, should there indeed be something else, we must fear punishment or expect a reward. We shall no longer ask ourselves how to live so as to obtain the latter, or avoid the former. We shall know. Thousands of new beings will teach us, and tens of thousands of new beings will take up and echo their words. They will have triumphed over temporal consciousness, vanquished the sense of limitation, supplanted the hegemony of Death. And yet, they will die.
But, thanks to them, we shall know that every disappearance is only apparent and provisional. And they will return, always more numerous, always more luminous and more rich in knowledge which they will share with us. Upon contact with them, we shall be depersonalized. And thus we shall no longer fear Death. For Death only extinguishes the personality—and even only the terrestrial personality, the role, or rather multiple roles, which Nature has us to assume and by means of which we would define ourselves. It does not suppress the true personality which moves from life to life, growing from experience to experience, blossoming from body to body. And we shall forget who we are in order to remember only that we are.
Thus Death will become a conscious ecstasy in which the soul changes bodies. Then, it will cease to be necessary. And there will be those who will no longer die. But many things will then have been accomplished on Earth to make of it the natural environment of this inevitable wonder. Centuries will have passed, but in another rhythm than that in which Time passes for us. Our intelligence will be opened to new lights. We shall have acquired a more complete mastery of the universe—which will become more subtle, as made of a psychological matter, in which what we call imagination will play a much greater role and relax the laws to which we are now subjected. This will still be the universe, not the new Heaven and Earth of the Apocalypse. For that is something different from the universe, a perception which will be reserved for those who, being different from men, will not die and even here live in an immortal world. It will still be the universe, this universe. For, as was said previously, many things will necessarily take place before the superhuman race emerges, like a sun rising, from us. And not a single thing can be omitted, as each represents a step we must take on the way to the great Discovery.
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Those to whom we have alluded in these pages are not the most important. There will be many others who, one after another, will enable us, on a much vaster scale than we today imagine, to realize our two greatest dreams: to peacefully unify the peoples of this world and to conquer the cosmos, by having us return to their source, which is the knowledge of pure Being, of the Eternal and Infinite, of the One which is all beings and manifests for us as Space, or Space-Time. Without beginning, it has no end; without birth, it is also that which dies not, the immortal Divine of which we are all representatives and in the image of which we grow.
As if the Earth were to approach the Sun, we shall raise ourselves always towards a greater light, become increasingly conscious of what the bounds of cosmic Night and of our own inner night conceal. Some say that night has never been darker, that this is the hour of silentium, the unfathomable and mute darkness which covers the dawn to come. But the day now being prepared will not resemble those of the past. It will be incomparably more lucent. For this reason, it is perhaps more correct to say that the Earth is approaching the Sun, that we are raising ourselves towards the origin of all light, and that the shadow of great density which surrounds us reflects what, beyond the firmament, leads to the dazzling crown of our guiding star.
We can also say, which amounts to the same, that in us the Sun becomes more brilliant, the physical form we know being only the reflection of that which is in us. And in us, it has begun to shine more brightly. Our enigma is becoming more clear. Our destiny can be glimpsed. Things are beginning to become comprehensible for us, and nothing will be able to prevent their fulfilment. The vessel of our humanity is sailing unremittingly towards the Eternal and Infinite. It ascends the river of the Sun, crosses zones of increasing richness, celestial continents—even those of thought—of increasing subtlety and, un deflected from its course, continues to rise towards the silent heights of that which lights for us the universe. And when the Sun in us, and we ourselves, have reached the zenith and it opens to receive us at its immeasurable centre, then all will be luminous and another universe—something different from the universe—will manifest. Then, and only then, he whom Sri Aurobindo called the superman, or gnostic being, will appear and a physically immortal race will exist in the world.
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The world, which is a misperception of paradise, will become paradisiacal, not to reward the new race by bestowing on it a state from which the former would be excluded, but because terrestrial Nature, having fashioned from race to race the most accurate instruments of perception, will have perfected consciousness and the substance which will enable them to comprehend the divine reality of the universe and to live there forever.
It would be decidedly naive to believe that such a task would not require centuries and centuries. How could we leap over any stage while ascending the river of the Sun? But it would be just as naive to deny that this task could ever be accomplished. In fact, it does not depend on us. It is carried out through us, while carrying us into the unknown and implanting in us images of a dream which will tomorrow become our truth. The Sun will never set again. There will no longer be day or night. Time will no longer exist, no more than Death. This is our most acute hope, which we conceal from ourselves, so inadmissible does it appear to us. Nevertheless, we are pervaded by a clarity which comes from a plane situated beyond day and night. The Sun descends in us and gives us the vision of the eternal Future which, being eternal, exists at this very moment, and always has.
The sole future of the Earth has always been to give birth to a divine species. Throughout the four and a half billion years of its existence, everything has been oriented to this end. There is not a single planetary moment during any evolutionary stage which would not have worked towards the accomplishment of that goal. If we observe the initial gaseous mass, the volcanic deserts of earliest times, the primordial ocean with its one-celled organisms and legions of plants and marine life, we shall find there but a single mission—which we will find again on dry land in all animal populations and living temples of the plant kingdom. In everything, everywhere and at all times the same voice ordains, or rather chants. It commands blind Night to recede, to liberate the forms of consciousness which it conceals in its depths, and it chants its litany of love to the growing Light. And nothing is impossible for it. Nothing.
The terrestrial past must suffice to assure us that the future holds the promise of a radical change in the processes of consciousness and the formation of a corresponding species. But we must no
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doubt first educate our intellects so as to transform our religious faith, which nothing supports, into simple certitude. This task is also incumbent upon the new beings. Their presence among us will be the sign we shall need, which nothing in Nature has yet given us, so that we no longer believe, but rather know that all has ever been a patient discovery of immortality and that, in this world ruled by Death, a day will come when we shall no longer die.
Once we have recognized the new beings and understood what they embody and which Force is at work in them and through their intercession, the world will be ready for peace, for unity and for a more integral form of knowledge of the universe. And we shall live according to another Law. It should be emphasized that we shall no longer act in the name of Good and Evil, but in the name of what is necessary for cosmic evolution, for the fulfilment of terrestrial destiny, for the blossoming of the flower of fire, the seed of which has been passed on to us from species to species since the beginning of things. Guided by the new beings, we shall know what it is. We shall know what we must do so that, from stage to stage, that for which everything existed in the past, and today exists, is realized. And the eternal Future will be our only God.
We shall always attempt to manifest that Future more completely and shall know the joy of bringing about the descent of the Divine to Earth. We shall no longer have to render ourselves auspicious by means of rites and prayers. We shall assume a more active and conscious role in His self-realization. All our acts will be characterized by the certainty that He is incarnating more and more in the world. All our thoughts will raise us towards Him, while He will more and more fill our consciousness. At present our thinking is horizontal. It only really explores a single plane of being: Matter, not Matter in itself, but such as is perceived by the mental. Our thinking will become vertical. It will raise itself to higher levels where it will not cease to modify, purify and enlighten itself.
In the presence of the wonder, and presaging what it heralds, we shall develop an adoring mentality. Feeling itself permeated by the love of God, the future humanity will adore, knowing itself to be protected and, through the new beings, taught by Him. Future humanity will doubtlessly no longer call him God, sensing too great a closeness to Him and knowing itself to be promised complete union.
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Henceforth, knowledge of the self will be the foremost object of study. It will no longer be adorned with the colours of religion, nor cloistered in yogic solitude. It will leave the sacred enclosures of faith to spontaneously become an integral part of our daily life. And it will govern all our activities without exception, whether individual or collective, whether pertaining to the conduct of peoples, Science, the arts, the exploitation of natural resources or to our most insignificant relations. For it will be founded on the evidence embodied by the new beings.
And God will gradually pervade humanity. And we shall give birth to God. Humanity will know the miracle of embodying God. For it is from our womb that the new beings will be born. And they will influence the laws of heredity. They will be constituted of our substance and will assist us in its transformation.
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According to Sri Aurobindo, from the moment in which individual consciousness has united with the supreme Consciousness, three hundred years will be required for the transformation of our human substance to bring forth the new beings. The first phase of this great work of the union with the Eternal and the Infinite requires such a long time and is reserved for so few among us that one may initially imagine that it would be forever impossible and that when the great passage is discovered we shall find ourselves to be unequipped to embark upon it.
Nevertheless, viewing this period of three centuries abstractly, we must first recognize that much will happen to irreversibly change both the external conditions and that part of inner space where experience is made. Supposing that a yogi were today to enter upon this undertaking, and were to be granted three centuries, the world in which his results would be achieved would no longer be that in which he began to transform his physical envelope. Victims of an ego which leads us to view the world as an immutable monolith exempt from the changes which take place in us, we ignore the fact that there is an interaction. We shall only change because everything changes, and conversely. This is all the more the case in the instance of an individual who, in yoga with pure being, would undertake the alchemical work of transforming his body into that which will define the superman. Firstly, only if everything in earthly being permitted, would he be able to do so. The results then obtained would have repercussions on this earthly being, on human and planetary collective consciousness, for he would come into contact in himself with the impersonal elements which are found everywhere in the whole.
Nevertheless, even if an isolated seeker were today to set out on the path of physical transformation, and the Force of the eternal Future would support him in his efforts and he were indeed to achieve some results, it would nonetheless still be true that the movement would rightfully belong to the new beings whose brain cells, activated by this Force, would endow the undertaking with a greater means of realization.
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At this point it would be appropriate to give more precise details. One knows that Mother was the first to work for years on the illumination of the cells in such a way that not only the mental, vital and physical being, but also the most insignificant elements of the latter would become conscious of and manifest pure Being. It would seem to logically follow that, as the brain is the most awakened part of our physical state, its cells would be the first to be affected, the first to be activated by the Force that She has set in motion, and that a superior humanity representing a new stage in the ascent of the stream of Light must be born of it.
It seems just as logical to infer that a kind of cellular contagion will be produced, starting from the brain governed by this Force, and that in the course of time other points of the body will be affected (all the more so as contemporary science tends to establish that the mental, until now localized in the brain, in truth circulates throughout the body), bringing about each time the emergence of a new stage in the ascent towards the centre of the Light. It is this continual expansion of consciousness and its powers which would be the feature of the new beings and confer upon them the capacity of traversing the centuries, or in any case of confronting the fateful three centuries without the destruction of their bodies.
One imagines that, if their physical substance is one day able to hold in check the laws of human aging, the physical substance of all men will be somewhat modified, but that as long as we have not together attained to a certain psycho-physical plateau, they will not succeed in their efforts. That is why it is indispensable that we do not imagine them as separate from ourselves, even if they begin to differ from us organically.
The body of humanity is one, and what is done by the most enlightened must correspond to something which is found in the subconscious of the most obscure. To want a single thing which would not share characteristics with the collective nature would be to doom that thing to impotence. Always, and if but murmured in the darkness, a response must arise from the masses when the voice of the divine dreamer chants. The new beings will be this dreamer to whom we shall respond. And because, in reality, we form all together but one body, the work which they will carry out to render their physical envelope more conscious and more supple
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and, finally, to enlighten it, will necessarily be reproduced on the scale of the body of humanity.
For the present, the dream ends here. Immense perspectives open before us. A new world is in the process of embodiment which, tomorrow, will provide the blueprint for heretofore unseen societies and yet unimagined arts and sciences, for still inconceivable morphological and psychological modifications. All that we have to know is that we are ascending, that we do not cease to move upwards, that such is the law of the universe and that nothing, not even the interlude of death, has ever been, or will ever be, able to stop us.
Brought forth by a Force gradually revealed in us and always elevating us to greater knowledge, we shall move unfailingly towards what yet remains unknown to us, but which that force knows to be the truth of things. In the course of this odyssey, we are shaped in such a way as to become sensitive to what it wants to give us. Or rather, the voyage itself is such as to continuously refine the material from which it has drawn us. Thus consciousness grows in us without end, expanding the world. Without end, it spreads the wings which enable us to cover the days and centuries, the millennia and then the inapprehensible totality of the Eternal and Infinite. As in a dream, we shall climb up the steps of the forecourt of God, without knowing either exactly what we would accomplish, or what gives us the power to do so.
We do nothing ourselves. If we look back and contemplate the path already covered, it is impossible for us to believe that we would have advanced to this point by our own means. What is there in us? What is it that forms us, our acts, and unwinds the glistening passage of time to cause us to aspire to the Immutable, the Eternal and Infinite? What is it that gives rise to this dream and patiently fulfills it? What is it that today half-opens the gates of a new vision and, tomorrow, will open them wide, bathing us in the images of an unknown beauty?
In an uninterrupted progression we advance from the depths of time, and our most insignificant acts participate without our knowledge in the unique act of God in man, and our most futile words merge in the hymn which man raises to God. A single path and a single goal—we have always progressed thus, each among us bringing a minute detail to the whole, a nuance in which for an instant all colours are exalted. We advance through the immensity
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of Time without clearly knowing towards what. We multiply and disappear and multiply again, nourishing on our obscure days the shining procession of a humanity which magnetizes from unknown heights the force of a yet unperceived Sun.
Do we really want what we accomplish? Are we only conscious of what is accomplished through our agency? We advance; we advance and nothing ever stops us. On the contrary, everything supports our advance and renders it more resolute, as we are visited by dreams in which something of the truth emerges. How long have we thus proceeded? We scarcely know, having forgotten. We would like to determine a beginning of things and of our life. We advance towards our origin, which is not in the past, regardless how remote. It is in the future, for it is in the future that we shall discover the secret. Thus, the most remote past and the most distant future will be but a moment of glory, of light and ecstasy. That which has always moved us will be manifest, and that is what we shall become. We shall enter into the Mystery of Mysteries in which we create ourselves and that which goes before us.
Pondicherry,
15 July 1990-15 September 1990
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