India - the Mother

June, 1958

One thing seems clear: humanity has reached a certain state of general tension—tension in effort, tension in action, tension even in everyday life—with such an excessive super-activity, such a generalized whirl that the species as a whole seems to have reached a point where a resistance needs to burst and we must emerge into a new consciousness, or else fall back into an abyss of darkness and inertia....

This struggle, this conflict between the constructive forces of ascending evolution, of an increasingly perfect and divine realization, and increasingly destructive forces—powerfully destructive, forces of madness beyond any control—is more and more evident, pronounced, visible, and there is a sort of race or struggle to reach the goal first. All the adverse, antidivine forces, the forces of the vital world,⁸ seem to have descended upon the earth to use it as their field of action, and at the same time, a higher, new, more powerful spiritual force seems to have descended too on the earth to bring a new life here. That makes the struggle more acute, more violent, more visible, but also more definitive, it would seem, and that is why we may hope to arrive soon at a solution....

That opens roads of realization in the future, possibilities already foreseen in which a whole part of mankind, all those who have consciously or unconsciously opened themselves to the new forces, will be as if uplifted towards a higher life, more harmonious and perfect.... There will be other consequences, which will tend to erase what the intervention of the mind in life has created in terms of perversion, of ugliness, a whole collection of distortions that have worsened suffering, misery, moral poverty, an entire zone of sordid and repulsive misery which has turned a whole part of human life into something so dreadful. That has to disappear. That's what makes mankind infinitely inferior on so many points to animal life in its simplicity and in its spontaneous and harmonious character in spite of everything. Never is suffering in animals so miserable and sordid as it is in an entire portion of mankind perverted by the use of a mentality exclusively turned to egoistic needs.

We must rise above, emerge in the Light and Harmony, or fall back below in the simplicity of an animal and healthy life, devoid of perversion.

(After a silence) But those who cannot be uplifted, those who refuse to progress will automatically lose the use of mental consciousness and will fall back to an infrahuman stage.... That corrupt part of the human consciousness, which through its wrong use of the mind allows perversion, will be abolished. That type of humanity is part of a fruitless attempt—to be eliminated—just as other aborted species disappeared in the course of universal history.

Questions and Answers (1957 - 1958): 19 March 1958