Preparing for the Miraculous

2012 and 1956: Doomsday? 113as a collective being,” as “all mankind is one in its nature,physical, vital, emotional, mental and ever has been in spiteof all differences of intellectual development ranging fromthe poverty of the Bushman and negroid to the rich culturesof Asia and Europe, and the whole race has, as the human totality,one destiny which it seeks and increasingly approachesin the cycles of progression and retrogression it describesthrough the countless millenniums of its history.” 21The recent decades in the history of humanity must ofcourse be seen in the perspective of “a cycle of progression”which started in ancient Greece and the cultures around theeastern Mediterranean. Christianity played an importantrole in this cycle, as did the Renaissance, the Enlightenmentand the Industrial Revolution. Then – “war being the fatherof all things” according to Heraclitus – the great War of theTwentieth Century, in its three parts of World War One andTwo, and the Cold War, was the dramatic upheaval that leddirectly to the unification of the world.Evolutionary progression seems always to come atwhat is to our human awareness an enormous cost. Herewe may remember “what Arjuna saw” on the battlefield ofKurukshetra: the Divine in all his glory, but also as Time theDevourer. 22 Each positive evolutionary movement inducesinevitably “an enormous force [of resistance] commensurablewith the magnitude of the thing that has to be done.But always these resistances turn out to have assisted by theresistance much more than they have impeded the intentionof the great Creatrix and her Mover.” 23 Such seems tohave been the process throughout the evolution of life onEarth. Even when global catastrophes threatened life with21 Sri Aurobindo: The Human Cycle, p. 66.22 See talk 4: “What Arjuna Saw: the Dark Side of the Force”.23 Sri Aurobindo: The Ideal of Human Unity, p. 311.