Patterns of the Present

2: The Avataric Field

Surely, for the earth-consciousness the very fact that the Divine manifests himself is the greatest of all splendours. Consider the obscurity here and what it would be if the Divine did not directly intervene and the Light of Lights did not break out of the obscurity – for that is the meaning of the [avataric] manifestation.¹

– Sri Aurobindo

The concept of the “Avatar” is generally understood to be typically Hindu, although, under other names, it is also alive in the West as a designation of Jesus Christ. While in Hinduism there is a succession of Avatars throughout the evolution, in Christianity Christ is supposed to be the one and only Avatar. In this, Christianity has been very “Eurocentric” and circumscribed in its outlook. The excuse is that Christian theology was embedded within a historical horizon beyond which it could not see or reach for many centuries.

In Hinduism, the fact that the Avatar incarnates at times of evolutionary crises to put matters straight is better known than the fact that he also comes when a special work of evolutionary development is to be done. The reason is Sri Krishna’s well-known pronouncement in the Bhagavad Gita: “Whensoever there is the fading of the Dharma and the uprising of unrighteousness, then I loose myself forth into birth.”² Of course, both reasons for the Avatar’s embodiment upon Earth are not exclusive of each other: the special reason for the coming may well be part and even the cause of an evolutionary crisis – as was the case in the coming of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, a double-poled, male-female, complete Avatar for the first time in the history of humanity.

According to Sri Aurobindo’s definition: “An Avatar, roughly speaking, is one who is conscious of the presence and power of the Divine born in him or descended into him and governing from within his will and life and action; he feels identified inwardly with this divine power and presence.”³ In India it is known that there are also other beings in a human incarnation who are charged with a special divine mission, and who are called vibhutis. “A Vibhuti”, writes Sri Aurobindo, “is supposed to embody some power of the Divine and is enabled by it to act with great force in the world, but that is all that is necessary to make him a Vibhuti: the power may be very great, but the consciousness is not that of an inborn or indwelling Divinity. This is the distinction we can gather from the Gita which is the main authority on this subject.”⁴

Among the Vibhutis may be counted: Veda Vyasa, Hatshepsut, Moses, Pericles, Socrates, Alexander, Confucius, Lao Tse, Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus, Mohammed, Joan of Arc, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, Shankara, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, and undoubtedly many more in all times and climes. All of them were concretely aware that they had a specific, superhuman mission to fulfil and so they did. It should be noted that some of them were atheists, like Julius Gaius Caesar. Secondly, morality seems not to be a criterion. “All morality is a convention”, said Sri Aurobindo, and conventions are not binding on divinely empowered actors and acts. Thirdly, many Vibhutis, like the Avatars, left an imprint on the memory of the species (which often is also true of the presence of their counterparts, the incarnations or emanations of the great Asuras), although others may have done their work in obscurity and remained unknown.

Turning back to the concept of the Avatar, a few quotations from Sri Aurobindo’s letters may complete our understanding of it.

• “There are two sides of the phenomenon of Avatarhood, the Divine Consciousness and the instrumental personality. The Divine Consciousness is omnipotent but it has put forth the instrumental personality in Nature under the conditions of Nature and it uses it according to the rules of the game – though also sometimes to change the rules of the game. If Avatarhood is only a flashing miracle, then I have no use for it. If it is a coherent part of the arrangement of the omnipotent Divine in Nature, then I can understand and accept it.”⁵

• “An Avatar is not at all bound to be a spiritual prophet – he is never in fact merely a prophet, he is a realiser, an establisher – not of outward things only, though he does realise something in the outward also, but, as I have said, of something essential and radical needed for the terrestrial evolution which is the evolution of the embodied spirit through successive stages towards the Divine.”⁶

• “I have said that the Avatar is one who comes to open the Way for humanity to a higher consciousness – if nobody can follow the way, then either our conception of the thing, which is also that of Christ and Krishna and Buddha also, is all wrong or the whole life and action of the Avatar is quite futile. X seems to say that there is no way and no possibility of following, that the struggles and sufferings of the Avatar are unreal and all humbug – there is no possibility of struggle for one who represents the Divine. Such a conception makes nonsense of the whole idea of Avatarhood; there is then no reason for it, no necessity in it, no meaning in it. The Divine being all-powerful can lift people up without bothering to come down on earth. It is only if it is a part of the world-arrangement that he should take upon himself the burden of humanity and open the Way that Avatarhood has any meaning.”⁷

• “The Avatar is not supposed to act in a non-human way – he takes up human action and uses human methods with the human consciousness in front and the Divine behind. If he did not his taking a human body would have no meaning and would be of no use to anybody. He could just as well have stayed above and done things from there.”⁸

• “An Avatar or Vibhuti have the knowledge that is necessary for their work, they need not have more. There was absolutely no reason why Buddha should know what was going on in Rome. An Avatar even does not manifest all the Divine omniscience and omnipotence; he has not come for any such unnecessary display; all that is behind him but not in the front of his consciousness. As for the Vibhuti, the Vibhuti need not even know that he is a power of the Divine. Some Vibhutis like Julius Caesar for instance have been atheists. Buddha himself did not believe in a personal God, only in some impersonal and indescribable Permanent.”⁹

• “Because he [i.e. the Avatar] chooses to limit or determine his action by conditions, it does not make him less omnipotent. His self-limitation is itself an act of omnipotence … Certain conditions have been established for the game and so long as those conditions remain unchanged certain things are not done, – so we say they are impossible, can’t be done.

• If the conditions are changed then the same things are done or at least become licit – allowable, legal according to the so-called laws of Nature, and then we say they can be done. The Divine also acts according to the conditions of the game. He may change them but he has to change them first, not proceed, while maintaining the conditions, to act by a series of miracles.”¹⁰

• “The Avatar is not bound to do extraordinary actions, but he is bound to give his acts or his work or what he is – any of this or all – a significance and an effective power that are part of something to be done in the history of the earth and its races.”¹¹

• “It is not by your mind that you can hope to understand the Divine and its action, but by the growth of a true and divine consciousness within you. If the Divine were to unveil and reveal itself in all its glory, the mind might feel a Presence, but it would not understand its action or its nature. It is in the measure of your own realisation and by the birth and growth of the greater consciousness in yourself that you will see the Divine and understand its action even behind its terrestrial disguises.”¹²

As the incarnation of an Avatar is a direct divine intervention in the evolution, it must be planned and timed “from behind the veil”, from the heart of Eternity, so that it comes at the right moment and has the intended effect on the stage of our evolutionary manifestation. The action of an Avatar consists of four phases: the time of his advent; his presence on Earth; the period after his passing, when apparently nothing or very little of his work is patently perceptible; and the time of accomplishment, when the results of his mission are a concrete part of the manifestation. These are the four phases of the avataric action which can be seen as one new field, a spiritual force field, bringing about the creation of a new step in the evolution or whatever may be the mission of the Avatar. We will now briefly sketch these four phases as applied to the work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

First Phase: The Advent of the Avatar

Sri Aurobindo was born in 1872 and the Mother in 1878. It is becoming fashionable among historians to write about “the long 19th century” (from the French Revolution till 1914, the beginning of the First World War) and “the short 20th century” (from 1914 till 1989, the collapse of the Communist Bloc). It might be much more appropriate to see the 20th century up to 1989 as a whole, intimately connected with the last decades of the 19th century. For there was doubtlessly a complex historical period preceding up to the First World War. It is therefore justifiable to consider the 19th century as beginning with the French Revolution and ending with the collapse of the ideological foundations of the bourgeoisie in the last decades of the 19th century, a process directly connected with the outbreak of the First World War.

The last decades of the 19th century were the time of “the second industrial revolution”. The first industrial revolution had been powered by coal and steel, this new phase of industrial development was powered by oil and electricity. The inventions made at that time are still with us in one form or another: the bicycle (“that most beneficent of all the period’s machines”), the motor car with its internal combustion engine, the telephone, the telegraph, the gramophone, the cinematic camera, the electric generator, the light bulb, etc.

One result of the new, ever-accelerating industrial development was a sudden increase of workers in the cities. Their living and working conditions were terrible; this problem reached such dimensions that it must either be solved or explode into widespread revolution. This was the time of the rise of socialism, which in its various forms referred back to the theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It was also the time of many utopian social systems and of militant anarchism.

Marx was only one of the thinkers directly influencing the age; the other principal ones were Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. Darwin gave a severe blow to the image man had of himself as the king of creation. Nietzsche, “the eloquent and menacing prophet of an impending catastrophe”, proclaimed the end of the Western civilisation based on Christianity; Freud showed that the psychology of the human being is much more complex than either the Greeks or the Christians had thought or dared to think. “The crisis of reason is most obvious in psychology, at least insofar as it tried to come to terms not with experimental situations, but with the human mind as a whole. What remained of the solid citizen pursuing rational aims by maximising personal utilities, if his pursuit was based on a bundle of ‘instincts’ like those of animal, if the rational mind was only a boat tossed on the waves and currents of the unconscious, or even if rational consciousness was only a special kind of consciousness ‘whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different’?”¹³

What was actually going on, generally speaking, was that the idea of “reality” was radically put into question, in the first place the reality constituting the human being itself. Since the Renaissance, the firmly fixed foundations of the medieval world view had been gradually eroded, to such an extent that the bourgeois 19th century had been living in a hollow and very vulnerable reality; still it had to hold up appearances, and it is therefore generally branded as hypocritical and fake. The Impressionists were the first who could no longer stand the bourgeois artificiality – Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe dates from 1863 – and created forms of expression of the authentic artistic experience. Their revolution was not based on any philosophical thought or intention; it sprang directly from a need of the heart. (The impressionists, however bourgeois in part of their personality, may be considered as the forerunners or the first wave of what Sri Aurobindo called “the subjective age”.)

A new scientific paradigm originated simultaneously with the artistic revolution. “Every historian is struck by the fact that the revolutionary transformation of the scientific world view in these years forms part of a more general, and dramatic, abandonment of established and often long-accepted values, truths and ways of looking at the world … It may be pure accident or arbitrary selection that Planck’s quantum theory, the rediscovery of Mendel, Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen, Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and Cézanne’s Still Life with Onions can all be dated to 1900 … but the coincidence of dramatic innovation in several fields remains striking.”¹⁴

All this happened mainly in the West while the East, in Sri Aurobindo’s words, was asleep. But not for long. For the decades we are considering also saw the culmination of colonialism. To many now “colonialism” is a dirty word; yet it was colonialism that prepared the world to become one, and this unification, as we will see, constituted an important element in the evolution of humanity. “It is a surprising fact that in most parts of Africa the entire experience of colonialism from original occupation to the formation of independent states, fits within a single lifetime – say that of Winston Churchill (1874-1965).”¹⁵

In those years the political situation grew enormously complicated and confused. The power game was in full swing and could erupt into war at any time, though nobody was able to foretell among whom exactly, let alone what might be the outcome. Kings, queens and other scions of the feudal nobility that had been ruling over Europe since Charlemagne were still on their thrones, a century after the French Revolution and Napoleon, but it was generally felt that most of them were colossi with clay feet and could topple over at any moment. The historians agree that the overall situation at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century was incredibly tense for reasons nobody could explain.

When in 1914 war finally happened, it was greeted with relief, and even joy and enthusiasm, by the participants, ignorant of the fact that so many young people would be slaughtered. Documentaries of festive crowds filmed at that time are still there for us to view. To quote Hobsbawm a last time: “As bourgeois Europe moved in growing material comfort towards its catastrophe, we observe the curious phenomenon of a bourgeoisie, or at least a significant part of its youth and its intellectuals, which plunged willingly, even enthusiastically, into the abyss. Everyone knows of the young men … who hailed the outbreak of the First World War like people who have fallen in love.”¹⁶ A striking testimony to these words are Rupert Brooke’s lines, quoted in Voices of the Great War:

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move …

From the Aurobindonian perspective it may be justified to ascribe the tension, the almost unbearable pressure at the time, to the fact that humanity was preparing for the greatest change in its history – a change that would make the 20th century the most eventful and as yet least understood century. It would be “the most revolutionary [period] ever experienced by the human race”. Fundamentally, the whole tense situation was created for and by the coming of the Avatar; it was created by the pressure of the avataric field.

Second Phase: The Presence of the Avatar

The Avatar is born in the circumstances determined by his divine self from outside the manifestation; these circumstances are chosen to make the execution of his mission possible. Born from humans in a human body, the Avatar’s first years are a time of self-discovery. Generally speaking, he is from an early age aware of a special destiny and mission in life, although not yet of his divinity. But this was not the case with the Buddha, who seems to have led a normal princely life up to the moment of his great discovery. When Sri Aurobindo was a boy and reading about the freedom movements in Ireland and Italy, he felt strongly that he had a role to play in the liberation of his motherland, but nothing more.

Sri Aurobindo has explicitly stated that his and the Mother’s consciousness were one. This is indirectly shown by the parallelism of their early lives at a time they did not yet know of each other, at least not in their surface awareness. Both had parents who wanted their children to become the best in the world; the parents of both were atheists; both were atheists themselves in their youth; their first contact with yoga took place in 1905, the year Sri Aurobindo started practising pranayama and the Mother discovered La Revue cosmique; both began their real yoga in 1908; both were instructed in an occult way by invisible teachers; the Bhagavad Gita played an important role in the development of both; Sri Aurobindo’s Record of Yoga and the Mother’s Prayers and Meditations were started at the same time; both discovered the Supermind and their mission independently …

The earthly presence of the Avatar of the Supermind, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, is better known than the life of any other Avatar. It should be understood, however, that our knowledge of them, however extensive, is only the tip of the iceberg, sufficient to construct a limited notion of who they were through convergence of the known facts. What does it mean, for example, to have the God Krishna living in one’s own body, as from 1926 till 1950 he was living in Sri Aurobindo’s? What was the splendid overmental world the Mother created in 1927? The reports of the disciples then present and actually involved in it hardly provide us with anything concrete. Which other interventions by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were there in the Second World War apart from the few they mentioned? Why did Sri Aurobindo have to descend into death? What did the Mother actually mean when she said, in the last years, that her body was only a means to render an external contact with her possible? …

The life of the Avatar has always a direct interaction with the life of humanity, for such is its raison d’être. It is the task of the Vibhuti to solve particular, localised problems, but it is the task of the Avatar to take the evolution forward at a point where even the most evolved terrestrial elements are no longer capable of doing so. This is the explanation of the fact that the Avatar, according to Krishna in the Gita, incarnates at times of crisis. The crisis necessitates the coming of the Avatar, as well as his coming causes the crisis. Rama, the Avatar of the rational mind, fought his great battle with the ten-headed asura Ravana, king of Lanka.¹⁷ Krishna incarnated at the time of the Mahabharata war, when the world of the peoples who participated in that war was in peril of perdition because of the Kauravas. The Buddha came at the time of the calcification of the Vedic ritual; so important was the new spiritual impetus he caused that it spread through a whole continent and continues working in the present day, when there are more than 500 million Buddhists. Christ appeared in a Mediterranean world in upheaval, at least as bewildering to the people then as is our turbulent world to us now. The Twentieth Century is the history of the interaction of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s Yoga with humanity.

Yet, despite their profound, decisive influence, the Avatars are usually not recognised. “I suppose very few recognised him [Krishna] as an Avatar,”¹⁸ wrote Sri Aurobindo. The same could be said of Buddha, regarded as a demon by the brahmans, and Christ, who was crucified as a criminal. The same could be said of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who still are practically unknown. The followers recognising them as the Avatar number no more than a handful, and even among them the recognition was and is not unanimous. A disciple to whom Sri Aurobindo once wrote “I have cherished you like a friend and a son” never recognised him as an Avatar but only as his guru, while he kept his distance from the Mother. For those who follow a certain yogic approach, for instance of devotion, to recognise, them as the Avatar may not be necessary because, if their attitude is faithful, the recognition will be given to them at the time of the fulfilment of their sadhana. But how can one have any idea of the importance of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s Work if one remains ignorant of their avataric function and does not perceive them as such?

Speaking of followers and disciples: the Avatar never comes alone; he always surrounds himself with individuals, incarnated souls, who represent the whole of humanity so that, through them, he may touch the complete field of his action. As Sri Aurobindo wrote: “Some psychic beings have come here [near him in Pondicherry] who are ready to join with great lines of consciousness above, represented often by beings of the higher planes and are therefore specially fitted to join with the Mother intimately in the great work that has to be done. These have all a special relation with the Mother which adds to the past one.”¹⁹ He also wrote: “A number of souls have been sent to see that it shall be now.”²⁰ The Buddha had his circle of disciples, devotees and followers; so had Krishna (the Pandavas and their allies) and so had Christ.

“No individual realisation can be complete or even come near to this perfection”, said the Mother to her audience at the Ashram Playground, “if it is not in harmony with at least a group of consciousnesses representative of a new world. There is, in spite of everything, so great an interdependence between the individual and the collectivity that the individual realisation … is limited, diminished by the irresponsive atmosphere – if I may put it like that – of what surrounds it. And it is certain that the entire terrestrial life has to follow a certain line of progress, so that a new world and a new consciousness may manifest. And this is why I said at the beginning that it depends at least partially on you.”²¹

Touching again upon this subject shortly afterwards she said: “The personal realisation has no limits. One can become inwardly, in oneself, perfect and infinite. But the outer realisation is necessarily limited, and if one wants to exert a general action, at least a minimum number of physical beings are needed. In a very old tradition it was said that twelve were enough, but in the complexities of modern life this does not seem possible. There must be a representative group. You know nothing about it, or you are not very much aware of it, but each one of you represents one of the difficulties that must be conquered for the transformation, and this makes quite a number of difficulties! I have written somewhere … that more than a difficulty, each one represents an impossibility to be solved. And it is the whole of all these impossibilities that can be transformed into the Work, the Realisation. Each case is an impossibility to be solved, and it is when all these impossibilities will be solved that the Work will be accomplished.”²²

Some of the most prominent disciples of the Avatars have been elevated in the esteem of the faithful to a quasi-divine status, a status they surely did not enjoy in their lifetime. For as their Master remained unrecognised by the multitude, so were they. “Those who were with Krishna were in all appearance men like other men”, wrote Sri Aurobindo. “They spoke and acted with each other as men with men and were not thought of by those around them as gods.”²³ As far as the disciples who were with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are concerned, telling anecdotes illustrating the last quotation can be found abundantly in Sri Aurobindo’s correspondence. The disciples of Christ just fled away at the moment of his highest need.

Still, whatever the shortcomings of their outer personality – in the Yoga the most difficult part to change – there is no doubt that the companions of the Avatar are always very special human incarnations. From the texts left us by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother we know that their disciples had participated in their avataric and vibhutic mission in times past. The Mother even said so explicitly to her audience of the Questions and Answers. They belonged, she said, to “the family of the aspiration”, and she had promised most of them in a previous incarnation that they would be present at the time of the great realisation, meaning the descent of the Supermind. It should nevertheless be kept in mind that the evolution proceeds through “the clash of opposites”, as Sri Aurobindo put it, through the clash of the forces for and against the divine design. (The Asuras were, after all, the “first-born” and the Gods the “second-born”.) Therefore he and the Mother also took some of the most powerful embodiments of the evolutionary resistance into their proximity, in order to work directly upon them and through them upon the whole of humanity. (The Asura and Rakshasa are there in all of us.) All were her children, the Mother said, the anshas²⁴ of the Gods as well as the anshas of the Asuras, and the conversion of the latter formed an essential part in the movement of transition towards the New World.

For those who want to see, or are chosen to see, the lives of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are a continuous confirmation of the veracity of their avatarhood; they have also confirmed it on many occasions, in most cases confidentially. And the portent of the present times is such that something of prime importance must be happening in the development of humanity; the crisis that humanity and its bhumi, the Earth, are undergoing is on a scale which requires the intervention of an Avatar. If all this is true, then the Avatar has been present on the Earth in the Twentieth Century. Then Kalki, with the sword of Truth, has fought his battles, even though his physical incarnation was not as described in the Puranas. The World-Redeemer came, and nobody recognised him – as is humanity’s wont.

Third Phase: After the Departure of the Avatar

Then comes the time when the Avatar leaves his body and the disciples stay behind, bereft of the sun of their lives, perplexed, stunned. They may be ridiculed by others for their belief in a person who promised them so much – a wonderful new life or the means to realise it – and who seemingly left them with so little after having died like any other mortal. The Buddha did not write a single word and neither did Christ, except for some mysterious words or signs in the sand. Moreover, in the case of the latter his return in glory was expected within the lifetime of those who had been with him, but they waited in vain.

Sri Aurobindo, who was supposed to be immortal according to many of his disciples and followers, left his body in December 1950; the Mother, after years of what looked like physical deterioration and illness, left her body in November 1973. Both times the bewilderment in the Aurobindonian community was widespread and the faith of many deeply shaken.

It is in this third phase that some harrowing questions crop up. What about the expectation that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother would stay on Earth forever? (They have never said so.) What about the appearance of the immortal supramental beings and the New World? (What Sri Aurobindo and the Mother said about the transitional being was not taken into consideration till the present day.) Would Sri Aurobindo and/or the Mother come back, preferably as soon as possible? (Since 1973 several women have declared themselves to be an incarnation of the Mother.) Are there any signs that the Work is going on, that the Supermind is active? (The fact of the presence of the Consciousness of the Overman is seldom, if ever, referred to.) In short, was it true what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had written or said, or was it another grandiose effort ending with the traditional “fiasco”?

These questions are rarely formulated in public or in writing. Some disciples and followers have bypassed the mental problematics, taken the devotional attitude, and included Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in the pantheon of the Gods whom they adore. In many the devotion is sincere and the support if not the reason of their whole life. And there are the ones who have kept a living relation with the Great Beings they once saw embodied before their eyes. Time goes by and the world changes.

The third phase of the avataric intervention in the world may well be the most trying phase for those involved in it. The Avatar is no longer there in the body to be seen or to be asked for his/her advice and personal support. The new teaching is interpreted in many ways and often distorted or appropriated by egos who consider themselves advanced on the path, or the sole heirs to it, or gifted with the exclusivity of a correct understanding. Verbal altercations and personal or group enmities arise because the teaching has to be interpreted in order to adapt it to new situations in a changing world. There are power struggles among the believers, hidden or overt.

The third phase covers the span of time – decades? centuries? – in which each and every embodied soul called to participate in the avataric Work has to fend for itself, with as its only support the staff of Faith and the inner development. Most often the disciples who were the companions of the Avatar are held in high esteem and some of them may gradually acquire superhuman proportions in the minds of those left behind. Their contribution to the Work was considerable, for sure. But the contribution to the Work of the souls that chose to be the vanguard of humanity in the most trying phase, when the Avatar is no longer there and the result of his Work is not yet concretely perceptible, is no less considerable.

Fourth Phase: The Fulfilment of the Avataric Mission

Finally, there is the time of accomplishment, for no Avatar incarnates without the divine certitude that his Work will be consummated. This certitude is the seal on his Work. The divine Vision saw the necessity of the coming and planned the means, time and required circumstances for it. The divine Power performed the Yoga, the realisation of something impossible and totally new in the evolution of the Earth. On the basis built by the Avatar, his divine Self sees to it, after his departure from the physical scene, that the Work develops and grows to maturity. Only his Self from behind the veil can have the necessary Vision and Knowledge of a future that seems totally utopian and unreal at the time the foundations of the new element in the evolution are realised. The Avatar remains present on Earth in an occult way at least till this Work is done and keeps intervening in the earthly circumstances to bring it about. The dimensions of his mission cannot be completed within the short span of a human life. The fourth phase of the fulfilment is an integral part of “the avataric field”.

This may seem a matter of belief. A look back at the avataric mission of the Buddha and Christ, however, provides concrete evidence. At the time the Buddha left his body, little seemed to be left of his superhuman effort except the presence of some followers in a corner of what is now the Indian state of Bihar. The subsequent development of Buddhism and its branching out in many variations and directions is impressive. In its heyday, Buddhism in one form or other covered most of the Asian continent and became the faith and the way of life of millions of people; it simultaneously created a literature which is one of the treasures of mankind. When Christ died abandoned on the cross nothing seemed to be left of all that he had preached and tried to inculcate in his disciples, followers and the crowds that had assembled to listen to him. Centuries later the European civilisation came into existence from the seeds he had sown in the human soil. (“Christ from his cross humanised Europe”, wrote Sri Aurobindo in one of his aphorisms.) Today the West still considers him the paragon of all that is good and noble in the human being, and his followers number seven or eight hundred million.

When will there be a concrete result of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s Yoga, in other words, when will the first signs of a supramental transformation be perceptible to ordinary humans? This question was considered of secondary importance during Sri Aurobindo’s lifetime. What counted then – “the one thing needful” – was the descent of the Supermind, as Sri Aurobindo told Nirodbaran in their correspondence; that should be the aim of the whole effort and all the rest was premature speculation.²⁵ (The manifestation of the Supermind took place in 1956.)

About the actual supramental transformation Sri Aurobindo at first talked vaguely in terms of thousands of years, and observed that this would be a very short time considering the scope of the evolutionary transformation envisaged. Towards the end of his life his guess was, according to the Mother, about three hundred years. In 1956, the Mother’s own estimation was still “a certain number of a thousand years” and “some centuries”. Between 1958 and 1973 she often repeated Sri Aurobindo’s estimation of “at least three hundred years”, considering this the minimum time required. Towards the end she usually referred to Sri Aurobindo’s estimation of “three hundred years”.

All the same, let us not forget that before another three centuries have passed, some unpredictable, very fundamental and apparently miraculous changes will take place leading up to the appearance of a supramental being whose presence we, ordinary mortals, could not even endure. For the Supermind is at work and so is the Overman Consciousness. No doubt, the future has always been unpredictable to the human being, unable to “even see the step ahead.”²⁶ The characteristics of the radical events ahead, however, should be identifiable as the conditions necessary for the appearance of the supramental being: world-unity in diversity; supercession of the ego in individuals, communities, religions, peoples and nations; fulfilment of the highest capabilities of the human being leading towards the realisation of his most sublime ideals; physical acquisitions pointing towards a body with the capacities of the superman; a universal empathy with all beings and with the universe as a precondition to the ultimate flowering of Love.

Words and thoughts like these were but seldom expressed in the countless messages on the threshold of the new millennium. Yet they are not completely foreign to us. They were abroad in the magic Sixties, peaking in ’68, though soon stifled by a human mind in bewilderment by what overtook it; they were abroad in ’89, when the Berlin Wall fell, pulling the Communist Bloc down with it. As Sri Aurobindo wrote in “The Hour of God”: “This is the time of the unexpected.”