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This year, we are celebrating Sri Aurobindo's Birth Centenary. He is known to barely a handful of men and yet his name will resound when the great men of today or yesterday are buried under their own debris. His work is discussed by philosophers, praised by poets, people acclaim his sociological vision and his yoga—but Sri Aurobindo is a living ACTION, a Word becoming real, and every day in the thousand circumstances that seem to want to rend the earth and topple its structures we can witness the first reflux of the Force he has set in motion. At the beginning of this century, when India was still struggling against British domination, Sri Aurobindo asserted: “It is not a revolt against the British Government [that is needed].... It is, in fact, a revolt against the whole universal Nature.” (A.B. Purani, Evening Talks, p. 45.) For the problem is fundamental. It is not a question of bringing a new philosophy to the world or new ideas or illuminations, as they are called. The question is not of making the Prison of our lives more habitable, or of endowing man with ever more fantastic powers. Armed with his microscopes and telescopes, the human gnome remains a gnome, pain‑ridden and helpless. We send rockets to the moon, but we know nothing of our own hearts. It is a question, says Sri Aurobindo, "of creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the Supramental being in a new evolution." (On Himself, XXVI.112.) |
For, in actuality, he says, "the imperfection of Man is not the last word of Nature, but his perfection too is not the last peak of the Spirit." (The Life Divine, XIX. 763.) Beyond the mental man we are, there exists the possibility of another being who will be the spearhead of evolution as man was once the spearhead of evolution among the great apes. "If," says Sri Aurobindo, "the animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man, man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co‑operation she wills to work out the superman, the god." (The Life Divine, XVIII.3.) Sri Aurobindo has come to tell us how to create this other being, this supramental being, and not only to tell us but actually to create this other being and open the path of the future, to hasten upon earth the rhythm of evolution, the new vibration that will replace the mental vibration—exactly as a thought one day disturbed the slow routine of the beasts—and will give us the power to shatter the walls of our human prison. Indeed, the prison is already starting to collapse. "The end of a stage of evolution," announced Sri Aurobindo, "is usuaIly marked by a powerful recrudescence of all that has to go out of the evolution." (The Ideal of the Karmayagin, III.347.) |