Preparing for the Miraculous

what arjuna saw: the dark side of the force 81In The Life Divine he formulates the problem as follows:“God being All-Good, who created pain and evil? If we saythat pain is a trial and an ordeal, we do not solve the moralproblem, we arrive at an immoral or non-moral God – anexcellent world-mechanist perhaps, a cunning psychologist,but not a God of Good and Love whom we can worship,only a God of might to whose law we must submitor whose caprice we may hope to propitiate. For one whoinvents torture as a means of test and ordeal, stands convictedeither of deliberate cruelty or of moral insensibilityand, if a moral being at all, is inferior to the highest instinctof his own creatures.” 15As Sri Aurobindo writes in the letters of which The Riddleof This World is composed: no answer has ever been givento satisfy the human mind because the answer requiresa consciousness vaster than ours, a cosmic consciousness,only obtainable in an advanced state of yoga. The path towardssuch understanding is the path of faith and surrender,warranted by the Vedantic affirmation that all is theBrahman and that our souls have chosen to incarnate inthis evolutionary universe. “If it be true that the Self aloneexists, it must also be true that all is the Self.”“The gospel of universal peace and goodwill amongmen – for without a universal and entire mutual goodwillthere can be no real and abiding peace – has never succeededfor a moment in possessing itself of human life during thehistoric cycle of our progress, because morally, socially, spirituallythe race was not prepared and the poise of Naturein its evolution would not admit of its being immediatelyprepared for any such transcendence. ... A day may come,must surely come, we will say, when humanity will be readyspiritually, morally, socially for the reign of universal peace;15 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 101.