A
NEW LIGHT DAWNS
SISIRKUMAR MITRA
Sri Aurobindo Ashram,
Man
is at this moment on the threshold of a new age and will be looking towards a
new world. Mystic experience affirms its birth. It marks the fulfilment of the purpose of Nature in the evolution of
man. Man, so long considered the last term in this process, has now the chance
to transcend himself and rise to a higher stage. The mental man must break out
of his old prison-house of half-lit consciousness and ego-driven life, and
emerge into the infinite Light, Delight and Power of the supramental
consciousness for which Nature has been working, step by step, all down the
ages. His preparedness today for this divine destiny may be indicated by his
having attained the highest possibilities of the mind. Powers that have ever
been beyond his mind are now within his reach to help him attain his inherent
perfection. The call has come. It is for him to respond.
Now
is ‘the hour of God’, says Sri Aurobindo, ‘the hour of the unexpected’, the hour
‘when the breath of the Lord is upon the waters of our being’. Hence his
warning: “Unhappy is the man or the nation which, when
the divine moment arrives, is found sleeping or unprepared to use it, because
the lamp has not been kept trimmed for the welcome and the ears are sealed to
the call. But thrice woe to them who are strong and ready, yet waste the force
or misuse the moment; for them is irreparable loss or a great destruction.”1
What
the Vedic Rishis had glimpsed as a distant light of
heaven was seized and realised more concretely by Sri
Aurobindo as a creative Light of the Supreme, called by him the Supermind. And he declared: “As there has been established
on earth a mental Consciousness and Power which shapes a race of mental begins
and take up into itself all of earthly nature that is ready for the change, so
now there will be established on earth a gnostic
Consciousness and Power which will shape a race of gnostic
and spiritual beings and take up into itself all of earth-nature that is ready for
the new transformation.” 2
This he had said during
the first world conflagration in 1914-18. The dawn was then behind the clouds.
In 1934 he was positive: ‘The supramental Force is
descending, but it has not yet taken possession of the body or of matter–there
is still much resistance to that.’ But he assured: ‘I know this descent is
inevitable–I have faith in view of my experience that the time can be and
should be now and not in a later age.’
And this came to pass in
1956–the greatest event of the century, the greatest ever in human history. It
has come down as a Force of the Supreme’s Grace not
only to save the world from self-annihilation but to transform the human into a
divine world.
“The manifestation of
the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise but a
living fact, a reality.
“It is at work here, and
one day will come when the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most
unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it.”
The manifestation took
place on February 29, 1956 and the Mother made this historic declaration on
April 24, 1956, the occasion being the thirty-sixth anniversary of her final
arrival at
‘A New Light breaks upon
the earth,
A
The things that were
promised are fulfilled.’
How will the New Light
affect the life of humanity? Says the Master: “...the presence of the liberated
and new sovereign supramental light and force at the
head of evolutionary Nature might be expected to have its consequences in the
whole evolution. Any incidence, a decisive stress would affect the life of the
lower evolutionary stages; something of the light, something of the force would
penetrate downwards and awaken into a greater action the hidden Truth-Power
everywhere in Nature. A dominant principle of harmony would impose itself on
the life of the Ignorance; the discord, the blind seeking, the clash of
struggle, the abnormal vicissitudes of exaggeration and depression and the
unsteady balance of the unseeing forces at work in their mixture and conflict,
would feel the influence and yield place to a more orderly pace and harmonic
steps of the development of being, a more revealing arrangement of progressive
life and consciousness, a better life-order. A freer play of intuition and
sympathy and understanding would enter into human life, a clearer sense of the
truth of self and things and a more enlightened dealing with the opportunities
and difficulties of existence ...” 3
In the rapidly changing
world of today are there not signs enough of the initial action of the New
Force visible even to an ordinary eye?
It will be interesting to recall how the ancient
religious traditions of the world had prophesied the advent of a
It is generally known
that the four Ages–Krita, Treta,
Dwapara and Kali–into which the ancient Hindus
divided Cosmic History are the four Ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron,
known as such also to the Greeks, the Romans and the early Christians. This
sliding showed a gradual decline in the culture of the peoples concerned. It
was however the night before the dawn. The downward curve meant no
retrogression. It was veiled progress in the sense that man as an individual or
a collective body needed varied experiences for an integral development and
perfection of his capacities, potential and actual. Besides, the earliest Ages
of Simplicity, Truth and Purity were the childhood of the race from
which it was to grow into the complexities of manhood. The Age of Iron, or the
Kali Yuga, as the Hindus call it, is the ‘Dark Age’ that marks the downward
curve of progress and with it a degeneration from which man by his own effort
can never save himself. Such crisis in evolution call for the
appearance of Incarnations, Avataras or Vibhutis of God, to help him up to a higher level of
consciousness.
Ancient religious
traditions also foresee divine advents to usher in the Dharmarajya
or ‘the Kingdom of Righteousnes’ of Sri Krishna’s
vision, ‘a new world of peace and harmony of the Maitreya
Buddha’, Laotse’s ideal world of ‘Grand Harmony’, the
Christ’s ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, ‘a new heaven and a new earth’, ‘a new
Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven’.
A most striking fact
about all these splendid visions of the Future of mankind is that they indicate
their fulfilment in a period of human history which,
from all points of view, seems to take its start from the Present. Sri
Aurobindo calls this a significant period, ‘the divine moment’, the moment for
man to be ready for the next higher stage of his evolution.
The Buddhistic tradition
has it that the Maitreya Buddha would bless the earth
by his advent 2500 years after Gautama the Buddha. In
1955 was observed the 2500th anniversary of the Buddha. The return of the Jews
to
Apart from the point of
time, the tradition describes vividly the general conditions of the present age
as the rise and dominance of a world wide scientific materialism heightening
the case and comfort of life, yet at the same time threatening death to all
life. Such would be the prevailing state of the world before the advent of Kalki. Other traditions, particularly Buddhistic,
Christian and Germanic, unanimously affirm that like Kalki, the Incarnation or
the Saviour of the present age, would come riding a
White Horse. This symbolic expression means a manifestation of pure energy, of
a creative power of Heaven.
The common conclusion of
all these religious traditions is that the Present is that sacred
and momentous hour in human history when, as the consummation of the
evolutionary process, a mighty change will come about in the life of man,
created by a new Force of God.
If religions are so many
doors to the One Divine Mansion that the Earth is now going to be–and this is
supported by the perfect accord of their prophetic visions–it can be taken as
certain that the New World of the morrow will have no religions but one,
if it can at all be called so, the religion, rather, the Sovereign Rule of the
Spirit. That this shall be had been provisioned by Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother. The Mother has now categorically declared that the Light that would
bring into birth the New World has dawned on earth and is in constant action.
1 Sri Aurobindo; The
Hour of God, p. 3.
2 Sri Aurobindo:
The Life Divine, Vol. II, Part II, p. 1028
3 Sri Aurobindo:
The Life Divine, Vol. II, Part II, p. 1030-31
“Man embodied in the natural world cannot cease
action, not for a moment, not for a second; his very existence here is an
action; the whole universe is an act of God, mere living even in His movement.”
–SRI AUROBINDO