Lab of Evolution

A comment yesterday to one of my much earlier but still very valid posts necessitates a whole new post for full expression of my own comment to that comment.

Here is the link to that old post and the comment now appearing below it, which I answer briefly and then announce that my longer answer to it will be as a full new post, now being written here. I first copy down below the full comment, as it quotes the poem I too will be talking about in the present post:

Comment by Janakabhakti

I just came across this lovely appreciation of the master-works of J.R.R.Tolkien, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy – works which have shaped me only slightly less [because they came to me at such an early age] than those of Sri Aurobindo and Mother.
But your essay on Adventure brings to mind one of the first poems by the Master Poet which took hold of my heart and never let go, called Invitation:

INVITATION

With wind and the weather beating round me
    Up to the hill and the moorland I go.
Who will come with me? Who will climb with me?
    Wade through the brook and tramp through the snow?
Not in the petty circle of cities
    Cramped by your doors and your walls I dwell;
Over me God is blue in the welkin,
    Against me the wind and the storm rebel.
I sport with solitude here in my regions,
    Of misadventure have made me a friend.
Who would live largely? Who would live freely?
    Here to the wind-swept uplands ascend.
I am the lord of tempest and mountain,
    I am the Spirit of freedom and pride.
Stark must he be and a kinsman to danger
    Who shares my kingdom and walks at my side.

In Their Divine Grace,
Karun Das / will moss

My reply:

First of all thank you, for adding this appreciative comment to my post. And your comment in itself is great too, with the magnificent poem it includes…
Yes, I myself know and love this poem by Sri Aurobindo, written, of all places, in the jail where he spent a full exact year, in 1908-1909, when being the main accused in a bomb attack he was not actually involved in, but which had killed two British persons – the wrong ones on top of that – and so could have very well cost him his own life quite soon, a verdict anticipated in fact by all.
That in such a seemingly desperate situation this had been the poem that had come to him is almost incredible, and yet here it is in all its glory, full of the ever-victorious pride of the all-powerful Divine.
I did admire it of course and was totally awed when I discovered it, and the deadly context it was written in, during my early years of research about Sri Aurobindo’s life, right after I joined Auroville in 1972.

But in the secrecy of my own being I was stunned and horrified by what it meant the Divine was expecting, it seemed, also of me. The vital (life-energy) part of me, the one which is naturally heroic anyway, felt like saying an enthusiastic yes to this divine Invitation, and my Soul too of course was at first all for it; but the physical part of me trembled at the very thought of it, and immediately shrunk away from it, ready to dart in the opposite direction and hide somewhere at the first sign of implementation of such a horrific program as described in the poem.

Then my Soul too, noticing that fearful physical reaction, had second thoughts, so to say.
And still today I find myself very ambiguous about the whole matter.
Because, precisely, of my own Matter, my own cells, who happen to have already found out through numerous lifetimes the horrors they could be forced to live in the name of such adventures, and who also happen to remember enough of such terrible mis-adventures for refusing any more of them if they are at all given the choice.

Well, at this point I feel they definitely should at last be given the choice indeed.

In all fairness they should, I’d say.

During the eons already past of Evolution on Earth, the portion of the Divine who accepted to become utterly diminished Matter so that this Adventure in Physical Matter would be possible, that self-sacrificed Portion has been suffering hardships of all kinds, and when it became Living Matter, more and more conscious Matter, this has been paid by increasing sensitivity, which meant Pain, and fragility, which meant Death, again and again and again. The Adventure hasn’t been much fun yet at all for Matter, the rare and brief moments of pleasure in living bodies hardly equalling all the toughness of the rest.

This is at least how my Soul feels, with a strong impression that if I accepted to incarnate again this time, it has been because this was the time when at last something decisive could be done for Matter to become consciously divine again, and I wanted to help that to happen.

I have been told also that for a number of lifetimes across the ages, under any color of skin and social status myself, my heart has had that love and compassion for the labourers, the little people, the downtrodden, trying my best to improve their lot and make their life happier and this world more just, more truly humane for all, who all were family to me. This time, this is why I decided to live in Auroville as an adult, and since childhood this tenderness and compassion were going all the way down to the tiny existences in Nature, those who are not harmful: the nice insects in the grass, the dragonflies and butterflies in the air, the paramecia under a microscope… and the cells of our bodies, who work so hard and have such a hard life.

For Matter as such, only when it will recover its capacity to feel and enjoy Ananda, the divine Bliss of Being, will the problem be really solved. As Sri Aurobindo wrote at the end of the little booklet ‘The Mother’:

‘the Ananda that alone can heal the gulf between the highest heights of the supramental spirit and the lowest abysses of Matter’

I suppose this is why I have been inwardly led after a few years here to take the Vedic name of Bhaga, the Power of Delight of the Supreme: in that way my whole being would gradually become that Delight, and would be able to participate in its own way in the healing of the world with that divine Delight straight from Bhagavan, this Blissful One I had first discovered through the Bhagavad Gita…

Then only, when so healed, will Matter too, and our physical bodies, enjoy a Life Divine like the rest of our beings, and our own Joy will be truly complete, for, as Savitri had said before, ‘Not complete is the joy not shared by all’, and as she says again after bringing Satyavan back to life: ‘Let us bring joy to all, for joy is ours’…

So I have become somehow one who protects and defends the cells from the perils and wounds of this Adventure, until they too will have become Delight enough to enjoy them, and so at last be able to joyfully respond, out of their own free choice, to the divine Invitation above.

The process is started, they are progressing, some of them enjoy already that Delight at least some of the time… and, as Mother found out, it is contagious! So we just keep going, and they light up, more and more…