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CHAPTER XX
'THE TIME HAS COME'
SOME TIME AFTER her Declaration of 24 April 1956, the Mother said : 'The greatest thing that can be, the most marvellous thing since the beginning of creation, the miracle has happened.... A new world, yes, a completely new world is born and is here'.
This 'miracle' had taken place on 29 February 1956. On 29 February 1960, the day of its first leap-year celebration, the Mother gave a graphic account of what had happened :
'During the common meditation on Wednesday the 29th February, 1956'
'This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine.
'As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that "the time has come", and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces.
'Then the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow'.
In a subsequent explanation the Mother said : 'It is interesting to note that the words—"The time has come"—which express what I simultaneously knew and willed when I found myself in front of the massive door on whose other side was the world, were heard by me in English and not in French. It was as if Sri Aurobindo had spoken them.... The pouring of the Light is constant.... The manifestation in the universal atmosphere is in the subtle physical. In the outer physical there is nothing apparent yet. Nature did not reject the Supermind—it could not reject it; but the Supermind has got engulfed and has to work itself out.
'Everything, however, has changed, radically changed. Previously the working was under the pressure of the Mind of Light. Sri Aurobindo had secured that victory. Now it is the Supermind that directly guides and governs. Here, too, Sri Aurobindo has been instrumental. And his presence is in me always'.1
The Mother's Declaration of 24 April 1956 and her statements quoted
1 The Mother : The Message of February 29, 1960, in the Mother India, March, 1960.
above, are her announcement of the decisive victory of Sri Aurobindo's tapasya, of the achievement of his divine mission, of the vindication of his vision of the Future as well as of her own; they show also how the Supramental Truth-Force has started working in the world, and how evolutionary Nature's slow aeonic endeavour to prepare man for his divine destiny has been hastened to save the present-day world now on the verge of destruction. That is why the Present, in the unerring vision of Sri Aurobindo, is 'the Hour of God', 'the Hour of the unexpected', and, in the words of the Mother, 'a most decisive turning-point in the history of man', which sees the Ideal not only reaffirmed but taking shape in the concrete and assuming the proportions of a universal fact. It is for this supreme realisation that Nature has, all through the millenniums, worked and paved the way. Well can the expectant world now look forward with redoubled assurance to the fulfilment of Sri Aurobindo's prophecy in Savitri: 'All things shall change in God's transfiguring hour.' This Great Hour has come upon mankind-'an opportunity', says the Mother, 'which presents itself only after thousands of years'.
This brings to mind a remarkable consensus of ancient religious traditions of the world, all with their respective prophecies of a New World, a New Age, which are more or less the same in spirit and, in some instances, almost the same in form, and how they agree, above all, on the time of the starting.
Ancient traditions of almost all lands speak of the Age of Gold to be, and all great epochs of cultural or spiritual resurgence go down in history as golden ages, evidently envisaging a culmination in which the consciousness of man will be illumined for ever by a golden light, the light, as it is now given us to know, of the supramental consciousness whose manifestation is announced by the Mother.
It is generally known that the four Ages—Krita, Treta, Dwapara and Kali—into which the ancient Hindus divided the time-cycle, are the four Ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze, and Iron, known as such also to the Greeks, the Romans and the early Christians. This sliding scale shows a gradual decline in the culture of the peoples concerned. It is however the night before a dawn. The downward curve means no retrogression. It was a veiled progress in the sense that man as an individual or a collective body needed varied experiences for an integral development and perfection of his capacities, potential and actual. Besides, the earliest Ages of Simplicity, Truth and Purity are the childhood of the race from which it has to grow into the complexities of manhood. The Age of Iron or the Kali Yuga, as the Hindus call it, is the 'Dark Age' that marks the nadir of the downward curve of the cycle of progress and with it a degeneration from which man by his own puny efforts alone can never save himself. Such crises in evolution call for the appearance of Incarnations, Avataras or Vibhutis of God, to help man up to a higher level of consciousness. Ancient religious traditions foresee divine advents to usher in the Dharmarajya, 'the Kingdom of righteousness' of Sri Krishna's vision, 'a new world of peace and harmony of the Maitreya Buddha', Laotse's ideal world of 'the Grand Harmony', the Christ's 'Kingdom of Heaven', 'a new heaven and a new earth', 'a new Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven'.
A most striking fact about all these splendid visions of the Future of mankind is that they indicate their fulfilment in a period of human history which from all points of view, seems to be the Present as its starting-point. Sri Aurobindo calls this significant period the divine moment 'when the Spirit moves among men and the breath of the Lord is abroad upon the waters of our being', the moment for man to cleanse his being of all un-divine stuff and look to the Lord to take him into His Grace. In her 1961 New Year Message the Mother said : 'This wonderful world of delight is waiting at our gates for our call, to come down upon earth... .'
The Buddhistic tradition has it that the Maitreya Buddha would bless the earth by his advent 2500 years after Gautama the Buddha. In 1955 was observed the 2500th anniversary of the Buddha. The return of the Jews to Palestine—now an accomplished fact—was previsioned in the ancient cabbalistic writings of the Jews as a condition for the coming of the Messiah who would establish 'the earthly paradise', 'the heavenly Jerusalem'. Islamic traditions say that fourteen centuries after Mohammad a Mahdi or 'Redeemer' would appear on earth, and after vanquishing the Dajjal or Antichrist, establish 'a regime of equality, justice, and brotherly love'. The date, according to the Islamic calendar, coincides with the present age. The Hindu Puranic tradition of the Ten Avataras or 'Divine Incarnations', announces the coming of Kalki, the tenth and last Avatara, who would overthrow the old order—the existing human-animal structure of consciousness and ways of life—and bring in the new.
This tradition describes vividly the general conditions of the present age as the rise and dominance of a worldwide materialism in which man will wallow in a plethora of ease and comfort, enslaved by the forces of darkness threatening to destroy the very bases of his existence. Such would be the prevailing state of the world before the advent of Kalki. Other traditions, particularly Buddhistic, Christian and Germanic, unanimously affirm that, like Kalki, the Incarnation or the Saviour of the present age, would come riding 'a White Horse'. This symbolic expression means a manifestation of divine energy, that is to say, the creative power of Heaven.
On the other hand, the seeing minds of the world today are perceiving the first golden glints of a dawning glory. They have begun to feel that out of the painful present a new world is slowly coming to birth.
Julian Huxley, the British scientist and thinker, declares that 'a vast New World of uncharted possibilities awaits its Columbus—The human race, in fact, is surrounded by a large area of unrealised possibilities. The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself... .Human destiny is to participate in the creative process of development, whereby the universe as a whole can realise more of its potentialities in richer and greater fulfilments'. Gaston Berger, the leader of the 'Prospective' movement in France, believes that man today is capable of transforming himself into a future species which will be something altogether new and not a mere continuation of his past. Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian thinker and novelist, speaks of the possibility of man's 'emergence into a new type of cosmic consciousness', of 'some unexpected discovery in the field of extrasensory perception providing man with a new spiritual insight, a new basis of our metaphysical beliefs, a new intuition of our ultimate responsibilities'. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French palaeontologist, holds that 'evolution is an ascent of consciousness' and that 'we are experiencing the first symptoms of an aggregation of a still higher order', 'the Future Universal and Hyper-Personal life'. Yet another French scientist and thinker, Alexis Carrel, says: 'The day has come to begin the work of our renovation . .. .We must arise and move on... . We faintly perceive through the mists of dawn a path which may lead to our salvation'. Ben Finger, the American poet, artist and historian, sees in history an inner process through which 'Thread of destiny is drawing us towards One World, and the Global Faith of Tomorrow'. 'Out of the crisis of our age,' says Pitirm A. Sorokin, the American sociologist, 'there is emerging an Integral Culture based upon intuitive foundations.' Rufus M. Jones, an eminent American mystic and thinker, feels, 'We are at the present moment passing through a period of very striking mystical awakening.' 'We are at the dawn of anew phase of evolution... .We are actually living in the midst of a revolution, a revolution in the scale of evolution.' says the French scientific thinker, Lecomte du Nouy. To quote Jean Gebser, an advanced German thinker of the day: 'Today a new consciousness is coming up in the West. More clearly expressed, a new kind of consciousness which forces its way towards an awakening, makes perceptions possible in the West today, through which reality can be apprehended in an entirely new manner. It may be presumed that to the same extent—and there are Indian witnesses for this, as for example Sri Aurobindo—a new consciousness is arising in Asia today.... It is to be assumed that Asia and the West will mutually assist one another in order to help bring forth the awakening of this new consciousness. Seen from the viewpoint of Man only this new consciousness possesses the power to guarantee the continuation of human existence.'
That the present is a period of epochal importance is also indicated in the tremendous speed with which the world is marching ahead into unexplored regions of science and thought promising to man the discovery of vaster truths of yet higher worlds. In a Message on 3 March 1963 the Mother said: 'The world is progressing so rapidly that we must be ready at any moment to overpass what we know in order to know better.'
Many thinkers of the West are convinced that this time also the light will come from the East, from India. As shown in the previous chapter, people in various parts of the world are opening to Sri Aurobindo's vision of the Future. Most of the pioneers of the modem Indian renaissance were one in their perception of the coming of a glorious future of India which would herald the dawn of' a New Age of the Spirit' all over the world.
The common conclusion of the ancient religious traditions and the visions of modern thinkers is that the clock of human destiny has struck the fateful hour when, as. the consummation of the evolutionary process, a mighty change will come about in the life of man, created by a new Force of God, the light of which was seen by the Vedic Mystics.
If religions are so many paths to the One Divine Reality which the Earth is now going to manifest—and this is supported by the perfect accord of their prophetic visions—it can be taken for certain that the new world of the morrow will have no religions but one, if it can at all be called by that name, the religion of the Sovereign Rule of the Spirit. That this shall be has been previsioned by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. And that will be one of the effects of the Supramental Manifestation.
The Vedic vision of the Light from which springs India's historic evolution was the starting-point of the present study. India's evolutionary march, inspired by that vision, is destined, in the divine ordering of things, to fulfil itself as part of the wider fulfilment of the divine vision of the Master and the Mother, sent on earth as leaders of the march. That fulfilment will be when the Sun of Truth, the Creator of India's destiny with which is bound up the destiny of the whole world, will shine on the consciousness of man, usher in the 'Everlasting Day', and create 'the Divine Race', daivyam janam1,as previsioned by the Vedic Seer.
There could be no happier conclusion to this study than with the two momentous pronouncements of the Mother. In February 1961 she said:
'What Sri Aurobindo represents in the world's history is not a teaching, not even a revelation; it is a decisive action direct from the Supreme.'
Fortunately for man, the Mother is there before the world to carry on this action to its divinely decreed consummation.
And this is her New Year (1963) Message :
Let us prepare for the Hour of God.
1 Rigveda, X.53.6, also quoted in Chapter I. |