Torchbearers of The Flame

PERSEVERANCE

There is Something
That Is in these happenings,
And That
That is also This
Is You
In your Oneness.
And so We progress
In The Game of games
Torchbearers of The Flame
With an integral understanding
Of our unique roles oh so varying
In this relativistic universe,
On Earth the marvellous,
This divine field
Of our evolving life
And consciousness
Towards
Our Manifest Completeness…

— Zech . 2021.11.14

. . .

The Flame symbolises Agni, godhead of the psychic beings.

Geographical Base:
Auroville, India

Featured Flower:
Flame of Aspiration

“A flame that illuminates but does not burn.”

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“One day or another, we may all join in the work of transformation that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have undertaken, because this is our evolutionary future. If we wish to understand what this process really is, its difficulties as well as the chances of failure or success, we must first understand the meaning of our own evolution, so that we can take an active part in it, instead of letting the centuries and millennia do the job after interminable meanderings. Sri Aurobindo is not dealing in theories: his vision of evolution rests essentially upon an experience. If he has attempted to express it in terms that may appear theoretical to us (since we do not yet have the experience), this is not in order to add one more idea to the millions of idea-forces in the world, but to help us seize the key to our own dynamism and accelerate the evolutionary process. For humanity’s present condition is scarcely worth lingering on.

The key is Agni, the Consciousness-Force, and the whole evolution can be described as Agni’s journey in four movements – involution, devolution, involution, evolution – from the eternal Center and within Him. The fourfold movement is in fact He. All is He. Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground. He outside time, outside space, the pure Being, the pure Consciousness, the great white Silence where all is in a state of involution, self-contained, still formless. Then He who becomes: Force separates from Consciousness, She from Him, and Agni’s journey begins:

… scattered on sealed depths, her luminous smile
Kindled to fire the silence of the worlds.

She casts herself forth from Him in an outburst of joy, to play at finding Him again in Time – He and She, two in one. 

What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for sheer delight of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it might find itself innumerably. 

But this beginning is perpetual; it is not situated at any point in Time. When we say “first” the Eternal, “then” the Becoming, we are back in the illusion of our spatio-temporal language, just as when we say “high” or “low.” Our language is false, as is our vision of the world. In reality, Being and Becoming, He and She, are two concurrent faces of the same eternal FACT. The universe is a perpetual phenomenon, as perpetual as the Silence beyond time: 

In the beginning, it is said, was the Eternal, the Infinite, the One. In the middle, it is said, is the finite, the transient, the Many. In the end, it is said, shall be the One, the Infinite, the Eternal. For when was the beginning? At no moment in Time, for the beginning is at every moment; the beginning always was, always is and always shall be. The divine beginning is before Time, in Time and beyond Time for ever. The Eternal, Infinite and One is an endless beginning. And where is the middle? There is no middle; for there is only the junction of the perpetual end and the eternal beginning; it is the sign of a creation which is new at every moment. The creation was for ever, is for ever, shall be for ever. The Eternal, Infinite and One is the magical middle-term of his own existence; it is he that is the beginningless and endless creation. And when is the end? There is no end. At no conceivable moment can there be a cessation. For all end of things is the beginning of new things which are still the same One in an ever developing and ever recurring figure. Nothing can be destroyed, for all is He who is forever. The Eternal, Infinite and One is the unimaginable end that is never closing upon new interminable vistas of his glory.

And Sri Aurobindo added: 

The experience of human life on an earth is not now for the first time enacted. It has been conducted a million times before and the long drama will again a million times be repeated. In all that we do now, our dreams, our discoveries, our swift or difficult attainments, we profit subconsciously by the experience of innumerable precursors and our labour will be fecund in planets unknown to us and in worlds yet uncreated. The plan, the peripetia, the denouement differ continually, yet are always governed by the conventions of an eternal Art. God, Man, Nature are the three perpetual symbols. The idea of eternal recurrence affects with a shudder of alarm the mind entrenched in the minute, the hour, the years, the centuries, all the finite’s unreal defences. But the strong soul conscious of its own immortal stuff and the inexhaustible ocean of its ever-flowing energies is seized by it with the thrill of an inconceivable rapture. It hears behind the thought the childlike laughter and ecstasy of the Infinite.”

– excerpt from Sri Aurobindo, or The Adventure of Consciousness