A new world is born

And he continued:

At about half past nine, a deeper stillness seemed to descend, and most people went into meditation. Then, at ten, the music (Mother playing the organ) began. it was strong and unfaltering, and seemed timeless, neither of the East nor of the West… Closing my eyes I seemed to see leaping flames and, opening them, the tree also seemed to be full of tongues of light, everything bright, clear, firm and full of creative energy… Later I heard that someone had had a vision of Krishna playing on his flute, and the Mother had said it was a true vision. Krishna was there.

That afternoon, Mother distributed golden medallions to everyone who filed past her. The golden medallion had, on one side, a lotus flower, and, on the other, Mother’s symbol, with the dates 29.2.56 and 29.2.60. There was also a card describing in English and French the event that had taken place on Wednesday, 29th February, 1956 during the common meditation.

The next day a notice appeared on the Ashram notice board. Headed ‘The Golden Day’, it announced that ‘Henceforth the 29th February will be the day of the Lord’.

But what was the ‘event’ that had taken place in the Playground on 29th February, 1956, and which future Golden Days would commemorate?

Mother described it as follows:

This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine. As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that, ‘the time has come', and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces. Then the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow.

Mother was later to explain that this was not a ‘descent’, which would be simply for an individual consciousness, but a ‘manifestation’, which meant the consequences of the ‘rushing down’ of the supramental Force would be felt worldwide. In fact, one month later, Mother clarified:

A new light breaks upon the earth,

A new world is born.

The things that were promised are fulfilled.

In April, 1956, she reiterated:

The manifestation of the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise but a living fact, a reality.

It is at work here, and one day will come when the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it.

Three months later, she clarified further for the students of the Ashram:

What has happened, the really new thing, is that a new world is born, born, born. It is not the old one transforming itself, it is a new world which is born. And we are right in the midst of this period of transition where the two are entangled—where the other still persists all-powerful and entirely dominating the ordinary consciousness, but where the new one is quietly slipping in, still very modest, unnoticed—unnoticed to the extent that outwardly it doesn't disturb anything very much, for the time being, and that in the consciousness of most people it is even altogether imperceptible.

The old world, she explained, was an age of the gods, and consequently the age of religions. However, now, all these old things seem so old, so out-of-date, so arbitrary—such a travesty of the real truth. In the (new) supramental creation there will no longer be any religions. The whole life will be the expression, the flowering into forms of the divine Unity manifesting in the world. And there will no longer be what men now call gods.

And she invited the students to join her in ‘the great adventure’ where

It is not a question of repeating spiritually what others have done before us, for our adventure begins beyond that. It is a question of a new creation, entirely new, with all the unforeseen events, the risks, the hazards it entails—a real adventure, whose goal is certain victory, but the road to which is unknown and must be traced out step by step in the unexplored. Something that has never been in this present universe and that will never be again in the same way. If that interests you…well, let us embark.

A few years later, on 3rd February, 1959, she had an experience that showed her that the supramental world already existed in a permanent way, and that she was there permanently in a supramental body.

I went strolling there in a concrete way – as concretely as I used to go strolling in Paris in times past – in a world that EXISTS IN ITSELF, beyond all subjectivity…I now know that for the two worlds to join in a constant and conscious relationship what is missing is an intermediate zone between the existing physical world and the supramental world as it exists. This zone has yet to be built, both in the individual consciousness and in the objective world, and it is being built.

Regarding this, in the first hours of 1st January 1969 Mother had the experience of what she later identified as the consciousness of the ‘Overman’, an intermediary species. Later, she explained that “The change from the human into the supramental being is being achieved … through the overman. It may be that there will be some overmen – there are some – who will make the transition possible.”

However, in spite of the fact that she had said that this new Force was, as yet, “very young, very weak”, many people wanted to know how it was manifesting in the world, and how it would change their lives. To the students she explained that:

Those who are ready within, who are open and in touch with the higher forces, those who have had a more or less direct personal contact with the Supramental Light and Consciousness, are capable of feeling the difference in the earth atmosphere.

Later, questioned further about how they could tell if someone was in touch with the supramental, she said there are two ‘irrefutable signs’:

1. a perfect and constant equality,

2. an absolute certainty in the knowledge.

To be perfect, the equality must be invariable and spontaneous, effortless, towards all circumstances, all happenings, all contacts, material or psychological, irrespective of their character and impact.

The absolute and indisputable certainty of an infallible knowledge through identity.

Asked how mankind as a whole can benefit (although she disliked this term), she replied:

NOW MAN CAN COLLABORATE. That is, he can lend himself to the process, with good will, with aspiration, and help to his utmost. Which is why I said it (the divinisation of life on Earth) will go faster. I hope it will go MUCH faster. But even if it does go much faster, it will still take some time! [Caps in original transcription, eds]

Georges van Vrekhem in his book, Preparing for the Miraculous, claimed that the effects of the 1956 Manifestation could also be seen in other ways. He pointed to the phenomenon called “the Sixties”: the decade of the New Age movement, the student revolts of ’68, and the Velvet Revolution of the same year in Prague, as well as the technological acceleration resulting in the global spread of television, the space technology of Sputnik, Apollo 11 and the nuclear rockets, the computer, and an increasing miniaturization of things technological. It was also the time when the desegregation movement in the US gave equal rights to all. “The common impulse behind all these phenomena was the need of ‘unity for the human race by an inner oneness,’ without which, according to Sri Aurobindo, the new world would not be possible.”

In fact, Mother was very explicit when asked what lay behind the students’ protests in Paris in May, 1968.

It’s clearly the future which is awakening and trying to drive away the past…it’s the higher power COMPELLING people to do what they must do… It’s clearly (not in the detail of it, but in the direction of the movement), clearly a will to have done with the past and to open the door to the future. It’s like a sort of revulsion with stagnation. That’s it. A thirst for something which is ahead and appears more luminous, better. And indeed there IS something – it’s not just imagination: there IS something. That’s the beauty of it, it’s that there is something. There IS a Response. There IS a Force that wants... to express itself.

However, she deprecated the violence; as soon as one indulges in violence, it’s the return to the past.

Yet, if a new world is being ushered in, why is there still so much violence, why are there so many upheavals everywhere?

In 1919, in The Ideal of Human Unity Sri Aurobindo explained that “each positive evolutionary movement induces inevitably an enormous force [of resistance] commensurable with the magnitude of the thing that has to be done. But always these resistances turn out to have assisted by the resistance much more than they have impeded the intention of the great Creatrix and her Mover.”

Much later, Mother was asked that if the present chaos and calamities were the birth pangs of a new creation, as Sri Aurobindo had said, how long would they continue?

They will continue, she said, “until the world is ready and willing to receive the new creation; the consciousness of this new creation is already at work upon earth since the beginning of this year. If instead of resisting, people were collaborating, it would be quicker. But stupidity and ignorance are very obstinate!”

And she explained that:

What is happening now is something that never happened before, and therefore nobody understands it. There is like a golden Force which presses on the [material] world, which has no material consistency but nevertheless seems terribly heavy and which presses on Matter. And the apparent result is as if catastrophes were inevitable. But together with this impression of inevitable catastrophes there are solutions to the situation, events which seem to be utterly miraculous. ... It is no longer like it was: this really is a new world…

She also warned, in one of her last messages, that “Before dying falsehood rises in full swing.”

As for the doubters who see only the present chaos, she emphasised, “The advent of a new world is an ineluctable fact and whatever name is given to it, its victory is certain.”

How, then, does one open oneself to participation in this new creation?

Mother gave some clues:

Be receptive and be plastic.

The Truth-Consciousness can manifest only in those who are rid of the ego.

It is indispensable that each one finds his psychic and unites with it definitively. It is through the psychic that the supramental will manifest itself.

In this context, it is worth remembering what Mother wrote in ‘To Be a True Aurovilian’.

The first necessity is the inner discovery to find out what one really is behind the social, moral, cultural racial, hereditary appearances. At the centre there is a being free, vast, aware, all-knowing, who awaits our discovery and must become the effective centre of our being and our life in Auroville.

The coming Golden Day is a reminder that the world, according to Mother, has ineluctably changed. It provides yet another opportunity to refocus ourselves on the new rather than on the last desperate flailings of the old.