A roller-coaster of a century

The twentieth century was like a roller-coaster ride at amazing speed! Early in the century, European thought took a curve … towards a ‘subjective’ turn. It covered an entire spectrum – in philosophy, psychology, literature, arts. The pioneers are only too well-known. Just to mention a few names, Kierkegaard, Henri Bergson, later Virginia Woolf, Freud, the cubist experience. Even sciences such as physics and biology started to make a new order of discoveries, which made the former reductionist method of enquiry gradually redundant. There followed the rise and slowing down of the communist/Marxist ideology and movement.

The two World Wars, coming fairly close to each other, led to the ‘angst’ of the existentialist period. As was inevitable! There was no meaning and purpose of life. Writers and philosophers were prolific and they dominated the mentality of the generation in quite a remarkable manner. 

From that ground, there arose two powerful movements that swept the world. The first was the building up of International institutions such as the United Nations and its subsidiaries in all areas of human activity. The second was the widely sweeping students’ movement of revolt in May, 1968, which rejected the old norms of education and culture and asked for new ones that prepared the youth for a meaningful and ‘holistic’ future!

At the same time technology, born of fresh discoveries of science in the nature/composition of Matter and Life, began to change the way we lived and worked.

And it was in February, 1968 that The Mother founded Auroville! What a history of this century!!

The work begun by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother in the latter part of the nineteenth century came into a concentrated focus in the beginning of the twentieth. And what do we see? What are the visible signs? The freedom of India… and of the Asian and African countries. In that free space, there was a renewed understanding of their ancient civilizations in the setting of modern life and its developments. A veritable renaissance of Asia became visible in a manifold way.

As this panorama of the world moving into its future possibilities unfolds, the Supramental manifestation takes place… in 1956, which was the evolutionary work that Sri Aurobindo and The Mother came to do. And for which Auroville was founded by Them.

A few lines from The Mother strike me as of the greatest evolutionary significance in our times: 

“…the Supermind has burst forth into universal play. It has become a principle at constant work upon all earth – a possibility of a general order, as when the mind was first diffused over the earth.”

May 22, 1956