Images Of The Future

Introduction

Archaka (Invoker of Light) and Alexandre Kalda were the names of this remarkable author born on 27th December 1943. His first novel published at the age of 16 by Grasset, the prestigious French publisher and then a whole series accepted by the principal publishing houses of France (several by Albin Michel) and hailed by the critics. He arrived at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in India in 1975 where he was based and spent most of his life until he left his body at the age of 53 on 7th February 1996.

In the introduction to his "Le Dieu de Dieu" he gives us some glimpses into his life:

"I belong to the generation of genocides: the one which came to birth during the Second World War and awoke to the awareness of the world as a perpetual battlefield. On the bombardment in Europe there soon followed the explosion of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, while the liberated countries learned with at least as much of a sense of devastation about what happened in the concentration camps. In an instant, a whole town could be destroyed under the stupefied eyes of the nations. Within a few years a whole race almost disappeared without the other nations knowing about it.

To the genetic code inscribed in our cells was added in our subconscious the most formidable horror of all times. Too small to know what had thus entered into us, we reacted blindly and declared war in every possible way on the adult world.

I was twelve years old when I scribbled my first book. Having broken with his family the hero. hardly older than myself, went to live in slums. I was sixteen when I signed my first contract for a novel. without
much literary value probably, but somehow I did write these words which were later at the heart of all my activities : 'I have killed death . I have not killed but destroyed, not death but the idea of death in me'

Fortunately I did not become famous..."

Fortunately because Archaka was a lifelong seeker. His search led him through Tangiers to India where he was brought by Sri Aurobindo's books. After meeting Nolini, the disciple who was

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closest to him and who gave him his name Archaka (he who invokes the light), he began gradually to become more and more a part of the Ashram where for 10 years he was appreciated as a very good teacher and the students loved his music lessons especially. In a letter of 1988 he writes to his great friend Christine de Rivoyre, the French writer:

"I work and enjoy myself and all is hope to me. Nothing weighs on me. Everything is essential. Oh, the Indian taste of things! How did I ever live in the West!... Here what dominates is the impression of light. At last I see the light of day."

Every day in the Ashram he wrote his commentary on Sri Aurobindo's theory of spiritual evolution. Sometimes when, after two hours of writing, he used to visit his close Russian friend, Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, he would tell him that he himself could not immediately understand what he had written. It was an inspired kind of writing and typical of Archaka who was first of all a seer. These writings, says Dimitri, are the clearest and most eloquent on the subject. Of this series of extraordinary essays, "Images of the Future" is one the most dazzlingly challenging to the agonising question of "why evil, why suffering", a question bred into his genes as can be seen from his introduction to "Le Dieu de Dieu". Not since Krishna gave his instructions to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra has the message of the role of war and suffering been so illuminated as in Sri Aurobindo's writings. Here is what Archaka says, daring to probe what most writers avoid:

"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-Kuruk-shetra, 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

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and die, attracting the Light to the abyss called AIDS, or death camps, or anything else repugnant to us".

Archaka is never afraid to plumb the depths with infinite compassion but he never leaves us there. His message is one of an inevitable solution:

"... 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".

This is the first of Archaka's essays published in English. He is the foremost transmitter of Sri Aurobindo's ideas and anyone who is interested in the psychic revolution now taking place on the planet cannot afford to miss reading this book.

Maggi Lidchi-Grassi

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Theoretical physics often end eavours to analyze and explain what is situated this side of the initial formation of the universe, where gravity already acted upon the elementary particles which gave birth to the cosmos. But, nothing enables us to determine what went before. A wall stands, called Planck's wall, named after the father of quantum physics who was the first to show the impossibility of describing the behaviour of atoms in conditions of extreme gravity. However, researchers have subsequently attempted to cross this barrier, to surpass the idea, since for man as a mental creature, the world is first an idea of the world, as well as its explication.

Among the possible visions, let us call to mind that, "the very structure of space disappeared in a gravitational cone of such intensity that time fell from the future to the past to explode at the bottom of the cone into a myriad of moments equal to eternity"¹.

A vertiginous, though not preposterous, hypothesis which brings into play our most subtle conceptions of the nature of Time, compelling us to ask what the future is and, inevitable corollary, what value should be attributed to the vision of the future of the Earth which prophets have transmitted to us over the centuries.

From the Vedic rishis and Moses—the first to have crossed the intangible frontier which separates Space-Time from the Eternal and Infinite—to Israel's inspired prophets, bards of planetary immortality, and to Sri Aurobindo, pioneer of the physical transformation of our species, an entire current emerges, leading us intuitively to the threshold where consciousness reverses, where the soul is enlightened and witnesses the appearance of the new Heaven and Earth of the apocalypse of St. John.

That scientific terms differ from mystic words should not mislead us, for it is the same reality which they attempt to circumscribe. The soul of the scientist is not less spiritual than the soul of the seer. The same necessity leads both, a necessity which is not so much individual, as collective, terrestrial, cosmic. Otherwise, it would be futile to speak of the unity of beings and, even more, of the uniqueness of Being.

¹ Jean Guitton, Grichka and Igor Bogdanov, Dieu et la science.

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Does it not come down to the same to suggest that time falls from the future to the past to result in a kind of myriad Eternity, or to evoke the vision of a future in which man triumphs over the unidirectional, temporal linearity in which we live to enter the consciousness of Eternity, the veritable future of humanity? Whether we acknowledge it or not, does that not imply the supreme presentiment: there is a phase and rhythm of Time which, as the goal of our advancement, guides it without fail? In other words, what one might call an absolute future pre-exists in what we do on the individual and collective plane, and engenders our actions from moment to moment.

If men have been able to instill in us the sense of a state in which we shall one day be physically inaccessible to death, if they have preached the expectation of the Kingdom of God, the reign of terrestrial immortality—the very foundation of Judeo-Christian culture and thus of Occidental society, whether secular or religious—, it should be understood that, in one way or another, they have entered into contact with something of this future.

Certainly, we can disbelieve their words which are often obscured by a symbolism no longer current. Nevertheless, their prophecies haunt us and we recall their eschatological content without understanding that the worldly ordeal which they describe in poetic and moral terms is the crucible in which humanity must be transmuted into a superior race forever living in the Light.

The end of the world is an athanor² in which the lead of our painful subconscious must be transmuted to the gold of beatific consciousness, not in some unverifiable beyond, but here itself in the reality of the material world. Thus one might summarize the content of these revelations which, heretofore sacred Utopias, Science now begins to corroborate and will necessarily continue to do so in the decades to come, as contemporary research concerning the direction of Time cannot fail to shed light on this question.

But, for there to have been a premonition of a superhuman future, as our Scriptures attest, our highest consciousness must have been impregnated by this very future, which is Eternity. This future must already exist and provide us in some way with signs to direct our evolutionary course. Consequently, we must understand that nothing can possibly prevent its opening in us and through our

² An alchemist's furnace.

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agency, as disastrous as our enterprise may seem, as desperate as our destiny may appear.

That is the notion upon which this book rests. These images come from the future, and only translate in modern terms a confusing and insistent millennial hope. They attempt to reproduce in human language what already awaits us beyond human perception. If, as the seers chant, our race is destined to become immortal— which the intellect, lacking the requisite tools, cannot envisage without seeing therein an absurd and appalling chimera—, if we are destined here below to enter and live in Eternity, nothing will prevent that from coming to be. That has even been accomplished in advance, for the simple reason that Eternity does not come after Time, but precedes, contains and transcends it. It has always been and will always be, and nothing can alter the perfection, modify the unknowable and infinite content, nor defer the manifestations of it in our material universe which, in fact, it carries in itself.

It goes without saying that without the teaching and example of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, these pages could not have been written. They are bathed in their vision of what I call the eternal Future.

In Le temple de 1'Apocalypse, wanted to go back to the beginning of the Paleolithic, to the pre-human source of our present behaviour and of the threat of complete destruction which that behaviour causes to weigh upon humanity. I wanted, as far as I was able, to expose the reasons we have to hope, in the face of all, and affirmed my certainty that, in spite of the din of arms and the accumulated gloom on our brows, we have not for a moment ceased to construct the temple of the Eternal and Infinite, the pillars of fire which we experience today. In this essay I have attempted to describe the holy of holies of this temple at the end of time.

This is obviously but a manner of speaking: according to the vision of St. John, there is no temple in the heavenly Jerusalem— and, therefore, no priests or religions, no more scriptures or prophets, no avatars or messiahs. It is, in fact, a matter of passage to another consciousness in which all meet God. How this passage will be effectuated, something which cannot be accomplished from one day to the next, nor result of the spell of some unknown magic, but must be the patient fruit of evolution—such is the theme of these pages.

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This essay will doubtlessly appear to some to be concerned with science-fiction, while for others it will be seen to pertain to the new mysticism revealed by Sri Aurobindo. Extra-terrestrials are replaced by supra-terrestrials, and the conquest of outer space by the conquest of the inner space of a planetary consciousness superior to that of which we today avail. My conviction results in the frequent employment of the future tense, rather than the conditional, so as to express what in my understanding is inevitable, not hypothetical. After all, is it not a question here of the eternal future, as well as of the images which emanate from it? If I am mistaken in my perception of these images, or in their transcription, the error is mine alone. And perhaps by correcting it, others will find the path of a greater truth.

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