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Satprem
Sri Aurobindo and the Earth's Future
This article was written for All India radio, broadcast on 1st
February 1972, on the occasion of Sri Aurobindo's Birth centenary.
Sometimes a great wandering Thought sees the yet unaccomplished ages,
seizes the force in its eternal flow and precipitates on earth the powerful
vision which is like a power able to materialize that which it sees.
The world is a vision coming into its truth. Its past and its present
are perhaps not really the result of an obscure impulse which goes back
to the depths of time, of a slow accumulation of sediments which little
by little fashion us only to stifle and hem us in. It is the powerful
golden attraction of the future which draws us in spite of ourselves,
as the sun draws the lotus from the mud, and drives us to a glory greater
than any of our mud or our efforts or our present triumphs could have
foreseen or created.
Sri Aurobindo is this vision and this power of precipitating the future
into the present. What he saw in an instant the ages and millions of
men will unwittingly accomplish. They will unknowingly set out in quest
of that new imperceptible quiver which has penetrated the earth's atmosphere.
From age to age great beings come amongst us to hew a great opening
of truth in the sepulchre of the past. And these beings are, in truth,
the great destroyers of the past. They come with the sword of Knowledge
and crumble our fragile empires.
This year, we are celebrating Sri Aurobindo's Birth Centenary. He is
known to barely a handful of men and yet his name will resound when
the great men of today or yesterday are buried under their own debris.
His work is discussed by philosophers, praised by poets. His sociological
vision and his yoga are acclaimed. But Sri Aurobindo is a living ACTION,
a Word made manifest which is even now being realised. And through the
thousand circumstances which seem to rend the earth and smash its structures
we daily witness the first reflux of the force which he has set in motion.
At the beginning of this century, when India was still struggling against
British domination, Sri Aurobindo declared: "It is not a revolt
against the British Government…(which is needed), it is, in fact,
a revolt against the whole universal Nature." [Evening Talks,
p.45].
For the problem is fundamental. It is not a question of bringing a new
philosophy to the world nor of so-called illuminations. It is not a
question of rendering the Prison of our lives more habitable, nor of
endowing man with ever more fantastic powers. Armed with his microscopes
and telescopes the human gnome remains none the less a gnome, wretched
and powerless. We send rockets to the moon but we know nothing of our
own hearts. "It is a question," says Sri Aurobindo,
"of creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation
of the Supramental being in a new evolution." [On Himself,
p. 172]. For, indeed, he says, "the imperfection of Man is not
the last word of Nature, but his perfection too is not the last peak
of the Spirit." [The Life Divine, p. 680]. Beyond mental man,
which is what we are, there opens the possibility of the emergence of
another being who will be the spearhead of evolution as man was once
the spearhead of evolution among the great apes. "If",
says Sri Aurobindo, "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." [The Life Divine,
p. 5]. Sri Aurobindo has come to tell us how to create this other being,
this supramental being, and not only to tell us but actually to create
this other being. He has come to open the path of the future, to hasten
upon earth the rhythm of evolution, the new vibration which will replace
the mental vibration - as a thought came one day and disturbed the slow
routine of the beasts - and which will give us the power to shatter
the walls of our human prison.
Indeed the prison is already crumbling. "The end of a stage
of evolution," announced Sri Aurobindo, "is usually
marked by a powerful recrudescence of all that has to go out of the
evolution." [The Ideal of the Karmayogin, p. 42]. Everywhere
about us we see this paroxysmal exploding of all the old forms: our
frontiers, our churches, our laws. Our morals crumble on all sides.
They do not crumble because we are bad, immoral, irreligious, nor because
we are not sufficiently rational, scientific, human, but precisely because
we have come to the end of being human! to the end of the old mechanism
- because we are in a state of transition towards SOMETHING ELSE. It
is not a moral crisis that the world is going through, it is an "evolutionary
crisis". We are not moving towards a better world, nor, for that
matter, towards a worse one. We are right in the midst of MUTATING into
a radically different world, as different as the world of man was different
from the ape-world of the Tertiary Age. We are entering a new era, a
supramental quinquennium. We leave our countries, become itinerants.
We go in quest of drugs, in quest of adventure. We go on strike here,
enact reforms there, start revolutions and counter-revolutions. But
this is only an appearance; in fact this is not at all what we are doing.
We are unwittingly in quest of the new being. We are in the midst of
human revolution.
And Sri Aurobindo gives us the key. It may be that the meaning of our
own revolution escapes us because we seek to prolong that which is already
in existence, to refine it, improve it, sublimate it. But the ape, in
the midst of his revolution which produced man, may have made the same
mistake and perhaps sought to become merely a super-ape, a better climber
of trees, a better hunter, a better runner, in short an ape with greater
agility and increased capacity for malice. With Nietzsche we also wanted
a "superman" who was nothing more than a colossalisation of
man. The spiritually minded want a super-saint more richly endowed with
virtue and wisdom. But we want nothing of human virtue and wisdom! Even
when carried to their extremest heights these are no more than the old
poverties gilded over, the obverse of our tenacious misery. "Supermanhood,"
says Sri Aurobindo, "is not man climbed to his own natural zenith,
not a superior degree of human greatness, knowledge, power, intelligence,
will, … genius, …saintliness, love, purity or perfection."
[The Hour of God, p. 6]. It is SOMETHING ELSE, another vibration of
being, another consciousness.
But if this new consciousness is not to be found on the peaks of the
human, where are we to find it? Perhaps, quite simply, it is to be found
in that which we have most neglected since we entered the mental cycle,
it is to be found in the body. The body is our base, our evolutionary
foundation, the old stock to which we must always return, and which
painfully compels our attention by making us suffer, age and die. "In
that imperfection", Sri Aurobindo assures us, "is the
urge towards a higher and more many-sided perfection. It contains the
last finite which yet yearns to the Supreme Infinite. God is pent in
the mire … but the very fact imposes a necessity to break through
that prison." [Sri Aurobindo came to me, p.414]. The old Ill
is still there never cured; the root has never changed, the dark matrix
of our misery is hardly different now from what it was in the time of
Lemuria. It is this physical substance which must be changed, transformed,
otherwise it will pull down, one after another, all the human and superhuman
artifices which we try to impose on it. This body, this physical cellular
substance shuts in "almighty powers" [Savitri, 4.3,
p.420], a dumb consciousness which harbours all the lights and all the
infinitudes just as well as all the mental and spiritual immensities.
For, in truth, all is Divine and unless the Lord of all the universe
resides in a single little cell he resides nowhere. It is this original,
dark cellular prison which we must shatter, and as long as we have not
shattered it, we will continue to turn in vain in our golden circles
or our iron circles of our mental prison. "These laws of Nature,"
says Sri Aurobindo, "that you call absolute … merely mean
an equilibrium established by Nature … it is merely a groove in
which Nature is accustomed to work in order to produce certain results.
But if you change the consciousness, then the groove also is bound to
change. " [Evening talks, p. 92].
This is the new adventure to which Sri Aurobindo calls us, an adventure
into man's unknown. Whether we like it or not the whole earth is passing
into a new groove, but why shouldn't we like it? Why shouldn't we collaborate
in this great, unprecedented adventure? Why shouldn't we collaborate
in our own evolution instead of repeating the same old story a thousand
times, instead of chasing hallucinatory heavens which will never quench
our thirst or otherwordly paradises which leave the earth to rot along
with our bodies? "Why should life have begun at all if it is
only to be climbed out of?" exclaims the Mother, She who continues
Sri Aurobindo's work. "What is the use of having struggled so
much, suffered so much, of having created something which, in its outer
appearance at least is so tragic, so dramatic, if it is only to learn
how to climb out of it - it would have been better if it had not been
started at all …Evolution is not a tortuous path which brings us
back, somewhat battered, to the starting-point. It exists ",
says the Mother, "quite on the contrary, in order to teach the
whole of creation the joy of being, the beauty of being, the grandeur
of being, the majesty of a sublime life and the perpetual development,
perpetually progressive, of this joy, this beauty, this grandeur. Then
everything has a meaning. " [Talks/Questions and Answers 1958:
12.11.58]
This body, this obscure beast of burden which we inhabit, is the experimental
field of Sri Aurobindo's yoga of the whole earth. One can readily understand
that if a single being amidst our millions of sufferings, manages to
negotiate the evolutionary leap, the mutation of the next age, the face
of the earth will be radically changed. Then all the so-called powers
with which we glorify ourselves today will seem childish games before
the radiance of this all-mighty spirit incarnated in the body. Sri Aurobindo
tells us that it is possible, not only that it is possible but that
it will be done. It is being done now and all depends not so much perhaps
on a sublime effort of humanity to transcend its limitation - for it
means still using our own human strength to free ourselves from human
strength - as on a call, a conscious cry of the earth to this new being
which the earth already carries within itself. All is there, already
within our hearts, the supreme Source which is the supreme Power, but
we must call it into our concrete forest. We must understand the meaning
of man, the meaning of ourselves. The multi-voiced cry of the earth,
of its millions of men who cannot bear the human condition any longer,
who no longer accept their prison, must create a crack through which
will surge in the new vibration. Then all the apparently ineluctable
laws which close us into our hereditary and scientific groove will crumble
before the Joy of the "sun-eyed children" [Savitri,
3.4, p. 389].
"Expect nothing of death," says the Mother, "life
is your salvation. It is in life that we must transform ourselves. It
is on earth that we progress. It is on earth that we can accomplish.
It is in the body that the Victory is won. " [Talks/Questions
and Answers 1957: 27.12.57]
And Sri Aurobindo says: "Nor let worldly prudence whisper too
closely in thy ear; for it is the hour of the unexpected."
[The Hour of God, p. 4]
December 9, 1971
Satprem
[translated from the French by Maggi Lidchi, Pondicherry]
Published in 1973, re-published in 1975 by
Sri Aurobindo
Ashram, Pondicherry, India
See the French original
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