Preparing for the Miraculous

252 eleven talksand a new law of divine growth and spiritual realisation.... Always we see in the history of the divine incarnationsthe double work, and inevitably, because the Avatar takesup the workings of God in human life, the way of the divineWill and Wisdom in the world, and that always fulfilsitself externally as well as internally, by inner progress inthe soul and by an outer change in the life ... The Avatarmay descend as a great spiritual teacher and saviour, theChrist, the Buddha, but always his work leads, after he hasfinished his earthly manifestation, to a profound and powerfulchange not only in the ethical, but in the social andoutward life and ideals of the race.” 46(Even the mission of Christ, the “Prince of Peace”, hasled to a superabundance of internal and quite physicalstruggles in Christianity, and to the Crusades and the Warsof Religion. Christ’s own words as quoted in the gospel ofMatthew should not be forgotten: “Do not suppose that Ihave come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bringpeace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man againsthis father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-inlawagainst her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies will be themembers of his own household.” Matth. 10: 34-36)Sri Aurobindo is generally seen as in the photos ofHenri Cartier-Bresson: the old wise man seated unmovedand unmovably in his big chair, Nirodbaran’s “Golden Purusha”.But if this is the sole aspect of Sri Aurobindo, or thesole one taken into consideration by so many of his perhaps“too ethereally-minded” disciples, when or where did he dothe avataric work about which he wrote, for instance, in hiscorrespondence with Nirodbaran, in his letters, poems andSavitri? When and where did he wage his battles againstthe assailing Titan kings? It is obviously a distortion to see46 Sri Aurobindo: Essays on the Gita, p. 161.