Aspects of Sri Aurobindo

An All-Round Revelation

Sri Aurobindo's spiritual vision of the world can be considered an all-round revelation because it finds some essential truth in every world-view reached by mystical, philosophical or scientific research, and weaves it into its own comprehensive system. There is nothing it rejects or fails to explicate.

Take even the very denial of it, the most extreme Materialism of our day, basing itself on blind physical phenomena, random genetic mutation, mindless natural selection of mutated forms by the environment, extensively wasteful processes of evolutionary life, mechanical reactions and reflexes of organisms, dependence of psychological movements on bodily processes. This very world-view can obtain its rationale in the Aurobindonian Weltanschauung when the latter is taken in its coverage of the lowest rung of things, no less than of their highest.

What is, in outline, Sri Aurobindo's scheme of reality? The supreme aspect of reality for him is an infinite and eternal quaternary of Existence, Consciousness-Force, Bliss and Supermind — the last-named a creative divinity bringing forth the truths inherent in the triple depth of Spirit behind it and holding in a perfect or archetypal cosmos a balanced interplay of the One and the Many.

The Supermind manifests below itself a hierarchy of "planes" disclosing the reality in various partial ways. At the lower end of the ladder there are the realms of Universal Mind, Life-Force and Subtle-Physical Substance, each organised into a set of interacting individual features. A realm of Soul-principle — a plane of World-Soul — exists at the back of them and is related to the universe we commonly know in our daily experience. The realms at the lower end of the hierarchy lie beyond this universe though they press upon it constantly for the expression of their powers and the evocation of its potencies.

Page 167

Our commonly known universe emerges from a tremendous concealment not only of the supreme aspect but also of all its partial manifestations. That concealment constitutes an utter opposite of all we may regard as divine, a boundless "Inconscient" where the quaternary "Superconscient", along with everything below it, lies "involved", locked in. From this involution, which the ultimate reality achieves as an extreme challenging adventure of self-loss and self-discovery, all evolves, progressively releasing the higher in the lower and integrating the lower with the higher. But the evolution marches across the huge obstacles put up by the reality's initial negation of its own being. With the Soul-principle stirring from behind, Matter is evolved from the chaos of the Inconscient, then Life from Matter and Mind from Life. Veiled by Mind, as Mind is by Life and Life by Matter, Supermind and its accompaniments wait to be evolved. What is initially veiled will be of necessity laid bare in the terminal outcome.

Here is a basic spiritual monism that prevents reality from being a jostle of disparates. At the same time there is a diverse pluralism that does justice to all agencies obviously different from one another though closely associated.

Such a synthesising vision recognises, even while it exceeds, the grounds from which all one-sided views derive, including the most extreme Materialism, the ground for which would here be the multi-moded Inconscient taken as all in all. Logically, the Inconscient would give rise to whatever blindness, randomness, mindlessness, wastefulness, mechanicality and Matter-dependence that science notes as fundamental in its study of our universe.

Sri Aurobindo does not need to proceed, as science does, from these data in order to posit them. He starts the other way round and posits the Highest Spirit, yet provides a valid reason for their appearance.

Without denying them or explaining them away, he supplies also a valid reason for all that extreme Materialism faces as a paradox — the outburst of sentient vitality from

Page 168

brute Matter, the breaking forth of self-conscious mentality from instinctive organic process, the upsurge of idealistic soul-sense and luminous spirituality from the perceptual-conceptual half-knowledge of the labouring intelligence. That upsurge carries even the promise of a fulfilled Mind, an accomplished Life-Force and even a perfected body because of the divine archetypes of these principles already subsisting in the Supermind and pressing upon their counterparts in the evolutionary world studied by extreme Materialism.

Such a promise is eminently in accord — although in a key undreamt-of by science — with this Materialism's own finest hope and endeavour — the push towards an ever greater achievement of all human powers within an embodied existence on earth rather than in a postulated Hereafter to which "souls" may be called, leaving earth as a mere temporary passage of little importance in the final assessment.

Thus the Aurobindonian spiritual vision assimilates and consummates instead of contradicting even the apparent stark antithesis of it. In doing this it renders itself acceptable automatically by the Age of Science and provides to this Age not only a self-transcendence but also a self-justification which makes the self-transcendence a natural move forward rather than a defeat and an annulment.

Page 169