Preparing for the Miraculous

206 eleven talksand it is only because we cannot conceive it in that beginningless,endless, ever-new moment which is the eternityof the Timeless that our notions and conceptions are compelledto place it in a temporal eternity of successive durationto which are attached the ideas of an always recurrentbeginning, middle and end.” 22 Which means that we donot have “any surety that there ever was or ever will be aperiod in time when no form of universe, no play of beingis represented to itself in the eternal Conscious-Being.” 23“[The ancient Hindu] believes that Nature has repeated itselfover and over again, as indeed it is probable she hasdone, resuming briefly and in sum at each start what shehad previously accomplished in detail, slowly and with labour.It is this great secular movement in cycles, perpetuallyself-repeating, yet perpetually progressing, which isimaged and set forth in the symbols of the Puranas.” 24In this view the ancient Hindu concept of pralaya, ordissolution of a universe, is part of the eternal process ofmanifestation. This concept was even less than a centuryago thought of as part of the old mythical Hindu lore, justlike the cycles of time were part of the mythology of ancientGreece. Now, amazingly, not only is the universe supposedto have burst forth from a magic primordial particle,the question “what came before the Big Bang?” has becomescientifically legitimate, as has the question what to expectafter the Big Crunch, when our universe will have died.Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, for instance, have publisheda book with the title Endless Universe: Beyond the BigBang, and consequently beyond the collapse that will bethe Big Crunch. “They say they were motivated to form anew theory as the Big Bang came to require more and more22 Id., p. 83.23 Id., p. 110.24 Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research, 1979, vol. I, p. 9.