There are several reasons for the increased levels of stress during the last few decades at least.
The Pace of life has increased as if we are on a high speed train. While this is happening everywhere, especially in India we have picked up the rapid pace relatively more recently. Centuries of oppression with foreign rule had put the Indian society in a largely conservative and tanasic mode. Even high things such as spirituality had become an escape route with the world renouncing ascetic as the highest ideal. Hence the pace and pressure of the change is being felt much more.
Meanwhile the last century also saw an explosion of knowledge in several fields followed by a host of technological expansion and life changing inventions. A creative impulse has seized mankind and new ideas are being released in the realm of human thought. Added to this the vital world has enlarged its net of desires to distract mankind through the lures of a material paradise of earthly comforts.
But behind this excess pace of material, vital and intellectual advancement there is the pressure of the Spirit urging nature to exceed herself and give birth to a new possibility so far concealed in her, even though ocassionally hinted in the lives of the few high and luminous spiritual figures. What we are however witnessing now is a large scale spiritual revolution and the sudden unprecedented changes in the mental, vital, physical fields of Nature are its apings or shadows. Those who catch this inner thread of the spiritual revolution will find the way towards freedom. Others will experience increasing levels of restlessness or even confusion until all this rapid churning leads them either to join the stream of spiritual revolution and the New Creation or else fall apart under the pressure. It is a moment of evolutionary leap or ‘The Hour of God’ as Sri Aurobindo foresaw long back and showed us the way.
Here are the Mother’s Words as indicators.
‘One thing seems clear: humanity has reached such a generalized state of tension—tension in effort, tension in action, tension even in daily life—with such an excessive hyperactivity, such an overall restlessness, that the species as a whole seems to have reached a point where it must either burst through the resistance and surge forth into a new consciousness, or else sink back into an abysm of obscurity and inertia.
This tension is so total and so generalized that obviously something must break. It cannot go on like this. Yet all this is a sure sign that a new principle of force, consciousness and power has been infused into matter and by its very pressure has produced this acute state. Outwardly, we might expect to see the old habitual means used by Nature whenever she wants to bring about an upheaval; but here there is a new phenomenon, which is evidently visible only in a select few, although even these few are widespread enough—this phenomenon is not localized in one point or one place in the world, for the signs are to be found in every country all over the earth: the will to find a new, a higher, an ascending solution, an effort to surge forth into a vaster, more encompassing perfection.
Certain ideas of a more general, more extensive, more collective nature, as it were, are being worked out and are at work in the world. And the two go together: a greater and more total possibility of destruction and an inventiveness that unrestrainedly increases the possibility of catastrophe, a catastrophe that would be much more massive than it has ever been; and at the same time, the birth, or rather the manifestation, of much higher and more comprehensive ideas and wills which, when heard, will bring a vaster, more extensive, more complete and more perfect solution than before.
This struggle, this conflict between the constructive forces of an ascending evolution, of an increasingly perfect and divine realization, and the more and more destructive forces—powerfully destructive, forces of an uncontrollable madness—is becoming more obvious, unmistakably visible, and it is a kind of race or battle as to which will be first to reach its goal. All the hostile, anti-divine forces, these forces of the vital world, seem to have descended upon earth and are using it as their field of action; and at the same time, a new, higher, more powerful spiritual force has also descended upon earth to bring a new life to it. This renders the battle more bitter, violent and visible, but apparently more decisive, too, which is why we may hope to arrive at an early solution.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when man’s spiritual aspiration was turned towards a silent, inactive peace, detached from all the things of this world, an evasion of life to avoid the struggle, precisely, to rise above the battle, to be liberated from effort. It was a spiritual peace where, along with the cessation of tension, struggle and effort, suffering in all its forms also ceased, and this was considered the true and unique expression of the spiritual and divine life. This is what was considered divine grace, divine succor, divine intervention. And even now, in this age of anguish, tension and hypertension , this sovereign peace is of all help the best received, the most welcome, the relief asked and hoped for. For many, it is still the true sign of divine intervention, of divine grace.
In fact, no matter what you wish to realize, you must begin by establishing this perfect and immutable peace—it is the necessary basis for any work; but unless you are thinking of an exclusive or personal and egoistic liberation, you cannot stop there. There is yet another aspect to the divine grace, the aspect of progress that will be victorious over all obstacles, the aspect that will propel humanity into a new realization, open the doors unto a new world, enable not only a select few to benefit from the divine realization, but through their influence, their example and their power, bring a new and better condition to the rest of humanity.
It opens vistas of realization into the future and already foreseen possibilities through which an entire section of humanity, which is consciously or unconsciously open to the new forces, will be lifted up, as it were, towards a higher, more harmonious, more perfect life … and even if individual transformations are not permissible nor possible in all cases, at least there will be a kind of uplifting of the whole, a harmonization of everything, enabling a new order, a new harmony to be established and the anguish of disorder and the present strife to disappear and be replaced by an order that will allow for the harmonious working of the whole.
There will be other consequences that by opposite means will tend to eradicate the perversion and ugliness created in life due to the intervention of the mind, a whole range of deformations that have aggravated suffering, misery, moral poverty, a whole zone of sordid and repugnant miseries that makes an entire portion of human life so hideous. That must disappear. That is what in many respects makes humanity infinitely inferior to animal life, with its simplicity and its natural spontaneity, and which in spite of everything is harmonious. Suffering among animals is never as miserable and sordid as it is in a whole section of humanity perverted by a mentality exclusively turned towards egoistic needs.
One must rise above, surge forth into the Light and the Harmony, or sink back down into the simplicity of a wholesome, unperverted animal life.’
Affectionately,
Alok Da
