The New World is growing silently and unseen in the human heart despite all the resistance and the confusion. In fact, the New Consciousness is using the confusion to teach us, especially the inadequacy of our old ways and the methods developed by the mind. The old ways and systems seem to be no more working whether it be in terms of practical applications in the field of diseases or in terms of education. No doubt the modern medicine based entirely material view of life and man has built a massive apparatus to control our life processes, yet it has come at a heavy cost of the loss of natural immunity. Our material sciences have also no doubt made our outer physical existence easier but the comfort has been purchased with a heavy servitude to machinery and equipment. The system of education built largely by the rational mind has no doubt churned out scientists and bureaucrats and inventors but the human soul has retreated in the background. The political systems of governance and its most recent offshoot democracy sprang up from the soil of reason with flowers of hope of creating a fair and equitable world that would fulfil man’s dream of freedom, equality and fraternity. It claimed, at least promised to fulfil the dream that religions failed to do. But if we look impartially and face it all squarely then it is not difficult to see that neither democracy nor communism and socialism and capitalism and all the others isms have as much failed to keep their promise as the rest. If Religion has failed man, then mental ideologies have failed us even more rapidly, even more precipitously.
The true reason is to be found not so much in the aspiration as in its application. Each religion, each ideology is an angle of vision that the mind takes. By its very nature it creates an either – or conflict. The mind sees things in bits and parts and hence engages in comparison and contrast leading to mutual opposition of each other with its attendant consequences. Even when it tries to join the pieces together it still misses the whole since it is yet limited by the idea as understood by the mind and not in its totality and its true place in the whole. Besides, the mind already crystallises the idea by giving it a particular form in application and hence loses the suppleness that can bring us back to the total vision where each thing has its own place. Most importantly by stressing too much on the outer form and structure and systems, the mind tends to lose sight of the soul whose secret aspiration brought forth these ideas and approaches to birth. It builds rules of living and systems of philosophy and governance but loses the spirit behind it and hence misses the truth that gave it birth. But the Spirit is free and infinite and seeks ever newer and higher and better forms of its self-manifestation. Therefore, it breaks the moulds of the past so that the spirit that was being stifled in fixed moulds, imprisoned as it were is released and clothes itself in new forms that are wider and supple to express its expanding curve. It is just as the body of a human being dies so that the soul can return in a new and better body and mind so too Ages pass away after completing their cycle so that the Cosmic Spirit takes a new birth and assumes a new body.
This is what we are witnessing today, – the old world is dying even as a new world is waiting to be born. Nay, the old world is already dead and the crumbling of its social, religious, educational, ideological and political institutions is only the outward result. And the New World is already born. It is asserting itself more and more through instruments that can embody the new impulsion.
Sri Aurobindo had foreseen it and together they had worked towards the fulfilment of the Dream Divine through the Ages. The time had come for the dream to be realized, at least in a few and then spreading as ripples and currents from the few radiating points serving as a nucleus of the New Creation, contaminate the whole world with the rhythms of the New Creation.
The old shall perish; it shall pass away,
Expunged, annihilated, blotted out;
And all the iron bands that ring about
Man’s wide expansion shall at last give way.
Freedom, God, Immortality; the three
Are one and shall be realised at length,
Love, Wisdom, Justice, Joy and utter Strength
Gather into a pure felicity.
It comes at last, the day foreseen of old,
What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed,
Vision and vain imagination deemed,
The City of Delight, the Age of Gold.
The Iron Age is ended. Only now
The last fierce spasm of the dying past
Shall shake the nations, and when that has passed,
Earth washed of ills shall raise a fairer brow.
This is man’s progress; for the Iron Age
Prepares the Age of Gold. What we call sin,
Is but man’s leavings as from deep within
The Pilot guides him in his pilgrimage.
He leaves behind the ill with strife and pain,
Because it clings and constantly returns,
And in the fire of suffering fiercely burns
More sweetness to deserve, more strength to gain.
He rises to the good with Titan wings:
And this the reason of his high unease,
Because he came from the infinities
To build immortally with mortal things;
The body with increasing soul to fill,
Extend Heaven’s claim upon the toiling earth
And climb from death to a diviner birth
Grasped and supported by immortal Will. [CWSA 2: 243 – 244]
And on the 24th April 1956, the Mother takes a passage from Prayers and Meditations of September 23, 1914:
The Lord hast willed, and Thou dost execute; A new Light shall break upon the earth. A new world shall be born. And the things that were promised shall be fulfilled
and rewrites it as follows in her own hand:
29 February – 29 March Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute: A new light breaks upon the earth A new world is born. The things that were promised are fulfilled.’
