The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

Waste in Nature

A NEW LOOK AT AN OLD PROBLEM

One of the most burning issues in the controversies about God is Waste in Nature. Philosophies that do not admit a Divine Being as the source and support and goal of the world, or only admit a rudimentary consciousness fundamental to Matter and attaining higher intensities according to the growing complexities of physical structure, or at most admit a non-perfect élan vital progressing through repeated trial and error - such philosophies can have no quarrel with Nature's huge amount of waste. But the plethora of blind and useless expenditure of energy we notice all around seems to give the lie direct to the presence of a secret Divine Consciousness.

How would the world-view of Sri Aurobindo face the objection? In his first glance at the problem Sri Aurobindo says: "... obviously this is an objection based on the limitations of our human intellect which seeks to impose its own particular rationality, good enough for limited human ends, on the general operations of the World-Force. We see only part of Nature's purpose and all that does not subserve that part we call waste. Yet even our own human action is full of an apparent waste, so appearing from the individual point of view, which yet, we may be sure, subserves well enough the large and universal purpose of things. That part of her intention which we can detect, Nature gets done surely enough in spite of, perhaps really by virtue of her apparent waste. We may well trust to her in the rest which we do not yet detect."¹

All this certainly has cogency, but there is a note of "trust" and "perhaps" and "we may be sure", and it does not tend to carry conviction quite home. Something is left unsaid, which possibly is premature at the stage where the problem is tackled. And Sri Aurobindo returns to the subject in another context which touches upon his earlier reference to "our own human action". He writes: "A narrow selection, a large rejection or reservation, a miserly-spendthrift system of waste of material and unemployment

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of resources and a scanty and disorderly modicum of useful spending and utilisable balance seems to be the method of Nature in our conscious becoming even as it is in the field of the material universe. But this is only in appearance, for it would be a wholly untrue account to say that all that is not thus saved up and utilised is destroyed, becomes null and has passed away ineffectually and in vain. A great part of it has been quietly used by Nature herself to form us and actuates that sufficiently large mass of our growth and becoming and action for which our conscious memory, will and intelligence are not responsible. A still greater part is used by her as a store from which she draws and which she utilises, while we ourselves have utterly forgotten the origin and provenance of this material which we find ourselves employing with a deceptive sense of creation; for we imagine we are creating this new material of our work, when we are only combining results out of that which we have forgotten but Nature in us has remembered. If we admit rebirth as part of her system, we shall realise that all experience has its use; for all experience counts in this prolonged building and nothing is rejected except what has exhausted its utility and would be a burden on the future. A judgment from what appears now in our conscious surface is fallacious: for when we study and understand, we perceive that only a little of her action and growth in us is conscious; the bulk of it is carried on subconsciously as in the rest of her material life. We are not only what we know of ourselves but an immense more which we do not know; our momentary personality is only a bubble on the ocean of our existence."²

A deeply helpful gloss on Nature's waste is here, suggesting pointers from what happens in our conscious becoming to what must be happening in the field of the material universe. But here also is not an entirely satisfying statement. Once again, waste is essentially denied, and the appearance of it attributed to our limited human view. But have we not to realise that our human view is limited because we are living in a certain sort of universe and are evolving portions of a particular kind of cosmic movement? If the universe, the cosmic movement, is such that a limited human view must inevitably occur in it, surely Nature is

² . Ibid., p. 555.

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working under conditions that are imperfect. And, though we may assert that only her individual items are faulty but her sum-total is faultless, we still do not quite get rid of our conclusion. To hold that in the divine reason of things there is a key beyond us to all the waste we witness is no sufficient answer. Sri Aurobindo himself starkly observes: "A Divine Whole that is perfect by reason of the imperfection of its parts, runs the risk of itself being only perfect in imperfection, because it fulfils entirely some stage in an unaccomplished purpose; it is then a present but not an ultimate Totality. To it we could apply the Greek saying Theos ouk estin alla gigentai, the Divine is not yet in being, but is becoming."³

Thus the cosmic movement, not possessed of the Divine, proves to be capable of real waste. And to reconcile this aspect with the one noted earlier we must say in extenuation: "The amount of real waste is the least possible, since a Divine Intelligence managing an imperfect world is making the best ever of a pretty bad job. This amount is the minimum necessity for that Intelligence to accomplish its plan. Indeed, everything is being made use of - but in the manner and the measure conforming to the type of manifestation that this world is. The type is such that - speaking figuratively - to reach the target once we need to expend a hundred arrows instead of just a single arrow, even though the hundred are the smallest number under the inauspicious circumstances, for a supreme Intelligence pits itself against the difficulties and is able to take the greatest advantage of them."

The light in which we see waste here is the same as that in which we see with Sri Aurobindo the oppositions he makes between the Divine and the Undivine. Under the latter head he puts "grief, pain, error, falsehood, ignorance, weakness, wickedness, incapacity, non-doing of what should be done and wrong-doing, deviation of will and denial of will, egoism, limitation, division from other beings with whom we should be one, all that makes up the effective figure of what we call evil."⁴ These, he says, are "facts of the world-consciousness, not fiction and unrealities."⁵ Of course, he is careful to add: "they are facts

³. Ibid., p. 395.

4. Ibid., p. 405.

5. Ibid.

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whose complete sense or true value is not that which we assign to them in our ignorance" - but he also continues: "Still our sense of them is part of a true sense, our values of them are necessary to their complete values."⁶

Sri Aurobindo affirms the undivine as an ingredient of cosmic existence. Although he does not specifically name waste in this connection, waste is undoubtedly one of the aspects of the undivine, it is a result of "error" and "incapacity" which Sri Aurobindo does name and it can be subsumed also under "non-doing of what should be done and wrong-doing." The waste in our human activity is but an example of all waste in Nature: it is due to insufficient knowledge and insufficient power. When conscious man is liable to such a lot of error and incapacity, what should we not expect of phenomena in which Nature has no surface consciousness at all or at best a very restricted one?

On looking at "evil" as a component of world reality, Sri Aurobindo is not standing on a universal or transcendent height which corrects our human outlook. Now his earlier treatment of the problem of waste becomes no more than half the answer of his spiritual philosophy. That half is part of the vision of the world as perfect from the standpoint of the Supreme Consciousness, the vision that all is Brahman. There is another vision which is more typically Aurobindonian on the whole: according to it, perfection has to emerge and evolve, Brahman has to manifest from non-Brahman and anti-Brahman. Both visions have their validity and the latter is indispensable to the Integral Yoga with its insistence on transforming all that is erring and false and feeble in our nature into the Divine. In this vision waste, featuring as a reality to be confronted, is not seen to be there because we are short-sighted: a ground for it has to be discovered in the cosmic scheme just as much as for suffering and falsehood, a formula that would make it possible in God's universe without impugning God's supreme Intelligence.

The required ground and formula in Sri Aurobindo's spiritual philosophy is God's "involution". Out of the infinite possibilities of manifestation the possibility that has been made the key-note of the present manifestation is that a sovereign Consciousness has used its power of variable self-play to find itself through a

6. Ibid.

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process beginning from an utter concealment of itself in what it puts forth. In contrast to its unobscurable status of ever-existing plenitude at the top, as it were, it effects at the bottom a complete involution of all its divine figures. Then a reverse movement takes place to evolve those figures in the terms of their negation and achieve a greater, a unique intensity of Light and Power and Bliss. But, when slowly the involved divinity is released from the chaos of the Inconscient, there is bound to be the brutal and the blind, the cruel and the wasteful. An irrational and useless expenditure of energy is inevitable if evolution starts from a plan to manifest God's innermost truth through diverse symbols of an entire contradiction of that truth.

With God becoming the Inconscient and then growing out of that abyss towards His own summit of Superconscience, so few would be the holds and vantage-points, so much would slip into the yawning chasm! Could there be anything save real gigantic waste? And this waste would exist and not be a mere seeming though a supreme Intelligence were at work. But in spite of this waste that Intelligence would not be called in question. For, it has itself settled the conditions of a paradoxical self-consummation and afterwards goes converting to the utmost utility possible the constraints and checks of those conditions so that the vast number of misfires is actually the smallest in a world of total initial darkness where, by the law of probability, nearly every move should be a misfire.

So one of the most burning issues in the controversy about God would be completely and convincingly met in the Aurobindonian world-view without our blinking any of the facts.

(May 1970)

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