Mother's Chronicles - Book Five

11

Nineteen Hundred

Looking back on the century gone by, Sri Aurobindo said, "The nineteenth century in Europe was a pre-eminently human era —now the vital world seems to be descending there." The invasion of the Vital caused the rout of the Intellect. "The setback to the human mind in Europe is amazing," reflected Sri Aurobindo in January 1939. "We had thought during the last years of the nineteenth century that the human mind had attained a certain level of intelligence and that it would have to be satisfied before any new idea could find acceptance. But it seems one can't rely on common sense to stand the strain. We find Nazi ideas being accepted; fifty years back it would have been impossible to predict their acceptance.... These Nazi ideas are infrarational."

The world was throwing up its blackest darkness —crookedness and corruption, cruelty and greed —smearing and permeating man's consciousness. "From one point of view," remarked Sri Aurobindo in December 1938, "there never was a time when humanity had come down so low as it has now. It looks as if a small number of violent men were the arbiters of

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humanity and the rest of the world ready to bow down before one man."

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At the turn of the century Sri Aurobindo jotted down in his diary: "The last century of the second millennium after Christ has begun; of the twenty centuries it seems the most full of incalculable possibilities and to open the widest door on destiny. The mind of humanity feels it is conscious of a voice of a distant advancing Ocean and a sound as of the wings of a mighty archangel flying towards the world, but whether to empty the vials of the wrath of God or to declare a new gospel of peace upon earth and goodwill unto men, is as yet dark to our understanding."

Soon it would no longer be dark to his understanding.

The first two decades of the twentieth century were to witness great human adventures, many natural calamities, and giant strides made by Science. This was the time when Amundsen reached the South Pole soon after Peary had conquered the North, when the Trans-Siberian railroad and the Panama Canal were completed. The solid Newtonian universe was shaken to its foundations by the theory of Relativity and quantum physics, while the Chinese and Soviet revolutions and the First World War showed how the road to peace was still long. The Earth seemed to agree: from the eruption of Mount Pelée to the California and Messina earthquakes, it kept reminding man that he is but 'a dwarf enamoured of the heights.'

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This was a memorable time for India too, for the renaissance of the nineteenth century was now bearing its fruit. With the partition of Bengal acting as a catalyst, the first great awakening of Indian masses shook the mighty British Empire.

In September 1909, in an interview with the correspondent of a Tamil nationalist weekly, India, Sri Aurobindo made the following prophecy. "Since 1907, we are living in a new era which is full of hope for India. Not only India, but the whole world will see sudden upheavals and revolutionary changes. The high will become low and the low high. The oppressed and the depressed shall be elevated. The nation and humanity will be animated by a new consciousness, new thought and new efforts will be made to reach new ends. Amidst these revolutionary changes, India will become free."

Ambalal B. Purani was a Gujarati and a revolutionary. In December 1918 he came to meet Sri Aurobindo at Pondicherry to inform him that after eleven years' preparation his group was "now ready to start revolutionary activity." Sri Aurobindo told him that it may not be necessary to resort to revolutionary activity to free India, as "India has already decided to win

freedom.........." Purani still said, "I feel intensely that I must do something for the freedom of India. I have been unable to sleep soundly for the last two years and a half." He wanted an assurance. Sri Aurobindo gave it in a serious tone : "Then, I give you the assurance that India will be free." But even this assurance from Sri Aurobindo did not completely dispel Purani's doubts. "Are you quite sure that India will be free?" Purani wanted a guarantee.

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"Sri Aurobindo became very serious," describes Purani. "His gaze was fixed at the sky that appeared beyond the window. Then he looked at me and putting his fist on the table he said, 'You can take it from me, it is as certain as the rising of the sun tomorrow. The decree has already gone forth, it may not be long in coming.'" So Purani bowed down to Sri Aurobindo and left. "That day I was able to sleep soundly in the train after more than two years. And in my mind was fixed for ever the picture of that scene: the two of us standing near the small table, my earnest question, that upward gaze, and that quiet and firm voice with power in it to shake the world, that firm fist planted on the table........."

So that was that. India's freedom was a certainty. But what role was to be assigned to her in the assembly of nations ?

In a 1915 interview to a correspondent of The Hindu Sri Aurobindo envisioned for India a great destiny, "a large place in the human future" as he put it. For, said he, "I believe also that humanity is about to enlarge its scope by new knowledge, new powers and capacities, which will create as great a revolution in human life as the physical science of the nineteenth century. Here, too, India holds in her past, a little rusted and put out of use, the key of humanity's future." Was he not thinking of the Veda in which he was then engrossed ? Did not the Rishis say some five or seven millennia ago, "Weave an inviolate work, become the human being, create the divine race... ?

That there was an urgent need of change in humanity was coming into sharp focus. "It is in these directions," he told

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The Hindu's correspondent, "that I have been for some time impelled to turn my energies rather than to the petty political activities which are alone open to us at the present moment. This is the reason of my continued retirement and detachment from action." Sri Aurobindo believed in the necessity of Tapasya in silence.

He was sure that "India, if it chooses, can guide the world." But what was India going to choose? What was the world going to choose? These were the crucial questions that confronted him. In his letters to Mother in 1915, he confided to her his forebodings.

"The whole earth is now under one law and answers to the same vibrations.... One needs to have a calm heart, a settled will, entire self-abnegation and the eyes constantly fixed on the beyond to live undiscouraged in times like these which are truly a period of universal decomposition." (6 May 1915)

What promise did 'the beyond' hold for the world?

"Heaven we have possessed, but not the earth; but the fullness of the Yoga is to make, in the formula of the Veda, 'Heaven and Earth equal and one'." (20 May 1915)

"Everything internal is ripe or ripening, but there is a sort of locked struggle in which neither side can make a very appreciable advance (somewhat like the trench warfare in Europe), the spiritual force insisting against the resistance of the physical world, that resistance disputing every inch and making more or less effective counter-attacks.... And if there were not the strength and Ananda within, it would be harassing and disgusting work; but the eye of knowledge looks beyond

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and sees that it is only a protracted episode." (28 July 1915)

"Nothing seems able to disturb the immobility of things and all that is active outside our own selves is a sort of welter of dark and sombre confusion from which nothing formed or luminous can emerge. It is a singular condition of the world, the very definition of chaos with the superficial form of the old world resting apparently intact on the surface. But a chaos of long disintegration or of some early new birth? It is the thing that is being fought out from day to day, but as yet without any approach to a decision." (16 September 1915)

At any rate, that the twentieth century was not going to be an ordinary century came out strongly in his writings. "The present era of the world" stated Sri Aurobindo in the Arya (July 1916), "is a stage of immense transformations. It may even be said that the future of humanity depends most upon the answer that will be given to the modern riddle of the Sphinx by the East and especially by India, the hoary guardian of the Asiatic ideal and its profound spiritual secrets. For the most vital issue of the age is whether the future progress of humanity is to be governed by the modern economic and materialistic mind of the West or by a nobler pragmatism guided, uplifted and enlightened by spiritual culture and knowledge."

Sri Aurobindo wrote a message at the request of Annie Besant for National Education Week (New India, 8 April 1918). We quote a passage from it: "This is an hour in which, for India as well as for all the world, its future destiny and the turn of its steps for a century are being powerfully decided, and for no ordinary century, but one which is itself a great

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turning-point, an immense turn-over in the inner and outer history of mankind."

The limitation, even the certain failure of all human systems was not hidden from Sri Aurobindo's sight. "No system, indeed," he wrote in 1920 in War and Self-Determination, "by its own force can bring about the change that humanity really needs; for that can only come by its growth into the firmly realised possibilities of its own higher nature, and this growth depends on an inner and not an outer change. But outer changes may at least prepare favourable conditions for that more real amelioration,—or on the contrary they may lead to such conditions that the sword of Kalki can alone purify the earth from the burden of an obstinately Asuric humanity. The choice lies with the race itself; for as it sows, so shall it reap the fruit of its Karma."

Let us hark back to 1910-11, for it was certainly from then on that his penetrating gaze had divined the burden imposed on the earth by 'an obstinately Asuric humanity' on the one side, and on the other, his eye of knowledge had looked beyond and seen the New World that was being created. "So much depends on Time and God's immediate purpose that it is more important to seek out His purpose than to attach ourselves to our own nostrums. The Kala Purusha, Zeitgeist and Death-Spirit, has risen to his dreadful work—lokaksayakrt pravrddhah, increasing to destroy a world —and who shall stay the terror and mightiness and irresistibility of Him? But He is not only destroying the world that was, He is creating the world that shall be; it is therefore more profitable for us to discover and help what He is

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building than to lament and hug in our arms what He is destroying.... Kali is the age for a destruction and rebirth, not for a desperate clinging to the old that can no longer be saved." Henceforth Sri Aurobindo was going to devote his time to discovering and helping create 'the world that shall be.'

"Has the time arrived for that destruction?" he asked. "We think that it has. Listen to the crash of those waters, more formidable than the noise of assault,—mark that slow, sullen, remorseless sapping,—watch pile after pile of our patched incoherent ramshackle structure corroding, creaking, shaking with the blows, breaking, sinking silently or with a splash, suddenly or little by little into the yeast of those billows." Today, at the end of the twentieth century, the uprooted flotsam and jetsam of the old world is floating in broad daylight in the great churning Ocean of Time.

"Has the time arrived for a new construction?" Sri Aurobindo asked again. "We say it has. Mark the activity, eagerness and hurrying to and fro of mankind, the rapid prospecting, seeking, digging, founding,—see the Avatars and great vibhūtis coming, arising thickly, treading each close behind the other. Are not these the signs and do they not tell us that the great Avatar of all arrives to establish the first Satya Yuga of the Kali?"

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Sri Aurobindo and Mrinalini at Nainital