Preparing for the Miraculous

eing human and the copernican principle 145In the Western “Age of Reason,” Alexander Pope wrotein his famous Essay on Man (1733):He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest;In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast ...Created half to rise, and half to fall;Great lord of all things, yet a prey of all;Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!In the spiritual view, now as well as in the past, the humanbeing is an incarnated soul, in other words the Divineincarnated to fulfil His purposes on Earth. This has alwaysbeen sensed and even concretely experienced by people inall climes called seers, great souls, yogis or mystics, evenwhen their mentality was restricted by the knowledge andthought patterns proper to their ages. Now the times seemto have ripened and may bear fruit in the realization by maturesouls of their presence in this material world, transformedby a higher Consciousness. The “anthropocentric illusion”will then be changed into a divine Reality. Which iswhy Sri Aurobindo had Narad say to Savitri’s royal father:Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;Earth is the heroic spirit’s battlefield ...Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king,Than all the glorious liberties of heaven. 35“This alone [the realization of the Divine] is man’s realbusiness in the world and the justification of his existence,without which he would be only an insect crawling amongother ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and waterwhich has managed to form itself amid the appallingimmensities of the physical universe.” 3635 Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, p. 686.36 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 48.