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.
As a seer
working out the occult truths and their discoveries of knowledge, he brought
into being the seven Craftsmen of heaven and in the light of day they spoke and
wrought the things of their wisdom. [1]
“A theory of spiritual evolution,” writes Sri
Aurobindo, “is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and
physical life-evolution; it must stand on its own inherent justification: it
may accept the scientific account of physical evolution as a support or an
element, but the support is not indispensable. The scientific theory is
concerned only with the outward and visible machinery and process, with the
detail of Nature’s execution, with the physical development of things in Matter
and the law of development of Life and Mind in Matter; its account of the
process may have to be considerably changed or may be dropped altogether in the
light of new discovery, but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a
spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul’s
manifestation in material existence. In its outward aspects this is what the
theory of evolution comes to,—there is in the scale of terrestrial existence a
development of forms, of bodies, a progressively complex and competent
organisation of Matter, of Life in Matter, of Consciousness in living Matter;
in this scale, the better organised the form, the more it is capable of housing
a better organised, a more complex and capable, a more developed or evolved
Life and Consciousness. Once the evolutionary hypothesis is put forward and the
facts supporting it are marshalled, this aspect of the terrestrial existence
becomes so striking as to appear indisputable. The precise machinery by which
this is done or the exact genealogy or chronological succession of types of
being is a secondary, though in itself an interesting and important question;
the development of one form of life out of a precedent less evolved form,
natural selection, the struggle for life, the survival of acquired
characteristics may or may not be accepted, but the fact of a successive
creation with a developing plan in it is the one conclusion which is of primary
consequence. Another self-evident conclusion is that there is a graduated
necessary succession in the evolution, first the evolution of Matter, next the
evolution of Life in Matter, then the evolution of Mind in living Matter, and
in this last stage an animal evolution followed by a human evolution. The first
three terms of the succession are too evident to be disputable. It may be
debated whether there was a succession of man to animal or a simultaneous
initial development, man outstripping the animal in Mind-evolution; a theory
has even been put forward that man was not the last, but the first and eldest
of the animal species. This priority of man is an ancient conception, but it
was not universal; it is born of the sense of the clear supremacy of man among
earthly creatures, the dignity of this supremacy seeming to demand a priority
of birth: but in evolutionary fact the superior is not prior but posterior in
appearance, the less developed precedes the more developed and prepares it.”
[2]
To understand the nature of the evolution of the
spiritual man and the prospects opening out to him it will be most appropriate,
and rewarding, to summarise what Sri Aurobindo has written about it in the last
few chapters of his great opus The Life
Divine.
The chapter dealing with the evolution of the spiritual
man (pp. 848-918) begins with the following: “In the earliest stages of
evolutionary Nature we are met by the dumb secrecy of her inconscience; there
is no revelation of any significance or purpose in her works, no hint of any
other principles of being than that first formulation which is her immediate
preoccupation and seems to be for ever her only business: for in her primal works
Matter alone appears, the sole dumb and stark cosmic reality. A Witness of
creation… would only have seen appearing out of a vast abyss of an apparent
non-existence an Energy busy with the creation of Matter, a material world and
material objects, organising the infinity of the Inconscient into the scheme of
a boundless universe or a system of countless universes that stretched around
him into Space without any certain end or limit, a tireless creation… without a
sense in it, empty of cause or purpose... . He would have seen no sign of an
indwelling Spirit, no being for whose delight it was made. A creation of this
kind could only be the outcome of an inconscient Energy or an illusion-cinema,
a shadow-play or puppet-play of forms reflected on a superconscient indifferent
Absolute. He would have seen no evidence of a soul and no hint of Mind or Life
in this immeasurable and interminable display of Matter. It would not have
seemed to him possible or imaginable that there could at all be in this desert
universe for ever inanimate and insensible an outbreak of teeming life, a first
vibration of something occult and incalculable, alive and conscious, a secret
spiritual entity... .” It continues as follows.
After a passage of long time appears the phenomenon of living
Matter, of Life living for itself with no significance in it, with the least
notion of thinking mind stepping into it, of consciousness awaking in the
Inconscient. If so, then, there is also a possibility of the hidden Spirit
establishing himself as the self-knower and world-knower, Nature’s ruler and
possessor. An alert observer could perhaps get a clue of this at an early stage
itself. He might even discern the appearance of the spiritual man, the fully
conscious being, man exceeding his first material self and discoverer of his
true self and highest nature.
There are however questions related to the exact nature
of the transition from mental to spiritual being and of the process and method
of his appearance. When a spiritual being emerges in a Mind embodied in
Life-in-Matter, then precisely because of that very circumstance he also gets
limited by the conditions of its existence here. Whatever spiritual evolution
has taken place in us so far it is as yet only a part of the mental evolution,
a special operation of man’s mentality, an upward movement of the mental being.
If this is all that is going to happen then the spiritual evolution cannot have
an independent emergence, nor a supramental future: it cannot be called
evolution of the spiritual man proper; there is at best an evolution of a finer
element in a mental being. Howsoever developed it be, it is difficult for man’s
mind to distinguish entirely the soul or self or any spiritual element in him.
He essentially remains mental.
In man mind has become separate, he can become aware of
his mental operations as distinct from his life-operations, his thought and
will can disengage themselves from his sensations and impulses, desires and
emotional reactions, can become detached from them, observe and control them,
sanction or cancel their functioning; yet he cannot know well enough the
secrets of his being. The movements of the soul in him are involved in the
mind-movements; its operations are mental and emotional. But then there can be
a decisive emergence in the mental being when it separates itself from thought
and sees itself in an inner silence as the spirit in mind, or separates itself
from the life-movements, desires, sensations, kinetic impulses, or separates
itself from the body-sense. Indeed, this discovery can go farther, it can even
put aside all relation to form or action of Nature. Not by mental perception
and observation, but by an intrinsic consciousness and its direct sense of
things and its intimate exact vision it is possible to look at Nature. In the
silent being one becomes aware of the Self, of the spiritual consciousness
itself. This is already a considerable evolution, a beginning of spiritual
transformation.
But it is possible to go farther; the spiritual being,
once inwardly liberated, can develop in mind the higher states of being that
are its own natural atmosphere and bring down a supramental energy and action
which are proper to the Truth-Consciousness. At first this truth of the spirit
and of spirituality is not self-evident to the mind. There is vagueness, and
confusion is inevitable as a temporary stage of the evolution, because
ignorance is its starting-point. Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to
the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our
mind, life and body; there is an inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that;
it is to enter into contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the
universe which inhabits also our own being; to be in communion with It and
union with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation of our whole being
as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into
a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature—this is what spirituality
means.
The task of the creative Consciousness-Force is to lead
a double evolution: the evolution of our outward nature and the evolution of
our inner being, our occult subliminal and spiritual nature. The evolution of
mind to its greatest possible range, height, subtlety has to be the
preoccupation for a long time. This is a preparation for the unveiling of an
entirely intuitive intelligence, of Overmind, of Supermind, the difficult
passage to a higher instrumentation of the Spirit. There are limitations and
obstacles, of the mind, life and body, the heavy inertia and persistence of the
body, the turbid passions of the life-part, the obscurity and doubting
incertitudes, denials, and other-formulations of the mind. These can make the
spiritual urge impatient, to the extent to reject the life, to mortify the
body, to silence the mind and achieve its own separate salvation. If Nature
refuses submission to the emerging spirit, then the soul must withdraw himself
from her.
There are four main lines which Nature has followed in
her attempt to open up the inner being,—religion, occultism, spiritual thought
and an inner spiritual realisation and experience: the three first are
approaches, the last is the decisive avenue of entry. All these four powers
have sometimes worked by a simultaneous action. Each of these means or
approaches corresponds to something in our total being and therefore to
something necessary to the total aim of her evolution. There are four
necessities of man's self-expansion. He must know himself and discover and
utilise all his potentialities. This he can do only by knowing his inner
mental, vital, physical and psychic being and its powers and movements and the
universal laws and processes of the occult Mind and Life which stand behind the
material front of the universe. He must know the hidden Power or Powers that
control the world, get into some kind of accord with the master Beings of the
universe. In the spiritual field all this religious, occult or philosophical
knowledge and endeavour must, to bear fruition, end in an opening up of the
spiritual consciousness, in experiences that found and continually heighten,
expand and enrich that consciousness and in the building of a life and action
that is in conformity with the truth of the spirit: this is the work of
spiritual realisation and experience.
In evolution each new principle has to make its way out
of an involution in Inconscience and Ignorance. It is a difficult task, of
pulling itself out of the involution, out of the hold of the obscurity. The
thing done has not only to be confirmed, secured against relapse and the
downward gravitation, against failure and extinction, but also opened out into
all the fields of its possibilities, its self-achievement, utmost height,
subtlety, riches, wideness; it has to become dominant, all-embracing,
comprehensive.
Evolutionary Nature in her first awakening must begin
with a vague sense of the Infinite and the Invisible surrounding the physical
being, a sense of the limitation and impotence of human mind and will and of
something greater than himself concealed in the world. In the process would
arrive the mystics with their endeavour on a power of suprarational knowledge,
intuitive, inspired, revelatory and with the force of the inner being to enter
into occult truth and experience.
An intellectual approach to the highest knowledge, the
mind’s possession of it, is an indispensable aid to this early movement of
Nature in the human being. Ordinarily, on our surface, man’s chief instrument
of thought and action is the reason, the observing, understanding and arranging
intellect. In any total advance or evolution of the Spirit, not only the
intuition, insight, inner sense, the heart’s devotion, a deep and direct
life-experience of the things of the Spirit have to be developed, but the intellect
also must be enlightened and satisfied. Spiritual realisation and experience,
an intuitive and direct knowledge, a growth of inner consciousness, a growth of
the soul and of an intimate soul-perception, soul-vision and a soul-sense, are
indeed the proper means of this evolution: but the support of the reflective
and critical reason is also of great importance, in the whole movement
indispensable. The means by which this need can be satisfied and with which our
nature of mind has provided us is philosophy, and in this field it must be a
spiritual philosophy. The method was at first an intuitive seeing and an
intuitive expression, as in the fathomless thought and profound language of the
Upanishads, but afterwards there was developed a critical method, a firm system
of dialectics, a logical organisation. In the West where the syncretic tendency
of the consciousness was replaced by the analytic and separative, the spiritual
urge and the intellectual reason parted company almost at the outset; philosophy
took from the first a turn towards a purely intellectual and ratiocinative
explanation of things. But still this line of development too is necessary,
because there must be a bridge between the spirit and the intellectual reason.
For the transformation of the Ignorance into the integral Knowledge, the growth
in us of a spiritual intelligence ready to receive a higher light and canalise
it for all the parts of our nature is an intermediate necessity of great
importance.
But it is only by an inner realisation of what these
approaches are seeking after, by an overwhelming experience or by many
experiences building up an inner change, by a transmutation of the
consciousness, by a liberation of the spirit from its present veil of mind,
life and body that there can emerge the spiritual being. That is the final line
of the soul’s progress. It is only after spiritual experience through the heart
and mind we see arise the saint, the prophet, the Rishi, the Yogi, the seer,
the spiritual sage and the mystic, and it is the religions in which these types
of spiritual manhood came into being that have endured, covered the globe and
given mankind all its spiritual aspiration and culture.
The sage and seer live in the spiritual mind, their
thought or their vision is governed and moulded by an inner or a greater divine
light of knowledge; the devotee lives in the spiritual aspiration of the heart,
its self-offering and its seeking; the saint is moved by the awakened psychic
being in the inner heart grown powerful to govern the emotional and vital
being; the others stand in the vital kinetic nature driven by a higher
spiritual energy and turned by it towards an inspired action, a God-given work
or mission, the service of some divine Power, idea or ideal. The last or
highest emergence is the liberated man who has realised the Self and Spirit
within him, entered into the cosmic consciousness, passed into union with the
Eternal and, so far as he still accepts life and action, acts by the light and
energy of the Power within him working through his human instruments of Nature.
This has been up till now the course of Nature’s
evolution of the spiritual man in the human mental being. Be it, however, noted
that spirituality cannot be called upon to deal with life by a non-spiritual method
or attempt to cure its ills by the panaceas, the political, social or other
mechanical remedies which the mind is constantly attempting and which have
always failed and will continue to fail to solve anything. To discover the
spiritual being in himself is the main business of the spiritual man and to
help others towards the same evolution is his real service to the race; till
that is done, an outward help can succour and alleviate, but nothing or very
little more is possible.
But the spiritual evolution of Nature is still in
process and incomplete,—one might almost say, still only beginning,—and its
main preoccupation has been to affirm and develop a basis of spiritual
consciousness and knowledge and to create more and more a foundation or
formation for the vision of that which is eternal in the truth of the spirit.
In the meanwhile, the individual must be preoccupied with his own problem of
entirely changing his mind and life into conformity with the truth of the
spirit which he is achieving or has achieved in his inner being and knowledge.
Any premature attempt at a large-scale collective spiritual life is exposed to
vitiation by some incompleteness of the spiritual knowledge on its dynamic
side, by the imperfections of the individual seekers and by the invasion of the
ordinary mind and vital and physical consciousness taking hold of the truth and
mechanising, obscuring or corrupting it.
Spiritual truth is a truth of the spirit, not a truth
of the intellect, not a mathematical theorem or a logical formula. It is a
truth of the Infinite and it can assume an infinite variety of aspects and
formations: in the spiritual evolution it is inevitable that there should be a
many-sided passage and reaching to the one Truth, a many-sided seizing of it.
The fundamental truth of spiritual experience is one, its consciousness is one.
But also there are numberless possibilities of variation of experience and
expression. In the evolution of the spiritual man there are many stages and in
each stage a great variety of individual formations of the being, the
consciousness, the life, the temperament, the ideas, the character. In the
domain of pure spiritual self-realisation and self-expression there need not be
a single white monotone, there can be a great diversity in unity; the supreme
Self is one, but the souls of the Self are many and, as is the soul’s formation
of nature, so will be its spiritual self-expression. Diversity in oneness is
the law of the manifestation; the supramental unification and integration must
harmonise these diversities, but to abolish them is not the intention of the
Spirit in Nature.
But there is a farther intention,—not only a revelation
of the Spirit, but a radical and integral transformation of Nature. There is a
will in her to effectuate a true manifestation of the embodied life of the
Spirit, to complete what she has begun by a passage from the Ignorance to the
Knowledge, to throw off her mask and to reveal herself as the luminous
Consciousness-Force carrying in her the eternal Existence and its universal
Delight of being. Which means, much has still to be done, bhūri aspaşţa kartvam. What the evolutionary Power has done so far
was to make a few individuals aware of their souls, conscious of their selves,
aware of the eternal being that they are: a certain change of nature prepares,
accompanies or follows upon this illumination, but it is not the complete and
radical change. When this is done the spiritual man would have evolved, but not
the supramental being who shall thenceforward be the leader of that Nature.
As the evolution proceeds, Nature begins slowly and
tentatively to manifest our occult parts. The soul in us, the psychic
principle, has already begun to take secret form; it puts forward and develops
a soul-personality, a distinct psychic being to represent it. This psychic
being remains still behind the veil in our subliminal part, like the true
mental, the true vital or the true or subtle physical being within us: but,
like them, it acts on the surface life by the influences and intimations it
throws up upon that surface. On this ignorant surface we become dimly aware of
something that can be called a soul as distinct from mind, life or body. A
certain sensitive feeling for all that is true and good and beautiful, fine and
pure and noble, a response to it, a demand for it, a pressure on mind and life
to accept and formulate it in our thought, feelings, conduct, character is the
most usually recognised though not the sole sign of this influence of the
psyche.
The psychic being, the soul-personality in us, does not
emerge full-grown and luminous; it evolves, passes through a slow development
and formation. Its appearance is the sign of a soul-emergence in Nature, and if
that emergence is as yet small and defective, the psychic personality also will
be stunted or feeble. It is too separated from its inner reality, in imperfect
communication with its own source in the depths of the being. But as the
psychic personality grows stronger, it begins to increase its communion with
the psychic entity behind it and improve its communications with the surface.
A first condition of the soul’s complete emergence is a
direct contact in the surface being with the spiritual Reality. Because it
comes from that, the psychic element in us turns always towards whatever in
phenomenal Nature seems to belong to a higher Reality and can be accepted as
its sign and character. But, for this change to arrive at its widest totality
and profound completeness, the consciousness has to shift its centre and its
static and dynamic position from the surface to the inner being; it is there that
we must find the foundation for our thought, life and action. The outer nature
has to undergo a change of poise, a quieting, a purification and fine mutation
of its substance and energy by which the many obstacles in it rarefy, drop away
or otherwise disappear.
Even before the outer nature has been effected or
before it is sufficient, one can still break down the wall screening our inner
being from our outer awareness by a strong force of call and aspiration, a
vehement will or violent effort or an effective discipline or process; but this
may be a premature movement and is not without its serious dangers. The perils
were well-known to a past spiritual experience and have been met by imposing
the necessity of initiation, of discipline, of methods of purification and
testing by ordeal, of an entire submission to the directions of the path-finder
or path-leader, one who has realised the Truth and himself possesses and is
able to communicate the light, the experience, a guide who is strong to take by
the hand and carry over difficult passages as well as to instruct and point out
the way. But even so the dangers will be there and can only be surmounted if
there is or there grows up a complete sincerity, a will for purity, a readiness
for obedience to the Truth, for surrender to the Highest, a readiness to lose
or to subject to a divine yoke the limiting and self-affirming ego.
A highest spiritual transformation must intervene on
the psychic or psycho-spiritual change; the psychic movement inward to the
inner being, the Self or Divinity within us, must be completed by an opening
upward to a supreme spiritual status or a higher existence. This can be done by
our opening into what is above us, by an ascent of consciousness into the
ranges of overmind and supramental nature in which the sense of Self and Spirit
is ever unveiled and permanent and in which the instrumentation of the Self and
Spirit is not restricted or divided as in our mind-nature, life-nature,
body-nature. The psychic change also makes this possible; it opens us to the
cosmic consciousness, also to what is now superconscient to our normality. An
early illumination from above can come as an outcome of aspiration or some
inner readiness. But if it is brought about by a premature pressure from below,
it can be attended with difficulties and dangers. The choice, however, does not
always rest with our will, for the operations of the spiritual evolution in us
are very various, and according to the line it has followed will be the turn
taken at any critical phase by the action of the Consciousness-Force in its
urge towards a higher self-manifestation and formation of our existence.
If the spirit could from the first dwell securely on
the superior heights, a complete spiritual transformation might be rapid. When
the psychic change is complete, this can happen by a painless process.
Otherwise a premature pulling down of the higher Forces may be too strong for
the flawed and impure material of Nature and its immediate fate may be that of
the unbaked jar of the Veda which could not hold the divine Soma Wine; or the
descending influence may withdraw or be spilt because the nature cannot contain
or keep it. There might even be some undivine Force trying to seize it and use
it for the purposes of the Adversary. If the work were done from above, from
some spiritual height, there might be a sublimation or uplifting or the
creation of a new Structure compelled by the sheer force of the influence from
above: but this change might not be accepted as native to itself by the lower
being; it would not be a total growth, an integral evolution. A light and power
of the Overmind working in its own full right and in its own sphere is one
thing, the same light working in the obscurity of the physical consciousness
and under its conditions is something quite different and, owing to dilution
and mixture, far inferior in its knowledge and force and results.
This is indeed the reason of the slow and difficult
emergence of the Consciousness-Force in Nature: for Mind and Life have to descend
into Matter and suit themselves to its conditions; changed and diminished by
the obscurity and reluctant inertia of the substance and force in which they
work, they are not able to make a complete transformation of their material
into a fit instrument and a changed substance revelatory of their real and
native power. The Life-consciousness is unable to effectuate the greatness and
felicity of its mighty or beautiful impulses in the material existence; its
impetus fails it, its force of effectuation is inferior to the truth of its
conceptions, the form betrays the Life-intuition within it which it tries to
render into terms of Life-being. The Mind is unable to achieve its high ideas
in the medium of Life or Matter without deductions and compromises which
deprive them of their divinity; its clarities of knowledge and will are not
matched by its force to mould this inferior substance to obey and express it:
on the contrary, its own powers get affected, its will is divided, its
knowledge confused and clouded by the turbidities of life and the
incomprehensiveness of Matter. Neither Life nor Mind succeeds in converting or
perfecting the material existence. But the higher spiritual-mental powers also
undergo the same disability when they descend into Life and Matter; they can do
much more, achieve much luminous change, but the result is a diminished
creation.
Only the Supermind can descend without losing its full
power of action, its action always intrinsic and automatic, its will and
knowledge identical and the result commensurate: its nature is a self-achieving
Truth-Consciousness and, if it limits itself or limits its working, it is by
choice and intention, not by compulsion; in the limits it chooses its action
and the results of its action are harmonious and inevitable. As the psychic
change has to call in the spiritual to complete it, so the first spiritual
change has to call in the supramental transformation to complete it. The whole
radical change in the evolution from a basis of Ignorance to a basis of Knowledge
can only come by the intervention of the supramental Power and its direct
action in earth-existence.
Even from this hurried paraphrasing of the wide sweep
of vision given by Sri Aurobindo for the future of man we do get an idea of the
progress that has been made in the long and slow course of evolution. But the
path moves on and the worthwhile transitional state has to lead to the coming
of the superman or the gnostic being. Man is a mental being incarnate in a
living body. His original form first appears in the world of Mind; the mental
Purusha prepares in that world his body to house Mind. Then, as the Upanishad
says, “by breaking open a door in Matter” he enters into it: the Manomaya
Purusha’s body takes the physical body. Prakriti in the terrestrial process
ultimately gives a form prepared by this Purusha. Similarly too came about the
Pranamaya Purusha’s appearance in the physical mould. But a radical
transformation takes place in the Vijnanamaya Purusha’s preparing his body
first in his world on the basis of the Truth-conscient Substance and then being
born on earth. This does not happen easily. “I purify earth and heaven by the
Truth,”—says boldly the Vedic Rishi. Even the great heavens have to be purified
for this eventuality to materialise. The spiritual mind going all the way up to
the overmental has to open itself to the supramental possibilities. Sri
Aurobindo’s own work was to prepare for the Vijnanamaya Purusha his body in
that world, the golden body of Agni as the Vedic Rishi would say. That he
achieved.
Sri Aurobindo writes: “The transition to Supermind
through Overmind is a passage from Nature as we know it into Supernature. It is
by that very fact impossible for any effort of the mere Mind to achieve; our
unaided personal aspiration and endeavour cannot reach it. All the previous
ascensions have been effectuated by a secret Consciousness-Force operating
first in Inconscience and then in the Ignorance: it has worked by an emergence
of its involved powers to the surface, powers concealed behind the veil and
superior to the past formulations of Nature. Overmind and Supermind are also
involved and occult in earth-Nature, but they have no formations on the
accessible levels of our subliminal inner consciousness; there is as yet no
overmind being or organised overmind nature, no supramental being or organised
supermind nature acting either on our surface or in our normal subliminal
parts: for these greater powers of consciousness are superconscient to the
level of our ignorance. In order that the involved principles of Overmind and
Supermind should emerge from their veiled secrecy, the being and powers of the
Superconscience must descend into us and uplift us and formulate themselves in
our being and powers; this descent is a sine
qua non of the transition and transformation.” [3] The Yoga of the Supreme
alone can cause the Supermind to emerge.
There are difficulties in the transformation of human
nature. When “the higher powers and their intensities enter into the substance
of the Inconscience, they are met by this blind opposing Necessity and are
subjected to this circumscribing and diminishing law of the nescient substance…
. There is an occult truth behind its negations which only the Supermind with
its reconciliation of contraries in the original Reality can take up and so
discover the pragmatic solution of the enigma. Only the supramental Force can
entirely overcome this difficulty of the fundamental Nescience; for with it
enters an opposite and luminous imperative Necessity which underlies all things
and is the original and final self-determining truth-force of the self-existent
Infinite. This greater luminous spiritual Necessity and its sovereign
imperative alone can displace or entirely penetrate, transform into itself and
so replace the blind Ananke of the Inconscience. A supramental change of the
whole substance of the being and therefore necessarily of all its characters,
powers, movements takes place when the involved Supermind in Nature emerges to
meet and join with the supramental light and power descending from Supernature…
. This would mean the appearance in the evolution of a gnostic being or Purusha
and a gnostic Prakriti, a gnostic Nature. There must be an emergent supramental
Consciousness-Force liberated and active within the terrestrial whole and an
organised supramental instrumentation of the Spirit in the life and the body… .
A supramental principle and its cosmic operation once established permanently
on its own basis, the intervening powers of Overmind and spiritual Mind could
found themselves securely upon it and reach their own perfection; they would
become in the earth-existence a hierarchy of states of consciousness rising out
of Mind and physical life to the supreme spiritual level. Mind and mental
humanity would remain as one step in the spiritual evolution; but other degrees
above it would be there formed and accessible by which the embodied mental
being, as it became ready, could climb into the gnosis and change into an
embodied supramental and spiritual being. On this basis the principle of a
divine life in terrestrial Nature would be manifested; even the world of
ignorance and inconscience might discover its own submerged secret and begin to
realise in each lower degree its divine significance.” [4]
To get an essential understanding about the prospects
held in the terrestrial manifestation, we could rapidly go through the last two
chapters of The Life Divine dealing
with the gnostic being and the divine life. Sri Aurobindo explains that the
gnosis is the effective principle of the Spirit; he also describes its
operative role in spiritual existence. Here is a beautiful example of
revelation coming straight from the original source of knowledge.
The gnostic individual would be the consummation of the
spiritual man. He would feel the presence of the Divine in every centre of his
consciousness, in every vibration of his life-force, in every cell of his body.
The gnostic individual would be in the world and of the world, yet would exceed
it in his consciousness and live in his Self of transcendence above it; he
would be universal but free in the universe, individual but not limited by a
separative individuality. The gnostic being will take up the world of Life and
Matter, but he will turn and adapt it to his own truth and purpose of
existence; he will mould life itself into his own spiritual image. This will be
first effective in the shaping of his own inner and outer individual existence,
but the same power and principle will operate in any common gnostic life; the
relations of gnostic being with gnostic being will be the expression of their
one gnostic self and supernature shaping into a significant power and form of
itself the whole common existence. The will of the Spirit will directly control
and determine the movements and law of the body. In the supramental being it is
the consciousness with the Real-Idea in it which will govern everything. This
Real-Idea is a truth-perception which is self-effective. It is this that will
rule the existence with an entire knowledge and power and include in its rule
the functioning and action of the body. The body will be turned by the power of
the spiritual consciousness into a true and fit and perfectly responsive
instrument of the Spirit.
The character of the dynamis of the gnostic Supernature
is an entire freedom of the Spirit, an entire self-existent order
self-creating, self-effectuating, self-secure in its own natural and inevitable
movement. Only if we live in that deeper and greater way in our dynamic parts,
can there be a force for creating a greater life.
The spiritual fulfilment of the urge to individual
perfection and an inner completeness of being is the sense of a divine life.
But a new world, a change in the total life calls for the appearance not only
of isolated evolved individuals acting in the unevolved mass, but of many
gnostic individuals forming a new kind of beings and a new common life superior
to the present individual and common existence. All will be united by the
evolution of the Truth-Consciousness in them; in the changed way of being which
this consciousness would bring about in them, they will feel themselves to be
embodiments of a single self, souls of a single Reality; illumined and motived
by a fundamental unity of knowledge, actuated by a fundamental unified will and
feeling, a life expressing the spiritual Truth would find through them its own
natural forms of becoming.
An innate character of the gnostic consciousness and
the instrumentation of Supernature is a wholeness of sight and action, a unity of
knowledge with knowledge, a reconciliation of all that seems contrary in our
mental seeing and knowing, an identity of Knowledge and Will acting as a single
power in perfect unison with the truth of things. An identity and authenticity
and a harmony of truth with truth are the native character of all gnostic
seeing and action. But also the larger existence will invade the mind with the
potencies of a greater consciousness and a greater force, a bringing out of new
powers of the being. Knowledge is power and act of consciousness, Will is
conscious power and conscious act of force of being; both in the gnostic being
will reach greater magnitudes than any we now know, a higher degree of
themselves, a richer instrumentation.
At present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis
in which is concealed a choice of its destiny. A structure of the external life
has been raised up by man’s ever-active mind and life-will, a structure of an
unmanageable hugeness and complexity, for the service of his mental, vital,
physical claims and urges, a complex political, social, administrative,
economic, cultural machinery, an organised collective means for his
intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has created
a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental
capacity and understanding and his still more limited spiritual and moral
capacity to utilise and manage, a too dangerous servant of his blundering ego
and its appetites. But no greater seeing mind, no intuitive soul of knowledge
has yet come to his surface of consciousness which could make this basic
fullness of life a condition for the free growth of something that exceeded it.
This new fullness of the means of life might be an opportunity for the full
pursuit of other and greater aims surpassing the material existence. The
evolution of human mind and life must necessarily lead towards an increasing
universality. Man has harmonised life in the past by organised ideation and
limitation; he has created societies based on fixed ideas or fixed customs, a
fixed cultural system or an organic life-system, each with its own order; the
throwing of all these into the melting-pot of a more and more intermingling
life and a pouring in of ever new ideas and motives and facts and possibilities
call for a new and greater consciousness to meet and master the increasing
potentialities of existence.
A life of unity, mutuality and harmony born of a deeper
and wider truth of our being is the only truth of life that can successfully
replace the imperfect mental constructions of the past. Such a change and such
a reshaping of life is what humanity is blindly seeking. But a genuine
discovery can be made only if there is an entire reliance upon the guiding
Light and Will, if there is the law of a luminous expression of the truth of
the Spirit in life. That would presuppose a gnostic world with the life of
gnostic beings proceeding within or side by side with a life of beings in the
Ignorance, attempting to emerge in it or out of it, and yet the law of the two
lives would seem to be contrary and to offend against each other. It might even
be questioned whether conflict and collision would not be the first rule of
their relation, since in the life of the Ignorance there is present and active
the formidable influence of those forces of Darkness, supporters of evil and
violence, whose interest it is to contaminate or destroy all higher Light that
enters into the human existence. But these issues will pertain to the problems
of transition.
If the gnostic consciousness is established in the
earth-life, the power and knowledge at its disposal would be much greater than
the power and knowledge of mental man, and the life of a community of gnostic
beings, supposing it to be separate, would be as safe against attack as the
organised life of man against any attack by a lower species. But as this
knowledge and the very principle of the gnostic nature would ensure a luminous
unity in the common life of gnostic beings, so also it would be sufficient to
ensure a dominating harmony and reconciliation between the two types of life.
The influence of the supramental principle on earth would fall upon the life of
the Ignorance and impose harmony on it within its limits. It is conceivable
that the gnostic life would be separate, but it would surely admit within its
borders as much of human life as was turned towards spirituality and in
progress towards the heights.
A gnostic Supernature transcends all the values of our
normal ignorant Nature. The gnostic being will be aware of the Divine Reality,
and it is for that he will live. What he shall do will be decided by the Truth
of the Knowledge and Will in him, a total and infinite Truth with respect for
each truth in its place and with a clear knowledge of the forces at work and
the intention in the manifesting Divine Nisus at each step of cosmic evolution
and in each event and circumstance.
All life for the achieved spiritual or gnostic
consciousness must be the manifestation of the realised truth of Spirit; only
what can transform itself and find its own spiritual self in that greater Truth
and fuse itself into its harmony can be accorded a life-acceptance. The
supramental gnosis will itself bring down its own truth. The forms with what is
real and abiding in them will be a part of it. The arts and the crafts would
exist as expressions and means of the truth of the Spirit and the beauty and
delight of existence. Life and the body would be no longer tyrannous masters
demanding nine-tenths of existence for their satisfaction, but means and powers
for the expression of the Spirit.
The one rule of the gnostic life would be the
self-expression of the Spirit, the will of the Divine Being; that will, that
self-expression could manifest through extreme simplicity or through extreme
complexity and opulence or in their natural balance,—for beauty and plenitude,
a hidden sweetness and laughter in things, a sunshine and gladness of life are
also powers and expressions of the Spirit. In all there would be the same
plastic principle. A great diversity and liberty of self-expression based on an
underlying unity might well become manifest; but everywhere there would be
harmony and truth of order.
A life of gnostic beings, a life of a spiritual divine
light and power and joy manifested in material Nature, might be characterised
as a divine life. But this must not be confused with past and present ideas of
supermanhood, a supermanhood of the Nietzschean type of the “blonde beast” or
the dark beast, a return to barbaric strength and ruthlessness and force; this
would be no evolution, it would be a reversion to an old strenuous barbarism.
Or it might signify the emergence of the Rakshasa or Asura out of a tense
effort of humanity to surpass and transcend itself, but in the wrong direction.
But what has to emerge is something much more difficult and much more simple;
it is a self-realised being, a building of the spiritual self, an intensity and
urge of the soul and the deliverance and sovereignty of its light and power and
beauty, the sovereignty of the Spirit over its own instruments, its possession
of itself and its possession of life in the power of the spirit. This is the
true supermanhood and the one real possibility of evolutionary Nature.
This new status would be a reversal of the present law
of human consciousness and life. It is for the taste of the Ignorance, its
surprise and adventure, one might say, that the soul has descended into the
Inconscience and assumed the disguise of Matter, for the adventure and the joy
of creation and discovery, an adventure of the Spirit, an adventure of the Mind
and Life and the hazardous surprises of their working in Matter, for the
discovery and conquest of the new and the unknown. Any life surpassing the
present life tends to appear as something featureless and empty. But this is a
misconception. But for the gnostic consciousness it would be an entry into the
Infinite. It would be a self-creation bringing out the Infinite infinitely into
form of being. The delight of the Spirit is ever new, the forms of beauty it
takes innumerable, its godhead ever young and the taste of delight, rasa, of the Infinite eternal and
inexhaustible. If there is an evolution in material Nature and if it is an
evolution of being with consciousness and life as its two key-terms and powers,
this fullness of being, fullness of consciousness, fullness of life must be the
goal of development towards which we are tending and which will manifest at an
early or later stage of our destiny. The Self, the Spirit, the Reality that is
disclosing itself out of the first inconscience of life and matter, would
evolve its complete truth of being and consciousness in that life and matter.
It would return to itself through a spiritual completeness of itself in life.
Our evolution in the Ignorance with its chequered joy and pain of
self-discovery and world-discovery, its half-fulfilments, its constant finding
and missing, is only our first state. It must lead inevitably towards an
evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of the Spirit, a
self-revelation of the Divinity in things in that true power of itself in
Nature which is to us still a Supernature. [5]
References
[1] Rig Veda, IV. 16. 3
[2] The Life
Divine, pp. 835-36
[3] Ibid., p.
921
[4] Ibid.,
pp. 961-63
[5] Ibid.,
pp. 971-1070