The Time Has Come
Saturday, November 15, 2003

Today I move from "Courage" room on the top floor to "Equanimity" one floor down. Sounds like a beneficial move. It puts the loss of my lovely ocean view in context, perhaps this stage of my journey, too. The end of the journey approaches. I leave India on the 20th, so I am gathering little fragments and colors of India to take back to California. Today is the first of several days of finalizing chores.

Canal Street separates the Ashram quarter of Pondicherry from the downtown shops and stores. Canal Street consists of two one-way lanes, one on each side of the "canal," which used to be simply a large open sewer. The city is gradually covering it over, but sewer it remains.

Downtown is old town. Many of the shops are small and narrow. When they were built, they didn't have that sense of infinite space that we had in the American West. Every inch of space has an occupant, including the sidewalks. In fact, most residents eschew the sidewalks and walk in the streets, those stream beds barely containing the overlapping currents of people, animals, and machines. My morning chores include changing travelers checks into rupees at Souvenirs Travel Agency, getting a taxi receipt at Autocare, renting a scooter on Canal Street, and shopping for Karen. How can I find clothes for her? I brought one of her salwars so I could get the right size.

The scooter is for speeding up final chores like this and for a trip to Auroville tomorrow with Lynn. I meet her for lunch at the Ashram dining room and after lunch she joins me in the shopping district to hunt clothes for Karen and an internet cafe for email. The internet connection at the first place is slow and sporadic. A new place on Canal Street has a fast connection, but my California ISP's webmail is down. I finally get off a message to Karen via another account. I have not heard from her since I got back to Pondicherry.

I'm glad to return to Equanimity at Mother's House and finish my chores - writing and washing a few clothes to dry on the balcony overnight. It's been a busy day. The only time I remember dropping down in there was when I pulled Patterns of the Present, by Georges van Vrekham, from the library downstairs this morning.

Georges is a Belgian Aurovillian best known for Beyond Humanity, a book that makes available to any interested reader the revolutionary vision and work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. In Patterns of the Present, Georges offers an unusual and hope-filled interpretation of the rushing swirl of events in the modern world, based on his reading of their writings. They were nothing if not farsighted. The massive dislocation that we feel in the modern world, the genocides, the huge upheavals of peoples, climate, and environmental degradation, says Georges, are neither random chaos nor the beginning of the end of civilization. Instead, the massive change is the result of a massive pressure, the pressure of a new world being born, a new force of conscious evolution, cleaning out the stables, breaking up the old hard shells, and bringing in a force as new to the mental world as the mind was to the animal world.

Evolution has not stopped. On the contrary, the pace is quickening. The seeds and shoots of a new one-world consciousness are appearing here and there. A mind-boggling change is moving on shore. A mind-transcending change. Sri Aurobindo and Mother were messengers and instigators of that change.

And how is it that I happen to be graced with a connection to this work, begun half way around the world from where I live? I turn the page in Patterns of the Present. Georges is recalling the answer to the same question that The Mother gave to the children at the Ashram playground:

You are on earth at this moment, she said, because you have chosen so in the past... There are large 'families of beings' that work for the same cause, who have gathered in more or less large numbers and who have come [down upon earth] in groups, as it were. It is as if at certain times there were awakenings in the psychic [soul] world, as if lots of sleeping children were being woken up: 'It's time! Quick, quick, you have to go down [to the earth]!' and they hurry down. And sometimes they do not touch down at the same place, they are dispersed. But there is something within that causes an uneasiness, that pushes them on. For some reason they feel attracted [to a certain place] and that brings them together.

That is the true family: the family of the aspiration, the family of the spiritual tendency.