The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 11

In These Fateful Days

      To destroy is easy; to create, it is difficult.

      The vital force destroys in its violence, it is the spirit that creates in its energy of consciousness.

      The vital force is easily available to man. The spirit is a far cry.

      And yet there is no other way out: if man is to be saved, that is the only way left before him.

      If man's destiny is to fulfil—fulfil the purpose of creation, he will have to find out the way of the spirit. If in his present mood of perversity, he pursues blindly the urge that has possessed him, he will surely annihilate himself—willingly or unwillingly he will commit hara-kiri.

      Fortunately for man, souls are there yet upon earth who have found the truth, souls that have declared unhesitatingly with the Upanishadic Rishi: "I know this being luminous as the sun beyond all darkness"; and that truth will be out, burst forth and spread abroad. Or in the words of the Biblical son of man: "I am from above.... I am not of this world....I am He...." (St. John.)

      And in the end may it not be that the present ruins and ravages are merely a symptom or a resultant of the pressures that the forces of the new creation are exerting from behind or from above? It is always true, it is a fact that any creation, for that matter, any happening on the material plane is already prepared or pre-figured within or behind in a subtler region. We all know Gita's

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tremendous vision: "all these have already been slain by Me"—the battle is fought, won or lost in another world beforehand; what we see on the material level are only the debris, disjecta membra, of forms and limbs thrown down from there. Only the sweeping or clearing is being done here for the appearance and establishment of what already has been built up unseen behind the material curtain. Or as it is sometimes given as an illustration or example, the breakage is that of the surface shell due to the pressing emergence of the fully formed living creature within.

      One creates through one's consciousness, not through one's hands. A true creation must have at its origin the true consciousness, and a true consciousness has always the power to create invincibly; for consciousness is identified with essential energy. Chit and Tapas are one and the same.

      The seed of consciousness has to be sown in the field of our being, whether it is the individual or the collective being. How is it to be done? And who is to find the seed? There must be some one or even a few who are the prophets, pioneers or forerunners, who are the appointed missionaries. You or I may be elected as one if we choose to be so.

      A vital force can create, but if it is not supported or inspired by something else, something inner, deeper and higher, the creation can be only an asuric (titanic) or rakshasik (demoniac) or even a pishachic (ghoulish) one, not a thing of light and happiness and harmony, but a thing made of obscurity and perversion, of pain and suffeing:

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we saw in practice something of it—fortunately shortlived—in the Hitlerian or Stalinian regime; a soulless mental or vital or physical being can create but a chaos.

      In the deluge of Doomsday the Lord himself appears and holds aloft safe the supreme Knowledge, the matrix of a new creation—the divine Ark. Indeed those alone who have souls, who are made of the soul-consciousness, who are in effect, parts and points, centres of the divine Being, will survive and form the nucleus of the new humanity— the rest if they cannot be corrected or converted will naturally be extirpated annihilated or else relegated to a status of barbarism worse than the animal life. But we expect a better fate for mankind.

      Today we call it—à la manière Churchill—our finest hour—for it is the hour when we have at our disposal the greatest opportunity to find our soul—even our God.

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