SELF-DETERMINATION   A new  phrase has recently been cast out from the bloodstained yeast of war into the shifty language of politics,— that strange language full of Maya and falsities, of self-illusion and deliberate delusion of others, which almost immediately turns all true and vivid phrases into a jargon, so that men may fight in a cloud of words without any clear sense of the thing they are battling for,—it is the luminous description of liberty as the just power, the freely exercised right of self-determination. The word is in itself a happy discovery, a thought-sign of real usefulness. For it helps to make definite and manageable what was apt till now to be splendidly vagu

A LEAGUE OF NATIONS         Ancient tradition believed in a golden age of mankind which lay in the splendid infancy of a primeval past; it looked back to some type or symbol of original perfection, Saturnian epoch, Satya Yuga, an age of sincere being and free unity when the sons of heaven were leaders of the human life and mind and the law of God was written, not in ineffective books, but on the tablets of man's heart. Then he needed no violence of outer law or government to restrain him from evil or to cut and force his free being into the machine-made Procrustean mould of a social ideal; for a natural divine rule in his members was the spontaneous and sufficient safeguard of hi

AFTER THE WAR         The great war has for some time been over: it is already receding into the near distances of the past. Around us is a black mist and welter of the present, before us the face of a dim and ambiguous future. It is just possible, however, to take some stock of the immediate results of the war,although by no stretch of language can the world situation be called clear, for it is marked rather by chaotic drift and an unexampled confusion. The ideals which were so loud of mouth during the collision—mainly as advertising agents of its conflicting interests,—are now discredited and silent: an uneasy locked struggle of irreconcilable forces entangled in an inextricable clasp

THE UNSEEN POWER         A war has ended, a world has perished in the realm of thought and begun to disappear in the order of outward Nature. The war that has ended, was fought in physical trenches, with shell and shot, with machine-gun and tank and aeroplane, with mangling of limbs and crash of physical edifices and rude uptearing of the bosom of our mother earth; the new war, or the old continued in another form, that is already beginning, will be fought more with mental trenches and bomb-proof shelters, with reconnaissances and batteries and moving machines of thought and word, propaganda and parties and programmes, with mangling of the desire-souls of men and of nations, crash o

1919         The year 1919 comes to us with the appearance of one of the most pregnant and historic dates of the modern world. It has ended the greatest war in history, begotten a new thing in the history of mankind, a League of Nations which claims to be the foundation-stone for the future united life of the human race, and cleared the stage for fresh and momentous other constructions or destructions, which will bring us into another structure of society and of the frame-work of human life than has yet been known in the recorded memory of the earth's peoples. This is record enough for a single year and it looks as if there were already sufficient to give this date an undisputed pre-eminence in

Publishers' Note         The three books — The Human Cycle, The Ideal of Human Unity and War and Self-Determination—printed and published originally as separate volumes and at different times, are put together here in one volume : they form in fact a unit, a trilogy as it were, depicting the historical process that the Time-Spirit deploys in the elaboration of the divine plan in the evolution of human life.         The Human Cycle in its first edition (1949) was prefaced with the following explanatory note:       "The Chapters constituting this book were written under the title 'The Psychology of Social Development' from month to month in the philosophical monthly, '

THE PASSING OF WAR ?         The progress of humanity proceeds by a series of imaginations which the Will in the race turns into accomplished facts and a train of illusions which contain each of them an inevitable truth. The truth is there in the secret Will and Knowledge that are conducting our affairs for us and it reflects itself in the soul of mankind; the illusion is in the shape we give to that reflection, the veil of arbitrary fixations of time, place and circumstance which that deceptive organ of knowledge, the human intellect, weaves over the face of the Truth. Human imaginations are often fulfilled to the letter; our illusions on the contrary find the truth behind them r

SRI AUROBINDO INTERNATIONAL CENTRE OF EDUCATION COLLECTION   VOL. IX   THE HUMAN CYCLE THE IDEAL OF HUMAN UNITY WAR AND SELF-DETERMINATION   Sri Aurobindo       SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM PONDICHERRY 1962 Publishers: © Sri Aurobindo International Centre Of Education, Pondicherry 1962     All rights reserved     Printed at: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press Pondicherry-2 PRINTED IN INDIA

WAR AND SELF-DETERMINATION   FOREWORD   (To the first edition)         The four essays1 published in this volume were not written at one time or conceived with any intentional connection between them in idea or purpose. The first was written in the early months of the war, two others when it was closing, the last recently during the formation and first operations of that remarkably ill-jointed, stumbling and hesitating machine, the League of Nations. But still they happen to be bound together by a common idea or at least look at four related subjects from a single general standpoint,—the obvious but practically quite forgotten truth that the destiny of t