Edited versions of 11 talks given by Georges Van Vrekhem in Auroville. Exploration of timeless questions in the light of Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary concepts
What is the meaning of our existence in the cosmic scheme? Is there a divine purpose in life or is it merely the mechanical playing-out of competing “greedy genes”? Exploration of timeless questions in the light of Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary concepts
1. Kurukshetra: The Field of the Kurus
The Bhagavad Gita, a part of the ancient Indian epos Mahabharata, is one of the great creations of the human spirit, if not the greatest. Indeed, when compared with the most brilliant passages of the Gilgamesh epic, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the works of the Greek tragedians, Dante’s Divina Commedia or the best of Shakespeare, the Gita soars above them all because of its philosophical and spiritual depth, its representative significance for the human condition, and the tragic though glorious setting of its action.
Arjuna, one of the five Pandavas, is the foremost kshatriya or knight of his time. His charioteer is his friend and mentor Krishna, king of the Vrishnis and in fact the avatar Sri Krishna. In the internecine quarrel within the Kuru clan, to which the Pandavas as well as the Kauravas belong, most kingdoms of the subcontinent have chosen sides and the day of the great confrontation, the battle in Kurukshetra, the field of the Kurus, has dawned. Of this great slaughter Arjuna is to be the chief instrument. Among the principal enemies are close relatives, former friends and even his former gurus. Many of them he will have to kill. Arjuna “finds suddenly that he has been led to become the protagonist of a terrific and unparalleled slaughter, a monstrous civil war involving all the cultured Aryan nations which must lead to the complete destruction of the flower of their manhood and threatens their ordered civilization with chaos and collapse.” 1
Overwhelmed by the tragic purport of the moment, Arjuna asks Sri Krishna to drive his chariot into the space between the two battle-ready armies, “for he wishes to look upon all these kings of men who have come here to champion against him the cause of unrighteousness and establish as a rule of life the disregard of law, justice and truth which they would replace by the rule of a selfish and arrogant egoism.” 2 Being well aware of the importance and the righteousness of his cause, he is yet suddenly overwhelmed by dejection. “O Krishna, I behold these kinsmen and friends arrayed in hostile armies, and my limbs sink beneath me and my face grows dry, and there are shudderings in my body, and my hair stands on end. Gandiva [his bow] falls from my hand and my very skin is on fire. Yea, I cannot stand and my brain whirls …” (Gita I, 28-32) Arjuna “thus lapsed into unheroic weakness,” a weakness which might cause him to fail in his dharma, his inherent duty as a warrior. And this is where Sri Krishna at first rebukes him, and then, making him see the essential, divine justification of it all, instructs him in the yoga. Arjuna receives his initiation on the battlefield.
That the Mahabharata, the great war of the Bharatas, has been a historic event is not in doubt, but the date of the war is still under discussion. In the introduction to his Search for the Historical Krishna, Navaratna S. Rajaram writes: “It is beginning to be seen that even the chronology of ancient India based on the so-called Kali Date (3102 BC) for the Mahabharata period is not lacking in scientific support, falling as it does at the beginning of what we now call the Harappan Civilization. The Kali Age – especially its harbinger, the Mahabharata War – may be seen as marking the end of the spiritual age of the Vedas to be replaced by the materialistic age in which we live. Its origins go back some 5 000 years. The Mahabharata War stands at the threshold of this transition.”
The historic significance of this war was therefore considerable. No less is its significance in the spiritual progress of humanity, as it constitutes the background of the avataric Work of Sri Krishna. And the lasting significance of Sri Krishna’s teaching to the present day – witness the role it played in Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga and his marvellous Essays on the Gita – is that it remains an inexhaustible guide for spiritual practice, especially useful on the daily “battlefield” of us, present-day humans.
2. Dharmakshetra: The Field of Dharma
The Gita, together with the Upanishads, was the text which Sri Aurobindo constantly studied and worked out in the practice of his Yoga during the year of his imprisonment in Alipore Jail (starting in May 1908). His realizations resulted in a completely new understanding of the rationale and destiny of the world and humanity. Considering the Vedantic premise that “All is That,” he drew the ineluctable conclusion that the Earth and life on it also were That, that their essence and their meaning must be spiritual, and that therefore the aim of life and yoga could not be an egoistic escape into a Hereafter or a Nirvana, but that the aim of earthly existence had to be the evolutionary recovery of the Divine.
As the Mother once said, Sri Aurobindo’s avataric action was “an immense spiritual revolution rehabilitating Matter and the creation.” Sri Aurobindo himself wrote in a letter: “I am concerned with the earth, not with worlds beyond for their own sake; it is a terrestrial realization that I seek and not a flight to distant summits. All other yogas regard this life as an illusion or a passing phase; the supramental yoga alone regards it as a thing created by the Divine for a progressive manifestation and takes the fulfilment of the life and the body for its object.” 3
Although the evolutionary and supramental vision of Sri Aurobindo is well known, his radical attitude towards Reality, including material reality, is sometimes forgotten or diluted in ways more in line with traditional views. The following passages from Essays on the Gita may remind us of the true contents of his teaching.
“From a clash of material or other forces everything in this world, if not the world itself, seems to be born; by a struggle of forces, tendencies, principles, beings it seems to proceed, ever creating new things, ever destroying the old, marching one knows not very well whither. However that may be, this is certain that there is not only no construction here without destruction, no harmony except by a poise of contending forces won out of many actual and potential discords, but also no continued existence of life except by a constant self-feeding and devouring of other life. The command seems to have gone out from the beginning, ‘Thou shalt not conquer except by battle with thy fellows and thy surroundings; thou shalt not even live except by battle and struggle and by absorbing into thyself other life. The first law of this world that I have made is creation and preservation by destruction.’
“Ancient thought accepted this starting-point so far as it could see it by scrutiny of the universe. The old Upanishads saw it very clearly and phrased it with an uncompromising thoroughness which will have nothing to do with any honeyed glosses or optimistic scuttlings of the truth. Hunger that is Death, they said, is the creator and master of this world, and they figured vital existence in the image of the Horse of the sacrifice. Matter they described by a name which means ordinarily food and they said, we call it food because it is devoured and devours creatures. The eater eating is eaten, this is the formula of the material world.” 4
“War, said Heraclitus, is the father of all things, war is the king of all; and the saying, like most of the apophthegms of the Greek thinker, suggests a profound truth. From a clash of material or other forces everything in this world, if not the world itself, seems to be born; by a struggle of forces, tendencies, principles, beings it seems to proceed, ever creating new things, ever destroying the old …” 5 Words like these are rarely found in books on spirituality and yoga. Still the truth is that the world can only be changed by confronting it without excluding any of its problems, not by sidestepping them or trying to escape from them in what is fundamentally an act of egoism.
“It is only a few religions which have had the courage to say without any reserve, like the Indian, that this enigmatic World-Power is one Deity, one Trinity, to lift up the image of the Force that acts in the world in the figure not only of the beneficent Durga, but of the terrible Kali in her blood-stained dance of destruction and to say, ‘This too is the Mother; this also know to be God; this too, if thou hast the strength, adore.’” 6 Therefore: “We must acknowledge Kurukshetra; we must submit to the law of life by Death before we can find our way to the life immortal; we must open our eyes, with a less appalled gaze than Arjuna’s, to the vision of our Lord of Time and Death and cease to deny, hate or recoil from the universal Destroyer.” 7
Which brings us to what Arjuna was given to see on the battlefield, between two armies lined up to attack each other.
3. What Arjuna Saw
After having been told by Sri Krishna that his dejection is unworthy of his dharma as a fighter, Arjuna, “the representative man of a great world-struggle and divinely guided movement of men and nations,” is initiated in yoga on the battlefield. Now he learns “what is the sense of the birth and passing away of existences. He knows that the imperishable greatness of the divine conscious Soul is the secret of all these appearances.” 8
As a confirmation of the revelation he has received from the Avatar, the Master of the Yoga himself, “he would see too the very form and body of this Godhead,” of the Absolute Existence about whom he has been told and who has done the telling.
“Thou shalt see, replies the Avatar, my hundreds and thousands of divine forms, various in kind, various in shape and hue … Thou shalt see wonders that none has beheld. Thou shalt see today the whole world related and unified in my body and whatever else thou willest to behold.” Yet what Arjuna has to see, the human eye cannot grasp. “But there is a divine eye, an inmost seeing, by which the supreme Godhead in his Yoga can be beheld, and that eye I now give to thee,” says Sri Krishna.9
The glory of the Supreme is disclosed to the warrior. “The supreme Form is then made visible. It is that of the infinite Godhead whose faces are everywhere and in whom are all the wonders of existence, who multiplies all the many marvellous revelations of his being, a world-wide Divinity seeing with innumerable eyes, speaking through innumerable mouths, armed for battle with numberless divine uplifted weapons, glorious with divine ornaments of beauty, robed in heavenly raiment of deity, lovely with garlands of divine flowers, fragrant with divine perfumes. Such is the light of this body of God as if a thousand suns had risen at once in heaven. The whole world multitudinously divided and yet unified is visible in the body of the God of Gods.” Arjuna, in ecstasy, cries out: “Thou art the supreme Immutable whom we have to know, thou art the high foundation and abode of the universe, thou art the imperishable guardian of the eternal laws, thou art the sempiternal soul of existence!”
However, in the absoluteness of the God of Gods there is also the opposite side, the terrible dark side completing the glorious bright side. This aspect of his being too Sri Krishna reveals to Arjuna, “this Godhead who embraces the worlds with his numberless arms and destroys with his million hands, whose eyes are suns and moons, has a face of blazing fire and is ever burning up the whole universe with the flame of his energy … The companies of the gods enter [that Being] … It has enormous burning eyes; it has mouths that gape to devour, terrible with many tusks of destruction; it has faces like the fires of Death and Time. The kings and the captains and the heroes on both sides of the world-battle are hastening into its tusked and terrible jaws, and some are seen with crushed and bleeding heads caught between its teeth of power; the nations are rushing to destruction with helpless speed into its mouths of flame … With those burning mouths the Form of Dread is licking all the regions around; the whole world is full of his burning energies and baked in the fierceness of his lustres …”
Arjuna, the protagonist in the world-battle at that time in human history, receives the full initiation. “This is the figure of the supreme and universal Being,” writes Sri Aurobindo, “the Ancient of Days who is for ever, sanatanam purusham puranam, this is he who for ever creates … he who keeps the world always in existence, for he is the guardian of the eternal laws, but who is always too destroying in order that he may new-create, who is Time, who is Death, who is Rudra the Dancer of the calm and awful dance, who is Kali with her garland of skulls trampling naked in battle and flecked with the blood of the slaughtered Titans, who is the cyclone and the fire and the earthquake and pain and famine and revolution and ruin and the swallowing ocean.” This aspect of the Divine “is an aspect from which the mind in men willingly turns away and ostrich-like hides its head so that perchance, not seeing, it may not be seen by the Terrible. The weakness of the human heart wants only fair and comforting truths or in their absence pleasant fables; it will not have the truth in its entirety because there there is much that is not clear and pleasant and comfortable but hard to understand and harder to bear.” 10
4. The Battle That is Our Battle
In the words of Sri Aurobindo, “Arjuna is the representative man of his age.” “In the Gita he typifies the human soul of action brought face to face through that action in its highest and most violent crisis with the problem of human life and its apparent incompatibility with the spiritual state or even with a purely ethical ideal of perfection.” 11 When putting the teachings of the Gita into practice, Sri Aurobindo himself was constantly guided by Sri Krishna whom afterwards he declared to have been the Master of his Yoga (and who later incarnated into him12). The Gita formed an integral part of the foundation of his avataric realization – which is one reason why his Essays on the Gita remain an essential source of inspiration for all who want to follow in his footsteps. The battle on the field of the Kurus is the battle of striving humanity; it is our battle.
“The world of our battle and labour is a fierce dangerous destructive devouring world in which life exists precariously and the soul and body of man move among enormous perils, a world in which by every step forward, whether we will it or no, something is crushed and broken, in which every breath of life is a breath too of death. To put away the responsibility for all that seems to us evil or terrible on the shoulders of a semi-omnipotent Devil, or to put it aside as part of Nature, making an unbridgeable opposition between world-nature and God-Nature, as if Nature were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on man and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making of this world or could create anything against the will of God, are clumsily comfortable devices.
“We have to look courageously in the face of the reality and see that it is God and none else who has made this world in his being and that so he has made it. We have to see that Nature devouring her children, Time eating up the lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable and the violence of the Rudra forces in man and Nature are also the supreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures. We have to see that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful, strong and benignant preserver is also God the devourer and destroyer. The torment of the couch of pain and evil on which we are racked is his touch as much as happiness and sweetness and pleasure. It is only when we see with the eye of the complete union and feel his truth in the depths of our being that we can entirely discover behind that mask too the calm and beautiful face of the all-blissful Godhead and in this touch that tests our imperfection the touch of the friend and builder of the spirit in man. The discords of the world are God’s discords and it is only by accepting and proceeding through them that we can arrive at the greater concords of his supreme harmony, the summits and thrilled vastnesses of his transcendent and his cosmic Ananda.” 13
Sri Aurobindo touches here upon the question that has been on the mind of all humans since their appearance on the Earth, and to which all religions have to provide an answer: the justification of a benevolent, omnipotent and omniscient God in view of the existence of evil and suffering.14 In The Life Divine he formulates the problem as follows: “God being All-Good, who created pain and evil? If we say that pain is a trial and an ordeal, we do not solve the moral problem, we arrive at an immoral or non-moral God – an excellent world-mechanist perhaps, a cunning psychologist, but not a God of Good and Love whom we can worship, only a God of might to whose law we must submit or whose caprice we may hope to propitiate. For one who invents torture as a means of test and ordeal, stands convicted either of deliberate cruelty or of moral insensibility and, if a moral being at all, is inferior to the highest instinct of his own creatures.” 15
As Sri Aurobindo writes in the letters of which The Riddle of This World is composed: no answer has ever been given to satisfy the human mind because the answer requires a consciousness vaster than ours, a cosmic consciousness, only obtainable in an advanced state of yoga. The path towards such understanding is the path of faith and surrender, warranted by the Vedantic affirmation that all is the Brahman and that our souls have chosen to incarnate in this evolutionary universe. “If it be true that the Self alone exists, it must also be true that all is the Self.”
“The gospel of universal peace and goodwill among men – for without a universal and entire mutual goodwill there can be no real and abiding peace – has never succeeded for a moment in possessing itself of human life during the historic cycle of our progress, because morally, socially, spiritually the race was not prepared and the poise of Nature in its evolution would not admit of its being immediately prepared for any such transcendence. … A day may come, must surely come, we will say, when humanity will be ready spiritually, morally, socially for the reign of universal peace; meanwhile the aspect of battle and the nature and function of man as a fighter have to be accepted and accounted for by any practical philosophy and religion.” (Essays on the Gita, p. 49)
5. The Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
In September 1943, when the Second World War was at its height and undecided, Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter: “Ours is a Sadhana which involves not only devotion or union with the Divine or a perception of Him in all things, but also action as workers and instruments and a work to be done in the world or a force to be brought in the world under difficult conditions … It does not seem to me that X is wrong in seeing in it [i.e. the Second World War] the same problem as in Kurukshetra.” “In this yoga,” he wrote on another occasion, “all sides of the Truth are taken up, not in the systematic forms given them formerly but in their essence, and carried to the fullest and highest significance.” 16
It cannot be overstressed that the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is a radical, revolutionary effort to change human nature. As it is “integral,” it takes up the essence and many processes of the old yogas, but it is new in its aim (the transformation and divinization of human nature); its standpoint (if all is the Brahman, the world and the body in which we are incarnated is also the Brahman; instead of the search for escape, the appreciation of their Work must lead to an understanding and realization of their purposes); and the totality of its method (including the yogas of devotion, knowledge and works).
The Integral Yoga is also new “because the object sought after is not an individual achievement of divine realization for the sake of the individual, but something to be gained for the earth-consciousness here, a cosmic, not solely a supra-cosmic achievement.” And it is new “because a method has been preconized for achieving this purpose which is as total and integral as the aim set before it, viz., the total and integral change of consciousness and nature … I have not found this method (as a whole) or anything like it professed or realized in the old yogas,” writes Sri Aurobindo. “If I had, I should not have wasted my time in hewing out a road and in thirty years of search and inner creation when I could have hastened home safely to my goal in an easy canter over paths already blazed out, laid down, perfectly mapped, macadamized, made secure and public. Our yoga is not a retreading of old walks, but a spiritual adventure.” 17
Hewing out a new road, broadening and deepening the destiny of humankind, is the task of the Avatar. In Sri Aurobindo’s words: “The Avatar is one who comes to open the Way for humanity to a higher consciousness. … 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… 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 these or all – a significance and an effective power that are part of something essential to be done in the history of the earth and its races. … The Avatar is necessary when a special work is to be done and in crises of the evolution,” as Sri Krishna himself gives Arjuna to understand, saying that he incarnates as an Avatar yuge yuge, from age to age.18
Extraordinary actions abounded in the lives of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the most extraordinary being of course that they hewed out the road by preparing the Earth for the descent and action of the Supermind. To this end they had to fight the good fight as no incarnated beings before them had done, for – and this is essential – the Avatar, to achieve the change he has come down for, has to take upon him the entire burden of the past, the burden of the evolution. In Savitri we find the lines:
But when God’s messenger comes to heal the world And lead the soul of earth to higher things, He too must carry the yoke he came to unloose …
But though to the outward eye no sign appears And peace is given to our torn human hearts, The struggle is there and paid the unseen price; The fire, the strife, the wrestle are within.
He carries the suffering world in his own breast …19
[He] Fought shadowy combats in mute eyeless depths, Assaults of Hell endured and Titan strokes And bore the fierce inner wounds that are slow to heal.20
And in that marvellous poem “A God’s Labour,” which could also be called “The Avatar’s Song,” we read:
My gaping wounds are a thousand and one And the Titan kings assail, But I dare not rest till my task is done And wrought the eternal will.21
Although in a case like this comparisons are otiose, we might say that the Mother’s burden has been no less, as witnessed for instance by some of her conversations in The Mother’s Agenda. At that time her transformational work in the depths of the subconscient had its repercussions in her physical body, while she had to perform what she called la besogne obscure, the obscure chore, and to confront toutes les horreurs de la création, all the horrors of creation. Now Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are accepted and adored as Gods by many; few realize that they were also the Great Warriors – Kalki with the sword, Kali doing battle – who had, unknown, to fight the crusade for the future of humanity. The reality of their Work, even of the little we know of it, is much more epochal than any of the religious myths.
“Krishna calls upon Arjuna to carry on war of the most terrible kind and by his example encourage men to do every kind of human work, sarvakármani. Do you contend that Krishna was an unspiritual man and that his advice to Arjuna was mistaken or wrong in principle?” asked Sri Aurobindo in a letter to a disciple. Each spiritual effort attracts automatically the adverse forces, who do not want that change and progress should occur in their dominion on Earth. It was so at the time of the Vedic Rishis; it was so at the time of the Mahabharata; it is so today in the experience of anybody who sincerely steps upon the path of yoga. “This yoga is a spiritual battle,” wrote Sri Aurobindo to a disciple, “its very attempt raises all sorts of adverse forces.” 22
Fighting, war, courage and heroism are not among the favourite social occurrences and virtues of the civilized mind at present, and, as mentioned above, the practice of “yoga” is usually associated with the search for tranquillity, peace and feeling well. Such, however, is not the path of the Integral Yoga, although some of its professed practitioners seek to level the path in imitation of more familiar traditional ways. Referring to the quotations from Sri Aurobindo, such an attitude cannot agree with the Integral Yoga because Sri Aurobindo’s and the Mother’s Yoga is about changing the human nature, which is such a difficult undertaking that formerly no spiritual path, and certainly no religious one, has even tried to attempt it.
As every aspirant is soon to find out: “This yoga is a spiritual battle; its very attempt raises all sorts of adverse forces.” The battlefield, however, is we ourselves, we composite, complex human beings. It is a “war of our members” in which every member, like every creature, has the right of its highest possible development. It is “a battle, a long war with ourselves and with opposing forces around us.”
Without heroism, avers Sri Aurobindo, no human can grow into the Godhead. “Courage, energy and strength are among the very first principles of the divine nature in action.” And the Mother had the following prayer printed in the Ashram School notebooks: “Make of us the hero-warriors we aspire to become. May we fight successfully the great battle of the future that is to be born, against the past that seeks to endure, so that the new things may manifest and we be ready to receive them.”
O soul, intruder in Nature’s ignorance, Armed traveller to the unseen supernal heights, Thy spirit’s fate is a battle and ceaseless march Against invisible opponent Powers …
All who would raise the fallen world must come Under the dangerous arches of their power; For even the radiant children of the gods To darken their privilege is and dreadful right.
None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell.23
6. Kurukshetra in the Twentieth Century
The Second World War is long past and is by most people today but vaguely remembered. Countless books have been written about it, but its true significance is to be found in the sparse comments and statements by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, providing us with a glimpse of the crucial importance of that war for humanity, and of their part in it. It may therefore be apposite here to quote once again the following lines from a letter by Sri Aurobindo to a disciple, written in September 1943, when the situation was critical not only for the world, but also for Sri Aurobindo, the Mother and the Ashram: “Ours is a Sadhana which involves not only devotion or union with the Divine or a perception of Him in all things, but also action as workers and instruments and a work to be done in the world or a force to be brought in the world under difficult conditions … It does not seem to me that X is wrong in seeing in it [i.e. the ongoing war] the same problem as in Kurukshetra.”
When “more than half” of the Ashram inmates were sympathetic towards Hitler, most of them out of hatred towards the British colonial regime, Sri Aurobindo made his and the Mother’s standpoint clear: “I affirm again to you most strongly that this is the Mother’s war … 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 realize 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. There cannot be the slightest doubt that if one side wins, there will be an end of all such freedom and hope of light and truth and the work that has to be done will be subjected to conditions which would make it humanly impossible; there will be a reign of falsehood and darkness, a cruel oppression and degradation for most of the human race such as people in this country do not dream of and cannot yet at all realize.” (29.7.1942)
“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.” (3.9.1943)
This was the Avatar speaking in defence of the Work he had come to do, to “keep the path open for the evolutionary forces.” It is at the vital, decisive evolutionary moments that the Avatar incarnates, yuge yuge, to create the possibility of an evolutionary step forwards and to do battle with the Forces who oppose his action with all their terrific, egoistic powers. Sri Rama had to fight Ravana at the time of the mentalization of humanity; Sri Krishna led the fight of the Mahabharata war, supporting with his physical presence and his spiritual Power the Pandavas against the ill-intentioned Kauravas. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were for the first time in human history the complete, bi-poled male-female Avatar. May it at last be realized that their crucial avataric effort of transforming humanity, to make a better world possible, impelled the Hostile Forces to retaliate and caused the twentieth-century wars. Actually the First and Second World War, together with the third Cold War, are closely interrelated and should be seen as one.
A direct result of the Second World War was that it brought the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to a halt, and this at the moment that they expected the supramental Descent to take place. Sri Aurobindo wrote later on about “these times of world-crisis when I have to be on guard and concentrated all the time to prevent irremediable catastrophes.” 24 The Mother reminisced more explicitly: “There was such a constant tension for Sri Aurobindo and me that it interrupted the yoga completely during the whole war. And it was for that reason that the war had come: to stop the Work. For there was an extraordinary descent of the Supermind at that time, it came like this [massive gesture]! That was exactly in 1939. Then the war came and brought everything to a standstill, completely. For if we had gone on with the Work personally, we would not have been sure that there was enough time to finish it before ‘the other one’ [the Asura of Falsehood, “Hitler’s God”] had made a mess of the world, and the whole affair would have been postponed for centuries. This had to be stopped first of all: the action of the Lord of Nations – the Lord of Falsehood.” 25
Hitler, his Nazis and the supporting Fascists of several countries lost the war. Yet the Lord of the Nations is not bound to any country or personality, and while the Allied nations were at their victory jig, he intensified his action in the knowledge that, if he did not win one way or another, there would come an end to his reign over the peoples. The situation was “as clear as a pike-staff” to Sri Aurobindo’s yogic knowledge and insight. “There was a time when Hitler was victorious everywhere and it seemed certain that a black yoke of the Asura would be imposed on the whole world; but where is Hitler now and where is his rule?” However: “Other blacknesses threaten to overshadow or even engulf mankind …” 26
May Aurobindians bear these words of Sri Aurobindo in mind: “It is not enough that our own hands should remain clean and our souls unstained for the law of strife and destruction to die out in the world; that which is its root must first disappear out of humanity.” “Not till the Time-Spirit in man is ready, can the inner and ultimate prevail over the outer and immediate reality. Christ and Buddha have come and gone. But it is Rudra who still holds the world in the hollow of his hand. And meanwhile the fierce forward labour of mankind tormented and oppressed by the Powers that are profiteers of egoistic force and their servants cries for the sword of the Hero of the struggle and the word of the prophet.” 27
“The gospel of universal peace and goodwill among men – for without a universal and entire mutual goodwill there can be no real and abiding peace – has never succeeded for a moment in possessing itself of human life during the historic cycle of our progress, because morally, socially, spiritually the race was not prepared and the poise of Nature in its evolution would not admit of its being immediately prepared for any such transcendence. … A day may come, must surely come, we will say, when humanity will be ready spiritually, morally, socially for the reign of universal peace; meanwhile the aspect of battle and the nature and function of man as a fighter have to be accepted and accounted for by any practical philosophy and religion.” 28
“The Yoga having come down against the bed-rock of Inconscience which is the fundamental basis of all resistance in the individual and in the world,” 29 the situation of the world worsened because the resistance against the avataric Work intensified. “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,” wrote Sri Aurobindo in July 1948.30 And, after a life of avataric effort, he wrote the fateful words: “I have no intention of giving my sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco, a partial and transient spiritual opening within with no true and radical change in the external nature” 31 – as had happened when Christ and the Buddha had come and were gone.
“It is not enough that our own hands should remain clean and our souls unstained for the law of strife and destruction to die out of the world; that which is its root must first disappear out of humanity.” 32 And Sri Aurobindo, the Avatar and Warrior of the Supermind, prepared to descend into death to extirpate, at the root of the human condition, that which on all previous occasions had barred the way of Progress. This act was the ultimate condition of the descent of a greater, a divine Consciousness on Earth. Only six years after his voluntary descent into death (1950) the Supramental Consciousness manifested in the earth atmosphere (1956).33
Coda
Years before he performed the yogic Master Act of consciously descending into death to purify and change the occult foundations of the world, Sri Aurobindo had written:
And yet I know my footprints’ track shall be A pathway towards Immortality.34
It is good for those who follow in his footprints to remember that they continue the arduous pilgrimage of so many predecessors, all of them belonging to the Fellowship of the Aspiration:
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Georges Van Vrekhem
Books
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