Take the example of the jungle life and its many dangers and challenges. Look at the python stifling its prey and the tiger slyly attacking the deer from behind. In this battle which side is the Supreme? To His vision He has become the tiger and the deer. Now all this He plays with Himself for Consciousness to emerge out of the dense obscure sleep of Matter in which He has hidden Himself. It is only extreme painful experience, perceived as pain that can arouse matter out of its sleep and release life and mind and thought and spirit hidden within it.
Why has He hidden so? Because He has seen the possibility at the end of the long struggle of beautiful dev moorti being carved out of this clay and mud, the emergence of many living and conscious forms of the One Supreme, ekohambahusyam, the One willed to be Many.
Now if you look at the animal world in the jungle, life is unimaginably tough but if you see that through it all man is emerging with all the journey to the stars and fine human emotions and noble feelings, then the pain may seem worthwhile. Of course man himself is far from perfect. And all these events that shock us are meant to awaken. The price may seem heavy for the moment, like the untimely death of Abhimanyu and the massive destruction of armies. But if you zoom out over 10000 years and see India and the world emerging through all this into a luminous home of the gods, then it would seem perhaps a small price to pay for the great result. After all that is the spirit in which a soldier dies or the freedom fighters gave up their lives so readily because the far result justified the immediate pain.
Our difficulty is that we do not know or see the far result. The future is unknown to us. But to the Supreme Vision the past, present and the future are simultaneously held. Hence He acts boldly and audaciously reckoning not our human judgments just as a parent would discipline a child even though the child may detest it.
This is of course a human way of understanding it. To the Supreme Vision the pain is experienced as a fierce and intense delight that matter is unable to bear. That is why He takes animal and human bodies as the Avatar to make matter itself capable of bearing the pressure of the Divine, gives us the way, teaches how to transit towards our highest destiny. Yet it is a slow process from the human time scale. But to the Divine there is no Time as we experience it. The time factor is the only thing in our hand. We can shorten or lengthen the passage, make it more or less tortuous since with the emergence of Man, the possibility of conscious collaboration has been foreseen too. This collaboration is to hasten the process since in man, the Supreme is able to make individualities that can become the first prototype of the Many.
Let me share a poem written to bring out this other part of the human story we fail to recognise and hence are overwhelmed with pain.
Sri Aurobindo reveals in Savitri.
‘Pain ploughed the first hard ground of the world-drowse.
By pain a spirit started from the clod,
By pain Life stirred in the subliminal deepโฆ.
By pain and joy, the bright and tenebrous twins,
The inanimate world perceived its sentient soul,
Else had the Inconscient never suffered change.
Pain is the hammer of the Gods to break
A dead resistance in the mortal’s heart,
His slow inertia as of living stone.
If the heart were not forced to want and weep,
His soul would have lain down content, at ease,
And never thought to exceed the human start
And never learned to climb towards the Sun.
This earth is full of labour, packed with pain;
Throes of an endless birth coerce her still;
The centuries end, the ages vainly pass
And yet the Godhead in her is not born.
The ancient Mother faces all with joy,
Calls for the ardent pang, the grandiose thrill;
For with pain and labour all creation comes.
This earth is full of the anguish of the gods;
Ever they travail driven by Time’s goad,
And strive to work out the eternal Will
And shape the life divine in mortal formsโฆ..
Men die that man may live and God be born.
An awful Silence watches tragic Time.
Pain is the hand of Nature sculpturing men
To greatness: an inspired labour chisels
With heavenly cruelty an unwilling mould.
Implacable in the passion of their will,
Lifting the hammers of titanic toil
The demiurges of the universe work;
They shape with giant strokes their own; their sons
Are marked with their enormous stamp of fire.
Although the shaping god’s tremendous touch
Is torture unbearable to mortal nerves,
The fiery spirit grows in strength within
And feels a joy in every titan pang.’
