Mother's Chronicles - Book Six

12

God's Cracker

Aeons passed.

Aeons had passed before.

But when aeons were not?

When "Time moved not yet nor Space was unrolled wide?"¹ Whamm! Cra-a-a-ck! Boom-booom-boo-ooom! What was that whiz-bang? A cracker bursting? My friends, had we been there to hear that ear-splitting noise, we would have had no ears left to hear anything. It was God setting off his cracker with a 'big bang' signalling the start of the World Game. Said Ishwar the God to Ishwari the Goddess:

"When Light first from the unconscious Immense burst to create nebula and sun

'Twas the meeting of our hands through the empty Night that enkindled the fateful blaze;

The huge systems abandoned their inert trance and this green crater of life rose

That we might look on each other form on form from the depths of a living gaze."²

¹ 'The World Game,' a poem by Sri Aurobindo.

⁸ Ibid.

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I recently read with interest that "astronomers looked 8000 light-years with the Hubble Space Telescope and it seemed that the eye of God was staring back."¹

When the Earth was young, she was a fanciful little maid. Hers was a playground of miracles. Time was timeless. Over geological aeons she made and remade her lands and seas (not that she has stopped!). Sculpting, painting now this picture then that. Always new. Always different. She is a great artist, our lass Earth. She formed huge landmasses—the continents—that move around the planet. At the surface ride more than a dozen huge, stiff fragments, or plates. They move at a tortoise's pace, but traverse thousands of kilometres over millions of years. As they drift, the plates collide and separate, in the process changing the face of the Earth and rearranging her features.

Once our young Earth formed a vast landmass: Pangea, part of which became Gondwanaland. An ancient super continent, Gondwanaland included in its landmass the present Antarctica, Africa, South America, Australia, and India. One fine day, about 160 million years ago, it began to break up. Each mobile fragment went its way. A small wedge went adventuring. It drifted and drifted. How delicious it was to sail along so lazily! The sun kissed it with its myriad rays. The wind blew over it, warbling, whispering sweet nothings. The sky twinkled at it with its million stars. The great, tropical Tethys Sea, wide as today's Atlantic, cradled it. It was lost in a reverie.

Wha-a-mm! What a jolt! Like a skittish kid it went and butted against the underside of the Eurasian continent. You

¹ National. Geographic, January 1997. Many scientists believe that the 'Big Bang' took place about 15 billion years ago. Give or take a billion or two.

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know how a calf butts its mother's underbelly to get more milk? Well, it was not milk that flowed from this particular impact. Instead, the great Himalayas rose. India became a part of Asia.¹

The young lass never ceases to amaze us. Full of whims, the 'green crater of life' now began to evolve 'life.' Whimsical, yes. But so very painstaking! Just note how she set in motion 'evolution,' whose beginnings our present-day biologists are still unveiling. Note also that the lass has her head well screwed on her shoulders. For, before creating 'life' she did not forget to create ingredients for sustenance of 'life'—atmospheric chemistry was in place.

"I suppose," wrote Sri Aurobindo to my father on 1^SI December 1935, "I suppose a matter-of-fact observer if there had been one at the time of the unrelieved reign of inanimate Matter in the earth's beginning would have criticised any promise of the emergence of life in a world of dead earth and rock and mineral as an absurdity and a chimera; so too afterwards he would have repeated his mistake and regarded the emergence of thought and reason in an animal world as an absurdity and a chimera...."² Let's then give the lass a standing ovation for her handiwork. From a mass of gases to inanimate Matter, to a

' Pangea began breaking up during the Triassic (220 million years ago); by the Jurassic (150 m. y. a.), the Tethys ocean had formed. "Until 65 million years ago, a great ocean, the Tethys, separated India from Asia. There were no Himalayas and no Tibetan Plateau. These high points of today's globe were created by the slow collision of India and Asia, and are still being forced upwards today as the plate carrying India grinds to a halt. The area around present-day Lhasa was an island, dividing the Tethys into two parts." ('Remains of an ancient ocean,' The Hindu, 9 September 1999.) ² Sri Aurobindo and Mother to Prithwi Singh,, p. 62.

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protoplasm, to gigantic dinosaurs, to hominids that led to us: Homo sapiens.

Our lass turned out to be a great Creatrix.

Scientists believe that 'life' on Earth began about four billion years ago. "The oldest rocks of Earth," writes V. B. Scheffer,¹ "showing evidence of life preserve the fossils of one-celled, microbial species only." Defying conventional wisdom, the planet of 'inanimate Matter' became a living world. There exist three-billion-year old fossilized microbes that closely resemble living bacteria.

When our lass made the first cell, she put a code in it. The Code of Life. A little hesitating at first, she began to move from single-celled to multi-celled stage. It was a momentous event. As she became adept at handling her imaginative creations she also went on to develop extraordinary strategies of survival.²

Our clever lass, not satisfied with a mere 'survival of life' code, also implanted something else in each species. An urge. A few individuals in each species felt the urge to push against its physical limitations of life and get out of its habitual rut. Weirdoes to the average members. Pioneers to the next generation.

Fantastic indeed is the handiwork of our lass. "The inventiveness of Nature during eons of time," marvels V. B. Schaffer, "has brought diversity to the animal world." Naturally. That was

¹ Spires of Form, Glimpses of Evolution.

- Nematodes, for example. Those microscopic worms go into a lifeless state when moisture departs. But they are not dead. It's a trance-like state. When the tiniest bit of moisture comes along, "the nematode emerge from their freeze-dried state and go back to eating bacteria." (National Geographic, October 1998, p. 132)

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the idea, no? To "look on each other form on form." So, through biological times she increased the diversity of species. And if, perchance, she did not like her handiwork she brought about a cataclysm and wiped out the species. Her latest major diversity being the species of bipeds, the modern Homo sapiens.

No, but see how our lass delights in complexity! Beginning with one single cell she has gone on to build creatures with trillions of cells. Then in the human genome she has inscribed roughly three and a half billion letters.¹ Again how very complex she did make a human brain! "Every second, more than ten billion neurones send electrochemical signals round your head at speeds up to 400 kmph."- Enough to keep our heads spinning!

The question uppermost in the minds of scientists is when, where and how Homo sapiens appeared on planet Earth. Most scientists now believe , because of evidence found there, that it was in Africa, around 125,000 years ago that modern Homo sa/liens appeared." Did that happen following a cataclysm? With ever new discoveries by pale anthropologists the dawn of humans is being rolled back. Scientists still debate the time.

Let the scientists debate. "A whole lot of Earth's history is unknown to us," Mother pointed out pertinently.⁴ Let the

¹National Geographic, October 1999 (p. 55).

²'How to Have Brilliant Ideas' by Nick Morgan (Reader's Digest, August 2000).

³Had the same amount of assiduous excavations as carried out in Africa, been done in other parts of the world—China or India—I am sure they would have found enough evidence to conclude that humans appeared simultaneously at several places on the Earth.

⁴Mother's Agenda, 17 October 1964.

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scientists puzzle out Nature's secrets. There are other means of knowing.

The memories of the dawn of humans remain embedded in Earth's memory. Some people have access to the storehouse. Mother has already taken us with her on a voyage of her memories of an earthly paradise,¹ when man lived in harmony with Nature.

Sri Aurobindo, in his turn, describes vividly that Nature. "Visions of waters blue in an immortal sunlight or grey in the drifting of a magic welter of cloud and rain, rocks swept by the surf and shifting in their hollows with the wind, island meadows and glades many-pictured above the sea, rivers and haze-purpled hills, a scene of unimaginable beauty where forms moved that had not lost the pristine beauty of man before the clutch stiffened on him of early decay and death, of grief and old age, where hearts beat that had not lost the pulsations of our ancient immortality and were not yet attuned to the broken rhythms of pain and grief... ."-

There are many things hidden in time that we have yet to learn. I am not a scientist, that is clear. I am not an intellectual, that's evident. Mine is an average brain. Therefore nothing binds it down to one single track. It wanders. It wonders.

I mused. Does not the interdependence of everything in Nature show us that it is all the work of one and the same hand? Did not our lass bestow equal loving care to the minute and the gigantic forms when she fashioned them? Now, the

¹ Mother's Chronicles, Book Three, ch. 6.

- 'Srevian, A Tale of Prehistoric Times' (Archives, April 1983, p. 49)

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question is, why this proliferation of forms? Why more and more complex, 'evolved' life forms? All this prodigious work of the Earth is then aimless? Or does she have an aim and a purpose? If we look carefully, we discover that Earth-nature has followed an amazing plan. Probe deep, and we find that Earth's aim was—is—to develop consciousness. Now, my friends, does it seem logical or reasonable to you to suppose that Earth-nature's billions of years' meticulous work is destined to be destroyed in a jiffy by the degraded bipeds, Homo sapiens sapiens ? Non-sapiens, actually, because our ignorance is simply colossal. The lass who put a code of conduct in the cells of each species, changed her formula when she came to the most complex of
her creations: the humans. She gave humans the liberty of choice. The choice of participating in her creative evolution, or committing enough error to destroy their own species (not to speak of the destruction of other species). But it seems quite illogical to me to think that Earth will rest on her laurels after having created this particular genus of bipeds, at present the 'pinnacle' of evolution. Would it not be more reasonable to suppose that Earth's evolutionary process is leading towards another type of being? Not necessarily different from us in form, but rather in substance. I can well imagine a type of being whose consciousness will not-cannot-Iend itself to degradation, but which will scale higher and higher peaks of knowledge, deeper and deeper oceans of reality. Sri Aurobindo called the new type 'supramental. '

"The descent of the supramental is an inevitable necessity in the logic of things and is therefore sure," had begun Sri Aurobindo in the same letter to my father. "It is because people

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do not understand what the supermind is or realise the significance of the emergence of consciousness in a world of '.inconscient' Matter that they are unable to realise this inevitability...." He said at the end of the letter, "It is the same now with the appearance of supermind in the stumbling mentality of this world of human consciousness and its reasoning ignorance."¹ The question that pops up is why did the great Creatrix give such a liberty to the human race? Maybe she wished to have some creatures to consciously share the World-Game with her? Share her joy of creation, partake of the rapture of God's bliss? She invites us to embark upon the adventure of life. To make a clear and willed choice. She beckons us to probe the mystery of existence. That is why, to put it in Mother's words, "It is the substance of physical life which wants to know its profound law."-

As Mother peeled off layer after layer of mystery wrapped round the cell, she could say: "A certitude at the bottom of Matter that the solution lies THERE."

The reason behind Sri Aurobindo and Mother joining forces in South India was to accelerate the process of evolution.

Towards the completion of her work, Mother's memory was freed. A cellular memory.

"We have to descend right to the very bottom, in quest of that marvellous bursting of the Vibration of Love."

¹ Sri Aurobindo and Mother to Prtihwi Singh, l^st Dec. 1935.

2 Mother's Agenda, 30 October 1964. On Satprem's 4T' birth anniversary

Mother revealed the great secret to him.

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