Preparing for the Miraculous

5: 2012 and 1956: Doomsday?

The Iron Age is ended. Only now
The last fierce spasm of the dying past
Shall shake the nations …

Sri Aurobindo, “In the Moonlight”

The 2012 Phenomenon

The 2012 phenomenon, simply put, consists in the worldwide expectation that on 21 December 2012 an event will take place, beneficial or detrimental, which will change the Earth and humanity on it. This eschatological belief has intensified in the last decades and snowballed into a media event. It originates in the finding, scientific or not, that the fourth 5,125 year-long cycle or “sun” in the Mayan Long Count calendar will end on that day.

A New Age interpretation of this presumed event tells us that on that day Earth and her inhabitants will undergo a physical and/or spiritual transformation which will initiate a new era. Others expect that event to bring the world to an end, or something of similar importance, which may be caused by cosmic catastrophes, e.g. a collision with a passing planet (Nibiru?) or with a black hole, a failure of the Earth’s magnetic field, or a hit by a massive expulsion of matter from the Sun …

In 2012: Universal Doom or New Age, Ashok Sharma writes: “All the so-called Mayan prophecies about 2012 are nothing more than wildly speculative extrapolations, which are based on yet uncertain interpretations by scholars of Maya hieroglyphs.” Carlos Barrios, a Mayan anthropologist who has extensively enquired about the prediction among his people, is of the following opinion: “There are some who announce the end of the world for December 2012. This is nothing but imagination. The Mayas are not happy with this interpretation. The world is not going to end: it will be transformed. The Indians have their calendars and know how to interpret them, but not the Westerners. Humanity will continue to exist, but in another way. The material structures will change. From then onwards, we will have the opportunity to be more human.” ¹

The doomsday prediction or expectation is a tradition which the West inherited together with its Judeo-Christian religion, more specifically from the biblical Book of Daniel and Revelation. Norman Cohn writes in his classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium: “Already in the Prophetical Books there are passages that foretell how, out of an immense cosmic catastrophe, there will arise a Palestine which will be nothing less than a new Eden, Paradise regained” – a Palestine to which the whole world would consent to bow or which would gradually dominate the whole world.² It should be remembered that the Hebrews were the first to interpret history not as cyclic but as linear, with a beginning at Creation and an end when evil will be conquered and Earth become an eternal Paradise.

The following words from Revelation, written by the visionary John of Patmos, have had an enormous influence in Christianity: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. … And God shall wipe all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new. … And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and showed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God, having the glory of God …” ³

It is rather remarkable that Jesus is seldom remembered as having been an apocalyptic himself, the reason probably being that the Catholic Church had to do its utmost to cover the fact because his predictions did not become true. Bart Ehrman writes in his Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium: “Jesus thought that the history of the world would come to a screeching halt, and that God would intervene in the affairs of the planet, overthrow the forces of evil in a cosmic act of judgment, and establish his utopian Kingdom here on earth. And this was to happen within his own generation. … Jesus stood within a long line of Jewish prophets who understood that God was soon going to intervene in this world, overthrow the forces of evil that ran it, and bring in a new kingdom in which there would be no more war, disease, catastrophe, despair, hatred, sin, or death.” ⁴

For instance in the gospel of Mark, now generally accepted as the earliest of the four gospels, we find Jesus quoted as having said: “Truly I tell you, some of you standing here will not taste death before they have seen the Kingdom of God having come in power.” (9:1) “Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away before all these things take place.” (13:30) “Truly I tell you, you will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven.” (14:62) Moreover, the gnostic Paul of Tarsus, considered by many the second founder of Christianity, was of the same conviction and wrote in his first letter to the Thessalonians: “We who are alive, we who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with [the resurrected] to meet the Lord in the air.” (4:15-17)

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, since those times, the end of the world has been foretold at least once every other year. At present, however, the imagery of the expectations has changed considerably. Nobody is coming or going on the clouds any more, and if heaven is a concrete place, it must be located somewhere beyond the farthest galaxies and quasars 13.7 billion light years away instead of beyond the orbit of the planet Saturn. The feared causes of doomsday are now asteroid and comet impacts, the change of our planet’s spin rate, solar fireworks, nearby supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, black holes, alien attacks, monstrous mutations on the Earth itself, or biological or nuclear terrorism.

This does not mean, nevertheless, that the present situation of planet Earth and its denizens should not be taken seriously. The interpretation of the Mayan long-count calendar is not the only prediction of an imminent best or direst. Our moment in time is also supposed to be the end of the Iron Age, the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, the momentous change predicted by Edgar Cayce, and, according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the time of upheaval inevitable in the transition to a new stage of the terrestrial evolution. The bewildering circumstances caused by this transition are clearly expressed in the extreme phenomena which seem to threaten life on Earth; in the mental, religious and spiritual confusion of the “postmodern” period; in the vulnerability of our planet as perceived by science; and, not least, in the astounding increase of the human population which seems unstoppable.

Gaia in Trouble

James Lovelock (°1919) is a scientist and inventor who at one time collaborated with NASA in their search for life on Mars. He became sincerely worried because of the damage done to the terrestrial environment by a careless humanity, increasing beyond all proportions. He formulated the analysis of his worries in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, published in 1979. By the name “Gaia” – the Greek name of the Goddess of the Earth, proposed by his friend William Golding – Lovelock wanted to make his readers aware that the surface and the atmosphere of the Earth, if not the planet as a whole, looked, acted and was as vulnerable as a living being.

Initially Lovelock’s hypothesis was stridently attacked by the Neo-Darwinists, especially by Richard Dawkins, the firebrand among them. They dismissed the Gaia hypothesis as “vitalist,” thereby declaring it anathema in serious, academic, materialist science. After Lovelock had pruned his hypothesis and its formulations somewhat, turning it into a proper scientific theory, Gaia became more respectable. In the year 2000 the first international conference, “Gaia 2000,” was held; the updated proceedings were published in 2004 under the title Scientists Debate Gaia.

According to Lovelock, Gaia is a thin spherical shell of matter that surrounds the incandescent interior of planet Earth, almost entirely made of hot or molten rock and metal. That spherical shell “begins where the crystal rocks meet the magma of the Earth’s hot interior, about 100 miles below the surface, and proceeds another 100 miles upwards through the ocean and air to the even hotter thermosphere at the edge of space. … I call Gaia a physiological system.” ⁵ Lynn Margulis, the biologist who together with Lovelock formulated the idea of Gaia, writes: “The entire planetary surface, not just the living bodies but the atmosphere that we think of as an inert background, is so far from chemical equilibrium that the entire planetary surface is best regarded as alive.” ⁶ And the science writer John Gribbin defines the theory as follows: “Gaia is the name given to a theory which describes how the different components of the Earth System, living and non-living, have worked together for eons to maintain conditions suitable for life.” ⁷

It should however be stressed that the authors of all three quotes took their distances from the romantic and New Age interpretations of the Gaia hypothesis, in their effort to conform to scientific norms and make the hypothesis generally acceptable. The original hypothesis postulated, according to Lovelock himself, “that life on Earth actively keeps the surface conditions always favourable for whatever is the contemporary ensemble of organisms.” Promoted to a scientific theory, this “supposition” was reworded and Gaia became “a view of the Earth that sees it as a self-regulating system made up from the totality of organisms, the surface rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere tightly coupled as an evolving system. The theory sees this system as having a goal: the regulation of surface conditions so as always to be as favourable as possible for contemporary life. It is based on observations and theoretical models; it is fruitful and has made ten successful predictions” ⁸ – predictions being a prerequisite to render any theory scientific.

Behind it all is the conviction that Gaia and her denizens are in serious trouble. In The Revenge of Gaia, Lovelock wrote as recently as 2006: “I make no apologies for repeating that Gaia is an evolutionary system in which any species, including humans, that persists with changes to the environment that lessen the survival of its progeny is doomed to extinction. By massively taking land to feed people and by fouling the air and water we are hampering Gaia’s ability to regulate the Earth’s climate and chemistry, and if we continue to do it we are in danger of extinction. We have in a sense stumbled into a war with Gaia, a war that we have no hope of winning. All that we can do is to make peace while we are still strong and not a broken rabble.” ⁹ His warning is grave: “Now humanity and the Earth face a deadly peril, with little time left to escape.”

Margulis, in The Symbiotic Planet, sounds even more draconian: “To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable – the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal our sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self-delusion. Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves. … No human culture, despite its inventiveness, can kill life on this planet, were it even to try. … Humans are not the centre of life, nor is any other single species. Humans are not even central to life. We are a recent, rapidly growing part of an enormous ancient whole.”

“It may already be too late to avert the looming climate catastrophe that Lovelock warns about,” opines John Gribbin. And the senior biologist Edward Wilson, one of the most respected living scientists, concludes his analysis of the Gaia situation with this paragraph: “The juggernaut of technology-based capitalism will not be stopped. Its momentum is reinforced by the billions of poor people in developing countries anxious to participate in order to share the material wealth of the industrialized nations. But its directions can be changed by mandate of a generally shared long-term environmental ethic. The choice is clear: the juggernaut will very soon either chew up what remains of the living world, or it will be redirected to save it. … Humanity is in a final struggle with the rest of life.” ¹⁰

Breakdown or Breakthrough

Ervin Laszlo (°1932) is the founder and president of the Club of Budapest, “an informal association of creative [and famous] people in diverse fields of human creativity”. The Club is “dedicated to the proposition that only by changing ourselves can we change the world,” or variously put: “A revolution of consciousness is perhaps the last, and certainly the best, hope of humankind.” They want to bring about a worldwide spiritual renaissance. In Laszlo’s words: “We now live in a period of transformation when a new world is struggling to be born.” ¹¹

Laszlo is convinced that the present situation of Planet Earth is as critical as the scientists in the previous section (together with most reasonable people) think it is. In addition he accepts 2012, the end of the running period of one of the Mayan calendars, as a given. This date will, according to him, mark a total breakdown of all life-systems on the planet if no conscious and collaborative effort is made to prevent it. However, if such an effort is made, what looms on our horizon as a breakdown may turn out to be a breakthrough.

The finding of a solution is urgent, for the window of opportunity for new thinking is now reduced to a single lifetime. The present tendencies move at high speed towards irreversibility. The estimation of the critical points at which going back is no longer possible have shrunk terrifyingly: from the end of this century to its middle, then to the next twenty years, and in some cases even to the next five to twenty years. In The Reenchanted Cosmos Laszlo’s “window of decision” is 2005-2012, which means that at the present moment this window has narrowed further to two years.

The physical or natural threats able to cause a global breakdown are now well known. The sea level in the whole world could rise by more than one meter, with the result that many very populated cities, towns and regions would be drowned and disappear from the map. The CO2 emission might be greater than predicted, causing the hole in the ozone layer to enlarge dramatically, doing untold harm. The increase in the temperature of the earth atmosphere might reach 3 to 6 degrees Celsius, which would make countless life-forms extinct. The Sun’s activity might reach a peak in 2012, producing solar storms of unequalled intensity. A change of the magnetic poles is feared to be imminent.

In this critical situation Laszlo sees the possibility of a worldwide spiritual renaissance. In Worldshift 2012 he states: “The completion of [the fourth Mayan] cycle in 2012 is the beginning of nothing less than an evolutionary jump in the earthly life. On that day a phase change of the frequency resonance [?] will take place, which opens the way for a post-2012 radiant golden age in our galactic-solar-planetary realization. … We will have made the transition not only to a post-historical, but to a superhuman phase in our evolution. … An immense change of consciousness will start on that day.” And he quotes José Arguelles: “It will be as if we see ourselves for the first time, and we will no longer recognize ourselves as human.” Laszlo is sure: “Something will happen. What will happen, however, depends on ourselves.”

A more realistic Vaclav Havel, prominent Czech intellectual and politician, has said when addressing the USA Congress: “Without a worldwide revolution in the human consciousness nothing will change for the better.” This agrees with Sri Aurobindo’s declaration that “an inner change is needed in human nature,” and that “if this is not the solution, then there is no solution, if this is not the way, then there is no way for the human kind.” ¹² Laszlo seems to share this conviction, but two turns in his thought render his argumentation questionable, not to say naive: that an immense change in the consciousness of humanity will start on a given day; and that the collective mind of humanity might be capable of undergoing such a sea-change in five years or less.

Our Final Century?

Another voice in the debate is that of a distinguished scientist, Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal since 1995 and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, since 2004. He has published a book with the ominous title Our Final Century: Will Civilization Survive the Twenty-First Century? “The theme of this book is that humanity is more at risk than at any other phase in its history,” writes Rees. “The wider cosmos has a potential future that could even be infinite. But will these vast expanses of time be filled with life, or be as empty as the Earth’s first sterile seas? The choice may depend on us, this century.”

It is a fact that scientific materialism revels in the denigration and degradation of all humanistic, religious and spiritual values (although it will readily use them when deemed handy to promote its cause). It finds pleasure in repeating that being born is beginning to die, as it does in reminding us of the Copernican Principle, which reduces the status of the Earth to nothing but one planet among others and the status of the human beings to nothing but one kind of animals among others. Bertrand Russell, at one time the mouthpiece of scientific rationalism, wrote already many years ago: “If you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life in general will die out in due course. You see in the moon the sort of thing towards which the earth is tending, something dead, cold and lifeless.” And: “Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way.” ¹³

This macabre gospel of what might be called “black science” has found a fertile field in the contemporary crisis mood of fear and uncertainty. It is divulged in practically each and every issue of the science magazines, followed in this by the other media. The Earth is going to die. “The surface of the Sun, at a temperature of several thousand degrees, will come extremely close. The Earth will be charred; it will be a cinder.” The Sun is going to die. “We can foresee with certainty that our Sun, about five billion years old, and which transforms its hydrogen into helium slowly but irreversibly, will soon be exhausted, and that it will explode like the Crab Nebula in 1054.” (Here “soon” means at the earliest in another five billion years!) The universe is going to die. It began with the Big Bang and will end with the Big Crunch. “The stars begin to fade like guttering candles and are snuffed out one by one. In the depths of space the great celestial cities, the galaxies, cluttered with the memorabilia of ages, are gradually dying. Tens of billions of years pass in the growing darkness. Occasional flickers of light pierce the fall of cosmic night, and spurts of activity delay the sentence of a universe condemned to become a galactic graveyard.”

“What happens in far-future eons may seem blazingly irrelevant to the practicalities of our lives,” finds Rees. Indeed so. But in the meantime he contributes to the prevailing mentality by commenting on all the well-known causes of eventual doom by adding some of his own, staking for instance one thousand dollars on a bet: that by the year 2020 an instance of bio-error, i.e. a mistake or negligence involving biological matter (like a deadly virus or bacterium), will have killed a million people. “I think,” he writes, “the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present century without a serious setback.” ¹⁴

The Curve

However scientifically well-founded or eloquent the above illustrations of the threat to planet Earth and its denizens may be, most striking is no doubt the curve of its human population growth. “Ten thousand years ago there may have been at most 2 to 3 million humans scattered around the globe. There were no cities, no great population centers. There were fewer people on the globe than are now found in virtually any large city. Two thousand years ago the number had swelled to perhaps 130 to 200 million people. Our first billion was reached in the year 1800 [i.e. at the time of the first Industrial Revolution]. If we take the time of origin of our species [Homo sapiens sapiens] as about 100,000 years ago, it seems that it took our species 100,000 years to reach the billion-person population plateau. Then things sped up considerably. We reached 2 billion people in 1930, about 1 000 times faster than it took to reach the first billion. But the rate of increase kept accelerating. By 1950, only twenty years later, we had reached 2.5 billion souls. In 1999, we hit 6 billion. There will be approximately 7 billion people by 2020 and perhaps 11 billion by 2050 to 2100.” ¹⁵ If the evolution has an aim, it cannot be to provide standing place only for the humans on our globe.

Once again we turn to Edward Wilson: “The problem before us is how to feed billions of new mouths over the next several decades and save the rest of life at the same time, without being wrapped in a Faustian bargain that threatens freedom and security. No one knows the exact solution to this dilemma,” he writes in The Future of Life. “During the twentieth century more people were added to the world than in all previous human history. … We and the rest of life cannot afford another hundred years like that. … It should be obvious to anyone not in a euphoric delirium that whatever humanity does or does not do, Earth’s capacity to support our species is approaching the limit.” ¹⁶

To conclude with James Lovelock: “The ultimate cause of the problem is that there are too many people – six or seven times too many people – on Earth today.” This raises the mega-question: if there is a meaning in it all, if the evolution has a goal, if the Curve is more than a curse, what is it that is happening and makes us look for an explanation of an Earth changing into one habitat for a unified humanity?

Is the Earth Special?

According to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Earth is a very special body in the universe. Speaking to the Ashram students in 1953, the Mother made this quite clear: “In the immensity of the astronomical skies, earth is a thing absolutely without interest and without importance, but from the occult and spiritual points of view the Earth is the concentrated symbol of the universe. … For the convenience and necessity of the work, the whole universe has been concentrated and condensed symbolically in a grain of sand which is called the Earth. And therefore it is the symbol of all – all that is to be changed, all that is to be transformed, all that is to be converted is here. This means that if one concentrates on this work and does it here, all the rest will follow automatically.” By the “work” she meant the effort of conscious spiritual evolution.

On another occasion, in 1951, she had said: “It is only upon earth that the Presence is found, this direct contact with the supreme Origin, this presence of the divine Consciousness hidden in all things. … All action on this special point has its irradiation into the whole universe … All knowledge in all traditions, from every part of the earth, says that the psychic formation is a terrestrial formation and that the growth of the psychic being is something that takes place upon earth. But once they are formed and free in their movement, they can go anywhere in the universe, they are not limited in their movement. But their formation and growth belong to the terrestrial life, for reasons of concentration.”

“What happens on Earth,” said the Mother, “has its repercussion in the entire universe.” Inversely, Sri Aurobindo wrote in Savitri: “The powers of all the worlds have entrance here.” ¹⁷ And in his correspondence he wrote: “Earth is the foundation and all the worlds are on the earth and to imagine a clean-cut or irreconcilable difference between them is ignorance; here and not elsewhere, not by going to some other world, the divine realization must come. … Evolution takes place on earth and therefore the earth is the proper field of progress. … 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.”

It goes without saying that a full interpretation of these words is only possible in the context of the Aurobindian teaching. The fundamental message, in the words of the Mother, is all the same quite clear: La Terre, on ne la détruit pas, the Earth will not be destroyed.¹⁸

Such a conviction contradicts directly most of the scientific knowledge about planet Earth in particular and about the universe in general. It can easily be seen as another instance of “mystic” or New Age imagination, especially at a time that the search for “exoplanets” is in full swing. At the time of writing more than 500 have been discovered, and their number is supposed to be, well, astronomical. Behind this expensive scientific search, and quite useful for its promotion, lingers the curiosity whether there is life elsewhere in the universe. The ancient Greek philosophers already asked the question; Giordano Bruno answered it positively, and so did Fontenelle, in his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes during the Enlightenment, and the French astronomer Camille Flammarion in the 19th century.

The popular opinion on key enigmas, even the supposedly scientific popular explanations in the media and in most popularizing books, should be taken with a substantial grain of salt. For example, the explanation that our gigantic universe originated in the miraculous explosion of something smaller than an atom – the Big Bang – has now been generally accepted for something like half a century, and most people would be surprised to hear that there are serious scientists who still have doubts about this, while others talk about multiple universes, baby universes, or an all-in-one multiverse. The atom is still commonly depicted as a miniature solar system, a view abandoned by science in 1927. Darwin was the father of the theory of evolution? Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and others formulated coherent evolutionary theories before him, and Alfred Wallace at the same time as he. The big apes were our direct ancestors? Paleoanthropology has not yet been able to pinpoint the origin of the real Homo species (see e.g. Pascal Picq: Les origines de l’homme, and Friedemann Schrenk: Die Frühzeit des Menschen, both recent publications). Humanity appeared in Africa? The age of fossils of Homo sapiens found in Europe and China increases year by year and puts the “out of Africa” theory in serious doubt. And so on.

Another item on this list is the status of planet Earth and of life on it. Life has not yet been found anywhere except on the Earth, although the countless articles about the possibility of life existing on other planets at times turns the possibility into an apparent certainty. “A new age of planetary exploration and exobiology dawned in the seventh decade of the twentieth century,” wrote the late Carl Sagan, who built a glamorous career on his much-professed enthusiasm for the subject. “We live in a time of adventure and high intellectual excitement, but also in the midst of an endeavour which promises great practical benefits.” He estimated in 1974 that a million civilizations may exist in our Milky Way alone. Given that our galaxy is but one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe, the number of intelligent alien species would be enormous. “The study of a single instance of extraterrestrial life will deprovincialize biology,” wrote Sagan in his best-selling Cosmos. “For the first time, the biologists will know what other kinds of life are possible. … Every star may be a sun to someone. Within a galaxy there are stars and worlds and, it may be, a proliferation of living things and intelligent beings and spacefaring civilizations.”

Everyone does not share this enthusiasm. “Those searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have published copiously, in almost total absence of data and in complete absence of any direct data,” notes Henry Bauer dryly. But, as mentioned before, the search for exoplanets is on and many are being detected, thanks to the marvellous orbiting telescopes and other advanced instruments cosmologists have now at their disposal. Yet, the question is whether life will be found on one or some of them. Experts have openly expressed their doubts, so for instance Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee in their Rare Earth, Paul Davies in The Eerie Silence and The Goldilocks Enigma, and Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards in The Privileged Planet.

“Of all yet known celestial bodies, Earth is unique in both its physical properties and its proven ability to sustain life,” write Ward and Brownlee. Our planet has “a highly fortuitous set of circumstances that could not be expected to exist commonly on other planets.” Of what kind are these circumstances? For instance Earth has a Moon which is the largest of the moons of all other solar planets, large enough to stabilize Earth’s spin. Earth is protected by Jupiter, which may be called its guardian because, enormous in size, it catches most of the potentially catastrophic debris headed for the Earth. Our solar system is located in the galactic habitable zone, so called because most of the Milky Way and other galaxies is not favourable for life-carrying planets; moreover, Earth’s orbit itself is located in the habitable zone around the Sun – closer would be too hot for life, farther away would be too cold.

A last factor of importance (there are more): our Sun does not seem to be as common as ordinarily supposed, but on the contrary to be a rarity, “not only within the Milky Way but also compared to the majority of other galaxies. It is often said that the Sun is a typical star, but this is entirely untrue. The mere fact that 95% of all stars are less massive than the Sun makes our planetary system quite rare. Besides, approximately two-thirds of solar-type stars in the solar neighbourhood are members of binary or multiple star systems.” (Lewis Dartnell: Life in the Universe)

“In the very few places [in the universe] that aren’t in a vacuum, too hot or too cold, we really know of only one: Earth,” concludes astronomer Philip Plait in his book with the spooky title Death from the Skies! – The Science behind the End of the World. “I honestly don’t know if we’re alone in the Universe; no one does. … Maybe, just maybe, we really are alone. In all the galaxy, in all the vast trillions of cubic light years of emptiness, ours is the very first planet to harbour creatures that can ponder their own existence.”

Taking all this into account, the statements of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother about planet Earth, which a few decades ago may have appeared “occult” or “mystic” to many, no longer seem so other-worldly. The scientific debate is on and its conclusion is not yet out to see. If scientific materialism is the only truth, the whole matter is worthy of little consideration, for then everything is anyway a matter of contingency destined to end badly. But if there are other means of knowledge, based on capacities and realms which scientific materialism refuses to recognize in principle, then our Earth, life on it, and its destiny may be unique and look forward to a future evolution which will not be cut short in the near future.

Future Positive

The Aurobindian scheme of things is in essence evolutionary. Accepting the gradual physiological development of the life forms on Earth, but as an expression of an increasing consciousness, it asks the pertinent question why Homo sapiens would be the ultimate species, for it is clear that the possibilities of nature are not exhausted by the human being. “The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god.” ¹⁹ As the incorporation of the mental consciousness in the scale of evolution led to the formation of Homo sapiens, so a higher consciousness, called “supermind” by Sri Aurobindo, is necessary to form the new, higher species in the scale.

The yogic effort of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother consisted in preparing humanity and the Earth for the descent of this higher consciousness. The literature and testimonies they have left behind provide anybody interested with a concrete, detailed idea of that lofty and difficult ambition, for which Sri Aurobindo had to descent voluntarily into death. Six years later, in 1956, the Mother announced the first manifestation of the Supermind in the Earth atmosphere, equivalent to the beginning of a new stage in the terrestrial evolution, of a new world.²⁰

The effects of this manifestation were immediate, for instance in the phenomenon called “the Sixties”: the decade of the New Age movement, the student revolts of ’68, and the Velvet Revolution of the same year in Prague. There was also the technological acceleration resulting in the global spread of television, the space technology of Sputnik, Apollo 11 and the nuclear rockets, the computer, and an increasing miniaturization of things technological. The desegregation movement in the US gave equal rights to all. The the colonial countries of “the third world” became independent.

The common impulse behind all these phenomena was the need of “unity for the human race by an inner oneness,” without which, according to Sri Aurobindo, the new world would not be possible. For “all mankind may be regarded as a collective being,” as “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.” ²¹

The recent decades in the history of humanity must of course be seen in the perspective of “a cycle of progression” which started in ancient Greece and the cultures around the eastern Mediterranean. Christianity played an important role in this cycle, as did the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Then – “war being the father of all things” according to Heraclitus – the great War of the Twentieth Century, in its three parts of World War One and Two, and the Cold War, was the dramatic upheaval that led directly to the unification of the world.

Evolutionary progression seems always to come at what is to our human awareness an enormous cost. Here we may remember “what Arjuna saw” on the battlefield of Kurukshetra: the Divine in all his glory, but also as Time the Devourer.²² Each positive evolutionary movement induces inevitably “an enormous force [of resistance] commensurable with the magnitude of the thing that has to be done. But always these resistances turn out to have assisted by the resistance much more than they have impeded the intention of the great Creatrix and her Mover.” ²³ Such seems to have been the process throughout the evolution of life on Earth. Even when global catastrophes threatened life with total extinction, it not only survived in astonishing ways but gained in the ordeal and made an evolutionary step forward. This happened when our planet almost completely froze over at least twice in its history (once 2.45 billion years ago and a second time between 800 and 600 million years ago), when asteroid impacts or volcanic eruptions turned it into a blazing hell, as well as at the time of the great biological extinctions.

Behind the evolution of our universe and life in it, there is a meaning: the adventure of the recovering of the Godhead which is its origin and its sustaining Principle. Starting from darkest matter, a movement of acceleration and intensification is discernible. “The first obscure material movement of the evolutionary Force is marked by an aeonic graduality; the movement of life-progress proceeds slowly but still with a quicker step, it is concentrated into the figure of millenniums; mind can still further compress the tardy leisureliness of Time and make long paces of the centuries; but when the conscious Spirit intervenes, a supremely concentrated pace of evolutionary swiftness becomes possible.” ²⁴

This is where we stand now: at the point where the conscious Spirit has become active. And this is why Sri Aurobindo and the Mother too foresaw the inevitable crisis which the action of the Spirit and its repercussions would cause among humans.

No, the world will not end. Yes, the world will change – and is changing at an ever accelerating pace. “What is happening now is something that never happened before, and therefore nobody understands it,” said the Mother. “There is like a golden Force which presses on the [material] world, which has no material consistency but nevertheless seems terribly heavy and which presses on Matter. And the apparent result is as if catastrophes were inevitable. And together with this impression of inevitable catastrophes there are solutions to the situation, events which seem to be utterly miraculous. … It is no longer like it was: this really is a new world … It is the descent of the supramental world, which is not something purely imaginary: it is an absolutely material Power but which has no need of material means. A world which wants to incarnate into the [existing material] world.” ²⁵

“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-organizing Chance, which it must be in a purely materialistic view of the nature of the world.” Thus wrote Sri Aurobindo in 1949, in a postscript chapter to his Ideal of Human Unity.

The Iron Age is ended. Only now
The last fierce spasm of the dying past
Shall shake the nations, and when that has passed,
Earth washed of ills shall raise a fairer brow.

It comes at last, the day foreseen of old,
What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed,
Vision and vain imagination deemed,
The City of Delight, the Age of Gold.²⁶