The Significance of Afghan Events

As to the significance of this event happening on Sri Aurobindo’s Birthday, we can surely surmise that it is an action of Truth-Light bringing out in one stroke all the falsehoods that govern our present-day politics, the hypocrisy behind our actions, the duplicity of internationalism. As earlier stated, this entire period starting 2020 till possibly 2028 humanity is being given a definitive choice, both as an individual and as a group to be sure which step of the evolutionary ladder they stand. It is this action of Truth that we have witnessed bringing out all the falsehood that was planted deep into the collective subconscious. It is akin to the fable of sage Agastya who drank the waters of the oceans, broke open the caves so that the hidden hostile could come out into the open before their final decimation.

The other and perhaps the more important question is whether it is enough to destroy the regressive forces that have suddenly surged in Afghanistan. Is this resurgence not a reminder that one cannot destroy evil until we strike the very roots from where it draws its force? The evil behind these forces is too deep. If we remember on another 15th August, they had a resurgence of sorts when India was divided into two parts due to the demand of a religious group. Though the gift of freedom came on the 15th August 1947, it was maimed and marred by the division. The fact is that evil cannot be whitewashed or glossed over by pseudo-religious ideas of tolerance and peace. It has to be dealt with at its roots and what we are witnessing and still will witness is this pushing of things to the limits until we can no longer hide our weaknesses and falsehoods behind ornamental words. That is what we are seeing since the centenary of the Mother’s arrival, ‘….for the hour is often terrible, a fire and a whirlwind and a tempest, a treading of the winepress of the wrath of God; but he who can stand up in it on the truth of his purpose is he who shall stand; even though he fall, he shall rise again, even though he seems to pass on the wings of the wind, he shall return.’

The Mother revealed this in one of Her powerful messages 50 years back, “Men, countries, continents! The choice is imperative: Truth or the abyss.” She explained:

“Right now there is a great tension. They have all taken positions as if to start war. It is the blind passion that men put into their international relations.

At the base of it all there is fear, general distrust, and what they believe to be their “interests” (money, business) – a combination of these three things. When these three lowest passions of humanity are brought into play, that is what I call “the abyss.”

When someone has decided to consecrate his life to the seeking for the Divine, if he is sincere, that is to say, if the resolution is sincere and carried out sincerely, there is absolutely nothing to fear, because all that happens or will happen to him will lead him by the shortest way to this realisation.

That is the response of the Grace. People believe that the Grace means making everything smooth for all your life. It is not true.

The Grace works for the realisation of your aspiration and everything is arranged to gain the most prompt, the quickest realisation – so there is nothing to fear.

Fear comes with insincerity. If you want a comfortable life, agreeable circumstances, etc., you are putting conditions and restrictions, and then you can fear.

But it has no business in the sadhana!”

It is like the coming up of things that were long hidden in the subconscious. They return again and again until they are completely cleansed or transformed. It is part of the world yoga. Sri Aurobindo recounts the inner reason for this horror in Savitri:

“Man’s lower nature hides these awful guests.
Their vast contagion grips sometimes man’s world.
An awful insurgence overpowers man’s soul.
In house and house the huge uprising grows:
Hell’s companies are loosed to do their work,
Into the earth-ways they break out from all doors,
Invade with blood-lust and the will to slay
And fill with horror and carnage God’s fair world.
Death and his hunters stalk a victim earth;
The terrible Angel smites at every door:
An awful laughter mocks at the world’s pain
And massacre and torture grin at Heaven:
All is the prey of the destroying force;
Creation rocks and tremble top and base.
This evil Nature housed in human hearts,
A foreign inhabitant, a dangerous guest:
The soul that harbours it it can dislodge,
Expel the householder, possess the house.
An opposite potency contradicting God,
A momentary Evil’s almightiness
Has straddled the straight path of Nature’s acts.
It imitates the Godhead it denies,
Puts on his figure and assumes his face.
A Manichean creator and destroyer,
This can abolish man, annul his world.
But there is a guardian power, there are Hands that save,
Calm eyes divine regard the human scene.

An old self lurks in the new self we are;
Hardly we escape from what we once had been:
In the dim gleam of habit’s passages,
In the subconscient’s darkling corridors
All things are carried by the porter nerves
And nothing checked by subterranean mind,
Unstudied by the guardians of the doors
And passed by a blind instinctive memory,
The old gang dismissed, old cancelled passports serve.
Nothing is wholly dead that once had lived;
In dim tunnels of the world’s being and in ours
The old rejected nature still survives;
The corpses of its slain thoughts raise their heads
And visit mind’s nocturnal walks in sleep,
Its stifled impulses breathe and move and rise;
All keeps a phantom immortality.
Irresistible are Nature’s sequences:
The seeds of sins renounced sprout from hid soil;
The evil cast from our hearts once more we face;
Our dead selves come to slay our living soul…..

But this is only Matter’s first self-view,
A scale and series in the Ignorance.
This is not all we are or all our world.
Our greater self of knowledge waits for us,
A supreme light in the truth-conscious Vast:
It sees from summits beyond thinking mind,
It moves in a splendid air transcending life.
It shall descend and make earth’s life divine.
Truth made the world, not a blind Nature-Force.”

To put it paradoxically we may repeat what Sri Aurobindo once remarked, ‘What if failure suits him better and serves better the ultimate purpose?’ What is important however for us is to remember that evil, darkness, are all temporary. They cannot destroy truth and whatever is based upon it. As the great Upanishad says a truth to which humanity has been a repeated witness that it is truth that wins and not falsehood, Satyameva jayate…, but it is also true that before dying falsehood rises…..
it is a moment of choice through which humanity is passing and the choices are being made easier by revealing to us things as they are and not as they seem. No more pretences is the verdict. Let everything be in the open and then let humanity decide. She revealed:

“Before dying falsehood rises in full swing.

Still people understand only the lesson of catastrophe. Will it have to come before they open their eyes to the truth?

I ask an effort from all so that it has not to be.

It is only the Truth that can save us: truth in words, truth in action, truth in will, truth in feelings. It is a choice between serving the Truth or being destroyed.

The hour has come when a choice has to be made, radical and definitive.

Lord, give us the strength to reject falsehood and emerge in Thy truth, pure and worthy of Thy victory.

This is no question of general theory; it belongs to the actuality of things. The Asura is the force of falsehood, antidivine, which reigns as sovereign over the physical world; his influence is felt everywhere, it is in everything in Matter. But the time has now come when the separation, the purification, can be made, the falsehood, the Asuric influence, rejected and there can be an exclusive living in the Divine Truth.”

This then is how one can see the events as they are unfolding. Neither an unwise hasty pessimism nor an imprudent optimism is the way but to quietly wait and see how things unfold while ensuring that we reject away every form of falsehood from our being. In the end, this is a passage but we know that this is a passage towards a greater Dawn. Let us prepare ourselves for that dawn rather than brood over the despairing night.