Volume VII, Issue 1
Author: Norman C. Dowsett
Editor’s Note: In our ongoing exploration of The New Ideal given to us by Sri Aurobindo, we now come to one of the most important writings of Sri Aurobindo, The Hour of God, circa 1918. In the 1955 issue of the annual journal Sri Aurobindo Circle (pp. 115-117), Norman Dowsett wrote a brief but inspiring commentary on these deeply revelatory words of the Master. We reproduce that commentary here; in addition to updating the references, we have made a few minor formatting revisions for easier virtual reading.
“There are moments when the Spirit moves among men and the breath of the Lord is abroad upon the waters of our being; there are others when it retires and men are left to act in the strength or the weakness of their own egoism.
“The first are periods when even a little effort produces great results and changes destiny; the second are spaces of time when much labour goes to the making of a little result. It is true that the latter may prepare the former, may be the little smoke of sacrifice going up to heaven which calls down the rain of God’s bounty.”
~ Sri Aurobindo, CWSA, 12: 146-147
Like all the words of Sri Aurobindo these words are revelatory, but perhaps with more of a divine insistence than most; for they hold within them a Power that goes out to the soul of all who are the least bit open to the higher Truth which seeks now to manifest itself in and through our human consciousness.
The Mother also says that higher Powers and aspects of Herself wait to enter the earth consciousness. And Sri Aurobindo in The Mother speaks of “one who is her Personality of that mysterious and powerful ecstasy and Ananda which flows from a supreme divine Love, the Ananda that alone can heal the gulf between the highest heights of the supramental Spirit and the lowest abysses of Matter.” She we might call the Mother of Radiances and Delight, the Divine Mahahladini.
From our archives:
The Manifestation of the Mother of Ananda
These various statements all converge upon one another at a time of great expectancy—great expectancy, not in any miracle-sense of the word but with the force of revelation which brings its own power of divine insistence and inevitability—something akin to the feeling the poet has at the moment when a beautiful line moves within him, as some inner subtle-physical pressure, insistent to be born.
These lines of Sri Aurobindo echo similar chords within our being, bringing forth a psychic response, and a psychic memory that echoes down the corridors of time, as if to say this happened once before, long, long ago, when the world aspired but man knew not the world; when God leaned down to earth to help and save, but man knew not his maker, nor in his heart the Truth and purpose of the evolving earth; an echo in the soul which brings forth lines like:
“Is this not She
Who was in every age
Yet lives for ever
In the hearts of men?”
Sri Aurobindo’s writings have always that power of evoking our psychic being to the front or raising us to the heights of our consciousness. There is always that stirring and adventurous challenge to plunge into the depths or reach up to the unclimbed heights of our being. But in these momentous lines we are discussing, there is an insistence and urgency which says: do something about it, and at first it is the outer being which looks to see what is it that has to be done so urgently.
But when that is quietened, when the mind is silent and turns towards a Light and Knowledge above and outside itself one sees the Truth and Luminosity waiting to be born; one sees that we exist in a period, in a moment of supreme becoming, a moment when always, at every step there is the choice, the possibility of greater heights or the profundity of unfathomed depths.
It is the Hour when the Spirit of the Lord moves upon the waters of our being. The waters of our being are the life-energies—the seven streams or the seven fostering cows,—the Vedic symbol for the seven cosmic principles and their activities, three inferior, the physical, vital and mental, four superior, the divine Truth, the divine Bliss, the divine Will and Consciousness, and the divine Being.
When the Spirit of the Lord is abroad upon the waters of our being there is a moment of supreme union possible among the cosmic principles, a contact of the highest and the lowest, the inferior with the superior. At such a moment it is possible for man to make an epic leap towards the heights as it is possible for him to fall back into the abyss of inconscient night.
Sri Aurobindo continues:
“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.”
This is indeed a most solemn and awful warning to the man or nation who bears the responsibility of expressing this Spirit of God at the time of its coming; for such a man or nation can never say they did not know, they were net warned. If they do, then it is a case of—there are none so blind as those who will not see, or those who will not hear. For them there is no help in heaven or earth nor in themselves.
And the last most beautiful and significant lines in this message of Sri Aurobindo are:
In the hour of God cleanse thy soul of all self-deceit and hypocrisy and vain self-flattering that thou mayst look straight into thy spirit and hear that which summons it. All insincerity of nature, once thy defence against the eye of the Master and the light of the ideal, becomes now a gap in thy armour and invites the blow. Even if thou conquer for the moment, it is the worse for thee, for the blow shall come afterwards and cast thee down in the midst of thy triumph.
“But being pure cast aside all fear; 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 seem to pass on the wings of the wind, he shall return.
“Nor let worldly prudence whisper too closely in thy ear; for it is the hour of the unexpected, the incalculable, the immeasurable. Mete not the power of the Breath by thy petty instruments, but trust and go forward.”
This language is that of the Seer, the Rishi; but it is the Divine Himself who speaks in lines of inevitable Truth ringing with the authority of Time across the waters of a Cosmic Hour. They are words from the SATYADHARMA, the direct Law of the Truth, from SURYA, the “Light” of the Veda, as the Divine once more makes ready for the end of the Kali Yuga and the Dawn of the Satya Yuga—the end of the iron age and the advent of the age of Truth.
For the man who has a responsibility to God, for the nation who feels within herself the stirrings of a great future moved by a divine Destiny, these words are of the utmost import and significance for they hold within them the Sacred Scriptures of our time, meeting the Purpose of our existence on the peaks of human consciousness, at a time of humanity’s most tremendous hour.
About the Author:
Born in Surrey, England, Professor Norman C. Dowsett was educated in England, France, Spain and Germany. In 1942, he met Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry, and three years later became a permanent member of the Ashram.
For 25 years, he taught and participated in the ‘Free Progress Education’ system practiced in the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education (SAICE). In 1970, the Mother gave him the task of creating an education system in the newly founded international township of Auroville. In 1971, he became director of the Department of Educational Research and Development of the Sri Aurobindo Society.
~ Design: Beloo Mehra
