Beyond Man

Epilogue: The Sun For Ever

At present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is concealed a choice of its destiny.¹

— Sri Aurobindo

Beginning with the Renaissance a period of new awakening started which has accelerated history and is unifying the Earth. From that time onwards the New Era was growing unperceived, like a child in the womb; the twentieth century has been the century of the birth, of the fruition of the seed that, so many centuries earlier, was implanted by the representatives of ‘the New Knowledge.’ Like every birth, the coming to light of what was before a hidden potentiality has been a miracle, happening all of a sudden (a century is but an instant in the long march of evolution) and in great pain. Eighty years ago Sri Aurobindo commenced his Synthesis with the words: ‘We are in an age, full of the throes of travail, when all forms of thought and activity that have in themselves any strong power of utility or any secret virtue of persistence are being subjected to the supreme test and given their opportunity of rebirth. The world to-day presents the aspect of a huge cauldron of Medea in which all things are being cast, shredded into pieces, experimented on, combined and recombined either to perish and provide the scattered material of new forms or to emerge rejuvenated and changed for a fresh term of existence.’ (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 3)

We, humans, experience a linear time, measured out by our mental consciousness in a global Time, which in the Unity-Consciousness is a harmonious coexistence of the various time-experiences of the various forms of consciousness. The spectacular twentieth century with the dawning awareness of the unity of the one Earth was foreseen long before Leonardo da Vinci,⁹¹ as long before Giordano Bruno, Johannes Kepler, Erasmus, Mercator, Vesalius, Christiaan Huygens and Galileo Galilei the coming was foreseen of the being that would be the fulfillment and at the same time the surpassing of man. None can tell why this had to happen now, as our notions of the development of humanity and of her true past are much too limited.

We situate the origin of civilization 12,000 years ago while most probably civilizations were already there 120,000 years ago, now buried under the sands of Sahara and Gobi or sunk in the waters of the oceans, but still alive in the collective memory of humankind. According to Sri Aurobindo ‘not a one hundred thousandth part’ of what has happened in human history, and at what we ourselves were present so often, has been conserved in the memory of humanity. The Mother told the children of the Ashram that the civilization of Atlantis had been much more advanced than our own, not only on the occult but also on the technical level.

Edgar Cayce, ‘the sleeping prophet,’ said in the beginning of the Forties that almost all prominent figures at that time were reborn Atlants. This might be an explanation of the revival of the theory of the master race and the inferior races — as it might be of the spirit of technical inventiveness producing at an amazing pace what was perhaps being remembered from times long past: telecommunication, independently functioning fast vehicles, flying machines, television, radar, rockets, death rays and bombs for mass destruction, space vehicles, machines imitating the functioning of the brain … All this machinery is still in its first stages, which is the reason why it is so immensely complicated and in its complexity unreliable and easily vulnerable. ‘The Earth is more and more charged with forces originating from ever higher regions (to our consciousness), which means that their action is faster and faster and that they give more and more the feeling of instantaneity,’² the Mother said.

‘Humanity has been waiting for centuries and centuries for this moment. It has come,’³ she said. ‘It is a step for which the whole of evolution has been a preparation,’⁴ wrote Sri Aurobindo. We have the privilege of being present at it, but few are aware of this privilege and still fewer appreciate it or profit from being alive during this unprecedented moment in full awareness, although their number is increasing throughout the world. Deep down most people are very confused. No philosophy offers them an outlook or intellectual support any more; the great religions are for the most part nothing but backward looking mammoth organizations; matter itself keeps escaping the grasp of science and technology suffers from the syndrome of gigantism, its machines being no longer in proportion with the psychological and even economical means of humankind. Astronauts and cosmonauts? Fearful explorers in the garden of planet Earth. A Unified Theory that will explain it all, matter, the cosmos, the human being and God? But what is the psychological wisdom we have gained for instance from Einstein’s famous formula? And how do we arrive at a unified theory when it does not take into account all the essential factors of Existence except matter, and this too only quantitatively described?

The first articles and books have already been published and thousands more will appear about all these subjects and, fundamentally, about the consternation of man on the threshold of the Unknown. Not only 1 January of the year 2000 is such a threshold: man has always stood on the threshold of the Unknown because it is a feature of his own mental consciousness which he cannot escape, except by a transformation of that consciousness which would take him beyond himself.

In this book we have seen that such a transformation of consciousness has taken place in Those who were sent for it and that it is transpiring in humanity as a whole. ‘We are at one of those moments Sri Aurobindo called “the hour of God,”’ the Mother wrote, ‘and the evolution has acquired an accelerated and intensified movement.’⁵

The Hour of God

‘The Hour of God’ is one of the many texts by Sri Aurobindo that was found somewhere in a notebook after his death. It dates from 1918 or thereabouts and must be quoted here, at the end of the curve of the work of the modern Avatar and at the beginning of its manifest elaboration in the imminent millennium. The tone is biblical.

‘There are moments when the Spirit moves among men and the breath of the Lord is abroad upon the waters of our being, there are others when it retires and men are left to act in the strength or the weakness of their own egoism. The first are periods when even a little effort produces great results and changes destiny, the second are spaces of time when much labour goes to the making of a little result. It is true that the latter may prepare the former, may be the little smoke of sacrifice going up to heaven which calls down the rain of God’s bounty.

‘Unhappy is the man or nation which, when the divine moment arrives, is found sleeping or unprepared to use it, because the lamp has not been kept trimmed for the welcome and the ears are sealed to the call. But thrice woe to them who are strong and ready, yet waste the force or misuse the moment; for them is irreparable loss or a great destruction.

‘In the hour of God cleanse they soul of all self-deceit and hypocrisy and vain self-flattering that thou mayst look straight into thy spirit and hear that which summons it. All insincerity of nature, once the defence against the eye of the Master and the light of the ideal, becomes now a gap in thy armour and invites the blow. Even if thou conquer for the moment, it is the worse for thee, for the blow shall come afterwards and cast thee down in the midst of thy triumph. But being pure cast away all fear; for the hour is often terrible, a fire and a whirlwind and a tempest, a treading of the winepress of the wrath of God; but he who can stand up in it on the truth of his purpose is he who shall stand; even though he fall, he shall rise again; even though he seem to pass on the wings of the wind, he shall return. Nor let wordly prudence whisper too closely in thy ear; for it is the hour of the unexpected, the incalculable, the immeasurable. Mete not the power of the Breath by thy petty instruments, but trust and go forward.

‘But most keep thy soul dear, even if for a while, of the clamour of the ego. Then shall a fire march before thee in the night and the storm be thy helper and thy flag shall wave on the highest height of the greatness that was to be conquered.’⁶

We are All Amateurs Again

Birth is a moment of crisis. The twentieth century has been a single crisis from beginning to end. The Mother even said that all wars in the twentieth century were one single war. They were part of the process of mutation by which the Earth is growing more and more conscious of itself. Humanity is essentially one in origin and destination; what matters is that it again becomes conscious of this unity and succeeds in living up to it effectively.

Not many are aware of the forces which have been at work in the past one hundred years or so. At the very beginning of this book the question was asked if the history of humanity, for instance in the twentieth century, could happen in interaction with one or two Beings. This question was answered in the affirmative if the Being(s) involved is an Avatar, this time a complete, double-poled one. The whole twentieth century can be read as the dialectical process of the action of, and the counteraction against, the Force this double Avatar embodied and which he introduced into the earth-atmosphere. ‘Night itself carries in it the burden of the Light that has to be,’⁷ (Sri Aurobindo) — and to a New Era the old one is always the night.

The Old Order is an established world, worked out in the greatest measure possible and — when the New Order presents itself — exhausted. Western Man realizes too little the degree to which the world is a complex structure, a balanced whole of forces, invisible but therefore not less real; Eastern Man still knows this, but he has let this authentic feeling be stultified by worn-out forms of thought and superstition. We have seen the important role the hostile forces play in the world people consider their own. The hostile forces dominate and govern this world of Ignorance in which the human beings are as blind and powerless as marionettes. They have been permitted to do so by the Supreme Authority for whom everything exists and moves within the Unity-Consciousness, this evolutionary world included. Our world is a materialized, elaborated gradation of evolution, and in the present stage the hostile forces, all of them offspring of the Four Asuras, still play their indispensable and irreplaceable role.

Seen from a distance, all this is a sort of dismal fairy tale, The Lord of the Rings but on a cosmic scale. To our experience, however, it is a raw, painful reality of which all our limitations and miseries are the outcome. Through it all, we carry the Divine in us, whom we are in essence; but our consciousness is veiled and our forces totally inadequate. Yesterday was unsatisfactory, today is a problem, tomorrow is an intimidating uncertainty. The earthly presence of the lower vital forces, those of the diabolical kind, has become much more widespread because of the wars. War is hell for us but it is an amusement park for those beings, and who will chase them away once they have, in their insatiable selfishness, taken possession of something? Their actions are reported in all newspapers, they grin, dance and romp on all television screens: manslaughter and murder, shameless and on a large scale, prostitution and pornography, bestial treatment of women and children, corruption, lying, undisguised and aggressive egoism, the hypocrisy of greatness and holiness … Yes, surely, all that was there formerly too, but rarely so widespread, on so large a scale and so openly as at present. And now there is something in man that knows better, but because of this profounder awareness the enjoyment of evil seems to be amplified. Exponents of evil are being exalted as heroes. Yesterday is long ago, today is a spasm of self-gratification, tomorrow is for afterwards.

The Asura of Falsehood, alias the Lord of Nations, knows that his hour has struck. ‘The Asura is unleashing all his fury, just like somebody who expects that he will disappear.’⁸ He has prepared an ideal terrain for himself: colossal problems caused by a colossal population increase and combined with a colossal shortage of food, energy and living space, together with a colossal pollution, intensified by a colossal insecurity taking refuge in a colossal inflation of the ego of the individual, the race, the nation, the religious conviction. The world is on the boil; the problems are insoluble; everything creaks and swirls, foams and roars, everywhere. One has to climb very high to be able to look over it and to see the sense of the whole. The vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is the only platform that is high enough.

History shows that the birth of something new always creates a period of confusion and bewilderment. Krishna was on Earth at the time of the Mahabharata war; before him, the Avatar Rama had to do battle with the asuric Ravana of Lanka and his legions; around the Mediterranean and especially in the Middle East the time of Christ was a whirlpool of races, cultures, religions and sects. Every Avatar had a worldwide influence, for his embodiment was intended as a progress for the entire humanity, even when this humanity knew little or nothing of it; for the world in former times consisted of many separate worlds, and it could take a long time before an event of global importance penetrated from the one into the other.

This time, and from the very start, the intention of the avataric incarnation was humanity and the one world. Nobody lives any longer outside the ongoing process of transformation, there is no escape from it. The Earth has grown ripe for it. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother represented, even through the cultures they had been born in, the one Earth. To them, the tension, the fermentation, the confusion, the complexity of the historical scene of the twentieth century were an unmistakable sign of an all-encompassing Change in progress. ‘I am coming to the conclusion that there must be a great power, probably a transforming power, in the extreme tension of the circumstances,’ the Mother said. ‘This always reaches a point, a point of such tension and complexity that, if one did not have this inner certitude, it would quite simply indicate the catastrophe, the sudden reversal. And it is always when things have reached such a point that everything changes — not before, not one minute before.’⁹

She therefore wrote: ‘The hours before the dawn are always the darkest. The servitude just before freedom comes is the most painful of all.’¹⁰ The events have to develop all the way up to the ultimate point if the sudden reversal, the sudden breakthrough of the ray of light in the night, has to become possible. This is a little known law of nature. Pregnancy reaches the point of impossibility for the body of the mother just before birth. The seed reaches the point of impossibility just before it bursts and makes new life grow. The caterpillar reaches the point of impossibility as a caterpillar just before it spins itself into a cocoon and becomes a butterfly. Everywhere we find that at the point of impossibility a crisis erupts, often resembling death or close to death, to make the new life possible. Thus it becomes clear that every life-process, every process of mutation or transformation has to progress to the point of impossibility if the mutation or transformation really is to have a Sense in the whole of processes designed by the Divine for the elaboration of evolution. A partial effort, a going of the way up to somewhere halfway, would be a sort of a sham event, a caricature of the profound meaning of things whereby the Creation would be turned into a macabre farce. ‘Often the decisive turn is preceded by an apparent emphasising and raising to their extreme of things which seem the very denial, the most uncompromising opposite of the new principle and the new creation.’¹¹ (Sri Aurobindo)

It is in and through the confusion that the Truth-Consciousness develops, the Mother said. We remember her words that even those who think they are acting against the Great Work are in fact collaborating. In the intensified action of the hostile forces she saw the acceleration of the process of transformation of which the duration had been reduced to the minimum by her and by Sri Aurobindo, in order that humanity would have to suffer as little as possible in this terrestrial hell and that it might share as soon as possible in a higher life on the Earth itself.

Everything indicates not only that we are entering the decisive time-period but also that we are already fully in it. We may expect that totally unforeseen changes will take place which will lead to the unity of humankind, to the abrasion of human egoism, to the transformation of gross matter and to the presence of superhuman and later on supramental beings. The Overhuman Consciousness, delegated by the Supermind, has been working to this end since 1 January 1969. Pointers to its action are the sudden surprise of the supposedly impossible event, the radicality of the event, the dosage, all else notwithstanding, of the event to avert any irreparable disaster, and the ‘benevolence’ of its interventions, its intimate understanding of all elements involved in the process of transformation and its divine Love for them, be they people, objects or structures.

Considering this, the events of 1989 will probably come to the reader’s mind. The East European communist bloc collapsed like a house of cards, suddenly and unexpectedly. This is only one example, albeit the most spectacular, of a whole series of political, economical and financial events in recent history which were as ‘miraculous,’ even if afterwards they were placed within a ‘reasonable’ context of causes and effects by the linear functioning of the mental consciousness. When in 1973 the oil tap in the Middle East was closed for the first time, everybody thought the world economy was going to break down; but a year later, Kermit Lansner wrote in Newsweek: ‘We are all amateurs again,’ for the very pessimistic predictions of the economic and other experts had proved false for unexplainable reasons. Yes, rape and murder are still rife on such an enormous scale that it blunts the mind. The dark forces will not do without this fun and their derision of the new creation as long as they can. But the miracles, facets of the diamond of The Miracle, are happening, and they are far more numerous than we are able to see.

‘The advance [of the transformation], however it comes about, will be indeed of the nature of a miracle, as are all such profound changes and immense developments; for they have the appearance of a kind of realised impossibility. But God works all his miracles by an evolution of secret possibilities which have been long prepared, at least in their elements, and in the end by a rapid bringing of all to a head, a throwing together of the elements so that in their fusion they produce a new form and name of things and reveal a new spirit.’¹² Thus writes Sri Aurobindo in The Human Cycle, where we also find: ‘The principle of such changes in Nature seems to be a long obscure preparation followed by a swift gathering up and precipitation of the elements into the new birth, a rapid conversion, a transformation that in its luminous moment figures like a miracle.’¹³

The Earth is undergoing the perceptible miracle now, in our time.

This miracle has been prepared in all its elements by the Avatar and it is happening everywhere on Earth. The Mother said in 1968: ‘There are long, long, long periods in which things are being prepared. Then, afterwards, there is a long, very long period in which things develop, are being organized, established, and have consequences. But in between [the preparation and the consequences] there is a moment when it happens; when things happen. This is not always very long — it is sometimes long, sometimes very short, but this is when it happens. And it is this “it” that will give a new development to the World. Well, we are at the right moment — it so happened that we are exactly at such a moment. This means that, if we are not blind (people are blind most of the time), if our eyes are open, that we will see, we will see things happen.’¹⁴ She invited everyone to heighten their capacity of attention and not let it weaken. The most important and perhaps the only instrument of the outer and the inner act of consciousness is the presence to what happens, the directed concentration, the attention — in the beautiful formulation of Louis Pauwels in Ce que je crois (What I do believe): une attention priante, attention in an attitude of prayer, an attention attuned to the Living Presence in everything.

‘A Child Shall Destroy Them’

It has been the constant concern of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother that the breaking through of the new world into the old one would happen without irreparable damage. The phasing out of a world is always a catastrophe, a loss of everything built up by it. The present Change is not without danger, for the sudden presence of the Supramental Power in whatever measure, even the most minute, might have a destructive effect on that what is and those who are unprepared. We know the reasoning: Truth automatically effaces Falsehood as light effaces darkness; the world and man, as they still are at the present moment, consist for the greatest part of Falsehood, for they are constructed with subconscious and inconscient substance; therefore, if the Supermind, which is the Truth-Consciousness, would come into direct contact with man and with the world, they would literally be dissolved and disappear.

The process of transformation of the world is going on, thanks to the work of the Mother and of Sri Aurobindo behind the veil, with an incredible speed, but according to the notions of time of the human beings miracles have to happen instantly, by a touch of the magic wand. A miracle that takes some ten weeks or ten years is no longer a miracle to them, probably because they confound the external with the internal process. If a person would be transferred from the Earth to the Moon in an instant, it would be a miracle according to everyday reasoning; if he flies to the Moon in a space capsule, then it is no longer a miracle but the result of man’s scientific and technical acquisitions. How come then that each and every important scientific discovery has been deemed by experts to be impossible before its realization, including space travel and the visit of man to the Moon? An impossibility can only become possible by a ‘miracle.’ We forget that our technological progress based on science is a concatenation of big and small miracles that have resulted in the atom bomb, the visits to the Moon and the personal computer. The question is how long humankind will be able to keep mastering all these miracles — if it is mastering them at all.

It is in science that the mental, dividing consciousness has its greatest expansion. Of this, the computer is the striking example and symbol; it is increasingly influencing life on Earth and there is already a lot of talk about electronic ‘super highways’ which will cause a revolution in human society and perhaps in the human being. All the same, one should not lose view of at least three things: the computer gets its instructions from somewhere, which means that its programmers or those who obtain command of the supernet acquire a formidable and for the most part invisible power over their fellow human beings; secondly, the computer is a very vulnerable apparatus, a compound of numerous vulnerable parts, which is a dubious omen for the society that bases its organization on it; thirdly, the mental consciousness has a great admiration, not to say veneration, for the computer which surpasses it by far in its quantitative, analytic functions, and which it therefore considers the divinization, as it were, of itself. For the materialist considers quality to be a kind of quantum leap of quantity, and holds it perfectly possible for the computer to acquire human characteristics or even a human personality. It cannot be denied that materialistic science as practised now has a dark side which likes to denigrate all human and spiritual values and if possible to eliminate them from every consideration.

One of Sri Aurobindo’s aphorisms reads: ‘Europe [i.e. the West] prides herself on her practical and scientific organisation and efficiency. I am waiting till her organisation is perfect; then a child shall destroy her.’¹⁵ The Mother, who at one time gave regular comments on these aphorisms, refused on several occasions to say something about this one because it was a prediction of the bankruptcy and the collapse of the techno-scientific world as we know it at present, and because she did not want to frighten people unnecessarily or prematurely. Science and the world it has created represent the high tide, the inflation of the mental consciousness. Its greatest merit is its contribution to the unification of the world. This is why it is of use for the time being and why in its present form it may continue to exist for some time, for as long as it is indispensable within the global process. But once the Supermind takes over, the mental consciousness under all its aspects will become the surpassed cosmic element. The ‘child’ in Sri Aurobindo’s aphorism, who must be a very powerful child, is the soul in its supramental body which will effortlessly bring the artificial techno-scientific world to an end. Sri Aurobindo wrote already in the first pages of The Life Divine that technical hardware is in fact a demonstration of the impotence of the mental consciousness, and that in the change-over to the Unity-Consciousness the technical machinery will be replaced by the awakened, activated inner senses and capacities of the being beyond man.

Satprem writes: ‘It is strange, our imaginings of the future or our comic strips invent all the time a world equipped more and more with miraculous supermachines. Nobody ever looks in the direction of a simplification of the means, of a direct power. And the more marvellous the machines, the more distorted are the faces of those operating them.’¹⁶ We should heed Sri Aurobindo’s warning in the Arya: ‘The one safety for man lies in learning to live from within outward, not depending on institutions and machinery to perfect him, but out of his growing inner perfection availing to shape a more perfect form and frame of life.’¹⁷ ‘The next century will be spiritual or it will not be,’ is a well-known statement by André Malraux. And one century earlier, the seer-poet who was the young Arthur Rimbaud had concluded Une saison en enfer (a season in hell) with the words: ‘We are going towards the spirit! It is very certain, it is oracular what I say!’ Many, since, feel likewise and look in the same direction.

No Catastrophe

The Mother said in 1968 that the result of the supramental transformation was a certainty and that it would come about with a minimum of destruction ‘although this minimum is still considerable.’ For it is impossible that things change without changing, and change is probably what human beings fear most of all. They are so insecure, so defenseless in their world that the assurance of their expectations is like the firm support under their feet. The falling away of the security of those expectations in all their forms (by death, divorce, accident, imprisonment, serious incapacitation, and so on) tops the list of the causes of illness and death.

The Mother was Love incarnate. She has made the greatest sacrifices so that this Earth, this ‘place of desolation,’ may become in the shortest possible term a paradise, and she has done everything for the change to cause as little suffering as possible. When Satprem insisted on so many occasions that she use her Kali-power on the world, she tried every time as kindly and prudently as possible to make him see that such violent interventions by her were no longer in order, that her method of acting was not the same anymore. ‘There is the method of Kali which consists in administering a thorough spanking, but this means a lot of damage for meager results.’¹⁸ Kali is the goddess who destroys to bring the world faster to its divine goal by a new creation. There is however a whole hierarchy of Kalis, from those in the lower vital up to Mahakali, the Great Kali, who is one of the four aspects or direct emanations of the Mother. The lower Kalis are as depicted in the Indian iconography: naked, black, with bulging eyes, the tongue hanging out, a garland of skulls around the neck, terrible weapons (powers) in their eight hands, and bloodthirsty. The lower Kalis are goddesses of murderers and thieves, of magicians and tantrikas, and they can give a lot of trouble to those adoring them. Mahakali, on the contrary, is as described by Sri Aurobindo in his booklet The Mother and is a magnificent, noble being with an enormous militant energy for a better world, but always in the first place motivated by her motherly love for all her children: objects, plants, animals and men, saints and sinners, gods, asuras, rakshasas and pishachas.

The Mother has strongly condemned violence: ‘Violence is an asuric deformation. True power acts in peace.’¹⁹ ‘The divine manifestation takes place in calm and harmony, not by catastrophic upheavals.’⁹²²⁰ ‘It is always preferable to save, to illumine, to transform, instead of having to destroy brutally.’²¹ ‘We do not want any catastrophes,’ she emphasized, and she called catastrophes ‘a terrible waste’. ‘Up there [in her higher consciousness] one is not in favour of breaking things, for that is a waste of time.’ She once said in a certain context: ‘To kill is not on my programme.’

When somebody wrote to him about the terrible catastrophes and upheavals that would happen when the Supermind appeared on the scene, Sri Aurobindo answered: ‘There need not be. There will necessarily be great changes but they are not bound to be catastrophic. When there is a strong pressure from overmind forces for change, then there are likely to be catastrophes because of the resistance and clash of forces. The supramental has a greater — in its fullness a complete — mastery of things and power of harmonisation which can overcome resistance by other means than dramatic struggle and violence.’²²

‘The force which is at work at this moment is a Force of harmony that makes for unity,’²³ the Mother wrote. In 1972 she said: ‘There is like a golden Force which presses [on the material world], which has no material consistency but nevertheless seems terribly heavy and which presses on Matter. And the apparent result is as if catastrophes were inevitable. And together which this perception of inevitable catastrophes there are solutions to the situation, events which seem to be utterly miraculous. It is as if the two extremes were becoming still more extreme, as if what is good became better and what is bad worse. This is how it is. With a formidable Power pressing on the world.’ And she continued: ‘It is no longer like it was … This really is a new world. We may call it “supramental” to avoid misunderstandings’ — the Mother has never liked this term very much — ‘for as soon as one speaks of “Divine” people think of a God and that spoils everything … It is the descent of the supramental world, which is not something purely imaginary: it is an absolutely material Power but which has no need of material means. A world which wants to incarnate into the [material] world.’²⁴

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have protected the world with all their divine power at moments when elements of humanity were not only able but also inclined to destroy their own planet. The moment had come for the supramental Transmutation to be possible and such crucial moments are extremely rare in history. A nuclear catastrophe could have turned the continents into radioactive deserts and wiped out civilization, the fruit of centuries. And everything would have had to be rebuilt from out of that primitivity — for the umpteenth time? How many civilizations like Atlantis have, in humanity’s past, disappeared in the water or under the sand? All indications are that in recent times we owe the continuation of our world to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the only Power that was able to counteract the human and material instruments of the destructive designs of the Asura.

The miracle is not for tomorrow: it is happening NOW. Those who have eyes can see it, those who have ears can hear it. Those who have a living soul can experience it. We have already witnessed the first surprises; the following ones may happen tonight or tomorrow. This is the Hour of God, the time of the unexpected. ‘What is happening now is something that never happened before, and therefore nobody can understand it.’²⁵ (the Mother) In this book we have got some idea of the Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and we may use this insight to try and prolong the lines of their Work into tomorrow as a not totally unfounded thought-experiment. It is already worthwhile to know that something indeed is happening, and to watch out with intensified attention for other signs of the birth of the New World and of its first embodied representatives.

Five Indications

On 15 August 1925, more than seventy years ago, Sri Aurobindo in his evening talks gave a few indications by which to recognize the dawning of the New Era. The first indication was that the knowledge of the physical world would increase to a degree that it would break its own bounds. In this book it has already been pointed out that physical science has been moving for decades in occult territory without being aware of the fact or willing to recognize it. The present moment is especially interesting, as physical science now says it has discovered the sixth quark and its system of the composition of matter therefore should be complete. For the Mother has said that the transformation takes place quite materially in the mutual relations of the elementary particles and also that new particles will be discovered of which the scientists have as yet no idea.

‘Secondly,’ Sri Aurobindo said, ‘there is an attempt all over the world towards breaking the veil between the outer and the inner mental, the outer and the inner vital and even the outer and the inner physical.’ People are becoming more ‘psychic’ he said, using the word in the ordinary sense (according to A.B. Purani’s notes). A visit to any bookshop can only confirm Sri Aurobindo’s assertion.

Sri Aurobindo’s third indication: ‘The vital is trying to lay hold on the physical as it never did before. It is always the sign that whenever the higher Truth is coming down, it throws up the hostile vital world on the surface, and you see all sorts of abnormal vital manifestations, such as an increase in the number of persons who go mad, earthquakes, etc.’ We have already been reflecting on this. The vital beings perform their frenetic dance in an orgy of violence and stupefaction, in a hellish roar from batteries of loudspeakers with a power of thousands of watts, under flashing, blinding strobe lights and on pounding rhythms, with hair-dos, face paintings and clothing from the domains of vital beings or dwellings of vicious clowns.

Fourthly: ‘The world is becoming more united on account of the discoveries of modern science … Such a union is the condition for the highest Truth coming down.’ We know that technology is indispensable in the present stage of planetary development. If technology in this world would fall away, the realization of the necessary human unity would become a practical impossibility, for the different parts of the planet would lose the necessary exchange with one another and be enclosed in their separate existences again. We may therefore conclude that humanity will retain its command of the means of communication till something will be available to replace them. As the problems related to planetary communication are urgent, because of the dwindling energy resources and widespread pollution, their solution may not be that far off. This would mean that the unexpected is of the order of the day. The formerly mentioned colossality of all worldwide problems, moreover, points in the same direction of a solution in the (relatively) short term.

‘I have a sort of certainty that, when the Work will be finished, the result will come almost like a bolt of lightning,’ the Mother said. Was the Work finished? ‘The change has been accomplished. The physical is able to receive the higher Light, the Truth, the true Consciousness.’ (14 March 1970) ‘It is in the year 2000 that it will take a clear turn,’ she said too. But in the meantime ‘it’ is active everywhere.

Sri Aurobindo’s fifth indication was ‘the rise of persons who wield tremendous vital influence over large numbers of people,’ the emissaries, directly or indirectly, of the Asura of Falsehood. When Sri Aurobindo said this, the world had not yet seen the hordes of khaki shirts and black shirts parading before their Leader (Führer, Duce, Caudillo, Netaji), with the symbols of death as their emblems. Neither had it seen that the number of those attending ideological or religious mass-manifestations was used to corroborate the truth of a religion or an ideology.

Taking all this into consideration, what is the future that humanity can expect? ‘It must be conceded at once that there is not the least probability or possibility of the whole human race rising in a block to the supramental level,’²⁶ Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Life Divine. He foresaw ‘an achievement by the few initiating a new order of beings, while humanity will have passed sentence of unfitness on itself and may fall back into an evolutionary decline or a stationary immobility.’²⁷ The Mother said the same: ‘Three quarters of humanity belong to the past.’²⁸

‘The few’ are the mature souls who, at the end of their adventure through the lower evolution, have reached the terminus of their series of incarnations. Sri Aurobindo called them ‘the great dynamic souls,’ ‘the handful of pioneers,’ ‘the born-free,’ ‘the predestined.’ ‘Throughout the course of history a small minority has been carrying the torch to save humanity in spite of itself,’²⁹ he said. Having arrived at that point, the soul is free to choose what it prefers to do. These souls of ‘the few,’ in their great love for their brothers and sisters, who are still struggling in the evolution towards maturity, having chosen to incarnate again upon the Earth to help the others and quicken the advent of the new era. They have chosen the moment of their return on Earth and the task they want to accomplish. They have chosen either to help prepare the coming of the Avatar, to work together with him at the time of his presence on Earth, or to continue the work when he has left the material scene, in the trying period between his bodily presence and the actual realization of his Work. This is a period which only can be traversed leaning on the staff of Faith — the Faith that always is a form of precognition.

These fully matured souls are the first overmen (surhommes), a number of whom are already present among the enormous mass of humanity. In the near future (in ‘three hundred years’), when gross matter will be sufficiently transformed, they or others of their kind will receive into themselves the descending great beings from the supramental world, and thus become the first incorporated supramental beings on planet Earth and in the cosmos; for then the Earth has no bounds for them any more, they being by definition cosmic and divine. These few ones ‘can still be counted,’ the Mother said.

He who chooses the Infinite has been chosen by the Infinite.³⁰

— Sri Aurobindo

If there is some truth in all this, humanity will very probably

develop into the following species:

1. Animal-man. By far the greatest part of present animal-humanity, which has not kept the pace in the ongoing evolution and to which the fact of a possible evolutionary change is not even a concrete notion, animal-man will drop back to the level on which the greatest part of its being still moves: the animal level. Animal-man as a species, the kind of being we ourselves are, has to remain in existence, however, to keep occupying its evolutionary level and enable the continuation of evolution from the existing lower to the future higher species.

2. Man-man. This future species will have assimilated into itself the capacities of the higher mental, the illumined mental and the intuition (according to the definitions given to these terms by Sri Aurobindo). Because of this it will be able to lead a totally satisfying life and have no higher ambitions. Sri Aurobindo called this species ‘a higher order of mental human beings’ and the Mother saw them as ‘a very happy humanity.’ One will remember that gross matter can become supramental only when the Augean stables of the Subconscient and the Inconscient will be cleaned. This liberation will completely change the way of existence of animal-man and man-man from the endless road of suffering which is our lot into ‘a happy pilgrimage.’ The presence of the supramental beings too will inevitably have a beneficial reflection on the environment in which both these species live and therefore on all lower species of the animal and semi-human kind.

3. Overman. The Overhuman Consciousness established itself on Earth on 1 January 1969 and has been active ever since. The Mother probably would have accredited all ‘miraculous’ events after that date to this Consciousness. Yet, the big scale events are always prepared by small scale transformations caused by this Consciousness; the latter are much more important than the big events because they are the seed that makes the changes on the surface possible. The Overhuman Consciousness has its instruments in the overmen already present on Earth. One is here reminded of the Mother’s words ‘il y en a’ (there are some) and Nolini’s declaration that the new man is present among us. Much more important than the external is the internal work — of openness to the new Consciousness and surrender to it, of faith in the transformation which is an inner certitude, and of a total and no longer egoistic preparedness to do everything the guiding Consciousness demands. (‘We want a race without an ego.’) Seen spiritually, the overmen are the radioactive element in humanity effecting the (trans)mutation.

4. The supramental species. The supramental being is the divine being of the future; it will no longer be embodied in the manner of the present animal-human procreation. The process by which it will acquire a body of supramentalized substance is not yet known. The fact that the Subconscient will no longer hold the Earth in its grip will undoubtedly result in new evolutionary processes and mechanisms. The supramental being, as the incorporation of the Unity-Consciousness which in essence is divine Love, will transpose the world into a higher mode of happiness and well-being.

What is to happen? The unexpected, the unimagined, the unparalleled — tomorrow, today, now. The possibility of all impossibilities, the bankruptcy of the theories of the experts, the dream of the soulful amateurs raised to its highest power. Like the golden ball of the Matrimandir, a Sun is breaking out of the Earth. ‘If mankind only caught a glimpse of what infinite enjoyments, what perfect forces, what luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge, what wide calms of our being lie waiting for us in the tract which our animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all and never rest till they had gained these treasures,’³¹ Sri Aurobindo wrote.

But it would have been a long wait if mankind had had to take the initiative. It has shut itself up within its own enclosures (to protect itself from the world), and it has given plenipotentiary powers to its self-created higher instances to terrorize itself with the scourges of sin, death, and hell, to formulate its credos and lock up its mysteries, and to make a past of slavery into the norm of an ever unsatisfactory future on the planet from whose womb it has been born. This spell is now broken by an act of God, at this moment of moments in the history of the Earth. For this Act the collaboration of man was not required; neither is it required for its execution. The fact exists and this fact is imposing itself.

‘It is a Force that exerts pressure on the Earth and that makes people do the most improbable things,’³² the Mother said. ‘Just do what you feel like, [what you do] is of no importance any more,’³³ she said. ‘The Work is being done in spite of the mental incomprehension and even of the mental “comprehension”.’³⁴ ‘The motive why people do things must no longer be taken seriously. What matters is that they do them.’³⁵ ‘All our common sense, all our logic, all our practical sense: useless! finished! … All that does not correspond to what is.’³⁶ ‘Anyway, all the former notions, all the former ways of understanding, all that is good and well finished, it belongs to the past,’³⁷ she also said.

When she tried to give the Ashram youth an idea of what the Divine is, she suggested they aggrandize to the highest degree in their imagination everything they could conceive of as the most valuable or desirable; in this way they might begin forming some idea of the ecstatic experience which is the contact with the Divine. Is he or she who has caught a glimpse of it not described in many mystical texts as love-drunk? We normally do not know this from experience. Yet our values and desires are reflections in us of the Divine, they are inspired into us by the Divine. It makes no sense, Sri Aurobindo said, to impose on the Supermind and its future world the norms and expectations of our mental manner of thinking and seeing. But as an experiment of the imagination, as a thought-experiment, we can project our values and our truly desirable desires upon the horizon of the improbable — and there begins Tomorrow.

I saw the Omnipotent’s flaming pioneers

Over the heavenly verge which turns towards life

Come crowding down the amber stairs of birth;

Forerunners of a divine multitude,

Out of the paths of the morning star they came

Into the little room of mortal life.

I saw them cross the twilight of an age,

The sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn,

The great creators with wide brows of calm,

The massive barrier-breakers of the world

And wrestlers with destiny in her lists of will,

The labourers in the quarries of the gods,

The messengers of the incommunicable,

The architects of immortality.³⁸

Once, sometime in 1956, Nirodbaran went within himself during his daily morning meditation and talked there with somebody for almost an hour. Back in his everyday consciousness, he asked himself who that might have been and wrote about it to the Mother. She answered: ‘Last night we (you and myself and some others) were together for quite a long time in the permanent dwelling of Sri Aurobindo which exists in the subtle physical (what Sri Aurobindo used to call the true physical). All that happened there (much too long and complicated to be told) was, so to say, organised in order to express concretely the rapid movement with which the present transformation is going on; and Sri Aurobindo told you with a smile something like this: “Do you believe now?” It is as if he was evoking these three lines from Savitri:

God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know of the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done.’³⁹

The need of the True, the New, the Real, of Something Different, lives in the breasts of so many. The seed of the New World has been strewn out and the attentive eye sees the signs of its germination everywhere. Jacques Lacarrière, for instance, ends his remarkable book on Les Gnostiques (the Gnostics) as follows: ‘The Gnostic of today can no longer be a preacher of salvation, a magus in seclusion on his mountain, or some illuminatus in the big city with his nose glued to old texts. He must be a sentient man, turned towards the present and the future, with the intuitive certitude that above all else he holds within himself the keys of the future. This certitude he has to oppose to all reassuring myths, so-called religions of salvation, and alienating ideologies, which do nothing but screen off his true presence to reality. For what is important today is not so much to discover new stars as to break down the new barriers which unceasingly rise up around us or within ourselves, in order to go through them, like through death, with the eyes wide open.’⁴⁰

‘The coming of a spiritual age must be preceded by the appearance of an increasing number of individuals who are no longer satisfied with the normal intellectual, vital and physical existence of man,’⁴¹ Sri Aurobindo wrote eight decades ago. These individuals are the ones who can no longer stand the lies and the almost unrealistic improbability of the whole mess of life because something inside them knows that it can be otherwise and that the moment of the other way has arrived. They have inside them a lacuna which the Mother called a ‘Need’ (un besoin) — the pressing need of Reality which is a hunger for sustenance of the soul. This Need is the sign of the mature psychic being. It is inevitably guided towards its very own place and contribution in the construction of the New World, often by an improbable coincidence — a word, an encounter, a book, an article in a newspaper wrapped around a pair of shoes. For it is for this specific contribution that it has come into the world again, and it will find the like-minded psychic beings, even though most of them are still moving incognito among the mass or within a religious or spiritual community. For it belongs to the planetary group of those who have been sent. And in the ear-shattering din of a world in travail it will discern the pure call which fills the eyes with tears of Joy because that call tells that That is present in this world and that life will no longer be a crawling act but a boundless flight with wide and light and colourful wings.

The world is coming apart at the seams ‘till the day that it will be the Sun for ever, the total Victory,’⁴² as the Mother put it. Those who feel the unquenchable thirst for Something Different will be protected in a cocoon of light, she said, to traverse all perils of the convulsions of the old and dying world, for in part of their being they already belong to that light, to the New World. And ‘all one has dreamed to be the most beautiful, the most marvellous, the most fantastic is nothing compared with what will be realized.’⁴³

‘The absoluteness of the Victory is in-dis-put-able,’ she stressed staccato — she who possessed the certitude ‘like a sword of Light, intangible.’ And like Joan of Arc to her standard which had been with her in so many battles, she said to those then and now who dedicate themselves to the advent of Tomorrow: ‘You have shared in the hardship, you will share in the honour.’

For: ‘It is not a crucified but a glorified body that will save the world.’⁴⁴