| Chapter 16 |
"The Final Dream" |
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"The final dream was a step in evolution which would raise man to a higher and larger consciousness and begin the solutions of the problems which have perplexed and vexed him since he first began to think and dream of individual perfection and a perfect society... The difficulties in the way are more formidable than in any other field of endeavour, but difficulties were made to be overcome and if the Supreme Will is there, they will be overcome. Here too, if this evolution is to take place, since it must proceed through a growth of the spirit and the inner consciousness, THE INITIATIVE CAN COME FROM INDIA and, although the scope must be universal, the central movement may be hers." (Sri Aurobindo's message on 15.8.47) What is that 'final dream' of which Sri Aurobindo talked about and in which he saw a preponderant part of India, the India of the last chapter, a true India, organized into a federation of free states with a central enlightened Government, a unified language and policy; a leader of the world in ideas and wisdom, which again would manifest the Santanam Dharma, Bharat born again. Man is the visible result of a long evolutionary process of which apes, were the previous link: "The appearance of a human possibility in a material and animal world was the first glint of some coming divine Light, the first far-off promise of a godhead to be born out of Matter", writes Sri Aurobindo in the Hour of God. And monkeys themselves, must have been the offspring of another species - and so on, back to the first Big Bang. In the same way, Sri Aurobindo believed that man was not the last link in human evolution and that there would be ANOTHER rung in the ladder towards Divine Perfection: "Man is a transitional being; he is not final. For in man and high beyond him ascend the radiant degrees that climb to a divine supermanhood. There lies our destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring but troubled and limited mundane existence." (The Hour of God, p. 61) Sri Aurobindo went on to explain that what he meant by man, "was the mind imprisoned in the body", and he emphasized that mind was not the highest possible form of consciousness, because mind is incapable of attaining truth; he is only at best "an ignorant seeker of truth". Beyond mind, he continued, is a "supramental or gnostic power of consciousness", which is in eternal possession of truth. Supermanhood is the next approaching achievement in earth's evolution and "it is inevitable because it is in the logic of Nature's process". But warned Sri Aurobindo: "Supermanhood is not man climbed to his own natural zenith, not a superior degree of human greatness, knowledge, power, intelligence, will, character, genius, dynamic force, saintliness, love, purity, or perfection. Supermind is something beyond mental man and his limits; it is a greater consciousness than the highest consciousness proper to human nature". (Hour of God 62) Today the Western world utterly shows the limits of mind carried to its extreme. Idealisms were the highest goals of Europe. And they were all tried: communism, socialism, liberalism, conservatism, socratism, materialism, pragmatism, atheism, existentialism...you name it... But they have all proved failures. In their name, man tried everything to control man: laws, rules, taxes, penalties, interdictions, bureaucratic hurdles. Or some gave him licence to indulge in his instincts, to go to the limits of his vital and sensual appetites. But nobody was able to bridle man. Nevertheless, it can be said that the greatest achievement of the West is that it has succeeded in a certain control over the physical, the material; and each day brings new discoveries, whether in science, medicine, technology, or that most marvelous of sciences, the computers, which come nearest to the intricacies of man's brain. But for what purpose? Man is more and more unhappy, as he is getting cut off from his divine reality; the two cars, cable TV, satellite phone and instant computerization, are not taking him nearer to his soul. As Sri Aurobindo emphasizes: "Mind is the highest form in man. But mind is an ignorant, clouded and struggling power. And even when most luminous it is possessed only of a thin, reflected and pallid light... Man is himself little more that an ambitious nothing. He is a littleness that reaches to a wideness and a grandeur that are beyond him, a dwarf enamored of the heights. His mind is a dark ray in the splendors of the Universal Mind. His life is a striving, exulting, suffering and eager passion-tossed and sorrow-stricken, or a blindly and dumbly longing petty moment of he Universal Life. His body is a labouring perishable speck in the material universe". (Hour of God.63) Can this be the end of evolutionary nature, this frail body and bumbling mind? Is this why the universe started billion of years ago, right from the big Bang where nothing was, to the first forms of life in the protoplasms? From the crawling, to the flying, and the standing? From the millions of apes who tried thinking, before one of them had the first crude idea in his mind and fashioned a stone into a weapon - to today's Discoverer spacecrafts and supercomputers? But in truth, man is indeed special: "An immortal soul is somewhere within him and gives out some sparks of its presence...Man's greatness is not in what he is, but in what he makes possible. His glory is that he is the closed place and the secret workshop of a living labour in which supermanhood is being made ready by a divine craftsman. But his conscious assent, his consecrated will and participation are needed that into his body may descend the glory that will replace him." (Hour of God, p.63) This is why we get those "soul moments" in our lives, when suddenly everything seems possible, when for a few seconds, we become All Harmony, All Joy. "Above, an eternal spirit overshadows him and upholds the soul continuity of his nature". This is the divine presence in us, above us, around us, the all pervading immanence of the Infinite. That to which man has always aspired throughout his History, that which he instinctively feels in himself, although the primitive man came closer to Nature and his heart may have been more receptive than the modern homo sapiens of today, immersed in the ego of his achievements. And this is the endless cycle of our human evolution: we are born, our soul grows from each life, drawing from each experiences it needs for its evolution -and then we die... and the soul is reborn again after some time and so son, and so on. Mind was the greatest achievement of man when he took over from the animal, but today mind has become the OBSTACLE, the impediment to the next evolutionary change, because Mind thinks it is the ultimate realization in the world, not realizing that "it is only a clumsy interlude between Nature's vast and precise subconscient action, and the vaster infallible superconscient action of the Godhead." What is the step for receiving that next possibility? What is the best attitude for feeling the Godhead at work? "There is nothing mind can do that cannot be better done in the mind's immobility and thought-free stillness. When mind is still, then Truth gets a chance to be heard in the purity of the silence... For Truth cannot be attained by the mind's thought, but only by identity and silent vision. Truth lives in the calm, wordless Light of the eternal spaces; she does not intervene in the noise and cackle of logical debate"... (Sri Aurobindo, the Hour of God) Good-bye O ye lofty philosophers, great thinkers and wise sociologists, ye who think that you can dissect the world and predict its future, ye who today still propound obscure, superficial and negative theories on the future of humanity. Hello our Indian yogis and sages, ye, who dwell in your caves, in your ashrams or in the quiet silence of your hearts! Hello you million of fellow meditators, who each day give a little of your time to the quietness of your mind, you are all participating in the elaboration of the next world. "O thou seeker of Truth, and traveller on the roads to the next step of humanity's relentless march to evolution and perfection: Be free in thyself and therefore free in thy mind, free in thy life and thy body, for the Spirit is freedom. Be one with God and all beings; live in thyself and not thy little ego. For the Spirit is Unity. Be thyself immortal, and put not thy faith in death; for death is not of thyself, but of thy body. For the spirit is immortality. To be immortal is to be infinite in being and consciousness and bliss; for the spirit is infinite and that which is finite lives only by this infinity.." (Hour of God page 9) "Be thyself immortal and put not thy faith in death"... DEATH, this is the fateful word. For what are all our human achievements, our loves, as lofty they can be, our creations, our hopes, our realizations, when death annihilates everything, when oblivion puts back the clock once more. And again we have to be reborn to start all over, to learn all over again what took us a life of patience to master. Is death the ultimate goal then? Is death the only end to our struggle and our endeavors?. No says Sri Aurobindo: "The Supramental is nothing less than the descent of the Supreme Truth and Power INTO MATTER, THE SUPRAMENTAL ESTABLISHED IN THE MATERIAL PLANE AND CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE MATERIAL WORLD AND AN INTEGRAL TRANSFORMATION DOWN TO THE VERY PRINCIPLE OF MATTER. This is what makes Sri Aurobindo's yoga different from other yogas and that is why he called it "integral yoga": not only the transformation of the mind and the vital, but also of the physical, the ultimate descent of what he called "the supermind", the next step in evolution, what is above mind, as mind was above the inanimate, into the most material planes of our existence, OUR BODY. And this immortality, is not a fancy resurrection or a miraculous glorified body in which we can live for ever our desires and fixations, but a body where truth descends and which is transformed into truth, for the ultimate truth in the ultimate material IS immortality. This is an uncharted path, this is the next step in our evolution: this descent of the supermind in our body. Sri Aurobindo had started the work and spoke at length of "the golden light that was invading his body". When he passed away on the 5th December 1950, his spiritual companion of 35 years, whom he called the Mother and about whom He said: "The one whom we adore as the Mother is the Divine Conscious Force that dominates all existence, one and yet so many-sided that to follow her movement is impossible, even for the quickest mind and for the freest and most vast intelligence. The Mother is the consciousness and force of the Supreme and far above all she creates". (The Mother 26,27) She is the universal Mother, Mother India, whom since Vedic times, Indians have worshiped under all her mighty forms: Durga, Kali, Parvati, Sita, Laxmi, Mahasaraswati, Maheswari. "O Mother of radiances, you have dawned in the narrow horizons of my mind. Out of the depthless rigidities, in the midst of the walled-up spaces you have created a heart-like something that will live its eternal life. You have revealed to me a chamber alive and warm within the mind's substance-less polar regions and there I can safely retire and find in you my refuge" (Hour of God, p 5). The Mother, Mira Alfassa, was born in Paris on the 21st February 1878. Already as a little girl, she had strong mystical experiences, dreaming at night of covering the whole of Paris with her long mantle of love and compassion, relieving the pains, the sufferings and the agonies of its men and women. Mathematician, painter and a remarkable pianist, she befriended many of the great artists of her time, Gustave Moreau, Rodin, or Monet. It is in 1914 that She arrives for the first time in Pondichery, where Sri Aurobindo had already started his intensive yoga with more and more disciples gathering around him, Sri Aurobindo whom she had seen in a dream, 10 years before meeting him. She will live 30 years with Sri Aurobindo, sharing his experiences, communicating hers and gradually taking over the daily running of the Ashram, which under her guidance, became an ashram like no other ashram, where work was "the prayer of the body to the Divine", and where physical education held a very important place for young and old alike, because as Sri Aurobindo had said: "The perfection of the body, as great a perfection as we can bring about by the means at our disposal, must be the ultimate aim of physical culture...for the body is the material basis, the body is the instrument which we have to use. 'Sariram khalu dharma sadhanam', says the old Sanskrit adage, -the body is the means of fulfillment of dharma". (Supramental Manifestation of man, page 5) At long last, we are coming back full circle to the Vedic seers who had gone down deep in the cavern of the body and had cried: "He discovered the Truth, the ultimate Sun who dwells in the deepest obscurity" (Rig Veda, III.39.5) But India lost the secret, its yogis and sages drifted farther and farther away from the material, away from the body, which houses the soul of light and withdrew in their ashrams, their caves, their mountains, to dwell on the Infinite. The body was laid to waste, India opened herself to infinite tamas, to the raping of her soil by numerous barbarians and to the neglecting of beauty. Then also came Buddhism, with its nefarious emphasis on escaping from the pain, illusion and misery of this world, into marvellous Nirvana. And Nirvana is indeed marvelous, and Gautama the Bouddha was indeed a great soul, but then what? Is all that suffering from these billion of years, of death and oblivion, just to go back to Nirvana? We might never have left all that wonderful bliss... And the eternal question of WHY DEATH has haunted us and still haunts us. When Sri Aurobindo left his body in 1950, having chartered the way for the descent of the supramental truth, the Mother took up what she called the "Yoga of the cells", to transform each cell of Her body, so that it accepts the supreme truth. And she said: " There is always the possibility to escape 'elsewhere'. Many have done that: they went into another world, more subtle, there are a million ways to run away like that. But there is only one way to stay here, that is to have the courage, the endurance, to accept all appearances of infirmity, the appearance of misunderstanding. But if one does not accept that, then nothing will ever be changed". And she went hunting for that "Secret": "One has the impression sometimes that there is an extraordinary secret to discover and that it is there at your fingertips. Sometime even for a split second, one sees the secret, there is an opening and then everything closes-up again. But again, for a second, the veil lifts and one knows a little more.. I have seen the Secret, I have seen that it is in the terrestrial Matter, on this earth that the Supreme becomes perfect (Mother's Agenda 25.9.65) What is this secret? What path did the Mother chart for 23 years? This secret has been carefully noted down step by step by Satprem, a French disciple of the Mother who was her confidant for all these years. Satprem called these notations "the Mother's Agenda", 13 volumes where page after page, the Mother narrates meticulously all that goes through her body, day after day. "There is a consciousness of the body which floats in there like an eternal peace, but it is not like a still immensity, it is a movement which has not limits and which has a very harmonious rhythm and very tranquil and very vast and calm. And it is this movement which is life...ever silent like the movements of waves, which has neither beginning nor end". And later she cries: "Death is an illusion, illness is an illusion, ignorance is an illusion! it has no reality, no existence...Only Love and Love and Love-immense, prodigious, and the thing is DONE". Comments Satprem in his beautiful book "the Mind of the Cells": "the passage to next species is done. When the first bird flew among the reptiles, it was the sure sign that others will inevitably follow and fly too. And the capital point is that death and illness disappear materially in this other state, which is the Mother's experience; it is an experience of the body, of the cells, and not the nirvanic experience of the mystical summits. It is not the illusion of the world as mystics preached, it is the illusion of our physical perception of the world and of the lie which springs out of that perception: death and illness. If the cellular perception changes, sickness and death vanish in 'something else', which the Mother was going to discover gradually." Satprem was born in 1923 in Paris. He spent his childhood in Bretagne, where his love for the sea and sailing was his only escape from an otherwise bleak world where he felt imprisoned in the rigid frames of the Western mould. When he was 20, he enrolled in the French resistance to fight against the German occupation army, was arrested by the dreaded Gestapo and taken to the terrible Buchenwald concentration camp, where so many Jews Gypsies, communists and resistants like him, were murdered by the Nazis in the gas chambers. Satprem survived, but this experience would forever shape his burning desire to go beyond the appearances. As he recalls: "I found myself there naked, vandalized, as in the Beginning of Times or may be at the End". After the war, Satprem, in a rage of confronting life, wanders around the world: "Just out of Hell, I took life on my knees and I told her: now you are going to tell me your secret, not of the books, but the secret that beats in my naked heart."(Mind of cells II) After many adventures, he lands up in Pondichery, as deputy to the last French Governor, François Baron. There he meets the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, and the experience of the one about whom he says was "immobile as the Himalayas", will last him all his life. He goes again wandering around the world; but his heart is really with the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. And in 1954 he comes back for good to Pondichery and becomes the Mother's confidant, jotting down Her Agenda. On the 17th November 1973, the Mother after having explored the cellular consciousness of her own body, departs. Was the earth not ready? She was struggling to be understood even by some of her own close disciples. Did she complete her work and then depart ? Who has the vision to say...But the way was traced and had not Sri Aurobindo decreed: "the Supramental manifestation is inevitable..." The path is however still long and Satprem, her confidant, took up the work, withdrew from all activity and in the secret of some Himalayan retreat, went on, alone, exploring the the yoga of the cells. And maybe are there others individuals like him, who quietly, anonymously, somewhere in this earth, are working on their own bodies towards the materialisation of the next species of our human evolution. Globally, it is India which holds the key to the destiny of the world; it is India which can show the way of supramentalization of man and society. India of whom the Mother said: " India must be saved for the good of the world since India alone can lead the world to peace and a new world order" (India and her destiny page 5). Through these 16 chapters, we have harped constantly on the fact that the Greatness that WAS India is not something of the past, that India's Santanam Dharma, Her boundless reserves of spirituality are intact, ready to manifest themselves again. India has to wake-up to Her destiny, recoup her spiritualized outlook, stop looking at Herself and at the World through the Western prism of understanding, which is an artificial view, out of touch with the inner reality and which has been imposed to India by its colonizers for three centuries. For this purpose, India must first unite from within, allow its own States, which represent the vast mosaic of her diversity, their freedom of expression, under a federalized setup, whatever its structure. the South Asian countries should also regroup under India's leadership in another system of confederation, which would leave them too the freedom to express their religion and culture in the creative bosom of India's Santanam Dharma. This South Asian block would become a major world power and could compete with China and the European Common Market. Then only, can India send Her light shining forth and show the way to the earth towards a return towards true spirituality. Then only can India tell the world : "look this is how things happen; this is the way of the soul, this is the history of evolution, this is our next step in our march towards a divine Reality. Thus India will not only become the land of Bharat again, the cradle of Indu civilization, but the great Vedic sages' prediction will also have been fulfilled: "Our fathers by their words broke the strong and stubborn places... shattered the great mountain rock with their cry; they made in us a path to the great Heaven, they discovered the Day and the Sun-World... They found the treasure of Heaven hidden in the secret cavern...The well of honey covered by the rock".. (Rig-Veda I.71.2-1.130.3-II.24.4) and India will lead the world onto the way to supramentalization, man after man, that which is above mind. LONG LIVE THE WONDER THAT IS INDIA. |
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Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 |