Beyond Man

Chapter Nine: From Man to Superman

[Present] man is but the shadow of Man; Man is but the shadow of God.¹

Inscription deciphered on a bas-relief
in a Babylonian temple.

To most of us, anything related to the spirit seems airy, insubstantial, unreal and on the whole fictitious. We have been cheated too many times by the so-called representatives of the spirit vaunting their abilities to describe to us the intangible and invisible, and to formulate the inaudible. Their contact with the spirit was the only true contact, they claimed, and had to be accepted at face value under the penalty of eternal damnation of our soul. They imprinted on our mind the belief that we ourselves could not directly contact the truth they held up to us because we were unworthy to do so. Even in the present day there is no shortage of usurpers and swindlers of the spirit, and the emptiness within us is so deep, the human distress so exasperating, that the ‘men of God’ always find an eager audience and a flourishing trade.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never made any effort to recruit disciples or devotees. We quote Sri Aurobindo’s well-known letter, perhaps addressed to a too zealous disciple: ‘I don’t believe in advertisement except for books etc., and in propaganda except for politics and patent medicines. But for serious work it is a poison. It means either a stunt or a boom — and stunts and booms exhaust the thing they carry on their crest and leave it lifeless and broken high and dry on the shores of nowhere — or it means a movement. A movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other damned⁹¹ nonsense. It means that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence. This is what happened to the “religions” and it is the reason of their failure.’ And he added: ‘I prefer to do solid work,’ and that, if the work got accomplished, it would spread by itself, if that work gets done, then it will propagate itself so far as propagation is necessary — if it were not to get done, propagation would be useless.’ ²

‘I have a profound aversion to publicity,’ said the Mother. And she had as strong an aversion to sectarianism in all its forms — the contorted self-righteousness of egocentric opinionatedness and narrow, stunted thinking.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were aware that their fully elaborated and forceful vision of the superman and supermanhood could easily lead to the growing self-assertion of fanatic sectarians. The Mother therefore warned: ‘Truth is not a dogma that one can learn once and for all and impose as a rule. Truth is infinite like the supreme Lord himself and it manifests at every moment in those who are sincere and attentive.’³ And she wrote to their own disciples: ‘I repeat that in connection with Sri Aurobindo it is impossible to talk of a teaching or even of a revelation: his is a direct Action by the Lord, and thereon no religion can be founded … Spiritual life can only exist in its purity when it is free of all forms of mental dogma.’⁴

Sometimes she saw the distortion, the narrowing and the hardening of Sri Aurobindo’s synthetic and flexible thought take place before her very eyes, in the writings of a disciple or in his brain, more easily accessible to her than an open book. ‘One must at any price prevent this from becoming a new religion. For as soon as it would be formulated in an elegant, impressive and somewhat forceful way, it would be finished.’⁵ Sri Aurobindo had written: ‘I may say that it is far from my purpose to propagate any religion, new or old, for humanity in the future. A way to be opened that is still blocked, not a religion to be founded, is my conception of the matter.’⁶ The Mother also said: ‘I have told you these things because it is necessary for you to hear them. But do not make an absolute dogma of it, for that would completely deprive them of their truth.’⁷ And she wrote it down on paper: ‘Do not take my words for a teaching. Always they are a force in action, uttered with a definite purpose, and they lose their true power when separated from that purpose.’⁸ This warning is printed at the beginning of every volume of the English edition of her collected works and often quoted — especially by people who act exactly to the contrary.

The human being longs for the heights but time and again is pulled downwards by the weight of the past it carries in him, by the darkness, the ignorance and the burden of the subconscious, by the weight of matter and the irrationality of the lower vital — all the invisible but very real forces affecting his thinking, usually a bobbing cork on the restless inner waves. Sri Aurobindo called this ‘the downward gravitation’. Moreover, the mental consciousness of the human cannot actually know reality. We have seen that of reality, which is a whole, it can only know fragments, aspects, flints — the pieces of a puzzle of which it feels that it exists as a whole, but which it can never know because it is unable to perceive it as a whole. True knowledge is only possible by identification, something human thought is incapable of doing.

In the human being only the lowest three steps of the stair of Existence have been realized. Higher on there are many more ‘spiritual’ steps. As the word ‘spirit’ is often misleading, when using it and its derivations we will keep in mind the difference between the ordinary mental consciousness and the gradations above it; ‘spiritual’ is henceforth used exclusively in relation to these higher gradations.

All things spiritual seem airy, insubstantial and unreal to humans because of the downward gravitation in them, because of the fact that their material senses can only perceive material objects, and because of the slipping grip of their intellect on reality. These limitations cause humans to see the spiritual worlds as an unreal fiction. And this is why, after centuries of contradictory accounts and descriptions by those who claimed to have access to these worlds, humankind has resolutely put both feet on the solid ground of matter and declared this to be its true domain.

Still, humans know little of the spiritual worlds. They sometimes sense them so intensely that their familiar world is turned upside down. One can only sense what one has in oneself, for otherwise the sensory capacity would not be there, and one can only make contact with what is already in some way present in oneself.

According to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who follow the ancient yogic tradition in this, the human body in the manifestation of the human being on Earth consists of several ‘sheaths’ (of the soul). The material, visible sheath, made out of what we call tangible matter, is only our most outward or ‘gross’ body. This material sheath is surrounded by or embedded in a vital sheath consisting of substance of the vital plane. It is in this vital body that we go in search of adventure in our vital dreams and that we leave our material or gross body for good at the time of death. Both bodies are in their turn surrounded by or embedded in a mental sheath, made of the still more subtle substance of the mental worlds. If our mental body is sufficiently developed we can roam about in it through mental dream worlds, and after death we spend some time in it, after having left the vital worlds by discarding our vital body. Then there still is a more subtle sheath, sometimes called the ‘causal body’, in which we may enter the supramental worlds once that body has completely been formed.

Seen in this way the human being is, just like the Earth, a condensation or representation of the cosmos. This is why it was called a microcosm in the occult mysteries and by the alchemists. ‘Man, the microcosm, has all these planes in his own being, ranged from his subconscient to his superconscient existence,’⁹ wrote Sri Aurobindo referring to the sheaths described above. ‘All things are potentially present in the substance out of which man has been formed … In an essential way every human being contains in himself all universal potentialities,’¹⁰ said the Mother; and she wrote to a disciple: if we did not carry in ourselves something corresponding to all that exists in the universe, the universe wouldn’t exist for us.’¹¹

Although the spiritual ranges seem to us airy, insubstantial and unreal, we relate to them because we partially consist of them. This is the reason why we continue thinking about them — and also why the mountebanks of spirituality can have such an influence on the naive and credulous. For we would like so fervently that all that is pure, elevated, beautiful and good in us might also exist here and now, because we feel it existing ‘somewhere.’

‘As we ascend, a finer but far stronger and more truly and spiritually concrete substance emerges, a greater luminosity and potent stuff of consciousness, a subtler, sweeter, purer and more powerfully ecstatic energy of delight,’¹² wrote Sri Aurobindo. And about the gradations of existence he said: ‘The more subtle is also the more powerful — one might say the more truly concrete; it is less bound than the gross, it has a greater permanence in its being along with a greater potentiality, plasticity and range in its becoming. Each plateau of the hill of being gives to our widening experience a higher plane of our consciousness and a richer world of our existence.’¹³ ‘Consciousness is a fundamental thing, the fundamental thing in existence.’¹⁴ (Sri Aurobindo) Of this we actually have no idea because we are not conscious of our consciousness. We are conscious of so little. Existence to us is like a fallow ground with a frail flower here and there, an illuminating thought or a moment of coherent reflective thinking after an intense effort. But if consciousness is the fundamental fact, than it is the foundation of all planes of existence, including ours. It is present in the atom, the cell, the body organ, the nervous system and the vital sheath. We are a (mainly unconscious) fantastically complex phenomenon of consciousness, and what we in ordinary parlance mean by consciousness is little more than a thin peel on the surface of an onion.

‘Consciousness is usually identified with mind, but mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of colour or human hearing all the gradations of sound,’¹⁵ wrote Sri Aurobindo. In the endless scale of vibrations of consciousness, our consciousness covers only a few degrees somewhere in the middle range.

‘Consciousness is not something abstract, it is like existence itself or ananda or mind or prana, something very concrete. If one becomes aware of the inner consciousness, one can do all sorts of things with it, send it out as a stream of force, erect a circle or wall of consciousness around oneself, direct an idea so that it shall enter somebody’s head in America, etc., etc.’¹⁶ As the yogis of all ages have said, one can learn how to manipulate consciousness. Sri Aurobindo has in the course of many years tested out all these possibilities ‘more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane.’¹⁷ Of the Mother we know that already in Tlemcen she was able to climb the twelve steps of the universal scale of consciousness, up to the border where the manifested worlds fade out at the gates of the eternal white silence.

In letter after letter from some disciples Sri Aurobindo had to read how unreal, cold, distant, abstract, monotonous, unreachable and scarcely desirable Consciousness, the Godhead and all things spiritual appeared to them. Most of them, like the other children of men, still remained buried up to their chin in the subconscious quicksand of matter, and of the open spaces of the spirit, they knew only from hearsay that one can breathe freely. Sri Aurobindo encouraged them in their arduous upward effort by sometimes telling them an experience of his own. ‘When the peace of God descends on you, when the Divine Presence is there within you, when the Ananda rushes on you like a sea, when you are driven like a leaf before the wind by the breath of the Divine Force, when Love flowers out from you on all creation, when Divine Knowledge floods you with a Light which illumines and transforms in a moment all that was before dark, sorrowful and obscure, when all that is becomes part of the One Reality, when the Reality is all around you, you feel at once by the spiritual contact, by the inner vision, by the illumined and seeing thought, by the vital sensation and even by the very physical sense, everywhere you see, hear, touch only the Divine. Then you can much less doubt it or deny it than you can doubt or deny daylight or air or the sun in heaven — for of these physical things you cannot be sure but they are what your senses represent them to be; but in the concrete experiences of the Divine, doubt is impossible.’¹⁸

Sri Aurobindo has related quite a few of his experiences (he said, just like the Mother: ‘I can only base myself on what I have experienced myself’), most extensively in Savitri. His philosophical works and letters are also full of them if one can read behind the direct meaning. Mystical experience is abstract only if one knows about it from hearsay; as direct experience — and all mystics agree about this — it is more concrete than the rock one stumbles on. ‘And what is the end of the whole matter? As if honey could taste itself and all its drops could taste each other and each the whole honeycomb as itself, so should the end be with God and the soul of man and the universe.’¹⁹ The Mother said that this is a realistic description of the highest ananda experience. And one is reminded of the words of the Flemish mystic Jan van Ruusbroec addressing the Divine: ‘Thou tastest sweeter to me than the honeycomb.’

Humans, illiterate, literate or highly learned, talk and talk about so much that surpasses them. ‘That prattles, and that prattles, and it does not even know what it is saying,’ the parrot keeps croaking about the humans surrounding it in Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le metro — about soccer, the latest automobiles and film stars, and tomato soup with little meat balls, about themselves and others, about life and death, God and maybe the soul, about spirituality and mysticism … ‘If mankind only caught a glimpse of what infinite enjoyments, what perfect forces, what luminous reaches of spontaneous knowledge, what wide calms of our being lie waiting for us in the tracts which our animal evolution has not yet conquered, they would leave all and never rest till they had gained these treasures. But the way is narrow, the doors are hard to force, and fear, distrust and scepticism are there, sentinels of Nature, to forbid the turning away of our feet from her ordinary pastures.’²⁰ (Sri Aurobindo)

The Soul

The soul in man is greater than his fate.²¹

— Sri Aurobindo

‘When thou hast the instrument that can show thee man’s soul as thou seest a picture, then thou wilt smile at the wonders of physical Science as the playthings of babies,’²² reads one of Sri Aurobindo’s aphorisms. But to us the soul, said to be our true self, our innermost core, source of power or the higher I — ‘the Daemon, the Godhead within’²³ — seems to be as airy, unreal and insubstantial as everything else that is spiritual. It is said that the soul is created by God at the moment of our birth and breathed into us, and that it continues existing in all eternity, in heaven or in hell. Sometimes it is pictured as a tiny, naked being, a miniature of the living person, escaping out of the body at the time of death and then going through all kinds of vicissitudes in scary places of the underworld. Or it is presented as a butterfly, a ghost, or in an animal form. Or it sings in harmony with the choirs of angels the eternal praise of God. All these seem rather childish if the soul really is a part, a ‘spark’ of the Godhead itself.

According to Eastern wisdom it is so indeed, in all its infinite greatness. ‘The soul, representative of the central being, is a spark of the Divine supporting all individual existence in Nature.’²⁴ (Sri Aurobindo) Being literally the Divine himself, it exists in all eternity, having no end and therefore no beginning. For that which has an infinite future must of necessity have had an infinite past. In the soul the adventure of evolution has been chosen before it started; in the soul it will find its fulfilment.

We know that the Divine is one, perfect and absolute, without the necessity of a manifestation. But it pleases him to contemplate his infinite potentialities in a play of worlds without number, which are the mirrorings of his potentialities. In all other worlds this exteriorization happens directly and without any problem; we call those worlds ‘typal’ because their laws do not change but always conform to their essential type, and their beings are fully satisfied within the gradation of the ananda of which they are the incarnations.

However, there is one world (as far as we know) which is not typal but evolutionary: the world created with ananda and freedom as its principle. We have seen how the first four incarnations of this world, which is ours, misused the freedom bestowed on them as it were, and how this error caused their ‘fall’ into darkness, suffering, falsehood and death. To compensate for the catastrophe of the fall, the Great Mother poured out the divine essence of Love in the dark Inconscient ‘with a greater intensity than at the time of the creation of the four original beings.’ This Love is the essence of the Divine, the essence of the Self, of the All-Soul in our world.

Because of the presence of the divine Love the Inconscient could no longer remain stagnant in its inertia, in its endless sleep. Love was the catalyst by which the degenerated manifestation would be led back towards the origin which had become its goal in a movement we call evolution. In the black Inconscient a hierarchy of forms — material, vital, mental — gradually took shape, ever more complex materializations of the Love that is the essence of the one Self, of the primordial Soul. All these gradual materializations are, within their limits and like all other created beings, reflections of the potentialities present in the Self of the Divine. As this world evolves, their limitations are progressively widened till the divine potentialities at the end of the adventure, manifested in their full glory, will again have become what they were at the origin and what essentially they will have remained all along.

Earth is the symbol or condensation of our universe; our universe evolves in and through the earth; what happens on earth has its repercussions in all whirling, flaming and radiating, or in the dark, condensed and spun-out matter of our universe. It is here that the involution of love-matter, which is soul-matter, has taken place. By its presence the evolution has commenced; because of its presence the evolution cannot rest before it has reached its aim.

There is nothing on Earth that does not have the divine Presence in itself. The Presence is there in the atom, in the crystal, the brick and the tree, in the watch, the airplane and the particle accelerator, in plants and animals — ever more complex according to the ever higher evolutionary gradations. Plants and animals, not yet individualized or self-reflecting, have a group-soul. In the animals this group-soul is as it were concentrated in and radiating through the whole species from their ‘archetype’ or ‘king’, known to us from legends and fairy tales.

In the human being, child of the Earth, evolution attains a crucial phase; the soul has grown sufficiently throughout its earthly embodiments to function as an individuality and to become conscious of itself within the material manifestation. Of this individually functioning soul, all the time an integral part of the All-Soul, one can say: ‘The soul is something that belongs specifically to mankind, it exists only in man.’²⁵

‘All knowledge in all traditions, wherever on earth, says that the formation of the psychic⁹² is an earthly formation and that the growth of the psychic being is something that takes place on earth,’²⁶ said the Mother. For ‘it is only on the Earth — I do not even mean the material universe — only on the Earth that this descent of divine Love, at the origin of the divine Presence in the heart of matter, has taken place.’²⁷ That is why only human beings — the human beings of the evolution, children of an earthly creation — ‘have a psychic being.’²⁸ By this they are superior to all other creatures, even to the gods, who have to take on an earthly body if they want to evolve further.

The Katha Upanishad says that the soul is ‘no larger than a man’s thumb’; the Swetaswatara Upanishad says it is ‘smaller than the hundredth part of the tip of a hair.’ Actually, these figurative descriptions mean that the soul has no dimensions in our tridimensional world. It belongs to a dimension behind the three outward dimensions familiar to us, and the point where it touches our material body is situated behind the heart, in the chakra of the heart. ‘Is the psychic being located in the heart?’ the Mother was asked by a little girl, and she answered: ‘Not in the physical heart, not in the heart muscle. It is in a fourth dimension, an internal dimension. But it is somewhere thereabouts, somewhere behind the solar plexus; that is where one finds it most easily. The psychic being is in a fourth dimension outside our physical being.’²⁹ It is felt by us as if it were in the heart, and this is how it is spoken about metaphorically: ‘The true secret soul in us burns in the temple of the inmost heart,’ writes Sri Aurobindo; there is ‘the light in the hidden crypt of the heart’s innermost sanctuary’, ‘a secluded King in a secret chamber,’ ‘a hidden king behind rich tapestries in his secret room.’ (Savitri)

“Cross and Christians, end to end, I examined. He was not on the cross. I went to the Hindu temple, to the ancient pagoda. In none of them was there any sign. To the uplands of Herat I went, and to Kandahar. I looked. He was not on the heights or in the lowlands. Resolutely, I went to the summit of the mountain of Kaf. There was only the dwelling of the Anqa bird. I went to the Kaaba of Mecca. He was not there. I asked about him from Avicenna the philosopher. He was beyond the range of Avicenna … I looked into my own heart. In that place, I saw him. He was in no other place.”³⁰ (Jalal ud-Din-ar-Rumi)

Rebirth

We can deduce from all this that the soul plays a prominent role in evolution, which essentially is a continuous evolution of Consciousness and only on the outside a saltatory evolution of material embodiments of Consciousness. If the soul is a part of the Godhead it must be infinite, for each part of the infinite is infinite too. In other words, the soul is immortal, and it is in the evolutionary process the ever present and growing force which makes evolution possible: it is the evolving element.

This automatically raises the question of reincarnation or rebirth. Reincarnation is for many Westerners a stumbling block in their approach of Eastern spirituality because the concept has been stigmatized as heresy by Christian orthodoxy and Western thought is permeated by Christianity. Not many know that the young Christian movement, like its twin Gnosticism, accepted reincarnation. Joe Fisher writes in The Case for Reincarnation: ‘The fact remains that before Christianity became a vehicle for the imperial ambitions of Roman emperors, rebirth was widely accepted among the persecuted faithful.’³¹ He quotes the church father Origenes (c. 185-254): ‘Every soul … comes into this world strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defeats of its previous life. Its place in this world as a vessel appointed to honor or dishonor, is determined by its previous merits or demerits. Its work in this world determines its place in the world which is to follow this.’ The definitive formulation of the Catholic dogma concerning rebirth followed a long and complicated succession of changing positions, definitions and condemnations, from the Council of Nicea in AD 325 to the Second Council of Constantinople in AD 553, when the official tenet of the Church concerning ‘the supposedly continued existence of the souls’ was decreed once and for all. This is not the place for a detailed review of the arguments in favour of rebirth, and only one or two of the most relevant points should be borne in mind.

Notable Westerners have believed in reincarnation: Pythagoras, Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, Shelley, Victor Hugo, Balzac, Richard Wagner, Walt Whitman, Nietzsche, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Gauguin, Strindberg, Mondriaan, Jung, H. G. Wells. It was the great composer and director Gustave Mahler who wrote: ‘We all return; it is this certainty that gives meaning to life and it does not make the slightest difference whether in a later incarnation we remember the former life. What counts is not the individual and his well-being, but the great aspiration towards the Perfect and the Pure which goes on in each incarnation.’³² And is it not amazing that, in spite of the deeply imprinted psychological condemnation of rebirth, there still are a great many who believe in it? In 1982 the Gallup poll organization announced that very nearly one American in four believed in reincarnation. Three years earlier a Sunday Telegraph poll had reported the same belief was held by twenty-eight per cent of all British adults — an increase of ten per cent in ten years. And in 1980 twenty-nine per cent of 1,314 people responding to a questionnaire in the ultraconservative Times attested to a belief in reincarnation.’³³ ‘The theory of rebirth is almost as ancient as thought itself and its origin is unknown,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo in the Arya. ‘We may according to our prepossessions accept it as the fruit of ancient psychological experience always renewable and verifiable and therefore true or dismiss it as a philosophical dogma and ingenious speculation; but in either case the doctrine, even as it is in all appearances well-nigh as old as human thought itself, is likely to endure as long as human beings continue to think.’³⁴

Reincarnation is often mistaken for transmigration, which is an ill-considered popular belief. Transmigration holds that the soul rather haphazardly comes back in all sorts of animal bodies and even in plants, but most often in the last species of animal the dying person has set eyes on before his death. According to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother the growth of the soul, in its various evolutionary stages, is the development of a spiritual consciousness at all times directed, meaningful and irreversible. And so Sri Aurobindo wrote: ‘We have to ask whether the soul, having once arrived at humanity, can go back to the animal life and body, a retrogression which the old popular theories of transmigration have supposed to be an ordinary movement. It seems impossible that it should so go back with any entirety, and for this reason that the transit from the animal to human life means a decisive conversion of the vital consciousness, quite as decisive as the conversion of the vital consciousness of the plant into the mental consciousness of the animal. It is surely impossible that a conversion so decisive made by Nature should be reversed by the soul and the decision of the spirit within her come, as it were, to naught.’ (The Life Divine, p. 762)

Sri Aurobindo goes on to say that a regression to a lower level may still be possible in the border areas just before reaching the threshold of humanity, but not after this threshold has been crossed. It is also possible, he writes, that parts of the vital composition of the personality may drop back, so that for instance a violent, unsatiated sexual desire may be integrated into an animal, but this of course is something very different from a falling back of the soul. ‘The soul does not go back to the animal condition; but a part of the vital personality may disjoin itself and join an animal birth to work out its animal propensities there.’³⁵

Another misunderstanding that may hinder a right view of reincarnation is what the Mother called the ‘three-penny romances’ often woven around it, the cheap and for the most part totally imaginary romanticization of putative former lives. How many reincarnations of Cleopatra, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, or of some mysterious Egyptian, Babylonian or Celtic priests or priestesses have dwelt unnoticed among ordinary mortals! Sri Aurobindo warned his disciples: ‘Seriously, these historical identifications are a perilous game and open a hundred doors to the play of imagination’³⁶ — a perilous play for those who want to know and master themselves integrally.

A frequent error concerning reincarnation is that the soul moving from body to body is an unalterable entity. ‘You must avoid a common popular blunder about reincarnation,’ Sri Aurobindo noted in a letter. ‘The popular idea is that Titus Balbus is reborn again as John Smith, a man with the same personality, character, attainments as he had in a former life with the sole difference that he wears coat and trousers instead of a toga and speaks in cockney English instead of popular Latin. That is not the case. What would be the earthly use of repeating the same personality or character a million times from the beginning of time till its end? The soul comes into birth for experience, for growth, for evolution till it can bring the Divine into Matter.’³⁷

A strong argument in favour of reincarnation is the blatant injustice of the one and only life, so short and so precarious, that is measured out to us. Is a human being really so intelligent and of a stature so high as to commit sins against God — supposing that one could sin against God — sins of such a nature that his soul would have to burn eternally in hell? What understanding has man of God, sin, hell and eternity? Are his psychological and physiological shortcomings not too much of a disadvantage in his struggle for virtuous perfection and spiritual indemnity? And what use are the few years accorded him in a contest with God and eternity for the salvation of his soul? The answers to these questions provided by religion, however threatening and severe, remain unsatisfactory.

Sri Aurobindo wrote in the Arya: ‘There is too the difficulty that this soul inherits a past for which it is in no way responsible, or is burdened with mastering propensities imposed on it not by its own act, and is yet responsible for its future which is treated as if it were in no way determined by that often deplorable inheritance, damnosa hereditas, of that unfair creation, and were entirely of its own making. We are made helplessly what we are and are yet responsible for what we are, or at least for what we shall be hereafter, which is inevitably determined to a large extent by what we are originally. And we have only this one chance. Plato and the Hottentot, the fortunate child of saints or Rishis and the born and trained criminal plunged from beginning to end in the lowest fetid corruption of a great modern city have equally to create by the action or belief of this one unequal life all their eternal future.’ And he concluded: ‘This is a paradox which offends both the soul and the reason, the ethical sense and the spiritual intuition.’³⁸

‘Note that the idea of rebirth and the circumstances of the new life as a reward or punishment … is a crude human idea of “justice” which is quite unphilosophical and unspiritual and distorts the true intention of life. Life here is an evolution and the soul grows by experience, working out by it this or that in the nature, and if there is suffering, it is for the purpose of that working out, not as a judgment inflicted by God or Cosmic Law on the errors or stumblings which are inevitable in the Ignorance.’ (Letters on Yoga, p. 441)

Rebirth or reincarnation is the process of the growth of the soul in a material evolution. The soul necessarily takes on body after body because material bodies are not supple enough to adapt to the soul’s development. The soul always remains essentially what it is in all eternity, but it has taken up the adventure of evolution, plunging into the Night of its opposite. By the intervention of the Great Mother the way back to the Light has become possible; this is an evolutionary process in which the soul is the active agent and in which it plays the central role.

In the Night arose Matter, in Matter arose Life, and in Life Mental Consciousness, because the Soul, the bearer of Consciousness, Love and Light, has developed in ever more complex forms of Matter, Life and Mental Consciousness. To Sri Aurobindo and the Mother reincarnation is the mechanism of the growth of the soul, which is the presence of the Divine in his evolving creation. Reincarnation is the indispensable spiritual mechanism of the growth of the soul, this growth being the cause of the otherwise unexplainable material mechanism of the development of material forms.

The soul has taken up the adventure of forgetting itself so that it may experience the joy of rediscovering itself in the evolution. This happens gradually, first as the slowly differentiating Earth-soul in the material forms, then as a group-soul in plants and animals, till it has sufficiently matured to become an individualized soul in man. Once that far, it extracts or filters, as it were, out of each life the experiences or elements required for its further growth and which are the reasons why it has chosen this particular life and no other. To use another metaphor: the soul chooses the necessary experiences in life after life, and each experience is like the cut of a chisel to sculpt the divine figure it essentially is and has wanted to become anew in the material manifestation.

Most of our life is a subconscious routine. But every now and then something happens to which the soul is really present because it needs this happening for its self-becoming. These kinds of happenings are intensely charged, unforgettable instants in our life, the moments when we are fully present to an event and which remain etched indelibly in our memory. The soul harbours those moments forever — moments of highest courage or lowest cowardice, of unbearable suffering or intense joy, of terror or rapture. For all this was and is needed to become who we are. The world is not an unfortunate accident; it is the mould of the living divine golden figure which we are already carrying in us and which in the future will also exist and act on Earth.

From our numerous previous lives we can only remember the events in which our soul has participated when inwardly we are grown enough to become aware of those remembrances, i.e. when they may be meaningful for our spiritual development. They contain the essence of our existence in time; they are the stuff of our eternal existence. These constructive remembrances can only be gathered by an individualized soul, a soul of a human being. In animal life there is not yet enough soul-stuff to produce a remembrance remaining beyond death and rebirth.

Between two lives the soul goes and rests in an internatal, harmonious psychic world where it assimilates its experiences from the former life. When it has taken all that into itself, it is ready to descend once more into the manifestation and to carry on its adventure. (Ancient texts say that at that moment it begins to perspire.) It chooses the earthly scene of its next experience, and when it sees the light that calls for it, it takes on a new body in the evolution. The programme of the experiences the soul has been drawn up by its essential Omniscience. It is the soul which governs the life of man and which determines all his experiences even before he is born.

This means that we should not put the blame for being here on anyone else: we have willed and picked everything ourselves, and the adversities we may be cursing are unconsciously a source of the intense joy of becoming. ‘When the Soul came into the manifestation, it was not that God threw it down into earth by force, but the Soul willingly chose to come down. There was no compulsion of the Divine,’³⁹ said Sri Aurobindo in a conversation. And when a disciple for the umpteenth time complained about his difficulties, Sri Aurobindo wrote to him: ‘In the beginning it was you (not the human you who is now complaining but the central being) who accepted or even invited the adventure of the Ignorance. Sorrow and struggle are a necessary consequence of the plunge into the Inconscience and the evolutionary emergence out of it. The explanation is that it had an object, the eventual play of the Divine Consciousness and Ananda not in its original transcendence but under conditions for which the plunge into the Inconscience was necessary.’⁴⁰

O mortal who complainst of death and fate,
Accuse none of the harms thyself hast called;
This troubled world thou hast chosen for thy home,
Thou art thyself the author of thy pain.⁴¹

— Savitri

The soul or psyche thus exists in different aspects. 1. It is an eternal part of the Godhead in his one transcendent multiplicity (the jivatman of the Hindus); 2. It is the projection of that eternal part into the manifestation because the Great Mother has brought the divine Self as Love into this manifestation; the soul is the divine Presence, the divine ‘spark’ in all that exists in the manifestation (the antaratman); 3. It is the growing Godhead in man, sculpting its original being in life after life, but now in a materially manifested form. This growing Godhead in man, as it were the growing body of the essential ‘spark-soul’, was called ‘the psychic being’ by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The psychic being is ‘the true evolving individual in our nature.’ These three aspects of the soul are the three forms of the one, very concrete reality which is the truth and foundation of our life and through which we belong to the All-Soul, to the Great Self.

A stone I died and rose again a plant,

A plant I died and rose again an animal;

I died an animal and was born a man.

Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?⁴²

— Jalal ud-Din ar-Rumi

Our true self is in the manifestation of our growing soul. Whatever we do can only increase the growth of our self and the human being can only become itself by surpassing itself. This means that it is not man who becomes the superman; he is the link between the animal and the god, the laboratory in which the material and spiritual conditions for the formation of the superman are worked out, but not the superman as such. ‘The hiatus between the animal and the human is so great in consciousness, however physically small, that the scientists’ alleged cousinship of monkey and man looks psychologically almost incredible. And yet the difference between vital animal and mental man is as nothing to that which will be between man’s mind and the superman’s vaster consciousness and richer powers. That past step will be to this new one as the snail’s slow march in the grass to a Titan’s sudden thousand league stride from continent to continent.’⁴³ (Sri Aurobindo).

We may suppose that the transitional process from man to superman takes place in a way analogous to what has happened every time a higher species appeared on Earth: the human species has reached its ceiling; because of the irresistible evolutionary impulse in it, its soul has called for the manifestation on Earth of a higher consciousness in a new material form; this higher consciousness, in this case the supramental Unity-consciousness, has answered from its own typal world where it is already a part of the infinite Self-manifestation; and to render the transition possible, something the human species is not able to accomplish by itself, the Supreme has incarnated on Earth as an Avatar.

The transition, thanks to the complete, two-bodied Avatar Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who have made it possible by their superhuman yoga, is happening now, as we will see further on. This time the aim is not a new evolutionary step or gradation in the lower hemisphere of being. The aim this time is a transition from the lower to the higher hemisphere, from the mental consciousness to the supramental consciousness, from our divisive, partial, impotent consciousness to a global, omnipotent, divine Unity-consciousness. All our misery and impotence derives from our divided consciousness; the new being, yet without a name, will constantly live in the essential divine Unity with its highest attributes of Being, Consciousness and Bliss. Therefore the present moment in the evolution of the Earth, which is the spiritual growth of the Earth, is its most important turning point. The foundations of the Kingdom of God have been dug and built. Its establishment is assured. The promise given to mankind at its origin is now being fulfilled. And all our suffering will not have been in vain.