The
Awakening
Ray
“One thing seems obvious, humanity has reached a certain state of general tension—
tension in effort, in action, even in daily life—with such an excessive hyperactivity, so
widespread a trepidation, that mankind as a whole seems to have come to a point where
it must either break through the resistance and emerge into a new consciousness or else
fall back into an abyss of darkness and inertia.
This tension is so complete and so widespread that something obviously has to break.
It cannot go on in this way. We may take it as a sure sign of the infusion into matter of
a new principle of force, consciousness, power, which by its very pressure is producing
this acute state. Outwardly, we could expect the old methods used by Nature when she
wants to bring about an upheaval; but there is a new characteristic, which of course is
only visible in an elite, but even this elite is fairly widespread—it is not localised at one
point, at one place in the world; we find traces of it in all countries, all over the world:
the will to find a new, higher, progressive solution, an effort to rise towards a vaster, more
comprehensive perfection.
Certain ideas of a more general nature, of a wider, perhaps more “collective” kind, are
being worked out and are acting in the world. And both things go together: a possibility
of a greater and more total destruction, a reckless inventiveness which increases the
possibility of catastrophe, a castastrophe which would be on a far greater scale than it has
ever been; and, at the same time, the birth or rather the manifestation of much higher
and more comprehensive ideas and acts of will which, when they are heard, will bring a
wider, vaster, more complete, more perfect remedy than before.
This struggle, this conflict between the constructive forces of the ascending evolution
of a more and more perfect and divine realisation, and the more and more destructive,
powerfully destructive forces—forces that are mad beyond all control—is more and
more obvious, marked, visible, and it is a kind of race or struggle as to which will reach
the goal first. It would seem that all the adverse, anti-divine forces, the forces of the vital
world, have descended on the earth, are making use of it as their field of action, and
that at the same time a new, higher, more powerful spiritual force has also descended
on earth to bring it a new life. This makes the struggle more acute, more violent, more
visible, but it seems also more definitive, and that is why we can hope to reach an early
solution.”
- The Mother
Conversation dated 19 March 1958
Collected Works of the Mother, vol.9
Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
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