The article posted here is an abstracted text taken
from Essays in Philosophy and Yoga,
Collected Works of Sri Aurobindo. For the fuller presentation please go to the
original. The essay first appeared in the August 1949 issue of the Bulletin of Physical Education and
later, in 1952, published in the book Supramental
Manifestation Upon Earth. This is the last set of eight prose articles Sri
Aurobindo wrote at the request of the Mother. If the evolutionary aim is the
manifestation of the Divine in the physical, that even the body shall be the
House of God, that it shall express dynamically the possibilities of the
Spirit, then the question arises as to what shall be its nature. “Light and
bliss and beauty and a perfection of the spontaneous right action of all the
being are there as native powers of the supramental truth-consciousness and
these will in their very nature transform mind and life and body even here upon
earth into a manifestation of the truth-conscious spirit.” There has to be
always the push towards perfection that the manifesting powers of light and joy
and truth and beauty and sweetness and love find their natural scope of articulation
and presentation. The new type, the divine body, must continue the already
developed evolutionary form; but it will acquire new means and ranges of
communication. It must ultimately reflect or reproduce here in a divine life on
the earth something of the highest glory and greatness of the self-manifesting
spirit. It shall be the dynamic centre of activity that a divine collectivity, divyam janam, will be in a position to
lead the evolution not from Ignorance to Knowledge but from Knowledge to
greater Knowledge in the limitless vistas of the Infinite. ~ RYD
A divine life in a divine body is the formula of the
ideal that we envisage. But what will be the divine body? What will be the
nature of this body, its structure, the principle of its activity, the
perfection that distinguishes it from the limited and imperfect physicality
within which we are now bound? What will be the conditions and operations of
its life, still physical in its base upon the earth, by which it can be known
as divine?
If it is to be the product of an evolution, what
principle must intervene if there is to be a transformation, a progressive or
sudden change?
It is indeed as a result of our evolution that we
arrive at the possibility of this transformation. Light and bliss and beauty
and a perfection of the spontaneous right action of all the being are there as
native powers of the supramental truth-consciousness and these will in their
very nature transform mind and life and body even here upon earth into a
manifestation of the truth-conscious spirit. The obscurations of earth will not
prevail against the supramental truth-consciousness. All may not open to the
fullness of its light and power, but whatever does open must to that extent
undergo the change. That will be the principle of transformation. A
transformation of the body must be the condition for a total transformation of
the nature.
It might be that the transformation might take place
by stages; there are powers of the nature still belonging to the mental region
which are yet potentialities of a growing gnosis lifted beyond our human
mentality and partaking of the light and power of the Divine and an ascent
through these planes, a descent of them into the mental being might seem to be
the natural evolutionary course. But in practice it might be found that these
intermediate levels would not be sufficient for the total transformation since
they could bring down to the mind only a partial divinity or raise the mind
towards that but not effectuate its elevation into the complete supramentality
of the truth-consciousness. Still these levels might become stages of the
ascent. It is not to be supposed that all humanity would rise in a block into
the supermind; at first those only might attain to the highest or some
intermediate height of the ascent whose inner evolution has fitted them for so
great a change or who are raised by the direct touch of the Divine into its
perfect light and power and bliss.
In any case these would be beginnings only and could
not constitute the fullness of the divine life upon earth. [The question could
be:] How far can physical transformation be carried, what are the limits
within which it must remain to be consistent with life upon earth and without
carrying that life beyond the earthly sphere or pushing it towards the
supraterrestrial existence? The supramental consciousness is not a fixed
quantity but a power which passes to higher and higher levels of possibility
until it reaches supreme consummations of spiritual existence fulfilling
supermind as supermind fulfils the ranges of spiritual consciousness that are
pushing towards it from the human or mental level. In this progression the body
also may reach a more perfect form and a higher range of its expressive powers,
become a more and more perfect vessel of divinity.
* * *
This destiny of the body has rarely in the past been
envisaged or else not for the body here upon earth; such forms would rather be
imagined or visioned as the privilege of celestial beings and not possible as
the physical residence of a soul still bound to terrestrial nature. The
Vaishnavas have spoken of a spiritualised conscious body, cinmaya deha; there
has been the conception of a radiant or luminous body, which might be the Vedic
jyotirmaya deha. A light has been seen by some radiating from the bodies of
highly developed spiritual persons, even extending to the emission of an
enveloping aura and there has been recorded an initial phenomenon of this kind
in the life of so great a spiritual personality as Ramakrishna. But these
things have been either conceptual only or rare and occasional and for the most
part the body has not been regarded as possessed of spiritual possibility or
capable of transformation… More ordinarily in the spiritual tradition the body
has been regarded as an obstacle, incapable of spiritualisation or
transmutation and a heavy weight holding the soul to earthly nature and
preventing its ascent either to spiritual fulfilment in the Supreme or to the
dissolution of its individual being in the Supreme. But if a total
transformation of the being is our aim, a transformation of the body must be an
indispensable part of it; without that no full divine life on earth is
possible…
* * *
Still the inconveniences of the animal body and its
animal nature and impulses and the limitations of the human body at its best
are there in the beginning. To the physical being it brings a bondage to the
material instruments, to the brain and heart and senses, wed to materiality and
materialism of all kinds, to the bodily mechanism and its needs and
obligations, to the imperative need of food and the preoccupation with the
means of getting it and storing it as one of the besetting interests of life,
to fatigue and sleep, to the satisfaction of bodily desire. The life-force in
man also is tied down to these small things; it has to limit the scope of its
larger ambitions and longings, its drive to rise beyond the pull of earth and
follow the heavenlier intuitions of its psychic parts, the heart's ideal and
the soul's yearnings. On the mind the body imposes the boundaries of the
physical being and the physical life and the sense of the sole complete reality
of physical things with the rest as a sort of brilliant fireworks of the
imagination, of lights and glories that can only have their full play in
heavens beyond, on higher planes of existence, but not here; it afflicts the
idea and aspiration with the burden of doubt, the evidence of the subtle senses
and the intuition with uncertainty and the vast field of supraphysical
consciousness and experience with the imputation of unreality and clamps down
to its earth-roots the growth of the spirit from its original limiting humanity
into the supramental truth and the divine nature. These obstacles can be
overcome, the denials and resistance of the body surmounted, its transformation
is possible. Even the inconscient and animal part of us can be illumined and
made capable of manifesting the god-nature, even as our mental humanity can be
made to manifest the superhumanity of the supramental truth-consciousness and
the divinity of what is now superconscious to us, and the total transformation
made a reality here.
The difficulty is dual, psychological and corporeal:
the first is the effect of the unregenerated animality upon the life,
especially by the insistence of the body's gross instincts, impulses, desires;
the second is the outcome of our corporeal structure and organic
instrumentation imposing its restrictions on the dynamism of the higher divine
nature. The first of these two difficulties is easier to deal with and conquer;
for here the will can intervene and impose on the body the power of the higher
nature…
Another difficulty that the transformation of the body
has to face is its dependence for its very existence upon food, and here too
are involved the gross physical instincts, impulses, desires that are
associated with this difficult factor, the essential cravings of the palate,
the greed of food and animal gluttony of the belly, the coarsening of the mind
when it grovels in the mud of sense, obeys a servitude to its mere animal part
and hugs its bondage to Matter. But until something is achieved or made
possible we have to go back to food and the established material forces of
Nature. In fact we do, however unconsciously, draw constantly upon the
universal energy, the force in Matter to replenish our material existence and
the mental, vital and other potencies in the body: we do it directly in the
invisible processes of interchange constantly kept up by Nature and by special
means devised by her; breathing is one of these, sleep also and repose. But as
her basic means for maintaining and renewing the gross physical body and its
workings and inner potencies Nature has selected the taking in of outside
matter in the shape of food, its digestion, assimilation of what is assimilable
and elimination of what cannot or ought not to be assimilated; this by itself
is sufficient for mere maintenance, but for assuring health and strength in the
body so maintained it has added the impulse towards physical exercise and play
of many kinds, ways for the expenditure and renewal of energy, the choice or
the necessity of manifold action and labour. In the new life, in its beginnings
at least, it would not be necessary or advisable to make any call for an
extreme or precipitate rejection of the need of food or the established natural
method for the maintenance of the still imperfectly transformed body.
The divine life must always be actuated by the push
towards perfection; a perfection of the joy of life is part and an essential
part of it, the body's delight in things and the body's joy of life are not
excluded from it; they too have to be made perfect. A large totality is the
very nature of this new and growing way of existence, a fullness of the
possibilities of the mind transmuted into a thing of light, of the life
converted into a force of spiritual power and joy, of the body transformed into
an instrument of a divine action, divine knowledge, divine bliss. All can be
taken into its scope that is capable of transforming itself, all that can be an
instrument, a vessel, an opportunity for the expression of this totality of the
self-manifesting Spirit.
* * *
What agency could we find which we could make the means
of this all-important liberation and change? Something there is in us or something
has to be developed, perhaps a central and still occult part of our being
containing forces whose powers in our actual and present make-up are only a
fraction of what could be, but if they became complete and dominant would be
truly able to bring about with the help of the light and force of the soul and
the supramental truth-consciousness the necessary physical transformation and
its consequences. This might be found in the system of Chakras revealed by
Tantric knowledge and accepted in the systems of Yoga, conscious centres and
sources of all the dynamic powers of our being organising their action through
the plexuses and arranged in an ascending series from the lowest physical to
the highest mind centre and spiritual centre called the thousand-petalled lotus
where ascending Nature, the Serpent Power of the Tantrics, meets the Brahman
and is liberated into the Divine Being. These centres are closed or half-closed
within us and have to be opened before their full potentiality can be
manifested in our physical nature…
But what would be the result of the emergence of these
forces and their liberated and diviner action on the body itself, what their
dynamic connection with it and their transforming operation on the still
existing animal nature and its animal impulses and gross material procedure? It
might be held that the first necessary change would be the liberation of the
mind, the life-force, the subtle physical agencies and the physical
consciousness into a freer and a diviner activity, a many-dimensioned and
unlimited operation of their consciousness, a large outbreak of higher powers
and the sublimation of the bodily consciousness itself, of its instrumentation,
capacity, capability for the manifestation of the soul in the world of Matter.
The subtle senses now concealed in us might come forward into a free action and
the material senses themselves become means or channels for the vision of what
is now invisible to us or the discovery of things surrounding us but at present
unseizable and held back from our knowledge. A total transformation of the body
would demand a sufficient change of the most material part of the organism, its
constitution, its processes and its set-up of nature.
Again, it might be thought that a full control would be
sufficient, a knowledge and a vision of this organism and its unseen action and
an effective control determining its operations according to the conscious
will; this possibility has been affirmed as something already achieved and a
part of the development of the inner powers in some. The cessation of the
breathing while still the life of the body remained stable, the hermetic
sealing up at will not only of the breath but of all the vital manifestations
for long periods, the stoppage of the heart similarly at will while thought and
speech and other mental workings continued unabated, these and other phenomena
of the power of the will over the body are known and well-attested examples of
this kind of mastery. But these are occasional or sporadic successes and do not
amount to transformation; a total control is necessary and an established and
customary and, indeed, a natural mastery. Even with that achieved something
more fundamental might have to be demanded for the complete liberation and
change into a divine body.
Again, it might be urged that the organic structure of
the body no less than its basic outer form would have to be retained as a
necessary material foundation for the retention of the earth-nature, the
connection of the divine life with the life of earth and a continuance of the
evolutionary process so as to prevent a breaking upward out of and away from it
into a state of being which would properly belong to a higher plane and not to
a terrestrial divine fulfilment. The maintenance of the present organism
without any transformation of it would not but act as such a bond and
confinement within the old nature. There would be a material base but it would
be of the earth earthy, an old and not a new earth with a diviner psychological
structure. A change is then necessary here too, a necessary part of the total
bodily transformation, which would divinise the whole man, at least in the
ultimate result, and not leave his evolution incomplete.
This aim, it might be said, would be sufficiently
served if the instrumentation of the centres and their forces reigned over all
the activities of the nature with an entire domination of the body and made it
both in its structural form and its organic workings a free channel and means
of communication and a plastic instrument of cognition and dynamic action for
all that they had to do in the material life, in the world of Matter. There
would have to be a change in the operative processes of the material organs
themselves and, it may well be, in their very constitution and their
importance; they could not be allowed to impose their limitations imperatively
on the new physical life. To begin with, they might become more clearly outer
ends of the channels of communication and action, more serviceable for the
psychological purposes of the inhabitant, less blindly material in their
responses, more conscious of the act and aim of the inner movements and powers
which use them and which they are wrongly supposed by the material man in us to
generate and to use. The brain would be a channel of communication of the form
of the thoughts and a battery of their insistence on the body and the outside
world where they could then become effective directly, communicating themselves
without physical means from mind to mind, producing with a similar directness
effects on the thoughts, actions and lives of others or even upon material
things. The heart would equally be a direct communicant and medium of
interchange for the feelings and emotions thrown outward upon the world by the
forces of the psychic centre. Heart could reply directly to heart, the
life-force come to the help of other lives and answer their call in spite of
strangeness and distance, many beings without any external communication thrill
with the message and meet in the secret light from one divine centre. The will
might control the organs that deal with food, safeguard automatically the
health, eliminate greed and desire, substitute subtler processes or draw in
strength and substance from the universal life-force so that the body could
maintain for a long time its own strength and substance without loss or waste,
remaining thus with no need of sustenance by material aliments, and yet
continue a strenuous action with no fatigue or pause for sleep or repose. The
soul's will or the mind's could act from higher sources upon the sex centre and
the sex organs so as to check firmly or even banish the grosser sexual impulse
or stimulus and instead of serving an animal excitation or crude drive or
desire turn their use to the storing, production and direction towards brain
and heart and life-force of the essential energy, ojas, of which this region is
the factory so as to support the works of the mind and soul and spirit and the
higher life-powers and limit the expenditure of the energy on lower things. The
soul, the psychic being, could more easily fill all with the light and turn the
very matter of the body to higher uses for its own greater purpose.
This would be a first potent change, but not by any
means all that is possible or desirable. For it may well be that the
evolutionary urge would proceed to a change of the organs themselves in their
material working and use and diminish greatly the need of their instrumentation
and even of their existence. The centres in the subtle body, sukşma śarīra, of
which one would become conscious and aware of all going on in it, would pour
their energies into material nerve and plexus and tissue and radiate them
through the whole material body; all the physical life and its necessary
activities in this new existence could be maintained and operated by these
higher agencies in a freer and ampler way and by a less burdensome and
restricting method. This might go so far that these organs might cease to be
indispensable and even be felt as too obstructive: the central force might use
them less and less and finally throw aside their use altogether. If that
happened they might waste by atrophy, be reduced to an insignificant minimum or
even disappear. The central force might substitute for them subtle organs of a
very different character or, if anything material was needed, instruments that
would be forms of dynamism or plastic transmitters rather than what we know as
organs.
This might well be part of a supreme total
transformation of the body, though this too might not be final. To envisage
such changes is to look far ahead. Whatever is necessary for the evolutionary
purpose for the increasing, enlarging, heightening of the consciousness, which
seems to be its central will and aim here, or the progression of its enabling
means and preserving environment, has to be kept and furthered. What has to
be preserved must indeed be preserved and that means whatever is necessary or
thoroughly serviceable for the uses of the new life on earth; whatever is still
needed and will serve its purpose but is imperfect, will have to be retained
but developed and perfected; whatever is no longer of use for new aims or is a
disability must be thrown aside. The necessary forms and instrumentations of
Matter must remain since it is in a world of Matter that the divine life has to
manifest, but their materiality must be refined, uplifted, ennobled, illumined,
since Matter and the world of Matter have increasingly to manifest the
indwelling Spirit.
The new type, the divine body, must continue the
already developed evolutionary form; there must be a continuation from the type
Nature has all along been developing, a continuity from the human to the divine
body, no breaking away to something unrecognisable but a high sequel to what
has already been achieved and in part perfected. The human body has in it parts
and instruments that have been sufficiently evolved to serve the divine life;
these have to survive in their form, though they must be still further
perfected, their limitations of range and use removed, their liability to
defect and malady and impairment eliminated, their capacities of cognition and
dynamic action carried beyond the present limits. New powers have to be
acquired by the body which our present humanity could not hope to realise,
could not even dream of or could only imagine. Much that can now only be known,
worked out or created by the use of invented tools and machinery might be
achieved by the new body in its own power or by the inhabitant spirit through
its own direct spiritual force. The body itself might acquire new means and
ranges of communication with other bodies, new processes of acquiring
knowledge, a new aesthesis, new potencies of manipulation of itself and
objects. It might not be impossible for it to possess or disclose means native
to its own constitution, substance or natural instrumentation for making the
far near and annulling distance, cognising what is now beyond the body's
cognisance, acting where action is now out of its reach or its domain,
developing subtleties and plasticities which could not be permitted under
present conditions to the needed fixity of a material frame. These and other
numerous potentialities might appear and the body become an instrument
immeasurably superior to what we can now imagine as possible. There could be an
evolution from a first apprehending truth-consciousness to the utmost heights
of the ascending ranges of supermind and it may pass the borders of the
supermind proper itself where it begins to shadow out, develop, delineate
expressive forms of life touched by a supreme pure existence, consciousness and
bliss which constitute the worlds of a highest truth of existence, dynamism of
tapas, glory and sweetness of bliss, the absolute essence and pitch of the all-creating
Ananda. The transformation of the physical being might follow this incessant
line of progression and the divine body reflect or reproduce here in a divine
life on the earth something of this highest greatness and glory of the
self-manifesting Spirit.
Re my question about natural selection from the other thread ...
How will the progress towards supramental transformation be passed from one body to another? Will it be only through occult means such as from Sri Aurobindo to the Mother at his Samadhi? Or will there be a physical basis for the transmission? If so, will it be heridity or some other? Will natural selection play any role?
> How will the progress towards supramental transformation be passed from one body to another?
Sri Aurobindo & The Mother were twin souls with the same psychic being so it was easy for them to pass their accumulated vibrations to each other. For the rest, that may not work. The common man's evolution would proceed along two stages:
1. In the intermediate stage, there would be a race of evolved beings who would practice Yoga in the existing human body and experience the supramental descent into the mind, vital and physical planes. This would be the way the forerunners Sri Aurobindo & The Mother experienced it.
2. In the second stage, there will be a new race alongside the existing human race with a real supramental body. Where does the real supramental body come from? For every being on earth, there exists a prototype/archetype in the occult worlds. The prototype is like a mold (think metal casting) which gathers the Universal elements and creates a form out of it. The human race has a human prototype and every species has a prototype somewhere in the Creator's womb. The Mother had seen the supramental prototype in her occult explorations.
Well, one time I was there (Theon used to warn against going beyond this domain, because he said you wouldn't come back), but there I was, wanting to pass over to the other side, when - in a quite unexpected and astounding way - I found myself in the presence of the 'principle,' a principle of the human form. It didn't resemble man as we are used to seeing him, but it was an upright form, standing just on the border between the world of forms and the Formless, like a kind of standard. [[By 'standard,' Mother means a sort of model or archetype. ]] At that time nobody had ever spoken to me about it and Madame Theon had never seen it - no one had ever seen or said anything. But I felt I was on the verge of discovering a secret.
Afterwards, when I met Sri Aurobindo and talked to him about it, he told me, 'It is surely the prototype of the supramental form.' I saw it several times again, later on, and this proved to be true.
When one went beyond and entered those regions, then there was ... it was the Supreme outside the creation, beyond the creation. That's where I saw the representative form of the new creation (and that was before I ever heard anything about Sri Aurobindo and the Supermind), that's where I saw the form that must succeed the human form, like the symbolic representation of the new creation. That was two or three years before I heard of Sri Aurobindo and met him. So when he told me about the supramental creation, I said to him (laughing), "But of course, I know, I saw it up there!"
> If so, will it be heredity or some other?
Can children of supramentalized beings be supramental ? I think the Mother said somewhere that procreation won't be necessary because supramental beings will be asexual. More confusion in the legal matters in society !
> Will natural selection play any role?
No. All such biological changes of species visible on the earth-scene [e.g. punctuated equilibrium] are the by-product of the some alteration in the generic prototype which first occurs in occult worlds.
> In the intermediate stage, there would be a race of evolved beings
The question can be asked : why is this intermediate race necessary? It is needed to fill the gap in consciousness between the human world and the supramental world. See The Agenda, February 3, 1958
http://mother-agenda.narod.ru/Agenda_1/1958-02-03_b.htm
I now know that for the two worlds to join in a constant and conscious relationship what is missing is an intermediate zone between the existing physical world and the supramental world as it exists. This zone has yet to be built, both in the individual consciousness and in the objective world, and it is being built.
> Mother said somewhere that procreation won't be necessary because supramental beings will be asexual.
The question here would be: If supramental beings are sexless, how can new beings be born? New beings would appear by direct manifestation of the psychic being. The Mother mentions this in
And it was a sexless being: neither man nor woman. So I said to myself (it may be always that way, I don't know, but at that time I noticed it very clearly), I said to myself, "But the psychic being is the one that will materialize and become the supramental being!"
Akash has two comments apropos of the unfolding mechanism of evolution, if we can say so.
Re: Two Sides of Two Different Coins
by Anonymous [Akash] on Wed 13 May 2009 10:58 AM IST |
Re: Towards the Intermediate Race: The Divine Body—by Sri Aurobindo
by Akash on Sat 16 May 2009 11:50 AM IST |
I: >>Is it ["harmonious rapport ... of the IY Community”,] necessary for the supramental manifestation? While Evolution will establish this new principle and make it accessible to all, only a few will be transformed into the new race (species) when the time comes - just like not all apes turned human. Since natural selection is much less applicable to humans who have separated survival and propagation, some other selection criterion will operate?>> [Wed 13 May 2009]
Luckily, as the Mother said, her work does not depend upon man’s readiness or otherwise. Her work is in the Will of the Lord and she was constantly invoking it in every occult-yogic move of hers.
But what is the kind of “selection criterion” you would like to indicate? Any idea? However here is a species which can become an active collaborator in making evolution itself evolve further. In fact, one begins to wonder if it is the “biological” that will determine the future or it is the future in the hands of man and evolved nature who will govern things in the logic of evolution, as if the teleological element is becoming prominent.
II: >> Re my question about natural selection from the other thread... How will the progress towards supramental transformation be passed from one body to another? Will it be only through occult means such as from Sri Aurobindo to the Mother at his Samadhi? Or will there be a physical basis for the transmission? If so, will it be heridity or some other? Will natural selection play any role? [Sat 16 May 2009]>>
First of course it has to be by the occult means. But it is absolutely necessary to recognize the work the Mother had to do, to recognise what she did after this occult transmission. No doubt it is a dynamic radiating centre, a power-house, a dynamo of the divine will put into the operation of the evolution; but the details the way things will happen have not been give. The Mother has said so on a number of occasions.
But let me say a few other things in this connection.
First it is the ‘story’ in the Aitereya Upanishad:
These were the Gods that He created; they fell into this great Ocean, and Hunger and Thirst leaped upon them. Then they said to Him, "Command unto us an habitation that we may dwell secure and eat of food."
He brought unto them the cow, but they said, "Verily, it is not sufficient for us." He brought unto them the horse, but they said, "Verily, it is not enough for us."
He brought unto them Man, and they said, "O well fashioned truly! Man indeed is well and beautifully made." Then the Spirit said unto them, "Enter ye in each according to his habitation."
Not biological but something else enters into the operation. There are far too many things that happen behind the scene, so to say, and we are trying to grasp them with analytical faculty alone. Naturally, this is going to prove frustrating. >
I’m stunned when I read some of the details Sri Aurobindo has put in his Record. It is totally beyond us, certainly beyond me. But let us go through it.
A series of images and a number of intimations have been given yesterday in the chitra-drishti to illustrate the history of the first two Manwantaras & the vicissitudes through which the human idea has gone in the course of these unnumbered ages. It is not at all surprising that there should be no relics of those vicissitudes in the strata of the present earth; for the present earth is not the soil of the planet as it was in the earliest Manwantaras. The detritions, the upheavals, the convulsions, the changes that it has undergone cannot be estimated by the imaginative & summary methods of the modern geologists, men who think themselves advanced & Notes on Images Seen in March 1914 masters of knowledge, but are only infants & babblers in their own sciences. It is unnecessary to go at present into the scene or habitat of the incidents & peoples shown in the drishti. The facts are sufficient.
The first image was that of a young & beautiful woman seeing, holding two children by either hand, preceded by a third though this was not clearly seen and followed by a little child, a girl with her cloth in her hand. All are of the female sex. In their fiight they have upset a handsome & well-dressed young man, who was also .eeing across the line of their .ight and now lies sprawling on his back. Behind the woman & her girls an elderly & bearded savage, naked & armed with some kind of weapon, runs at a distance of not many yards and but for the accident of the upset would soon overtake the fugitives. The second image showed the young man still supine with the savage upon him threatening him .ercely with his weapon, but the bhava shows that not slaughter, but prisoners &slaves are the object of the raid. The young man is evidently taken prisoner by the pursuer who has turned aside from the women to this, possibly, more valuable booty. In the third image the little girl of the .rst is seen captured by a young&handsome barbarian who has managed to comfort and soothe her&is persuading her to lead him to the secret refuge of the fugitives. By this device, it is now indicated, he is able to discover this refuge & capture the whole colony of the civilised people. The success raises him to the rank of a great chief among his people, for it is his section of the raiders who make the victory really pro.table. The chitra-lipi Indigenous just given shows that these barbarians are the original inhabitants of the country, the others colonists & conquerors. It is intimated by the vijnana that both assailants & assailed are in the Pashu stage & people of the first or second Manu, but the civilised have reached a kind of Devahood of the Gandharva type, the savages are a reappearance of the Asura Rakshasa type of Pashu brought back into a more advanced age in order to re-invigorate the over-refined type that has been evolved. The young chief of the image is a sort of Caesar-Augustus or Alaric of the barbarians. He takes the lead of their revolt which is at .rst a disordered movement of indignation (lipi Indignation alternating with indigenous)[,] systematizes it, conquers & enslaves the Gandharvas, learns from them their civilisation and modi.es it by the barbarian manners. The new race evolved finally dominates the then world & .xes the next type of the Pashu evolution.
But who are these Pashus? For this is not the first pratikalpa of the Pashus, but the sixth of the Asuras, and it is indicated that none of these visions belong to any other pratikalpa than the present. It follows that even these savages cannot be pure Pashus, but Asuras or Asura Rakshasas starting from the Pashu stage, so far as the Asura can go back to that stage, and ful.lling the possibilities of a sort of Pashu-Asura before evolving his Asurahood in the higher types & arriving & shooting beyond the pure Asura. This is an important modi.cation. It follows that each type of the Dashagavas goes, within the mould of his own type, through all the ten g´avas from the Pashu to the Siddhadeva. The Pashu-Asura will be different from the pure Pashu or the Pashu Deva, because he will always be .rst & characteristically an Asura, but he will weigh from the buddhi on the bodily experiences as Pashu, on the vijnana experiences as Deva & so in each type according to its particular .eld of activity. The Deva will do it, instead, from the vijnana, & the difference of leverage & point of action will make an immense difference both to the character of the activity and its results in the .eld. Moreover it is clear that the Pashu Asura goes also through the various types within his mixed Pashuhood & Asurahood before he passes to the Pisacha-Asura, who has to undergo a similar development. The great variety of types that will result from this evolutionary system, is evident.
The farther images seen3 in connection with this Pashu-Asura episode are three in number. First the plain&desolate country with a hill in the distance, about which it is indicated by the vijnana that this was the appearance of the country not actually occupied by the barbarians before the colonists came in (by sea, it is suggested & then by movement from the coasts occupied to the inland tracts,) & peopled it sparsely. The catastrophe came because of their haste to conquer the whole small continent before they were able to people all the unoccupied land & build themselves into a strong & irresistible power organised in great cities&populous nations. This haste was due to the superior fertility & attractiveness of the soil actually occupied by the barbarians who, being poor agriculturalists, had settled only on rich soil not demanding a skilful labour & left the rest untilled. The contrast between the waterless soil first seen & the banks of the great river on which was the barbarian settlement, is typical of the contrast between the two kinds of soil,
utilised & unutilised. The premature attempts at conquest began with aggressions on the nearest barbarian villages & the raid seen was the .rst effective retaliation carried out in the absence of the .ghting men of the colony, so that on the side of the attacked only women, children & peaceful unarmed men are seen fleeing to a habitual & secret place of refuge. For this colony was on the very borders of the barbarian country & always exposed to incursions.
It is not clear why the colonist .ghters were absent, whether on a raid on the barbarians or in a civil quarrel among themselves. The second image, the forti.ed city on the plateau, shown by the terraces cut in the slope of the plateau & the subsequent separate chitra of one of the city domes, to be a civilised & magnificent metropolis, shows the final result of the amalgamation of barbarians & colonists. The original barbarian settlement was on the bank of the great river seen with one of its ghauts not far from the foot of the plateau, but after the raid, in order to afeguard themselves & their booty, the savages retreated at the instance of the young victorious chief, now by common consent their leader, to the plateau, then steep in its slope & dif.cult of access. Afterwards a great city was built on the site of this barbarian stronghold. The construction on the river in appearance like a house, but apparently standing on the water can have been nothing but a houseboat or rather a house-raft, & it is moored to a char in the river, a fact which suggested the .rst erroneous idea that it was a house on an island in the river.
The third image, the large, high & spacious hut, built almost with elegance & with the great wide open door, was that of the chief and shows that the savages, in spite of their nakedness, were not on the lowest scale either of human immaturity or of human degeneration. The figure in clerical dress & hat is that not of a priest, but of an envoy, one of the elders of the colony come to negotiate for the restoration of the captives; the girl with whom he converses & from whom he turns in shocked despair, is one of the daughters of the woman seen in the earliest of this series of images, now a slave & concubine of the chief. At .rst, the colonists were unwilling to use violence lest the captives should be maltreated.The fact that one of the most important of them has already been subjected to irremediable indignity, has just come to the knowledge of the elder along with other facts, eg the unwillingness of the chiefs to make any reparation, & accounts for the action which indicates despair of peace or any fruitful negotiation. The series is not yet complete, but awaits the unfolding of farther events already very vaguely indicated by the vijnana. The other image has no connection with these events but belongs to a later Manvantara,
that of the Pramatha-Rakshasa, of the sixth Manu in one of its most perfect & brilliant stages. It has to be kept vivid in the mind for future interpretation.
The disposition of the Manwantaras may now be described. It will be remembered that there are fourteen Manus and ten gavas of the Dashagava. How are these divided among the Manus? In this Kalpa or rather Pratikalpa the type Pashu is the Vanara, but as in all Nature’s movements, even in manifesting the Vanara, the others .rst make their appearance rapidly before the type “arrives”; those most germane to the matter are the lion, tiger, elephant, dog, wolf, cat, bull & cow, bear, fox, ass, horse, bee, ant, butterfly, fish, eagle (also kite, hawk & vulture), songbird, crow & cuckoo etc. In
all these human egos readily incarnate & the human type absorbs them all. The .rst Manu takes all these totems&applies them to the general type of the Asura, driving at the evolution of a giant Vanara-Asura who has in him all these elements & combines them into an animal harmony dominated by curiosity, humour, adaptability & adaptiveness, the Ape virtues which bring that type nearest to man. This Vanara Asura the .rst Manu hands on to the second, who takes the type, fulfils it and evolves it into the Pishacha-Asura. This he does by bringing the Ape curiosity uppermost and applying it to all the experiences of man’s animal life, to play, work, domesticity, battle, pleasure, pain, laughter, grief, relations, arrangements etc. All the higher qualities imagination, re.ection, invention, thought, spirituality even are turned towards these experiences & their possibilities, cognitional not aesthetic exhausted so far as the human animal can exhaust them. This however, is done only in the third Manwantara. In the second it is the Vanara who satis.es his humour, curiosity & adaptiveness in a far more elementary & summary fashion, but as he does so, he begins to re.ne & evolve in search of new sensations until the full Pisacha Asura is born. This type is handed over to the third Manu to ful.l, & to it two Manvantaras are devoted, in the third the Pisacho-Pramatha of the Asura type evolves; in the fourth the Pisacha Pramatha evolves into the full Pramatha-Asura. The curiosity ceases to be merely cognitional & practically scienti.c, it becomes aesthetic with an animal & vital aestheticism; the Pramatha seeks to extract their full emotional & aesthetic values, their full rasa out of everything in life, out of torture equally with ecstasy, death equally with life, grief equally with joy. That type is evolved by the .fth Manu into the Pramatha-Rakshasa of the Asura type, & by the sixth into the full Rakshasa-Asura. The Rakshasa it is who .rst begins really to think, but his thought is also egoistic & turned towards sensation. What he seeks is a gross egoistic satisfaction in all the life of the mind, prana & body, in all the experiences of the Pashu, Pisacha, Pramatha & his own. But as this type is not a pure Rakshasa, but a Rakshasasura, the thought is there from the beginning, for the Rakshasa has already established it in the human mould in the fifth pratikalpa. It now, however, in the Asura ceases to be subservient to the vital & animal instincts & becomes the instrument instead of a vigorous, violent & clamorous intellectual ego. As the main type is that of the Asura, there is always a tendency to subordinate the lower ego to the intellectual Aham, but the subordination is at first only a self-disciplining for a more intelligently victorious selfindulgence, like the tapasya of Ravana. This type evolved is fixed in the character of Ravana and takes possession of its .eld in the Manwantara of the seventh Manu, Vaivasvata. In that Manwantara it evolves into the Asuro-Rakshasa in which the intellectual ego & the emotional, sensational ego enter into an equal copartnership for the grand enthronement & ful.lment of the human ahankara. As the type of the sensational&emotional Rakshasa-Asura is Ravana, so the type of the more mightily balanced Asura Rakshasa of the Asura type isHiranyakashipu. In the eighthManwantara this Asura Rakshasa evolves into the pure Asura who serves his intellectual ego & subordinates to it all the other faculties. That type reigns with the ninth Manu & evolves into the Asuradeva of the Asura mould&in the tenth Manvantara into theDevasurawho enthrones the vijnana and glori.es the Asura existence by the vijnanamaya illuminations playing on the whole of the triple mental[,] vital & bodily life of man. In the eleventh & twelfth manwantaras the Devasura evolves into the Sadhya, the Anandamaya Asura who at .rst with the pure Ananda, then with the Tapomaya Ananda, then with the Sanmaya Ananda dominates the reigns of the thirteenth & fourteenth Manus & completes the apotheosis of the Asura in man. With the Siddhadeva in the Asura the hundredth Chaturyuga of the sixth Pratikalpa comes to a glorious close.
IV. Certain farther images have appeared which seem intended to show the nature of the Kaliyuga civilisation evolved by the intermixture of the barbarian & the Gandharva Pashus.4 One is that of a very wide road climbing up a steep incline; the comparative height of the trees on one side show its great width. This picture seems to be intended to con.rm the impression created by the ensemble of the city on the plateau, by the dome & by another chitra of a part of the hill with a (private?) house roofed like a modern church, that this civilisation had a certain bigness, massiveness & sharply cut variety. A low type of the Pashu in this age was also seen, Notes on bearded, [hatted]5 & visaged like a lowclass modern American of the West. These resemblances have created some doubt as to either the genuineness of these images or their right interpretation; but the doubt is not justi.ed by its cause. For throughout the fourteen Manwantaras, variations, permutations & combinations of the same type are bound to appear. This is the law of Nature’s development in clay, plant & animal & applies equally to man, his manners, ideas, appurtenances & institutions. Given the truth of the Manwantara theory any other feature than this varied repetition would be more surprising than the repetition itself & lead to more legitimate distrust. There are plenty of variations & signs of immaturity or different tendency. In the image of the river, it is noticeable that there are no modern vessels. The houseboat is a houseraft & entirely different in structure from the modern houseboat; the craft in which the man&girl in another image are seen crossing the river is also a raft & not a boat. The Gandharvas, when .rst seen, are robed differently in themales&the women; the former have dresses like the older styles of European dress, the latter wear loose&light classical draperies an arrangement which is after all sufficiently natural & might easily evolve in an artistic & aesthetically minded race. The Teutonic element in the character & civilisation of the new type Pashus is a result of the blending of the graceful, slight & artistic Gandharva with the plain, forceful & robust barbarian; the latter predominates in the blend & the former merely tones down
his force & gives a few details of dress & manners much modified in the direction of rude & clear cut plainness & strength, & is chie.y prominent but not predominant in the women as typified by the girl on the raft who has a native grace denied to the men of her blood. Their elegance is heavy & arti.cial, worn as a dress rather than possessed as a native characteristic. Sometimes the type goes very low as in the premature American; the ordinary type is higher but void of dignity or greatness, grace or beauty. They represent an early tendency towards the Asura Rakshasa such as he manifests himself in the Kaliyugas of this Pratikalpa when he has compassed the .rst heavy self-restraint necessary for his evolution towards the Deva. In a later image the woman of the .rst, the captive of the barbarian Augustus, is seen in a later incarnation at the turning point when this type dissatis.ed with itself is trying to recover the grace, humour, artistry, fantasy, liveliness of their Gandharva blood, so as to develop again in themselves the Pashu deva. This fixes the period of these incidents. It is in the Kali of the fourth chaturyuga in the reign of the .rst Manu when the Rakshasa Asura of the Pashu Asura type reigns & is attempting to turn full Asura with occasional overshootings to the Pashu deva. Every race that thus overshoots its mark&goes a step farther than their immediate next pace in evolution aids powerfully that evolution, but becomes unfit for survival&has to disappear. For this reason the Gandharva race of the Pashus disappeared & the Asura Rakshasa type reappeared, then took up something of the Gandharva & advanced one step towards the Asura-Pashu of the Asura type. By such overleapings & recoilings human evolution has always advanced.
V. There are certain images of animals dating from these early aeons which should be recorded here although they are not of the .rst Pashu period but fall before & after it. The first are images of a monstrous creature resembling the modern seal, but thicker & bulkier seen in a region of ice; the other another animal of equally monstrous bulk, its skin a series of successive red and yellow bands, its face exceedingly long, rough, thin & snouted, a cross between bear, wolf & tiger in the face, rhinoceroslike, yet supple in the body, but in spite of its ferocious appearance, suf.ciently harmless. These creatures, it is suggested in the vijnana, belong to the first chaturyuga of the pratikalpa previous to the appearance of man; for the fourteen Manus enjoy each a reign of seven chaturyugas of varying lengths and the .rst&last of the hundred belong not to any Manu but the opening chaturyuga to Brahma&Rudra, the closing to Kalki &to Shiva. Man in the .rst appears only tentatively at the end, in the last only as a survival at the beginning. The third image is that of a bear leaping on a smaller animal which it keeps under its paw while it wrests from it&devours some eatable for which the victim was pursued. The male of the captive is near unable to help, unwilling to .ee. It is a small deer, only one third the size of the modern fallow deer. Suddenly the head of the bear sinks. It has been killed, it would seem, by the arrow, spear or other weapon of a human hunter. This scene belongs to the second Manwantara of the Vanaras.
A fourth image is of a horse of the .rst Manwantara in one of its earlier chaturyugas, a clumsy stiff-legged & long-eared animal squarish in its lines & most unlike the graceful modern equine species. The animal stands on the side of a river,&with head raised & stretched sideways & ears pricked, listens to a sound amid the trees on the opposite bank. This image was preceded by another of a horse of the Pashu period in the later age when the civilized barbarian type was trying to recover the Gandharva. This type of horse, standing with a rider on its back & other human beings conversing near&at its head, is more equine, but is still stiff-legged & has not lost the asinine cast of head of its predecessor.
VI. Three images of the fourth in descent from the Chief of the Barbarians; the .rst showing him standing meditating on the great ghaut of the river, a .gure & face like Napoleon’s clad in a dress
resembling the modern European; the second, his mother & stepmother, descendants of the captives of the .rst image; the third, the emperor again with his halfbrother, irreproachably clad, Prefect of the city, consulting with regard to some palace intrigue in which the mother & stepmother are concerned.8 It is intimated that it is this fourth King of the line who establishes the dominance of the race in the then earth. And this is from the Mother:
Which is this goal? Toward what unexpected realisation of the future does Nature aim? What does she seek since her dark origins?
Each form that she creates is a fresh affirmation of that which through her will be born, of that which it is her mission to manifest.
Each species preparing the others, making them possible, bears witness to her untiring perseverance, is a proof of her solemn vow; in each one is a little more matter transfigured, announcing future dawns of intelligence. Through innumerable cycles how many paths has she had to follow in order to reach at last the cave of the anthropoid, the primitive man?
It is before him that will open the royal avenue leading to the palace of spirit. But how many races, how many generations will pass on the earth without discovering it, how many wrong paths will Nature follow in the footsteps of man. For, believing himself the masterpiece of the universe, he knows not that he has a further stage to pass through.
Could the idea of man be conceived, before he existed, in the obscure brain of even the nearest of his ancestors? Can the idea of the superman, before he exists, penetrate into the brain of man?
And yet, in every child of man which comes into the world, in every growing intelligence, in every effort of the emerging generations, in every attempt of human genius, Nature seeks the way which, once again, will lead her further.
Fifteen hundred million men since perhaps fifteen hundred centuries wander without finding this way.
Among the multitude of the ways over which all the efforts of their progress are scattered, in this domain as in all the others, only one is good: it is the way of synthetic perfections. Where to discover it?
And who among men dares to venture elsewhere than on the easy and well-beaten tracks? Who, knowing that there is another path which goes further, accepts to lose all in order to find it perhaps, to lose all in walking alone, in thinking alone, always apart among the others, not even certain of attaining what he seeks.
Try not to discover this one among the men who excel and shine, for these excel and shine only in being, somewhat more perfectly, similar to their own kind.
Precious stones also excel and shine among all the other stones, but the most beautiful gem is outside the series of chemical combinations from whence comes forth life. In the same way, ascending the series of forms, the most beautiful tree of the forest is outside the lines of evolution which lead the biological process up to the animal, up to man.
And once again, among men, the most admired, the most famous, the most artistic, the most learned, the most religious, may well .nd himself far off the way leading from
man to superman.
Each race, each civilisation, each human society, each religion, represents a new attempt of Nature, one more effort adding to the long series of those she multiplied during countless time.
Now, as among all the animal forms there was one from which man was to come forth, so also, among the social and religious species, must one be born from which some day will come forth the superman.
For it is this which Nature seeks in all her successive attempts, from the first germination of life until man, until the God who shall be born of him.
In the multitude of men she seeks the possibility of the superman; and in each one of them, she aims towards the realisation of the divine.