On India - 1998-2020

On India

A call for direction

Aum Namo Bhagavate

Sri Aravindaye

Namastasyei Namastasyei Namastasyei

Namo Namah

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April 22, 2020.

This is an unprecedented period and experience for mankind, as most of its 7.5 billions are compelled to stay indoors, in a lockdown situation seen as the only solution to survive a pandemic scare by the present governing bodies of this world, and this day is already, where India is concerned, the 32 nd day of this paralysis. Depending on the perspective one elects to focus on, such a condition which could not ever have been brought about by any political decision even when the very fate of material Nature is compromised – as it has been with increasing speed over the last few decades -, has in only a few weeks resulted in a spectacular cleansing of the earth atmosphere and a visible and sensible, if partial, recovery of its biosphere; it has also exposed the almost complete vulnerability of this human species, however civilized, to a well organized and coordinated takeover by determined and superlatively well-equipped groupings aiming at imposing a totalitarian control of which every stage is well-planned. There are quite a few such broad perspectives, each of which bears its own teaching and also its own questioning. Within this almost terrestrial scene, this overview of an almost frozen humanity, one has to wonder whether India’s true role could thus be given the possibility to awaken to its own laws and necessities and begin to manifest, despite its own chaotic, callous and possessed brand of vitality that has all but drowned its inner voice and sacred intuitions – whether India’s eternal spirit-force could be called upon by at least some of its people to take its right place as a leader and a guide to a delivered and harmonious and progressive collective existence upon earth. A few days ago, picking from the shelf a book which I wanted to read again, published in 1998, I found folded between two pages, a few handwritten sheets of paper: the beginning of a sort of a call to India which I had drafted sometime in the early part of 1999.

Here it is, as a marker on the way, twenty-one years old…:

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“Auroville, early 1999.

Today more than ever India must play its true role, as a mother amongst the nations and as a guide in the bosom of our confused and wounded race. It must play its role for its own sake and for the sake of the entire world, it must become one with She, the Mother. It must center itself around its soul, offer itself to its spirit and receive from soul and spirit the real strength that is Hers alone. India today is weak, it is a chaos of contradictions: its very own, but also those it has inherited, imported or yielded to.

And yet India alone can lay the foundation for the coming age.

India is ancient beyond memory.

Yet it is hardly born as a nation.

It holds the supreme keys to the only condition that will redeem humanity and save the earth: the life of Spirit in Matter. India has yet to gather its children and its powers into Her true puissance of unity. For uncounted millennia its people, throughout the width and breadth of its land and the many dimensions of its culture have freely met the Spirit.

And yet what selfishness has ensued, what blindness, what denial of the body of the Lord!

It is time for India to make its true offering, the one every human being needs, the offering of a physical and material home for the divinity.

Let India become Herself, the Mother, and show the way for each human being to unite with the divinity within and without, for each human body to serve the divine manifest, for each human action to express the Divine’s inexhaustible riches.

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Let India gather itself and its people in the living love of the One and become the haven and the beacon She is meant to be for all the nations, all peoples and all beings. Let each and every Indian at heart renounce the pretences and falsities and stand for the very breath of the Lord across the land of India and be worthy of that blessing. Today every individual, every grouping, every people, every nation, has but one choice = to work for the true sense of evolution and serve the advent of a terrestrial life ruled by the spirit and the soul, or to join and feed the forces that resist and deny.

These forces are active everywhere and in every one of us.

This is the battle.

There is no other.

These are the forces that misguide those who deny the beauty of life and the truth of unity and would rather become terrorists than accept and offer their own evolving humanity.

These are the forces that sustain exclusivisms and self-serving hatreds.

These are the forces that would reduce human beings to mere numbers under the false rule of greedy gods or treacherous ideals, or for the sake of a destructive material prosperity that is empty and devoid of spirit. India has yet to claim its body as a living nation and show the example of an entire united people whose free members choose the law off the spirit and exist by the truth of the soul. Let India move forward, secure in the clarity of its purpose, calling the Mother to unite all of its children into Her embrace and lead them by Her Will and Grace, for all of mankind and the love of One Earth.”

***

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Twenty years have passed.

We were all made slaves to a mindless rush for a false image of prosperity and well-being.

We have now come to a standstill.

On the brink.

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Today, what to say, what to add? Today what is the priority?

Perhaps it may be helpful to look at the most recalcitrant contradictions that prevent an actual commitment to a unified common effort towards a collective terrestrial existence inhabited by the Spirit and guided by the Soul and, in that light, see the absurdity of our clinging to a three- dimensional struggle for enjoyment circled in by death. If all the difficulties, all the snares, all the falsities and all the denials of today’ world are now indeed actively represented within the collective life of this one beleaguered yet indomitable multitude that is India – and it is so perhaps because India owns a power of integral realization no other country of this world can claim for itself -, yet India can only begin to find their living and progressive resolution when it has faced its own failings and identified, recognized and integrated the true and valid gains and discoveries made by other societies and peoples of this one world. And each people, each society of this world, however globalized it may appear under the predatory eye of consumerism, have their own unique and singular contradictions to offer, their own inherited failings and their own incomparable powers of being.

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It is self-evident that we, all of 7.5 billions of us, have been subjected to a common spell and yet the way to shake off this hypnotic malignancy cannot be identical for all. It is also self-evident that, through human agencies, numerous forces are rapidly ruining the earth’ integrity and compromising the very possibility of continuous and progressive life upon it. Many voices have risen in the past decades and many more are now rising: voices of warning, of prophecy, exhorting voices, voices of alarm, of denunciation, from all paths of life and all disciplines, even while certain technological advances are forging ahead, fuelled by the greed for enormous profits and control. Some of these voices resonate deeper as they draw the substance of their calls from experiencing the fundamental oneness of the universe and mankind’s role and responsibility as an evolutionary bridge – a bridge TOWARDS a more harmonious and conscious condition, instead of an agent of another destruction and failure within its infinity.

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One of India’s sons and its most articulate and far-seeing voice, which India as a country, a society and a field of research, thought and action, has so consistently and significantly ignored since its very birth as a nation, is yet the One who has enunciated all the keys and processes that are necessary for an integral realization and the activation of a high unifying power upon earth for its future as a site of ever-progressive manifestation.

Sri Aurobindo.

And the reason why He has been so largely ignored for all these crucial decades is plain and simple: one can begin to “understand”, accept and

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recognize the truth He speaks only when one is ready to give up the ego as a base for one’s existence. Yet for humanity to be led and propelled and protected by an actual manifestation of a higher and truer and more effective principle of existence, a certain proportion of its members must make the transition to a condition that is free of ego, wherein ego is replaced by the soul – the flame in the individual being that is always conscious of its source, its function, its work and its unconditional unity with the rest.

But who wants to be free?

Who truly wants to be free?

Who wants to be truly free?

Egoless, held like a growing bud within One Conscious Presence which lives immensely in every point of Itself and throbs with a vibrant infinity of potentials…: who wants to be free within the One!!!

Ego was the formative process in humanity, thriving on separation and duality.

It has now come to its evolutionary limit and must yield to another process: the soul is ready to meet the world with the consciousness that is now replacing the mind and, through it, Matter and Spirit are to accomplish and fulfill one another in the emergence of a new being, a true humanity upon earth.

But we cling to this ego, to this identity; to whatever helps define us as an unique individual; we are attached and willingly bound – to family, to society, to caste, to status, to country and we cling to our possessions, our achievements, our talents and capacities, to our name and fame; we are attached to our religion, to our beliefs, to our cause, to our positioning; we are attached and we cling to our revolt, our independence, our despair, our

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lament, our pain; we are attached to our routine, to the small pleasures of each day, to the evening cigarette and glass of wine; the sambar and chutney of simple existence, we do not wish to let go, although we know well that death will tear us apart and away and so cling all the more despite even our agony.

Sri Aurobindo is the one son of India who has delved deep within the spirit of Bharat Mata and delivered from the centuries of neglect, shadow and oppression, Her eternal living truths to be incarnated anew for an age of terrestrial harmony.

But who cares to listen?

Bharat Mata’s very body has been desecrated by Her own people, Her rivers and glaciers, Her forests and Her hills have been violated, exploited and vitiated by Her own children avid for the comforts of a global fraud. Her ancient, vast, far-seeing wisdom, exact and fluid, ever welcoming of sincere experiences and seekings, ever compassionate and ready to guide, ever understanding of all, has been revealed anew by Her Son, Sri Aurobindo, for Her leading mission in the world. Instead of the multiplied fossilized rituals and rules and stigma and privileges and moral duties that generations of Her people have let replace the breath of living spiritual advance and discovery that was Her ferment and Her dynamism, Sri Aurobindo has illumined again the deeper laws of the Shakti in Her workings which must take on a new life and vigor in Her rebirth.. Castes, for instance, that to this day remain the bane of Indian society, are a grotesque and painful mimicry and betrayal of the realities of the inner life. For, in truth, each individual is naturally inclined to an aspect of the manifestation, until the soul develops and learns to integrate all complementary aspects in a living, progressive whole: the movement of

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service and material care, the movement of ingenious crafting and utilization of materials provided by Nature, the movement of saving, producing, circulating energies, the movement of defending, protecting, breeding valor and fearlessness, the movement of managing, administering, sharing, prospering, the movement of purifying and illuminating and receiving knowledge and sight and helping others in the attainment of the higher foundations - all movements of the dynamic Shakti at work in the world of material Nature, were to find their ordered expression and legitimate growth within the collective organization. Religion in the contemporary sense had and has no place in Bharat Mata’s vastitude; for in truth each person is entitled to one’s own unique discovery of the Reality. Each one’s religion is one’s unique path of experience in one’s quest for union with the One, the Supreme Reality, “That”, which exists without forms and sustains all forms, beyond time and within all times. Innumerable paths have thus been opened and trod through the millennia and innumerable faces of the Divine have thus been discovered and made visible and accessible to mankind, yet none is exclusive, none claims dominion over the whole. This is the profundity and the true prosperity of Bharat Mata: even the sincere and honest atheist is Her child whom She will nurture to new wisdoms further awakening our humanity to Conscious Existence. And this is why it is made unnecessarily hard for Her life as a nation to integrate and assimilate a religious formation which not only claims to be the only righteous one but bans all other expressions of and relationships with the Divinity. Yet in truth even within the breadth and depth of Islam, there is a more profound approach of the Highest, as there is a more inclusive occult knowledge, just as there is, in Islam’s community, a great sense of brotherhood and collective order which can benefit the whole of the nation.

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For millennia, Bharat Mata’s sons and daughters explored the inexhaustible riches and mysteries of the great Shakti, at each level of Her manifestation; precise sciences were born and went on developing and strengthening their actuality in the lives of Her people, each of these disciplines being founded on the immutable reality of the Spirit that informs all that is. And to this day such sciences remain unchallenged, simply because of their integrity. And for all these millennia, arts and sciences were complementing one another as the two arms of a single offering – and their blooms resonate still in the hearts of the viewers. He is the One who prepared the ground for the transition to another age, an age of conscious harmony ruled by a principle of unity and oneness and its transforming power. To this end he first identified and studied all founding truths of past and present cultures and civilizations; then he ascended through all the planes accessible to the present human consciousness, explicitly describing each of them and their corresponding worlds and forces and beings, till he reached the Unknowable – the limit of this spiritual hemisphere. Once established there he uttered the call he was born with: “Let the One take possession of Its house, let this material world be redeemed and its travails vindicated by a higher, truer, vaster Consciousness”. Sri Aurobindo.

And the answer came.

This is the golden rush that is cleansing the layers of our ignorance and causing all our demons to surface and be unmasked.

This is the time for the change and the choice and the opening of the Path of conscious becoming upon this earth.

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This is the moment for humanity to be reborn into, to deliver and to welcome and receive the new consciousness, the new awareness, the new existence in Matter, of a Principle of manifestation that transcends and transforms all dualities, dissolves all egoism and separateness, dispels all ignorance, reconciles all opposites and recreates our physical world within its limitless embrace. India’s role is to cleave the way for “the True, the Right and the Vast” to replace the divisive rule of ego and begin converting all human activities into offerings to the rule of Love and Beauty and Harmony, Liberty and Solidarity for the whole of terrestrial life and nature – so that all can progress and humanity may take its rightful place in the order of the universe.

We all stand at the edge of an unnamable chasm.

We must awake.

It is no longer an issue of “secularism” versus “hindutva”, it is way past the time of political gains, it is even beyond the matter of survival - either we stand up and serve the Spirit, or we forever fail. The term “secularism” was always a hollow convenient word to legitimize various and contradictory paths of self-development, which had become imperative due to the continued neglect of substantial progress in the collective consciousness. “Hindutva” is a return of the swing to reclaim one’s spiritual identity, but it is tainted with ego and revenge and the poverty of its thought can but attract its own demise.

India demands more of us all.

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Sri Aurobindo has underlined all the elements of a more fortunate and better-inspired social reconstruction that may serve as the necessary environment and sustenance for the passage to the new being, the new material being that is now stirring in the crucible of evolution.

This new consciousness, this new principle, this “supramental” being, as Sri Aurobindo first named it, for lack of words, is truly and directly conscious: it knows. It does not surmise or guess or imagine or figure or divine or propounds or proposes: it knows. And it knows the immeasurable presence of the One in every atom and molecule and particle as in every cell and every single material aggregate. Thus does it know, directly and incontrovertibly, the sacredness of all that is. A few centuries ago mankind allowed itself, out of its own misplaced sense of superiority, to begin exploiting Nature’s resources without respect or reverence, to ill-treat its creatures so they become preys to its own selfish blinded ends, to rampage and ransack the whole earth. When the invention of machines ought to have been used with a sense of responsibility for the welfare of the whole, it was misused for the separate dominance of one species to the detriment of all the others. And the same goes for the further sophistication of our technological leaps and bounds, which have now the power to curse all of this earthly creation. Today’ ecologists, environmentalists, activists – terms that are often used with scorn or derision – may not all be realized spiritual beings, but they share a profound and terrible sense of all the injustice and all the wrongs that are inflicted every minute of our time onto the terrestrial balance and, as such, they do serve the Presence and the future of its manifestation here upon earth.

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Their goodwill can and must be harnessed for the work of rebuilding a nation’ course as a beacon of perception and expression of a new, superior harmony.

Read Sri Aurobindo .

Listen to Sri Aurobindo .

Be Sri Aurobindo’s action in India today.

Let India respond to its treasure and help this world to veer away from waste and destruction to a path of continuous, evermore conscious and evermore harmonious progress. This drastic episode of unparalleled collective confinement has shown and laid bare many of our misdeeds as a race. It has also pulled all of us, however momentarily, out of the forceful routine of vitiation and dereliction we were all embarked upon.

Let it be the moment of assessment and awakening.

Let us all, limbs of one people, identify our common priorities so that Bharat Mata may stand erect again and clear the way.

Divakar.

Auroville, May 5, 2020.

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