The Future

From "Conservation and Progress."
By Sri Aurobindo Ghose

The future is a sphinx with two minds, and energy which offers itself and denies, gives itself and resists seeks to enthrone us and seeks to slay. But the conquest has to be attempted, the wager has to be accepted. We have to face the future’s offer of death as well as its offer of life, and it need not alarm us, for it is by constant death to our old names and forms that we shall live more vitally in greater and newer forms and names.
Go on we must; for if we do not, time itself will force us forward in spite of our fancied immobility. And this is the most pitiable and dangerous movement of all. For what can be more pitiable than to be borne helplessly forward clinging to the old that disintegrates in spite of our efforts and shrieking to the dead ghosts and dissolving fragments of the past to save us a live? And what can be more dangerous than to impose immobility on that which in its nature mobile? This means an increasing and horrible rottenness; it means an attempt to persist on as a putrid and stinking corps instead of a living and self-renewing energetic creature.

The greatest spirits are, therefore, those who have no fear of the future, who accept its challenge and its wager; who have that sublime trust in the God or Power that guides the world, that high audacity of the human soul to wrestle with the infinite and realise the impossible ,that wise and warrior confidence in its ultimate destiny, which mark the avatars and profits and great innovators and renovators.