object:1.05 - 2010 and 1956 - Doomsday?
book classPreparing for the Miraculous
author class:George Van Vrekhem
subject class:Integral Yoga
class:chapter
The Iron Age is ended. Only now
The last fierce spasm of the dying past
Shall shake the nations ...
Sri Aurobindo, In the Moonlight
The 2012 phenomenon
The 2012 phenomenon, simply put, consists in the
worldwide expectation that on 21 December 2012 an event
will take place, beneficial or detrimental, which will change
the Earth and humanity on it. This eschatological belief has
intensified in the last decades and snowballed into a media
event. It originates in the finding, scientific or not, that the94
e l e v e n ta l k s
fourth 5,125 year-long cycle or sun in the Mayan Long
Count calendar will end on that day.
A New Age interpretation of this presumed event tells
us that on that day Earth and her inhabitants will undergo
a physical and/or spiritual transformation which will initi-
ate a new era. Others expect that event to bring the world
to an end, or something of similar importance, which may
be caused by cosmic catastrophes, e.g. a collision with a
passing planet (Nibiru?) or with a black hole, a failure of
the Earths magnetic field, or a hit by a massive expulsion
of matter from the Sun ...
In 2012: Universal Doom or New Age, Ashok Sharma
writes: All the so-called Mayan prophecies about 2012
are nothing more than wildly speculative extrapolations,
which are based on yet uncertain interpretations by schol-
ars of Maya hieroglyphs. Carlos Barrios, a Mayan anthro-
pologist who has extensively enquired about the predic-
tion among his people, is of the following opinion: There
are some who announce the end of the world for December
2012. This is nothing but imagination. The Mayas are not
happy with this interpretation. The world is not going to
end: it will be transformed. The Indians have their calen-
dars and know how to interpret them, but not the Western-
ers. Humanity will continue to exist, but in another way.
The material structures will change. From then onwards,
we will have the opportunity to be more human. 1
The doomsday prediction or expectation is a tradition
which the West inherited together with its Judeo-Christian
religion, more specifically from the biblical Book of Daniel
and Revelation. Norman Cohn writes in his classic work The
Pursuit of the Millennium: Already in the Prophetical Books
there are passages that foretell how, out of an immense
1
In Sylvie Simon: 2012 Le rendez-vous, p. 45.2012 and 1956: D oomsday?
95
cosmic catastrophe, there will arise a Palestine which will
be nothing less than a new Eden, Paradise regained a
Palestine to which the whole world would consent to bow
or which would gradually dominate the whole world. 2 It
should be remembered that the Hebrews were the first to
interpret history not as cyclic but as linear, with a begin-
ning at Creation and an end when evil will be conquered
and Earth become an eternal Paradise.
The following words from Revelation, written by the vi-
sionary John of Patmos, have had an enormous influence
in Christianity: And I saw a new heaven and a new earth:
for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away;
and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city,
new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven,
prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. ... And God
shall wipe all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no
more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there
be any more pain; for the former things are passed away.
And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all
things new. ... And he carried me away in the spirit to a
great and high mountain, and showed me that great city,
the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God,
having the glory of God ... 3
It is rather remarkable that Jesus is seldom remembered
as having been an apocalyptic himself, the reason probably
being that the Catholic Church had to do its utmost to cover
the fact because his predictions did not become true. Bart
Ehrman writes in his Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New
Millennium: Jesus thought that the history of the world
would come to a screeching halt, and that God would in-
tervene in the affairs of the planet, overthrow the forces of
2 Norman Cohn: The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 20.
3
As quoted in Cohn, p. 25.96
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evil in a cosmic act of judgment, and establish his utopian
Kingdom here on earth. And this was to happen within his
own generation. ... Jesus stood within a long line of Jew-
ish prophets who understood that God was soon going to
intervene in this world, overthrow the forces of evil that
ran it, and bring in a new kingdom in which there would
be no more war, disease, catastrophe, despair, hatred, sin,
or death. 4
For instance in the gospel of Mark, now generally ac-
cepted as the earliest of the four gospels, we find Jesus
quoted as having said: Truly I tell you, some of you stand-
ing here will not taste death before they have seen the King-
dom of God having come in power. (9:1) Truly I tell you,
this generation will not pass away before all these things
take place. (13:30) Truly I tell you, you will see the Son of
Man coming on the clouds of heaven. (14:62) Moreover,
the gnostic Paul of Tarsus, considered by many the second
founder of Christianity, was of the same conviction and
wrote in his first letter to the Thessalonians: We who are
alive, we who are left, will be caught up in the clouds to-
gether with [the resurrected] to meet the Lord in the air.
(4:15-17)
It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, since those
times, the end of the world has been foretold at least once
every other year. At present, however, the imagery of the
expectations has changed considerably. Nobody is com-
ing or going on the clouds any more, and if heaven is a
concrete place, it must be located somewhere beyond the
farthest galaxies and quasars 13.7 billion light years away
instead of beyond the orbit of the planet Saturn. The feared
causes of doomsday are now asteroid and comet impacts,
4 Bart Ehrman: Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, pp. 3
and 21.2012 and 1956: D oomsday?
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the change of our planets spin rate, solar fireworks, nearby
supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, black holes, alien attacks,
monstrous mutations on the Earth itself, or biological or
nuclear terrorism.
This does not mean, nevertheless, that the present situ-
ation of planet Earth and its denizens should not be taken
seriously. The interpretation of the Mayan long-count cal-
endar is not the only prediction of an imminent best or dir-
est. Our moment in time is also supposed to be the end of
the Iron Age, the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, the mo-
mentous change predicted by Edgar Cayce, and, accord-
ing to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the time of upheaval
inevitable in the transition to a new stage of the terrestrial
evolution. The bewildering circumstances caused by this
transition are clearly expressed in the extreme phenomena
which seem to threaten life on Earth; in the mental, reli-
gious and spiritual confusion of the postmodern period;
in the vulnerability of our planet as perceived by science;
and, not least, in the astounding increase of the human
population which seems unstoppable.
Gaia in trouble
James Lovelock (1919) is a scientist and inventor who
at one time collaborated with NASA in their search for life
on Mars. He became sincerely worried because of the dam-
age done to the terrestrial environment by a careless hu-
manity, increasing beyond all proportions. He formulated
the analysis of his worries in Gaia: A New Look at Life on
Earth, published in 1979. By the name Gaia the Greek
name of the Goddess of the Earth, proposed by his friend
William Golding Lovelock wanted to make his readers
aware that the surface and the atmosphere of the Earth, if
not the planet as a whole, looked, acted and was as vulner-
able as a living being.98
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Initially Lovelocks hypothesis was stridently attacked
by the Neo-Darwinists, especially by Richard Dawkins, the
firebrand among them. They dismissed the Gaia hypothesis
as vitalist, thereby declaring it anathema in serious, aca-
demic, materialist science. After Lovelock had pruned his
hypothesis and its formulations somewhat, turning it into
a proper scientific theory, Gaia became more respectable.
In the year 2000 the first international conference, Gaia
2000, was held; the updated proceedings were published
in 2004 under the title Scientists Debate Gaia.
According to Lovelock, Gaia is a thin spherical shell
of matter that surrounds the incandescent interior of plan-
et Earth, almost entirely made of hot or molten rock and
metal. That spherical shell begins where the crystal rocks
meet the magma of the Earths hot interior, about 100 miles
below the surface, and proceeds another 100 miles upwards
through the ocean and air to the even hotter thermosphere
at the edge of space. ... I call Gaia a physiological system. 5
Lynn Margulis, the biologist who together with Lovelock
formulated the idea of Gaia, writes: The entire planetary
surface, not just the living bodies but the atmosphere that
we think of as an inert background, is so far from chemical
equilibrium that the entire planetary surface is best regard-
ed as alive. 6 And the science writer John Gribbin defines
the theory as follows: Gaia is the name given to a theory
which describes how the different components of the Earth
System, living and non-living, have worked together for
eons to maintain conditions suitable for life. 7
It should however be stressed that the authors of all
three quotes took their distances from the romantic and
5
James Lovelock: The Revenge of Gaia, p. 19.
6 Lynn Margulis: The Symbiotic Planet - A New Look at Evolution, p. 154.
7 John Gribbin: He Knew He Was Right The Irrepressible Life of James
Lovelock, p. x.2012 and 1956: D oomsday?
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New Age interpretations of the Gaia hypothesis, in their ef-
fort to conform to scientific norms and make the hypothesis
generally acceptable. The original hypothesis postulated,
according to Lovelock himself, that life on Earth actively
keeps the surface conditions always favourable for whatever
is the contemporary ensemble of organisms. Promoted to a
scientific theory, this supposition was reworded and Gaia
became a view of the Earth that sees it as a self-regulating
system made up from the totality of organisms, the surface
rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere tightly coupled as an
evolving system. The theory sees this system as having a
goal: the regulation of surface conditions so as always to be
as favourable as possible for contemporary life. It is based
on observations and theoretical models; it is fruitful and
has made ten successful predictions 8 predictions being a
prerequisite to render any theory scientific.
Behind it all is the conviction that Gaia and her deni-
zens are in serious trouble. In The Revenge of Gaia, Love-
lock wrote as recently as 2006: I make no apologies for
repeating that Gaia is an evolutionary system in which
any species, including humans, that persists with changes
to the environment that lessen the survival of its progeny
is doomed to extinction. By massively taking land to feed
people and by fouling the air and water we are hampering
Gaias ability to regulate the Earths climate and chemistry,
and if we continue to do it we are in danger of extinction.
We have in a sense stumbled into a war with Gaia, a war
that we have no hope of winning. All that we can do is to
make peace while we are still strong and not a broken rab-
ble. 9 His warning is grave: Now humanity and the Earth
face a deadly peril, with little time left to escape.
8 James Lovelock: op. cit., p. 208.
9 Id., pp. 139-140.100
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Margulis, in The Symbiotic Planet, sounds even more
draconian: To me, the human move to take responsibility
for the living Earth is laughable the rhetoric of the power-
less. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflat-
ed moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal our
sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self-
delusion. Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves. ...
No human culture, despite its inventiveness, can kill life on
this planet, were it even to try. ... Humans are not the centre
of life, nor is any other single species. Humans are not even
central to life. We are a recent, rapidly growing part of an
enormous ancient whole.
It may already be too late to avert the looming climate
catastrophe that Lovelock warns about, opines John Grib-
bin. And the senior biologist Edward Wilson, one of the
most respected living scientists, concludes his analysis of
the Gaia situation with this paragraph: The juggernaut of
technology-based capitalism will not be stopped. Its mo-
mentum is reinforced by the billions of poor people in de-
veloping countries anxious to participate in order to share
the material wealth of the industrialized nations. But its di-
rections can be changed by mandate of a generally shared
long-term environmental ethic. The choice is clear: the jug-
gernaut will very soon either chew up what remains of the
living world, or it will be redirected to save it. ... Humanity
is in a final struggle with the rest of life. 10
Breakdown or breakthrough
Ervin Laszlo (1932) is the founder and president of the
Club of Budapest, an informal association of creative [and
famous] people in diverse fields of human creativity. The
Club is dedicated to the proposition that only by changing
ourselves can we change the world, or variously put: A
10 Edward Wilson: The Future of Life, pp. 156 and 43.2012 and 1956: D oomsday?
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revolution of consciousness is perhaps the last, and certain-
ly the best, hope of humankind. They want to bring about
a worldwide spiritual renaissance. In Laszlos words: We
now live in a period of transformation when a new world is
struggling to be born. 11
Laszlo is convinced that the present situation of Planet
Earth is as critical as the scientists in the previous section
(together with most reasonable people) think it is. In addi-
tion he accepts 2012, the end of the running period of one of
the Mayan calendars, as a given. This date will, according to
him, mark a total breakdown of all life-systems on the planet
if no conscious and collaborative effort is made to prevent it.
However, if such an effort is made, what looms on our hori-
zon as a breakdown may turn out to be a breakthrough.
The finding of a solution is urgent, for the window of
opportunity for new thinking is now reduced to a single
lifetime. The present tendencies move at high speed to-
wards irreversibility. The estimation of the critical points at
which going back is no longer possible have shrunk terrify-
ingly: from the end of this century to its middle, then to the
next twenty years, and in some cases even to the next five to
twenty years. In The Reenchanted Cosmos Laszlos window
of decision is 2005-2012, which means that at the present
moment this window has narrowed further to two years.
The physical or natural threats able to cause a global
breakdown are now well known. The sea level in the whole
world could rise by more than one meter, with the result
that many very populated cities, towns and regions would
11 The quotations in this section are from the following books by
Ervin Laszlo: The Reenchanted Cosmos Welcome Home in the Universe
(2005), The Chaos Point The World at the Crossroads (2006), and Worldshift
2012: Making Green Business, New Politics & Higher Consciousness Work
Together (2009).102
e l e v e n ta l k s
be drowned and disappear from the map. The CO 2 emis-
sion might be greater than predicted, causing the hole in the
ozone layer to enlarge dramatically, doing untold harm. The
increase in the temperature of the earth atmosphere might
reach 3 to 6 degrees Celsius, which would make countless
life-forms extinct. The Suns activity might reach a peak
in 2012, producing solar storms of unequalled intensity. A
change of the magnetic poles is feared to be imminent.
In this critical situation Laszlo sees the possibility of
a worldwide spiritual renaissance. In Worldshift 2012 he
states: The completion of [the fourth Mayan] cycle in 2012
is the beginning of nothing less than an evolutionary jump
in the earthly life. On that day a phase change of the fre-
quency resonance [?] will take place, which opens the way
for a post-2012 radiant golden age in our galactic-solar-
planetary realization. ... We will have made the transition
not only to a post-historical, but to a superhuman phase
in our evolution. ... An immense change of consciousness
will start on that day. And he quotes Jos Arguelles: It
will be as if we see ourselves for the first time, and we will
no longer recognize ourselves as human. Laszlo is sure:
Something will happen. What will happen, however, de-
pends on ourselves.
A more realistic Vaclav Havel, prominent Czech intel-
lectual and politician, has said when addressing the USA
Congress: Without a worldwide revolution in the human
consciousness nothing will change for the better. This
agrees with Sri Aurobindos declaration that an inner
change is needed in human nature, and that if this is not
the solution, then there is no solution, if this is not the way,
then there is no way for the human kind. 12 Laszlo seems to
share this conviction, but two turns in his thought render
12 Sri Aurobindo: The Human Cycle, p. 221.2012 and 1956: D oomsday?
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his argumentation questionable, not to say naive: that an
immense change in the consciousness of humanity will
start on a given day; and that the collective mind of hu-
manity might be capable of undergoing such a sea-change
in five years or less.
Our final century?
Another voice in the debate is that of a distinguished
scientist, Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal since 1995 and
Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, since 2004. He has
published a book with the ominous title Our Final Centu-
ry: Will Civilization Survive the Twenty-First Century? The
theme of this book is that humanity is more at risk than
at any other phase in its history, writes Rees. The wider
cosmos has a potential future that could even be infinite.
But will these vast expanses of time be filled with life, or
be as empty of the Earths first sterile seas? The choice may
depend on us, this century.
It is a fact that scientific materialism revels in the deni-
gration and degradation of all humanistic, religious and
spiritual values (although it will readily use them when
deemed handy to promote its cause). It finds pleasure in
repeating that being born is beginning to die, as it does in
reminding us of the Copernican Principle, which reduces
the status of the Earth to nothing but one planet among
others and the status of the human beings to nothing but
one kind of animals among others. Bertrand Russell, at
one time the mouthpiece of scientific rationalism, wrote
already many years ago: If you accept the ordinary laws
of science, you have to suppose that human life in general
will die out in due course. You see in the moon the sort of
thing towards which the earth is tending, something dead,
cold and lifeless. And: Brief and powerless is Mans life;
on him and all his race the slow sure doom falls pitiless104
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and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction,
omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way. 13
This macabre gospel of what might be called black sci-
ence has found a fertile field in the contemporary crisis
mood of fear and uncertainty. It is divulged in practically
each and every issue of the science magazines, followed in
this by the other media. The Earth is going to die. The sur-
face of the Sun, at a temperature of several thousand de-
grees, will come extremely close. The Earth will be charred;
it will be a cinder. The Sun is going to die. We can foresee
with certainty that our Sun, about five billion years old, and
which transforms its hydrogen into helium slowly but ir-
reversibly, will soon be exhausted, and that it will explode
like the Crab Nebula in 1054. (Here soon means at the
earliest in another five billion years!) The universe is going
to die. It began with the Big Bang and will end with the Big
Crunch. The stars begin to fade like guttering candles and
are snuffed out one by one. In the depths of space the great
celestial cities, the galaxies, cluttered with the memorabilia
of ages, are gradually dying. Tens of billions of years pass in
the growing darkness. Occasional flickers of light pierce the
fall of cosmic night, and spurts of activity delay the sentence
of a universe condemned to become a galactic graveyard.
What happens in far-future eons may seem blazingly
irrelevant to the practicalities of our lives, finds Rees. In-
deed so. But in the meantime he contributes to the prevail-
ing mentality by commenting on all the well-known causes
of eventual doom by adding some of his own, staking for
instance one thousand dollars on a bet: that by the year 2020
an instance of bio-error, i.e. a mistake or negligence involv-
ing biological matter (like a deadly virus or bacterium), will
have killed a million people. I think, he writes, the odds
13 In Russell on Religion, pp. 9 and 38.2012 and 1956: D oomsday?
105
are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilization on
Earth will survive to the end of the present century without
a serious setback. 14
The Curve
However scientifically well-founded or eloquent the
above illustrations of the threat to planet Earth and its
denizens may be, most striking is no doubt the curve of its
human population growth. Ten thousand years ago there
may have been at most 2 to 3 million humans scattered
around the globe. There were no cities, no great popula-
tion centers. There were fewer people on the globe than are
now found in virtually any large city. Two thousand years
ago the number had swelled to perhaps 130 to 200 million
people. Our first billion was reached in the year 1800 [i.e.
at the time of the first Industrial Revolution]. If we take the
time of origin of our species [Homo sapiens sapiens] as about
100,000 years ago, it seems that it took our species 100,000
years to reach the billion-person population plateau. Then
things sped up considerably. We reached 2 billion people
in 1930, about 1 000 times faster than it took to reach the
first billion. But the rate of increase kept accelerating. By
1950, only twenty years later, we had reached 2.5 billion
souls. In 1999, we hit 6 billion. There will be approximately
7 billion people by 2020 and perhaps 11 billion by 2050 to
2100. 15 If the evolution has an aim, it cannot be to provide
standing place only for the humans on our globe.
Once again we turn to Edward Wilson: The problem
before us is how to feed billions of new mouths over the
next several decades and save the rest of life at the same
time, without being wrapped in a Faustian bargain that
14 Martin Rees: Our Final Century, p. 8.
15 Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee: Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is
Uncommon in the Universe, p. 284.106
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threatens freedom and security. No one knows the exact
solution to this dilemma, he writes in The Future of Life.
During the twentieth century more people were added to
the world than in all previous human history. ... We and the
rest of life cannot afford another hundred years like that. ...
It should be obvious to anyone not in a euphoric delirium
that whatever humanity does or does not do, Earths capac-
ity to support our species is approaching the limit. 16
To conclude with James Lovelock: The ultimate cause
of the problem is that there are too many people six or
seven times too many people on Earth today. This raises
the mega-question: if there is a meaning in it all, if the evo-
lution has a goal, if the Curve is more than a curse, what is
it that is happening and makes us look for an explanation of
an Earth changing into one habitat for a unified humanity?
Is the Earth special?
According to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Earth
is a very special body in the universe. Speaking to the
Ashram students in 1953, the Mother made this quite clear:
In the immensity of the astronomical skies, earth is a thing
absolutely without interest and without importance, but
from the occult and spiritual points of view the Earth is the
concentrated symbol of the universe. ... For the convenience
and necessity of the work, the whole universe has been con-
centrated and condensed symbolically in a grain of sand
which is called the Earth. And therefore it is the symbol of
all all that is to be changed, all that is to be transformed,
all that is to be converted is here. This means that if one
concentrates on this work and does it here, all the rest will
follow automatically. By the work she meant the effort
of conscious spiritual evolution.
16 Edward Wilson: op.cit., pp. 28-33, passim.2012 and 1956: D oomsday?
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On another occasion, in 1951, she had said: It is only
upon earth that the Presence is found, this direct contact
with the supreme Origin, this presence of the divine Con-
sciousness hidden in all things. ... All action on this spe-
cial point has its irradiation into the whole universe ... All
knowledge in all traditions, from every part of the earth,
says that the psychic formation is a terrestrial formation
and that the growth of the psychic being is something that
takes place upon earth. But once they are formed and free
in their movement, they can go anywhere in the universe,
they are not limited in their movement. But their forma-
tion and growth belong to the terrestrial life, for reasons of
concentration.
What happens on Earth, said the Mother, has its re-
percussion in the entire universe. Inversely, Sri Aurobindo
wrote in Savitri: The powers of all the worlds have entrance
here. 17 And in his correspondence he wrote: Earth is the
foundation and all the worlds are on the earth and to im-
agine a clean-cut or irreconcilable difference between them
is ignorance; here and not elsewhere, not by going to some
other world, the divine realization must come. ... Evolution
takes place on earth and therefore the earth is the proper
field of progress. ... I am concerned with the earth, not with
worlds beyond for their own sake; it is a terrestrial realiza-
tion that I seek and not a flight to distant summits. All other
yogas regard this life as an illusion or a passing phase; the
supramental yoga alone regards it as a thing created by the
Divine for a progressive manifestation and takes the fulfil-
ment of the life and the body for its object.
It goes without saying that a full interpretation of these
words is only possible in the context of the Aurobindian
teaching. The fundamental message, in the words of the
17 Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, p. 153.108
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Mother, is all the same quite clear: La Terre, on ne la dtruit
pas, the Earth will not be destroyed. 18
Such a conviction contradicts directly most of the scien-
tific knowledge about planet Earth in particular and about
the universe in general. It can easily be seen as another in-
stance of mystic or New Age imagination, especially at a
time that the search for exoplanets is in full swing. At the
time of writing more than 500 have been discovered, and
their number is supposed to be, well, astronomical. Behind
this expensive scientific search, and quite useful for its pro-
motion, lingers the curiosity whether there is life elsewhere
in the universe. The ancient Greek philosophers already
asked the question; Giordano Bruno answered it positively,
and so did Fontenelle, in his Entretiens sur la pluralit des
mondes during the Enlightenment, and the French astrono-
mer Camille Flammarion in the 19th century.
The popular opinion on key enigmas, even the sup-
posedly scientific popular explanations in the media and
in most popularizing books, should be taken with a sub-
stantial grain of salt. For example, the explanation that our
gigantic universe originated in the miraculous explosion of
something smaller than an atom the Big Bang has now
been generally accepted for something like half a century,
and most people would be surprised to hear that there are
serious scientists who still have doubts about this, while
others talk about multiple universes, baby universes, or an
all-in-one multiverse. The atom is still commonly depicted
as a miniature solar system, a view abandoned by science
in 1927. Darwin was the father of the theory of evolution?
Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and others formulated coherent
evolutionary theories before him, and Alfred Wallace at the
same time as he. The big apes were our direct ancestors?
18 LAgenda de Mre, vol. 12, p. 330.2012 and 1956: D oomsday?
109
Paleoanthropology has not yet been able to pinpoint the
origin of the real Homo species (see e.g. Pascal Picq: Les orig-
ines de lhomme, and Friedemann Schrenk: Die Frhzeit des
Menschen, both recent publications). Humanity appeared in
Africa? The age of fossils of Homo sapiens found in Europe
and China increases year by year and puts the out of Af-
rica theory in serious doubt. And so on.
Another item on this list is the status of planet Earth
and of life on it. Life has not yet been found anywhere ex-
cept on the Earth, although the countless articles about the
possibility of life existing on other planets at times turns the
possibility into an apparent certainty. A new age of plan-
etary exploration and exobiology dawned in the seventh
decade of the twentieth century, wrote the late Carl Sagan,
who built a glamorous career on his much-professed en-
thusiasm for the subject. We live in a time of adventure
and high intellectual excitement, but also in the midst of
an endeavour which promises great practical benefits. He
estimated in 1974 that a million civilizations may exist in
our Milky Way alone. Given that our galaxy is but one of
hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe, the number
of intelligent alien species would be enormous. The study
of a single instance of extraterrestrial life will deprovincial-
ize biology, wrote Sagan in his best-selling Cosmos. For
the first time, the biologists will know what other kinds of
life are possible. ... Every star may be a sun to someone.
Within a galaxy there are stars and worlds and, it may be,
a proliferation of living things and intelligent beings and
spacefaring civilizations.
Everyone does not share this enthusiasm. Those
searching for extraterrestrial intelligence have published
copiously, in almost total absence of data and in complete
absence of any direct data, notes Henry Bauer dryly. But,
as mentioned before, the search for exoplanets is on and110
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many are being detected, thanks to the marvellous orbiting
telescopes and other advanced instruments cosmologists
have now at their disposal. Yet, the question is whether
life will be found on one or some of them. Experts have
openly expressed their doubts, so for instance Peter Ward
and Donald Brownlee in their Rare Earth, Paul Davies in
The Eerie Silence and The Goldilocks Enigma, and Guillermo
Gonzalez and Jay Richards in The Privileged Planet.
Of all yet known celestial bodies, Earth is unique in
both its physical properties and its proven ability to sustain
life, write Ward and Brownlee. Our planet has a highly
fortuitous set of circumstances that could not be expected
to exist commonly on other planets. Of what kind are
these circumstances? For instance Earth has a Moon which
is the largest of the moons of all other solar planets, large
enough to stabilize Earths spin. Earth is protected by Jupi-
ter, which may be called its guardian because, enormous in
size, it catches most of the potentially catastrophic debris
headed for the Earth. Our solar system is located in the ga-
lactic habitable zone, so called because most of the Milky
Way and other galaxies is not favourable for life-carrying
planets; moreover, Earths orbit itself is located in the habit-
able zone around the Sun closer would be too hot for life,
farther away would be too cold.
A last factor of importance (there are more): our Sun
does not seem to be as common as ordinarily supposed, but
on the contrary to be a rarity, not only within the Milky
Way but also compared to the majority of other galaxies. It
is often said that the Sun is a typical star, but this is entirely
untrue. The mere fact that 95% of all stars are less massive
than the Sun makes our planetary system quite rare. Be-
sides, approximately two-thirds of solar-type stars in the
solar neighbourhood are members of binary or multiple
star systems. (Lewis Dartnell: Life in the Universe)2012 and 1956: D oomsday?
111
In the very few places [in the universe] that arent in
a vacuum, too hot or too cold, we really know of only one:
Earth, concludes astronomer Philip Plait in his book with
the spooky title Death from the Skies! The Science behind the
End of the World. I honestly dont know if were alone in
the Universe; no one does. ... Maybe, just maybe, we really
are alone. In all the galaxy, in all the vast trillions of cubic
light years of emptiness, ours is the very first planet to har-
bour creatures that can ponder their own existence.
Taking all this into account, the statements of Sri Au-
robindo and the Mother about planet Earth, which a few
decades ago may have appeared occult or mystic to
many, no longer seem so other-worldly. The scientific de-
bate is on and its conclusion is not yet out to see. If scientific
materialism is the only truth, the whole matter is worthy of
little consideration, for then everything is anyway a matter
of contingency destined to end badly. But if there are other
means of knowledge, based on capacities and realms which
scientific materialism refuses to recognize in principle, then
our Earth, life on it, and its destiny may be unique and look
forward to a future evolution which will not be cut short in
the near future.
Future positive
The Aurobindian scheme of things is in essence evolu-
tionary. Accepting the gradual physiological development
of the life forms on Earth, but as an expression of an increas-
ing consciousness, it asks the pertinent question why Homo
sapiens would be the ultimate species, for it is clear that
the possibilities of nature are not exhausted by the human
being. The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature
has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be
a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose
conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman,112
e l e v e n ta l k s
the god. 19 As the incorporation of the mental conscious-
ness in the scale of evolution led to the formation of Homo
sapiens, so a higher consciousness, called supermind by
Sri Aurobindo, is necessary to form the new, higher species
in the scale.
The yogic effort of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother con-
sisted in preparing humanity and the Earth for the descent
of this higher consciousness. The literature and testimonies
they have left behind provide anybody interested with a
concrete, detailed idea of that lofty and difficult ambition,
for which Sri Aurobindo had to descent voluntarily into
death. Six years later, in 1956, the Mother announced the
first manifestation of the Supermind in the Earth atmos-
phere, equivalent to the beginning of a new stage in the
terrestrial evolution, of a new world. 20
The effects of this manifestation were immediate, for
instance in the phenomenon called the Sixties: the dec-
ade of the New Age movement, the student revolts of 68,
and the Velvet Revolution of the same year in Prague. There
was also the technological acceleration resulting in the glo-
bal spread of television, the space technology of Sputnik,
Apollo 11 and the nuclear rockets, the computer, and an
increasing miniaturization of things technological. The de-
segregation movement in the US gave equal rights to all.
The the colonial countries of the third world became in-
dependent.
The common impulse behind all these phenomena was
the need of unity for the human race by an inner oneness,
without which, according to Sri Aurobindo, the new world
would not be possible. For all mankind may be regarded
19 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 4.
20 See talk 8: Sri Aurobindos Descent into Death.2012 and 1956: D oomsday?
113
as a collective being, as all mankind is one in its nature,
physical, vital, emotional, mental and ever has been in spite
of all differences of intellectual development ranging from
the poverty of the Bushman and negroid to the rich cultures
of Asia and Europe, and the whole race has, as the human to-
tality, one destiny which it seeks and increasingly approach-
es in the cycles of progression and retrogression it describes
through the countless millenniums of its history. 21
The recent decades in the history of humanity must of
course be seen in the perspective of a cycle of progression
which started in ancient Greece and the cultures around the
eastern Mediterranean. Christianity played an important
role in this cycle, as did the Renaissance, the Enlightenment
and the Industrial Revolution. Then war being the father
of all things according to Heraclitus the great War of the
Twentieth Century, in its three parts of World War One and
Two, and the Cold War, was the dramatic upheaval that led
directly to the unification of the world.
Evolutionary progression seems always to come at
what is to our human awareness an enormous cost. Here
we may remember what Arjuna saw on the battlefield of
Kurukshetra: the Divine in all his glory, but also as Time the
Devourer. 22 Each positive evolutionary movement induces
inevitably an enormous force [of resistance] commensu-
rable with the magnitude of the thing that has to be done.
But always these resistances turn out to have assisted by the
resistance much more than they have impeded the inten-
tion of the great Creatrix and her Mover. 23 Such seems to
have been the process throughout the evolution of life on
Earth. Even when global catastrophes threatened life with
21 Sri Aurobindo: The Human Cycle, p. 66.
22 See talk 4: What Arjuna Saw: the Dark Side of the Force.
23 Sri Aurobindo: The Ideal of Human Unity, p. 311.114
e l e v e n ta l k s
total extinction, it not only survived in astonishing ways
but gained in the ordeal and made an evolutionary step
forward. This happened when our planet almost complete-
ly froze over at least twice in its history (once 2.45 billion
years ago and a second time between 800 and 600 million
years ago), when asteroid impacts or volcanic eruptions
turned it into a blazing hell, as well as at the time of the
great biological extinctions.
Behind the evolution of our universe and life in it,
there is a meaning: the adventure of the recovering of the
Godhead which is its origin and its sustaining Principle.
Starting from darkest matter, a movement of acceleration
and intensification is discernible. The first obscure mate-
rial movement of the evolutionary Force is marked by an
aeonic graduality; the movement of life-progress proceeds
slowly but still with a quicker step, it is concentrated into
the figure of millenniums; mind can still further compress
the tardy leisureliness of Time and make long paces of the
centuries; but when the conscious Spirit intervenes, a su-
premely concentrated pace of evolutionary swiftness be-
comes possible. 24
This is where we stand now: at the point where the con-
scious Spirit has become active. And this is why Sri Aurob-
indo and the Mother too foresaw the inevitable crisis which
the action of the Spirit and its repercussions would cause
among humans.
No, the world will not end. Yes, the world will change
and is changing at an ever accelerating pace. What is hap-
pening now is something that never happened before, and
therefore nobody understands it, said the Mother. There
is like a golden Force which presses on the [material] world,
which has no material consistency but nevertheless seems
24 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 932.2012 and 1956: D oomsday?
115
terribly heavy and which presses on Matter. And the ap-
parent result is as if catastrophes were inevitable. And
together with this impression of inevitable catastrophes
there are solutions to the situation, events which seem to
be utterly miraculous. ... It is no longer like it was: this re-
ally is a new world ... It is the descent of the supramental
world, which is not something purely imaginary: it is an
absolutely material Power but which has no need of ma-
terial means. A world which wants to incarnate into the
[existing material] world. 25
Mankind has a habit of surviving the worst catastro-
phes created by its own errors or by the violent turns of
Nature and it must be so if there is any meaning in its exist-
ence, if its long history and continuous survival is not the
accident of a fortuitously self-organizing Chance, which it
must be in a purely materialistic view of the nature of the
world. Thus wrote Sri Aurobindo in 1949, in a postscript
chapter to his Ideal of Human Unity.
The Iron Age is ended. Only now
The last fierce spasm of the dying past
Shall shake the nations, and when that has passed,
Earth washed of ills shall raise a fairer brow.
It comes at last, the day foreseen of old,
What John in Patmos saw, what Shelley dreamed,
Vision and vain imagination deemed,
The City of Delight, the Age of Gold. 26
25 LAgenda de Mre, vol. 3, p. 484.
26 Sri Aurobindo: Collected Poems, p. 244.
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