Indian
Philosphy
by
Brahmasrii
Dr K C Varadachari
The
other yogas were partial and their direction was escapism or individual power
in a limited way. But Sri Aurobindo pointed out that it is not liberation that
is the aim-for that is secured by renunciation of all life and
earth-consciousness-but the transformation of the earth-consciousness itself so
that true freedom and perfection become possible here. It is true pessimism
about the world’s possibility has been inculcated from the dawn of human
history. It is against this pre-conception or superstition that Sri Aurobindo
waged a
relentless war. No religion, not even the Christianity of
the moderns, entertains the perfectibility of earth-nature or asura-nature. It
is therefore not the consciousness that informed the prophets of the earth so
far but a new consciousness that comes down from depths of Reality-as
supramental consciousness-that can perform this task in the next step of
evolution. Sri Aurobindo canvasses the possibility of earlier descents in the
form of the several Avataras (descents) and sees in the new descent the
fulfillment of evolutionary perfection of the earth-consciousness which would
henceforth have a new kind of man, a man with gnostic knowledge-wisdom-love and
delight spreading world harmony everywhere. It is not a speculative conclusion
to a daring imagination that he presents but a divine life itself in the
process of descent. For himself he does not claim this status of a descent
(Avatar), but as a human who is seeking the evolutionary ascent so that it may
be possible for all humans who have this aspiration and thirst for the divine
life in all its purity, glory and eternity. Evolution to be real must be of the
all, the souls in upward movement to perfection. It is true there are many who
are bent on the route to the dark worlds
where light does not penetrate; but to those who yearn
for the sunlit worlds of Truth, Beauty and Delight and Awareness the hope of an
evolutionary ascent is open.
It
is true also that ancients had in view the devas or gods who were equally
considered to be under a peculiar kind of limitation and were not perfect in
every sense-they are powers of the one divine or personalities limited by their
cosmic station and functions. Sri Aurobindo’s superman is not one of this kind
but a free individual of the Divine All, in whom the All eminently indwells and
who dwells in the All.
Sri
Aurobindo in one sense sums up all that is the hope of the future. Nothing that
he has done in the spirit of a thinker but of master. He has broadly laid down
the lines of human advance. His encyclopaedic knowledge and courageous
interpretation of human destiny has opened up frontiers of hope in the human
breast. He has himself guided, unlike the professors of the several faculties
in the institution of education, the seekers after the Infinite in an integral
way. There is to be a basic unification of one’s inward personality which is
the condition of evolutionary advance. Our system of
education geared up to secular ends-indeed evolutionary
ascent is not an end at all for the human in the institutions of education
today nor indeed in other institutions of religion too-have almost bye-passed
this grandest necessity. It is forgotten that those who wish to survive must
advance or perish. But our vigilance is to secure liberty or freedom or retain
it but to use it for advance. For even a little liberty utilized or constantly
exercised for evolutionary advance will help the movement towards ultimate
realization as well as survival as better men.
The
world has been broken up into bits for convenience of government but languages
and customs and other factors have built up walls that have tended to separate
man from man, group from group. Our world now is divided by all kinds of walls,
psychic, physical, racial, communal and religious. But again and again nature
breaks these walls and helps man to break up these walls. But assiduously like
termites we build them up rationalizing their necessity for preservation of the
odd and the useless, sometimes called culture - a word more unmeaning than many
social words of to-day. All patterns do not have the
meaning for evolutionary ascent or transformation. Sri
Aurobindo has seen that though there can be many cultures the true culture that
liberates is that which produces the dynamic stimulus for higher evolution. All
which only lead to the preservation of linguistic and other trends of the human
order or paint a picture of rosy certainty of self-complacency are meaningless
to divine evolution. A new approach, a new light in the heart, a new vision that
integrates and inspires the heart of all, these indeed are our need. Sri
Aurobindo has provided these for this age to assimilate.
Careful
in respect of the growth of man into divine nature, Sri Aurobindo had hardly
neglected the meticulous training of his Sadhakas for this great
transformation, this leap into the divine Nature, this Divine Birth – Sambhutya
amrtam asnute – this birth that leads to Immortality.
All
salutations to the Seer of the New Age of Divine Evolution.
SOME BASIC CONCEPTS OF THE
PHILOSOPHY OF SRI AUROBINDO
While
the idea of the One Spirit as All is the basic concept of Sri Aurobindo, it is
also his special and unique contribution in so far as he has tried to bring the
two poles of manyness and Oneness together in a dynamic manner by his concept
of divine evolution.
He
takes for granted that modern science has proved the fact of evolution upto
man, based on the large amount of convincing evidence about the general upward
movement of life from its most primitive forms to the stage of man. The present
century has continued the expansion of the theory of evolution propounded by
Charles Darwin. Competent studies have emerged during the past one hundred
years on several phases and areas of organic evolution. The transition from the
inorganic to the organic is currently tried to be explained scientifically.
Materialism has accepted the
fact that life has come out of matter in its form of
particles or waves or both.
The
question is not, philosophically speaking, whether matter or life was the
original stuff out of which all have been coming out, but what inherent forces
have shaped matter to become life-laden and this in turn has been bringing into
being the possibility of mind and its growth in the context of time. It is held
by some thinkers namely idealists and absolutists and monists that evolution
has not really occurred, it is something that cannot occur. A perfect Spirit
has no inner necessity to change for change is a process involving
imperfection. And if it did occur it must be due to other reasons than moving
towards perfection. If evolution means that there is a goal to which all
creation moves then it is not that kind of evolution that can take place in the
Perfect or the Absolute1. It may be a delirium of the will that has
no other purpose except to exhibit it -- a kind of play if you please to call
it like that, but not a real inner necessity for the Absolute, it can have no
such inner or outer necessity.
1 A.E.
Taylor: Elements
of Metaphysics, pp.277-8
Some thinkers deny evolution to which some religions
appeal. Dean Inge considers that religion does not need evolution for its
acceptance, for spirituality rejects the primacy of the temporal process.2
While
facts of evolution are interpreted in terms of the development of higher and
more complex forms of life and organized behaviour, theories of evolution
usually posit the continuous process arising from a cause, or causes. The
original cause whatever it is should contain all the forms and potentialities
emerging out of it or shaped out of it. This may be matter and of course it
requires another namely motion. It may be Spirit and this requires also
activity or motion. The question arises as to how this motion or activity
arises or could arise from matter or spirit or is it an original second.
Perhaps one could conceive of this Motion to be primary and consider Spirit as
pure motion or pure Action whereas matter is either reversed motion or motion
that has slowed down so much as to be no motion at all. In between alone we perceive
the two terms in wedlock in different degrees.
Bertrand
Russell: Religion and Science, Home University Library, p.183. cf. Mysticism
and Logic.
The birth of motion is said to be owing to a stir in the
Spirit which being perfect is changeless or at best must have equilibrium or
rest or peace. But the stir or elan is possible only if it has something to
realise, there must be a purpose. The stir is a projection out of the original
substance, it develops a direction of movement or flow of itself. It may be
called 'thought' or 'idea' which obviously must be of two kinds firstly to
reveal the potentialities of its own self-recollected nature, or secondly it
must be some external purpose which it lacks. If Spirit moves towards matter in
a spiral of deterioration or grossening, this seems to be its purpose in
evolution which is downward. If matter ascends towards Spirit or moves from
grossness towards subtle being, from quantity to quality then it is clear that
its purpose is to exhibit what is its potentiality. Any theory which affirms
either the one or the other as cause is bound to accept the consequences of
potentiality of the one in the other. Monisms have to explain the purpose of
this evolution downward or upward and this purpose must be something involving
the inner necessity in matter or spirit to become the other. The evolutional
theories would be called
'degradation' theory or ‘upgradation’ theory--it depends
whether we consider Spirit as more valuable or Matter as more valuable.
But
in both cases it is clear that evolution is bound to be a kind of determinism
either of spirit or matter - where every step seems logically (causally) to
follow from the previous -- a kind of pratitya samutpada -- dependent
causation theory affirmed by Buddhistic logic.
But
if we consider that the most significant fact about us is the persistency of
life, its struggle against matter on the one hand and for spirit on the other,
the evolution-story would be the story of life utilising all the resources of
spirit on the one hand and utilising all the resources of matter on the other.
This is what biological evolution has succeeded in showing. Instead of asking
about the metaphysical prius or original stuff we might well discover what it
is at the end of our discovery regarding the process of life itself.
It
may now be seen that life is freedom to organize the interplay of matter
and pure spirit from the
humble units of matter to the most complex and indeed
subtle organisms of spirit. It is also possible to conjecture that as life has
progressed through aeons of evolutionary history it has revealed its manysided
simultaneous activities which are marvels of sheer intelligence, unconscious in
a sense, but something at which all consciousness marvels as results of ingenuity
and intuition which may well be called super-conscious. Though we may discover
that matter has brought into being life and life has brought out mind,
consciousness, thinking capacity, it would also be clear that these latter are
already in incipient stages available in the so called inconscient matter. Thus
it is through life that mind releases itself from matter and when we take the
further step we may find that it is mind that has released the spirit from
matter and life. Incomprehensible though it appears it is well known that the
organization of the smallest particle of matter corresponds or is repeated in
the Cosmos, in the solar system itself. Similarly it has been discovered that
the cell, the unit of living matter is organized in a correspondential manner
with that of matter with its nuclei and tissues. There seems to be a similar
geometry or structural oneness in all whether it
is an atom or cell or psychic being (jiva) or the cosmos.
Plato's mystical statement that if you wish to know about man please look at
the state and work out the correspondence. To know the small look at the bigger
representation of it or its original. Thus mystic intuition has been one of the
major helps for the solution of the problem of evolution also. Man is seen to
grow and increase and seek out goals beyond himself, beyond death and life too.
This fact cannot be denied or dismissed as illusion or fantasy or imagination.
The
human being is midway between the atom and the star so said Max Born, and is
about the most easily understood by us. But it is precisely this fact that was denied
by people who said that though the imperative is 'Know Thyself' yet to know
the state is more easy than to know oneself and one can know oneself through
the knowledge of the society. In India, however, it was seen that it
is more impossible to know the complex texture of a real society which is
almost an ideal one if not utopian, and it is more easy to know oneself by the
psychological study of his life in Matter, in society, in Spirit. The
psychological and biological approach yields more results in so far as the
growth of
life in matter is concerned. It is the psychological
moral approach that leads to the apprehension of the growth of man or mind in
life and matter. It is however in the psychological spiritual approach that one
discerns universality of evolution beyond man.
Further
as Sri Aurobindo who was fully conversant with the theories of Creative
Evolution of Henri Bergson, of emergent evolution of Lloyd Morgan and of Samuel
Alexander, and of course the Heackelian and Darwinian versions of Evolution,
saw that neither the evolution of mind through life of matter nor the evolution
of matter through life of spirit can explain the fundamental nature of
Evolution itself. n the other hand we witness an integration of several levels
of matter and life and mind in the unique organism called man himself. Truly
Professor Sherrington in his Gifford Lectures on Man on his nature has
revealed the scientific approach towards the integration problem presented in
human psychology. The works of Alexis Carrell have shown that we are not in a
position to show how all this works. The intelligence seems to baffle all human
diagnosis and in fact would thwart its understanding itself. The Spirit of man
cannot be
identified with his mind, its functions and
consciousness. It seems that man is but a preparation for a greater evolutional
upsurge, for an integration with higher levels of being not at present open to
him but which subtly, perhaps unconsciously push him up from within. This
integrational possibility of a higher consciousness -- the Spirit in its purest
form or at least more pure than what it has revealed in the human mind and for
the human mind, has paved the way for conceiving a Divine Evolution. Professor
Whitehead of course has intimated that this may be due to the ‘ingression' of
higher ideas, conceived not merely as thoughts or mentational possibilities
mathematically conceived but as forces capable of organizing the human tissues to
respond to the new cosmic demands made on it by the rapidly changing
environment - technology and atomic and nuclear potentialities for well or ill.
"The professed aim of a
constructive philosophy of evolution is to work out a scheme which includes
both the physical and the psychical”.
(Lloyd
Morgan)
"I
accept...as part of the constructive scheme of evolutionary philosophy, an
ascending hierarchy of kinds of relatedness There is a kind of relatedness (a)
of physical events in the atom: there is a supervenient kind of relatedness (b)
of atoms in the molecules: there is a further kind of relatedness (c) of
specialised molecules in the organic cell: there is the yet further kind of
relatedness (d) of all the cellular tissues of the organism. These are only
salient examples. We do not find (d) without (c) nor (c) without (b): or as I
put it (d) involves (c) and (c) involves (b)
(Lloyd
Morgan: Contemporary British Philosophy, Vol. I, p277)
Further
Lloyd Morgan finds in evolution not merely relatedness which would be a static
hierarchy, of the four kinds mentioned above but also Activity. About this
Activity he makes interesting remarks :
"The teaching of one
school is that Activity is inserted into nature at this, that or the other
'critical turning point’, of evolutionary advance -- say, at the level of life,
or of mind, or (with Des Cartes) of the rational soul. The teaching of the
other school, in which I serve, is that Causality (which I would distinguish
from the naturalist causation adverted to above) is the universal
operation
of Spirit manifested everywhere and every when – not only at the level of life
or of mind or of reflective consciousness. There is for us one immanent
causality, of which the whole course of evolution affords diverse manifestations.
On there terms the scientific concept of evolution, as epigenetic may be
supplemented (not superseded) by the older philosophical concept of progressive
unfolding sub specie temporis of revelations of that Activity which a
universally enfolded sub specie eternitatis."
(Lloyd
Morgan, ibid., p.304).
The
Emergent evolutionist has in fact focussed the importance of having a composite
theory of Causality that is continuous as well as discontinuous at points of
'critical turning points' in the evolutionary ascent but which are subordinate
to the first type of causality. In other words there is an attempted
reconciliation of both occasionalism and determinism. But both are subordinate
to the third type of Causality which is that of Divine Plan through freedom—which
contracts time or space or both when it transforms matter into higher and
higher levels of Being. The
denials of Finalism as well as of determinism bode
no escape from the dynamic actuality of spiritual growth in man in his
movements.
II
Sri
Aurobindo has affirmed in the opening lines of the Life Divine that man
yearns after four goals integral to one another and not opposed to each other.
"The divination of
Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure truth and
unmixed bliss, the sense of immortality”.
Divination
or that occult manner of knowing God which is not to be had by means of the
senses, nor by thought that infers the unknown by means of the known, but by a
direct revelation of the form and nature of God to the awakened intuition. The
impulse towards perfection is also not within the competence of consciousness
that man has which is intended for his action, vyavahara, in society, in
the environment. It is seen that this impulse is directly different from the
instincts which are life-preserving autograms so to speak. It is deeper than
the need for saving life, for perfection is sought even at the perilous cost of
life
itself and all. It is a value which transcends
life-values. The search after truth and unmixed bliss again is not something
like a search for needs of food and clothing and shelter or mate. Truth is
indeed different from pragmatic truths, opportunistic acceptances as truth of
things which have no roots in reality. Philosophers usually strive after truth
for the sake of truth, but mostly they end up in neat non-self-contradictory
systems or coherent systems of half-known facts for there are things of which
philosophy hardly knows or can become aware of. Profoundly true also is the
fact that truth eludes even as happiness, unmixed bliss eludes him when man is
confined to his own private being or individuated existence. There has been so
far no philosophy that has given us truth, naked and pure; for every
philosophy, even the so called eternal ones, is overthrown by a higher
intuition and revelation than the previous. Nowadays Existence (existenz) seems
to be a category which has superseded truth. But this absolute concept when
absolute is meaningless, and when relative too unhelpful. Above all the sense of
immortality is a sense of existence and this is a
revelation of one's own intrinsic necessity to be
which has been overlain by all the others mentioned before.
Sri
Aurobindo has clearly and in a classic manner stated the wherefore of
evolution; the descent into matter and the ascent into Spirit, are verily for
the constant realisation of the sense of existence, of immortality, through the
unconscious urges of the former three.
In
the Ideal of Human Unity Sri Aurobindo writes:
"Nature starts from the visible
manifestation of the one and the many, from the totality and its constituent
units and creates intermediary unities between the two without which there can
be no full development either of the totality of the units. But whilst in the
animal life she is satisfied to separate rigidly and group summarily, in the
human she strives on the contrary to override the divisions she has made and
lead the whole kind to the sense of unity and realisation of unity.. The ideal
or ultimate aim of Nature must be to develop the individual and all individuals
to their final capacity, to develop the community and all communities to the
full expression of that many-sided existence and potentiality which their
differences were created to express, and to
evolve the
united life of mankind to its full common capacity and satisfaction not by
suppressing that of the individual or smaller commonalty but by taking full
advantage of the diversity which they develop and so to increase the total
riches of mankind and throw them into a fund of common possession and
enjoyment.”
(Ideal of Human Unity, ed.
1919, p. 191).
It
can be seen that the aim of evolution is more than what has been stated above
as the ideal of human unity which Sri Aurobindo has visualised in such clear
and unequivocal terms. But it is not mankind that is the goal of man; it is
also clear that the ideal above sketched which humanists perhaps are trying in
their own dialectical method to realise, cannot be realised that way. It is
this discovery of the necessity to go beyond man and his dialectical
rationality or dialectical materiality (the two forms under which dialectical
frenzies have been taking place in the major movements of our times, namely
absolutism and communism) that has made Sri Aurobindo go beyond the mental
fabrications of an albeit well-intentioned rationality or humanistic logic.
This is the discovery of the emergence of the super-mind which is not merely a
substitute for the human mind and the lower minds, but an
organizing force of the lower minds to the tasks of the cosmic and global and
universal existence. Life has to adapt itself not to the motivations of the
instincts or materiality nor to the aspirations and neat coherency schemes or
plans of a discursive and dialectical thought or reason but to a new spirit or
the supermind. The envisagement of this potentiality in Nature or rather this
formulation of Spirit for the evolution of Nature so that Nature may more and
more find union and fulfillment in Spirit is one of the serious and creative
contributions of Sri Aurobindo to the theory of Evolution.
Though
a metaphysical thinker, which he is very properly, Sri Aurobindo tries to
evolve his theory as the play of manyness and oneness; yet his diagram of
evolution constantly reiterates the historical evolutionary role of the
interplay of the one and the many in several grades of realization or levels of
unified diversity and diversified unity.
Evolution
creates the conditions under which the individuals themselves discover their
multiplicity as
even the manynesses discover their organized unity. Thus
we find that the mystic formula as in the cosmos so in the individual—yatha
ande tatha pinde applies with perhaps just a difference that the whole
organisation can find itself reversed or inverted at different levels.
This
conception of divine evolution provides for the acceptance of the view that all
evolution is a creative delight of the play of oneness and manyness in the
individual as in the collective. Perhaps we may also conceive of the entire
hierarchy of planes of life as holistic (as each being a whole which is
integral to wholes of the higher levels of evolution). Altogether the motive
for this creative delight of evolutionary activity is an inexplicable secret of
the Spirit that is said to take delight in the manyness of the one and the
oneness of the many. This includes the idea of a dialectical activity without
its trenchant abstractions which kill the many or the one.
The
unique advance made by Sri Aurobindo is to explain the transcendence over the
human mind in which the abstractive activity of the human mind is
surpassed. The human mind creates contradictions,
oppositions, real or unreal or fancied, and sets in opposition all types of
distinctions and differences. Therefore the dialectic of opposition is the law
of the human mind. No one has shown as clearly as Hegel this kind of evolution
as a synthesis of opposites. But this was so overworked that Benedetto Croce
had to draw attention to the presence of an equally valid synthesis of
distincts producing more stable synthesis than the former. This is, he showed,
also a kind of dialectic. He considered this to be more spiritual, for Spirit
is not only the synthesis a priori, but also a synthesis always in activity
which heals all oppositions and confers harmony as well as growth into fullness
and perfection. Croce's significant appraisal, I shall not call it analysis,
really marks a transcendence of the sense of unity and harmony over the
oppositional, debating consciousness that always looks out for fissures and
winning points in the opposition.
Sri
Aurobindo clearly perceives the twofold process in Reality. In his Riddle of
the World he writes:
"There
are in fact two systems simultaneously active in the organization of being and
its parts: one is concentric a series of rings or sheaths with the psyche at
the centre: another is vertical, an ascension and descent, like a flight of
steps, a series of superimposed planes with the supermind-overmind as the
crucial nodus of the transition beyond the human into the divine." (p.7)
It
is only when the consciousness of the vertical becomes dominant to the vision
that one goes beyond the concentric or rises above the concentric. Obviously
humanity as also every other plane has this double characteristic. But each
system in turn is also infected with this dual-being of the oneness and the
manyness.
The
higher levels of mind to which some of the past seers had access have been
shown to be the Overmind and supermind (vijnana). The Upanishads have intimated
this. They have also intimated the fourth condition (turiya) and some have even
affirmed the Turyatita beyond the fourth state. Some have affirmed the Void
--Unground--Paramam Vyoman. Sri Aurobindo in bringing all these into a
systematic
exposition has shown how the evolution of all life to
these states is possible to man, who is yearning for that which is ultimate and
beyond himself.
In
fact if we consider that all evolution is a process of interrelating or rather
is a process of uniting the divided and in the words of Lloyd Morgan
establishing dynamic relationships, then the same could be described as Yoga.
Life is a creative process of uniting or unifying properly for growth and
increase of consciousness the several units of existence. Organization for
growth of the psychic centre makes this less conspicuously unconscious. In man
this psychic centre has begun to come into function, and all urges and
yearnings are of it. It is from that centre the vertical movement must take
place and can.
The
descriptions of the overmind reveals the greater and greater subordination of
the concentric movement to the ascending movement and in fact it is even a
force necessary for a take off from even the physical body. The overmind really
begins to see that the two systems are incompatible and the acceptance of the
one is the rejection of the other. This has been
the general view of spiritual evolution. It involves the
rejection of the physical evolution, in fact it is a necessity for spiritual
growth (ujjivana). The world has witnessed in all the religions
this basic opposition between this world and the yonder world, between the soul
and the body, each having its own domain and exclusive of one another. Almost
all religious literature or even the spiritual mystic literature reveals this
tendency.
This
negation is a basic negation (vairagya) and all thought is focussed to
establish this negation (viveka). It is against this that Sri Aurobindo
projects his vision of the supermind which is a supreme affirmation of the
integral organisational possibility of the physical life with the life of the
Spirit. This meeting place of the life at two planes is crucial to the
spiritual evolution becoming the legitimate next step to the biological
instinct-intellectual evolutions that Bergson has so graphically evaluated, in
his Creative Evolution and also his Two Sources of Morality and Religion.3
3 S.K.
Maitra: ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’ : Review of Philosophy and Religion, 1942,
Allahabad; ‘Sri
Aurobindo and Bergson’: Sri Aurobindo Pathamandir Annual, 1942.
Sri Aurobindo sees that the emergence of the Supermind is
due to its descent into the organic mental body of man today and though it had
several descents in individual cases as in the case of the avatars, yet for the
first time in the evolutionary history the Supermind is to become the universal
possibility of every one. It is clear that this is rendered possible by the
sufficient growth of man to receive this ingression or new transforming force
from the Absolute Spirit as a gift or grace so to speak so that the
oppositional unification could be replaced by the organisation of an utterly
spiritual kind. Mechanical ways of unity or even the enforced co-operational
covenants hardly make for the change in the consciousness. Man is capable of
becoming divine only when the divine consciousness takes up the entire work of
physio-biological and psychic transformation. This requires a technique of a
different kind and that is the supramental Yoga, a yoga which is carried on by
the Supermind or one who is its advent or its full possessor. Individuals as
well as collective organisations and institutions should offer themselves for
this conversion or transformation of their very being in the light of this
supermind. Supermind
when it becomes the operational principle in man makes
for his superman hood which is the next biological spiritual step. The physical
change is no less an imperative of this supermind than the ordinary life of
mind.
This
is obviously the next step in spiritual evolution. It is not something that
happens by the mere will to evolve as one very eminent stated – evolution
happened in the animal, it has to be willed in the human, which is an
unconscious limitation of the famous utterance of F. Nietzsche: Will to power.
It is on the other hand a deep humility of the human to surrender and offer
one's humanity at the altar of the Super-personality -- supermind. The
recognition that at this level offering oneself to the Divine totally and in
all one's parts is more powerful as an evolutionary force than the will to
power, will to survive, or will to adapt is a dynamic resolution to the problem
of the ego, that has been the bar to further progress or ascent and has only
wheeled the individuals in the concentric circles of a horizontal movement.
May be it is not the final step for the vast oceans of
the Infinite are yet to be traversed -- though not in sorrow or misery but in
the growing awareness of that original principle -- the Brahman – the Vast,
Saccidananda -- the three supernals of Vedantic thought. That these have to be
traversed in growing delight or newer and sweeter delights unmixed with sorrow
or pain or death is undoubtedly the goal Whether the supermentalisation of
humanity even if it be in part will halt the other processes is a question of
questions. Sri Aurobindo has basically stated the goal, the need, the way and
the realisation of the supermind consciousness as the next step in spiritual
evolution, the first after the biological human. A physical immortality may be
a crowning achievement but the first appears to be the necessity for the
physical to bear the force and weight of the descent and the capacity to yield
to the stresses of the Spirit on it without breaking up. But these require the
tender care of the Master of Wisdom of the Supramental activity and cannot be
realised without it.
In
spiritual evolution the necessity for the work of God or his deputy is very
necessary to pull up the
individual, to remove the 'golden lid that covers the
face of truth' (Isa Up.) of the individual ego, as it is a barrier which the
individual cannot push out from within. The immanence of the Divine is not
sufficient to push out the lid or open it from within. The transcendence of God
is necessary for this act. Therefore the typical mechanistic explanation of
evolution or even the vitalistic (elan vitalistic) explanation of the impulse
from within does not satisfy the higher need. On the other hand the eternal
transcendence of the Deity in His ultimate status has been always at work at
different levels of evolution--all of which are underway without intermission.
No step of evolution has been totally annulled by the occurrence of the higher
type or plane of being. At each level the evolutionary pulling up of the lower
has been and is at work. At the human level we are aware of the need for the
higher pull up, removing of the lid that bars man's higher evolution or the
evolution of those who seek to go beyond man.
The
Guru or Master is thus absolutely necessary for the Yoga of spiritual ascent
and evolution. It is clear that God alone can be the adequate Guru or evolutor
and that is the reason why almost all disciples hold the
Guru to be God Himself incarnate. However it is only
after the evolution into the highest or supermanic status happens that one
really recognizes the godhood. The fact that through all this training the Guru
had been keeping watch over the individual aspirant and in fact carried him in
his womb so to speak, makes the Guru verily a Mother. Sri Aurobindonian view
sees in this a rare possibility of the Mother who at every level and plane of
the disciple had been protecting the disciple and training him or watching over
his spiritual evolution from the human to the Divine. Leaving the mythological
garb in which he has dressed this fourfold activity of the Mother-function of
the Guru, or Advent, it can be seen that the jnana, vairagya, aisvarya and
sakti are the necessary gifts for the transformation of the entire
nature which is fourfold, physical, vital, mental, and supramental.
To
bring them upto perfection is the work of the Higher Supramental Nature,
advented as Mother or Guru.
Needless
to emphasize that the many implications of the genius of Sri Aurobindo do
require
an experimental experience to verify the same. It is
fervently to be hoped that this process which is underway under the guidance of
the Mother in Sri Aurobindo Ashram will be realised in the not too distant
future.
It
would be clear from the above that Sri Aurobindo has revealed genuine advance
in his concepts of (1) the relation between the One and the many (2) in the
solution to the problem of hierarchical organic relationship that goes along
with the problem of the Transcendent or the Absolute (3) by revealing the spiritual
evolution as a continuous development with the physio-biological evolution of
the scientists (4) by revealing that the only manner by which Spirit can be
real to matter and matter can be real to spirit is to accept the spirituality
of matter and the materiality of spirit both of which are expressed by the
idealism of the one and the realism of the other. Fifthly it can be shown that
the ascent is not a mere objectification or heterogenefication of the
homogenous One, but an integral revivification of the two poles of reality so
that both are fully exhibited to the perfect superman. The last is the most
relevant to the human situation.
Om Tat Sat
(Continued...)
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