Eleven talks at Auroville Preparing for the Miraculous Georges Van Vrekhem Eleven Talks at Auroville Preparing for the Miraculous Georges Van Vrekhem Stichting Aurofonds © Georges Van Vrekhem All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or translated into any language in India or abroad in any form or by any means without permission of the author. ISBN : 81-87582-09-X First edition : May 2011 Printed in India Cover design, layout and printing by Brihat Consultants (India) Pvt. Ltd. [email protected] Table of Contents Foreword 1 Adam Kadmon and the Evolution 1 2 The Development of Sri Aurobindo’s Thought 25 3 Preparing for the Miraculous 43 4 What Arjuna Saw: the Dark Side of the Force 71 5 2010 and 1956: Doomsday? 93 6 Being Human and the Copernican Principle 117 7 Bridges across the Afterlife 147 8 Sri Aurobindo’s Descent into Death 171 9 Sri Aurobindo and the Big Bang 191 10 Theodicy: “Nature Makes No Mistakes” 213 11 The Kalki Avatar 235 Biographical Note 267 Foreword The talks in this book have been delivered in Auroville, the first four at the Townhall in September, the following six at Savitri Bhavan in November and December 2010. The talk on “The Kalki Avatar” was also held at the Townhall, in February 2011, in the context of the seminar on “Muta- tion II”. I had been invited to give talks in Europe, the USA and India, but I had to cancel all travelling plans because of my heart condition. This led to the idea of giving a series of talks in Auroville, where I am living, and to record them so that the people who had invited me would be able, if they so desired, to have the talks all the same. After having delivered the series it was found worthwhile to round it off by making the talks also available in writing. The texts in this collection are not transcriptions of the talks, they are what I call “write-outs,” presenting a read- able version of the spoken word. Each text follows the talk faithfully and treats a given topic in its entirety, yet these are not polished-up essays which are supposed to exhaust their subject and could in each case easily be extended into a book. The reader may find that repetitions occur, even of quotes. I have kept these repetitions because I thought that they create an inner resonance which connects the various topics into a whole which reflects, as I dare to hope, the Aurobindian vision behind it. I wish to thank fellow-Aurovillians Anandi Breton and Joseba Martinez for suggesting to give the talks; Bindu Mo- hanty and Carel Thieme for their initiative of organizing them; Shraddhavan for her hospitality at Savitri Bhavan; Sergey Stanovykh for the video recordings; Joel Van Lierde and the people of the Auroville Radio for the audio record- ings; and Muriel Ghion and Antim Singhi for their kind assistance when giving the talks. Also thanks, once more, to Carel Thieme for reading the texts in spite of his busy schedule. Last but not least I would like to thank the Aurovillian audiences. Their empathy and aspiration have each time created the atmosphere which carried me through the talks and made them an unforgettable experience for me. G.V.V. It comes at last, the day foreseen of old, What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed, Vision and vain imagination deemed, The City of Delight, the Age of Gold. The Iron Age is ended. Only now The last fierce spasm of the dying past Shall shake the nations, and when that has passed, Earth washed of ills shall raise a fairer brow. Sri Aurobindo 1 Adam Kadmon and the Evolution The Cosmic Purusha The Mother has told several times of a very old tra di tion at the origin of the Vedic and the Chaldean branches of wisdom and spirituality. According to this tradition, the One, wanting to know himself, manifest- ed as the Great Mother and thus became two. And the Great Mother, in her turn, manifested the attributes of the One – Truth, Light or Consciousness, Life, and Ananda or Bliss – as the main elements of the manifestation. But, relates the tradition, a crucial mistake happened which 2 ELEVEN talKS made Truth turn into falsehood, Light into darkness and ignorance, Bliss into suffering, and Life into death. “The Creative Power implored the Supreme Origin, ask ing for a special intervention which could save this cor rupt ed universe; and in reply to this prayer there was emanated from the Supreme Origin a special Entity of love and consciousness, who cast himself directly into the most inconscient matter to begin there the work of awakening. In the old narratives this Being is described as stretched out in a deep sleep at the bottom of a very dark cave.” This very old story about an accident on the threshold of creation, for which the Great Mother was held responsi- ble, is also the foundation story of all schools of Gnosticism; according to the gnostic myths, souls (sparks of the Divine) get lost in the world of the Ignorance and can only be saved by a redeemer who reminds them of their origin. In the Bible, Satan (originally the Angel of Light) revolts against God and becomes the devil. The Mother herself has more than once told the same story in its complete form: the four attributes of the Divine – truth, light, life and bliss – in their boundless egoistic pride deemed themselves equal to be the very Divine and therefore turned into the great Asuras: the Lords of Falsehood, Darkness, Suffering and Death. (In one of his sonnets Sri Aurobindo called them “the iron Dictators”. They are also known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.) The “special Entity,” emanated by the Divine to save the world, is described in the narratives of the old tradi- tions “as stretched out in a deep sleep at the bottom of a very dark cave, and in his sleep prismatic rays of light irra- diate from him and gradually penetrate in all the elements of the Inconscient.” Without this direct divine permeation the world of Ignorance and Darkness could never have evolved back towards its Origin. ADAM kADMon AnD THE EvoLuTIon 3 During her second visit to Tlemcen, in 1907, when working with Max Théon, the Mother descended in trance into the “total Inconscient” at the bottom of the manifesta- tion. Suddenly she found herself in front of a cave in which there was that special Entity, “a Being of iridescent light, lying on one side and with its head resting in its hand.” She had trained herself to talk in trance, and when she reported to Théon what she saw, he replied that it was “the immanent Divine at the bottom of the Inconscient.” But then something remarkable happened: the Being opened its eyes, thereby indicating that the time of wakeful, con- scious action had come. While still at Tlemcen, the Mother had another, related experience which she narrated many years later, in 1961. She had learned to leave the successive sheaths of the body “with great dexterity... I could halt on any plane, do what I had to do there, move around freely, see, observe, and then speak about what I had seen.” once, having left behind the most subtle body sheath, she passed “beyond all possi- ble forms, even all thought forms,” in a domain where one experienced total unity – unity in “something that was the essence of Love.” Quite unexpected, and to her amazement, she there found herself “in the presence of the principle, the principle of the human form. ... It was an upright form, standing just on the border between the world of forms and the Formless” like a kind of norm, model or archetype. “At that time nobody had ever spoken to me about it,” for no one she knew had ever seen anything like it. But she felt at once the special importance of her experience. “Afterwards [at least thirteen years later], when I met Sri Auro bindo and talked to him about it, he told me: 'It is surely the prototype of the supramental form.' I saw it several times again, later on, and this proved to be true.” We remember that the Mother said that the story about what she usually called “the accident,” the fall into the 4 ELEVEN talKS Inconscient, was under different names known in the an- cient wisdom traditions. “In every country, every tradition, the event has been presented in a special way, with differ- ent limitations, different details or particular features, but, truly speaking, the origin of all these stories is the same.” It is the gnostic story, rediscovered and revived in the great periods of the history of humankind (as we shall see). And we remember that, at the beginning of the evolution as well as at its end, there is a divine archetype determining the development of Life on Earth. 1 Sri Aurobindo too has written about such archetype, which he called “the body of the creative Deity.” When con- sidering the four varnas – brahmins, kshatriyas, vaishyas, and shudras – he mentions the Purushasukta of the Vedas “where the four orders are described as having sprung from the body of the creative Deity, from his head, arms, thighs and feet. To us,” he comments, “this is merely a poeti cal image. As if this were all, as if the men of those days would have so profound a reverence for mere poetical figures like this of the body of Brahma.