A New Light Dawns

SISIRKUMAR MITRA
Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry

Man is at this moment on the threshold of a new age and will be looking towards a new world. Mystic experience affirms its birth. It marks the fulfilment of the purpose of Nature in the evolution of man. Man, so long considered the last term in this process, has now the chance to transcend himself and rise to a higher stage. The mental man must break out of his old prison-house of half-lit consciousness and ego-driven life, and emerge into the infinite Light, Delight and Power of the supramental consciousness for which Nature has been working, step by step, all down the ages. His preparedness today for this divine destiny may be indicated by his having attained the highest possibilities of the mind. Powers that have ever been beyond his mind are now within his reach to help him attain his inherent perfection. The call has come. It is for him to respond.

Now is ‘the hour of God’, says Sri Aurobindo, ‘the hour of the unexpected’, the hour ‘when the breath of the Lord is upon the waters of our being’. Hence his warning: “Unhappy is the man or the nation which, when the divine moment arrives, is found sleeping or unprepared to use it, because the lamp has not been kept trimmed for the welcome and the ears are sealed to the call. But thrice woe to them who are strong and ready, yet waste the force or misuse the moment; for them is irreparable loss or a great destruction.”¹

What the Vedic Rishis had glimpsed as a distant light of heaven was seized and realised more concretely by Sri Aurobindo as a creative Light of the Supreme, called by him the Supermind. And he declared: “As there has been established on earth a mental Consciousness and Power which shapes a race of mental begins and take up into itself all of earthly nature that is ready for the change, so now there will be established on earth a gnostic Consciousness and Power which will shape a race of gnostic and spiritual beings and take up into itself all of earth-nature that is ready for the new transformation.” ²

This he had said during the first world conflagration in 1914-18. The dawn was then behind the clouds. In 1934 he was positive: ‘The supramental Force is descending, but it has not yet taken possession of the body or of matter–there is still much resistance to that.’ But he assured: ‘I know this descent is inevitable–I have faith in view of my experience that the time can be and should be now and not in a later age.’

And this came to pass in 1956–the greatest event of the century, the greatest ever in human history. It has come down as a Force of the Supreme’s Grace not only to save the world from self-annihilation but to transform the human into a divine world.

“The manifestation of the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise but a living fact, a reality.

“It is at work here, and one day will come when the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it.”

The manifestation took place on February 29, 1956 and the Mother made this historic declaration on April 24, 1956, the occasion being the thirty-sixth anniversary of her final arrival at Pondicherry. The other Message given by theMother on the same occasion was:

‘A New Light breaks upon the earth,
A New World is born.
The things that were promised are fulfilled.’

How will the New Light affect the life of humanity? Says the Master: “...the presence of the liberated and new sovereign supramental light and force at the head of evolutionary Nature might be expected to have its consequences in the whole evolution. Any incidence, a decisive stress would affect the life of the lower evolutionary stages; something of the light, something of the force would penetrate downwards and awaken into a greater action the hidden Truth-Power everywhere in Nature. A dominant principle of harmony would impose itself on the life of the Ignorance; the discord, the blind seeking, the clash of struggle, the abnormal vicissitudes of exaggeration and depression and the unsteady balance of the unseeing forces at work in their mixture and conflict, would feel the influence and yield place to a more orderly pace and harmonic steps of the development of being, a more revealing arrangement of progressive life and consciousness, a better life-order. A freer play of intuition and sympathy and understanding would enter into human life, a clearer sense of the truth of self and things and a more enlightened dealing with the opportunities and difficulties of existence ...” ³

In the rapidly changing world of today are there not signs enough of the initial action of the New Force visible even to an ordinary eye?

It will be interesting to recall how the ancient religious traditions of the world had prophesied the advent of a New World, a New Age, how those prophecies were more or less the same in spirit and, in some instances, almost the same in form, and how they agree, above all, about the time of starting.

It is generally known that the four Ages–Krita, Treta, Dwapara and Kali–into which the ancient Hindus divided Cosmic History are the four Ages of Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron, known as such also to the Greeks, the Romans and the early Christians. This sliding showed a gradual decline in the culture of the peoples concerned. It was however the night before the dawn. The downward curve meant no retrogression. It was veiled progress in the sense that man as an individual or a collective body needed varied experiences for an integral development and perfection of his capacities, potential and actual. Besides, the earliest Ages of Simplicity, Truth andPurity were the childhood of the race from which it was to grow into the complexities of manhood. The Age of Iron, or the Kali Yuga, as the Hindus call it, is the ‘Dark Age’ that marks the downward curve of progress and with it a degeneration from which man by his own effort can never save himself. Such crisis in evolution call for the appearance of Incarnations, Avataras or Vibhutis of God, to help him up to a higher level of consciousness.

Ancient religious traditions also foresee divine advents to usher in the Dharmarajya or ‘the Kingdom of Righteousnes’ of Sri Krishna’s vision, ‘a new world of peace and harmony of the Maitreya Buddha’, Laotse’s ideal world of ‘Grand Harmony’, the Christ’s ‘Kingdom of Heaven’, ‘a newheaven and a new earth’, ‘a new Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven’.

A most striking fact about all these splendid visions of the Future of mankind is that they indicate their fulfilment in a period of human history which, from all points of view, seems to take its start from the Present. Sri Aurobindo calls this a significant period, ‘the divine moment’, the moment for man to be ready for the nexthigher stage of his evolution.

The Buddhistic tradition has it that the Maitreya Buddha would bless the earth by his advent 2500 years after Gautama the Buddha. In 1955 was observed the 2500th anniversary of the Buddha. The return of the Jews to Palestine–now an accomplished fact–was predicted in the ancient cabbalistic writings of the Jews as a condition for the coming of the Messiah who would establish ‘the earthly Paradise’, ‘the heavenly Jerusalem’. Islamic traditions say that fourteen centuries after Mohammad a Madhi or ‘Redeemer’ would appear on earth and after vanquishing the Dajjal or Antichrist, establish ‘a regime of equality, justice, and a brotherly love on the earth’. The date, according to the Islamic calendar, coincides with the present age. The Hindu Puranic tradition of Ten Avataras or ‘Divine Incarnations’, announces the coming of Kalki, the tenth and last Avatara, who would overthrow the old order–the existing human–animal structure of consciousness and ways of life–and bring in the new.

Apart from the point of time, the tradition describes vividly the general conditions of the present age as the rise and dominance of a world wide scientific materialism heightening the case and comfort of life, yet at the same time threatening death to all life. Such would be the prevailing state of the world before the advent of Kalki. Other traditions, particularly Buddhistic, Christian and Germanic, unanimously affirm that like Kalki, the Incarnation or the Saviour of the present age, would come riding a White Horse. This symbolic expression means a manifestation of pure energy, of a creative power of Heaven.

The common conclusion of all these religious traditions is that the Present is that sacred and momentous hour in human history when, as the consummation of the evolutionary process, a mighty change will come about in the life of man, created by a new Force of God.

If religions are so many doors to the One Divine Mansion that the Earth is now going to be–and this is supported by the perfect accord of their prophetic visions–it can be taken as certain that the New World of the morrow will have no religions butone, if it can at all be called so, the religion, rather, the Sovereign Rule of the Spirit. That this shall be had been provisioned by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The Mother has now categorically declared that the Light that would bring into birth the New World has dawned on earth and is in constant action.

¹ Sri Aurobindo; The Hour of God, p. 3.
²  Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, Vol. II, Part II, p. 1028
³  Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, Vol. II, Part II, p. 1030-31

“Man embodied in the natural world cannot cease action, not for a moment, not for a second; his very existence here is an action; the whole universe is an act of God, mere living even in His movement.”
–SRI AUROBINDO