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.
If material creation is a manifestation of the Divine,
then there is a possibility of it being Divine in every mode of activity.
Presently it is not, but it can. That is the compelling or true sense of
evolution. From darkness to light, from falsehood to truth, from death to
immortality is one lap of this evolutionary process, the upward climb; but it
can become complete when the reversal also starts happening, that whatever has
to happen here shall happen in light and truth and deathlessness, in the
delight of authentic becoming and being. This is possible because what the
spirit sees creates a truth, as Narad maintains; the prevalent falsehood and
ignorance and error and pain might give an impression of the world being
unreal, mithyā, an illusion, māyā, but it is not. There is a functional veil
drawn over the spirit and it has to be removed, a protective golden cloud
behind which shines the Sun of Truth, protective lest the solar intensity
consume in its flames the entire existence itself. By spiritually preparing oneself,
the cloud or the golden lid must be removed—as the Upanishad says. To receive
the light of the Sun of Truth and to live in it is the happy fulfilment, the
glad aim of the evolutionary endeavour. The agency that can accomplish this
with a “masterful finality” is the divine Supermind alone and it is that power
which must enter into the terrestrial operation. Our present existence shall
not only be a proper spiritual ādhāra or support for its working; but shall be
a field of dynamic play of the luminous Force or Shakti in her joy of endless
creation. “The supramental change,” declares Sri Aurobindo in his last message
of 24 November 1950, “is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the
earth-consciousness.” [1] The key for execution of the divine Decree is
provided by yogic sadhana of the Yogi of the New Age himself. It alone can
“rend the lid and tear the covering and shape the vessel and bring down into
this world of obscurity and falsehood and suffering Truth and Light and Life
divine and the immortal’s Ananda.” The urge towards the reign of Satyam and
Ritam is the genuine sense of evolutionary transformation.
In this far-reaching conception embodied in Sri
Aurobindo’s yogic-spiritual philosophy what is envisaged is the working of
transcendental powers in the earth-consciousness, the earth-existence, the
earth-life, in the sky and the air and the fire and the water and in the
earth-stuff itself, not only in its countless material forms but also in its
precious soul and in its open and progressive and spacious spirit. Earth is the
“significant centre” of the universe from the point of view a divine
manifestation, as if created to focus all effort on one point. So, not by
abandoning it, which is harshly suicidal, but by living in its creative essence
and psyche can the true meaning of life, of the becoming itself be realised. We
must fully recognise that there is something wonderful here, very meaningful
also, that
Earth has beatitudes warmer than heaven’s that are bare
and undying,
Marvels of Time on the crest of the moments to infinity
flying. [2]
But there is a genuine difficulty vis-à-vis man as the
mental being. About his present occupation in the world and the urge that
drives him in it and what is expected of it to come out, Sri Aurobindo writes:
“He seeks to know Matter in order to be master of the material environment, to
know Life in order to be master of the vital existence, to know Mind in order
to be master of the great obscure movement of mentality… he seeks to know
himself in order to be master of himself, to know the world in order to be
master of the world. This is the urge of Existence in him, the necessity of the
Consciousness he is. … To find the conditions under which this inner impulsion
is satisfied is the problem man must strive always to resolve and to that he is
compelled by the very nature of his own existence and by the Deity seated
within him. … Either man must fulfil himself by satisfying the Divine within
him or he must produce out of himself a new and greater being who will be more
capable of satisfying it. He must either himself become a divine humanity or
give place to Superman.” [3] Notwithstanding man’s limitations, the appearance
of the divine humanity, the divine multitude, divyam janam as the Veda says, is
the entire thrust present in the evolutionary movement. Behind it is the Will
of the Unmanifest to manifest himself in the fine multiplicity of existence, bahusyām
prajāyeyeti. There has to be the “universal incarnation”. By whatever means it
be, Superman has to arrive in this creation.
In the meanwhile, however, the human enigma with man’s
conscious life obeying the Inconscient’s rule has to be faced. It is not that
“God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world!” True, as Robert Browning
perceives, the hillside’s dew-pearl’d and the lark’s on the wing and the
snail’s on the thorn; but then in its naked actuality this world is a “haunt of
Ignorance” and a “home of Pain”. There is a deep-seated dualism that cannot be
just wished away. There is always the troubling why and the wherefore of it.
Dualism exists everywhere, as much in the modes of
life’s passions and pursuits as in all the ways of thought’s theses and
antitheses. Thus, while there is archetypal perfection in the timeless domain,
in the temporal realm we witness limitation and crudity and failing. What is
ideal over there is not real here. We are ourselves a flawed substandard copy,
quite removed from reality. The Platonic Idea belonging to the unchanging world
shows itself only as a far reflection on the dark walls of the cave, walls
which themselves bring distortions. The contrast between, let us call, the
timeless divine insight and design and the time-governed human knowledge and
work has dominated all medieaval thought, Christian, Jewish, and Islamic. The
time-transcending divine knowledge which embraces the totality of all
successive events in one single act, in the theological totum simul, altogether
disappears in the fragmented analytical system. In it there is no—in fact there
cannot be—the all-embracing as well as organised kinetic vision of the three
tomes of time, of the Past-Present-Future, of trīkāladŗşti.
An inevitable consequence of the rational analytical
system is, it has to lead to every kind of dualism, dualism of faith and
reason, in faith itself the dualism of this transient and sorrowful world and
the ever-abiding happy empyrean elsewhere, in reason between relational time
and unmoving detached absolute time, in philosophy the dualism of static and
unfolding reality, between the determinate and the indeterminate, and so on.
As regards science, the concept of time as formulated
by
This easily takes us back to the “ancient dialogue”
between Heraclitus and Parmenides. Parmenides came after Heraclites, just
before Socrates. Born of an illustrious family about 510 BCE, he saw in his Way
of Truth One Being alone as the self-existent and lasting reality, in contrast
to the changing physical world. While the former is incapable of development,
the latter is a sense-perceived world and therefore illusory. This means,
Heraclites’s “everything is in flux, nothing stands still” leads to an
erroneous Becoming. The dialogue, though well separated in time, can be put in
Plato’s words: “Heraclites says that everything moves on and that nothing is at
rest; and, comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says that you
could not step into the same river twice.” And then Plato hurries to tell
Theodoros, “I almost forgot that there were others who asserted opinions the
very opposite of these: ‘the all is alone, unmoved; to this all names apply,’
and the other emphatic statements in opposition to those referred to, which the
school of Melissos and Parmenides make, to the effect that all things are one, and
that the all stands itself in itself, not having space in which it is moved.”
The ancient dualism shows itself up again in the form of persistence and
change, static existence and movement.
In this context we should be concerned with an
important philosophical consequence of quantum aspect of the physical world.
This essentially arises from indeterminacy of the microphysical processes
formulated by Heisenberg in 1927, giving birth to new physics. “The two
different names of this principle—‘uncertainty principle’ or ‘indeterminacy
principle’—suggest two radically different interpretations of it. The first
interpretation, more conservative in its outlook and favoured more by
traditionally oriented philosophers than by physicists, regards microphysical
indeterminacy as a result of the interference of the process of observation
with the process observed. The second interpretation, more favoured by
physicists, regards it as a manifestation of objective indeterminacy in nature.
The first interpretation leaves the Laplacean determinism intact; the second
one suggests the objective status of chance in the sense of Boutroux and
Pierce, that is, of the ‘open world’ (H. Weyl’s term), forever in growth and
forever incomplete, in which the future remains genuinely ambiguous and, though
influenced by the past, is not predetermined by it. While the first
interpretation is more congruous with the philosophical tradition glorifying
static and immutable Being, the second interpretation is viewed with sympathy
by the process-oriented thinkers. Thus the discussion concerning the
interpretation of this principle is merely the most recent phase of the ancient
dialogue between Parmenides and Heraclitus.” [4] There is of course a
difference between the two dialogues, one philosophy against philosophy and the
other philosophy against science, science not much bothered by the anguish it
can cause to philosophy. But then perhaps there is really no “objective
indeterminacy in nature”; instead, what is probably happening is that the physicist
in his loud triumph of professionalism is simply imposing objective
indeterminacy on nature. While there is nothing uncertain about the uncertainty
principle, the indeterminacy proposition starts becoming ominous. If in the
open world the future remains genuinely ambiguous and is not predetermined by
the past, is not influenced by it, then the question is: what is it that shapes
the course of the unfolding events? What is it that gives push to things? Is
there some kind of freewill in the physical nature, giving rise to this
“open”-ness? And even if there is that freewill in it, by what process does it
bring about whatever it wills? In that eventuality, inconscient and insensitive
matter would no more remain dumb and stupid and brutish. Or, is it that at the
microscopic level there is freedom which gets robbed off in the gross physical?
If so, again, by what kind of mechanism? The original word for indeterminacy or
uncertainty in German actually means fuzziness. Can fuzziness have motivation
or urge or freewill? But then if it were there, it would be talking not only
non-science but also non-philosophy. Nor in this situation would Fritjof
Capra’s Tao of Physics bear any meaning or sense. To speak of this fuzziness as
freewill and connecting it with the dance of Shiva is either not to understand
either, or it is simply a misplaced enthusiasm for mystical interpretation of
the physical world. Whether it is physics or philosophy, perhaps we should go
to the Upanishadic statement of Goethe wherein he asserts the primal reality as
“ever changing and yet preserving itself, near and far and far and near, and so
shaping and re-shaping itself.” That primal reality indeed is the real source
of authentic freewill and it is that which can provide the real push to things.
Not in the lower nature but in the active functioning of the primal reality can
the true meaning of time in manifestation be grasped. It will also remove from
our mind the hundred dualisms that occupy it.
Yet, notwithstanding Kant, the dualism between
rationalism and empiricism continues to haunt us. Its reflection in quantum
physics is seen in the positions taken by Niels Bohr and Einstein. Einstein
held that an idea or theory should be correct per se if it is founded on
acceptable logical principles; it is the crudeness of our mental approach that
demands proofs based on observation. The theory of relativity itself is a good
example of this view, that its verification came much later than when it was
given. Not only verification; it brought about a radical change in our social
organisations when it found its use in the Second World War in the form of the
atomic weapon. Such could indeed be the power of pure reason. Based on suchlike
convictions he refused to accept the quantum mechanical formulation which was
strongly advocated by Bohr. Its empirical basis was not sufficient for Einstein
to subscribe to it. He always considered it to be a provisional way of looking
at things. Today we might not be talking about this Bohr-Einstein debate at
all, but then the problem fundamentally remains unsolved; but perhaps
empiricism is a surer way for the organic mind to depend upon. Matter is the
touchstone for Idea, if Idea has to have authentic contents and significance in
the context of the physical world.
Kant saw that while the rationalist held the view that
we could understand the world by careful use of reason, the empiricist argued
that all of our knowledge must be firmly grounded in experience. The former
“guarantees the indubitability of our knowledge but leaves serious questions
about its practical content”; in the latter, “practical content is secured, but
it turns out that we can be certain of very little. Both approaches have
failed, Kant supposed, because both are premised on the same mistaken assumption.”
Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg, studied at its
university, and worked there as a tutor and professor for more than forty
years, “never travelling more than fifty miles from home. Although his outward
life was one of legendary calm and regularity, Kant’s intellectual work easily
justified his own claim to have effected a Copernican revolution in
philosophy.” The upshot of his discovery is that, “the possibility of human
knowledge presupposes the active participation of the human mind.” Which means,
“it is we who render all experience coherent as scientific knowledge. But
regulative principles of this sort hold only for the world as we know it, and
since metaphysical propositions seek a truth beyond all experience, they cannot
be established within the bounds of reason.”
While making a distinction between pure and empirical
knowledge, in his introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason Kant writes:
“There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience… In the
order of time… we have no knowledge antecedent to experience, and with
experience all our knowledge begins. But though all our knowledge begins with
experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.”
Continuing further, he speaks of the idea of transcendental philosophy as
follows: “Experience is, beyond all doubt, the first product to which our
understanding gives rise, in working up the raw material of sensible
impressions. Experience is therefore our first instruction, and in its progress
is so inexhaustible in new information, that… there will never be any lack of
new knowledge that can be thus ingathered. Nevertheless, it is by no means the
sole field to which our understanding is confined. For it may well be that even
our empirical knowledge is made up of what we receive through impressions and
of what our own faculty of knowledge (sensible impressions serving merely as
the occasion) supplies from itself. If our faculty of knowledge makes any such
addition, it may be that we are not in a position to distinguish it from the
raw material, until with long practice of attention we have become skilled in
separating it. This, then, is a question which at least calls for closer
examination, and does not allow of any off-hand answer—whether there is any
knowledge that is thus independent of experience and even of all impressions of
the senses. Such knowledge is entitled a priori, and distinguished from the
empirical, which has its sources a posteriori, that is, in experience.
Experience tells us, indeed, what is, but not that it must necessarily be so,
and not otherwise. It therefore gives us no true universality; and reason,
which is so insistent upon this kind of knowledge, is therefore more stimulated
by it than satisfied. Such universal modes of knowledge, which at the same time
possess the character of inner necessity, must in themselves, independently of
experience, be clear and certain. They are therefore entitled knowledge a
priori; whereas, on the other hand, that which is borrowed solely from
experience is, as we say, known only a posteriori, or empirically.”
But then in the preface to the first edition of his Critique,
Kant points out the limitations of pure reason: “Human reason has this peculiar
fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as
prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but
which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.” If human
reason is burdened with questions which it cannot answer, and if empirical knowledge
is of a subordinate kind, then there has to be another faculty taking us beyond
reason. Contrast this with Thomas Paine’s infallible or unerring reason as the
preventer of errors, “the most formidable weapon against errors”. Indeed,
notwithstanding the fact that we live in the Age of Reason, it seems that our
true progress lies in our going beyond reason—because reason is burdened with a
thousand questions which it cannot answer. “Reason was the helper, Reason is
the bar,” says one of Sri Aurobindo’s aphorisms. [5] In the same context we
also have: “Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the
reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the
animal, so out of man the superman emerges.” [6] Man is a reasoning animal but
it seems he is not really a reasonable animal and therefore must outgrow
himself.
We have thus mechanistic linear theories of existence
in which stand queuing up the events or processes; we have infructuous notions
of time that is again unidirectional; we have question-burdened intelligence or
wisdom accustomed to sequential mode of thinking; we have sense-perceived
empiricism with all the shortcomings and grossness of the tools of our
knowledge. Nowhere we see the hidden motivating agent. If it is Chaos and
Necessity in science, it could be the Idea without the driving Daemon in
philosophy, or at best a kind of resistless Becoming propelled by itself. The
Kantian reason is a barren woman who cannot bear an issue. While in all these
formulations the aspect of the Self stands out prominently in one way or the
other, the conspicuous absence of Nature or Prakriti becomes discomforting. Not
cerebral hypothesisation but an active driving force, a swift and many-mooded
consciousness has to be present to give breathing life to all that is. If life
is meaningless in the absence of thought, thought without life has no
locomotive thrust. There is a necessity to postulate an in-built propelling
agent to account for what gets unfolded in the sequence of things and events.
We do see the glimpses of it in Bergson’s élan vital or Nietzsche’s
will-to-power or Samuel Alexander’s nisus.
For Bergson “life is the absolute temporal movement
informed by duration and retained in memory”. But life has to also encounter
practical situations. Which means, in life both continuity and discontinuity
are simultaneously present. His Creative Evolution sets itself to look into
these aspects. If the phenomenon of change leads to evolution, its causes must
be explored. “His argument consists of four main steps. First, he shows that
there must be an original common impulse which explains the creation of all
living species; this is his famous vital impulse (élan vital). Second, the
diversity resulting from evolution must be accounted for as well. If the
original impulse is common to all life, then there must also be a principle of
divergence and differentiation that explains evolution; this is Bergson’s
tendency theory. Third, the two main diverging tendencies that account for
evolution can ultimately be identified as instinct on the one hand and
intelligence on the other. Human knowledge results from the form and the
structure of intelligence… which consists precisely in an analytic, external,
hence essentially practical and spatialised approach to the world. Unlike
instinct, human intelligence is therefore unable to attain to the essence of
life in its duration. The paradoxical situation of humanity… must therefore be
overcome. So, fourth, the effort of intuition what allows us to place ourselves
back within the original creative impulse so as to overcome the numerous
obstacles that stand in the way of true knowledge.” The concept of vital
impulse gives rise to the possibility of creativity entering into the otherwise
mechanistic approach. Yet the vital impulse itself could become mechanistic, in
which case the diversity one witnesses all around would remain unexplained.
Bergson’s “complexification” of life makes room for the appearance of different
species. But it is intelligence that provides pragmatic orientation to achieve
diversity. However, intelligence by itself cannot seize upon life; hence enters
into the scheme intuition. Indeed, “intuition and intelligence each correspond
to tendencies within the human psyche”. In this way intuition gives unity to
mental life. Bergson also recognises the fact that “while one can go from
intuition to intelligence by way of diminution, the analytic nature of
intelligence precludes the opposite process.” Does this provide a connection
between the life of the spirit and the life of the body? It does not, but it
does make life advance. Bergson’s creative evolution makes an opening for
Darwinian staticism to step out. “The destiny of man will be realised because
it is the nature of the élan vital to triumph over matter and environment.” If
the role of the élan vital is to bring about a change, then first we have to
define the sense of change itself. While preparing notes on Bergson, Sri
Aurobindo writes: “Change is possible only if there is a status from which to
change; but status again exists only as a step that pauses, a step in the
continuous passage of change or a step on which change pauses before it passes
into another step in its creative passage. And behind this relation is a
duality of eternal status and eternal motion.” [7] The two inseparable aspects
we again see in this formulation are of Existence and Consciousness-Force in
the world-creative activity. If an Urge has been planted for the creation to
come out of utter Inconscience, then it is that Urge which is promoted by
status and motion.
Nietzsche was another type of thinker. His thoughts as
propagated by his “unscrupulous sister” after his death had a powerful hold on
German soldiers when they read his books even in the trenches. And in the world
of philosophy we ascribe to him notions which would have “profoundly disgusted
the philosopher himself.” Martin Heidegger speaks of Nietzsche as “the last
metaphysician of the West.” Walter Kaufmann takes him as a “Socratic
questioner”, or else a “Goethean man of controlled passion.” For Sri Aurobindo
he was more a seer than a thinker with a touch of intuition in his philosophy,
yet perhaps paradoxically with something leading to Titanic egoism. According
to Nietzsche, war is an aspect of life and man as a warrior, as a “lion-man”,
with the will-to-be, has to come in order to exceed himself, excel himself.
Nietzsche believed that he grasped the reality of the
underlying chaos or void; that God was dead; that nihilism, the process by
which “the highest values devalue themselves” was upon us. (The Will to Power)
That became the basis of all his thought, taking him to dangerous extremes.
But, then, what is this will-to-power for? It is the freedom for the
maximisation of our faculties to acquire control over things and events and to
create what Nietzsche called the übermensch or the “overman”. But it will be a
gross mistake to equate this German “übermensch” with the generally understood
English “superman”, particularly so when we are concerned with Sri Aurobindo’s
evolutionary being as the next radical step beyond the present man. The word übermensch
was coined by Goethe. However, while freedom for the maximisation of our
faculties is a very desirable thing, it should not become an unfettered or
unregenerate will-to-be; it should not get so much aggrandised that there might
arrive amongst us the monstrosity of a crude vital being. Berkowitz rightly as
well as cautiously indicates that in Nietzsche’s extreme advocacy of will-to-be
“cultural control has gone, be that religion, law, custom or what we have.”
This is a pretty hazardous situation and before
accepting it the question of good and evil in the scheme of things must be
weighed in terms of its deeper implications. Not that religion had always been
a happy promoter of man’s genuine good, nor were so the great traditions of
philosophy, including the Kantian idea of wisdom as its noblest foundation; not
much did these avail in the pragmatics of our common life. Even the
degeneration of Wagner’s later music is attributed to the disappearance of that
will-to-be. A shift from materialism to vitalism has taken place, accompanied
by perils on a collective scale.
“Nietzsche, the most vivid, concrete and suggestive of
modern thinkers” was “an apostle who never entirely understood his own
message,” says Sri Aurobindo. [8] In fact, his was an imperfect awakening and
not the necessary awakening to our real highest self and nature. Making the
unguarded German philosopher’s will-to-be as an unbridled driving force towards
supermanhood, and not bringing into play the possibilities of opening to the
higher and nobler creative spirit of man, can prove to be disastrous.
Nietzsche has a problem in the context of the Darwinian
theory of biological evolution. While his “intuition” of the will-to-power says
that the fittest must survive, the solution is not in the species but in the
survival of the “sovereign individuals” who, “day after tomorrow”, will be the
“victorious supermen”. For this to happen the religious sense of charity and
virtue should go. In contrast to this, Sri Aurobindo sees a purpose behind the
evolutionary process with the dynamism of growth in it.
From a psycho-spiritual point of view we have to
understand that evolution is a double process. If on the one hand there is the
urge to grow from below, a kind of compulsion pushing itself up, there is also
the pressure from above, the higher stepping into the lower and lifting it up.
If this is true then we also see the possibility, perhaps even the necessity, of
a willed yogic action in this great transformative effort. Which means that the
role of an Avatar, which no Nietzsche can visualise, also enters into the
dynamics of operation. In Nietzsche is the march of the camel-man, the lion-man
and the child-man. In the last metamorphosis the child-spirit “can create
freely, and its creation is without any goal, a free expression of its
will-to-be, its will to live and enjoy without any after-thought… it is a new
beginning and a new movement… it is wheel that runs by itself… . There remains
for it only the free affirmation of itself… it does what it wills.” Here is the
arrival of the perfect individual, the Nietzschean superman. But such a being
cannot be the grand finale of the evolutionary effort.
Nietzsche left the appearance of his superman wholly at
the mercy of Chance. If this is acceptable, we might then as well say that
there is a good likelihood even for the donkey of Sancho Panza to become one in
the course of long time. And for the same reason and by the same process the
superman could also just disappear. As Sancho’s creature turns up suddenly from
nowhere and goes into nowhere, our superman too would become a product of
dubious ways of destiny.
But more often than not it has been proved that the
rationalist conclusions of science are only provisional and, even when
accepted, are not always satisfying to our deeper sense of understanding.
Collective life cannot and should not end in the death of the individual.
Besides, we have to also know if there is any future for the physical body that
houses us in it, body that has been always regarded more as an obstacle than an
aid, something that is unworthy of nobler things cherished by us but not easily
obtained because of its severe limitations. Add to this the likelihood of what
caused evolution that itself is evolving further. Is not then man himself a
transitional being for the secret Urge that is driving evolution onward? To
questions of this kind we cannot get answers from science. Nor would the
philosophical systems or propositions fill up the bill. Take an example, of
Samuel Alexander’s Space-Time. It looks so unconvincing that it should have
been endowed with a nisus that makes matter, life, and mind emerge out of it;
it is practically as good as saying that these have come into existence out of
non-existence, ex nihilo.
Not much is gained in later formulations. To Alexis
Carrel’s “Man the Unknown”, Teilhard de Chardin adds “Man to be” as the
solution of everything that we can know. After a long and almost a linear
anti-entropic process of chemico-biological evolution, there is the appearance
of a complex mental activity on an unprecedented scale. This mental activity or
awareness or consciousness in its turn gives to evolution a new process or
mechanism for the evolution itself to forge ahead in its ever-growing
unfoldment. According to Teilhard, what is going to happen in the future are
not somatic but vast mental and social transformations leading to an intense
noogenic activity. A critical point in this development having been reached, a
stage where the biological is more or less exhausted, only a collective higher
order must culminate into impersonalised organisation of superlife. Based so
much on scientific researches is the thesis that it may look in its
infallibility to be the last word to fix the possibilities for man.
Man was born, and he stood erect; soon he started
acquiring power over his surroundings which itself, over a period of sixty
million years, contributed to the development of his brain that made him a
“thinking being in an unthinking world”, as we have in Savitri. He began to
“laugh and weep”, though Plato never did in his whole of 81-year life, nor
perhaps Kant. Man became the Protagorean measure of all things. He climbed
noble peaks in the domain of science and philosophy and mathematics, even as he
soared with tireless wings in the sky of religion and art and poetry. Yet,
despite all the achievements of quantum mechanics, there looms over his head
the ambiguous cloud of Uncertainty in the helplessness of this multidimensional
world. Henri Poincaré states that for mathematics “there is no such thing as a
solved problem, there are only problems more or less solved.” However, knowing
well that there is so much of à peu prés in the entire approach, one begins to wonder
whether this bears any satisfying conviction.
It seems that “in this epoch of spiritual malady, the
Heideggerian angst has taken possession of the minds of men. Modern man is
verily in a state of utter alienation.” He has lost faith; he has lost belief
in himself; he has even lent himself to the Marxian sun under which there can
exist no God. But then this is essentially an evolutionary problem and unless, à la Sri Aurobindo, we take evolution as the evolution
of consciousness there cannot be any solution to it. The glorious “divine
humanism” held in front of us by him is a possibility that can materialise soon
with the conscious participation of man himself. It is the great spiritual
Ascent of Man which no Bronowski can visualise.
Sri Aurobindo’s vision of the destiny of man is based
on direct spiritual experience and has authenticity of one who has meticulously
tested the thousand aspects and modes of nature in her evolutionary enterprise.
In it is the indisputable basis of empiricism that goes far beyond even the
hardest methodology of science. The conclusion is that man is after all a
mediator divinity and the real evolution, rather the evolution in reality, is
to start from this point onward. One could hence call it infinite progress. It
is in this context that we should see the issues related to physical
transformation and the work carried out by the Mother deep into the cellular
regions. From man human to man divine there doesn’t seem to be a direct leap or
transition possible and there is the necessity for the “intermediate” man to
arrive.
Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of integral non-dualism, as
propounded by him in his magnum opus The Life Divine, is a landmark event
regarding our view of reality. What we clearly see in it is that the a priori
and unconditional application of the laws of formal logic, namely, Identity,
Contradiction and Excluded Middle to propositions which express the nature of
reality, is logically unwarranted and unjustified. When abstract or formal reason
has to deny the reality of one or the other aspect of the Absolute in order to
make it consistent with the laws of formal logic, laws which are empty of
content and do not present a picture of reality, we have to go beyond reason or
formal logic. There has to be the Logic of the Infinite. Sri Aurobindo’s Logic
of the Infinite is founded on integral knowledge. Indeed that knowledge, and
not of formal logic, alone can be the true ground for the activity of dynamic
consciousness itself. The system thus offered carries on it the stamp of the
knowledge of a spiritual seer; it is a dŗştānta with the infallibility of some
higher truth of the Self expressing itself in revelatory words. Metaphysically
speaking, we have in it three elements: Omnipresent Reality as the creator of
all that is and that could be more, the Logic of the Infinite governing the
process, and Integral Knowledge as the basis of its action. Behind all this is
of course the creative Delight itself.
This theory is a multi-stranded theory with the urge to
grow from below and with the constant pressure of the higher levels bringing
their potentialities and powers into the lower. Evolution is not a monochord.
There is a double process in it, with Avatarhood as one significant aspect.
This evolution is finally to effect the establishment of a race whose governing
consciousness-force shall be the creative truth operating in the freedom of
progressive delight. There will be the race of gnostic beings.
To put in the words of KD Sethna (Amal Kiran): “What we
call evolution is a process by which the multiplicity of the soul-truths
inherent in the Spirit shape various series of formulations on earth for the
gradual revelation of their own shades of divine diversity at play in the
divine unity. This, again, means that each soul-truth gathers and assimilates
through these formulations or rebirths a certain growing experience which helps
it to express its diversity on evolutionary lines, and which it holds together
in an evolving intermediate psychological form of itself between its pure
spiritual status and its expression here.” The upshot of the evolution is:
diversity and unity in a divine way.
Sri Aurobindo’s explanation of the evolutionary
universe is as follows. He writes in a letter: “I have put forward this
cardinal fact of a spiritual evolution as the meaning of our existence here. It
is a series of ascents from the physical being and consciousness to the vital,
the being dominated by the life-self, thence to the mental being realised in
the fully developed man and thence into the perfect consciousness which is
beyond the mental, into the supramental Consciousness and the supramental
being, the Truth-Consciousness which is the integral consciousness of the
spiritual being. Mind cannot be our last conscious expression because mind is
fundamentally an ignorance seeking for knowledge; it is only the supramental
Truth-Consciousness that can bring us the true and whole Self-Knowledge and
world-Knowledge; it is through that only that we can get to our true being and
the fulfilment of our spiritual evolution.” [9]
Thus in spite of the long course of evolution of
thought, we find that it is not possible for thought by itself to arrive at the
Self-Knowledge and world-Knowledge Sri Aurobindo speaks of; it cannot, closes
as it does on itself. Therefore, all metaphysical theories of evolution are
bound to be bounded by the limitations of mental faculty and hence cannot be
satisfying in the deeper sense of our longings and aspiration, cannot be
acceptable to perceptions that are sensitive to the possibilities of the spirit
expressing itself even here in the physical world of ours. Sri Aurobindo’s The
Life Divine opens with the following quotations from the Rig Veda: “She follows
to the goal of those that are passing on beyond, she is the first in the
eternal succession of the dawns that are coming,—Usha widens bringing out that
which lives, awakening someone who was dead... . What is her scope when she
harmonises with the dawns that shone out before and those that now must shine?
She desires the ancient mornings and fulfils their light; projecting forwards
her illumination she enters into communion with the rest that are to come.”
[10] “Threefold are those supreme births of this divine force that is in the
world, they are true, they are desirable; he moves there wide-overt within the
Infinite and shines pure, luminous and fulfilling.... That which is immortal in mortals and
possessed of the truth, is a god and established inwardly as an energy working
out in our divine powers.... Become high-uplifted, O Strength, pierce all
veils, manifest in us the things of the Godhead.” [11]
This mystical knowledge of the divine Dawn who “desires
the ancient mornings and fulfils their light”, who is in communion with what is
to come, is the truest basis of the unfolding evolution. It has to “manifest in
us the things of the Godhead.”
References
[1] See also The Mother
[2] Collected Poems, p. 524
[3] The Life Divine, pp. 208-09
[4] An Internet write-up
[5] The Supramental Manifestation, p. 377
[6] The Hour of God, p. 98
[7] Ibid., p. 390
[8] Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, p. 151
[9] Letters on Yoga, p. 47
[10] Kutsa Angirasa, I.113. 8, 10
[11] Vamadeva: IV. 1. 7; IV. 2. 1; IV. 4. 5