Page 40 - NAMAH-Jul-2022

Namah Vol. 30, Issue 2, 15th July 2022

evolutionary conflict between the forces an opportunity for the full pursuit of other
of an ascending evolution and the forces of and greater aims surpassing the material
a retrograde downward gravitation and a existence, for the discovery of a higher truth
shifting of power centres. and good and beauty, for the discovery of
a greater and diviner spirit which would
Sri Aurobindo spoke of the evolutionary intervene and use life for a higher perfection
crisis that had taken the form of a crisis of of the being: but it is being used instead for
human values, a crisis of events so to say, at the multiplication of new wants and an
the beginning of the previous century. Or, aggressive expansion of the collective ego. At
to use a more comprehensive word from the same time Science has put at his disposal
the Indian mystic thought, it is a crisis and many potencies of the universal Force and
conflict through a field of evolving dharma. has made the life of humanity materially one;
but what uses this universal Force is a little
“At present mankind is undergoing an human individual or communal ego with
evolutionary crisis in which is concealed nothing universal in its light of knowledge
a choice of its destiny; for a stage has been or its movements, no inner sense or power
reached in which the human mind has achieved which would create in this physical drawing
in certain directions an enormous development together of the human world a true life unity,
while in others it stands arrested and bewildered a mental unity or a spiritual oneness. All that
and can no longer find its way. A structure of is there is a chaos of clashing mental ideas,
the external life has been raised up by man’s urges of individual and collective physical
ever-active mind and life-will, a structure of want and need, vital claims and desires,
an unmanageable hugeness and complexity, impulses of an ignorant life-push, hungers
for the service of his mental, vital, physical and calls for life satisfaction of individuals,
claims and urges, a complex political, social, classes, nations, a rich fungus of political and
administrative, economic, cultural machinery, social and economic nostrums and notions,
an organised collective means for his a hustling medley of slogans and panaceas
intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material for which men are ready to oppress and be
satisfaction. Man has created a system of oppressed, to kill and be killed, to impose
civilisation which has become too big for his them somehow or other by the immense
limited mental capacity and understanding and too formidable means placed at his
and his still more limited spiritual and moral disposal, in the belief that this is his way
capacity to utilise and manage, a too dangerous out to something ideal. The evolution of human
servant of his blundering ego and its appetites. mind and life must necessarily lead towards
For no greater seeing mind, no intuitive soul an increasing universality; but on a basis of
of knowledge has yet come to his surface of ego and segmenting and dividing mind this
consciousness which could make this basic opening to the universal can only create a vast
fullness of life a condition for the free growth pullulation of unaccorded ideas and impulses,
of something that exceeded it. This new fullness a surge of enormous powers and desires, a
of the means of life might be, by its power chaotic mass of unassimilated and intermixed
for a release from the incessant unsatisfied mental, vital and physical material of a larger
stress of his economic and physical needs, existence which, because it is not taken up

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