On the centenary of the Mother’s final arrival on the 24th April 1920
As of now it is a race between the forces of destruction and those of the New Creation. There can be no doubt as to which of these two will have the victory. It was settled a hundred years back with the final coming of the Mother to start the divine project of the New Creation with Sri Aurobindo’s Help. The final seal of victory was put on the 29th February 1956 since the Supramental manifestation began to work. The entire history of evolution, physical as well as spiritual is the proof that eventually the new creation wins the victory, even though sometimes the path to this victory may be paved with temporary setbacks and even seeming failures.
Ultimately through both these seeming opposites the Divine fulfils His grand purpose. But it is given to us either to be sucked into the whirlpool of Death and destruction through fear, pessimism, doubt and distrust or else become the harbingers of light and hope and faith and the forerunners of a New Creation. Events such as the recent pandemic are indeed somewhat like differentiating processes in nature that either end up crushing us under the wheels of Time or else catapult us towards the Future. They are not tests as we understand it, least of all they are given to us by the Divine. Nor should we look upon these things as some sort of punishment and karma. To put it mildly the Divine is always with the soul and His chief concern is our progress. He does not busy Himself with a tribunal of reward and punishment. If He were to do so it would be akin to rewarding and punishing Himself since in His Consciousness there is no ‘otherness’. He puts a pressure on Time and Nature begins to move putting the pressure of her forces now here, now there.
When the evolutionary Power is active this pressure is felt rather acutely. It exposes ruthlessly all that is weak in us. It is like a sorting out process that removes or sieves out all that is still not ready for evolution. What is ready goes through, what is not willing to be ready falls out of the game. What is not ready but willing to do so is given chances again and again until one makes the definitive choice of being on one side or the other. It is the choice between being on the side of the evolutionary forces of an ascending evolution or slipping into a vortex of destruction. On the one hand is the leap of faith, the path of sincerity, the road less travelled so to say paved by the fire of aspiration and surrender. On the other hand is the road to the abyss, the path of fear and doubt surrounded by gloom and pessimism circuiting through the valleys and abysses of despair. On the one hand is safety secured by surrounding oneself in an atmosphere of the Divine Peace and Harmony and Trust in the Grace. On the other hand there is safety held hostage in the cage of matter by a host of material crutches and props of pills and equipment. Surely if one has not yet found the former then it is prudent to rely on the latter but the thrust and direction of our growth is important. Is it towards a multiplication of gadgets and material armaments that give us the sense of outer security while impoverishing our soul and the inner being? Or is our future trajectory going to be in an inward direction, a reorientation so to say, may be even a re-examination and reflection upon our basic beliefs and fundamental faith in life and our will-to-be?
The course of our future, individually and collectively, will depend upon our choice. It is not just a question of this pandemic or some other crisis. It is about the vulnerability of man, the fragility of our humanity and above all, our tendency to add to disharmony and disorder and thereby becoming an instrument of our own destruction one way or the other. There is a lesson to be learnt here, a wisdom to be acquired. Will we, won’t we? That is the question.
