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That is the old, uncured Illness, the unchanged root, the dark matrix of our misery, hardly different now from what it was in the time of Lemuria. It is this physical substance which we must transform, otherwise it will topple, one after another, all the human or superhuman devices we try to graft on it. This body, this physical cellular substance contains '`almighty powers," (Savitri, IV.III.370.) a dumb consciousness that harbors all the lights and all the infinitudes, just as much as the mental and spiritual immensities do. For, in truth, all is Divine and unless the Lord of all the universe resides in a singIe little cell he resides nowhere. It is this original, dark cellular Prison which we must break open; for as long as we have not broken it, we will continue to turn vainly in the golden or iron circles of our mental prison. "These laws of Nature," says Sri Aurobindo, "that you call absolute ... merely mean an equilibrium established by Nature.... It is merely a groove in which Nature is accustomed to work in order to produce certain results. But, if you change the consciousness, then the groove also is bound to change." (A.B. Purani, Evening Talts, p. 92.) Such is the new adventure to which Sri Aurobindo invites us, an adventure into man's unknown. Whether we like it or not, the whole earth is moving into a new groove, but why shouldn't we like it ? Why shouldn't we colIaborate in this great, unprecedented adventure? Why shouldn't we collaborate in our own evolution, instead of repeating endlessly the same old story, instead of chasing hallucinatory paradises which will never quench our thirst or otherworldly paradises which leave the earth to rot along with our bodies? "Why be born if it is to get out at the end?" exclaims the Mother, who continues Sri Aurobindo's work. "What is the use of having struggled so much, suffered so much, of having created something which, in its outer appearance at least, is so tragic and dramatic, if it is only to learn how to get out of it—it would have been
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better not to start at all.... Evolution is not a tortuous course that brings us back, somewhat battered, to the starting point. Quite the contrary, it is meant," says Mother, "to teach the whole of creation the joy of being, the beauty of being, the grandeur of being, the majesty of a sublime life, and the perpetual development, perpetually progressive, of this joy, this beauty, this grandeur. Then everything has a meaning." This body, this obscure beast of burden we inhabit, is the experimental field of Sri Aurobindo's yoga—which is a yoga of the whole earth, for one can easily understand that if a single being among our millions of sufferings succeeds in negotiating the evolutionary leap, the mutation of the next age, the face of the earth will be radically altered. Then all the so-called powers of which we boast today will seem like childish games before the radiance of this almighty embodied spirit. Sri Aurobindo tells us that it is possible—not only possible but that it will be done. It is being done. And perhaps everything depends not so much on a sublime effort of humanity to transcend its limitations—for that means still using our own human strength to free ourselves from human strength—as on a call, a conscious cry of the earth to this new being which the earth already carries within itself. All is already there, within our hearts, the supreme Source which is the supreme Power—only we must call it into our forest of cement, we must understand the meaning of man, the meaning of our selves. The amplified cry of the earth, of its millions of men and women who cannot bear it anymore, who no longer accept their prison, must open a crack to let the new vibration in. Then all the apparently ineluctable laws that bind us in their hereditary and scientific groove will crumble before the Joy of the "sun-eyed children." (Savitri, IR.JV.343.) |