Vrekhem applies the evolutionary vision of Sri Aurobindo & The Mother to derive a positive interpretation of the global situation and present state of humanity.
The author puts the present situation of humanity in the perspective of the evolutionary vision of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. The result is a positive interpretation of the global situation.
… the anarchy of our being which covers our confused attempt at a new order …1 – Sri Aurobindo Suddenly, there is a curve in the road, a turning point. Somewhere, the real scene has been lost, the scene where you had rules for the game and some solid stakes that everybody could rely on.2 – Jean Baudrillard
… the anarchy of our being which covers our confused attempt at a new order …1
– Sri Aurobindo
Suddenly, there is a curve in the road, a turning point. Somewhere, the real scene has been lost, the scene where you had rules for the game and some solid stakes that everybody could rely on.2
– Jean Baudrillard
In 1972 the Mother said: “For centuries and centuries humanity has waited for this time. It has come. But it’s difficult. I don’t simply tell you we are here upon earth to rest and enjoy ourselves, now is not the time for that. We are here to prepare the way for the new creation.
“The body [her body] has some difficulty, so I can’t be active, alas. It’s not because I am old: I am not old. I am not old, I am younger than most of you. If I am here inactive, it’s because the body has given itself definitely to prepare the transformation. But the consciousness is clear and we are here to work. Rest and enjoyment will come afterwards. Let’s do our work here. So I’ve called you to tell you that. Take what you can, do what you can, my help will be with you. All sincere effort will be helped to the maximum.”3
“It’s the hour to be heroic. Heroism is not what it’s usually said to be: it is to become wholly unified.4 And the divine help will always be with those who have resolved to be heroic in full sincerity. That’s what I have to say.”
“You are here at this moment – that’s to say upon earth – because you have chosen so in the past.5 (You don’t remember that any more, but I do.) That is why you are here. Well, you must rise to the height of the task. You must do your utmost, you must conquer all pettiness and limitations. Above all you must say to your ego: ‘Your time is past.’ We want a race without ego, that has a divine Consciousness in place of the ego. That is what we want: the divine Consciousness that will allow the race to develop and the supramental being to be born.”6
Like every kind of birth in our universe the birth of a new era in the development of the manifestation is a dramatic event, invisibly prepared and in its consequences unforeseeable. The pain of a mother’s labour cannot be expressed in words. It is that cosmic moment when two lives are at stake and Destiny holds both in its hand. Likewise, when a new era is born “the confusion becomes all the more intense and dark at the time the light is about to dawn.”7
“The better things that are to come are preparing or growing under a veil and the worse are prominent everywhere,”8 wrote Sri Aurobindo in 1946 (i.e. ten years before the manifestation of the Supermind). In 1947 he wrote: “I myself foresaw that this worst would come, the darkness of night before the dawn; therefore I am not discouraged. I know what is preparing behind the darkness and can see and feel the first signs of its coming.”9 And in 1948: “I am afraid I can hold but cold comfort – for the present at least – to those of your correspondents who are lamenting the present state of things. Things are bad, are growing worse and may at any time grow worst or worse than worst if that is possible – and anything however paradoxical seems possible in the present perturbed world. The best thing for them [the correspondents in question] is to realise that all this was necessary because certain possibilities had to emerge and be got rid of, if a new and better world was at all to come into being; it would not have done to postpone them for a later time10 … But they must remember too that the new world whose coming we envisage is not to be made of the same texture as the old and different only in pattern, and that it must come by other means – from within and not from without; so the best way is not to be too much preoccupied with the lamentable things that are happening outside, but themselves to grow within so that they may be ready for the new world, whatever form it may take.”11
“At the present stage”, wrote Sri Aurobindo in 1947, “the progressive supramentalisation of the Overmind is the first immediate preoccupation and a second is the lightening of the heavy resistance of the Inconscient.”12 He will in the end have to descend, in 1950, into death voluntarily in order to tackle the problem at the root of things in Death’s own den. Six years later, in 1956, the supramental Consciousness established itself in the earth-atmosphere. The turning point was reached, and the historians lost their bearings to further interpret what was happening on the planet. Said Sri Aurobindo: “I have never had a strong and persistent will for anything to happen in the world – I am not speaking of personal things – which did not eventually happen even after delay, defeat or even disaster.”13
The Mother knew what was going on because she saw it, was involved in it and even caused it. That is why she spoke of “the supramental catastrophe” the world was undergoing: this “catastrophe” was the inevitable process of the most momentous change not only in the history of humanity but in the course of evolution on this Earth. Things were no longer as they had been, she said in the last years of her embodiment. “This really is a new world.” “There is something like a golden Force, without material consistence and yet apparently enormously heavy, that is pressing down upon Matter in order to compel it to turn towards the Divine inwardly – not an outward escape (gesture upward) – to turn towards the Divine inwardly. Because of this the apparent result is as if catastrophes were inevitable. But along with this perception of inevitable catastrophes there are solutions to the situation, events that seem to be utterly miraculous. It is as if the two extremes were becoming more extreme, as if what is good were becoming better and what is bad were becoming worse. That’s how it is – with that formidable Power pressing – upon the world.”14 The result of the supramental transformation was certain and would come about with a minimum of damage, but that minimum, according to the Mother, might still be considerable.
“[Great catastrophic upheavals after the descent of the Supermind] there need not be”, wrote Sri Aurobindo reassuring a disciple. “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.”15
“The future of the earth depends on a change of consciousness”, wrote the Mother in a message of 1964. “The only hope for the future is a change of man’s consciousness and the change is bound to come. But it is left to men to decide if they will collaborate for this change or if it will have to be enforced upon them by the power of crushing circumstances.”16 She also said: “Nothing but a radical change of consciousness can save humanity from the terrible plight into which it is plunged.” And again: “A new world, based on Truth and refusing the old slavery to falsehood, wants to take birth. In all countries there are people who know it, at least feel it. To them we call: ‘Will you collaborate?’”17
In the last quotation from Sri Aurobindo, he makes a distinction between the action of the Overmind, which is the world of the Gods, and the action of the Supermind. The Supermind, being a Consciousness of Unity and Harmony, acts in the manifestation as a whole, harmoniously and inescapably, with its divine omnipotence. This is the reason why Sri Aurobindo and the Mother worked unceasingly and one-pointedly for its descent into the earth-atmosphere and were never satisfied with partial realisation. This fundamental rationale of their whole avataric effort has been very little understood and is generally interpreted within the context of traditional spirituality, while it was something completely different. The Gods are cosmic forces, each of them representing the One; from this results that their action can only be partial – Overmind is situated on the “fault” in the universal manifestation where the One becomes the many – and that the consequences of their action are always fragmentary and often result in clashes among themselves and with their titanic adversaries. This is what the greatest part of all mythologies in the world is about.
Having explained this, Sri Aurobindo warns against another possible misunderstanding. “A mental control can only be a control, not a cure; a mental teaching, rule, standard, can only impose an artificial groove in which our action revolves mechanically or with difficulty and which imposes a curbed and limited formation on the course of our nature. A total change of consciousness, a radical change of nature is the one remedy and the sole issue.”18 As he wrote to Nirodbaran, all efforts of the mind and the overmind can yield nothing but partial results. “The absoluteness can only come with a supramental change. For below the supramental it is an action of a Force among many forces – in the supramental it becomes a law of the nature.”19 Nature is being made anew. “Evolution itself is evolving.”
The problem, however, is that the substance of Supermind is so different from the kind of substance we are made of and are used to. Beings like us can live in gross matter, on a planet consisting of gross matter, but to live in the Supermind means no less than to live in the Sun, metaphorically speaking. This explains the necessity of a period of transition and of transitional beings which the Mother called “overman”. When she went through the process of transformation in her body, she said more than once that its temperature became so hot that she thought it would burst, and she thanked “the Lord” for the care with which he dosed the progress of the transformation, adapting it to her body’s capacities. The supramental substance “is not the substance we know at present”, she said, and if the Supermind in its full power appeared suddenly on the earth “everybody would disappear.”20 – “Sri Aurobindo has said … that if the divine Consciousness, the divine Power, the divine Love, the Truth, manifested too rapidly upon the earth, the earth would be dissolved! She would not be able to stand it!”21
The Family of the Aspiration
“You are on the earth at this moment because you have chosen so in the past”, said the Mother to her youthful audience at the Ashram Playground. “If you go deep enough where all outer things are as silent as can be, you will find within that flame of which I often speak, and in that flame you will see your destiny. You will see a centuries-old aspiration that has concentrated little by little to lead you through countless births to the great day of the realisation – a preparation which has been made in the course of thousands of years and will now reach its culmination.”22
“Some psychic beings have come here [in the Ashram] 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,”23 wrote Sri Aurobindo. “Some have come with her to share in the work, others she had called, others have come seeking for the light.”24 They were “the souls destined to the way of the integral yoga,” “the rare souls that were ripe,” “the pioneer few.”
The Mother’s first question when she met Aurobindo Ghose for the first time, in 1914, had been: “Should you do your yoga, attain the goal, and then afterwards take up the work with others, or should you immediately let all those who have the same aspiration gather around you and go forward all together towards the goal? Because of my earlier work and all that I had tried out”, said the Mother many years later, “I came to Sri Aurobindo with this question very precisely formulated. For the two possibilities were there: either to practise an intensive individual sadhana by withdrawing from the world, that is, by no longer having any contact with others, or to let the group be formed naturally and spontaneously, not preventing it from being formed, allowing it to form by itself, and starting all together on the path. Well, the decision was not at all a mental choice, it came spontaneously. The circumstances were such that no choice was required. I mean, quite naturally, spontaneously, the group was formed in such a way that it became an imperious necessity. And so, once you have started like that, it is settled, you have to go on like that to the end.”25
“How come that we have met?” an English lady once asked the Mother. The Mother answered: “We have all been together in former lives, otherwise we would not have been able to meet in this life. All of us belong to the same family, and we have worked together through the centuries for the victory of the Divine and His manifestation upon the earth.”26 – “If you have in you the sincere aspiration to find those who, like you, are in search of something, you will always be put in a position to meet them in one way or another, in totally unexpected circumstances.”27 – “It is ages of ardent aspiration that have brought us here to do the Divine’s Work.”28
“When people, who are born dispersed over the world at great distances from one another, are driven by circumstances or by an inner impulsion to come together here, it is almost always because they have met in some previous life (not all in the same life), and because their psychic being felt that they belong to the same family. So they have taken an inner vow to continue to act together and to collaborate. This is why, even though they are born far from one another, there is ‘something’ that compels them to come and get together. [This ‘something’] is the psychic being, the psychic consciousness behind. And it is only to the extent that the psychic consciousness is strong enough to arrange, to organise the external circumstances or the life, that it is strong enough, that is, not to be counteracted by outside forces, by the external events of life, that one can meet.”
“This is profoundly true in reality [i.e. in the material world]: There are large ‘families of beings’ who work for the same cause, who have gathered in more or less large numbers and who come [down upon earth] in groups, as it were. It is as if at certain times there were awakenings in the psychic world, as if lots of sleeping children were being woken up: ‘It’s time! Quick, quick, you have to go down [to the earth]!’ and they hurry down. And sometimes they do not touch down at the same place, they are dispersed. But there is something within that causes an uneasiness, that pushes them on. For some reason they feel attracted [to a certain place] and that brings them together.”29
“That is the true family: the family of the aspiration, the family of the spiritual tendency”, said the Mother.30 And to the people who had confided their lives to her she said: “It is ages of ardent aspiration that have brought us here to do the Divine’s Work.”31 She called them les bien-né: “the well-born”, or “the few”, “the predestined”, “the pioneers”, “the avant-garde”, “those who have in them a spiritual destiny and are born to realise the Divine”. “To follow the path of spiritual experience”, she said, “one must have within oneself a ‘spiritual being,’32 one must be ‘twice born’, as it is said. For if one does not have a spiritual being within which is at least at the point of becoming self-aware, one may try to imitate these [spiritual] experiences, but it will only be a crude imitation or hypocrisy, it will not be real.”33 It is of this “family of the aspiration” whom Sri Aurobindo said: “Throughout the course of history, a small minority has been carrying the torch to save humanity in spite of itself.”34
The following question was put to Sri Aurobindo: “In her book ‘Conversations’ [^1929] the Mother says: ‘We have all met in previous lives … and have worked through the ages for the victory of the Divine.’ Is it true of all people who come and stay here [i.e. in the Ashram]? What about so many who came and went away?” Sri Aurobindo answered: “Those who went away are also of these and still are of that circle. Temporary checks do not make any difference to the essential truth of the soul’s seeking.”35
“What Sri Aurobindo promised and what naturally interests us, we who are here now”, said the Mother in October 1956, “is that the time has come when some beings among the élite36 of humanity, who fulfil the conditions necessary for spiritualization, will be able to transform their bodies with the help of the supramental Force, Consciousness and Light, so as no longer to be animal-men but overmen.37 Sri Aurobindo has made this promise, and he based it on the knowledge he had that the supramental Force was on the point of manifesting on the earth. In fact, it had descended into him long ago; he knew it, and he knew what its effects were. And now that it has manifested universally, generally, I may say [on 29 February 1956], the certitude of the possibility of transformation is of course still greater. There is no longer any doubt that those who will fulfil or who now fulfil the conditions are on the way towards this transformation.”38 Reading the above quotations from the Mother, does one have to conclude that “the family of the aspiration”, the souls who have descended to undertake the great but demanding job of the transformation, were or are to be found exclusively at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, in Pondicherry, South India? In August 1957, one year after the descent of the Supermind, the Mother said the following: “It is only quite recently that the need for a collective reality began to appear, which remains not necessarily limited to the Ashram but embraces all who have declared themselves – I don’t mean materially but in their consciousness – to be disciples of Sri Aurobindo, and who have tried to live his teaching. Among all of them, and more pronouncedly since the manifestation of the supramental Consciousness and Force, there has awakened the necessity for a true communal life, which would not be based only on purely material circumstances, but which would represent a deeper truth and be the beginning of what Sri Aurobindo calls a supramental or gnostic community.
“He has of course said that, to this end, the individuals constituting this collectivity should themselves have the supramental consciousness. But even without attaining an individual perfection – even while still being very far from it – there was at the same time an inner effort to create this ‘collective individuality’, so to speak. The need for a real union, a deeper bond has been felt and the effort has been directed towards that realisation … The effort which you will be able to make individually, instead of being only an individual progress, will spread, it will have very important collective results.”39
And the Mother said in the same month: “[The global condition] is not very bright. But for us one possibility remains. Even if on the outside things deteriorate completely and a catastrophe cannot be avoided, there remains for us, I mean for those to whom the supramental life is not a vain dream, those who have faith in its reality and the aspiration to realise it – I don’t necessarily mean those who are gathered here in Pondicherry, in the Ashram, but those who have between them the link which the knowledge Sri Aurobindo has given them and the will to live according to this knowledge – there remains for them the possibility to intensify their aspiration, their will, their effort, to marshal their energies and shorten the time for the realisation.”40
These words bring to mind a book that caused quite a furore in the 1980s, namely Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy. The author had no idea of the Supermind, but she had a finely tuned sense of the times. Her central thesis is that people everywhere are looking towards a “shuddering” change and feel united in this expectation. “The social activism of the 1960s and the ‘consciousness revolution’ of the early 1970s seemed to be moving towards a historic synthesis: social transformation resulting from personal transformation – change from the inside out.” (p. 18) – “The great shuddering, irrevocable shift overtaking us is not a new political, religious, or philosophical system. It is a new mind – the ascendance of a startling worldview that gathers into its framework breakthrough science and insights from earliest recorded thought.” (p. 23) – “A revolution that is just getting under way, like a scientific revolution, is initially dismissed as crazy or unlikely. While it is clearly in progress, it seems alarming and threatening. In retrospect, when power has changed hands, it appears to have been foreordained.” (p. 40) – “What the world lives by at the moment just will not do. Nor will it; nor do very many people suppose any longer that it will. Countries like ours are full of people who have all the material comforts they desire, yet lead lives of quiet (and at times noisy) desperation, understanding nothing but the fact that there is a hole inside them and that however much food and drink they pour into it, however many motorcars and television sets they stuff it with, however many well-balanced children and loyal friends they parade around the edges of it … it aches.” (p. 42) The Mother deemed the feeling of that “hole” inside, ce besoin, the need for the experience of fullness and integrality, for the unexplainable “something” worth living for, the starting point of the yogic effort leading to the transformation. – “Given what we are learning about the nature of profound change, transformation of the human species seems less and less improbable.” (p. 172).
The mature souls, incarnated on earth to help bring about the supramental transformation, are not numerous. On 24 November 1965, a darshan day, Sri Aurobindo had been present from morning till night, and he had shown the Mother the state of humanity and its future evolution (which will be described in the next chapter). “… And then there were the few”, said the Mother, “the rare individuals who were ready for the necessary effort to prepare the transformation and to draw the new forces, to try to make Matter adapt, to seek the means of expression, etc. These are ready for the yoga of Sri Aurobindo. They are very few in number. There are even those who have the sense of sacrifice and are ready for a hard, difficult life if it would lead or contribute to the future transformation. But they should not, they should not in any way try to influence the others and make them share in their own effort; it would be altogether wrong – not only wrong, but extremely inept, for it would change the universal rhythm and movement, or at least the terrestrial movement, and instead of helping, it would create conflicts and end in chaos …”
“It was like the vision of a great universal Rhythm in which each thing takes its place and everything is all right. And the effort for transformation, reduced to a small number, becomes a thing much more precious and much more powerful for the realisation. It is as though a choice has been made for those who will be the pioneers of the new creation. And all those ideas of ‘spreading’, of ‘preparing’ or ‘churning Matter’ are childishness. They are human restlessness. The vision was of a beauty so majestic and so calm, so smiling, oh! It was full, truly full of the divine Love. And not a divine Love that ‘pardons’, it is not like that at all: each thing in its place, realising its inner rhythm as perfectly as possible.”41
The more the Mother’s body became supramentalised, the more its realisations spread in the body of humanity. For a supramentalised cell is no longer an individual in the separate, egoistic sense – the supramental Consciousness and ego do not agree – it is divinely omnipresent, as the supramental body will be omnipresent. Therefore the Mother sometimes quipped that coming into contact with her was contagious. “The power of spiritual contagion”, she said, was “the only efficacious one” to communicate one’s spiritual realisation. “The only thing that is truly effective is the possibility of transferring to others the state of consciousness in which one lives oneself. But one cannot improvise this power; one cannot imitate it; one cannot do as if one has it … If one sincerely wants to help the others and the world, the best thing one can do is to be oneself what one wants others to be, not only as an example, but because one becomes a centre of radiating power which, by the very fact that it exists, compels the rest of the world to transform itself.”42
She felt more and more that there were responses everywhere in the world. Beaucoup de gens, many people, had extraordinary experiences, caused by the new Force, without knowing it. What happened in her body, the Mother said, had repercussion in all bodies that were receptive, wherever. “I know that there are people everywhere on earth” taken up into the movement of transformation. Ferguson’s Aquarian Conspiracy is but seldom referred to any more, but it was a much truer premonition than she herself may have thought when writing it two decades ago.
We end this section about “the family of the aspiration” with two notes in the margin. The first one is that the Mother stressed countless times the necessity of heroism, courage and the warrior spirit for the ones who were fighting the battle in the spiritual vanguard of the new age. “C’est le moment d’être héroïque: it’s the time to be heroic”, she said. And Sri Aurobindo had written: “Without heroism man cannot grow into the Godhead.”43 In this era of pacifism, after the protests against the war in Vietnam and like-minded movements, an exhortation to braveness is often looked at askance, but this betrays an ignorance of what spiritual transformation actually means. Most people come to the yoga for quietude and peace, for release from the stressful burden that living in an earthly body means. Their intention is justified and praiseworthy, and the established spiritual paths are meant to provide just that. The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, though, seeks to take evolution a step ahead, which means to transform the present condition of the planet and of humanity. But humanity and the planet are dominated by forces hostile to the Divine, opposed to any kind of transformation, and they will never let go of their supremacy if they are not compelled to. The change in the existing world order depends on the fiat of the Divine, implemented through his embodiment as an Avatar, and worked out through the spreading of the new powers established by the Avatar in Matter. The spreading of these powers is the work of the “ripe souls” that have incarnated in order to accomplish this very job.
Any spiritual effort is as much as possible thwarted by the hostile forces. These beings exist on all lower levels of existence, as well on what is for us “inside” as on what we experience as “outside”. In fact, the ignorant human being is to them what the mouse is to the cat, for everything that to us is occult is their domain. Western man hardly believes in the devil any more, and evil has become a metaphor. Disbelief in the devil is understandable because, as is the case with all things occult, Christianity had presented him in a too ridiculous form. The East has a much more thorough occult knowledge of “the devil”, of the anti-divine beings in their various shapes and levels of existence, including the Asuras, the great mental beings who are a challenge to any godlike powers, the rakshasas, who are comparable to the titans in Greek mythology, and the pishachas, the small beings on the lowest vital levels who have pleasure in making the lives of the humans and of each other as chaotic as possible.
“Imagine not the way is easy”, wrote Sri Aurobindo from experience, “the way is long, arduous, dangerous, difficult. At every step is an ambush, at every turn a pitfall. A thousand seen or unseen enemies will start up against thee, terrible in subtlety against thy ignorance, formidable in power against thy weakness. And when with pain thou hast destroyed them, other thousands will surge up to take their place. Hell will vomit its hordes to oppose thee with its pitiless tests and its cold luminous denials. Thou shalt find thyself alone in thy anguish, the demons furious in thy path, the Gods unwilling above thee. Ancient and powerful, cruel, unvanquished and close and innumerable are the dark and dreadful Powers that profit by the reign of Night and Ignorance and would have no change and are hostile. Aloof, slow to arrive, far-off and few and brief in visits are the Bright Ones who are willing or permitted to succour. Each step forward is a battle.”44 “None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell,”45 he wrote in Savitri.
There is no visible foe, but the unseen
Is round us, forces intangible besiege,
Touches from alien realms, thoughts not our own
Overtake us and compel the erring heart;
Our lives are caught in an ambiguous net.
An adversary Force was born of old:
Invader of the life of mortal man,
It hides from him the straight immortal path.46
Our second marginal note is about the children. From 1967 onwards the Mother said that many of the newborn children were special, particularly the children of parents in some way or other related to the ongoing evolutionary transformation. “Since a few months the children born, amongst our people mainly, are of a very special kind.”47 And four years later she said: “I really think that it is among the children that there are those able to begin the new race.”48 It is now often observed that the new generation of children is amazingly intelligent,49 that they seem to be fully aware of themselves and have the gift of looking straight through you. It is for this sort of children that the Mother founded her school with its integral education, based on the theory and practice of the Integral Yoga. She warned that children born with a special mission, mature souls all of them, might be difficult to understand and educate, and that much patience was needed to accompany them during the first years of their life. Generally unrecognised, they are among the overmen and overwomen of the present. They are the hope of the future, not vaguely or sentimentally as is so often expressed in solemn speeches on ceremonious occasions, but concretely, effectively.
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.50
The Four Aids of the Overman
“Imagine not the way is easy …” The reader may remember Sri Aurobindo’s poem A God’s Labour, in which he writes about his avataric ordeals; a testimony of what the Mother went through can be found in some of her conversations in Mother’s Agenda. The world does not yet realise the scope and the difficulty of their avataric sadhana, nor scarcely do their followers. They repeatedly said that their labour would make the path easier or possible for those following them, but “easier” does not mean “easy”.
The difficulty of the path makes us understand why those who want to follow it have to be called to it. It is not an aim one can set oneself by a simple mental decision; the dedication to such an aim can only be the consequence of an increasing aspiration throughout many lives, a selfless dedication to share the divine Work in the manifestation. This also explains why “surrender” is “the Alpha and the Omega” of the Integral Yoga: the souls who have given themselves to it cannot expect the realisation of the goal in this lifetime, because the goal of the Integral Yoga is the supramental transformation, which can only be reached after centuries. The second reason is that nobody can practice the Integral Yoga for selfish aims. A necessary condition of the supramental transformation is the acquisition of the cosmic consciousness, something that is impossible in the ego-state. Besides, the acquisition of the supramental consciousness, even in a single cell of a human body, is a cosmic event with repercussions throughout the cosmos. “We want a race without ego …”
All this would be unattainable without the four supramental aids, totally new in the history of spirituality.
“But there is one essential condition: the reign of the ego must have come to an end. The ego is now the obstacle. The ego must be replaced by the divine Consciousness. Sri Aurobindo called it ‘Supermind’. We too can call it ‘Supermind’ so that there is no misunderstanding. Because when one speaks of ‘the Divine’, people immediately think of a ‘God’, and that spoils everything. It is not that. No, it is not that: it is the descent of the supramental world, which is not merely something of the imagination. It is an absolutely material Power, but it has no need of material things. A world that wants to incarnate within the world.”51
In 1954 the Mother had already mentioned a change in the composition of gross Matter, perceptible in the presence of particles which had all the colours of the rainbow. In the course of the transformation of her body she will mention this changed Matter more and more often. The body of the supramental being cannot consist of the same substance as ours. Gross Matter is the direct outcome of the Inconscient; therefore a supramentally conscious body can only incarnate in a transformed, supramentalised substance. It was this supramentalisation of Matter that she perceived.
“This manner of being is still very undefinable. In this research, though, there is a constant perception, translated by a vision, of a multicoloured light comprising all the colours – all the colours not in layers but as though (gesture of dotting) as if connected by dots of every colour. It is now two years – perhaps a little more, I don’t remember any more – since I met the Tantrics. I was in relation with them and I started seeing this light, and I thought that it was the ‘tantric light’, the tantric way of seeing the material world. But now I see it constantly, in relation with everything, and it seems to be what one might call a perception of ‘true Matter’. All possible colours are connected without being intermingled (same gesture of dotting), and connected by luminous dots. Everything is made of that, as it were. And this seems to be the true manner of being. I am not yet sure, but in any case it is a much more conscious manner of being.”
And the Mother painstakingly tried to describe her perception of this new substance: “And I see it all the time: with eyes open, with eyes closed – all the time. And one has a strange – for the body, that is – a strange perception at once of subtleness, of penetrability if one may say so, of suppleness of the form and positively not of an eradication but a considerable diminution in the rigidity of the forms. Eradication of rigidity, not eradication of the forms: a suppleness in the forms. And when the body for the first time felt this in one part or another, it had the impression – it felt somewhat confused – the impression that something was escaping [from its control]: But if one keeps very quiet and waits quietly, that is simply replaced by a sort of plasticity, of fluidity, which for the cells seems a new way of being.”52
“My impression was that of an immense personality – immense!” the Mother said when trying to describe this consciousness for the first time. “By this I mean that the earth was small for it, small like this (gesture as if holding a little ball in the palm of her hand), like a ball. An immense personality, very, very benevolent, that came for (the Mother seems to lift the little ball gently from the palm of her hand). It gave the impression of a personal divinity who comes to help. And so strong, so strong! and at the same time so gentle, so all-embracing.”54
“It is a guide. It is a consciousness, after all … Strange, it is as if I were given the task of putting it into contact with all those who come near me,”55 the Mother said. Afterwards she often mentioned the practical guidance of this Overman Consciousness, glad that she had found some concrete assistance on her perilous adventure in “the virgin forest”, where as yet there was no beaten path. “Many of the activities [of her avataric yoga] I have left to this Consciousness”, she said in 1970. “I let this Consciousness work actively because I found that it really knows.”56
It is this Consciousness of the Overman, an activated aspect of the Supramental Consciousness adapted to the present circumstances, which is at work now. It is changing the world through its formation and guidance of beings who are open to it, the overmen and overwomen. The turmoil of the present world in which we live is caused by this Consciousness – to which the ongoing change is not an unpredictable vortex, but a process guided in the smallest details. Before the descent of the Supermind the transformation of the lower into the higher hemisphere was a certainty, for the Avatar never comes without accomplishing his mission, but the way in which it would come about could not be foreseen, as Sri Aurobindo said so often. At the very moment of the manifestation of the Supermind the process of the supramental transformation of our world was initiated, but it could still take “thousands of years”. The sadhana of the Mother induced the Consciousness of the Overman, which manifested on 1 January 1969 and effected the unseen presence among humanity of the first overmen and overwomen. Through them is worked out the guidance of the Overman Consciousness, which is sometimes detectable in the world events.
In 1953 the Mother wrote in a letter: “[Sri Aurobindo] has not left me, not for a moment – for He is still with me, day and night, thinking through my brain, writing through my pen, speaking through my mouth and acting through my organising power.”58 She would often report his presence with her – “he is here all the time” – or in the Ashram (especially on darshan days), and his advice or decisions, his interventions in world situations. “I see now”, she said in 1970, “I see how his departure and his work so vast, yes, and so constant in the subtle physical, how much, how much it has helped! How much it has helped to prepare things, to change the physical structure.”59 And two years later: “He himself has more action, more power for action, now than when he was in his body. Besides, it is for this reason that he left, because it was necessary to do so. It is very concrete, you see, his action has become very concrete. Evidently it is something that is not mental at all, it is from another region. But it is not ethereal nor … It is concrete. One could almost say that it is material.”60
One of the many statements and messages the Mother gave after Sri Aurobindo’s passing was the following: “In the eternity of becoming, each Avatar is only the announcer, the forerunner of a more perfect realisation. And yet men have always the tendency to deify the Avatar of the past in opposition to the Avatar of the future. Now again Sri Aurobindo has come announcing to the world the realisation of tomorrow; and again his message meets with the same opposition as of all those who preceded him. But tomorrow will prove the truth of what he revealed and his work will be done.”
On 24 March 1972, the Mother reported: “For the first time, early in the morning, I saw myself, my body. I do not know whether it is the supramental body or – how to say it? – a transitional body. But I had a body completely new in the sense that it was sexless: it was neither a woman nor was it a man. It was very white, but this is because my skin is white, I think, I don’t know. It was very slim. It was beautiful, really a harmonious form. So, this was the first time. I did not know at all. I had no idea how it would be like or whatever, and I saw: I was like that, I had become like that.”
The next day she returned to the subject: “I was like that. It was myself. I did not see myself in a mirror: I saw myself like the (Mother bends her head down) … I did not look to see how it was because everything happened quite naturally, so I cannot give a detailed description. Simply, it was neither the body of a woman nor the body of a man, that much is clear. And the outline [in English in the text], the silhouette, was almost the same, as of a very, very young person. There was as it were the remembrance of the human forms: there was a shoulder and a waist. The remembrance of a form, as it were … I saw it in the way one sees oneself. And there was a kind of veil that I had put on, like this, to cover myself. It was not surprising to me: it was a natural way of being. It must be like that in the subtle physical.”61
Without going into details, let us consider the following. A transitional body, generated as all bodies are now, is not sexless. As the body the Mother saw was sexless, it must have been a supramental body, for this is how she said the supramental body would be. At the time she saw her new body, “as of a very, very young person”, she was ninety-four. What she called “the subtle physical” in her conversations, she sometimes also called “the true physical” and used this term to locate “Sri Aurobindo’s abode” in the supramental. Putting these elements together – and there are more – there is little doubt that the Mother had built a supramental body that would be the prototype or archetype of the supramental bodies to come. With the descent of the Supermind, the establishment of the Overman Consciousness and the realisation of the prototype of the supramental body all the foundations were laid for the development of the New World.
This also means that, like Sri Aurobindo, the Mother lives in an immortal body. Hers is even more fully supramental than Sri Aurobindo’s because not only the mental and vital sheaths of her adhara were supramentalised, but also part of the material sheath. (This is what most of her conversations from 1958 till 1973, recorded in the Agenda, were about.) Consequently she, like him, is omnipresent in a supramental form, doubtlessly always there to ensure the progress of the Work and help the souls who are dedicating their present incarnation to it.
The Avataric Interaction with History
There already have been for many years extraordinary, fantastic consequences [of the avataric Yoga] in the world. An action in the world? It is constant. But to see it, one must have some knowledge. Otherwise one believes them to be quite normal and ordinary events, because one doesn’t even know how they happen.62
– the Mother
We are living in a new world, a world that does not know how to define itself by what it is, but only by what it has just-now ceased to be.63
– Walter Truett Anderson
The exceptional individual that is the Vibhuti comes to accomplish a specific action in the evolution of mankind; the divine individual that is the Avatar comes to accomplish something essential for the evolution of mankind. Parasurama stood at the origin of homo habilis or represents him symbolically; Rama incarnated the rational mind and thus generated the possibility of homo sapiens. The influence of the mission of Krishna and the Buddha remained limited to Asia for centuries, till it eventually spread over the whole globe. The avataric, Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was in principle intended for the transformation of humanity, and must therefore have had global consequences in their lifetime and afterwards.
India has become free; Asia has woken up; in Europe the European Union has been founded; the world is becoming one; Indian spirituality is penetrating the West; the supramental transformation of the world is under way. Each of these momentous changes in history was predicted by Sri Aurobindo between 1914 and 1921, at a moment in history when they not only seemed implausible but outright impossible. And Sri Aurobindo did not “predict” or “foresee” these historical milestones in the way seers or clairvoyants do: he formulated their rationale and described their probable way of coming about in great detail. His two books dealing with these topics are The Human Cycle and The Ideal of Human Unity, but his concern with them is present everywhere in his writings, for the fulfilment of these historic evolutions was (and is) required for the accomplishment of the supramental transformation.64
We need not go further into the subject of India’s freedom here. Sri Aurobindo was the first to formulate the need of India’s unconditional freedom. His concern with his motherland and its culture is evident throughout his work, specifically in writings like The Renaissance of India, The Secret of the Veda, Essays on the Gita, Writings in Bengali, articles from Bande Mataram and the Karmayogin, etc. The Mother said that India was “the country of her soul”.
About Asia, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “We have then to return to the pursuit of the ancient secret which man, as a race, has seen only obscurely and followed after lamely, has indeed understood only with his surface mind and not in its heart of meaning, – and yet in following it lies his social no less than his individual salvation, – the ideal of the Kingdom of God, the secret of the reign of the Spirit over mind and life and body. It is because they have never quite lost hold of this secret, never disowned it in impatience for a lesser victory, that the older Asiatic nations have survived so persistently and can now, as if immortal, raise their faces towards a new dawn; for they have fallen asleep, but they have not perished.”65 This was written in 1915. It may be considered a fact that Asia, whatever its problems, has woken up since then.
Sri Aurobindo deemed it imperative that in the future global development groups of countries, bound by historical and cultural interests or relations, would unite in supranational structures. That this was prescient is proven by the South-Asian SAARC and ASEAN, the American OAS, the African OAU, the ever closer ties between the countries on the Pacific Rim – and of course especially by the still expanding European Union. “Some form of European federation, however loose, is therefore essential if the idea behind these suggestions of a new order is to be made practically effective, and once commenced, such a federation must necessarily be tightened and draw more and more towards the form of a United States of Europe.”66
In a “Postscript Chapter” to his Ideal of Human Unity, Sri Aurobindo wrote in April 1950: “One of the possibilities suggested at the time [of writing The Ideal of Human Unity] was the growth of continental agglomerates, a united Europe, some kind of a combine of the peoples of the American continent under the leadership of the United States, even possibly the resurgence of Asia and its drive towards independence from the dominance of the European peoples, a drawing together for a self-defensive combination of the nations of this continent; such an eventuality of large continental combinations might even be a stage in the final formation of a world-union. This possibility has tended to take shape to a certain extent with a celerity that could not then be anticipated. In the two American continents it has actually assumed a predominating and practical form, though not in the totality. The idea of a United States of Europe has also actually taken shape and is assuming a formal existence, but is not yet able to develop into a completed and fully realised possibility because of the antagonism based on conflicting ideologies which cuts off from each other Russia and her satellites behind their iron curtain and Western Europe. This separation has gone so far that it is difficult to envisage its cessation at any foreseeable time in a predictable future.”67 At present three of Russia’s former satellites are member states of the European Union …
An important aspect of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s Work was the building up of a global unity, a world-union. According to them, the unification (in diversity) of humanity was an essential requisite for the supramental realisation. The following quotations will speak more eloquently than any comment can do.
“Mankind upon earth is one foremost self-expression of the universal Being in His cosmic self-unfolding; he expresses, under the conditions of the terrestrial world he inhabits, the mental power of the universal existence. All mankind is one in its nature, physical, vital, emotional, mental and ever has been in spite of all differences of intellectual development ranging from the poverty of the bushman and Negroid to the rich cultures of Asia and Europe, and the whole race has, as the human totality, one destiny which it seeks and increasingly approaches in the cycles of progression and retrogression it describes through the countless millenniums of its history. Nothing which any individual race or nation can triumphantly realise, no victory of their self-aggrandisement, illumination, intellectual achievement or mastery over the environment has any permanent meaning or value except in so far as it adds something or recovers something or preserves something for this human march.”68
“The collective being is a fact; all mankind may be regarded as a collective being: but this being is a soul and life, not merely a mind and a body.”69
“[Individual man] is not merely the noble, merchant, warrior, priest, scholar, artist, cultivator or artisan, not merely the religionist or the worldling or the politician. Nor can he be limited by his nationality; he is not merely the Englishman or the Frenchman, the Japanese or the Indian; if by a part of himself he belongs to the nation, by another he exceeds it and belongs to humanity. And even there is a part in him the greatest, which is not limited by humanity; he belongs by it to God and to the world of all beings and to the godheads of the future.”70
“The perfect society will be that which most entirely favours the perfection of the individual; the perfection of the individual will be incomplete if it does not help towards the perfect state of the social aggregate to which he belongs and eventually to that of the largest possible human aggregate, the whole of a united humanity.”71
“Today the ideal of human unity is more or less vaguely making its way to the front of our consciousness … The ideal, having once made its way to the front of thought, must certainly be attempted, and this ideal of human unity is likely to figure largely among the determining forces of the future; for the intellectual and material circumstances of the age have prepared and almost impose it, especially the scientific discoveries which have made our earth so small that its vastest kingdoms seem now no more than the provinces of a single country.”72
“The earth is in travail now of one common, large and flexible civilisation for the whole human race into which each modern and ancient culture shall bring its contribution and each clearly defined human aggregate shall introduce its necessary element of variation.”73
“Perhaps liberty and equality, liberty and authority, liberty and organised efficiency can never be quite satisfactorily reconciled as long as man individual and aggregate lives by egoism, so long as he cannot undergo a great spiritual and psychological change and rise beyond mere communal association to that third ideal which some vague inner sense made the revolutionary thinkers of France add to their watchwords of liberty and equality, – the greatest of all the three, though till now only an empty word on man’s lips, the ideal of fraternity or, less sentimentally and more truly expressed, an inner oneness. That no mechanism social, political, religious has ever created or can create; it must take birth in the soul and rise from hidden and divine depths within.”74
“Continent has no longer a separate life from continent; no nation can any longer isolate itself at will and live a separate existence. Science, commerce and rapid communications have produced a state of things in which the disparate masses of humanity, once living to themselves, have been drawn together by a process of subtle unification into a single mass which has already a common vital and is rapidly forming a common mental existence. A great precipitating and transforming shock was needed which should make this subtle organic unity manifest and reveal the necessity and create the will for a closer and organised union and this shock came with the Great War [i.e. the First World War]: The idea of a World-State or world-union has been born not only in the speculating forecasting mind of the thinker but in the consciousness of humanity out of the very necessity of this new common existence. The World-State must now either be brought about by a mutual understanding or by the force of circumstances and a series of new and disastrous shocks.”75
“Mankind has a habit of surviving the worst catastrophes created by its own errors or by the violent turns of Nature and it must be so if there is any meaning in its existence, if its long history and continuous survival is not the accident of a fortuitously self-organising Chance, which it must be in a purely materialistic view of the nature of the world. If man is intended to survive and carry forward the evolution of which he is at present the head and, to some extent, a half-conscious leader of its march, he must come out of his present chaotic international life and arrive at a beginning of organised united action; some kind of World-State, unitary or federal, or a confederacy or a coalition he must arrive at in the end; no smaller or looser expedient would adequately serve the purpose.”76
“An authority of this nature [then the League of Nations, now the United Nations] would have to command the psychological assent of mankind, exercise a moral force upon the nations greater than that of their own national authority and compel more readily their obedience under all normal circumstances. It would have not only to be a symbol and a centre of the unity of the race but make itself constantly serviceable to the world by assuring the effective maintenance and development of large common interests and benefits which would outweigh all separate national interests and satisfy entirely the sense of need that had brought it into existence. It must help more and more to fix the growing sense of a common humanity and a common life in which the sharp divisions which separate country from country, race from race, colour from colour, continent from continent would gradually lose their force and undergo a progressive effacement. Given these conditions, it would develop a moral authority which would enable it to pursue with less and less opposition and friction the unification of mankind.”77
Sri Aurobindo’s next prediction was about Indian spirituality spreading to the West and the other parts of the globe. That this has become a fact, and is ever-increasing, is so obvious that it does not need documentary support. The start of this contact – the fourth enrichment of the West by the Eastern spirit according to Sri Aurobindo – may be taken to be 1893, the year Vivekananda was sent to the USA by Ramakrishna Paramhansa in order to participate in the Congress of World Religions at Chicago. “No one could have imagined then that a Hindu monk would make converts in London and Chicago or that a Vedantic temple would be built in San Francisco and Anglo-Saxon Islamites erect a Musulman mosque in Liverpool”, noted Sri Aurobindo in 1912.78 Nor could anyone have imagined then that by the end of the 20th century about 300,000 French and 250,000 Dutch would be practising Buddhists. “That which is permanent in the Hindu religion, must form the basis on which the world will increasingly take its stand in dealing with spiritual experience and religious truth,”79 wrote Sri Aurobindo. And “that which is permanent in the Hindu religion” may well prove to be the synthesis he and the Mother first realised and then formulated.
It has already been stated in one of the previous chapters that there is a fundamental flaw at the basis of the whole body of modern Western thought: the distorted picture of the human being constructed by modern Western philosophy and psychology as a consequence of and a reaction against the Christian Middle Ages. If the Chain of Being – the universal hierarchy or gradations of being – was recognised at all, it was only felt as theoretical, never as real. The West took an instrument of consciousness, rational mind or Reason, as the nec plus ultra; it based itself on the immediate given, Matter, and never investigated life and the supra-rational levels and worlds from which, after all, its seminal inspirations came. The idea of the soul, which generally had remained very misty, was discarded by science, as were all matters occult and religious – but only up to a certain point. For it is touching when studying the history of Marxism, Fascism, Nazism, Russian communism and Maoism, among other national or worldwide movements, to see how desperately millions of people have been surrendering themselves to these pseudo-religions. Now, even the blessings of consumerism cannot fill up “the hole within”.
The fifth prediction and practical endeavour of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother was the supramental transformation of matter and of humanity. For this the reader may refer to my aforementioned books.
As yet thought only some high spirit’s dream
Or a vexed illusion in man’s toiling mind,
A new creation from the old shall rise,
A knowledge inarticulate find speech,
Beauty suppressed burst into paradise bloom,
Pleasure and pain dive into absolute bliss.
A tongueless oracle shall speak at last,
The Superconscient conscious grow on earth,
The Eternal’s wonder join the dance of Time.80
Impact upon History
In March 1958 the Mother said: “One thing seems obvious: humanity has reached such a state of general tension – tension in its endeavour, tension in its action, tension even in its daily life – with such an excessive hyperactivity, such a widespread trepidation, that the species as a whole seems to have come to a point where it must either break through the resistance and emerge into a new consciousness or else fall back into an abyss of obscurity and inertia.
“This tension is so total and has become so generalised that obviously something has to break. It cannot go on in this way. We may take it as a sure sign of the infusion into matter of a new principle of force, of consciousness, of power, that by its very pressure produces this acute state. Outwardly we would expect the old methods used by Nature when she wants to bring about a violent change. There is however a new characteristic, of course only visible in an élite, but even this élite is sufficiently widespread. It is not localised at one point, at one place in the world; one finds clues of it in all countries, on the whole earth: the will to find a new, progressive, higher solution, an effort to rise towards a larger, more comprehensive perfection.
“Certain ideas of a more general nature, of a wider, one could say more ‘collective’ kind, are being worked out and acting in the world. And both things go together: a possibility of a greater and more total destruction, a recklessness which increases the possibility of catastrophe beyond all limits, a catastrophe which would be far greater than ever before; and at the same time the birth or rather the manifestation of much higher and more comprehensive ideas and acts of the will which, when they are listened to, will bring a larger, more comprehensive, more complete, more perfect solution than before.
“This struggle, this conflict between the constructive forces of the ascending evolution, of a more and more perfect and divine realisation, and the ever more destructive – wildly destructive, forces of a madness beyond all control – is more and more evident, noticeable, visible, and it is a kind of race or of a struggle as to which [of the two sides] will reach its goal first. It would seem that all the adverse, antidivine forces, the forces of the vital world, have descended upon the earth, that they are using it as their fields of action,81 and that at the same time a new, higher, more powerful spiritual force has also descended on earth to bring it a new life. This renders the struggle more acute, more violent, more visible, but also, it seems, more definitive, and that is why we can hope to reach an early solution.
“There was a time, not so long ago, when the spiritual aspiration of man was turned towards a silent, inactive peace, detached from all worldly things, a flight from life, precisely in order to avoid battle, to rise above all struggle, to escape from all effort … In fact, no matter what one wants to realise, one must begin by establishing this perfect and immutable peace. It is the basis from which one must work. But unless one dreams of an exclusive, personal and egoistic liberation, one cannot stop there. There is another aspect of the divine Grace, the aspect of a progress that will be victorious of all obstacles, the aspect that will propel humanity towards a new realisation, that will open the doors of a new world, that will make it possible that not only a chosen few will benefit from the divine realisation, but that their influence, their example, their power will bring new and better conditions to the rest of mankind. This opens up roads of realisation into the future, possibilities which are already foreseen, when an entire part of humanity, the whole part that has opened itself consciously or unconsciously to the new forces, is lifted up, as it were, into a higher, more harmonious, more perfect life.”82
The impact of the lives of the Avatar of the Supermind, or rather the interaction between his/her avataric sadhana and history is a subject still to be examined in detail. A few facts are nevertheless very telling, while others are rather suggestive in this direction. That the First World War began at the moment the Arya was published and the Second World Way at the time of the publication of The Life Divine, however significant, may be taken as a coincidence – though according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother coincidences do not exist: everything hangs together in the manifestation of the All.
The impact of the avataric sadhana upon history becomes unmistakable in the 1930s, when the rise of Nazism paralleled the curve of Sri Aurobindo’s effort to bring down the Supermind. The whole process can be followed almost step by step in Nirodbaran’s Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo. Hidden behind Nazism and causing its success was the action of the Asura of Falsehood who calls himself “the Lord of the Nations”83: In 1938, when the descent of the Supermind seemed imminent, Sri Aurobindo was directly attacked and broke his thigh. That the Second World War was intended to countermand the mission of the Avatar has been stated explicitly by Sri Aurobindo as well as by the Mother.
“I affirm again to you most strongly that this is the Mother’s war”, wrote Sri Aurobindo to an Indian disciple when circumstances were critical. “You should not think of it as a fight for certain nations against others or even for India; it is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realise itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind in the immediate future. It is the forces behind the battle that have to be seen and not this or that superficial circumstance … It is a struggle for the liberty of mankind to develop, for conditions in which men have freedom and room to think and act according to the light in them and grow in the Truth, grow in the Spirit …”84
“The victory of one side (the Allies) would keep the path open for the evolutionary forces: the victory of the other side would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as a race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished. That is the whole question and all other considerations are either irrelevant or of a minor importance. The Allies at least have stood for human values, though they may often act against their own best ideals (human beings always do that); Hitler stands for diabolical values or for human values exaggerated in the wrong way until they become diabolical …”85
The struggle for the liberty of mankind was fought and won, but the end of the world war did not mean the end of the activities of the Lord of Falsehood. In June 1950, a few months before his departure, Sri Aurobindo wrote in a note to K.D. Sethna on the Korean War: “The whole affair is as plain as a pike-staff. It is the move in the Communist plan of campaign to dominate and take possession first of these northern parts [including Korea] 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 … 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 … For the moment the situation is as grave as it can be.”86
1955 was a peak year in the Cold War, as it was also the year of the Bandung Conference where recently decolonialised powers of the “Third World” stood up together against the Capitalist and Communist Blocs. About 1955 the Mother said: “It is the last hope of the adverse forces to triumph against the present Realisation. If we [i.e. the people who practise the Integral Yoga] can stand firm during these months, they won’t be able to do much afterwards, their resistance will crumble. This is what it is about: it is the essential conflict of the adverse forces, of the antidivine forces, who are trying to push back the divine Realisation as much as possible – thousands of years, they hope. And it is this conflict that has reached its paroxysm. It is their last chance. And as the beings that are behind their exterior action are totally conscious, they are fully aware that it is their last chance, and they will do everything they can. And what they can is quite a lot.”87 The Mother had earlier reminded her audience what a tremendous catastrophe and evolutionary setback is the wiping out of a civilisation. In 1955, and of course in the following decades, the superpowers had the capacity to erase the present civilisations and even the whole of humanity from the globe. That this did not happen, taking into account “what human beings always do”, is one of the mysteries of history that may only be explainable from the Aurobindonian angle. Then, in 1956, the Supermind descended into the earth-atmosphere. Its descent meant the certitude of the coming of the supramental species. A new world was born.
The Mother often mentioned the action of the new supramental Force in the world. This action became quite obvious in the 1960s, the decade of which the importance has been continually growing in the historians’ estimation, so much so that according to some of them history has become an interpreter’s problem from that time onwards.
A new spirit was spreading over the Earth calling the whole Western paradigm into question. The most colourful exponents of this new spirit were America’s “flower children”, soon imitated by “hippies” everywhere. Whatever the confusion, inevitable on the fault-line between two worlds, the sincerity of their inspiration and of their peaceful protest against values gone stale is undeniable. They represented, according to Luc Ferry, “a vision of the world characterised by a claim to ‘authenticity’ and demanding, in the name of the respect of the individual, the eradication of all dogmatisms whether of moral or religious origin.”88
In their search for authenticity, the flower children spontaneously focused on forms of thought and spiritual practice in relation to the big gap in Western philosophy, psychology and religion: the spiritual life, the soul. For this they turned towards the East, and firstly, towards India. “According to what I am being told”, said the Mother in 1964, “I mean by people who listen to the radio and read the newspapers – things that I do not do – the whole world seems to be undergoing an action which for the moment is upsetting. It seems that the number of those who are apparently mad increases considerably. In America, for example, the entire youth seems to be in the grip of a kind of curious vertigo which may be disquieting to reasonable people, but which is certainly an indication that an unusual force is at work. It means the breaking of all the habits and all the rules. It is good. For the moment it is rather strange, but it is necessary.”89
Then came “May ’68”, the culmination of that bizarre decade – just after the founding of Auroville by the Mother. May ’68 started in Paris, but it spread like wildfire among the young people of the whole world, and it is certainly legitimate to count the “Prague Spring”, the revolt in Czechoslovakia against the Russian form of communism, as an aspect of that movement. “A radical irruption of the new”, “a new period in universal history”, “a revolt of the individuals against the norms, in the sense of the affirmation of the individuality against the pretension of the norms to be universal”, write the commentators.90 “The principal representatives of the thought of ’68 have made history without knowing what history they were making.” “The actors of May were actually the inconscient agents of a process by which they were encompassed and surpassed.”
From the Aurobindonian standpoint there is little doubt that the spirit which took possession of the youth in 1968 and animated them with a quest for authenticity, was the direct outflow of the new Force present in the world, and very probably a consequence of the special Force the Mother had applied for the foundation of Auroville, the utopian “City of Dawn”, founded by her to be a field of experimentation for the creation of the new being. The charter of Auroville, formulated by the Mother, and the slogans of May’68 in Paris are worth a comparative study. The whole “elan” of May ’68 tells of a thirst for truth, for “authenticity”, and for the total fulfilment of the individual human potential. But as this was something new in the history of mankind, the minds of the leaders of the movement could not adequately grasp it and soon started revolving again into their established grooves (like Marxism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, and often pure habitual verbalism). May ’68 remains a one month’s wonder which thinkers of all disciplines keep wondering about. Its authenticity is more and more confirmed by the fact that the sense of its importance grows ever stronger.
It might be possible to comment on other historical facts from the second half of the 20th century and interpret them within the perspective sketched in these chapters, for instance the Watergate Affair and the oil crisis of 1973. We will limit ourselves, though, to that amazing year 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall together with the collapse of communism. One of the best eyewitness accounts of this extraordinary historical moment is Timothy Garton Ash’s We the People: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin and Prague. We quote some passages from this well-informed, extremely interesting and heart-warming book.
“Should we talk about this [the 1989 events in Prague] as a revolution? someone asks. For after all, in our linguistic context the word ‘revolution’ has a clear subtext of violence. A ‘peaceful revolution’ sounds like a contradiction in terms. A rather academic point, you might think. But actually a great deal of what is happening is precisely about words: about finding new, plain, true words rather than the old mendacious phrases with which people have lived for so long.” (p. 113) – “The motto of the year – and not just in Czechoslovakia – was Pravda Vitezi, the old Hussite slogan, adopted by Masaryk, ‘Truth shall prevail’, or, in the still more ancient Latin, Magna est veritas et preavalebit [the truth is great and will prevail]: As one talks in English of a ‘moment of truth’ for some undertaking, so this was a year of truth for communism. There is a real sense in which these regimes lived by the word and perished by the word.” (p. 138) “Here, for the first time, we saw that massive, sustained, yet supremely peaceful and self-disciplined manifestation of social unity, the gentle crowd against the Party-state, which was both the hallmark and the essential domestic catalyst of change in 1989.” (p. 133) – “I have found treasures: examples of great moral courage and intellectual integrity; comradeship, deep friendship, family life; time and space for serious conversation, music, literature, not disturbed by the perpetual noise of our media-driven and obsessively telecommunicative world; Christian witness in its original and purest form; more broadly, qualities of relations between men and women of very different backgrounds, and once bitterly opposed faiths – an ethos of solidarity.” (p. 154)
“The truth is that 1989 could have turned bloody at any point … In Warsaw, we watched the first pictures from Tiananmen Square while waiting for the [decisive] election results. ‘Tiananmen’ was a word that I would hear muttered many times in Central and East European capitals over the next few months. What made the difference in Europe was two sets of political leaders: the opposition elites and the Gorbachev group in Moscow. 1989 was further proof of the vital importance of individuals in history.” (p. 162)
And Timothy Garton Ash writes the following, for a critical-minded journalist, remarkable words which put the peaceful revolution of 1989 within the framework of the present chapter: “Yet when all this has been said, no one in Prague could resist the feeling that there must also be an additional, supra-rational cause at work. Hegel’s Weltgeist, said some. [Saint] Agnes of Bohemia, said others. ‘The whole world is moving from dictatorship to democracy’, said a third … How you describe the supra-rational agency is a matter of personal choice. For myself, I stick to the angels.” (p. 128)
The collapse of communism in Europe and Russia, unforeseen and unforeseeable even a month before it happened, was entirely bloodless, except for some incidents in Rumania. Non-violence was, according to Garton Ash, “the first commandment of all Central European oppositions.” It was “unlike all earlier revolutions.” In 1957 the Mother had said: “Something has happened in the world’s history which allows us to hope that a selection of humanity, a small number of beings, perhaps, is ready to be transformed into pure gold, and that they will be able to manifest strength without violence, heroism without destruction, and courage without catastrophe … At the moment we are at a decisive turning-point in terrestrial history, once again. From every side I am asked: ‘What is going to happen?’ Everywhere there is anguish, expectation, fear. ‘What is going to happen? …’ There is only one answer: ‘If only man would consent to be spiritualised.’”91
The Supermind and the Consciousness of the Overman are established. They are acting to transform the world. So are Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who will remain present throughout the third and fourth phases of their avataric Work: the period after their apparent departure and the period of the tangible accomplishment of their mission. The effects of these four divine Forces is incomprehensible, unfathomable for the human mind – as are the events these Forces are producing towards a realisation surpassing everything humans are able to imagine. All these are not the imaginings of the present writer: it is a summary of what the Mother said in the last years of her presence on the Earth, when the foundations of a new world had been laid and the results were, from then onwards, inevitable.
“The miracles that are happening are not what one might call ‘literary’ miracles, in the sense that they do not happen as in the stories. They are visible only to a very deep vision of things – very deep, very comprehensive, very broad. You must already be capable of following the methods and ways of the Grace in order to recognise its action. You must already be capable of not being blinded by appearances in order to see a deeper truth of things.”92
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