A Bridge Towards the Future (3): The Leap

In this high signal moment of the gods
Answering earth’s yearning and her cry for bliss,
A greatness from our other countries came.
A silence in the noise of earthly things
Immutably revealed the secret Word,
A mightier influx filled the oblivious clay:
A lamp was lit, a sacred image made.
A mediating ray had touched the earth
Bridging the gulf between man’s mind and God’s;
Its brightness linked our transience to the Unknown.
A spirit of its celestial source aware
Translating heaven into a human shape
Descended into earth’s imperfect mould
And wept not fallen to mortality,
But looked on all with large and tranquil eyes.
One had returned from the transcendent planes
And bore anew the load of mortal breath,
Who had striven of old with our darkness and our pain;
She took again her divine unfinished task:
Survivor of death and the aeonic years,
Once more with her fathomless heart she fronted Time.
Again there was renewed, again revealed
The ancient closeness by earth-vision veiled,
The secret contact broken off in Time,
A consanguinity of earth and heaven,
Between the human portion toiling here
And an as yet unborn and limitless Force. [Savitri: 353]

Even as Sri Aurobindo embodied the aspiration of the earth, spearheading the ascending element of humanity, the Mother embodied the Divine Grace that answers. She had brought with her divine gifts for earth, the most important of which was the gift of the Supramental Consciousness and Force that would bridge the gap between man’s force and fate, between the highest heights and deepest abyss, between God and the World, between heaven and earth. It was a leap of man beyond Man towards the Superman. On Wednesday, the 29th February 1956 and the world was preparing for a big leap on the leap year day. 

But this leap was going to be different from the other leaps that were taking place around this period in the twentieth century.  An old-world order and its values were near completely destroyed by the two World Wars. On the other hand, a new age was looming upon the horizons as the world entered the atomic and the digital age. Material, scientific, industrial, political, Ideological revolutions had turned the soil of human nature for some new great sowing.  It is this sowing that was taking place in a quiet corner of the world without any fanfare. It was the great spiritual sowing that was to usher a new age of Truth for the earth, an Age whence mankind will at last awaken to its own highest destiny.  

It is not that mankind had not explored the spiritual. The spiritual has always run side by side the material in human life. There have always been those who tried to explore the extreme limits of the spiritual by entering far and wide into the inner subjective spaces. They brought their riches from these explorations, boons and gifts that would enrich mankind through various religions, sects and spiritual philosophies and their impact upon human life and action.  So too there have always been those who explored the extreme limits of the material by diving into the depths of Matter and studying the laws and forces that govern our outer existence.  They too brought their riches, the wealth that could make our outer life comfortable, provide ways and means of manipulating our material existence and open new ways to cure diseases and invent equipment to give to our earthly life some semblance of heaven. 

Yet these two paths grew along two different lines moving in two different and even opposite directions. There means and methods too are different. At times they ran like two parallel lines supporting the integral life of humanity and yet as lines that never meet. There have been efforts to bring them together, even to enrich if not to fulfil each other. There have been ages of mankind to synthesise the different approaches and their experiences, yet the ultimate synthesis, the mutual reconciliation of Spirit and Matter has still been missing.  A bridge had to be permanently built between these two opposite poles of our total existence. Else life would always remain maimed, swinging between the two. It would mean that matter and material life would always remain limited and imperfect and the spiritual unable to manifest its glories fully in the absence of adequate earthly instruments. Of course, the spiritual and Divine Perfection is self-existent and one can always come into inner contact with it as certain yogis of yore, but it will not be able to express itself fully upon earth, through physical bodies and in man’s outer life. 

The new spiritual sowing was named by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother ‘the Supramental Manifestation’. Its purpose was precisely to bridge the gulf between the spiritual and the material, between God and the world, between Soul and Nature. While the world was rolling by, a hand had shifted its axis.