TO A PEACE CORPS WORKER IN NEPAL

A LETTER OF SEPTEMBER 27,1972

I believe that what you have gone through lately in Kath-mandu is not something unexpected. Of course, you may not have known it coming, but when one has suddenly burst open to new dimensions of feeling, new depths of being, a return to the old associations and environments is bound to bring a psychological reshuffling, a vision of things and persons as if one either saw them from a great distance that dwarfs their former importance or from very close so that one touches all the grossness and insufficiency and impermanence which one never realised before.

But the reshuffling should not disorientate one completely. And I am glad you have been able to keep the Pondicherry-peace glowing within you. It will effect a new adjustment, in which you will find in the very diminution of the old values and old ties an increase of the divine presence that is always there in the world and only waits for our receptivity to show us its calm eternal smile whose message is: "Abhaya — Have no fear."

Your indecision over staying on in Nepal or going back to your own country is quite natural. But I am afraid the time has come in the evolutionary career of the world when many souls are likely to feel that they have no home. The whole Hippie movement is an odd manifestation of this wide-spread homelessness. The true reason for the phenomenon lies in our having reached a critical threshold where one epoch of evolution is dead and another not yet born — or, if born, still not

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"alive and kicking". Man the Mental Being has had his day — the hour of his triumph, the hour of nuclear energy and bio-genetic control, is also the moment when he sees an abyss yawn under his feet, the abyss opened up by his awareness of the huge imbalance between his world-knowledge and his self-knowledge.

Suddenly something from beyond the Mind has touched Man's glittering kingdom and exposed its inadequacy. Nothing positive has yet come to light in the common world-consciousness, but this touch has disclosed a void in the human set-up and that void creates the sense of homelessness, the vague wandering of the heart away from ancient fixities, a profound discontent with all achievements of society, religion, science, personal relationship.

The turn in the right direction will arrive, I believe, when the void will be seen as God-shaped. The emptiness, the homelessness will then become a positive power and guide one towards one's true parents, whom I consider to be Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. A real home will then have been found — an America beyond Columbus's discovery, a country even beyond the India Columbus dreamed of reaching when he stumbled upon America, a land towards which Whitman moved when he cried "Passage to India!" but which is truly seen when we hear his deeper cry: "Passage to more than India!" For, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are leaders, from an Indian starting-point, to a Future where all earth will attain at the same time its consummation and its self transcend-ence.

However, it is not unimportant to know where Sri Aurobindo and the Mother start from on their wonderful journey.

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