For a hundred years and more man has been made to believe by our science that he is nothing more than mere mud and mire. The biologist, the psychologist, the scientist hammered into our ignorant brains the sole gospel of matter, the omnipotent power of genes and chemistry in whose wheels man is caught helplessly as a worm trapped in a hole.
For a hundred years and more man has been made to believe by our science in the non-existence of his soul or even of his self and mind which we are told is nothing but a glandular secretion and an ephemeral passage of electrical current in the neuronal circuits of his brain.
For a hundred years and more we have been made to believe that the only way we can survive and live is by plundering nature, by exterminating all that threatens us, by creating safe comfort zones that eliminate all that can disturb our ‘happiness’ purchased by paying the heavy price of an increasing servitude of our soul.
But now the coming century that opens before us brings a newer vision and a greater hope. Not by bricks of matter and chemicals alone am I built. Not by the genes is my fate decided and won or lost. Not by the props and crutches of nature do I stand and hold my precarious existence. I am greater than destiny, stronger than my fate.
This is the new message that is whispering itself as a mantra of awakening into the human heart. This is the new light that is stealing into mind’s inner chambers. This is the power that is flooding through life’s doors and filling nature with wonder and joy and hope once again.
“I saw the mornings of the future rise,
I heard the voices of an age unborn
That comes behind us and our pallid morn,
And from the heart of an approaching light
One said to man, “Know thyself infinite,
Who shalt do mightier miracles than these,
Infinite, moving mid infinities.”
Then from our hills the ancient answer pealed,
“For Thou, O Splendour, art myself concealed,
And the grey cell contains me not, the star
I outmeasure and am older than the elements are.
Whether on earth or far beyond the sun,
I, stumbling, clouded, am the Eternal One.”
[Sri Aurobindo: Collected Poems, pp. 43]
Alok Pandey
