Continued from PART 1
The Hour of the Unexpected
Above all, one must not hope and expect too much from the Government machinery. It is very doubtful that the nation will change with a change in political parties. What is much more likely is that politics and the parties will be forced to change because of an uprising in the national consciousness. And things are fast reaching a boiling point when a little ferment at an opportune moment may precipitate a chain reaction of the kind we never expected.
Indeed the sense of the unexpected is clearly shaping the world much more than the planned execution of calculated ideas. This is another sign that the divine is behind this play and is forcing the change upon us by the power of crashing circumstances. Politics will perhaps be the last thing to change, more out of compulsion than choice.
Also read:
Of Politics, Patriotism and Yoga
The major effort of national regeneration should therefore be directed towards this spiritual awakening and for this the most powerful tool is not politics but education. That is where the stress of the nation should be. That is also the instrument through which the Time-Spirit is working most swiftly. Instead of changing old-fashioned politicians and old-fashioned parents, it is changing the children! And they are changing very fast.
Can we imagine a child born today or ten years from now carrying such a religious or regional identity as a generation before us did? Even his national identity will be more fluid and plastic, something not sentimental and political but temperamental. Already the first signs are appearing and the new generation is unlikely to carry the vendetta, the unfinished agenda of hatred and revenge beyond the history books, except perhaps in a few pockets of strong resistance. What we need is not the repair of the old lamps but to replace old lamps with new ones.
Everything will change if the children of today change. And change they must and change they will.
It is already happening and this is perhaps the most happening thing in the world. Only we are not looking in that direction or perhaps so conditioned are we by our own old and worn-out value systems that we are unable to notice and appreciate the winds of change.
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have taken great pains to reveal to us the nature of these new children and the kind of education we need for them. If we still do not take heed then one day these children are going to upset the system and change it. For they come to wrestle with destiny and change it.
Much more than we changing them it is they who are changing us!
More than we transmitting some old traditional values into them it is they who are infusing some fresh life and a breath of inspiration from a sublimer realm into our narrow and cabined view of life. They are coming with a spiritual hunger and the carefree laughter of the gods and what they despise most is artificiality, hypocrisy, and false authority due to mere age or tradition. They respect none of these things: neither the priests nor the elders; yet they acknowledge genuine accomplishment, idolise true achievement and respect authenticity.
The fact that they need so much more psychological space for themselves is itself an unmistakable sign that they have a wider, subtler, freer consciousness; free from the trappings of the past, ready to surge towards the future with the whole wide world as their field of adventure. And they bring along with this a new subjective sense of the nation-unit. They do not look at a nation so much as a geo-political unit (that line is fast blurring with transcontinental travels, the TV and the Internet) but rather as an ideological unit.
The nations are being increasingly described by the “temperamental adjectives” and are no more the last but the intermediate rung of our group life and collective existence. Today we are mulling over how to solve the problem of caste divide, religious divide, ethnic divide, national divide, even ideological divide. In the coming age of synthesis that is fast approaching us (we have already entered into it), the children a few decades later will laugh with surprise and wonder how we their ancestors thought and felt so narrowly, and thought and acted with such smallness and meanness!
READ:
Sri Aurobindo’s Essay ‘On Original Thinking’: An Infallible Light for the Vision of New India
Yes, the human race is getting increasingly “psychicised” or “spiritualised” if we may say so. Homo sapiens erectus is soon changing into Homo sapiens psychicus—and thankfully in spite of us. And one can clearly see that the epicentre of this new change is located in India.
The great exodus of Indians is carrying a new Light to the world and a new way of living. The gift of India has already begun to the world. And the children here, in India at least, are distinctly different. They are a lot more confident, a lot more carefree, wide and integrated. They meet life with much more trust and confidence.
They easily combine and reconcile in them the spirituality of the East and the materialism of the West. They also know how to separate Christ from the Church and Krishna from his followers. They may not have read the Vedas but the Vedas reveal themselves in their utterances, if we know how to listen. These are the “sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn” whose “tread one day shall change the suffering earth” and not the crooked politician, the pot-bellied priest, or the rule-bound administrator.
They are priests of wisdom and they play ball with Time and circumstance. They know the relativity of all rules and do not fear to break the limits and barriers erected by an artificial and limited human standard. The only authority they follow is not external but internal. And these are multiplying by the hundreds and spreading like contagion through the world as if a new consciousness had exploded beyond limits and was looking for bodies fit and ready to inhabit it. It is they who are spreading the Light of ‘Sanatana Dharma’ to the world.
Are our schools ready? Perhaps they are soon becoming redundant!
This indeed is the third phase of the national yoga,—the emergence of the true Indian soul, free from traditions and customs, wide and spiritual in its outlook. And each one of us can contribute to it by looking in that direction, inward to the soul rather than outwardly on surface events and circumstances. And upwards and forwards towards the future that is fast entering into us rather than downwards and backwards towards the shadows and ghosts of the various problems that we leave behind us.
This is not to say that we must play the ostrich or be blind to the problems. Of course, there are a good many of these waiting to eat up our energies and divert our attention from the true thing needed.
Corruption, greed, red-tapism, goondaism, political vandalism and legalised loot, crass selfishness, grossness of appetites, smallness of aims, and most of all tamas, a laziness to think originally, feel widely and live largely. These are there but there is also the growing psychic impulse, the spiritual hunger, the seeking for truth and the more we concentrate in that direction, in the direction of Light and facilitate its growth in ourselves and others, the more we shall see the darkness receding.
If instead of slogan-raising, pamphleteering, politicking, and wasting our time and energy on superficial analysis of surface events whose true significance escapes us on every side, we can focus our energies on the emergence of our soul-power and through that and by a spiritual contamination the soul-power of the children who gather near us then we would have done our bit.
It is in our soul that we must recover the Vedas and their power to save and then cast our life into its mould.
It is in our soul that we must first discover the true India and its mighty spirit that still survives with its power to illumine and guide the world grown mightier with defeat and greater by the fall it suffered in the last few centuries.
Rather than changing policies and regulations or holding big seminars and conclaves and summit meetings and intellectual discussions, if we could focus on changing our consciousness then the circumstances will change of their own accord. We do not have to worry about them. For we have stepped into the Age of Truth, and therefore, outer methods that only polish the surface but leave the foundations hollow are foredoomed to failure. All such buildings of false hopes are bound to come crashing down sooner than later. The gods of mind and the vital have failed us and are destined to fail further. Let us stop trusting them and their methods.
Beyond the thinking mind there lies a greater and higher consciousness in which the Truth Eternal shines unbroken as in still waters.
It is That which will save us and not traditions and conventions. Neither democracy nor dictatorship; neither capitalism nor communism; nor any -ism: not even religionism or socialism or humanitarianism will save us though humanity is likely to go through experimenting and stumbling through all these fakes and imposters that have usurped the throne of Truth and imitate its gestures.
In Truth lies our salvation. For the mantra of Satyameva Jayate given to the soul of India is clear:
Supreme Lord, Eternal Truth, Let us obey Thee alone and live according to Truth.
~ The Mother, CWM, Vol. 14, p. 192
And the message has gone to the nations:
Men, countries, continents! The choice is imperative: Truth or the abyss.
~ The Mother, CWM, Vol. 15, p. 175
READ PART 1
~ Design: Beloo, Satya & Ramajayam
