Questions and Meditations

Questions and Meditations

Divakar

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Preamble

The earth as we know it is at stake. Evolution is in a phase of acceleration. Humanity must awake, or perish.

If many are the clarified voices that rise today in all countries and in all languages of this world, enjoining governments to change course while there is still time, monopolies, consortiums and financial groups are increasing their self-interested pressure all the more. What are the forces that actually hold the power, what is really this power, where is it seated and is there no saving puissance at work in this universe? Or is it still and always the same perpetual age-long battle between Good and Evil, between the Adversary and the Divine? Or else are such perceptions only issuing from our state of consciousness and our subjectivity?

Yet is it not undeniable that two distinct kinds of forces, actions and currents are engaged in our consciousnesses?

It is NOW that we all must choose between those forces that possess us through our obscured willingness and those forces that are working for the true Good. The choice is between those forces that seek to destroy the very milieu of a continuously progressive evolution, and those forces that are working to establish a concrete and irreversible awakening in human consciousness.

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The ideal towards which we must move actively and integrally is that of a humanity enlightened, pacified and eager for harmony, which will be capable of accepting and welcoming the apparition of transitory beings learning to operate in the material world according to a Principle of Unity and a direct and sovereign Consciousness.

For mankind must and can collaborate.

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At the level of peoples and nations, the measures to be taken are known and, by now, self-evident. - To halt the growth and expansion of large cities and to redistribute the necessary infrastructure in the smaller towns and villages, while encouraging local initiatives. - To halt the animal food industry and to convert its capacities. - To halt the armament industry and to convert its capacities. - To halt noxious chemical fertilizers and pesticides industry and to convert its capacities. - To halt all harmful extraction of fossil matter and all excessive exploitation of natural resources – activities which degrade the environment. - To better support and stimulate scientific researches, by freeing the numerous patents that have been occulted by self-serving industrial and financial entities and by turning all progress towards the realization of a material harmony for all. - To cease from blindly reproducing ourselves. - To encourage and facilitate a responsible economy wherein each one learns to give and to receive in the respect of the oneness of all that is. - To rehabilitate the dignity of all work. - To orient society towards an agreement that would ensure minimum universal revenue. - To support and promote free access to practical know-how and information in all languages currently used so as to allow everyone to acquire a concrete and creative autonomy.

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However another virulent specter must also be faced, understood and integrated in humanity’s awakening – that of fanaticism. Both identity and religious fanaticisms, exacerbated exclusivisms, must be appeased and their causes comprehended so that, on the one hand, the forces that feed from their excess of sanctified violence may desist and, on

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the other hand, that a sentiment of community may circulate among their numbers. Every fanaticism is the sign of a primal stage of individual and collective development: no inwardly developed individuality or any society cultivating universal values will indulge in any form of fanaticism. But the contemporary world is a great chaos of values and directions and for all those who have not yet found their inner compass, the need of a structure and of a code of conduct is imperative. The great religions: why are they great, how could they generate so much adhesion? Because they each offer the advantage of structuring individual existence from the cradle to the grave in providing it with meaning, a sense of belonging and of direction and a body of immutable values. According to the declared aim of a particular religion, its percepts and its examples, the individual may derive the necessary indications for daily practice and behavior. However, none of these great religions preaches the search for perfection upon this Earth: each one is content to propose a way of salvation and redemption or liberation. None of them is concerned with a durable creation, more and more conscious and harmonious in this material world, although they all advise to observe a conduct as noble and irreproachable as possible during this temporary sojourn. Yet, among all these terrestrial religions, the one named “Hinduism” is potentially the vastest and the most open to mankind’s spiritual future, for it has its roots and origins in an infinite store of inner direct experience which states that “All is That” and “Nothing exists but That” and this material universe is to become the Supreme’s habitation: this is therefore what we must strive for, work towards and give ourselves to. One of the consequences of the infiniteness of this source is that all genuine spiritual experience is accepted and every realized relation to the Divine is respected. *

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As for the atheist, the agnostic, the faithless, he is obliged to reflect and question and to seek to discern the values, qualities, virtues and faculties that constitute the essence of the human being and guarantee its integrity while providing it with a leverage for its progress as well as a moral of conduct that may pass the tests of time and help to respond to the circumstances of this world wherein it is anchored – and this without ever having to rely on any superior reality. Yet, in fact as in practice, very rare today are those individuals who are either true believers or truly without faith, for everyone eventually becomes jaded or disillusioned by the limits and contradictions of all dogma as of all positioning.

And all of us together gathered on this single ship seem to be rushing towards annihilation - of our human existence at any rate.

How to hasten the awakening - the effective awakening, through and through, of our ambivalent and precarious condition?

And can we even possibly awaken? Shall we not be terrified?

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For such is the conundrum of our state: with whatever the plans and energies of mind and life have provided us, we have tried to occupy the emptiness of absence, which is the consequence of our having grown separated. Having at our disposal the faculty of imagination, we keep peopling the future with a multitude of artifacts ever more sophisticated and performing, serving ever more puissant societies and personae, wavering between good and evil and from worst to best, those advances being reflected in our present times by the technological applications we elect to make of our scientific discoveries – and these choices betray us.

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For we almost never imagine, nor are we able to do so, what would be a true existence – filled and vibrant with Presence and independent of any exterior input. Yet whenever one of us human beings, somewhere upon this unique Earth, succeeds in making an offered and oriented usage of this faculty of imagination and exercises it as a call and a channel, something of That Reality that we miss, some expression of its presence, its force and its harmony filters into our ambient collective milieu and works in it to sow, propagate and disseminate a little of the true consciousness. We are still the cavemen: those immense caves wherein minuscule inhabitants gesticulate, yowl, fear and intoxicate themselves in their ceaseless attempts to remedy to the absence, the hollowness and the sonorous emptiness, covering the walls with absorbent objects, fabricating always more tools and instruments and subterfuges and busying themselves as much as they can – so as to no longer feel the bite of this gaping yaw.

Can we imagine at all the sovereignty of the true consciousness? No, we cannot – it can only be known through identity.

But sometimes, as if by accident, one experiences a glimpse of it and one knows, one comprehends = that This IS.

What to do, then?

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However, we are not entirely bereft of offerings when we come before the true consciousness. For, through it all we have developed what may remain and grow within the breast and under the watch of the consciousness of Unity: our culture, or multitudinous cultivation, of our relation to the Divine – to Truth, to Perfection, Harmony, Beauty, to Justice or Goodness, to all that pulls us up to the height of what we truly are. From our human condition of constraints, needs and necessities, this treasure built itself up which nothing can destroy and the future will make to blossom.

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We must choose.

The peril is there.

For we are presently yielding to a virtual world which, although it seems to us to be the magical fruit of our survival capacity, whose combinations, permutations end extensions are probably infinite, yet grows like a constant parasite that is robbing us of our flame of aspiration and call. We need to shake this hypnosis off, we need to call and call and call, wherever we are, as breath, as food, as water, to call this veritable Good that alone can put everything in its place, quieten and soothe and relieve and change everything.

Is calling an act?

Is it enough for us to be calling, individually, or in groups?

The call is indispensable, if only because we do not actually know how to resolve the impasses humanity has moved into and all the “solutions” we might consider would inevitably be partial and fragmented. But the call alone is like a mute cry: one must associate it with a process, an action, even while knowing that this process and this action will surely fall short and fail us, one must give a body and a vehicle to this cry, make it circulate, make it resonate and rise and flame and reach – and it teaches us to open and to receive. Thus, the citizens’ movements, punctual acts, the protests and testimonies, the healing works and the beneficial innovations, every such action may associate with the call, draw strength from it and give it substance. To act without any attachment, with all the necessary conviction and commitment, yet without ever being reduced to it, such is the responsibility each of us is to respect.

For above all we must put ourselves into the transforming current and let it flow and let it work.

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This Consciousness is capable.

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Let us withdraw from all the drama: Consciousness is One and when we open our doors to it, the doors of our most material state, that of our body, the circulation of the Force may reveal the operations required for the advent of an uninterrupted harmonious terrestrial progress.

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AUM NAMO BHAGAVATE

Aum = Invoking That which IS. That which is Consciousness, Existence and Joy. That which is Plenitude and Freedom. That which depends on nothing but Self – the Source infinite, eternal, limitless.

Namo = One offers to That All that one is, all that one has, All that one can do and will ever be able to do, All that one hopes for, Without any reservation, calculation or impatience.

Bhagavate = One turns towards That Future Which can manifest, which wills to manifest, Which will manifest.

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At the Sweet Mother’s feet.

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What follows is a series of questionings and meditations, or contemplations, around matters that concern every one of us, seeking to grasp the role and place of the contradiction and the adversity which have made of our humanity a curse for terrestrial nature and to unite more consciously to That which can open to us the way of a durable and fecund Harmony.

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1 The Role of Horror

One day in 1968, the Mother made the comment that… “We know that the adverse forces are so to speak authorized to work – precisely through the sentiment of horror – to hasten the awakening of the consciousness…” (….”I know now, I remember, this whole experience came after having read a book which was published in India very recently, in English, which they called ‘The Roll of Honor’, where there is the photograph and a short biography of all those who died in the fight against the British, for the freedom of India. There were photos everywhere, lots of photographs (some were only the photograph taken by the police when they had just been killed and were still lying on the ground), and all this brought a certain atmosphere: the atmosphere of these disinterested good-wills that meet with a tragic fate. It gave me an impression similar to the effect produced by the photographs of the German horrors during the war over there. It is evident that these things are directly under the influence of certain adverse forces, but we know that the adverse forces are so to say authorized to work – precisely through this sentiment of horror – to hasten the awakening of the consciousness. And then, this experience, which very much resembled the one I had when I saw the photographs of the German atrocities in France, has put me in touch with the vision of the human error, terrestrial, modern (it is modern: it started in those last thousand years and it is becoming more and more acute in the last hundred years), with the aspiration to counter it: how to do so, what is to be done… And the answer: “It is for this that you have created Auroville!” It is a perception of the forces – the forces that act directly in the events, the material events, which are … illusory and false; for example, the man who has fought for the freedom of his country, who has just been assassinated there because he is a revolted one, and who looks like a defeated one, lying on the parapet of the road: it is he, the victorious one! This is it. It shows well the kind of relation between the truth and the expression. And so, if one enters into this consciousness where one perceives the play of forces and one sees the world this way, it is very interesting and it is like this, when I was in this state, that it was said to me, shown to me clearly (it is inexpressible because these are not words, but

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facts): “It is for this that you have created Auroville”. It is the same thing as for this photo.”… Extract from the Mother’s Agenda, recorded by Sujata and Satprem)

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Horror.

The sentiment one experiences when confronted with the manifestation of wills, intents and motives which seem contrary to the very sense of humanness, betray it, vilify it, threaten it and harm it. This sentiment one experiences before the torture inflicted to the brave, the heroes and the revolted, before the murder of those who have the courage to retain human dignity.

Before the enterprise of methodical, deliberate, organized annihilation of all those who do not conform to the norms established by the local majority.

Before the planned, detailed, refined and legitimized spread of abomination.

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The faces and the behaviors that inspire this horror, which provoke or induce this sentiment of horror like a massive alarm, a chilling reminder and a terrible testimony to our condition, are strewn along our way in space and time – today itself we must face them and respond: how?

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“We know…” Who is “we”? Mother and Sri Aurobindo and their disciples and children on their Way of Yoga for the Earth? All those who are conscious of the One, of the Real, of the Supreme?

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Or even, all those of us who are the irreducible ones, who will not yield even under the most cruel and intense agony or the most ingenious and convincing temptations, their essential humanity?

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Is it not often said that every human being has its price?

In the language of adversity, rare, very rare are those who cannot be bought = is this not the appraisal that stares at us now, questioning our integrity wherever we may exist upon this Earth? Has it not been amply and concretely demonstrated that the most intensive, rounded, thorough and perfected development of our instrumental nature, constitutes no guarantee of real humanness? That a monstrous project can form and take flight within the very culture of excellence?

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We are not even the masters of our own individual domains, how could we be responsible of all of their parts?

How could any one of us ever claim and affirm and promise never to buckle and give, never to surrender, never to capitulate?

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Whoever has had, when came its time, the experience to be born to the spirit, to be reborn, would wish to share it, for it then seems as if a very simple movement suffices – and yet how many lives and ordeals were needed before this single perfectly simple shift… of the consciousness? The consciousness imprisoned, reduced, hypnotized for so long that, suddenly, finds itself released and free in the true milieu, Life infinite… It does not take any time = the consciousness disengaged, its burden divested, light and whole… yes, afterwards, this is what one observes, when one has had to return, at once the same and ineffably changed.

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It is the identification that keeps us fettered and chained.

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We are bound, we suffer, we desire and we despair – because we are identified. Identified to the instrumental personality, this tiny temporary amalgam which is “me”, this past, this history, these assets and these lacks and wants, this complexity, these possibilities, this journey – and this body = the closer we are to the body and the tighter is the identification. Our most material vital being, our nervous being, is at once a narrow cord of energy and an envelope or sheath which the body itself needs constantly in order to persist in its form and its organism. To recover the integrity of the true consciousness while remaining incarnated, one must sever, dissolve or master this bond = it is thus that the ancient initiatory disciplines always included a central ordeal, the most critical and determining, that of physical death. To return clear-sighted and liberated from this radical experience was the condition to be fulfilled before confronting other dangers, to serve the Truth and to hold the torch of consciousness in this world as in the others.

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Under the action of an invasive terror, an intense desire, an extreme pleasure or an acute pain, the identification grows ever stronger until it becomes exclusive and seems absolute. It is then as if it has become impossible to extract, or to abstract oneself from it. Thus, how could one’s resistance to inflicted suffering be the only measure or indicator of integrity?

An effective transformative action must have already unified each instrumental part to the conscious source.

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However, even if one has held the charge, adversity still detains the ultimate weapon to force us to succumb – that of the atrocity which could be committed upon those one loves, if one does not surrender. What are then the karmic consequences of holding forth no matter what, relying on a higher force, or of abdicating for the safeguard of others?

Where will go the weight and the responsibility, how will they move?

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“…To hasten the awakening of consciousness…”

The collective consciousness, the consciousness of, or in, humanity? The consciousness of every human being, with the recognition of one’s part of responsibility or, more precisely, of connivance, with adversity? The consciousness in all of its forms and manifestations, disengaging itself, becoming aware again, finding itself back?

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During the rise to power of Nazism, with its goal of supremacy, it was the Lord of Falsehood, the entity that called itself the Lord of the Nations, that inspired the mustachioed pawn and puppet and placed him at the apparent reins, dictating his words and actions, and inebriating him, intoxicating him with visions of puissance. The nourishment it served was fine and rare: mysticism, ideal, greatness of the pure civilized race, organized prosperity, glorious future. By virtue of an exemplary collective discipline, a great cleansing would be accomplished, high lessons would be taught and the keys would be seized of a measured, impeccable, irresistible development of the superior race. A superman devoid of love, triumphantly separated from the vaster unity, a superman without truth.

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For this particular lord entity wanted first and foremost to secure its grip on the Earth – the site of evolution. And when its instruments met with unyielding resistance in humanity and its strategy was derailed by the sword of a Light it recognized, it had to withdraw – but, doing so, it swore to take its revenge.

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Such entities do not wish to incarnate here in this terrestrial material reality, but only to feed indefinitely upon it, to influence and dominate it, to keep it separated and at its mercy and, to that end, to prevent it from evolving towards its own unique realization of the One, of the Divine, of the manifest Supreme. They have their seat primarily in one or the other of the vital worlds, but they also operate in domains of the Mind and at times have an innate access, by a kind of ancient right or privilege, to planes of the Overmind. For, in this very world, in this physical and material condition which we believe to be the only one to exist, upon this Earth where we sojourn in these vulnerable mortal bodies, concretization is irreversible: what is done cannot be undone, one cannot go back in time, two objects cannot occupy the same space, every experience is direct and precise and generates objective consequences within an immeasurable interactive complexity and each human being must perforce learn to make a choice at every moment. While the other worlds offer divers degrees of flexibility, of instantaneous creativity, of almost infinite simultaneities, our material world here is unbending in its exactitude as in its laws. But it holds a Grace which no other world possesses. This is the secret of terrestrial evolution, this secret which one can reach or attain nowhere else, of the reciprocal creative Grace manifesting in two aspects = on the side of the human being, through the conscious creature’s dignity and on the side of the Supreme, of the Fundament of all that is, manifesting through Love. And by this Grace the consciousness progresses.

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But where is the dignity of those who callously exploit, without any regard or respect, those who plunder and who rape?

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This terrestrial Nature that has given us everything, its blood, its milk, its eggs and its fruits, its fibers and its grains, its sap and its honey and its water of vigor, its stones and its minerals and its gold and its infinite beauty – what have we returned to it?

This incomparable possibility of co-creation, of solidarity, of shared conscious evolution, what have we done of it?

We have eviscerated, pillaged, exhausted and poisoned it, we have stifled it with our practices and choked it with our inert and separate objects.

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Thus, is not the vengeance of the shadow spread out in every part, laid bare, demonstrated?

Is not the very possibility of continuity compromised?

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2 The new predators

The Second World War had barely ended that a number of other devastating conflicts were fired on all the continents = massacres, partitions, interfaith wars, fratricides and genocides were sprouting like a virulence, while humanity itself set to wildly and inexplicably proliferate. The colonial powers now weakened, faced with the untamable resilience of those peoples they had presumed to conquer with their supposedly superior civilizing values, had to renounce their ill-acquired empires and withdraw, not without imprinting their marks and signatures in the soils and the bloods – rules and laws and narrow hypocritical morals and arbitrary borders drawn hastily so as to distribute among themselves future access to natural riches and resources. A new world order was seeking to impose itself, with the wealthiest and best equipped nations taking on the role of gendarmes – with an eye on profit – and competing in cunning so as, using lesser nations as pawns, to consolidate their respective control over the mineral and fossil sources required for their own maintenance and development. It is in times of war that scientific research is best funded, its main mission the discovery and perfecting of new means of augmenting one’s autonomy and survival capacities on the one hand and, on the other, of increasing one’s attacking and destructing or retaliating power. Thus, the perfecting of the power to neutralize and to harm made spectacular progress, along with the enabling means of secret communication. But in times of peace, the cost of the manufacture and industry of all the new ever more sophisticated weapons and instruments becomes prohibitive and they must be turned into profitable ventures, selling to the highest bidder – or the most deserving, depending on the political perspective. *

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With the rise of a multitude of young nations, the formidable demographic leap and the increasing immediacy of the new technologies of communication, the morals of exploitation and profit became law and normal conduct – shared by the majority -, a principle of existence and a language common to all contemporary societies, defeating all wisdoms.

All sorts of predators grew on an increasingly fertile ground of opportunities.

Sustained observation of behaviors and their assessment in terms of potential mining became crucial to the creation of new goods and tools and their markets. The individual pursuit of happiness, an already ignorant, reductive and misleading proposition, further deteriorated, by rapid increments, into the pursuit of material comfort: the acquisition of each of the material components of an image being projected worldwide without let. We now know that this physical reality which we apprehend through our senses is but a degree or level or state of an infinitely more complex material reality. The more we learn about Matter and its conditions and the more, paradoxically, its mystery expands and deepens. As our methods and instruments of observation are further refined and we become able to appreciate other laws and underlying behaviors – unperceived by our senses -, we are tempted to make use of them, to draw some advantage from them and improve our lot. *

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It is the motive of the quest that determines the knowledge one will acquire.

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It seems evident that, if one steals into this multiple material reality with the intention of extracting the means of creating the perfect weapon, or if one

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approaches and explores this same multidimensional reality with the aspiration and the need to discern the means of serving and establishing a progressive terrestrial harmony, the observations and records one will have made on the way will not be the same. And yet one cannot destroy without having identified the laws that rule cohesion, just as one cannot build without having grasped the laws that rule disintegration. And here lies the ambiguity of science. An ambiguity which necessarily implies every researcher as every discoverer’s responsibility.

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The three degrees of the Yoga of the Earth = - To serve the lasting good of the whole of humanity. - To serve the advent of an enlightened humanity, converted to the Truth, as a guarantee for the progressive equilibrium of the entire terrestrial Nature. - To serve the Supreme in its manifestation.

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3 Malfeasance

Rivers and oceans have become our refuse bins.

Where is the horror?

Where is the awakening?

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This year, 2018, in Kerala, the southernmost State in the Indian peninsula, during the month of August, unprecedented floods took place – considerably aggravated by the “human factor”: unregulated construction along the water bodies, defective management of dams and choking of run-offs. The tons and tons of accumulated rubbish piled at the bottom of the rivers, ponds, basins and channels, were lifted up and borne every which way, mingling with crumbling soil, uprooted trees and fragments of collapsed buildings, broken vehicles and machinery.

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In the United States, in Canada, in New-Zealand, forests continue to burn.

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What is the source, or the cause, of this collective blindness?

How have we come to this state of monstrosity, how have we turned into these harmful creatures that pullulate all over the Earth and vitiate its atmosphere and devour, parasite and disrupt its entire organism?

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A human being and a horse, a human being and a wolf, or a dolphin, a tree or a garden, can together learn to recognize and respect and love one another, to grow one by the other, one with the other, one from the other.

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We say – according to these experiences we qualify as “spiritual”- that veritable love is unconditional. But love is the supreme condition, love is supremely intolerant, since nothing exists as much as love does.

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However mankind has rather learnt to dominate, tame, enslave and domesticate those species it deemed inferior but from which it could draw some advantage. In so doing, it is yet possible for the shepherd and the sheep to learn from and mutually appreciate one another. Isn’t the instinct of mastery inherent to mankind, by which it forever seeks to dominate its environment, the expression of an intention of Nature in its evolutionary impetus? Yet this instinct, in order to accomplish its goal and fulfill its function, must unite to its superior foundation, that of a wisdom effectively able to guide and to govern, truly serving the manifestation.

The human being acquires its dignity only by self-knowledge and self- mastery. Only then can it watch over the general good.

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One who does not have self-mastery is but a shadow of oneself. One then is dominated, led like a slave by one’s own impulses, wants and desires, by the others, by the image they reflect.

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It is the gravity of the guts. It is the condition of the herd.

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Nowadays the predators have greatly perfected the shepherd’s abilities – human masses are potential sources of profit.

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4 To take

When and how did violence become unavoidable?

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If you prevent me from obtaining or accessing what is indispensable to me, you force me to exert pressure on you till you yield.

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Separation. The ego.

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Whatever Nature is not willingly offering to us, we must therefore tear it from her.

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5 Imbalance

Nearly eight billions of human beings. Phenomena and consequences are studied: they are named, classified, labeled and assessed; one defines, comments and predicts them. One specializes.

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Is there, in time and space, a single existence devoid of violence?

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Is there a single power that can act without violence?

Yes. The Force of Harmony. The Force of Healing. True Beauty. Truth.

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Moral violence, State-violence, emotional violence – and physical violence. From wild, primal and impulsive violence to deliberate, organized, legitimized violence, lies this process which we name “civilization”.

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Would the progress of consciousness be possible without violence or suffering? Could consciousness ever awaken from its inert torpor of material creature without the shock of pain or the horror that lights in it the flame of an aspiration and a call towards a higher, fuller and truer existence?

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If the cause, purpose and aim of this material incarnation, of this sojourn in the physical world, are but one – to become conscious of the Divine -, does it follow that everything happening to us, absolutely everything, tragedies and triumphs, joys and miseries, must be accepted as an aid?

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But how many are they, these human beings who, today itself, experience that need, the need to become conscious of the Divine?

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In relation to the future health and equilibrium of the Earth, is humanity partly or largely dispensable?

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All soils are not suitable for all seeds.

With time and the diversification of human activities, sciences have been elaborated, developed, defined and situated.

What one perhaps knew without thoughts or words now requires and demands all sorts of calculations, references, categorizations and classifications in order to present a range of explanations and advanced or informed guesses.

Could humanity have actually become a rogue species?

This happens: with the sudden intrusion of molecular or chemical products or associations into a given milieu, a myriad of extraordinary phenomenal reactions occur; thus a variety of algae abruptly propagating itself may swiftly suffocate a maritime environment. Or it may be the subtle intrusion of forces and influences into consciousnesses that ruptures their collective balance and perverts or destabilizes their relation to their natural milieu and environment.

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Are time and space – space-time, spaces-times – more than one, more than two, more than several, are they infinitely numerous? Are they simultaneous, parallel, interdependent? Do they ride, cross, influence one another? And from here, from this body and this matter, concrete and perishable, can we have access to these other dimensions? Can these other realities have access to ours? Is there exchange, is there exploitation? Is collaboration possible? Look at these kids absorbed by the vagaries of a virtual violence so sovereign that only those internalized sensations it triggers and stimulates remain real – bodies are forgotten, human distress, sorrow and fear and pleasure, everything is recuperated by the frantic, endlessly varied setting, direction and enactment of violence: there is no more horror, no more awakening, there is only all-powerful, magical nourishment. Look at these adults unreservedly engrossed in the market of sex images they can no longer live without, have they not forgotten how to give, how to offer themselves, how to celebrate the human care and tenderness in Matter?

How many are we not who no longer wish anything but to be caught and captured, exempted from responsibility, so we may forget the want that reigns in our lives?

Thus can one select one’s preferred drug, one’s brand of hypnosis and possession, so as to “pass the time”, so as to no longer be this hollow shell, this wandering wreck, this dull day and this absence that never end, or these dramas so heavy and so vain that one wants to run.

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6 Pralaya

Our animal life, from the instant of our expulsion from the womb, is furrowed with violence, beginning with the violence of our needs, appetites and cravings which dominates our physical consciousness till its instruments develop – and propel us in fields of forces where compete and clash all sorts of wills seeking to impose themselves.

But every imposition is a violence, be it institutional, clannish, moral, emotional, intellectual or physical.

And it is in terms of violence that we learn to make use of our personal will, violence is the measure of its effectiveness = even when we are convinced of acting for the good.

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It is only when one unites with one’s psychic consciousness that one may withdraw from all violence and let the Force of Harmony act.

And the only imposition free of violence is that of the true Consciousness, for it bears its own evidence, unalterable, indivisible, whole and contraryless.

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Violence may as well be passive: one is its blinded instrument, one commits a violation unwittingly. So does the entrepreneur who lets the toxic effluents pour out from his factory into the river, who is himself under the violent pressures being exerted on his own resources and his limited capacity of discernment and choice.

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It would seem at present – is it a terrestrial battle, a general conflict, a frenetic race, or is it rather the transition to another equilibrium? – that our

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destiny is being waged between a coalition of destructive forces and the consciously chosen collaboration of the forces of harmony.

But our appreciation of the situation is largely determined by our subjective experience of time.

And of death.

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The rhythms of Time. The Pralaya.

Universal pulsations, creations, expansions, destructions, re-absorptions… the germ of Life, the buried civilizations, the limitless past, history always renewed : have we now arrived to the edge of the great precipice?

There is yet a state of consciousness wherein one knows with absolute certainty that energy and matter are one, indivisible and infinite – that the tender moss at the base of the tree, the gently rushing torrent, the sea-shell against your skin, are eternal and, even destroyed, continue to exist and will be reborn in matter, ever new assemblages of relations in the consciousness one and without bounds.

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But there it is: there is a sense and there is a necessity to the progress of our consciousnesses. Your hatred is a grimace that searches for its truth. Your contempt, your crudeness, are wounds on our living body. My harshness is a mask that fears the mixture of the obscure.

We must learn, learn as one single being, our lesson. One single being.

We must recover love in Matter. Now.

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Earth is grievously injured and hurt: down deep into its innards it must endure the noxious effects of our ravages. Would we, could we still tend it and heal it and see that it recovers its balance and its integrity, cleanse its atmosphere and, at last, give it all the love it deserves from us.

*

Sentimentalism? Anthropomorphism?

Today, wherever we may live upon this wondrous planet, we know in and with our bodies the scale of its anger, of its rage, of its impatience – or of its distress? We have seen and felt and sensed it heave and shake, erupt and rush and mow and trample everything, dislodge, uproot, pulverize and grind mercilessly.

*

But whatever may be the occult chronicles of vanished continents, of very ancient accomplished societies that succumbed to their own vice and partiality, or the cellular memories of an epoch without any hurt or discord when all creatures of all species could mutually recognize one another and the human being stood like a promise, and whether it all occurred a hundred or a thousand times, never has there been anywhere such a formidable acceleration – towards a convergence, or a conflagration? The human species so spread out and populous, so actively harmful, so very contradictory, so very near to discovery and transformation, as to defeat and disintegration, never has it occurred anywhere, but here and now.

*

Yes indeed, Earth can destroy us all with but a flick of its will, one sees that, or it can make this material existence so harsh and hard that our present organisms will not be able to adapt: we are destroying it, it is destroying us – is this only about it and us, about mankind and the earth, about the failure of an evolutionary association?

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Earth and its forces, Nature and its forces, the forces of Matter and those subtle forces, unperceived by our senses, that sustain and feed Matter – is it really just about it and “us”? To the ruins and rubble of our wars will then be added those of Earth’s final vengeance – is it not this taste of dust everywhere that inexorably seems to us to be most probable?

And then?

Between the infinite resources of energy in Matter and those of the energy in surviving terrestrial Nature, new molecular combinations, original encounters and associations, other sub-atomic behaviors will contribute to the formation of new organisms and all the inert debris of the past will be decomposed and then, who knows, there will perhaps be another attempt at incarnating and manifesting Consciousness?

*

But how have we come to this pass?

Have we actually, really grasped the solidarity of all that is?

To what extent are we the impuissant preys and puppets of those adjacent planes which constantly influence us?

***

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7 The baits

The entities, or groups of entities, that feed on our emotional discharges and feast on our terror and our extreme pleasure, are also our purveyors of intensity and this is indeed how we become their playthings. Without their intervention, interference and injections of vital influx, we seem to be abandoned to a gloomy, tedious and senseless existence or to the slavish endless demands and gross necessities of an aimless and sparkless life. We would perhaps wish to believe that it is but a matter of energy flow and exchange – we emit, we receive, is this not how everything works? Yet, the more our dependence increases and the more alienated we are from our consciousness and the deafer to its call. To have more, to acquire and possess more, to enjoy and profit more… one’s right to comfort, pleasure and entertainment… In this fashion, one’s well-being is measured by the amount of owned objects – soon to be thrown, discarded and replaced in the unceasing pursuit of more perfect yield and efficiency. An immense moving chain is gradually capturing all of us living human beings. *

*

The manipulation of others, their objectification and exploitation, has become the norm; to make one’s career of it is normal and respectable.

*

Obscene fortunes are thus amassed and the power of action conferred by wealth and money is placed in the hands of the new miserable, who are slaves to the images that move them, the ambitions that propel them and the stated intentions that serve them as profiling banners.

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*

Is there today a single nation that be at once free and capable of managing its own resources, its own economy, and the harmony of its own society?

Those nations that are “great” or “puissant” are only so at the detriment of other, less arrogant ones, which they speedily ransack or “protect” conditionally, or they only become so, like India, at the expense of their own inner culture and natural riches, emulating the model of success promulgated by the West and throwing their population to the shepherds of the world market. The space and milieu of international “negotiations” is that of a deleterious dynamics of mutual pressure, blackmail, extortion, threat and false promise. Thus all the nations, preys and predators, rally, bend and bow under the flag of “progress”, the flattering appellation for a criminal development devoid of love and vision. As of today, two very small countries appear to be escaping the dictates of this frantic race, Bhutan and Costa-Rica. However, Bhutan is coveted by China, which seeks to consolidate its territorial dominance all around India and depends partly on India for its energy sources insofar as its people, recently emancipated from an ancient monarchy, is now demanding access to the contagious array of goods and facilities of “modern life”. Costa-Rica stands rightly proud, having kept its integrity while renouncing any armament; its denizens practice the respect and care of Nature and, to a major extent, of every individual human being’s fundamental rights. These are two dots on the map of the Earth, two minuscule enclaves of health and well-being.

***

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8 Here and there and everywhere

One searches and searches on – looking, seeing, feeling, seizing, grasping all one can, one searches for this one single common point of transmission, this point of direct, immediate, universal communication, or at least human, this threshold, this instant opening through which the Harmony of the True, the true harmony, may pass and flow, circulate, act and manifest in all the consciousnesses at once and, through them, in the circumstances of the Earth.

One searches and searches on, how to serve this saltus, this transit and this seeding, how to hasten it.

One well understands that an unshakable, unalterable calm, an irreversible equality, are indispensable for this service. A sovereign impersonality, established and wholly offered, must already rule all the movements and activities of the being. But, as one is still so far and separate from It, one is tempted to… to what?... to renounce, to give up? No, but, knowing the imperfection of one’s condition, to nonetheless try and serve, without having obtained this realization, without having changed enough yet!!! Because the urgency seems to grow almost by the day if not by the hour – and one prays for the undoing and dissolution of the very possibility of destruction: of an immeasurable loss and waste from the point of view of the consciousness emitted and of the experience in Matter on the path of Evolution.

*

No doubt, human nature has long striven to conciliate its appetites and greeds with its intelligence and its sense of balance – and its practices of dominance and allegiance, or submission, of exploitation and dependency, of seduction and subterfuges, are so ancient and tested that they seem eternal and incontrovertible.

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But what has never occurred before is for such a living mass of humanity to be made entirely vulnerable to a concerted exploitation of its creature wants and instincts.

*

We are all each of us prisoners of our respective context = it is our context that determines our comprehension and appreciation of the state of the world – and of our position relative to it. Consenting and even grateful prisoners we are, since this context, whichever it may be, at once protects us and gives us structure and definition. If some breaches happen to tear our immediate horizon, they allow us to believe that our ignorance is thus somewhat mitigated, tempered and corrected by the sudden glimpses they give us of the vaster world and of its dangers = my husband, who must often go on tours of duty and returns each tine burdened with nightmares, the refugee ahead of me who does not understand the price of a baguette, the prostitute child who hails me from the shadow of a recessed entryway, the livid disheveled hulk who barges into my ashram, the river in spate that suddenly carries floating corpses, the flank of the hill that brutally splits and flounders at the end of my village…

***

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9 Open societies

Sometimes, disorder is a gift and a chance, insofar as it arouses or elicits an opening and a call. - “O Lord, let Truth reign, I no longer want anything but Thee, what Thou wantest…!” – (to be translated according to languages and cultures, the differences in formulation do not matter).

*

From the inner standpoint, democracy is a sorry solution, since it gives ignorance the Right to dominate by the numbers. Yet, while the “Vox Populi” is often the expression of the most obscure, dumbest and heaviest instincts, it is also at times deeper and clearer than the voice of the ambitious, greedy and arrogant self-driven types; but only an awakened and disinterested consciousness may distinguish between the sources of its dynamics and seek to work for the good of the whole. Those who are elected – by “the people” – are so on the basis of promises they will never be in a position to keep, contracting debts they will never be able to repay honorably: and thus will they have to let themselves be bought one way or another (reasonably, courteously, or more bluntly and crudely). Those who actually govern are “the others”, the industry tycoons, the financiers, the big entrepreneurs and media barons – and the members of the grey occult area who occupy the less visible part of the State edifice and do not depend on the will of the citizens, forming the administrative hierarchy that can modulate the flows of power. There are also, almost anonymous and bound to watch and observe, the servitors of the people, of the nation or of the soul of the country, those who have been trained in respect and integrity, in the discipline of service, the sense of duty, the preservation of the founding values and the defense of the homeland. They are those who truly bear the collective banner.

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Where then can be found the potential agents of the necessary change – change of collective comprehension and orientation – so that the continuity of terrestrial evolution may be ensured? Can one recognize them?

Appearances are sometimes shelters.

*

A society can be coherent and progressive only if each of its members is aware of one’s status as a subject amongst other subjects and of one’s share of responsibility before all the divers questions that arise. For only then can everyone participate in the orientations and help carry out the collective choices.

What then is a secular society?

The fundaments of a just society, capable of evolving in consciousness as in practice, are so very simple = - Each one is free to choose one’s religion, without ever imposing it in any way on others. - Each one is free to choose one’s sexuality, without ever abusing of anyone else. - Each one is free to choose one’s quest, without ever in any way harming others. - Each one is free to choose one’s activity, without ever compromising others’ freedom.

***

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