A next step

A next step

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MAA

SRIMIRAARAVINDAYE

AUM NAMO BHAGAVATE

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Who are we?

Are we today the fruit of these uncounted millennia of civilizing effort and tension to realize a society of accomplished human beings? Our fields of garbage, our toxic furrows, our venomous rivers, our air become lethal and our edifices scratching the skies and our rockets dirtying it till the stars and our machines to crush trees and our billions of obese bodies, is it for this that the thousands of generations which preceded us have gradually and against all odds, despite all obstacles and predicaments, disciplined, enlightened, cultivated, developed, emancipated, refined and organized themselves? Have we reached the end of the venture, a venture which turns out to be regrettable? Or else, when everything we ever built and touched seems to be about to self-destroy – and even though some will keep bragging and perorating on their technological triumphs “that will fix it all” -, are we nearing another kind of respiration, a letting go that will allow for a mutation, unintelligible yet full and certain at last, into another world of relations that is founded upon unity and balance, here itself?

Is there a possible choice and can we, are we capable of choosing it?

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Conditions

The year 2020 can be compared to no other in our collective history.

The year of the confinement: billions of human beings, of educated, civilized, active and able individuals have accepted to submit to radical directives issued by the world concert of “authorities” - and to their consequences whatever those may be. All of these innumerable persons to whom it is enjoined even to abandon their own if needed for the good and welfare of all and who accept it even th ough nothing, absolutely nothing but the word of “those who know” can actually prove its just necessity, whatever has happened to them, whatever is happening to us all? But, for that matter, not all of these billions are equally asleep: some are reflecting and pondering outside of the dotted lines, thus preserving and animating various runs and courses of observation, analysis or intuition. Thus arises the matter of conditionings, particularly this one conditioning that has been installed on the terrestrial scale through technological tools and applications of communication that physically link each person to a constant and continuous net of information allying and wedding all inventoried knowledge with all sorts of recreational satisfactions made virtually accessible at any time – thus facilitating, through their addictive effects, an actual possession. Therefore arises the matter of the primary and ultimate intent to be attributed to some self-appointed elite pursuing a defined program of domination and control of the various populations so as to organize the future of the human species according to more exacting criteria of durability, wherewithal and profitability and to a totalitarian vision of the terrestrial harmony and its management.

And there arises too the matter of a more complex battle between forces and powers of different natures and orders even as the now inevitable

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deadline is fast approaching of a planetary disaster in terms of ecology, energy and economy.

Or perhaps it is all a matter of the intensification of all the resistances to the advent of another perception and another State of the incarnating Consciousness?

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It is thus and therefore a matter of these processes and mechanisms we term as “conditionings”, whether they be inflicted o r wanted, withstood and endured or deliberate, ineluctable or arbitrarily imposed. But is there, in any of us human beings, any part or any element that is not subjected to or determined by one conditioning or another? Whoever reflects upon and examines for a moment the nature and origin of one’s own responses to any given event or situation, will inevitably realize that they are determined and conditioned – they are not free: we all are predisposed to certain judgments and interpretations by our acquired notions, our respective journey, our cultural, social, religious, political racial upbringing and grounding, our emotional past, our immediate personal position, our fears and desires.

We are thus incapable of real impartiality or of direct and actual comprehension of whatever we happen to be the witnesses of.

And we are thus incapable of perceiving and seeing: we must thereby scrutinize and analyze and consult divers versions and accounts of the same event, try and take a little distance and open to other points of view in order to have some chance of accessing the unique actuality of the concerned event.

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It is practically impossible for us to “see” anything without the filter of our prejudices.

Alone this deeper being whom we must discover is capable of discerning directly the reality of an event, of a person, of a situation whatever they may be but, in order for us to grasp this perception which is independent of all formations, we must first learn to unite with its presence and its law of consciousness.

Prior to and until this meeting, this new birth, we are bound.

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Here below are a few notations and observations inspired by this “crisis” 2020, crisis which marks a hinging point in our human terrestrial adventure.

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Unavoidable conditionings

Even before being born to this world, while our living body and organism lie still in pre-formation, the founding conditions, either transmitted or inherited, of our physical existence are silently gathering – and ineluctably -, these conditions that fix our constitution, morphology, sex, color, appearance, our biological seasons, some of our corporeal vulnerabilities and aptitudes, some of our psychological traits and, even more fundamentally, our absolute subjection to death. And even while this first conditioning, which will largely determine our behavioral propensities, is inscribing itself within our genes during the gestation, the actual “birth” of the physical body is the first external conditioning. It is the sudden and brutal encounter with the conditions of existence within the material universe and, in our case, those that govern human life upon earth. And so, before this happens, there is a milieu – one is carried, contained, immersed in it: it is the nourishing amnios, a protected suspension between the other dimensions and those here of space-time; it is the gestation of the potential body, the formation and setting into place, the live aggregation and assembly of all the constituent elements in their complementary and cooperative relationships. One is still nestled, in there. It is the soft velvety workshop wherein together busy themselves the knowledges and powers that sustain the universes.

Then, one is “delivered”, brought or thrown or laid into this world.

The pressure of the air, the space, the distances and the movement, the solidity and the weight of the bodies and objects, the degrees of the light, the textures of the touch, the functions – the nipple, the two nipples, the two

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hands: the need, the hunger, the calming satiety, the sleep, the cycles, alternations and returns.

The rhythms, the cadences, the multitude of sounds and resonances, the hot, the warm and the cold, the rigid and the malleable, endlessly fill up the world. Soon it is the entire immediate environment that demands, stimulates, indicates and sanctions the responses of the organism and their development. In other ways simultaneously, the emotional environment begins to manifest: accords and discords, intensities of divers characters make themselves familiar along with their imprints and traces. Then, from the near to the far, from the intimate to the strange, superimposed or mingling and interacting, these environments reveal themselves as located, situated and particular within a much vaster milieu which one must begin to learn and navigate.

It is thereafter that, from circumstantial conditionings already determining a complex range of responses, defenses and positionings, one must now approach and meet with the influences of intentional conditionings, beginning with education.

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But beyond or behind it all, what are the intrinsic and independent resources each unique being is provided with, at the edge of this unavoidable process of individualization and definition as a singular person?

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And are these free, internal resources, which allow for a measure of distanciation and perspective onto this mechanical assemblage of responses and stimuli, equally accessible to each and all, or is their availability also dependent on another sort of determinisms? Yet it is on the conscious development of these resources that will depend not only the orientation of the individual’s existence but also its realizations. These resource s, we customarily call them “inner’, to differentiate them from the complex, intricate patchwork that constitutes our frontal, or “outer” personality. Without them, without the access they give us to freer, more profound and absolute states of awareness, we remain entirely subjected to the conjugated action of all the determinisms that are entangled and involved in the flux of human physical existence.

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Conditioning acquired, elected, inflicted, accepted

Education, then, is the first agent of the concerted intervention of “society” so as to guide, acclimatize, habituate and mould the personality in the making. Other forms of conditioning will soon present themselves as well – often as the one viable alternative to an existence of uncertainty and vain questioning – to the individual in search of a way: the army, or some monastic order, or political enrolment or the service of some ideal but, more generally, the most favored option is that of founding a family and thus to help feed the common functioning of the human adventure, however mysterious or ordinary it may be.

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Nowadays, it is the cunning predators who appear to gain the most ground: capitalizing on perfected tools of observation, evaluation and programming, it becomes easier and easier for them to elaborate and put in place strategies of overseeing and influencing individual and collective behaviors. And whatever may be their goals, whatever may be the nature of their designs, their actual realization implies and invites such research and activity that may interest and enthuse numerous candidates to an attractive and alluring vision of the future - ignoring however, if not denying or negating the reality of consciousness.

Some of us dread the well-planned out forthcoming imposition and enforcement of an orchestrated campaign of vaccination, which would treat individual human bodies as guinea pigs; this is not an irrational fear as, in effect and actuality, for the past few decades, we have all been used as

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experimental subjects, our every reactions studied, analyzed, compared, assessed and gradually modified and habituated by the constant and continuous practice of publicity, with the enormity of its effects and consequences on each and every person and their immediate choices, while all sorts of profiteers have become all that richer by the loss of all common sense and natural discernment.

And the ravaging outcomes and symptoms of this broad venture are all there everywhere upon this Earth.

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The staging

And now this year 2020 has come upon us all with its rapid procession of soft-padded, almost tranquil upheavals: a series of collective catches at once answering to a coherent and foreseeable logic, and bearing unhoped for possibilities and opportunities for a reorientation, so very necessary, of human behavior.

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The massive erosion of common sense and reason to the benefit, not of a more intuitive mode of perception that would be superior to them, but of a kind of abject submission, an impotent, timorous, anxious and servile surrender, was apparently achieved in a matter of a few days.

Is that possible?

Has not this erosion been introduced already for years, right into our most intimate gestures?

All of a sudden we are now faced with necessities of which the origin escapes our grasp.

On one side, danger lurks, the danger of death for oneself and the others, or at the very least of their suffering, if one does not bend to the rules and instructions: if one holds out, reneges or resists in any way, one thus demonstrates either a suicidal or criminal inclination, an unconsciousness, a callous irresponsibility and carelessness or an arrogance and selfishness that are detrimental to the society.

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One becomes suspect.

And on the other side, perhaps a greater peril broods: that of losing all discernment, of letting oneself be reduced to an obedient and compliant shadow, hollowed out, dispossessed and divested of all independent resource, of all autonomous capacity of reflection – and of all right to rule one’s own conduct.

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The pitiless logic of the first step into the gearing is set in motion.

To tie up for the first time this mask on one’s face, to recoil for the first time from the nearness of another – and distrust settles in, infiltrates and spreads like an opaque smoke in all the spaces of daily life.

One no longer knows and, worse, one is no longer capable of knowing: it is the “authorities” that know and can know: and yet, bombarded and strafed from every side at every moment by debilitating, contradictory and inconclusive information, it is the very status of these authorities that is somehow unseated and altered: is there something else behind them all, another agent, power or formation that evaluates, judges and decides?

Doubt proliferates, infecting all our actions, in the exact image of this parasitic spectre released upon earth.

In whom, where are we to rest our trust?

What has happened?

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Here are these persons, these individuals, these physical beings – these women and these men – who are placing their two feet inside circles marked with white chalk on the ground, six feet distant from one another, the lower half of their face hidden as if by an accident victim’s bandage, waiting to move to the circle ahead in the line, so as to obtain the rice, vegetables, bread, milk, oil they need, under the surveillance of masked police armed with sticks: whatever has happened to them? There is no war but all the roads are almost deserted, the children no longer play in the open, the air is calm – indeed the sky is clearer -: what is happening?

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But, after all, what is “common sense”?

What do we try to define with this term?

Is it the natural instinct?

Is it the elementary logic born out of shared experience and observation, verified by others – therefore objective? - of physical existence and physical laws? Or is it also, at least in part or implicitly, something like the intelligence of the heart? Or else is it perhaps the fruit of a prolonged and attentive discernment confirmed in time as well as in space? Of a recording and witnessing as sober and neutral – as impersonal – as possible of those phenomena that tend to occur in our human existence? Or is it too the contents of our inculcated moral sense, of our attachment to known or transmitted laws and habits: “it is the way it is and cannot be otherwise, one cannot change the laws of Nature …!”

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Indeed, according to the persons concerned and their circumstances, this “common sense” may be synonymous with the health, balance and confidence of the physical being, as it may also signify a call for prudence and precautions.

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How to breathe?

Nonetheless there is erosion, there has been a process of intensive wearing out, of diligent and continuous erosion during these last decades of digital cultivation, through which a more and more major part of humankind has found itself gradually dumbed down, dimmed and dulled and diminished, possessed, addicted and dissociated from the lived here and now. By the prolific, invasive magic of computing science and technology, free access to all knowledge along with all possible virtual satiation and gratification have been provided to its members. A broad and comprehensive leveling has ensued, by which all knowledge is of equal worth and the highest scientific or ethical stances are vigorously countered, negated or dismembered, until every information of every sort has equal bearing and cynicism, doubt and gullibility share in the rite of welcome at the threshold of our personal habitations.

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The very exercising of logic, this exercise which every individual is meant to practice innumerable times in number less occasions in one’s existence, is now put to the test; it is now being asked, even demanded, of each individual, to renounce it for the sake of en emergency policy which implicates all members of society at once and decrees the measures and regulations each and all must now observe and respect and follow scrupulously for as long as the “crisis” will last. However the “authorities” cannot possibly sequester the whole of humanity nor force it to obey at every instant and on every point, even equipped as

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they are with those means of surveillance and control as are already available to them.

The instructions that are being dispensed, distributed, propagated, relentlessly rehashed till idiocy, are not to be appealed, they stand beyond objection: protective gestures, physical distancing, wearing of a mask, sanitizing of the hands whenever they have been in contact with surfaces touched – contaminated – by others. But are these measures well and thoroughly reasoned out, legitimate, justified, and understood as such by everyone, or are they gestures or acts of superstition, semi-magical acts? Or are they perhaps meant, like pledges, to express and consummate our fully accepted subordination and obedience?

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After several months of enforced confinement, the mental formation that was initially projected into the terrestrial atmosphere has augmented its effectiveness; this formation stipulates that human organisms are no longer capable of defending themselves and that the earth environment has become hostile to them: they have become exposed to “new” viruses, at the mercy of new parasitic viral particles which science must now identify so as to invent or fabricate new shields or protections. And in the meantime and until they succeed, it is imperative that we all respect the directives that are issued, formulated and imposed “for our common good”.

But the rooting down of this formation into the human physical consciousness actually increases the susceptibility and vulnerability of the “good citizens” and their propensity to submit to and rely on some vague

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hierarchy that must somehow possess more knowledge and power of action.

Thus it is that the least suggestion of a graver and more vicious attack to come becomes all the more intimidating and dreadful.

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The right to question

It would evidently be preferable, from the perspective of the consciousness in progress, that each and all of us do ask themselves a number of questions , each in one’s own ways and terms.

The most obvious question of all, almost the grossest, is this: at the risk of ruining innumerable human lives and to repel and throw back into extreme poverty large swathes of the population, of downing and collapsing world economy and demolishing millions of projects and enterprises, the authorities and governments of the day have shown themselves willing and ready to paralyze most movements for an indefinite period of time, whatever be the consequences, under the single threat of a “new” viral disease that could well decimate an approximate number of the members of our valiant and valorous species… And yet, all along these past few decades during which we could all of us observe, watch and document the noxious, toxic, destructive effects on all living species and on the entire terrestrial environment of the blind and selfish mode of development to which a particular elite has chosen to bind and subjugate the whole of humankind, thereby precipitating this entire physical world to irreversible disaster, these same authorities and governments were satisfied with obfuscation, procrastination and compromise.

Nevertheless did they not just demonstrate that it is indeed possible to take such radical measures as to cause the rapid decrease of the various pollutions for which everyone of us is directly or indirectly responsible, and thus to serve a future of equilibrium and harmony for the entire biosph ere…?!

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So, what are the actual motivations, priorities and exigencies that have given them the impulse and audacity to act the way they did?!

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It is therefore legitimate to postulate that, had not the state of collective degeneracy of our faculties of discernment and impartial analysis been so pronounced, had we not collectively let the reins be grabbed by the hands of the most ambitious and clever swindlers, an altogether different and saner approach of this “crisis” could have been formulated, an a pproach at once more respectful, more fraternal and integral, more honest and more creative. This approach would have consisted in, firstly, sharing and relaying the most reliable, exact and verified information regarding this newly identified viral threat, while committing to sharing equally the results of all research as and when it would proceed and evolve, inviting and encouraging each and every individual to practice observation and diligence and to assume one’s part of responsibility. Within such an approach, all sorts of local initiatives could have been welcomed and supported, each contributing their advances as their failures in prevention and in care, once the most considered and enlightened recommendations and advice had been clearly and precisely enunciated.

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Is our awareness being strangled?

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Let us simply take as an example the matter of wearing a mask: by which reasoning does one come to choose and wear a cloth mask on the lower half of one’s face even while alone driving one’s car or two -wheeler, far from any other person? One realizes then, with some resignation, some anxiety or a jolt of reckoning, that one actually knows nothing clearly, that one is fed but truncated or jarring information that keeps us at the mercy of some invisible decisional hierarchy: in the likeness of hungry chicks awaiting sustenance, we are fed from hour to hour and day to day with a volley of warnings and dire announcements until, as if surreptitiously, one moves or is moved away, alienated, from all possibility of trust and confidence.

Who then, and how, can decide on the fate of this humanity at present?

Can it, must it be, some committee or commission of the United Nations, better funded than others to lavish its supposedly enlightened directives?

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The work of every individual

What does our consciousness say?

What does Consciousness say?

For, midst this jumbled mess, Consciousness alone remains free, Consciousness alone truly exists – which yet informs all that is.

There is no supreme God seated on its throne that watches, judges, allots and assigns.

Consciousness alone IS.

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There exists within every individual a being that Consciousness has gradually formed and sustained, that it has alone developed through lives and their experiences, sheltered away from all determinisms and conditionings.’ It is for each of us to find and meet this deeper being, to unite with its reality and thus to work for the world.

But first we must want only this: nothing else than this must matter, not even life itself, but this one discovery, this union and this work.

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There is no use waiting and hoping, wanting and dreading.

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There is nothing to fear other than leaving this world without having found one’s consciousness.

We know nothing, can nothing: the whole Earth cries it to us al.

Here are the results of an evolution under the aegis and the rule of the mind and its mate, the vital – the intelligence and the life-force -: the principle of the mind has been our guide and our foundation and we have by it grown and learnt. We know no space that is not inhabited, organized, issued or generated by the mind and today, yes indeed, here are the results – great progress and still greater damage. The contradiction that is inherent to the principle of duality is today reaching its ultimate possibility: another principle is now to take over, a principle which we can serve only by becoming conscious: free of the mind, ready to give ourselves unreservedly.

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It is no use yielding to fear – fear of what? Of calamities, of sufferings, for oneself, for others? These can only be momentary events, passing phenomena, which do not affect consciousness.

Consciousness remains – ever remains.

Let us strive already to be kind and good willed and benevolent towards all while centering in this need of the consciousness that alone can bring us

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into relation with another evolutionary Principle, a principle of invincible progressive harmony.

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We are shut into an implosive bubble.

We must pierce it.

With our deleterious practices we have poisoned everything.

We have used Matter without ever grasping its truth: Matter is infinite consciousness.

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It is time.

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And perhaps we have long cried already, cried this unnamable mute cry, before the absurdity of this frantic race that possesses us all and makes us contemptible and unworthy: “let it all stop…!”

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And today, this day of the year 2020 upon this earth, there has indeed been a halt – there has come a break in almost all our activities which no one could have thought possible to orchestrate…!

That fear had to be the means of persuasion, a fear instilled from top down, from the elites to the masses, is after all but “natural”: has not the time also come to confront our terror before death?

Thus it is for each and all of us to shake off the hypnotisms that keep us nailed, despite our most brilliant thoughts, our most eloquent works and our most masterly accomplishments.

It is for each of us to see, hear, touch and feel what Earth and its Nature are telling us: it is time to grow up and become worthy of the Grace.

We need to let go, to prepare to collaborate and let ourselves be guided and moved by the Consciousness that truly knows and loves truly.

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Evidently we are not all equally aware of our “inner” being; it would thus seem that we cannot all give ourselves to this work of transition and crossing over. However it is not “us” that can really do anything at al l for the destiny of this world , however equipped or “spiritually” developed we may believe ourselves to be: it is the Consciousness that can, it is the next step, the next State, the State to come, that is little by little founding itself in Matter or

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raising itself out of Matter and Life and Mind and humanness – in spite of, by dint of, right through and independently of all contingencies.

And wherever we are, each of us can find the internal movement which can pierce or bore the hypnotic sheath of our mentalized state, whatever be our degree of education in any domain whatsoever; each human being today can gain direct access to this consciousness that acts in the world by piercing this opacity that possesses us – even and most of all in the body itself.

Consciousness can foil and outpace all conditionings and all dictatorships.

And so, whoever reads these lines may look at any other person in the world and understand that Consciousness is working therein and that the passage is therein possible, for there necessarily is today in each and every human being the possibility of a contact with Consciousness and its Presence.

And this in itself is already an opening to Unity.

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Divakar. Auroville, August 1, 2020.

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MAA

SRIMIRAARAVINDAYE

AUM NAMO BHAGAVATE

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