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The Great Sense
This "message to youth" was originally written in French for the Italian television, by the author of The Adventure of Consciousness (Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry, 1968). It is addressed to students, to those who want to bring about the revolution of the future by the means of the future. For indeed, if we want to build a new world, it is not by the means of the past that we shall succeed neither by violence nor by non violence. But by something else. Page-11 THE GREAT SENSE This is the time of the Great Sense.
We look to the right or left, we build theories, reform our Churches, invent super-machines and we go out into the street to break the Machine' that stifles us we struggle in the small sense. When the terrestrial ship is sinking, does it matter whether the passengers drown to the right or left, under a black flag or a red, or one of celestial blue? Our Churches have already sunk: they reform their dust. Our countries crush us, our machines crush us, our schools crush us, and we construct more machines in order to come out of the Machine. We go to the moon, but we know not our own heart nor our terrestrial destiny. And we want to improve the existent but it is no longer the time to improve the existent : does one improve rot? This is the time for SOMETHING ELSE. Page-13 "Something else" is not the same thing with an improvement. But how shall we proceed? They preach violence to us, or non-violence. But these are the two faces of the same Falsehood, the yes and the no of the same impotence: the little saints are bankrupt with the rest, and the others want to take power what power ? That of the statesmen ? Are we going to fight to hold the keys of the prison ? Or to construct another prison ? Or do we really want to get out of it ? Power does not spring from the barrel of the gun, neither does liberty spring from the belly -of the deadfor thirty million years we have been building on corpses, on wars, on revolutions. We take the same things and start all over again. Perhaps the time has come to build upon something else, and to find the key to true Power ? Then we must look in the Great Sense. This is what the Great Sense says/: It says that we were born so many millions of Page-14 years ago a molecule, a gene, a bit of quivering plasm and we have produced a dinosaur, a crab, a monkey. And if our eyes had stopped half way along the road, we could have said, with reason (!), that the Baboon was the summit of creation, and there was nothing better to do, unless to improve our capacities of monkeyhood and to create a United Kingdom of Monkeys... And perhaps we are committing the same error today in our forest of concrete. We have invented enormous means and put them at the service of a microscopic consciousness, splendid devices at the service of mediocrity, and still more devices to be cured of the Device. But is man truly the end of all these millions of years of effort ? the matriculation for all and the washing machine ? The Great Sense, the True Sense, tells us that man is not the final goal. It is not the triumph of man that we want, not an improved version of the intelligent dwarf it is another being on the earth, another race amongst us. Sri Aurobindo has said : man is a transitional being. We are right in the middle of this transition, it is Page-15 Israel, in China, on BouI'Mich'1. Man is ill at ease in his skin. And the Great Sense, the True Sense tells us that the best we can do is to set to work to find the secret of the transition, the "great passage" to wards the new being, as one day we found the passage from monkey to man and to collaborate with our own evolution instead of turning in a circle and seizing false powers to govern a false life. But where is the lever of this Transmutation ? It is within. There is a Consciousness within, there is a Power within, the very one which pushed up in the dinosaur, in the crab, in the monkey, in man which pushes up still, which presses farther on, which clothes itself in a more and more perfected form as its instrument grows, which creates its own form. If we seize the lever of this Power, it is this Power itself which will create its new form, for it is itself the lever of the Transmutation. Instead of letting the evolution unfold through 1 The famous boulevard in front of Sorbonne where the revolt of the month of May 1968, by the students of Paris, took place. Page-16 millenniums of unproductive painful attempts and useless deaths and fake revolutions that revolutionize nothing, we can shorten the time, we can make a concentrated evolution we can be the conscious creators of the New Being. In truth, it is the time of the Great Adventure. The world is closed, there are no more adventures to be had outside : only robots go to the moon and our frontiers are guarded everywhere in Rome or Rangoon, the same functionaries of the great Machine are watching us, punching our cards, verifying our pates and searching our pockets there is no more adventure outside! The Adventure is Within Freedom is within, Space is within, and the transformation of our world by the power of the Spirit. Because indeed, this Power was always there, supreme, all-powerful, pushing the evolution forward : this was the hidden Spirit which grows to become the Spirit manifest upon the earth, and if we have confidence, if we want this supreme Power, if we have the courage to descend into our hearts, everything is possible, because God is in us. Satprem PONDICHERRY 27th June 1969
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