Beyond Man

Chapter Eight: Homo Sum

Man is Nature’s great term of transition in which she grows conscious of her aim; in him she looks up from the animal with open eyes towards the divine ideal.¹

— Sri Aurobindo

‘a story has neither a beginning nor an end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.’ These are the opening words of Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair. The story of the human being has neither a beginning nor an end. It moves between two infinities: behind man his origin, ahead of him his destiny. And both are the same, ‘a consciousness … against which the universe seems to stand out like a petty picture against an immeasurable background.’² (Sri Aurobindo)

Man carries in him all that has preceded him in the manifestation. In him he carries the Godhead that he essentially still is and has to become again fully. He carries in him the features of the big Four who where his primordial progenitors in the creation; because of them his Earth has been perverted and become susceptible to darkness, suffering, falsehood and death. And he carries in him everything that has emerged before in the evolution, not only matter and life but also mental consciousness, which is why he is able to think, to reason and even to ‘see’ a little. Although his true nature is that of an incarnated mental consciousness in matter and life, the lower evolutionary gradations still prevail in him to such a degree that he may still be considered to be animal man, not the mental being in its pure form which in times to come may take shape as a higher species on Earth.

He is great, he is little. He is terribly vulnerable though in essence immortal. He is ignorant but has the omniscience in him and therefore at every moment does exactly the action that is required for the destiny of himself and of the Whole. He is a dwarf, a worm, a speck of dust on the sleeve of the universe, and he is the child of the Great Mother, the princely child of the Queen with the crown of twelve pearls. It is true, ‘man as he is cannot be the last term of the evolution: he is too imperfect an expression of the Spirit’.³ (Sri Aurobindo) It is also true that ‘we are the first possible instruments to begin and make the world progress.’⁴ ‘It is man who will do the job. He is the one who will change. He is the one who will transform his Earth.’⁵ (The Mother) ‘For man is precisely that term and symbol of a higher Existence descended into the material world in which it is possible for the lower to transfigure itself and put on the nature of the higher and the higher to reveal itself in the forms of the lower.’⁶ (Sri Aurobindo) Man is the crux, the big X. He stands at the intersection of the universal force lines, he is the cross and the crucified, impotent in his concealed omnipotence, flogged and crowned with thorns as the grotesque and yet true king of Creation.

And he is the child of Mother Earth. ‘Heaven is his father, the Earth his mother,’ says Hermes Trismegistos in the Tabula Smaragdina. According to the present scientific model, planet Earth is a small ball in space as there are probably billions more. Nothing much in fact, and if life-forms have appeared on it, it can only have been by accident. But on this point too science is revising its opinion, and some cosmologists now dare to suggest that Earth as the bearer of life might be unique. The recently introduced weak and strong anthropic principles prove how even the sober men of science are in need of an explanation of the improbable chain of coincidences that leads up to their own existence.

The view of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, referring to the great traditions and based on their own occult experience, differs radically from the generally accepted scientific model. ‘In the whole creation the earth has a place of distinction, because unlike any other planet it is evolutionary with a psychic entity at its centre,’⁷ wrote the Mother. To the children of the Ashram she said: ‘The Earth is a sort of symbolical crystallization of universal life, a reduction, a concentration, to facilitate the work of evolution and to participate in it.’⁸ Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘Our attention must be fixed on the earth because our work is here. Besides, the earth is a concentration of all the other worlds and one can touch them by touching something corresponding in the earth-atmosphere.’⁹ By this he does not mean the physical atmosphere, but the extremely complex invisible body of Earth, the living entity, her physical body being to our senses the perceptible exteriorization of it.

Seen in this way the Earth is no longer some little globe spinning in space, one out of a probably countless number — as one so often reads: a small satellite of an average sun somewhere in the outer end of one of the arms of a common galaxy. It is again awarded a central position in the material cosmos, even the central position from the standpoint of evolution and of everything that is of vital importance to us. ‘The Earth has been formed in a special way by a direct intervention, without anything intermediary, of the supreme Consciousness [the Great Mother] in the Inconscient [after the fall of the four original Beings] … I have taken great pains to tell you that it was a symbolical creation and that every action on this special point [the Earth] radiates in the whole universe. Don’t forget this and don’t go about telling that the Earth has been formed from something ejected by the sun,’¹⁰ the Mother said to the children of the Ashram.

After the complete development of their occult capacities, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had access to all manifested worlds. Sri Aurobindo has described the whole range of them in detail in his epic poem Savitri, a revelation with a lasting place in the occult and spiritual world literature. For him and for the Mother it was not difficult to visit in their subtle body the planets of our own solar system, and they have done so. But it soon became clear to them that those planetary worlds were of secondary importance to their work when compared to Earth and its central place in the cosmic order. ‘The evolution takes place on the earth and the earth is therefore the right field of progress,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo, and also: ‘I am concerned with the earth, not with worlds beyond for their own sake.’ All cosmic elements being present in the Earth, everything that happens here transmits its vibrations to similar elements elsewhere in the cosmos. As the nucleus of a cell determines the functioning of the whole of the cell, so too Earth determines the life and development of the cosmos.

We who have been living under the nuclear threat of the Cold War receive from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother an unexpected reassurance. ‘The Earth has been built with a certain purpose and it will not disappear before the things have been accomplished,’¹¹ said the Mother in 1960. She repeated this emphatically eleven years later, when many feared that humanity, together with its planet, would volatilize in nuclear radiation before the end of the century. ‘The Earth will not be destroyed,’ not before it has accomplished the purpose for which it was built. This does not mean that it might not be subject to changes of great moment at the present time or in times to come.

Indeed, some pronouncements by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are based on a cosmology completely different from the one generally accepted today, which after all is quite recent and exclusively constructed on what is materially perceptible (though physics, with its neutron stars, quasars and black holes, has grown much more occult than it likes to acknowledge). How to interpret for instance the following aphorism of Sri Aurobindo: ‘To the senses it is always true that the sun moves round the earth; this is false for reason. To the reason it is always true that the earth moves round the sun; this is false to the supreme vision. Neither earth moves nor the sun; there is only a change in the relation of sun-consciousness and earth-consciousness’?¹² One feels that here a fundamental, albeit for us still incomprehensible, truth has been formulated.

Or let us quote the following paragraph by Sri Aurobindo, expressing a view parallel to the scientific one: ‘Necessarily, by terrestrial we do not mean this one earth and its period of duration, but use earth in the wider root-sense of the Vedantic prithwi, the earth-principle creating habitations of physical form for the soul.’¹³ This is the earth-principle that together with the principles of wafer, fire, air and ether constitutes the five elements of which things consist.⁹¹

We have been told that the divine manifestation has neither beginning nor end. From this we might deduce that the drama of evolution, that is the incarnation of the Divine Consciousness in a material, ‘earthly’ environment, must have taken place countless times before, in a ‘habitation’ — a planet or a world — where the Self in its variety of selves (souls) has taken on physical forms. We find this supposition confirmed in the following paragraph of Sri Aurobindo: ‘The experiment of human life on an earth is not now for the first time enacted. It has been conducted a million times before and the long drama will again a million times be repeated. In all that we do now, our dreams, our discoveries, our swift or difficult attainments, we profit subconsciously by the experience of innumerable precursors and our labour will be fecund in planets unknown to us and in worlds yet uncreated. The plan, the peripeties, the denouement differ continually, yet are always governed by the conventions of an eternal Art. God, Man, Nature are the three perpetual symbols.’¹⁴ This still virtually unknown text of Sri Aurobindo, written in the late Twenties or the early Thirties and for the first time published in 1982 by the Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research, is the logical, staggering consequence of his general outlook.

And he also wrote: ‘Then he [the Creator] creates out of this solar body of Vishnu the planets, each of which successively becomes the Bhumi [Earth] or place of manifestation for Manu, the mental being, who is the nodus of manifest life-existence and the link between the life and the spirit. The present earth in its turn appears as the scene of life, Mars being its last theatre.’¹⁵ These words are from an essay written by Sri Aurobindo in 1914 under the title ‘The Evolutionary Scale’. Might this be the reason why we are still so fascinated by Mars?

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have seldom given much attention to speculations about other planets and stellar systems. There are beings anywhere in the manifestation, they said, but materialized beings are found exclusively on Earth. It is too easy to indulge in all kinds of romantic fantasies as long as we do not fully know and master ourselves, as long as we have not found a solution to the problems of existence confronting us here.

‘The world in which we live is not a meaningless accident that has unaccountably taken place in the void of Space; it is the scene of an evolution in which an eternal Truth has been embodied, hidden in a form of things, and is secretly in process of unfoldment through the ages. There is a meaning in our existence, a purpose in our birth and death and travail, a consummation of all our labour. All are parts of a single plan; nothing has been idly made in the universe; nothing is vain in our life.’¹⁶ (Sri Aurobindo)

Some not totally disinterested promoters of space travel, which according to the Mother is ‘a game for grown-up children,’ give as an important reason for its further development that we might find somewhere in the universe the explanation of our being and our existence. Yet this explanation is not to be found in matter as such, here or elsewhere, but in That which has brought matter forth and by which it exists. Besides, it seems somewhat improbable that on the other side of the universe should be found what is not present here; on the contrary, the Earth, as we have seen, is a symbolic condensation of the universe, with all its shades of light and darkness. Man carries the fundamental problems in himself, be it in jeans or in a space suit.

The evolution of our universe, seen in a broad perspective, is a concatenation of miracles, of improbabilities which all the same have happened in one way or another, and about which science has a lot of suppositions and theories but no explanations. Science actually has only models, i.e. mathematical descriptions of processes, but not a single fundamental explanation whatsoever. For to explain one single phenomenon, however simple, one has to know everything, as everything is inseparably, intrinsically connected. ‘The universe as a whole explains every single thing at any moment.’¹⁷ ‘The tree does not explain the seed, nor the seed the tree; cosmos explains both and God explains cosmos.’¹⁸

There is no scientific explanation of the Big Bang, which, precisely because of its uniqueness, is called a ‘singularity’. Neither is there a scientific explanation of the phenomenon Earth, ‘a habitable planet in an inhabitable system’ (Sri Aurobindo). And there is no scientific explanation of the ‘ontological discontinuities’, called ‘irreducible mysteries’ by E.E. Schumacher, namely the hierarchically ordered forms of existence that have appeared on Earth: matter, life, lower and higher mental consciousness.

Let there be no misunderstanding: the origin of life on Earth has not yet been scientifically accounted for. In this matter, as in many others, official science gives in to wishful thinking. It refers for example to the experiments of Urey and Miller, who are supposed to have proven the life-producing possibilities of a hypothetical prebiotic soup, and even to a modern version of ‘panspermia’, which holds that life was brought to the Earth somewhere from the universe by comets or other carriers. Even if it were true that life has originated in some other place in the universe, this would not bring us one step nearer to an explanation of it.

All seven present theories of the origin of life have been examined by Robert Shapiro, an expert in the research on DNA, in his book Origins: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth. He arrives at the conclusion that, these theories notwithstanding, life on our planet still seems to be a generatio spontanea as it was in former times. ‘The improbability involved in generating even one bacterium is so large that it reduces all considerations of time and space to nothingness’ (p. 128).

If life on Earth indeed has come into existence by an ontological discontinuity or ‘quantum leap’, then its gestation and its essence cannot but remain out of reach of materialistic science; for then it is something wholly other than an epiphenomenon of material processes — in the supposition that these processes could exist by themselves — and then the cell, like every living organism, is much more than a machine (cf. ‘The cell is indeed a machine,’ Jacques Monod in Le Hasard et la Necessité, p. 145). Life has its own laws and processes that are yet to be discovered by the true, comprehensive science of the future.

The same reasoning is valid, and in still greater measure, in theories concerning mental consciousness. To us the processes of life can still be directly experienced, most intimately in our beating heart, but the mental processes are a lot more impalpable and intangible, so much so that they are frequently mistaken for spiritual phenomena, both ranges of existence then being covered by what is called ‘spirit’ or by similar terms.

The great confusion, with regrettable consequences, in every discussion about ‘body’ and ‘spirit’ has been caused by a philosopher who is generally thought of as the very epitome of clear thinking, René Descartes. To him man is a body, which is a machine composed of measurable substances, and ‘spirit’; what man thinks with, as well as the higher domains determining his thinking and what is supposedly spiritual or divine, is abstract, unmeasurable and therefore insubstantial. Secondly, science must consider only the measurable. The result of both premises, however, was that science declared itself to be an abstraction, an epiphenomenon of matter, with the absurd consequence that science was and is being practised by something it has declared an abstraction. For the scientist’s awareness of his own life experiences, including his reflections and thus his scientific thinking, is according to his own assumptions something unmeasurable and therefore scientifically unreal. Science too, the standard bearer of matter and of the concrete, has declared the human experience and consequently the experienced world to be an illusion!

Material and Spiritual Evolution

It may seem amazing how near E.F. Schumacher brings the higher animal to the human being. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother go still further in this. ‘Man and the animal are both mentally conscious beings …’¹⁹ In the animal the human intellect is being prepared, ‘for the animal too thinks.’²⁰ (Sri Aurobindo) Studying their line of thinking one concludes that the deep gap assumed by man between himself and the animal is actually the expression of a kind of self-defense; he tries to distance himself from his own animality by elevating himself as high as possible above it. No ardent self-contemplation is needed to realize our external similarities with the primates, and all human history testifies to our inner similarities with the animal, so much so that comparisons often turn out to the advantage of it.

How has man originated? The human species has come about in accordance with the evolutionary mechanisms that have already been described. On the one hand there were the primates who had reached their ceiling, in whom evolution had worked out the possibility of a higher form of consciousness and in whom it now called for the descent of this higher form. On the other hand there was the answer from above by which a higher mental world, the world of the ‘typal’ mental being, was inserted into the evolutionary ladder, thus enabling the incarnation of a species on a higher rung of the ladder, earthman.

When approximately did this take place? Paleontologists say that the human being made its appearance on Earth between one and three million years ago, and according to the Mother a million years had already elapsed between the descent of the mental principle on Earth and the first material incarnation of the human being. ‘After the mental had descended on earth, between the time of the manifestation of the mental in the atmosphere and the time of the appearance of the first man, something like a million years has gone by.’²¹ The mental consciousness as incarnated in the human being, with the reason, the reflective consciousness, the awareness of space and time and the inception of the capacity of a higher ‘seeing’, should consequently have descended into the earth-atmosphere between two and four million years ago. The Mother also said: ‘There have most certainly been intermediaries or parallel forms between the ape and man.’²² It is now common knowledge that the fossil remains of several intermediary beings have been found and classified by paleontologists.

The Mother confirms the teachings of the ancient traditions and also what is stated in the Bible: that beings from a higher world first came on the Earth in their pure form, but that later on they united with the higher animals, which resulted in a long transition of probably very bizarre corporeal forms, of which the human being finally was the harmonious outcome. ‘It was only when man was made, that the gods were satisfied … and cried, “Man indeed is well and wonderfully made; the higher evolution can now begin!” He is like God, the sum of all other creatures from the animal to the god, infinitely variable where they are fixed, dynamic where they, even the highest, are static, and therefore, although in the present and in his attainment a little lower than the angels, yet in the eventuality and in his culmination considerably higher than the gods.’²³ (Sri Aurobindo)

Evolution on Earth is a development, a growth of consciousness in material forms, which becomes ever more refined and complex as the growth proceeds. ‘The evolution has always had a spiritual significance and the physical change was only instrumental.’²⁴ (Sri Aurobindo) It is consciousness which, by the described non-material processes, irresistibly drives evolution onwards and upwards, and works out every gradation of it. The origin and the goal of evolution on Earth are spiritual; the mechanisms of evolution are procedures of the spirit in matter, and its results are ever higher gradations of material forms.

‘A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution; it must stand on its own inherent justification: it may accept the scientific account of physical evolution as a support or an element, but the support is not indispensable. The scientific theory is concerned only with the outward and visible machinery and process, with the details of Nature’s execution, with the physical development of things in Matter and the law of development of Life and Mind in Matter; its account of the process may have to be considerably changed or may be dropped altogether in the light of new discovery, but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul’s manifestation in material existence.’ (The Life Divine, p. 835)

Seen from the standpoint of the Spirit, ‘the material universe is only the facade of an immense building which has other structures behind it, and it is only if one knows the whole that one can have some knowledge of the truth of the material universe.’²⁵ (Sri Aurobindo) Science sees things exactly the other way around, because for science it is not the Spirit but Matter that is primordial and even the sole existent. As for evolution, science seems to be very much assured of its knowledge. Paul Davies, for instance, writes: ‘The basic principles and mechanisms of evolution are no longer seriously in doubt.’²⁶ And in Le hasard et la nécessité, which some years ago was a French best-seller by Nobel Prize winner and champion of materialistic positivism Jacques Monod, we read: ‘Today one can say that the elementary mechanisms of evolution are not only understood in principle but identified with precision.’²⁷ Is that so?

While talking about the appearance of life on Earth, we have already mentioned Robert Shapiro’s book Origins, first published in 1986, in which is clearly shown that not one theory of life comes even near to explaining the origin of a living, self-reproducing organism on our planet. The papers of the 1993 congress in Barcelona on the same subject contain masses of data and a lot of hopeful surmises, but they have not taken us a step nearer to the explanation of life.

The truth is that science knows little about the mechanisms of evolution, and that all declarations to the contrary are self-delusions and often a form of demagogy practised by the creed of materialism, not to say an untruth consciously kept alive. Francis Hitching puts it as follows: in three crucial areas where neo-Darwinism [at present still the generally recognized evolutionary ‘school’] can be tested, it has failed. 1. The fossil records reveal a pattern of evolutionary leaps rather than gradual change. 2. Genes do not create evolution, they are a powerful stabilizing mechanism whose main function is to prevent new forms evolving. 3, Random step-by-step mutations at the molecular level cannot explain the organized and growing complexity of life.²⁸

In other words, the theory of gradualism (i.e., the gradual apparition of evolutionary changes during very long periods of time), to be unconditionally accepted at the cost of ridicule by the scientific community, does not seem to hold water; the genes are not the fundamental evolutionary factors as molecular biology continues to teach; evolution is not a matter of random mutations and mutants, for these result almost exclusively in non-viable deformations, which consequently cannot be the building elements in the grandiose and extremely complex order of evolution as a whole and of each of its gradations in particular. This means, briefly summarized, that the three pillars of neo-Darwinism, and accordingly of the generally accepted theory of evolution at present, are without foundation.

Equally important is the fact that the famous ‘missing links’, the untraceable transitory forms between the species, remain missing. Most paleontologists now admit that they do not exist. It is not even possible to make a caricature [i.e., a resemblance] of evolution out of palaeobiological facts. ‘The fossil material is now so complete that the lack of transitional series cannot be explained by the scarcity of the material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.’²⁹ These are the words of N. Heribert-Nilsson, professor at the University of Lund, after forty years of study of the subject. ‘There are missing links that remain always missing,’³⁰ wrote an ironical Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine. We now know the explanation: the evolutionary leaps take place in Consciousness, the essence, carrier and developing factor of all manifestation, and the material life forms are what the processes in Consciousness have fixed in Matter because they proved to be viable organisms.

It is important to give some consideration to this topic. For questions about humankind and its origins arise in everybody’s mind, and explanations provided by religion are, for the most part, so unreasonable that they invariably lose out against the arguments of science, which make the scientific view look irrefutable.

Sri Aurobindo’s vision is a rational elaboration of the fundamentals of everyday experience as well as of a higher experience in which the cosmic events and the smallest common details are provided with a justified and meaningful place, for he wanted his view ‘to agree with all the facts of existence.’ To the relation between science and spirituality we will come back later, and in the next chapter we will take a look at the apparent lack of concreteness of things ‘spiritual’. Sri Aurobindo always kept ‘a healthy grip on the facts’ and favoured a ‘spiritual positivism’. His aim was ‘the widest, the most flexible, the most catholic affirmation possible.’³¹ ‘As in science, so in metaphysical thought, that general and ultimate solution is likely to be the best which includes and accounts for all so that each truth of experience takes its place in the whole.’³²

‘The touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical Knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only be really mastered in its fullness — to its heights we can always reach — when we keep our feet firmly on the physical. “Earth is his footing,” says the Upanishad whenever it images the Self that manifests in the universe. And it is certainly a fact that the wider we extend and the surer we make our knowledge of the physical world, the wider and surer becomes our foundation of the higher knowledge, even for the highest, even for the Brahmavidya [the knowledge of Brahman].’ (The Life Divine, p. 11)

Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;

Earth is the heroic spirit’s battlefield,

The forge where the Arch-mason shapes his works.

Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king,

Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.³³

— Savitri