Questions and Meditations

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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