On The Mother

CHAPTER 42

The Next Future

I

The Great Secret,¹ subtitled "Six Monologues and a Conclusion", was conceived and written by the Mother with the collaboration of Nolini, Pavitra, Andre and Pranab. The Mother visualised a situation of extreme limit, as it were on the edge of time. A ship carrying six famous men indifferent spheres of life, and an unknown young man, who are all on their way to attend a World Conference on Human Progress, is wrecked in mid-ocean, and these seven "brought together, apparently by chance", take refuge in a lifeboat. The six famous men are the Statesman, the Writer, the Scientist, the Artist, the Industrialist and the Athlete. The Unknown Man sits at the helm of the boat, "immobile and silent, but listens attentively to what the others are saying". The lifeboat has been afloat for a period long enough for the provisions and the drinking water to be almost exhausted. "No hope on the horizon: death is approaching." A grimmer situation cannot be imagined.

The minutes crawl, and there is no glimmer of hope. The silence of despair is oppressive. To provide relief however flimsy and fragmentary, it is suggested that each of the famous six might recapitulate aloud the story of his life. The Statesman with his seasoned aplomb sets the ball rolling. It could be said that politics was in his blood, and he had breathed politics in his home. Even as a boy he "would find a simple solution to every difficulty". He was a brilliant student of political science, but after he had entered politics, it became painfully clear to him that his ideas couldn't be put into practice. He had to compromise more and more, adapt himself to circumstances and flatter the weaknesses of people. He was a success of course, and duly became Prime Minister at last. With real power in his hands. he now tried to rise above party politics, economic rivalries and the acerbities of narrow nationalism, but all in vain:

I wished for peace, concord, understanding between nations, collaboration for the good of all, and I was compelled by a force greater than mine to wage war and to triumph by unscrupulous means and uncharitable decisions.

Every war is a Mahabharata replayed under altered circumstances, and Truth is ever the first casualty. What thrives is only duplicity and inhumanity and criminal stupidity. Yet, in the end, when the Statesman had safely come through the blood and iron ordeal of the war, he was hailed as a hero and as a friend of humanity. But in his heart of hearts he knows

Page 577

the bitter unvarnished truth: "I have done very little and perhaps even very badly, and I shall cross the threshold of death sad and disillusioned."

The next to speak is the Writer, and this part was written by Nolini Kanta Gupta. After trying a whole lifetime with winged words - in lyric, drama, epic, novel - "to capture the beauty and the truth that throb in our mortality", he is now seized only with a gnawing sense of failure:

I feel I have not touched the true truth of things nor their soul of beauty. I have scratched the mere surface, I have caressed the outer robe that Nature puts on herself; but her very body, her own self has escaped me.

Instead of the numberless spans of thought and feet of sound which he had structured in his prose and verse, "a great silence, a sheer dumbness" may have served the purpose better. His whole adventure has been akin to that of a beautiful ineffectual angel beating in the void its luminous wings in vain. "Wherefore to have lived, wherefore to die? He has no answer. It is all a bad joke at once gruesome and useless."

II

It is the Scientist's turn, and the voice is Pavitra's. For the Scientist, "knowledge rather than action was the main attraction - knowledge in its modern guise: Science". His work was stimulated and governed by two postulates: firstly, that increase of knowledge would mean increase of power over Nature, which in its turn must contribute more and more to human progress; and secondly, that it was possible to know the real truth about the Universe. He specialised in physics, or rather atomic physics, and he was associated with the hard, dogged, one-pointed work on uranium fission and the birth of the atom bomb. He discovered too how atomic energy could be harnessed to the tasks of peace. Presently he stumbled on the discovery of a method of liberating atomic energy even from common metals like copper and aluminium. But he dared not publicise his discovery:

...what would happen if any criminal or crank or fanatic could in any make-shift laboratory, put together a weapon capable of blowing up Paris, London or New York! Would that not be the finishing blow for humanity?

His first postulate thus fell to pieces; "Scientific progress does not necessarily imply moral progress." More science might mean only a closer assignation with doom! Likewise, the second postulate too has failed to stand its ground. Scientific theories are not the writ of Truth; they are only symbols, formulas of convenience, essays in probability. "They do not bring us into touch with reality." Alas, all measurements, hypotheses, formulae - "they are as much subjective as well as objective and perhaps,

Page 578

in fact, they exist only in my mind." As a scientist he has no certitudes any longer!

The Artist now finds his voice. Born in a bourgeois family where art and artists were suspect, he had nevertheless opted to be a painter. "My entire consciousness was centred in my eyes," he recalls, "and I could express myself more easily by a sketch than in words." His first school was Nature, and he learnt a lot looking at landscapes, faces and drawings, and his precocious mastery of water colour, pastels and oil painting attracted attention, and he even earned some money. He then received regular training at the School of Fine Arts and became "one of the youngest artists ever to win the Prix de Rome", which gave him the opportunity to make a thorough study of Italian art. Later, he traveled on scholarships to Spain, Belgium, Holland, England and other countries studying art "in all forms, oriental as well as occidental". It was henceforth magisterial progress for him - prizes, titles, honours, affluence. And yet, what does it all amount to now, of what use are those triumphs?

We have to create new forms, with new methods and processes in order to express a new kind of beauty that is higher and purer, truer and nobler. So long as I still feel bound to human animality, I cannot free myself completely from the forms of material Nature.

Although the aspiration was there, he lacked the knowledge, the vision. His life, he must admit, has clearly been a failure!

When it is his turn, the Industrialist - this part was written by Andre - reviews the spectacular achievements of his life, the targets of mass production set and exceeded, the breathtaking new inventions, the high-pressure sales at competitive prices, the undreamt-of abridgement of distances, the unbelievable diffusion of affluence over vast areas. The great automobile revolution! And the surfeit of success:

My business began to grow as if it were a living thing. Whatever I undertook seemed to become successful. This is how I became almost a legendary figure, a demi-god who had created a new way of life, an example to follow....

This might be a modern Napoleon of industry like Henry Ford speaking. But this success is, after all, akin to that of a man who rides a tiger. Faster and faster must the business grow, farther and farther its tentacles extend, - or there must be a terrific and irretrievable crash! "My business is growing so rapidly," he muses, "that it now looks more like an inflated balloon than a living body moving harmoniously and steadily towards maturity." To what end all his vaunted successes? Are men truly happier today than before? Something had gone wrong with his calculations, and he feels that "there is a secret yet to be discovered; and without this discovery all our efforts are in vain".

Page 579

The last of the eminent men to speak is the Athlete - the writing of this part was assigned, appropriately enough, to Pranab Bhattacharya. Like the Statesman, the Athlete too claims a hereditary bent towards games, sports and physical exercises. His own father's speciality has been body-building and wrestling, his mother's were swimming, diving, archery, fencing and dancing. He had proved to be a worthy son, endowed with agility, alertness and a daring spirit; and during the long period of his schooling, year after year, in open championship he won almost all the trophies. He then entered the national arena and won the Decathlon event. From there to the world Olympics - and there too he won the Decathlon event with ease, scoring so high "as had never been done before nor has again been repeated". But even after this peak of success and glory, he began to feel an inexplicable sadness and emptiness. Outwardly he continued his triumphant career. He trained other athletes, organised teachers' training centres all over his country, and popularised physical culture among the masses. He won a world reputation, he was even called "superman"; but that was all the sheerest nonsense. Now when death stares him in the face, he has no illusions about his achievements. With all his laurels, he has remained "the slave of nature, a man"; he could not solve his problems in his lifetime. He cannot now help asking what good his physical perfection and ability, his feats of endurance, his organisational skill and international prestige - of what use have all these been? What has he missed so badly in the midst of all his run of successes and trophies?

III

It is clear that every one of them - the Statesman no less than the Writer or the Artist, the Industrialist no less than the Scientist or the Athlete - has made the best possible effort, reached the top of his profession and achieved phenomenal recognition. Yet all feel dissatisfied, sad, frustrated, resigned. But why? What went wrong? The glories of their striving and arriving have been but dead-sea fruit. They have surely missed something, perhaps the essential thing. Where exactly had they gone wrong? And now alas, it is too late to seek the solution to the riddle of their failure at the very pinnacle of their respective careers.

Just then - just when all seems hopeless beyond any possibility of retrieval - just then the voice of the unknown seventh survivor, the young almost ageless man whom they have so far wholly ignored (as the world too had ignored him earlier), his voice rises "calm, gentle, clear, full of a serene authority". The famous six are arrested to attention, and they listen with growing interest.

Yes, he will tell them what they want to know, where they have failed, how they have missed the pearl of immeasurable price in their excessive

Page 580

preoccupation with the inessentials. Strange indeed that the elite of the élite they who had in their several ways reached the summit of their ambitions, should now feel only an abyss yawning before them. None of them had given serious thought as to what would have contributed to their intrinsic good or to the real and lasting good of the human aggregate. They were doubtless intelligent men, but their mental consciousness had failed even to pose the right questions. They were yet to see that "behind these fleeting appearances there is an eternal reality, behind this unconscious and warring multitude there is a single, serene Consciousness, behind these endless and innumerable falsehoods there is a pure, radiant Truth, behind this obscure and obdurate ignorance there is a sovereign knowledge". And one doesn't have to go far to seek and find it, for this Reality is here, here, here at the centre of our being, "as it is at the centre of the universe". Indeed, this centre is everywhere, the circumference is nowhere.

Religions no doubt talk of God - or gods - but the religionists' solutions are usually apt to be otherworldly. Not here, but on the other bank and shoal of Time - only on the thither side - is relief, salvation, bliss to be expected. This will not do! It is this world that has to change, it is in this life we have to overcome our limitations and ordain a new order:

...it is neither mystic nor imaginary; it is altogether concrete and disclosed to us by Nature herself, if we know how to observe her. For the movement of Nature is an ascending one; from one form, one species, she brings forth a new one capable of manifesting something more of the universal consciousness... the present human consciousness will be replaced by a new consciousness, no longer mental but supramental. And this consciousness will give birth to a higher race, superhuman and divine.

And now is the time when this possibility, this thrust into the future, this breaking of the present and the remoulding of the future, should take place. Only this inevitable, this imminent, this radical change in consciousness can solve the current conundrum of defeat in success, despair in progress, that daunts and overwhelms mankind:

We must become concretely what we are essentially; we must live integrally the truth, the beauty, the power and the perfection that are hidden in the depths of our being, and then all life will become the expression of the sublime, eternal, divine Joy.

Of course, this is the Mother herself addressing the statesmen, the potentates, the captains of industry, the scientists and technocrats, the writers, artists, athletes, Napoleons of commerce, and all the rest of the pillars of society. The situation of extreme limit, with which the play opens, may not have visibly developed already, but the Mother with her precise occult vision could see the unfolding situation even in 1954. The Great Secret is thus no exercise in fancy, but a terribly earnest appraisal of

Page 581

current pointers and a formulation of the only possible solution to the ills of mankind.

The Writer is the first to find his voice. The Unknown Man's words have gone home, a new door is opening, a new hope is dawning in the heart. But isn't it all too late? "No, it is not too late," says the Unknown Man, "it is never too late." And he also makes the fervent appeal:

Let us unite our wills in a great aspiration; let us pray for an intervention of the Grace. A miracle can always happen. Faith has a sovereign power... let us invoke with sincerity this new Consciousness, this new Force, Truth, and Beauty which must manifest, so that the earth may be transformed and the supramental life realised in the material world.

Then they concentrate in silence as he articulates the prayer:

O Supreme Reality, grant that we may live integrally the marvellous secret that is now revealed to us.

Suddenly the Artist sights a ship in the far distance, and the Athlete jumps and pulls out his handkerchief and waves it. Evidently their prayer has been heard, and as the ship comes nearer, the Unknown Man says slowly: "Here is salvation, here is New Life!"

IV

If The Great Secret presents forcefully the developing human tragedy and the sole means of averting it: how the distressing world drama is unfolding with exponential speed as if driven by fatality, how mankind is racing madly towards the abyss, and how only a breakthrough in consciousness can meet the crisis, a breakthrough that must be the result as much of mankind's united one-pointed ascent of Aspiration as of the timely descent of Grace, the same Vision is projected also in the companion dramatic piece (or pageant) The Ascent to the Truth.² In The Great Secret, it is a simplified and modernised Noah's Ark that is enacted, agonisingly relevant to the conditions of the nuclear age. In The Ascent to the Truth, which is described as "a Drama of Life", there is the adventurous climbing up the slopes of Aspiration, and the sustained effort needed to reach the heights. It seems not unlike the climactic situation in Ibsen's Brand or in Tagore's The Child. In her pre-Pondicherry period the Mother had first made a painting she called "Ascent to the Truth"³ and this painting was to inspire the Ashram children to represent the idea in sand and fossil in 1954, and it was gratifying to the Mother that the children's flowering consciousness could thus respond to the hope and the challenge conveyed by the picture.⁴ The written dramatic piece is but the Mother's elaboration of the painting and of the children's vivid evocation of it in sand and fossil.

Page 582

As in The Great Secret, here too a group of people are got together, as it were: the Philanthropist, the Pessimist, the Scientist, the Artist, the three Students, the two Lovers, the Ascetic, and the two Aspirants, a dozen typal characters in all. They have all come together in the studio of the Artist, and the evening has lost itself in the night. Their meeting draws to a close, and the Artist would like to clinch the issue of the proposed assault on the Hill to reach its summit of Truth. The Philanthropist - the man of goodwill and the do-gooder - declares that his labours so far haven't given him satisfying results; and he feels convinced that without the "true meaning of life" he cannot help people effectively. The Pessimist, having failed so often and suffered so much injustice, can now believe in nothing, and hope for nothing; but he would like to have a go at the quest for the Truth. The two Aspirants, who have chosen the Infinite because they have been chosen by the Infinite, who are bound by no carnal or sentimental ties but only by their common aspiration, are willing to join the great search for the Truth. The two Lovers, on the contrary, are eager to realise perfection in human love, and agree to join the search hoping for the perfect truth of love. The Ascetic warns the others that the quest must involve "dangers and risks, of threats and deceptive illusions" of all sorts, but as he has disciplined himself through his lifelong austerities, he is ready for all the sacrifices his quest may ask for. The rest - the Scientist, the three Students - have no firm opinion either way, and the Artist therefore announces the consensus:

So we are all agreed: together, by uniting our efforts, we shall climb this sacred mountain that leads to the Truth... for when one reaches the summit, one can look upon the Truth and all problems must necessarily be solved.

The next morning, the pilgrims assemble and start the journey, and at an easy canter along a wide path reach the first stage, a kind of green plateau. They arrive together still full of "energy and enthusiasm" and scan the valley below. But, with humanity left behind on the plains, the Philanthropist finds his occupation gone. Where are the relief works to organise? Where are the waifs, wastrels, down-and-outs, where are the delinquents, do-nothings, where are the wretched of the earth to reclaim and rehabilitate? You cannot practise philanthropy among crags and trees and ravines! The Philanthropist decides to abandon his quest for the Truth. "Do not ask me to stay with you," he tells his companions; "I must leave you and return to my duty." As he starts descending towards the valley, the others are surprised and disappointed, but the Ascetic exhorts them to continue the ascent.

The path narrowed and wound round the spurs of the massive rocky mountain but at the second stage the slope became steeper turning suddenly at right angles and blocking the view further up, while below them

Page 583

lay "a long, white, very dense cloud". It seemed they were completely isolated from the world! But all pass on, still in more or less high spirits, except the Pessimist who "sinks down... by the roadside". He had begun the quest with a lot of reservations and now, cut off from the world below, felt "nothing is left on which we can base our understanding"; the upward path too was blocked from view! Can any good come out of this foolhardy quest? What next? "After all, there might not even be any Truth to discover." The Pessimist suddenly makes up his mind: "I won't move, I refuse to be taken in!" He is convinced that "The world and life are only a dead end - a hell in which we are imprisoned."

At the third stage, the Scientist and the Artist decide to call the whole thing off. The Scientist finds no opportunities for "constant experimentation"; he feels like a man whose occupation is gone. "Our endeavour is not at all scientific," he announces. The Artist too finds the adventure a barren exercise. He has seen new beauties on the way, but finds no time to turn them into significant forms. He must pause and ponder to express his recent experiences in artistic terms:

When I have said all that I have to say, I shall take up the ascent again and I shall rejoin you, wherever you are, in quest of new discoveries.

It is all typical of the respective professional attitudes. The Scientist must pose his problems, set his controlled experiments, and anxiously look for evidence and make his pointer-readings. An adventure into the wholly unknown and utterly unpredictable is not quite "scientific", and he cannot afford to waste any more of his time. "Yes, I prefer my own methods," he says self-defensively; "they are more rational. They are based on constant experimentation and I do not take a step forward until I am sure of the validity of the previous one." The Artist is not so completely unresponsive to the gains of the quest, but he desires to record the impact of his experiences and he needs time to find the appropriate rhythms and symbols and colours. For the time being, he has had his fill of new impressions, and he will now assimilate them, shape them anew and charge them with incandescent life. The ascent can wait. Alike for the Scientist and the Artist, their initial enthusiasm has worn off. They both decide to drop off from the climb.

Every hour has meant a new trial of faith and endurance, and a new call for dedication. And not all the pilgrims can meet the challenge, and not all along the way. The two Aspirants and the Ascetic have gone ahead with unfaltering steps, never casting a look behind. The Lovers have lagged a little behind, engrossed in each other and oblivious of the rest, whether ahead of them or left behind them. The three Students (two boys and a girl) who come in the rear of the Lovers are already panting. One of the boys feels utterly exhausted, and is inclined to rest for a while. "No, no, there's no question of giving up," he tells his comrades. "But why don't we

Page 584

rest a while?" The tamasic sophistry infects the other two Students also, although they know full well that "it is dangerous to linger on the way". Alas, they have neither the needed faith nor the needed endurance. The Lovers, however, are not so much tired as mutually absorbed clasping each other. What if some have raced forward, and some have given the game up at a lower stage; the Lovers are a world unto themselves- and aren't they perfectly happy together? At the fifth stage, a lone small house facing the sky, but "just off the path", proves an intense attraction - "isolated and yet so welcoming, so intimate and yet opening on infinite space" - and an ideal sanctuary to enact the fulfilment of their love. They decide to move into the house and surrender to their love "without a care for anything else".

Almost near the top, "the end of the path has become extremely narrow and stops abruptly at the foot of a huge rock whose sheer wall rises towards the sky, so that the summit is out of sight." But to the left there is a small plateau with a tiny hut which lures the Ascetic. He calls the other two - the Aspirants - and tells them with due solemnity:

In the course of our ascent I have discovered my true being, my true Self. I have become one with the Eternal and nothing else exists for me, nothing else is necessary. All that is not That is illusory, worthless.

He has reached his journey's end, and he will now retire to the solitary hut to live in perfect contemplation. We might imagine him lost in Śivo'ham! Śivo'ham! That alone is the Reality, all else is the magic of māyā, the phantasmagoria or the baseless fabric of illusion.

V

Undaunted by the drop-outs, even by the decision of the austere Ascetic to seek his own way to peace, the two Aspirants haul themselves up with a supreme effort and reach the summit at last. The long and steep ascent up the slopes of impatience, doubt, weariness, lassitude, hedonism, escapism, complacency has brought the two to the Everest of - what? It is a whiteness and flatness and a silence beyond comprehension. What next? Where to go? What to do? They converse with a sense of urgency and a waiting on the unexpected:

First Aspirant: Obviously, all possibility of personal effort ends here. Another power must intervene.

Second Aspirant: Grace, Grace alone can act. Grace alone can open the way for us. Grace alone can perform the miracle.

First Aspirant: (stretching his arm towards the horizon) Look, look over there, far away, on the other side of the bottomless abyss, that peak

Page 585

resplendent with brilliant light, those perfect forms, that marvellous harmony, the promised land, the new earth.

Second Aspirant: Yes, that is where we must go. But how?

First Aspirant: Since that is where we must go, the means will be given to us.

Second Aspirant: Yes, we must have faith, an absolute trust in the Grace, a total surrender to the Divine.

They take a definitive quantum leap into the Future, canter to the arms of the Divine, and leave all the accumulated past behind. Borne by invisible wings, their feet presently touch "a land of fairy light". The second Aspirant looks round and says: "What marvellous splendour! Now we have only to learn to live the new life." In other words, the Life Divine in the transfigured world of the Next Future. As Sri Aurobindo puts it in Savitri:

A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell

And take the charge of breath and speech and act

And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns

And every feeling a celestial thrill.

Often a lustrous inner dawn shall come

Lighting the chambers of the slumbering mind;

A sudden bliss shall run through every limb

And Nature with a mightier Presence fill.⁵

The Great Secret and The Ascent to the Truth are dramatic presentations of ultimate Possibility - of a revolutionary leap into the Future - they must have come to the Mother more or less as simultaneous and complementary apocalyptic Visions. Varieties of human beings appear as recognisable types, but the central actors are really Human Aspiration and Divine Grace: one calls and the other responds.

In The Great Secret, the characters are trapped by destiny to start self-examination in real earnest and face the truth of their respective failures. In the second play. The Ascent to the Truth, the characters impose a trial of faith and endurance upon themselves, and fail one after another on the way. In the end, the key action is a great Aspiration - in the first play, all the survivors aspire together and call for an intervention of Grace, while in the second the Aspirants enact absolute self-giving to the Divine Will and make total surrender - which provokes the immediate and adequate response of Grace. There is a Future now, alike for the survivors in the boat and for the Aspirants, but it will not be a Future merely continuing or repeating the present or the past; it will be a New Future, a supramentalised Future, or simply the Next Future when Man and Nature shall have exceeded themselves and become Superman and Supernature.

Page 586