Time Presses

The message we received from the Ashram for the April Darshan day sums the current situation up well:

“The Future of the earth depends on a change of consciousness.  The only hope for the future is in a change of consciousness and the change is bound to come. But it is left to men to decide if they will collaborate for this change or it will have to be enforced upon them by the power of crashing circumstances. So, wake up and collaborate.” [CWM 15:60]

This then is the essence of all that is happening and would happen.  It is to push humanity through the doors of the inner being into a higher and greater consciousness.  In one of Her Conversations, given below, all this has been foreseen.

After all, the whole problem is to know whether humanity has reached the state of pure gold or whether it still needs to be tested in the crucible.

One thing is evident, humanity has not become pure gold; that is visible and certain.

But something has happened in the world’s history which allows us to hope that a selected few in humanity, a small number of beings, perhaps, are ready to be transformed into pure gold and that they will be able to manifest strength without violence, heroism without destruction and courage without catastrophe.

But in the very next paragraph Sri Aurobindo gives the answer: “If man could once consent to be spiritualised.” [CWSA 13:210]. If only the individual could consent to be spiritualised… could consent…

Something in him asks for it, aspires, and all the rest refuses, wants to continue to be what it is: the mixed ore which needs to be cast into the furnace.

At the moment we are at a decisive turning-point in the history of the earth, once again. From every side I am asked, “What is going to happen?” Everywhere there is anguish, expectation, fear. “What is going to happen?…” There is only one reply: “If only man could consent to be spiritualised.”

And perhaps it would be enough if some individuals became pure gold, for this would be enough to change the course of events…. We are faced with this necessity in a very urgent way.

This courage, this heroism which the Divine wants of us, why not use it to fight against one’s own difficulties, one’s own imperfections, one’s own obscurities? Why not heroically face the furnace of inner purification so that it does not become necessary to pass once more through one of those terrible, gigantic destructions which plunge an entire civilisation into darkness?

This is the problem before us. It is for each one to solve it in his own way.

This evening I am answering the questions I have been asked, and my reply is that of Sri Aurobindo: If man could once consent to be spiritualised….

And I add: Time presses… from the human point of view. 

27 March 1957 [CWM 09:74-75]