Narad’s Arrival at Madra by RY Deshpande is a book based on the opening passage
of 81 lines of the Book of Fate of Savitri. It has, inter alia, aspects
of this evolutionary creation of ours advancing towards what Sri Aurobindo
envisaged as the supramental manifestation in plenitudes of the transcendental
reality. Chapters XII-XVI of the book see the related issues from various
angles. These are as follows:
·
The Story of
Creation
·
Evolution—Scientific
and Occult-Yogic Aspects
·
Evolution—A
Metaphysical Discussion
·
Evolution—The
Spiritual-Gnostic Possibilities
·
Towards the
Intermediate Race
The expectation is that these themes will be of
considerable interest to the readers of the Mirror of Tomorrow and
therefore it is thought quite pertinent to post them on it. The book was
published in April 2006 under the auspices of the Sri Aurobindo International
Centre of Education, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and it is heartening to see that it
has been received enthusiastically in the Aurobindonian circles. It is now
hoped that it will, through the Internet, become accessible to a much wider
readership which can see the process and objective of the terrestrial evolution
in terms of spiritual verities. Such an interest in it could be particularly
rewarding because of the deep and fundamental positions that are available to
the discernible and the perceptive; these will make them aware of the
thousandfold possibilities of the spirit entering into this creation, the
growing possibilities that can, in fact which must come into the operative
dynamics of the earthly scheme. Going beyond the immediate
intellectual-intuitive grasp of the issues involved in it are the profounder
things of the occult-yogic kind and to be aware of them and to participate in
them as far as possible to us is to prepare ourselves in the greatness of what
they hold for us. It is with this view in mind that I am posting these five
chapters as a set of articles one after another.
Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published
on 24 November 1859; its advance publicity had assured the sale of all the
thousand copies on the same day. It continues to make deep impact on our ideas
of biological evolution through the process of natural selection and the
survival of the fittest. It is an elegant scientific theory based on detailed
scientific observations. The subject was perhaps just ripe at this point of
time for such investigations and the air was full of it. Indeed, there were
many competing claims for the discovery; but the Newtonian foundation provided
by
The long history of life is a fascinating
document. Fossils records continue to unfold the biological diversity that had
come around some four hundred million years in the past. Large teams of palaeobiologists
are busy in collecting and analysing more than a hundred thousand fossil
specimens. But the data have many dimensions and there is confidence as well as
wariness in the study. At the other extreme, massive investments are being made
in tailoring life to specific demands. There is the commercial impetus in
promoting genetically fashioned products. The “evil technology foisted by
greedy corporations” on the consumer society is a foreboding sign full of
apprehensions. The 800-kg pumpkin is one example of it. The worldwide
popularity of French fries well illustrates the money-motivated organisations
that spring up in our midst; it has urged the food giants to introduce
engineered potatoes on a large scale. The saying goes that “human desire shapes
the plants that then shape human desire.” There is truth in it. The overall
picture is that of life in the service of man; rather than man trying to know
and understand life, it is gratification that rules his conduct. The sense of
direction that gives meaning to things is not available in these pursuits;
there is also a good deal of non-science in the entire business. The tragedy of
our time is, science as a source of power is more domineering than science as a
branch of knowledge. This has led to unpleasant consequences.
One is astonished by the accomplishments of
life; but one is also baffled by the problems of life. How did life begin? How
did it evolve? Is there some kind of a life-force that is operative in all its
thousand workings? Or is there something else which governs it? If so, can that
mysterious something be known, comprehended? If there is evolution, is it
complete or is it still proceeding with its own plan about which we have no
knowledge? And then there is the fundamental question: why is life always
accompanied by death?
But let us get back to
About the documentation and publication of
the Origin,
Not any divine influence but natural
selection as a statistical necessity became the scientific Bible for
understanding biology. This Bible proclaims: adapt or perish. While the traits
of the materialist’s arrogance are very strong in such statements, and while
these may not be always acceptable, their robustness does give to thought a
firmness which is desirable when one lives in the vagueness of subjective
experience or else in creed. But in the process care is also necessary that
another system of dogma is not erected.
Janet Browne in her “magisterial biography”
paints a vivid picture of the Victorian Britain in which
She continues: “In among the contrasts
stood the unobtrusive figure of Charles Darwin. Supported by a family fortune
derived from the Industrial Revolution,
Apropos of religious implications of his
findings, Janet Browne writes: “Every so often, a little debate about church
doctrine with John Innes, the resident vicar, made
And then: “Much of the lasting fascination
of Darwin’s life story surely lies in the relationship between this prolific
inner world of the mind and the private and public lives that he created for
himself. His power of analysis was outstanding; his creative imagination
remarkable. As a biologist, his distinctive gift was to envisage all living
beings not only in their relations to one another but also in their relations
to the places in which they lived and to the unfolding sequence of time. He
would become one of the most famous scientists of his day, a Victorian celebrity
whose work even in his own lifetime was regarded as a foundation stone for the
modern world, not least for the manner in which he changed the way human beings
thought about themselves and their own place in nature. And yet he liked to be
a countryman, pottering around his garden.”
The Origin of Species was an instantaneous success no doubt, but
compared with the contemporary Tale of Two Cities it got a mixed
response; it proved highly controversial. When
It is imperative that these issues be
properly resolved. The paradox was: whereas
Take the Hymn of Creation one reads in
Genesis. According to it, in six days the Lord made heavens and earth but on
the seventh day he rested. He revealed truths about his creation to Moses. It
was on the fifth day that from waters sprang forth living creatures. It will be
a gross mistake to consider it a scientific pronouncement: we should understand
that it is another knowledge put in another language. Failure to do so is the
cause of all disagreement. Before we can think of linking it up with the
concepts and findings of rational sciences, we have to grasp the essence of
both of them. It will be improper, if not wrong, to believe that Genesis is
concerned with factual statements as are figured out by the naturalists. It is
also improper if not wrong to say that God was behind whatever happened
or happens in this creation. A certain pragmatic distinction has to be made
between the Creator and his creation. This is something which is least
appreciated, in fact more often than not it is most frowned upon. But in it is
the occult-spiritual aspect of fundamental importance. There cannot be
evolution without prior involution. God has to become Non-God which he can by
his own Will, samkalpa; though Non-God he has still the freedom of God,
that being his own stance. There is the aspect of Becoming and not only Being;
in fact a static non-active Being would not give rise to any creation, but as
Becoming can re-emerge into its own self-manifesting multiplicity. There is the
aspect of inconscient Self and somnambulist Force with the Being present as the
substratum Reality shaping out this self-manifesting multiplicity. Nothing can
be more absurd than saying that the supreme God is the source of the cosmic
evil and falsehood and sorrow and suffering and pain; he is not. His
transcendental poise is different from the universal. Failure to make a
distinction between the two is the source of all dogmatism. In the limited
perspective of evolutionary biology, the question is perhaps “not on how humans
were created, but on what they are and why they were created.”
The point is well illustrated by the
following parable. “A story is told of a
There is an ongoing debate in the Muslim
world about the modern theory of evolution as propounded by science vis-à-vis
the religious tradition. A question is asked if the Quranic account of creation
goes counter to the appearance of man as postulated by
But then are scientific theories always
logical, coherent, applicable and adequate to raise themselves to the level of
this debate? And what constitutes belief in terms of human perception and
acceptance? One wonders if at all scientific objectivity in the former is
innate in the approach or it is just some notion of ours which we finally
“verify”. Could it not be that our “facts” are an outcome of our expectations?
Customarily, we make cognitive statements and support them with the so-called
observations. This itself knocks off the basis of absolutism in science. The
protagonists of faith pick up this unyielding line of reasoning to dismiss the
scientific provisionality of our understanding of nature. We trenchantly uphold
science to be always based on reason and logic. But then there are also jumps
of imagination. If biological evolution is the “given” then the fossil records
are there to fit into it. But there are large gaps in
But the tendency of the theological mind to
bring everything under the compass of religion is more a hard creed than the
knowledge that actually comes from some luminous sweep of intuition. Starting
with the premise “all is God’s creation”, it is very obligatory for religion to
understand and explain everything in terms of its dogma and its metaphysics,
its arguments of divinity. Otherwise it becomes insufficient, lacking
universality and hence flawed, that the non-credulous can challenge it, and the
credulous feel suspicious about it even to the point of losing faith. But there
are layers and layers of understanding and explanation. There is the logic of
the finite and also there is the logic of the infinite. To impose one on
another is perhaps also to miss the wholesome way of looking at things in their
totality, in their integrality. When one imposes ones authority on another, one
becomes imperious, rude; there is certain impertinence in this insistence. Such
was the fallacy of the Christian dogma. And it went to such an extent in the
mediaeval days that it would have no compunction to set inquisitions. Even
today, there are opinions in progressive countries like the
In the Quran we have the following about
the appearance of man. “He created him out of dust, from clay, humid or moist
earth.” More specifically, we have: “The Lord said unto the angels: lo! I am
about to create a mortal out of clay, and when I have fashioned him and breathed
into him of My spirit, then fall down before him prostrate.” (38:72-73) The
Book also suggests “the possibility of more advanced forms of creation
developing, with superior sensory faculties or even new senses, in addition to
our five. Although the Quran does not state that this will definitely happen,
yet it affirms God’s power to produce such changes are within his plan.” This
should be contrasted first against the chemical and then the biological
evolution of life and arrival of man. In the Christian tradition also God
created Man out of the dust, he created him in his own image; Adam in Hebrew
means “red earth”. Eve came from one of Adam’s ribs. In Greek mythology Athena
had leaped straight from the head of Zeus. In the Aitereya Upanishad we have the
description of the Spirit bringing unto the gods Man and they said, “O well
fashioned truly! Man indeed is well and beautifully made.” The belief in all
these cases is of an instantaneous creation. There is no question of evolution
of form or of emergence out of chaos. However, we must remember that these
sages and seers were not writing a treatise in a modern fashion on scientific
lines to put forward their discoveries. But the miraculous birth of Athena, for
instance, presented to us by Homer and Hesiod, belongs to another kind of
language and another kind of metaphor-symbol. Not only that; it is a reality on
another level of perception. Sponsor of warriors and heroes, giver of arts and
crafts, wise counsellor and bestower of wisdom, Athena was the foremost in
bringing out a whole civilisation. So when it is said that from the head of
Zeus she sprang out full-grown and armed for battle, it has certainly another
meaning and we tend to confuse this language of the ancients with our metaphors
and idioms. If we are unable to enter into the spirit of their mythology then
the blame is ours, but liberal thought will also try to grasp it as far as
possible.
So the conflict between religion and
science is a universal conflict, though the Catholic Church maintains that
there is no real disagreement between the theologian and the scientist when
they keep themselves in their respective bounds. Still this catholic outlook is hardly a solution; it is just
a pious counsel. It is also claimed that Islam does not encourage the belief
that science and religion belong to opposing domains of activity. But all the
religious revelations or statements will prove anathematic to the evolutionary
biologist who considers the appearance of man from ape as a natural fact. For
instance, to say “at every step of creation choices that had to be made were
made not by the blind hand of natural selection but by the will of God” is to
speak non-science. There are bound to be irreconcilable differences between the
two. We do admire the marvel that an Arctic bear or fox is, or a dolphin, or an
owl, even a butterfly or a small mosquito, or a tulip is; but to insist that
biological process has nothing to do with it and that there is God’s very first
design behind everything, that nothing came as a result of later accident or is
not governed by natural selection is something else. It is to cross into
another domain, the domain of faith or else of credulity. While we do recognise
the limitations of a theory propounding natural selection and survival of the
fittest, to condemn it on grounds that are really not scientific becomes
equally unacceptable. We are strictly forbidden to think of the possible ways
by which the divine agency might have brought out these marvels.
It is equally self-destructive to solely go
along with Thomas Huxley. While reviewing Darwin's Origin of the Species
in 1860 he wrote, with a superior pride: “Extinguished theologians lie about
the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules;
and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly
opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and
crushed, if not annihilated. But orthodoxy is the bourbon of the world of
thought, it learns not, neither can it forget.” Stiffness of Victorian
materialism is pretty evident in this.
Perhaps resolution of the science-theology
conflict lies elsewhere. We must understand that the two are giving us truths
at different levels and attempts to see them on the same will always prove to be
frustrating or futile. The knowledge imparted by revelation is of a different
kind than the knowledge that comes from secular scientific pursuits. Rational
conceptions and intuitive perceptions are not the same. Intuition can at times
persuade enlightened reason and reason can consciously or unconsciously receive
intimations from intuition, but their modes of cognisance and operation do not
quite overlap. Non-recognition of this fundamental aspect cannot but lead to
violent oppositions.
The Muslim biology prides itself in
preceding
Regarding struggle for existence as
proposed by al-Jahiz an Internet posting from The Islamic Quarterly,
This is a secular discovery reflecting the
fundamental law of the vital world in which, as the Upanishad says, the eater
eating is eaten. The process by which life itself grows and develops into more
and more complex forms is what it proclaims. The whole biology is an unbroken
chain, of life living on life. Bertrand Russell has a poetic description of the
whole process: “One by one as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight,
seized by the silent orders of Death. Very brief is the time in which we can
help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided… Brief and powerless
is Man’s life; on him and all his race is raised the slow, sure doom falls
pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent
matter rolls on its relentless way.” But we don’t know if al-Jahiz had enough
observational data at his disposal to arrive at theoretical concepts of the
struggle for existence and survival of the fittest. Perhaps these ideas were
more speculative in their character than what we would call as things of
observational science.
The Book of Animals by al-Jahiz is a
mine of information, though most of it is “folkloric rather than zoological.”
Nevertheless, there are statements aplenty about the metaphysical issues
involved with life and death. It is argued that not survival of the fittest,
not the law of natural selection but the factors which come into play are
themselves “governed by a universal divine scheme of things.” But this itself
may almost amount to putting our very way of understanding things as a part of
some wonderful Design behind this creation. To speak of survival through death
is a great occult truth but survival of the fittest belongs to quite a
different category. It is necessary to distinguish these two. We have a
profound discovery in “the hand of death serving the cause of life”; but in it
we should also see death standing as a power with a will, howsoever antagonist
it be. Death is not just an abstract concept but is functionally present as an
agent in the working of life in a physical medium. Material foundation of life
also implies presence of death. It means, we have to go down to the cellular
level to see the presence of death. This is beyond science.
According to the
Let us consider some of the factors we have
presently at our disposal. Following Bonner again, these could be the proteins
and the DNA. Proteins are among the most complex molecules known, with very
precise molecular structure, and with molecular weights up to 50,000. They may
contain 200-300 amino acids, which must be exactly the right sort in exactly
the right order. Amino acids come in approximately 20 different types with
either left-handed or right-handed shape. In determining the structure of the
cell, proteins play an important part. Then there is the DNA molecule which
every cell possesses. The e-coli bacterium has a wound-up DNA strand which is
1000 times its own length and has 3000 genes made of some 4 million base pairs.
RNA is a shorter, usually single-stranded molecule, but still with large
numbers of nucleotide bases. No life survives without food and it must be
produced from chemicals either by photosynthesis or chemosynthesis, or else it
must live on food already prepared for it in other life forms. Can all this
happen by chance alone or is there some other law governing the entire process
of life’s living? Or is it that life asserts itself in every circumstance and
we mistake circumstance as a necessary condition for life’s existence, a
pre-requisite for the appearance of life in the manner we understand it? Is a
certain chemical formulation our definition of life, a tag, a name given to a
chemical combination? circumstance a way of recognising the presence of life?
Can life exist without material support? Perhaps it is not the chemicals that
make life, but that life lives in the chemicals. If it were the former, chance
would enter into the description, causing life, as well as its death. Is there
a fundamental principle that science can provide for our perception of this
chemical basis of life? Or is this also just another set of beliefs?
Evolutionary biology maintains that man is
a Darwinian creature, a product coming on the scene after several millennia by a gradual step-by-step change. But did the
evolutionary biology have the least notion that, one of these days, it will
give rise to man? Nor does the hindsight make it much wiser. Can it say that
man is the last stage on the evolutionary ladder and above it there is no
further biological gain possible, implying that evolution comes to an end with
this achievement? If it does not, then where is it going to lead us? In the
present busy quantum world we have accepted ourselves to live in another
uncertainty. Its baffling quantum leaps could be large and inorganically
exponential and might produce a computer, but can ever these give rise to the
phenomenon proudly proclaimed as man? Or if he is a transitional occurrence,
what are the new prospects it can offer to us? None knows anything about them
and we simply gape into a stark blind abyss. The findings of professional
knowledge have to be viewed in its context only, and not much elsewhere.
It is well known that
If we take a microbiological view, it cannot be denied
that “copying errors” occur in the genes; these errors can be harmful as well
as beneficial. In the latter case, the organism derives some advantage over
other organisms, which is then passed on to offspring. It is this aspect which
upholds Darwinism even in the present-day understanding of the theory of
evolution. But there is also an on-going debate about the dependability of the
fossils records. The molecular biologists say that these are fragmentary and
corrupt. Stephen Jay Gould proposes the theory of punctuated equilibrium.
According to him, new species do appear suddenly and then persist with little
change until they go extinct. The theory implies that species are individuals,
not classes. Nonetheless, the basic approach is the same, Darwinian. But if in
biological evolution there is the force of heredity, there is also the truth of
other forces entering into operation. They feed it. They present challenges
too; Survival of the Fittest is the name given to it, but the details of the
challenges are never known to it. But how exactly are these challenges met?
None knows about that.
There is an interesting dialogue between
man and computer: man saying that computer is fast, accurate, stupid, and the
computer retorting that man is slow, inaccurate, brilliant. Though biology
would never accept having brought them together, willy-nilly this is exactly
what the quantum argument imposes upon us. But what would the similarity of
their appearance imply if both of them, man and machine, have come from the
same cold womb of fruitful chaos? Are they really twins, though paradoxically
separated by an unimaginable gap of time as far as their arrival is concerned?
The coming of man before the arrival of the computer is by no means a sign of
his self-acclaimed superiority; nor could it be the other way around. Indeed,
long before the probabilistic spin was built into nature’s working, from their
cozy homes
Seven gods had stepped out
Carrying a meaningless doubt
In their stochastic brains
Wondering, if there are gains
From evolution to accrue,
If chaos could be richly true.
But then by chance into a well,
Of deep uncertainty, they fell.
At once there were seven nods
For the strange waylost gods.
People talk of cellular processes and feel happy about
it. But at the moment it is prudent to talk of the Redwood and wonder why
evolution should have produced this tree at all, this marvel of enduring
majesty. Yet science has to move on, and this is exactly what we witness in the
recent South Korean researches about the possibility of human cloning.
NBC’s report from
The discovery of Hwang and his colleagues has been
published in Science, putting a stamp of professional authenticity on
it. [Recently this has been retracted and the researcher admitted that the data
were doctored. That is the human angle and speaks volumes about the nature of
man.] “They created the clone using eggs and cumulus cells donated by Korean
women. Cumulus cells are found in the ovaries and in some species have been
found to work especially well in cloning experiments. The researchers used a
process called nuclear transfer, which involves removing the nucleus from an
egg cell and replacing it with the nucleus of a so-called adult cell—in this
case a cumulus cell. They succeeded largely because of using extremely fresh
eggs donated by South Korean volunteers and gentler handling of the genetic
material inside them. They activated the egg cells using a chemical process,
which started the eggs growing as if they had been fertilised by a sperm and
got 30 embryos to grow to the blastocyst stage. At this stage, approximately
100 cells, the stem cells should be removable. They pulled stem cells from one
of the blastocysts and managed to get them to grow into a variety of different
cells including eye cells, muscle cells, bone and cartilage.” This is a
remarkable discovery and no dogmatism should decry it in its essential
implications; nor have ethics and morality any place in governing such human
advancements. [But alas! More often than not we live
in a human system in a subhuman way.]
Cloning had another beginning sometime ago.
The birth of Dolly, the cloned sheep in 1997, was a celebrated event in the progress
of life sciences. But the embryonic cloning has now surpassed this. Dolly was
created by reproductive cloning technology. She lived for 6 years,
till 14 February 2003, and gave birth to six lambs in a normal way. But she had
also been suffering from lung cancer and arthritis. It is said that the present
South Korean success in embryo cloning breaks a “biological Gordian knot”. The
far possibility is that of a cloned human being. A cloned embryo can develop
and grow as naturally in a host womb, resulting in the birth of a
biogenetically synthesised twin of ours.
There are essentially three types of
cloning: recombinant or DNA cloning, reproductive cloning, and therapeutic or
embryo cloning. In the recombinant process, a DNA fragment of interest is transferred
from one organism to a self-replicating genetic element. This amounts to the
propagation of the DNA in a foreign cell. The technique has been in practice
now for thirty years or more. Reproductive cloning is for the species that has
the same nuclear DNA as another. In it genetic material is transferred from the
donor nucleus to an egg whose nucleus has been removed. In the uterus of a
female host it then continues to develop until birth. With the exception of the
sperm and egg, every cell in the body contains all of the genetic material in
its DNA to theoretically create an exact clone of the original body. Cells have
been “biochemically programmed to perform limited functions.” In the
embryo cloning, eggs are collected from women’s ovaries and the genetic
material removed. Under suitable conditions these can begin to divide. The
building blocks of our bodies come from embryonic stem cells, cells from which
all other tissue types become available. The eventual goal of stem cell
research is to create a replacement organ or part of an organ. But then there
is a problem. Removing these cells, present in an embryo only days after
conception, would amount to destroying the embryo. Ethics shudders to think of
such murderous acts. But where is ethics?
What took millennia to materialise is given
to us by genetics as if in a jiffy, but with all the immediate hazards present
in it, hazards biological as well as psychological. In these researches there
are issues, social-professional which cannot be divorced from each other. One
of them is the exact moment when life begins. The traditional belief is, it
begins when egg and sperm unite. But in the stem cell researches embryos must
be destroyed to generate embryonic stem cells. This becomes unacceptable on
several counts. And yet there is the irrefutable gain, in our understanding the
processes of nature. Conflicts of the kind happen at every major discovery of
science and the current stem cell investigations are no exception. Perhaps as
long as what we are, this will continue.
Nicholas Wade puts the
pragmatic-empiric side as follows: “From a technical point of view the
researches are simply aimed at understanding the life process. The advantages
are varied and compelling. In them we could possibly have living factories for
producing animals with tailored qualities. The availability of medicinal
materials is an important attraction. Engendered species can be saved using the
techniques of reproductive cloning. Hundreds of cloned animals exist today. No
wonder, mega-companies should get drawn towards this business. New bio-products
could be the commerce of the future. Aspects of exploitation or else of
trampling of ethical principles obviously come into picture. Governmental
regulations to stem them down are possible remedies. There are of course
difficulties also, difficulties such as expenses, poor results or high failure
rates, infection, tumour growth, and other disorders. There could, and are,
professional problems aplenty. But perhaps it will be only a matter of time for
these to be sorted out. In fact with better understanding of the entire process
these need not cause despair to us. History of science assures us that such
situations are not new.” But there are other kinds of despair, including what
we are.
Should humans be cloned?
Indisputably, the thought of human monsters or Hitlerite armies springing up
from our own genes will be repugnant to the finer taste of mankind. Fallouts of research always cause significant
changes in our life-styles. The atomic weapons development programme of the
Second World War was one such great event. But then in the total reckoning, the
Promethean fire turned out to be more creative than destructive. From the pyre
of the past arose the new future, as if behind it was working some wonderful
unknown force in all its benevolence. A whole new civilisation has sprung up,
bringing lands and nations closer, as much as providing a vision from the sky
of the vastness of the universe in which we dwell. It does not make us
pint-sized or trivial in any way; rather it puts us meaningfully at the centre
of the existence itself. Surely, that also means responsibility. Will the
genetic science give us an understanding of the truer nature of life as it
lives under the present material conditions? That is the real question. But can
that question be called a scientific question at all and, if it is not, is one
obliged to answer it? But even if it were not a scientific question, can it be
shirked off? But let us look at the issue from an occult-spiritual point of
view.
The Mother was intensively engaged in the
arduous work of cellular transformation during the last fifteen years or so of
her yogic sadhana. Essentially this began with the advent of the supramental
manifestation in the subtle physical of the earth on 29 February 1956, an event
for which Sri Aurobindo had already laid the foundation. She had spoken on a
number of occasions about the difficulties involved in the process of
transformation, and also about the extreme danger in it; Savitri through
Narad had already foretold it in 1950 itself. The Mother was standing on a
perilous threshold but left everything to the Will of the Lord. In it her work
proceeded, to the pleasant extent that the body’s cells themselves started
responding positively to the Force that was descending in the physical.
The Mother discloses: “We come now to the
most terrible battle of all, the physical battle which is fought in the body;
for it goes on without respite or truce. It begins at birth and can end only
with the defeat of one of the two combatants: the force of transformation and
the force of disintegration. I say at birth, for in fact the two movements are
in conflict from the very moment one comes into the world, although the
conflict becomes conscious and deliberate only much later. For every
indisposition, every illness, every malformation, even accidents, are the
result of the action of the force of disintegration, just as growth, harmonious
development, resistance to attack, recovery from illness, every return to the
normal functioning, even progressive improvement, are due to the action of the
force of transformation. Later on, with the development of the consciousness,
when the fight becomes deliberate, it changes into a frantic race between the
two opposite and rival movements, a race to see which one will reach its goal
first, transformation or death. This means a ceaseless effort, a constant
concentration to call down the unregenerating forces and to increase the
receptivity of the cells to this force, to fight step by step, from point to
point against the devastating action of the forces of destruction and decline,
to tear out its grasp everything that is capable of responding to the ascending
urge, to enlighten, purify and stabilise. It is an obscure and obstinate
struggle, most often without any apparent result or any external sign of the
partial victories that have been won and are ever uncertain—for the work that
has been done always seems to need to be redone; each step forward is most
often made at the cost of a setback elsewhere and what has been done one day
can be undone the next. Indeed, the victory can be sure and lasting only when
it is total.” [1] She also speaks of knowingly entering into the domain of
death “deliberately and consciously while one is still alive, and then to
return from this region and re-enter the physical body, resuming the course of
material existence with full knowledge.” [2]
This was in 1954, but in 1967 she gives the
prayer of the cells in the body: “Now that by the effect of the Grace, we are
slowly emerging out of inconscience and waking to a conscious life, an ardent
prayer rises in us for more light, more consciousness: ‘O Supreme Lord of the
universe, we implore Thee, give us the strength and the beauty, the harmonious
perfection needed to be Thy divine instruments upon earth.’ ” [3]
During the same period the Mother speaks of
supramental descent in the physical cells: “The material cells have to obtain
the capacity to receive and to manifest consciousness. And then what makes for
a radical transformation is that in place of… an eternal and indefinite ascent,
there is the appearance of a new type—it is a descent from above. The previous
descent was a mental descent, and this one, Sri Aurobindo calls it a supramental
descent; the impression is that of a descent of the supreme Consciousness which
infuses itself into something that is capable of receiving it and manifesting
it. And then out of this, when this has been thoroughly churned (how long it
will take, one does not know), a new form will take birth, which will be what
Sri Aurobindo called the supramental form—which will be… it does not matter
what, I do not know how these beings will be called. How will they express
themselves, how will they make themselves understood, and all that?… In man, it
has developed very slowly. Only the mind has laboured much and basically has
made things move quicker. … Only, when
man came out of the animal, there was no means of recording… now it is quite
different, so it will be more interesting. … It is the body that aspires, the
body that says the mantra, the body that wants the light, the body that wants
the consciousness.” [4]
What the Mother is speaking of is beyond
the perspectives or faculties of genetic sciences. But if the material cells
have to receive and manifest consciousness, then the inquisitive mind
has a rational demand to make: if chance is the cause of all that happens in
this physical world, and chance is the only mechanism known to such a mind, can
it lead to the arrival of such a consciousness? The answer is, it cannot—for
the reason that consciousness is not a product of chance; it is not a freak
occurrence. Recognition of a conscious will and its awakening in the cells is
totally outside its comprehension. However, the inquisitive mind could prepare
itself in a meaningful way to look into possibilities of the cells receiving
and manifesting consciousness. Even if direct knowledge might not be within its
reach, there is certainly enough scope to receive its intuition. Progressive
science must open out to it for its own progress. It is not that its techniques
can discover the secret consciousness in the material processes, but surely it
can reveal the truer ways of operation in them.
No doubt, as Sri Aurobindo writes in a
letter, in the mid-1930s, there is “an obscure mind of the body, of the very
cells, molecules, corpuscles. Haeckel, the German materialist, spoke somewhere
of the will in the atom, and recent science, dealing with the incalculable
individual variation in the activity of the electrons, comes near to perceiving
that this is not a figure but the shadow thrown by a secret reality. This
body-mind is a very tangible truth; owing to its obscurity and mechanical
clinging to past movements and facile oblivion and rejection of the new, we
find in it one of the chief obstacles to permeation by the supermind Force and
the transformation of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once
effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the
stabilisation of the supramental Light and Force in material Nature.” [5].Opening
of the body-mind to the supramental Light and Force is what Sri Aurobindo later
called as the Mind of Light. The Mother’s yoga of cellular transformation was
precisely concerned with it. It had advanced to such an extent that some of the
cells could perceive the Divine Will working in them.
The trouble with the conventional science
is that it recognises only the working of a blind mechanical agency in this
creation. It is a committed votary of the inconscient Self and the somnambulist
Force. But, then, that is not everything, cannot be everything. Conventional
science has the least notion that there are indeed different poises of the
Truth-conscient dynamism that operates everywhere, even in the fruitful
Nothingness.
“It is not very easy for the customary mind
of man,” analyses and asserts Sri Aurobindo, “always attached to its past and
present associations, to conceive of an existence still human, yet radically
changed in what are now our fixed circumstances. We are in respect to our
possible higher evolution much in the position of the original Ape of the
Darwinian theory. It would have been impossible for that Ape leading his
instinctive arboreal life in primeval forests to conceive that there would be
one day an animal on the earth who would use a new faculty called reason upon
the materials of his inner and outer existence, who would dominate by that
power his instincts and habits, change the circumstances of his physical life,
build for himself houses of stone, manipulate Nature’s forces, sail the seas,
ride the air, develop codes of conduct, evolve conscious methods for his mental
and spiritual development. And if such a conception had been possible for the
Ape-mind, it would still have been difficult for him to imagine that by any
progress of Nature or long effort of Will and tendency he himself could develop
into that animal. Man, because he has acquired reason and still more because he
has indulged his power of imagination and intuition, is able to conceive an
existence higher than his own and even to envisage his personal elevation
beyond his present state into that existence. His idea of the supreme state is
an absolute of all that is positive to his own concepts and desirable to his
own instinctive aspiration,—Knowledge without its negative shadow of error,
Bliss without its negation in experience of suffering, Power without its
constant denial by incapacity, purity and plenitude of being without the
opposing sense of defect and limitation. It is so that he conceives his gods;
it is so that he constructs his heavens. But it is not so that his reason
conceives of a possible earth and a possible humanity. His dream of God and
Heaven is really a dream of his own perfection; but he finds the same
difficulty in accepting its practical realisation here for his ultimate aim as
would the ancestral Ape if called upon to believe in himself as the future
In the theory of evolution there are many
strands and the DNA is only one small aspect of it. Apart from biological
factors there are interwoven occult and spiritual elements also. In that
respect let us look into the working of life in its several ways.
As in Matter, writes Sri Aurobindo, in
“Life also the Consciousness-Force begins with infinitesimal forms of vegetable
life and infinitesimal animalcules; it creates an original plasm and multiplies
it, creates the living cell as a unit, creates other kinds of minute biological
apparatus like the seed or the gene, uses always the same method of grouping
and association so as to build by a various operation various living organisms.
A constant creation of types is visible, but that is no indubitable proof of
evolution. The types are sometimes distant from each other, sometimes closely
similar, sometimes identical in basis but different in detail; all are patterns,
and such a variation in patterns with an identical rudimentary basis for all is
the sign of a conscious Force playing with its own Idea and developing by it
all kinds of possibilities of creation. Animal species in coming into birth may
begin with a like rudimentary embryonic or fundamental pattern for all, it may
follow out up to a stage certain similarities of development on some or all of
its lines; there may too be species that are twy-natured, amphibious,
intermediate between one type and another: but all this need not mean that the
types developed one from another in an evolutionary series. Other forces than
hereditary variation have been at work in bringing about the appearance of new
characteristics; there are physical forces such as food, light-rays and others
that we are only beginning to know, there are surely others which we do not yet
know; there are at work invisible life-forces and obscure psychological forces.
For these subtler powers have to be admitted even in the physical evolutionary theory
to account for natural selection; if the occult or subconscious energy in some
types answers to the need of the environment, in others remains unresponsive
and unable to survive, this is clearly the sign of a varying life-energy and
psychology, of a consciousness and a force other than the physical at work
making for variation in Nature. The problem of the method of operation is still
too full of obscure and unknown factors for any at present possible structure
of theory to be definitive. Man is a type among many types so constructed, one
pattern among the multitude of patterns in the manifestation in Matter. He is
the most complex that has been created, the richest in content of consciousness
and the curious ingeniousness of his building; he is the head of the earthly
creation, but he does not exceed it. Even as others, so he too has his own
native law, limits, special kind of existence, svabhāva, svadharma;
within those limits he can extend and develop, but he cannot go outside them.
If there is a perfection to which he has to arrive, it must be a perfection in
his own kind, within his own law of being,—the full play of it, but by observation
of its mode and measure, not by transcendence. To exceed himself, to grow into
the superman, to put on the nature and capacities of a god would be a
contradiction of his self-law, impracticable and impossible. Each form and way
of being has its own appropriate way of the delight of being; to seek through
the mind the mastery and use and enjoyment of the environment of which he is
capable is rightly man the mental being’s objective: but to look beyond, to run
after an ulterior object or aim of existence, to aspire to surpass the mental
stature is to bring in a teleological element into existence which is not
visible in the cosmic structure. If a supramental being is to appear in the
terrestrial creation, it must be a new and independent manifestation; just as
Life and Mind have manifested in Matter, so Supermind must manifest there and
the secret Conscious-Energy must create the necessary patterns for this new
grade of its potencies. But there is no sign of any such intention in the
operations of Nature.” [7]
But what is the real basis of the Darwinian
theory concerned with life? The three terms associated wit it are: death and
mutual devouring, hunger and conscious desire, the sense of a limited room and
capacity and the struggle to increase, to expand, to conquer and to possess.
Sri Aurobindo maintains that the three terms death, desire, struggle “are the
basis of that status of evolution which the Darwinian theory first made plain
to human knowledge. For the phenomenon of death involves in itself a struggle
to survive, since death is only the negative term in which Life hides from
itself and tempts its own positive being to seek for immortality. The
phenomenon of hunger and desire involves a struggle towards a status of
satisfaction and security, since desire is only the stimulus by which Life
tempts its own positive being to rise out of the negation of unfulfilled hunger
towards the full possession of the delight of existence. The phenomenon of
limited capacity involves a struggle towards expansion, mastery and possession,
the possession of the self and the conquest of the environment, since
limitation and defect are only the negation by which Life tempts its own
positive being to seek for the perfection of which it is eternally capable. The
struggle for life is not only a struggle to survive, it is also a struggle for
possession and perfection, since only by taking hold of the environment whether
more or less, whether by self-adaptation to it or by adapting it to oneself
either by accepting and conciliating it or by conquering and changing it, can
survival be secured, and equally is it true that only a greater and greater
perfection can assure a continuous permanence, a lasting survival. It is this
truth that Darwinism sought to express in the formula of the survival of the
fittest.” [8]
Here is a poetic essay dealing with
evolution we read in Savitri. After describing the first self-view of
Matter, which is just a scale and series in the Ignorance, the poet tells us
that this is not all we are or all our world; there are possibilities ahead of
us:
Our greater self of knowledge waits for us,
A supreme light in the truth-conscious
Vast:
It sees from summits beyond thinking mind,
It moves in a splendid air transcending
life.
It shall descend and make earth’s life
divine.
Truth made the world, not a blind
Nature-Force.
For here are not our large diviner heights;
Our summits in the superconscient’s blaze
Are glorious with the very face of God:
There is our aspect of eternity,
There is the figure of the god we are,
His young unaging look on deathless things,
His joy in our escape from death and Time,
His immortality and light and bliss.
Our larger being sits behind cryptic walls:
There are greatnesses hidden in our unseen
parts
That wait their hour to step into life’s
front:
We feel an aid from deep indwelling Gods:
One speaks within, Light comes to us from
above.
Our soul from its mysterious chamber acts;
Its influence pressing on our heart and
mind
Pushes them to exceed their mortal selves.
It seeks for Good and Beauty and for God;
We see beyond self’s walls our limitless
self,
We gaze through our world’s glass at
half-seen vasts,
We hunt for the Truth behind apparent
things.
Our inner Mind dwells in a larger light,
Its brightness looks at us through hidden
doors;
Our members luminous grow and Wisdom’s face
Appears in the doorway of the mystic ward:
When she enters into our house of outward
sense,
Then we look up and see, above, her sun.
A mighty life-self with its inner powers
Supports the dwarfish modicum we call life;
It can graft upon our crawl two puissant
wings.
Our body’s subtle self is throned within
In its viewless palace of veridical dreams
That are bright shadows of the thoughts of
God.
In the prone obscure beginnings of the race
The human grew in the bowed apelike man.
He stood erect, a godlike form and force,
And a soul's thoughts looked out from
earthborn eyes;
Man stood erect, he wore the thinker’s
brow:
He looked at heaven and saw his comrade
stars;
A vision came of beauty and greater birth
Slowly emerging from the heart’s chapel of
light
And moved in a white lucent air of dreams.
He saw his being's unrealised vastnesses,
He aspired and housed the nascent demi-god.
Out of the dim recesses of the self
The occult seeker into the open came:
He heard the far and touched the
intangible,
He gazed into the future and the unseen;
He used the powers earth-instruments cannot
use,
A pastime made of the impossible;
He caught up fragments of the Omniscient’s
thought,
He scattered formulas of omnipotence.
Thus man in his little house made of
earth’s dust
Grew towards an unseen heaven of thought
and dream
Looking into the vast vistas of his mind
On a small globe dotting infinity.
At last climbing a long and narrow stair
He stood alone on a high roof of things
And saw the light of a spiritual sun.
Aspiring he transcends his earthly self;
He stands in the largeness of his soul
new-born
Redeemed from encirclement by mortal things
And moves in a pure free spiritual realm…
A last end of far lines of divinity,
He mounts by a frail thread to his high
source;
He reaches his fount of immortality,
He calls the Godhead into his mortal life.
[9]
If the hard core of materialism is in the
admission of inconscient Self and somnambulist Force alone, and nothing else,
then to see our self of greater knowledge waiting on us, to imagine that it
shall descend and make earth’s life divine, is beyond it; it may even be
ineffective to talk about it to it. Again, the same age-old
reason-versus-religion conflict will arise and plague us evermore. But the
occult seeker unmindful all these debates and oppositions moves on and makes it
possible for the Godhead to enter into this mortal life.
The kind of science we have today is human
knowledge for human use and in that respect it has done something astounding.
In it is the power of empirical rationalism at its best. But its empiricism is
always limited by the physical tools it uses. Naturally, its scope and its
understanding get limited by them. And then it has made reason as its primary
mode of comprehension. Its progress is also the progress of reason. It has
become refined, subtle, swift; it has provided solidity derived from
objectivity, made the foundation secure. In the process it has also opened
itself out more and more to higher intuition although it may not be aware of
it. Which means, there is a hope also. It may not be able to receive direct
spiritual light but it can well live in its bright ambiance that can liberate
it from the constraints of thought itself. If this happens, it will be able to
recognise the true sense of evolution, which is essentially the evolution of
consciousness in the material creation.
“A spiritual evolution, an evolution of
consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form
can reveal the indwelling Spirit, is… the central significant motive of the
terrestrial existence,” writes Sri Aurobindo. “This significance is concealed
at the outset by the involution of the Spirit, the Divine Reality, in a dense
material Inconscience; a veil of Inconscience, a veil of insensibility of
Matter hides the universal Consciousness-Force which works within it, so that
the Energy, which is the first form the Force of creation assumes in the
physical universe, appears to be itself inconscient and yet does the works of a
vast occult Intelligence. The obscure mysterious creatrix ends indeed by
delivering the secret consciousness out of its thick and tenebrous prison... At
first she houses herself in forms of Matter which appear to be altogether
unconscious, then struggles towards mentality in the guise of living Matter and
attains to it imperfectly in the conscious animal. This consciousness is at
first rudimentary, mostly a half subconscious or just conscious instinct; it
develops slowly till in more organised forms of living Matter it reaches its
climax of intelligence and exceeds itself in Man, the thinking animal who
develops into the reasoning mental being... hampered and burdened, mental man
has still to evolve out of himself the fully conscious being, a divine manhood
or a spiritual and supramental supermanhood which shall be the next product of
the evolution. That transition will mark the passage from the evolution in the
Ignorance to a greater evolution in the Knowledge, founded and proceeding in
the light of the Superconscient and no longer in the darkness of the Ignorance
and Inconscience. This terrestrial evolutionary working of Nature… has a double
process: there is an outward visible process of physical evolution with birth
as its machinery… there is, at the same time, an invisible process of soul
evolution with rebirth into ascending grades of form and consciousness as its
machinery. The first by itself would mean only a cosmic evolution; for the
individual would be a quickly perishing instrument, and the race, a more
abiding collective formulation, would be the real step in the progressive
manifestation of the cosmic Inhabitant, the universal Spirit.” [10]
References
[1] On Education, CWM, Vol. 12, pp. 86-87
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., p. 284
[4] Notes on the Way, pp. 95-98
[5] Letters on Yoga, p. 340
[6] The Life Divine, pp. 55-56
[7] Ibid., pp. 830-31
[8] Ibid., p. 199
[9] Savitri, pp. 484-86; see also pp. 477-78
[10] The Life Divine, pp. 824-26