A seed in endless Time
This was a seed cast into endless Time.
A Word is spoken or a Light is shown,
A moment sees, the ages toil to express.
So flashing out of the Timeless leaped the worlds;
An eternal instant is the cause of the years.
All he had done was to prepare a field;
His small beginnings asked for a mighty end:
For all that he had been must now new-shape
In him her joy to embody, to enshrine
Her beauty and greatness in his house of life.
But now his being was too wide for self;
His heart’s demand had grown immeasurable:
His single freedom could not satisfy,
Her light, her bliss he asked for earth and men.
[Savitri: 315]
People often doubt whether what has been initiated by Her will arrive at full fruition. This is of course one of the natural limitation of our human vision. We cannot see beyond a single life time. We are glued to the surfaces and tied to events and circumstances that change like a cinema on the vast endless canvas of life. What She has done is sown a seed of the New Consciousness, watered it by Her Divine Love, nourished it by Her Light and the Breath of Grace. As time rolls by and seasons change, the seeds will sprout forth and blooms appear. True the spring may still be far but the first buds and new leaves already indicate the sign of blossoming that is going to follow.
Each sphere of the Ashram life including the School bears testimony to Her Love and Grace. As She said, it is not a place for justice but for Grace. One breathes Grace and drinks Her Love, basks in the sunshine of Her luminous smile and receives Her Divine Touch simply by treading the soil where Her lotus Feet have pressed.
It takes a special Grace and a deeper vision to understand the way that the Ashram has been created. It is not one of those human comfort zones of thought and sentimental idealism where we often wish to rest and call it utopia. No utopia can be created as long as human ego and money governs life. It is rather a dream, the dream of the Supreme that She has planted here and these dreams are bound to emerge as realities in their own time. She Herself has best described this dream:
There should be somewhere on earth a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of goodwill who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme truth; a place of peace, concord and harmony where all the fighting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his sufferings and miseries, to surmount his weaknesses and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the search for pleasure and material enjoyment. In this place, children would be able to grow and develop integrally without losing contact with their souls; education would be given not for passing examinations or obtaining certificates and posts but to enrich existing faculties and bring forth new ones. In this place, titles and positions would be replaced by opportunities to serve and organise; the bodily needs of each one would be equally provided for, and intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority would be expressed in the general organisation not by an increase in the pleasures and powers of life but by increased duties and responsibilities. Beauty in all its artistic forms, painting, sculpture, music, literature, would be equally accessible to all; the ability to share in the joy it brings would be limited only by the capacities of each one and not by social or financial position. For in this ideal place money would no longer be the sovereign lord; individual worth would have a far greater importance than that of material wealth and social standing. There, work would not be a way to earn one’s living but a way to express oneself and to develop one’s capacities and possibilities while being of service to the community as a whole, which, for its own part, would provide for each individual’s subsistence and sphere of action. In short, it would be a place where human relationships, which are normally based almost exclusively on competition and strife, would be replaced by relationships of emulation in doing well, of collaboration and real brotherhood.
The earth is certainly not ready to realise such an ideal, for mankind does not yet possess sufficient knowledge to understand and adopt it nor the conscious force that is indispensable in order to execute it; that is why I call it a dream.
And yet this dream is in the course of becoming a reality; that is what we are striving for in Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram, on a very small scale, in proportion to our limited means. The realization is certainly far from perfect, but it is progressive; little by little we are advancing towards our goal which we hope we may one day be able to present to the world as a practical and effective way to emerge from the present chaos, to be born into a new life that is more harmonious and true.
[CWM 12: 93-94]
Indeed, one of things that strikes one engaged with the Ashram is that all binaries are resolved into the original binary of that which is open and responsive to the Light, Truth, Peace, Harmony, Beauty, in one word to the forces of a higher progressive order working for the ascent of creation towards the Divine, as against, all that revolts and resists the advent and manifestation of these divine qualities in creation. And even this original binary that wears many a masks and makes of our human heart and mind a conflict-ridden battlefield is dissolved into the singularity of Her Love.
The Ashram and the School are held together despite the complex many-layered heterogeneity by the power of Her Love. Whether openly recognized or not, this is the secret Power of transformation that is ever at work in this geographically small but psychologically immense field of spiritual evolution created by the Mother.
Yes, it is an evolutionary field which means that everything is being pushed towards the evolution next. Experiences, events, circumstances, even people one meets and gets associated with are all designed to help man evolve towards his inevitable destiny. Any other classification and mental categorization of these is an ignorant perception of the occult arrangement of forces that work here. The School developed within the larger context of the Ashram, thriving in its divine atmosphere shares this dream, this aspiration and the complex play of forces that move within its occult formations.
This is the cosmic backdrop and the divine context in which the ashram school has developed and continues to do so. It is an experimental program which is yet going on and is far from being over. All the forces at work in the world are here but directly under the watchful gaze of the Divine. They are here so that they can be healed and transformed by the pressure and power of Her Love. That is why in certain ways this is a non-replicable experiment. Unlike human creations it is not a system fixed and formulated by thought and transplanted elsewhere by following the general guidelines and duplicating the methods. Perhaps there is no one method, no fixed rule, no binding system. It is a wide and complex movement that is taking place under the impulsion of the Infinite that recreates the universe each moment. The core is the Divine Love, the divine atmosphere that envelops all, the power radiating as a result of the divine tapasya of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Grace that is ever active shifting the different elements of our nature incalculably towards the great consummation.
This core is difficult, almost impossible to establish or create anywhere. The only way one can come a little close to replicating the Ashram School is if there is a core body of sadhaks fully open to Her Love and Grace and Light through whom She can pour Her Force upon all. All other mere mental ways will not suffice, in fact not even come close to what the Ashram School represents.
