Beyond Man

Chapter Seventeen: The Five ‘Dreams’ of Sri Aurobindo

It is not for personal greatness that I am seeking to bring down the Supermind. I care nothing for greatness or littleness in the human sense … If human reason regards me as a fool for trying to do what Krishna did not try, I do not in the least care … It is a question between the Divine and myself — whether it is the Divine Will or not, whether I am sent to bring that down or open the way for its descent or at least make it more possible or not. Let all men jeer at me if they will or all Hell fall upon me if it will for my presumption — I go on till I conquer or perish.¹

— Sri Aurobindo

India became free and independent on 15 August 1947 without a shot being fired. On that occasion All India Radio, station Trichinopoly, asked Sri Aurobindo — he who had inculcated the idea of an absolute and unconditional independence upon the minds and the hearts of the Indian people — for a message. Sri Aurobindo rarely complied with such requests, but this time he wrote one of the important documents in his life. His text, read by a news reader, was broadcast on 14 August.

‘August 15th, 1947 is the birthday of free India. It marks for her the end of an old era, the beginning of a new age. But we can also make it by our life and acts as a free nation an important date in the new age opening for the whole world, for the political, social and spiritual future of humanity.

‘August 15th is my own birthday and it is naturally gratifying to me that it should have assumed this vast significance. I take this coincidence not as a fortuitous accident, but as the sanction and seal of the Divine Force that guides my steps in the work with which I began life, as the beginning of its full fruition. Indeed, on this day I can watch almost all the world-movements which I hoped to see fulfilled in my lifetime, though then they looked like impracticable dreams, arriving at fruition or on their way to achievement.’² Sri Aurobindo then sums up those five ‘dreams’ one after the other. Let us have a closer look at them.

1. India

‘The first of these dreams was a revolutionary movement which would create a free and united India. India today is free but she has not achieved unity.’

To Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, India was not a mass of land but a being, a goddess, ‘just like Shiva is a god’, called Bharat Mata, Mother India. The visible land mass is the material body of this very real being, venerated as the soul of the nation. In the same way other nations too have at their centre a living Being always striving for their integrality, their natural completeness and perfection; it is this Being that inspires the ‘cells’ of its body, i.e., the beings born from its substance, to the passionate love and defence of their motherland called patriotism. It is indispensable for the realization of the goal of terrestrial evolution that every true nation acquires its material completeness at a culminating point in history. Whatever may be the external, political motives, this is the true impetus of most historical emotion and commotion.

In the view of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, India occupied a special place in the world. This country has always been the cradle of the most important spiritual discoveries and the highest spiritual realizations, which have spread out in the world from there. It is also the place where the essential gains of humanity were made imperishable and can therefore be integrated in its future evolution to make them into its foundations. Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘[India is] a country apart in which as in a fortress the highest spiritual ideal could maintain itself in its most absolute purity.’³ ‘India is the Guru of the world. The future structure of the world depends on India,’⁴ wrote the Mother, and also: ‘India must be saved for the good of the world since India alone can lead the world to peace and a new world order.’⁵ Statements of this kind — and there are many more — will strike some as exaggerated, to put it mildly. But one should not forget that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother advocated a ‘spiritual realism’ and that they never spoke out of emotional idealism. They based themselves on what they experienced and perceived with their highly evolved inner faculties. The fact that some of their followers have published one-sided selections from their talks and writings about India — as about other subjects — cannot be blamed on them. Sri Aurobindo has more than once castigated the ‘cherished torpor and weakness’ in his country⁶ and its omnipresent tamas, i.e., the inertia, the corporeal and mental immovability, lack of effort, etc. So did the Mother too, and she said that, had she been born in India, she would have shattered all its calcified and no longer meaningful habits and traditions, but that, being a French subject, she had to watch her step. A couple of representative quotations in this context may suffice.

K.D. Sethna wrote somewhere in 1978: ‘Two generations ago Tagore said that although India was lying in the dust, the very dust in which she lay was holy. Obviously it was in his mind that this dust had been trod by the feet of Rishis and Saints and Avatars. Sri Aurobindo’s comment is reported to have been that whatever might be the case the dust could not be the proper thing for a man to lie in and that man had not been created to adopt a prone posture.’⁷

A.B. Purani has noted down Sri Aurobindo’s words in one of the evening talks of 1926: ‘Present-day Indians have got nothing to boast of from their past. Indian culture today is in the most abject condition, like the fort of Gingee — one pillar standing here, and another ceiling there and some hall out of recognition somewhere else.’⁸ Sri Aurobindo wrote in the Arya: ‘If an ancient Indian of the time of the Upanishads, of the Buddha or of the later classical age were to be set down in modern India and note that larger part of its life which belongs to the age of decline, it would be to experience a much more depressing sensation, the sense of a national, a cultural debacle, a fall from the highest summits to discouragingly low levels. He might well ask himself what this degenerate posterity had done with the mighty civilisation of the past … He would compare the spiritual light and energy of the heroic ages of the Upanishads and the philosophies with the later inertia or small and broken fragmentarily derivative activity; after the intellectual curiosity, the scientific development, the creative literary and artistic greatness, the noble fecundity of the classical age, he would be amazed by the extent of later degeneracy, the mental poverty, the immobility, the static repetition, the cessation of science, the long sterility of art, the comparative feebleness of the creative intuition. He would see a prone descent to ignorance, a failing of the old powerful will and tapasya [disciplined effort], almost a volitional impotence.’ (Arya, vol. V, pp. 423-24)

No, it would not be very difficult to compile from the available literature a selection of texts in which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother draw the attention to the depth of India’s fall in modern times, when compared to its past spiritual and cultural heights, still for the most part unknown in the West. (They blame the degeneration on the general spreading of the illusionism of the Buddha and Mahavir during a period of several centuries.) But this detracts nothing from the essential importance of the presence of India in the world, of the message it has to share with humanity, and of the future role it will play on the unified Earth. ‘The future of India is luminous in spite of its present gloom,’⁹ wrote the Mother. And Sri Aurobindo said as early as 1926: ‘I am sure that India is not destined to be destroyed.’¹⁰ He has repeated this as late as 1950 in a conversation with K.M. Munshi, the last visitor of note before his passing away: ‘Rest assured that our culture cannot be undermined. This is only a passing phase.’¹¹

We have seen how the ardent nationalist Aurobindo Ghose worked for the freedom of Mother India with a total dedication, the effectiveness of which was multiplied after the acquisition of his spiritual powers as Sri Aurobindo. A.B. Purani, himself a former freedom fighter, relates in his Evening Talks how he went to see Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry for the first time in 1918, and how at that time he confided to Sri Aurobindo that the concentration of his whole being was directed at India’s liberation. ‘It is difficult for me to sleep till that is secured,’ Purani said. ‘Sri Aurobindo remained silent for two or three minutes. It was a long pause. Then he said: “Suppose an assurance is given to you that India will be free?” “Who can give me such an assurance?” I could feel the echo of doubt and challenge in my own question. Again he remained silent for three or four minutes. Then he looked at me and added: “Suppose I give you the assurance?” I paused for a moment, considered the question with myself and said: “If you give the assurance, I can accept it.” “Then I give you the assurance that India will be free,” he said in a serious tone.’¹² How could Sri Aurobindo in 1918 be certain that India would be free somewhere in the future and express that certainty, knowing full well that his words would give a new direction to the life of Purani, who would turn away from his involvement in the freedom struggle and become a member of the Ashram?

Once again, the Mother lets us have a look in the occult repository. In the Entretiens of 1956, she tells: ‘After having gone to a certain place, I said to Sri Aurobindo: “India is free.” I did not say: “India will be free”, I said: “India is free.” Now, how many years has it taken between that moment, when that was an accomplished fact, and the moment it became translated in the material world on earth? [The occult experience] took place in 1915 and the liberation in 1947 — thirty-two years.’ In this instance it took thirty-two years for an occult fact in a subtle world to become material reality on Earth. Next Sri Aurobindo asked her how the liberation would be accomplished, and the Mother answered ‘from the same place’: ‘There will be no violence. It will come about without a revolution. The British will decide to leave of their own accord because the place will have become untenable as a consequence of certain terrestrial circumstances.’ And she said to her audience, the Ashram youth: ‘I did neither guess nor prophesy: it was a fact.’¹³ A fact that in all particulars has come about exactly like she had seen it that many years earlier on another plane of reality.

In this way they have undoubtedly known a lot of historical events in advance. Concerning the same topic and corroborating for that matter the assurance given to Purani, there is also a passage in Nirodbaran’s correspondence bearing witness to the same knowledge. On 16 September 1935 Nirodbaran writes to Sri Aurobindo: ‘You have stated that for the spreading of spirituality in the world India must be free. I suppose you must be working for it.’ And Sri Aurobindo answers: ‘That is all settled. It is a question of working out only. The question is what is India going to do with her independence? … Things look ominous.’¹⁴

In his message for the day of India’s independence, Sri Aurobindo wrote about the division of the body of Mother India then into India and Pakistan: ‘The old communal division into Hindus and Muslims seems now to have hardened into a permanent political division of the country. It is to be hoped that this settled fact will not be accepted for ever or as anything more than a temporary expedient. For if it lasts, India may be seriously weakened, even crippled; civil strife may remain always possible, possible even a new invasion and foreign conquest. India’s internal development and prosperity may be impeded, her position among the nations weakened, her destiny impaired or even frustrated. This must not be; the partition must go. Let us hope that that may come about naturally … But by whatever means, in whatever way, the division must go; unity must and will be achieved, for it is necessary for the greatness of India’s future.’¹⁵

If the leaders of the Congress had listened to Sri Aurobindo in 1942, the division of India would most probably never have happened. In March of that year Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Lord Privy Seal and as such a member of Churchill’s war cabinet, came to India to offer the country ‘dominion status’ in what is known as ‘the Cripps-offer’. This meant ‘the creation of a new Indian union which shall constitute a dominion, associated with the United Kingdom and other dominions by a common allegiance to the Crown, but equal to them in every respect, and in no way subordinate in any aspect of its domestic or external affairs, and free to remain in or to separate itself from the equal partnership of the British Commonwealth of nations.’¹⁶ This was a huge concession as well from Churchill as from the British Crown and should have led to the full independence of the country within a foreseeable time. The British, involved in a war of life and death with Hitler and the nations supporting him, needed the wholehearted assistance of the Indian subcontinent urgently, notwithstanding the fact that already a million Indian troops were fighting on the side of the Allies and that each month 50,000 more were being enlisted. (It was from the Indian prisoners of war that S.C. Bose recruited the volunteers for the Springing Tigers and the Indian National Army.)

Sri Aurobindo perceived that India should not let go of the onetime chance of the Cripps-offer; if it did so, the consequences might be disastrous. He sent Doraiswamy, a prominent Madras lawyer who was a devotee, to Delhi with a message for M.K. Gandhi, Nehru, Rajagopalachari and the other members of the Congress leadership. ‘The scene is still fresh in our memory,’ remembers Nirodbaran, it was the evening hour. Sri Aurobindo was sitting on the edge of his bed just before his daily walking exercise … Doraiswamy, the distinguished Madras lawyer and disciple, was selected as the envoy … He was to start for Delhi that very night. He came for Sri Aurobindo’s blessings, lay prostrate before him, got up and stood looking at the Master with folded hands and then departed.’¹⁷ Sri Aurobindo also sent a message to Stafford Cripps personally: ‘I have heard your broadcast. As one who has been a nationalist leader and worker for India’s independence, though now my activity is no longer in the political but in the spiritual field, I wish to express my appreciation of all you have done to bring about this offer. I welcome it as an opportunity given to India to determine for herself, and organise in all liberty and choice her freedom and unity, and take an effective place among the world’s free nations. I hope it will be accepted … In this light, I offer my public adhesion, in case it can be of any help in your work.’¹⁸

Sri Aurobindo’s intervention with the leaders of the Congress would be of no avail. They had never understood and perhaps never forgiven his withdrawal from political life. He said that he had known of the failure beforehand and that he had acted only in a spirit of nishkama karma — the disinterested or desireless action which is the basis of the authentic karmayoga. But historical events, like everything else in the universe, are always complex. In a well-documented article about the Cripps-offer by Divakar and Sucharu in Mother India, from which some material is borrowed here, we read: ‘It was generally believed that if Cripps brought off the settlement, he would replace Churchill.’¹⁹ We know, however, that Churchill was an irreplaceable instrument of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother — while, on the other hand, India’s independence was a matter of great urgency, as well in the then prevailing world situation as for India’s future unity. Sri Aurobindo has stressed several times that he did not use the omnipotent supramental force for his work, for the simple reason that the world would not be able to stand it. He said he used the overmental force, which allows a struggle of the cosmic ideas and powers, each pursuing its own expression in the highest possible degree. The events concerning the Cripps-offer are an example of such a struggle in a situation which allowed of nothing but a detached act of nishkama karma.

‘India has become the symbolic representation of all the difficulties of modern mankind. India will be the land of its resurrection — the resurrection to a higher and truer life,’²⁰ the Mother wrote in 1968. Three years before, during the second war between India and Pakistan, she had declared: ‘It is for the sake and the triumph of Truth that India fights and must fight, till India and Pakistan have become one again, because that is the truth of their being.’²¹ The conflict between India and Pakistan is still far from resolved. In what measure the situation on the Indian subcontinent is symbolic of the difficulties of the whole world can be read in the book Critical Mass, written by two American journalists, William E. Burrows and Robert Windrem (1994). The authors call the continent ‘the most dangerous place in the world’ because no less than three times it has been on the verge of a nuclear war and at the present time tensions are once more being raised. They quote Richard Kerr, deputy director of the CIA during the last Indo-Pakistan crisis, ‘It was the most dangerous nuclear situation we have faced since I have been in the US government. It may be as close as we have come to a nuclear war. This was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis.’

On a wall of the playground of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram still hangs the map of what, according to the Mother, is the true material body of India — inclusive of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and part of Burma. It was in front of that map that she stood when she took the salute of the Ashram youth marching past her on certain festive days, and she sat in front of it when teaching her ‘evening classes’. ‘The map was made after the partition [of India]. It is the map of the true India’, she wrote, ‘in spite of all passing appearances, and it will always remain the map of the true India, whatever people may think about it.’⁹¹²² The parties involved would do better to heed Sri Aurobindo’s words: ‘By whatever means, in whatever way, the division must go.’ He also repeated this elsewhere: ‘India will be reunited. I see it clearly.’²³ The Mother has even predicted how that would come to pass: Pakistan, divided into provinces on the lines of its ethnic populations, will fall apart and the separate regions will seek a confederation with India, which itself, as a solution to its internal problems, will become a still more confederate state than it is at the moment.

India had a grand past. Those who know the country better must be moved by the intelligence, the psychological depth and plasticity, and the physical harmony of the races inhabiting it. The light of which it is the bearer shines in the eyes and the smiles of its children. But because of illusionism it has temporarily withdrawn its attention from material reality, thus being weighed down by habits and traditions which lost their meaning and are devoid of vigour. The problems are many and colossal: population explosion, poverty, corruption, political chaos, the caste system, religious division, blind solipsism of the individual and the group, etc. Despite the country’s apparently unpromising present situation, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother — they who saw — have predicted a golden future for it. If they were right, this will be one of the wonders of the future.

2. Asia

‘Another dream was for the resurgence and liberation of the peoples of Asia and her return to her great role in the progress of human civilisation. Asia has arisen; large parts are now quite free or are at this moment being liberated; its other still subject or partly subject parts are moving through whatever struggles towards freedom. Only a little has to be done and that will be done today or tomorrow.’²⁴ Thirty years before, he had written in The Human Cycle: ‘It is in Europe that the age of individualism has taken birth and exercised its full sway.’ This individualistic period which started with the Renaissance was the necessary reaction against the preceding era of conventions, as we soon will see. ‘The East has entered into it only by contact and influence, not from an organical impulse. And it is to its passion for the discovery of the actual truth of things and for the governing of human life by whatever law of the truth it has found that the West owes its centuries of strength, vigour, light, progress, irresistible expansion. Equally, it is due not to any original falsehood in the ideals on which its life was founded, but to the loss of the living sense of the Truth it once held and its long contented slumber in the cramping bonds of a mechanical conventionalism that the East has found itself helpless in the hour of its awakening, a giant empty of strength, inert masses of men who had forgotten how to deal freely with facts and forces because they had learned only how to live in a world of stereotyped thought and customary action.’²⁵ The reader of these words sees passing before his inner eye the world of Chinese emperors and warlords, the traditional Japan of shoguns and samurai, the India of maharajas, sultans and nizams: the whole colourful but burned-out East of the traditions. When an Indian at the time asked the Mother the question: ‘How is India likely to get freedom?’ she put him straight: ‘Listen! The British did not conquer India. You yourselves handed over the country to the British’ — a truth applicable to practically all colonial conquests in the East. (And she then reiterated what she had seen as early as 1915: ‘In the same manner the British will themselves hand over the country to you. And they will do it in a hurry as if a ship were waiting to take them away.’²⁶ In history few enterprises of an importance equal to Indian independence have been dealt with as rashly.)

The East has not always been so powerless. In the Arya Sri Aurobindo had already pointed out the occasions on which its energy had been spilling over into the West. But each time Europe, as a whole or in part, rejected the spiritual substance of the Eastern inspiration and utilized it only as an impulse towards a revivifying intellectual and material effort of progress.

‘The first attempt [towards a spiritualization of the West by the East] was the filtering of Egyptian, Chaldean and Indian wisdom through the thought of the Greek philosophers from Pythagoras to Plato and the Neo-Platonists; the result was the brilliantly intellectual and unspiritual civilisation of Greece and Rome. But it prepared the way for the second attempt when Buddhism and Vaishnavism, filtered through the Semitic temperament, entered Europe in the form of Christianity. Christianity came within an ace of spiritualising and even of asceticising the mind of Europe; it was baffled by its own theological deformation in the minds of the Greek fathers of the Church and by the sudden flooding of Europe with a German barbarism whose temperament in its merits no less than in its defects was the very anti-type of the Christian spirit and the Graeco-Roman intellect.

‘The Islamic invasion of Spain and the southern coast of the Mediterranean — curious as the sole noteworthy example of Asiatic culture using the European method of material and political irruption as opposed to a peaceful invasion by ideas — may be regarded as a third attempt. The result of its meeting with Graecised Christianity was the awakening of the European mind in feudal and Catholic Europe and the obscure beginnings of modern thought and science,’²⁷ which would lead up to the Renaissance.

The fourth attempt at spiritualization of the West by the East is happening at present. As the year of its beginning we could consider 1893, when Swami Vivekananda addressed the Congress of Religions in Chicago. ‘The influence of the East is likely to be rather in the direction of subjectivism and practical spirituality, a greater opening of our physical existence to the realisation of ideals other than the strong but limited aims suggested by the life and the body in their own gross nature.’²⁸ ‘Rationalistic and physical Science has overpassed itself and must before long be overtaken by a mounting flood of psychological and psychic knowledge which cannot fail to compel quite a new view of the human being and open a new vista before mankind.’²⁹ ‘The safety of Europe⁹² has to be sought in the recognition of the spiritual aim of human existence, otherwise she will be crushed by the weight of her own unillumined knowledge and soulless organisation’³⁰ — words which are gaining significance in the computer age.

All human beings in East and West have a divine soul, therefore knowledge and wisdom are potentially present everywhere. ‘There is no law of Nature by which spiritual knowledge is confined to the East or must bear the stamp of an Indian manufacture before it can receive the imprimatur of the All-Wise,’³¹ said Sri Aurobindo crisply. But also, as we have seen, every true nation has its own character and nature, which are the reasons of its existence and place within the spectrum of humanity. Anyone who is in some measure knowledgeable about the past of India cannot deny that this country — ‘the Asia of Asia, the heart of the world’s spiritual life’³² (Sri Aurobindo) — has been the carrier and treasurer of the authentic spiritual riches since Vedic times. ‘The message of the East to the West is a true message: “Only by finding himself can man be saved,” and “what shall it profit a man though he gain the whole world, if he lose his own soul,”’³³ wrote Sri Aurobindo. He also wrote: ‘The two continents [Asia and Europe, and what they stand for] are two sides of the integral orb of humanity and until they meet and fuse, each must move to whatever progress or culmination the spirit in humanity seeks, by the law of its being … A one-sided world would have been the poorer for its uniformity and the monotone of a single culture; there is a need of divergent lines of advance until we can raise our head into that infinity of the spirit in which there is a light broad enough to draw together and reconcile all highest ways of thinking, feeling and living. That is a truth which the violent Indian assailant of a materialistic Europe or the contemptuous enemy or cold disparager of Asiatic or Indian culture agree to ignore.’³⁴

3. World-Unity

‘The third dream was a world-union forming the outer basis of a fairer, brighter and nobler life for all mankind. That unification of the human world is under way; there is an imperfect initiation organised but struggling against tremendous difficulties. But the momentum is there and it must inevitably increase and conquer … A catastrophe may intervene and interrupt or destroy what is being done, but even then the final result is sure.’³⁵ The One World is one of Sri Aurobindo’s great prophecies. ‘A new spirit of oneness will take hold of the human race.’³⁶ We who in the Nineties feel that wind of unity over our face can barely imagine how the world looked in 1947, at the time these words were written by Sri Aurobindo, when everywhere in the world the ruins of the Second World War were still smouldering, the two big ideological blocks were jockeying for position, and the deadly mushrooms of the atomic explosions rose threateningly above humanity.

In 1915 he had written in a letter to Mirra Alfassa: ‘The whole earth is now under one law and answers to the same vibrations.’³⁷ In our consciousness at present is stored the world map and the picture of the earth globe, and since recently the magnificent photos taken from space capsules and satellites of that slightly misty blue ball: the material body of our Mother the Earth. Things have not always been like that, however. During the whole of humankind’s history as known to us there were many worlds in the world, totally distinct from each other, materially as well as psychologically. There was the world of the Mayas, of the Aztecs, of European medieval man, of the Roman and his mare nostrum, of the Chinese in his Middle Kingdom, of the Mongol in his steppes’ … For all of them the other, that strange being from a strange other world, was a barbarian, a psychologically incomprehensible, linguistically gibbering and socially superfluous non-human. This is why in the language of so many races the word signifying themselves is the same as ‘human being.’

In all those different worlds the curtains have now been drawn on one Planet which always was the womb of their origin and the scene of their existence; and slowly, with much friction, strife and complications, they arrive at the recognition of the others on equal terms, as co-humans, and still more slowly at the acceptance of the right of all of them to co-exist. But deep inside the selfish instincts of the races are still alive, reacting to differences of the colour of the skin, of the build of the body, of behaviour, common habits, culture and religion. The process of the unification of humanity, consisting of countless painful but also hopeful episodes, is still going on. In actual fact humanity has always been one, despite its colourful diversity, but it is now becoming aware of that fundamental unity. This awareness is indispensable, said Sri Aurobindo, to realize the following step in its evolution.

The idea of ‘a soundly organised world-union or World-State no longer on the principle of strife and competition, but on a principle of co-operation or mutual adjustment or at least of competition regulated by law and equity and just interchange’³⁸ was extensively treated by Sri Aurobindo in his book The Ideal of Human Unity. This would be a good manual for all who want to contribute to the unification of mankind. It first appeared in the Arya from September 1915 to July 1918 and is an astonishing document from the pen of a yogi who was apparently living in withdrawal, in out-of-the-way Pondicherry, but to whom the past, present and future of humanity were the constant object of care and attention. The book has gained in importance in the meantime and the language reads as masterly and fresh as when it was first put down on paper.

In 1950 Sri Aurobindo added ‘a postscript chapter⁹³ to it in which he applauded the foundation of the United Nations, although he was very much conscious of the shortcomings of the organization just like he had been of those of its predecessor, the League of Nations. ‘The League of Nations disappeared but was replaced by the United Nations Organisation which now stands in the forefront of the world and struggles towards some kind of secure permanence and success in the great and far-reaching endeavour on which depends the world’s future. This is the capital event, the crucial and decisive outcome of the world-wide tendencies which Nature* has set in motion for her destined purpose.’³⁹

A no less important work is The Human Cycle, insufficiently valued by most of Sri Aurobindo’s commentators. The reason may be that Sri Aurobindo is generally supposed to have been a Master-Yogi and that therefore his reflections on world events and humanity could be of no more than secondary importance. But another reason in many cases is that the commentators themselves are inadequately familiar with their subject. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are the Avatar of this era; besides their personal development and the development of the group around them, their interest and constant concern encompassed the whole of humanity in all its elements, races and cultures. The Human Cycle, originally written along with The Ideal of Human Unity, presents, as few other works do, a norm for the appreciation of the historical, modern and contemporary evolution of humankind, and merits a prominent place amongst the writings on sociology and historical philosophy.

Taking the theory of the German historian Karl Lamprecht (1856-1915) as his point of departure, Sri Aurobindo divides the curve of human evolution in a symbolical, a typal⁹⁴, a conventional and an individualistic age, and to this he adds a future subjective age. The symbolical age is the one at the very origin of man as a social being at the time of ‘the thickly veiled secret of our historic evolution’ when the social structures, culture and all human behaviour were still impregnated by the sense of their extraterrestrial origin.

(Here it should be pointed out that, according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the history of humankind, as commonly accepted and taught at present, constitutes only a fraction of the long and winding path of pilgrimage it has been in actuality, ‘for not one hundred-thousandth part of what has been has still a name preserved by human Time.’⁴⁰ Sri Aurobindo indicates that the time-period of known history is much too short to allow for the mental evolvement of homo sapiens to the level it has now reached. He suggests more than once that the primitive peoples, in his time still called savages, are actually degenerated elements of former civilizations — a fact which can be concluded from their mental capacities which equal those of the ‘civilized’ cultures once they get access to the same environment.)

In the ‘typal’ age the original all-impregnating symbolism is partially lost; there is a formation of ‘types’ in a society mainly based on moral norms. The following stage of society, the conventional, comes about ‘when the external supports, the outward expressions of the spirit or the ideal, become more important than the ideal, the body or even the clothes more important than the person.’⁴¹ This kind of social system is so suffocating that the individual cannot but revolt against it, thereby initiating the age of individualism and reason. ‘It is then that men in spite of the natural conservatism of the social mind are compelled at last to perceive that the Truth is dead in them and that they are living by a lie. The individualism of the new age,’ commenced in the West at the time of the Renaissance,’is an attempt to get back from the conventionalism of belief and practice to some solid bed-rock, no matter what, or real and tangible Truth ,.. It is the individual who has to become a discoverer, a pioneer.’⁴² The renovating truth-impulse of Nature in this individual is then so strong that, like Martin Luther, ‘he stands there and can no other.’ In Sri Aurobindo’s view, the revolution of the individual will ultimately lead up to the subjective period — not of egocentrism in the psychological sense as the term may easily be misunderstood, but of discovery of the subjective truths and realities which will result in the advent of a new world in which authenticity, reality and Truth will again be the bases of experience.

Sri Aurobindo had formulated the principle of world-unity; he now formulated the norm of individual freedom in the ideal future world: ‘The principle of individualism is the liberty of the human being regarded as a separate existence to develop himself and fulfill his life, satisfy his mental tendencies, emotional and vital needs and physical being according to his own desire, governed by his reason; it admits no other limit to this right and this liberty except the obligation to respect the same individual liberty and right in others.’⁴³

4. The Gift of India to the World

‘Another dream, the spiritual gift of India to the world, has already begun. India’s spirituality is entering Europe and America in an ever increasing measure. That movement will grow; amid the disasters of the time more and more eyes are turning towards her with hope and there is even an increasing resort not only to her teachings, but to her psychic and spiritual practice.’⁴⁴ We have already paid attention to this to some extent when considering Sri Aurobindo’s ‘dream’ concerning Asia.

5. A New Step in Evolution

‘The final dream was a step in evolution which would raise man to a higher and larger consciousness and begin the solution of the problems which have perplexed and vexed him since he began first to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society. This is still a personal hope and an idea, an ideal which has begun to take hold both in India and in the West on forward-looking minds. The difficulties in the way are more formidable than in any other field of endeavour, but difficulties were made to overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they will be overcome. Here too, if this evolution is to take place, since it must proceed through a growth of the spirit and the inner consciousness, the initiative can come from India and, although the scope must he universal, the central movement may be hers.’⁴⁵

Sri Aurobindo concluded his message for All India Radio as follows: ‘Such is the content which I put into this date of India’s liberation; whether or how far this hope will be justified depends upon the new and free India.’ When his message was spreading as radio-waves through the ether, nobody knew that they were listening to Sri Aurobindo’s testament.

With the termination of the Second World War — ‘Where is Hitler now and where is his rule?’ said Sri Aurobindo — and the independence of India, the problems of the world were not solved. On the contrary, Sri Aurobindo kept repeating that the world situation was very grave, graver than ever. Stalin was still there, and there were the many little Stalins, and even after Hitler’s and Stalin’s death the forces who had used them would choose others as their instruments. ‘To them, it is as if you change your shirt,’ the Mother said. The Lord of the Nations did everything possible to redeem his threatening promise to her.

In June 1950 Sri Aurobindo therefore wrote about the Korean War to K.D. Sethna, chief editor of Mother India, the periodical regarded by Sri Aurobindo as a vehicle for his thought: ‘The whole affair is as plain as a pike-staff. It is the first move in the Communist plan of campaign to dominate and take possession first of these northern parts and then of South East Asia as a preliminary to their manoeuvres with regard to the rest of the continent — in passing, Tibet as a gate opening to India. If they succeed, there is no reason why domination of the whole world should not follow by steps until they are ready to deal with America. That is, provided the war can be staved off with America until Stalin can choose his time.

‘Truman seems to have understood the situation if we can judge from his moves in Korea, but it is to be seen whether he is strong enough and determined enough to carry the matter through. The measures he has taken are likely to be incomplete and unsuccessful, since they do not include any actual military intervention [at that time] except on sea and in the air.

‘That seems to be the situation; we have to see how it develops. One thing is certain that if there is too much shilly-shallying and if America gives up now her defence of Korea, she may be driven to yield position after position until it is too late; at one point or another she will have to stand and face the necessity of drastic action even if it leads to war. Stalin also seems not to be ready to face at once the risk of a world war and, if so, Truman can turn the tables on him by constantly facing him with the onus of either taking that risk or yielding position after position to America. I think that is all I can say at present.’⁴⁶

Sri Aurobindo expounded here summarily but in unmistakable terms what afterwards in world-politics would become known as ‘the domino theory’. And he concluded his survey with the words: ‘The situation is as grave as it can be.’ So it was indeed, on the political front as well as on other, inner battlefields imperceptible to human eyes.