The birth of the new world took
place half an hour after the supramental manifestation, the golden event which
occurred on 29 February 1956. About the manifestation,—it was a manifestation
and not just a descent,—the Mother wrote in her diary the same day the
following:
This evening the Divine Presence,
concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living
gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door
which separated the world from the Divine. As I looked at the door, I knew and
willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that the time has come, and
lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single
blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces. Then the supramental
Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted
flow.
This happened during the common meditation on Wednesday, in the evening, in the
Ashram Playground. Later she added, in November 1957, that it was an event
which was a forerunner of the birth of a new world. In the South, in
When asked as when exactly did the birth of the new world take place, the
Mother replied: “half an hour later.” First the supramental Light and Force and
Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow and then half an
hour later took place the birth. The sequence is perfect: there could not have
been the new birth if the old Light was still present—that would have been
incongruous and strange, self-defeating. Only when the Light got fixed, did the
new birth occur. Isn’t that wonderful, the working of super-logic in the great
sequence of time?
On 25 September 1957 a question was put to the Mother: “When the Supreme Lord
told you to make the world, how did you know what had to be done?” She
answered: “I had nothing to learn for that, because the Supreme Lord contains
everything in Himself: the whole world, the knowledge of the world and the
power to make it. When He decided that there should be a world, He first
brought forth the knowledge of the world and the power to make it and that is
me, and then He commanded me to make the world.”
God the wise and the mighty—that is the constant refrain of the Holy Scripture!
“He first brought forth the knowledge of the world”—that was Sri Aurobindo. The
Avatar and his executive Shakti coming together in their full power of
manifestation can alone carry out triumphantly such a fundamental
world-transforming task. This has now happened; the task has been accomplished.
Such indeed was the divine Siddhi in this creation obtained by Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother. Glory to the twin Avatar! Glory to the Lord of the Creation!
Let us read fully the Mother’s talk
dated 10 July 1957. (Collected Works of
the Mother, Vol. 9, pp. 144-51)
It may well be that the
evolutionary urge would proceed to a change of the organs themselves in their
material working and use and diminish greatly the need of their instrumentation
and even of their existence. The centres in the subtle body, sūkşma śarīra, of which one would become
conscious and aware of all going on in it would pour their energies into
material nerve and plexus and tissue and radiate them through the whole material
body; all the physical life and its necessary activities in this new existence
could be maintained and operated by these higher agencies in a freer and ampler
way and by a less burdensome and restricting method. This might go so far that
these organs might cease to be indispensable and even be felt as too
obstructive: the central force might use them less and less and finally throw
aside their use altogether. If that happened they might waste by atrophy, be
reduced to an insignificant minimum or even disappear. The central force might
substitute for them subtle organs of a very different character or, if anything
material was needed, instruments that would be forms of dynamism or plastic
transmitters rather than what we know as organs. This might well be part of a supreme
total transformation of the body, though this too might not be final. To
envisage such changes is to look far ahead and minds attached to the present
form of things may be unable to give credence to their possibility. No such
limits and no such impossibility of any necessary change can be imposed on the
evolutionary urge.... What has to be overpassed, whatever has no longer a use
or is degraded, what has become unhelpful or retarding, can be discarded and
dropped on the way. That has been evident in the history of the evolution of the
body from its beginning in elementary forms to its most developed type, the
human, there is no reason why this process should not intervene in the
transition from the human into the divine body. For the manifestation or
building of a divine body on earth there must be an initial transformation, the
appearance of a new, a greater and more developed type, not a continuance with
little modifications of the present physical form and its limited
possibilities.
[The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16, pp. 38 – 39]
It is quite difficult to free
oneself from old habits of being and to be able to freely conceive of a new
life, a new world. And naturally, the liberation begins on the highest planes
of consciousness: it is easier for the mind or the higher intelligence to conceive
of new things than for the vital being, for instance, to feel things in a new
way. And it is still more difficult for the body to have a purely material
perception of what a new world will be. Yet this perception must precede the
material transformation; first one must feel very concretely the strangeness of
the old things, their lack of relevance, if I may say so. One must have the
feeling, even a material impression, that they are outdated, that they belong
to a past which no longer has any purpose. For the old impressions one had of
past things which have become historic—which have their interest from that
point of view and support the advance of the present and the future—this is
still a movement that belongs to the old world: it is the old world that is
unfolding with a past, a present, a future. But for the creation of a new
world, there is, so to speak, only a continuity of transition which gives an
appearance—an impression rather—the impression of two things still intermingled
but almost disconnected, and that the things of the past no longer have the power
or the strength to endure, with whatever modifications, in the new things. That
other world is necessarily an absolutely new experience. One would have to go
back to the time when there was a transition from the animal to the human
creation to find a similar period, and at that time the consciousness was not
sufficiently mentalised to be able to observe, understand, feel intelligently—the
passage must have been made in a completely obscure way. So, what I am speaking
about is absolutely new, unique in the terrestrial creation, it is something
unprecedented, truly a perception or a sensation or an impression... that is
quite strange and new. (After a silence)
A disconnection: something which has overstayed its time and has only quite a
subordinate force of existence, from something totally new, but still so young,
so imperceptible, almost weak, so to say; it hasn’t yet the power to impose and
assert itself and to predominate, to take the place of the other. So there is a
concomitance but, as I said, with a disconnection, that is, the connection
between the two is missing.
It is difficult to describe, but I
am speaking to you about it because this is what I felt yesterday evening. I
felt it so acutely... that it made me look at certain things, and once I had
seen them I felt it would be interesting to tell you about them.
(Silence)
It seems strange that something so
new, so special and I might say so unexpected should happen during a film-show.
[1] For people who believe that some things are important and other things are
not, that there are activities which are helpful to yoga and others which are
not, well, this is one more opportunity to show that they are wrong. I have
always noticed that it is unexpected things which give you the most interesting
experiences. Yesterday evening, suddenly something happened which I have just
described to you as best I could—I don’t know if I have succeeded in making
myself understood—but it was truly quite new and altogether unexpected. We were
shown, comparatively clumsily, a picture of the temple on the banks of the
Ganges, and the statue of Kali—for I suppose it was a photograph of that
statue, I could not manage to get any precise information about it—and while I
was seeing that, which was a completely superficial appearance and, as I said,
rather clumsy, I saw the reality it was trying to represent, what was behind,
and this put me in touch with all that world of religion and worship, of
aspiration, man’s whole relationship with the gods, which was—I am already
speaking in the past tense—which was the flower of the human spiritual effort
towards something more divine than man, something which was the highest and
almost the purest expression of his effort towards what is higher than he. And
suddenly I had concretely, materially, the impression that it was
another world, a world that had ceased to be real, living, an outdated world
which had lost its reality, its truth, which had been transcended, surpassed by
something which had taken birth and was only beginning to express itself, but
whose life was so intense, so true, so sublime, that all
this became false, unreal, worthless.
Then I truly understood—for I
understood not with the head, the intelligence but with the body, you
understand what I mean—I understood in the cells of the body—that a new world
is born and is beginning to grow.
And so, when I saw all this, I
remembered something that had happened.... I think I remember rightly, in 1926.
[2]
Sri Aurobindo had given me charge of the outer work because he wanted to withdraw into concentration in order to hasten the manifestation of the supramental consciousness and he had announced to the few people who were there that he was entrusting to me the work of helping and guiding them, that I would remain in contact with him, naturally, and that through me he would do the work. Suddenly, immediately, things took a certain shape: a very brilliant creation was worked out in extraordinary detail, with marvellous experiences, contacts with divine beings, and all kinds of manifestations which are considered miraculous. Experiences followed one upon another, and, well, things were unfolding altogether brilliantly and... I must say, in an extremely interesting way.
One day, I went as usual to relate
to Sri Aurobindo what had been happening—we had come to something really very
interesting, and perhaps I showed a little enthusiasm in my account of what had
taken place—then Sri Aurobindo looked at me... and said: “Yes, this is an
Overmind creation. It is very interesting, very well done. You will perform
miracles which will make you famous throughout the world, you will be able to
turn all events on earth topsy-turvy, indeed,...” and then he smiled and said: “It
will be a great success. But it is an
Overmind creation. And it is not success that we want; we want to establish the
Supermind on earth. One must know how to renounce immediate success in order to
create the new world, the supramental world in its integrality.”
With my inner consciousness I
understood immediately: a few hours later the creation was gone... and from
that moment we started anew on other bases.
Well, I announced to you all that
this new world was born. But it has been so engulfed, as it were, in the old
world that so far the difference has not been very perceptible to many people.
Still, the action of the new forces has continued very regularly, very persistently,
very steadily, and to a certain extent, very effectively. And one of the
manifestations of this action was my experience—truly so very new—of yesterday
evening. And the result of all this I have noted step by step in almost daily
experiences. It could be expressed succinctly, in a rather linear way:
First, it is not only a “new conception”
of spiritual life and the divine Reality. This conception was expressed by Sri Aurobindo,
I have expressed it myself many a time, and it could be formulated somewhat
like this: the old spirituality was an escape from life into the divine
Reality, leaving the world just where it was, as it was; whereas our new
vision, on the contrary, is a divinisation of life, a transformation of the
material world into a divine world. This has been said, repeated, more or less understood,
indeed it is the basic idea of what we want to do. But this could be a
continuation with an improvement, a widening of the old world as it was—and so
long as this is a conception up there in the field of thought, in fact it is
hardly more than that—but what has happened, the really new thing, is that a
new world is born, born, born. It is not the old one transforming itself, it is
a new world which is born. And we are right in the midst of this period of
transition where the two are entangled—where the other still persists all-powerful
and entirely dominating the ordinary consciousness, but where the new one is
quietly slipping in, still very modest, unnoticed—unnoticed to the extent that
outwardly it doesn’t disturb anything very much, for the time being, and that
in the consciousness of most people it is even altogether imperceptible. And
yet it is working, growing—until it is strong enough to assert itself visibly.
In any case, to simplify things, it
could be said that characteristically the old world, the creation of what Sri
Aurobindo calls the Overmind, was an age of the gods, and consequently the age
of religions. As I said, the flower of human effort towards what is above it
gave rise to innumerable religious forms, to a religious relationship between
the best souls and the invisible world. And at the very summit of all that, as
an effort towards a higher realisation there has arisen the idea of the unity
of religions, of this “one single thing” which is behind all these manifestations;
and this idea has truly been, so to speak, the extreme limit of human
aspiration. Well, that is at the frontier, it is something that still belongs
completely to the Overmind world, the Overmind creation and which from there
seems to be looking towards this “other thing” which is a new creation it cannot
grasp—which it tries to reach, feels coming, but cannot grasp. To grasp it, a
reversal is needed. It is necessary to leave the Overmind creation. It was
necessary that the new creation, the supramental creation should take place.
And now, all these old things seem
so old, so out-of-date, so arbitrary—such a travesty of the real truth.
In the supramental creation there
will no longer be any religions. The whole life will be the expression, the
flowering into forms of the divine Unity manifesting in the world. And there
will no longer be what men now call gods.
These great divine beings
themselves will be able to participate in the new creation; but to do so, they
will have to put on what we could call the “supramental substance” on earth.
And if some of them choose to remain in their world as they are, if they decide
not to manifest physically, their relation with the beings of a supramental
earth will be a relation of friends, collaborators, equals, for the highest
divine essence will be manifested in the beings of the new supramental world on
earth.
When the physical substance is
supramentalised, to incarnate on earth will no longer be a cause of
inferiority, quite the contrary. It will give a plenitude which cannot be
obtained otherwise.
But all this is in the future; it
is a future... which has begun, but which will take some time to be realised
integrally. Meanwhile we are in a very special situation, extremely special, without
precedent. We are now witnessing the birth of a new world; it is very young,
very weak—not in its essence but in its outer manifestation—not yet recognised,
not even felt, denied by themajority. But it is here. It is here, making an
effort to grow, absolutely sure of the result. But the road to it is a
completely new road which has never before been traced out—nobody has gone
there, nobody has done that! It is a beginning, a universal beginning. So, it
is an absolutely unexpected and unpredictable adventure.
There are people who love
adventure. It is these I call, and I tell them this: “I invite you to the great
adventure.”
It is not a question of repeating
spiritually what others have done before us, for our adventure begins beyond
that. It is a question of a new creation, entirely new, with all the unforeseen
events, the risks, the hazards it entails—a real adventure, whose goal is
certain victory, but the road to which is unknown and must be traced out step
by step in the unexplored. Something that has never been in this present
universe and that will never be again in the same way. If that interests you...
well, let us embark. What will happen to you tomorrow—I have no idea. One must
put aside all that has been foreseen, all that has been devised, all that has
been constructed, and then... set off walking into the unknown. And—come what
may! There.
[1] A Bengali film, Rani Rasmani, which describes the lives
of Sri Ramakrishna and Rani Rasmani, a rich, very intelligent and religious
Bengali widow, who in 1847 built the
[2] On 24 November 1926 Sri
Aurobindo withdrew into seclusion and Mother assumed charge of the running of
the Ashram.