Preparing for the Miraculous

the development of Sri Aurobindo’s thought 33This is why Sri Aurobindo could write in The HumanCycle: “The Age of Reason is visibly drawing to an end;novel ideas are sweeping over the world and are being acceptedwith significant rapidity;” and he could point to the“dynamic ideas such as Nietzsche’s Will-to-live, Bergson’sexaltation of intuition above intellect, or the latest Germanphilosophical tendency [German Idealism] to acknowledgea supramental faculty and a suprarational order of truths.” 7In The Life Divine he wrote: “Now that we are outgrowingthe superstition of the sole truth of Matter ... the outpostsof the scientific knowledge come more and more to be seton the borders that divide the material from the immaterial... In the present time itself, after an age of triumphantintellectuality and materialism, we can see evidence of thisnatural process – a return towards inner self-discovery, aninner seeking and thinking, a new attempt at mystic experience,a groping after the inner self, a reawakening tosome sense of the truth and power of the spirit ...” 8All the signs were there, but the resistance – the viciousswoop of the Black Dragon’s tail – was more resilient thanapparently presumed. Ahead lay the continuation of thetwentieth century with a series of cataclysms and wars ona global scale, and with an acceleration of change, scientificand social, in which humanity would integrate towardsoneness in spite of all innate resistances caused by its evolutionaryformation. This was the terrain of the battle to befought out in the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.The Word of CreationIn the later months of 1926, Sri Aurobindo spoke severaltimes to the evening circle of disciples about the gods,7 Sri Aurobindo: The Human Cycle, p. 23.8 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, pp. 909 and 900.