Devan Nair is the founder of the Sri Aurobindo Society of Singapore, and a past labor activist and President of Singapore. He is widely respected for his knowledge of the Integral Yoga and his ability as a speaker. He is currently working on his memoirs. 

Excerpt from a talk by Devan, SRI AUROBINDO AND THE TOMORROW OF THE EARTH (given at the Savitri Solar Dome, Crestone, Colorado on August 15, 1994).

True, the world at large has failed to appreciate the unprecedented legacy of Sri Aurobindo. After a stunning realization during my stay in India (I simply cannot explain the why and the wherefore), this no longer surprises me. It never surprised Mother. She knew why. THREE QUARTERS OF HUMANITY IS OBSOLETE; she had once laconically observed. And those who are already obsolete or on their way to obsoloscence cannot reasonably be expected to resonate to the supernal significance of the divine bequest. Similarly, once can imagine the once largely simian world being totally indifferent to the first few human voices of wonder and awe as they looked up at the star-spangled wonder of a cloudless, moonless night-sky. Perfectly understandable! After all, these were merely a few aberrant flat-footed apes uttering sounds abnormal to the'cultivated' gibberish of simian culture. Pooh! (in gibberish, of course, perhaps only a grunt).

The most radical outbreaks in the aeonic adventure of consciousness on earth have always gone unnoticed, except by the all-seeing eye of the Supreme Mediatrix. They occur way below the surface reaches of worm, insect, beast and man ‹ in the cells of embodied matter. Even things like the aspirations of heart, mind and soul, or the intoxication of Divine Love so vividly exemplified in the life of Sri Ramakrishna, are beyond the range of the paraphernalia of modern medical science, like X-rays, catscans, ultra-sound and NMR scans. We recall the acute observation by the renowned English physicist, Sir Arthur Eddington: "Any attempt to scientifically measure a subjective experience is like trying to find the square root of a sonnet."

Again, the results of transformative changes in the conscious aspiration of the cells, for instance, are not immediately manifest externally, any more than did the reptiles suffocating in their swamps develop wings overnight, to wing their way to the sky as birds. A period of mounting intensity of aspiration, as that of a drowning man for air a desperation in the very cells is necessary. There is always a time lag between the aspiration and its fulfillment.

And thus it is that, not aberrant apes this time, but a mere handful of aberrant men and women, who gasp for another kind of air, have gathered here on this day, as they are doing in similar gatherings in scattered areas of our globe, without attracting headlines anywhere, in remembrance of what Mother called 'an eternal birth.' It is good that we have gathered once again on 'this day of great amnesties, when all past errors are effaced', as Mother put it.

In other words, on this day of days, we have the opportunity to achieve the utmost possible sincerity and to put ourselves back once again on the Grand Trunk Road, and consciously walk once more towards the Tomorrow of the Earth. How often, and perphaps in how many previous lives, have we not allowed ourselves to be diverted from the main highway of existence by some bondage to opinion, emotion, or physical appetites? "Opinions are worthless", the Mother said.

Virginia Woolf described the opinions of know-all critics thus: "as hot as lava, discoloured as dish-water". And how often have we not heard, in one language or another, under one skin or another, the eternal poet's cry in our ears: "In what landscape of disaster has your unhappy spirit lost its road?"

It is with a thrill of instant recognition that we recall the great words of Sri Aurobindo:
" ........... safety lies in tending towards our highest and not in resting content with an inferior potentiality....... . To rest in or follow after an inferior potentiality may seem safe, rational, comfortable, easy, but it ends badly, in some futility or in a mere circling, down the abyss or in a stagnant morass. Our right and natural road is towards the summits."

"This is what a true subjectivism teaches us, first, that we are a higher self than our ego or our members, secondly, that we are in our life and being not only ourselves but all others; for there is a secret solidarity which our egoism may kick at and strive against, but from which we cannot escape. ... our real 'I' is a Supreme Being which is our true self and which it is our business to discover and consciously become and, secondly, that that Being is one in all, expressed in the individual and the collectivity and only by admitting and realising our unity with others can we entirely fulfill our true self-being". (Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, Chap V, p40, SABCL, Vol.15) 

"I have lost all wish for my salvation. May I be be born again and again and suffer thousands of miseries so that I may worship the only God that exists, the only God I believe in, the sum-total of all souls, and above all, my God the wicked, my God the miserable, my God the poor of all races, of all species is the special object of my worship. He who is the high and low, the saint and the sinner, the god and the worm, Him worship, the visible, the knowable, the real, the omnipresent; break all other idols. In whom there is neither past life nor future birth, nor death nor going nor coming, in whom we always have been and always will be one, Him worship; break all other idols." (Swami Vivekananda, quoted by Sri Aurobindo in the The Synthesis of Yoga, Part 1,Chap.12, p 257. SABCL, Vol.20).