Beyond Man

Chapter Seven: Sri Aurobindo’s Vision

It is an enormous spiritual revolution rehabilitating matter and the creation.¹

— The Mother

Aurobindo Ghose and Mirra Alfassa, whom henceforth we will only call Sri Aurobindo⁹¹ and the Mother, had from very different backgrounds arrived at the same experiences and the same vision. ‘There is no difference between the Mother’s path and mine; we have and have always had the same path, the path that leads to the supramental change and the divine realization; not only at the end, but from the beginning they have been the same,’² wrote Sri Aurobindo. Truth is one in all its gradations, and they had come to work out a new gradation of it, ‘a truer Truth’, on Earth. Yet, because those experiences and that vision have been formulated mainly by Sri Aurobindo, with the Arya as his instrument, we call it Sri Aurobindo’s vision for the sake of simplicity. This vision has been developed progressively, always with spiritual experience as its foundation and touchstone. At no time has it been the intention of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to stop somewhere on the way, to review their gained knowledge at that point and to mould it into a system.

Theirs was an open vision, and they have employed everything in their power to build up, literally every minute of their life, as much as possible of a new world on Earth.

The starting point of Sri Aurobindo’s thoughts is known in India as Vedanta, with the idea of the Brahman at its centre. ‘Brahman is the Alpha and the Omega. Brahman is the One besides whom there is nothing else existent.’³ Brahman is a densely vibrating Sanskrit word denoting what in the West is called the One or the Absolute. It is of some importance to use at first a neuter word for the beginning, middle and end of all things, because otherwise we get stuck from the start with a male-female dichotomy which taints and distorts the manner in which the supreme Reality is perceived. ‘It is our first premise that the Absolute is the supreme Reality’ (Sri Aurobindo). From this first premise, and from the fact of the existence of the world as experienced by us, follows everything else. We are continually confronted with the world, it is visible and tangible to us; the first premise is not self-evident, because the Absolute cannot be known and still less defined by the human intellect — it is a fact of experience directly perceived by the great in spirit of all times and climes, and confirmed by others after them over and over again. One can live the Absolute but one cannot name, describe or define it. ‘The only way of knowing the Divine is by identifying oneself with Him.’⁴ (the Mother)

All is Brahman. There is nothing that is not Brahman, for outside Brahman nothing exists — because all is Brahman. ‘Thou art man and woman, boy and girl; old and worn out, thou walkest bent over a staff; thou art the blue bird and the green and the scarlet-eyed …’ sings the Swetaswatara Upanishad (IY 3,4). ‘If it is true that only the Self exists, then it must also be true that everything is the Self.’ (Sri Aurobindo). As simple as that, but fundamental. The Mother said it still more categorically: ‘There is only That. Only That exists. That, what? — Only That exists!’ And That is the one ‘all containing, everywhere present point without dimensions.’

The concept of the absolute one Reality which is all, though confirmed by Western mystics too, is not generally current in the West. The reason, called by the Mother ‘the error at the origin’, is a supposed rift, probably first thought of in Chaldea, between God on the one hand and Creation on the other. ‘There is no separation between that what you call God and that what you call creation … It is through the whole of this creation, little by little, step by step, that [the Divine] rediscovers himself, that he unites with himself, that he realizes himself, that he expresses himself … It is not at all something that he has willed in an arbitrary way or that he has done in an autocratic way: it is the growing expression, developing ever more, of a consciousness which objectifies itself to itself.’⁵ From the Chaldean world-view derived the Jewish, and from the Jewish, the Christian. And God remains seated on his throne above the clouds, and the human goes on fighting the good fight in the earthly valley of tears hoping for a heavenly reward, and the devil keeps stoking his eternal fires in an eternal hell.

Many have rebelled against this sort of worldview, which after all was intended to form the background and justification of their life — as did the Mother in her youth. ‘Up to my twenty-fifth year, or thereabouts, I knew only the God of the religions, the God as men have made him, and I did not want anything of it, nothing at all!’ (Then, as we know, she discovered the Revue cosmique with its teaching of the immanent God, the Presence in the heart of man.) A God who has placed the ignorant, helpless human being in a world like the present one, she found a monster and our kind of life a hell — a very understandable point of view despite all theological arguments to the contrary. ‘If God exists, then he is a veritable scoundrel! He is a villain, and I do not want a God like the one who has created us,’ she wrote at the time. ‘You know, the idea of the God who is quietly seated in his heaven, who then makes the world and takes pleasure in watching it, and who then says: “How well it is made!” No! I said by myself: “I do not want anything to do with that monster.”’⁶

All her life the Mother had felt uncomfortable about the use of the word ‘God’. ‘I do not like using the word “God” because the religions have made it into the name of an omnipotent being who differs from his creation and stands outside of it, which is not true.’ She found it ‘a dangerously hollow word,’ associated with a supra-earthly tyrant. Therefore she, like Sri Aurobindo, usually called the supreme Being ‘the Divine’ (le Divin) instead of ‘God*. Or she named the Unnamable simply ‘That’, or ‘the Lord’, or ‘the Supreme,’ etc., ‘because anyhow one has to use a word,’ for otherwise one cannot talk.

Brahman, says the Vedanta, exists in itself outside and beyond all manifestation. Its three highest attributes are Sat = Being, Chit = Consciousness and Ananda = Bliss. Consequently Satchitananda, in Sanskrit spelled Sachchidananda, is one of the names of Brahman. These three attributes are absolute and unlimited, for limitations would have to be imposed from the outside, which is impossible as there is nothing outside the Brahman. ‘For we cannot suppose that the sole Entity is compelled by something outside or other than Itself, since no Such thing exists.’⁷ This also means that there is no Nothing, since all that is, is That; if there were a Nothing, it too would have to be That and therefore could not be Nothing.

Absolute Consciousness also means absolute power, Omnipotence, something the human imaginative faculty cannot grasp, because in man consciousness is separated from the power of realization. It is through its Omnipotence that the limitless Brahman is able to limit itself in forms, by which it can as it were unfold itself to its own view. ‘Its self-limitation is itself an act of omnipotence.’ That is how the great Play of the manifestation originated, the Play of Ananda, a Play called Lila in Sanskrit. ‘The transcendent God is playing his material Play in Himself, by Himself and with Himself.’

This unfolding, this self-manifestation of the Brahman is infinite just like the Brahman itself, and like the Brahman it has neither beginning nor end. According to the terminology descended from the Chaldeans we usually talk about a ‘creation’, as a ‘Creator’ is supposed to have brought forth everything out of nothing, which is considered a proof of his omnipotence. But there being no nothing, ‘nothing’ cannot possibly be the origin of things existent. The sole source is That, the Brahman that is everything. ‘The Infinite does not create, it manifests what is present in itself’ (Sri Aurobindo). The act of omnipotence, in all eternity and at each moment, consists of the fact that the Brahman, to manifest itself, concretizes itself, thereby limiting itself. The Infinite causes itself, seemingly, to become finite. Conversely, all things finite remain, essentially, infinite, otherwise they could not be. ‘All finites are in their spiritual essence the Infinite,’ says Sri Aurobindo.

As a consequence, in the manifestation also there is nothing but Brahman. ‘Which means that there can only be Ananda in all the worlds throughout the scale of manifestation. In the manifestation of Brahman, logically speaking, the presence of suffering, need, fear or any feeling of incompleteness is an impossibility, and death can only be a meaningful and joyful metamorphosis. In the scale of manifestation there are material, vital, mental and supramental worlds, and worlds with beings partaking of the highest attributes of the Brahman, up to the borderline where the finest, subtlest forms of materialization dim in the immaterial, absolute, self-existing Being of the Godhead — ‘the Absolute, the Perfect, the Alone.’

He is the Maker and the world he made,
He is the vision and he is the seer;
He is himself the actor and the act,
He is himself the knower and the known,
He is himself the dreamer and the dream.⁸

— Savitri

Climbing down from those high abstractions⁹² with so many capital letters, we cannot but ask the pertinent question: ‘If everything is the Brahman, this, our world, must be the Brahman too. Then how comes that here undeniably there is suffering, fear and death?’

Vedanta has an answer to this question: as in the infinity of the Brahman the number of possibilities is infinite, necessarily its own negation must have been one of the possibilities. In a state of absolute Consciousness, which is Omnipotence, to ‘see’ a possibility means to realize it. Therefore the Brahman, in one of its manifestations, has as it were plunged into its opposites which is how Being became inertia, Light became night, consciousness became ignorance, and Bliss became blind dullness.

But like all manifestation this too is a Play, by which the Brahman, so to speak, hides itself from its own view so that it may rediscover itself, in which it has plunged into the Night to experience the ecstasy, the glory of Dawn. For, remember, the Brahman can only be itself, and nothing, not even the negation of itself, can exist outside it.

The rediscovery takes place by a process which we call ‘evolution’. In the night is present the light, by us unmarked, in every atom, in every molecule shaped in the course of the evolution. In every elementary particle the Godhead is present in his full potential. The Godhead grows in his creation; he reveals himself gradually more and more to his own perception till the moment that he will also objectively be what he has always subjectively been and experience that which is the stake of the whole Play: pure, divine Love.

We are the growing Godhead. ‘Brahman, sir, is the name given by Indian philosophy since the beginning of time to the one Reality, eternal and infinite, which is the Self, the Divine, the All, the more than All … In fact, sir, you are Brahman,’⁹ wrote Sri Aurobindo in meaningful jest to Nirodbaran. The Godhead is present in every part of our material, vital and mental body. He is especially present, wholly himself, in our heart which we feel as the location of our soul. What we call the soul is purely That. At the origin, where the Spirit plunged into Time, it was we ourselves, souls in all eternity existing in That, who have undertaken the great adventure because we must have felt it worth its while.

Evolution is the growth process, also in us, of the materialized Godhead towards his manifested completeness. The world is an unfolding miracle, but the unfolding takes time, and at every rebirth we drop so heavily on our head, said the Mother, that we forget where we have come from. ‘We are the Godhead who has forgotten himself.’ Humanity had also forgotten where it came from, namely from the womb of Mother Earth, but recently it has found this out again, though it is not yet aware where it is going to; neither does it realize that if there have been so many evolutionary steps before it, logically speaking there could or should also follow some after it. Having read the morning paper or looked at oneself in the mirror, it is rather difficult for man to keep contending that mankind has reached the summit of perfection or that the human being is ‘the masterpiece of masterpieces.’

But here we are no longer following Vedanta, at least not as interpreted by most Indian sages who, like the rest of us, found life on Earth such a mess that they declared it to be a bad dream, a chimera, an illusion, advising us to get out of it as soon as possible. Following their line of reasoning, these sages did not seem to be aware that they were pulling the carpet if not from under the feet of the Brahman, then surely from under the structure of their own logic. How in the omniscient, omnipotent and all-blissful Brahman could there possibly be a world — for instance a spinning, bluish globe with little humans on it — that is so worthless that one has to get out of it as soon as possible? Has the Omniscient blundered? Has the Omnipotent lacked in power? And the All-Blissful, has he taken pleasure in the miserable lives of creatures with a veiled consciousness?

Yet many religions in the East and the West essentially agree with this interpretation of Vedanta: somewhere something has gone wrong (maybe because of the magic intervention by a Black Demiurge?); the Earth is no more than a necessary evil (as, once born on it, our incarnation cannot be helped); and we can only try to get in the Hereafter by the shortest possible way (hopefully in the enjoyable regions of it) or to get rid of the nightmare once and for all (in Nirvana). Some say that we get out of the ordeal after this absurdly short life, others that we have to come back hundreds or thousands of times. Whatever the truth, the escapist solution is the same for most religions.

But that is not how Sri Aurobindo saw things. He did not avoid the logical conclusions from the Vedantic line of thinking. If absolute Being-Consciousness-Bliss is the essence of all existence, also of existence in evolution, then evolution must inevitably contain these attributes in itself too and should manifest them sooner or later. Besides, such is according to all great occult traditions the promise given to humankind — the promise of the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth.

‘Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal so out of man the superman emerges,’¹⁰ reads one of Sri Aurobindo’s aphorisms. And in the first pages of The Life Divine he writes: ‘The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god.’¹¹ To him this was not only a possibility, it was a certainty because it was ‘inevitable’, resulting from the essence and process of evolution when seen in the correct perspective. ‘The supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness; for its upward ascent is not ended and mind is not the last summit.’¹²

Evolution and Involution

‘The word evolution carries with it in its intrinsic sense, in the idea at its root, the necessity of a previous involution,’¹³ writes Sri Aurobindo. For ‘nothing can evolve out of Matter which is not already therein contained.’¹⁴ ‘Evolution of life in matter supposes a previous involution of it there, unless we suppose it to be a new creation magically and unaccountably introduced into Nature.’¹⁵ ‘The evolution of consciousness and knowledge cannot be accounted for unless there is already a concealed consciousness in things with its inherent and native powers emerging little by little.’¹⁶ In other words: what is not contained in the evolving stuff cannot come out of it, and as it has come out of it, it must have been contained in it, in the basic evolutionary material.

The process of creation, the model of our evolutionary world, can therefore be metaphorically represented by a stair of worlds created by the Godhead first to descend into its manifestation from the highest consciousness to the lowest, total unconsciousness, and by which, objectively incarnated in ever higher evolutionary forms, it now climbs back to its absolute perfection. One might suppose that at this juncture it is, in the human, somewhere halfway in its climb back up.

The lowest steps of the stairs are clearly discernible for anyone not wearing the dark glasses of dogmatic materialism: at the bottom there is matter (the minerals), then life (plants and lower animals), then mental consciousness (higher animals and man). Each of these levels has grown out of the levels underneath and contains all their elements in itself. An original thinker like the economist E.F. Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, explained this evolutionary stratification in a conversation with Fritjof Capra, who writes: ‘Schumacher expressed his belief in a fundamental hierarchical order consisting of four characteristic elements — mineral, plant, animal, and human — with four others — matter, life, consciousness, and self-awareness — which are manifest in such a way that each level possesses not only its own characteristic element but also those of all lower levels. This, of course, was the ancient idea of the Great Chain of Being, which Schumacher presented in modern language and with considerable subtlety. However, he maintained that the four elements are irreducible mysteries that cannot be explained, and that the differences between them represent fundamental jumps in the vertical dimension, “ontological discontinuities,” as he put it. “This is why physics cannot have any philosophical impact,” he repeated. “It cannot deal with the whole; it deals only with the lowest level,” the level of matter.’¹⁷ (Uncommon Wisdom).

Schumacher’s words are remarkable because he had managed to break through the boundaries of the generally dominant scientific reductionism and to perceive reality with an unprejudiced eye. The laws of science are indeed exclusively, and only partially, the laws of the material level of existence, occupying the outer layer of the Globe of Being. This is why, out of necessity, they must remain incomplete till science can get out of its vicious circle asserting that everything is matter because there is nothing but matter.

Above these levels there are still others also experienced by us, though much less concretely perceptible, such as the level of our inspirations and intuitions, or above it the world of the great beings whom man calls gods, angels or beings of light. Considering the diversity of cultures and the abundance of their creations throughout the centuries, and the role played by religion in the world of men, it would be absurd to deny the existence of these levels surpassing our ordinary mental consciousness. Surely, all that had to emerge from somewhere. And is there one important scientific discovery or invention that was not the result of an inspiration, of a sudden ‘insight’ or ‘illumination’?

According to Sri Aurobindo, all the afore-mentioned levels belong to the lower half of the evolutionary stair, to the lower hemisphere of the Globe of Being — perhaps a better term than ‘Chain of Being’, which remains associated with a linear mode of thinking. Part of the higher hemisphere are the worlds of the attributes of the Godhead, of Being, Consciousness and Bliss, held by the seers to be the highest qualities of existence. When one thinks of Zeus and his Olympic court, of the Hindu pantheon, or of Yahweh and his hosts of angels, it becomes obvious that Brahman with its attributes must be higher, or deeper, or more inclusive. The worlds of the gods are manifested worlds, while Being is the manifesting source beyond all names and manifestations.

In spiritual experience there is a division between the worlds of the divine attributes and the worlds of the gods, a separation which the ancient Indian writings call ‘a golden lid’; it is this separation which is the rationale behind the supposed ‘gap’ between God and his creation as taught by the religions of the Chaldean family. This golden lid is a gate, as it were, which man in his present state is not allowed to pass, for the Vedas say that he who goes through ‘the gate of the Sun’ cannot come back.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have passed through it — and they have come back, because they were the first beings destined for this adventure. They have explored the divine solar world between the uppermost levels of Sat-Chit-Ananda and the ones our world and we ourselves consist of. They have found that the lower hemisphere of existence originates from and is supported by the higher. Some seers had already viewed this sun-world, among them the Vedic rishis, but for them the time had not yet come to insert it into the ascending stair of evolution. Sri Aurobindo, using a technical, neutral term, has called the sun-world ‘the Supramental’, because it is far above the mental consciousness, even above its highest reaches.

The Supramental — itself a resplendent prism of worlds — is essentially a principle of Unity, to us unimaginable. For in our world everything is divided, separated into I and you, he and she, in things on a cosmic, human or atomic scale; we are bumping into everyone and everything, and we are not certain about what is going on behind the eyes of a cat, of our own child or of our beloved. A great Western philosopher has even said that everything exists in itself and that it is impossible to know something that is not oneself. In the Supramental, on the contrary, everything is consciously and constantly present in everything else at the same time; there life is shadowless bliss (the divine Ananda) and immortal. ‘Light is [there] one with Force, the vibrations of knowledge with the rhythm of the will and both are one, perfectly and without seeking, groping or effort, with the assured result.’¹⁸ The Supramental ‘has the knowledge of the One, but it is able to draw out of the One its hidden multitudes; it manifests the Many, but does not lose itself in their differentiations.’¹⁹

The Supramental, being the directly manifested Godhead and therefore possessing the intrinsic unity of the Godhead, is present everywhere and in everything, even now, in the paper on which these words are printed and in the iris of the eye that reads them, as well as in the ice of the comets beyond Pluto and in the burning core of the quasars. Without the Supramental nothing could possibly exist. It will be remembered that God is not only ‘higher’ but also deeper, more inward, and it is from the ‘inside’ that, by his supramental creation, he keeps up our darkened world.

But indeed, how is it that our world has been ‘darkened’? How is it that we are living in such a troublesome world of division, separation and ignorance? Because the golden sunrays of the Consciousness of Unity have been filtered, so to speak, by the lid between the hemispheres, thus being dimmed and turned into what we call the mental consciousness, or ‘the mind’ for short. The mind is an instrument of knowledge able to see only from a certain standpoint and never from all possible standpoints at the same time like the supramental Consciousness of Unity; therefore it can only perceive aspects, aspects that are parts, flakes or chips of the One Reality. This is why Sri Aurobindo called the human so often ‘the mental being’, halfway on the ascending ladder of evolution, between the dark abyss of the Inconscient and the radiant summit of the all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful Being.

Thus evolution actually means the rebuilding in Matter of the stair, or the supercosmic column, or the tower of worlds, up to the point where the manifestation will become the fully conscious incarnation of its Maker. Mother Nature, an emanation of the Great Mother, takes an endless time for the work, at least when measured against our brief human lifespan, and she seems to revel in the modelling of a wonderful variety of creatures, having surpassed the most beautiful inventions of the modern artists millions of years ago in works of art that are alive, that swim, run and fly. A new step of the stair, we have seen, is made out of the already existing materials of the previous steps — man carrying in him the complete preceding evolution — plus something more that, thanks to the involution, lay waiting in them. When one step, or one species, in the material evolution has reached its upper limit and in its completeness keeps pushing against this ceiling, then the evolutionary impulse for further development acts as a call for the realization of the following step, for a new, higher species.

‘Involution’ is another word for the full scale of manifested but, to our eye, hidden worlds; these are non-evolutionary ‘typal’ worlds, in other words worlds in which the beings do not change or evolve as they are fully satisfied with their way of being and with their type, a satisfaction which is the expression of the fundamental omnipresent Ananda or Bliss. These worlds represent the complete consciousness scale from the highest Ananda to the lowest vital level. From the ‘column’ of typal worlds — which is the manifestation of the Godhead — a ‘slice’ or gradation (i.e., a world with its laws and beings) has to be inserted at each higher step into the material evolution; this happens in answer to the impulse from below, to the pressure against the temporary evolutionary ceiling. The coordination of both forces, of the impulse from below and the answer from above, results in the material manifestation of a new, higher species. This has happened time and again when the lower and higher life-forms made their appearance on planet Earth, followed by the ever more mentalized animals and then by the full-grown, typical mental being, the human.

All this implies that somewhere in the typal manifestation there must have existed a mental world belonging to mental beings like the human long before he became materially incarnated on Earth. The Mother formulates it as follows: ‘Man does not belong to the Earth only: man is essentially a universal being, but he has a special manifestation on Earth.’²⁰ In Sri Aurobindo’s words: ‘[Man] expresses, under the conditions of the terrestrial world he inhabits, the mental power of the universal existence.’²¹ And he wrote to a disciple: ‘You speak as if the evolution were the sole creation; the creation or manifestation is very vast and contains many planes and worlds that existed before the evolution, all different in character and with different kinds of beings.’²²

Seen in this way, the divine manifestation, including earthly evolution, is not the result or the scene of a dictatorial divine fancy. The omnipotent Godhead has limited himself in his creation by building laws into it, thus providing it with a supporting structure. This is the reason why evolution has to follow certain processes. One of these laws exacts the insertion of ever higher universal levels of consciousness into the ascending material stair of evolution as an answer to the evolutionary impulse when the previous, lower level has reached its ceiling. Another necessary process is the intervention of the Godhead itself in its evolving creation to make the insertion of a new gradation possible. To this end the Godhead incarnates on Earth as an Avatar.

According to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother the existing human species, at present, has reached its ceiling, after a long-lasting development of which only the most recent phase is known to us, the period in time which we call historical. The vision of the evolutionary saltus, of the evolutionary quantum leap was given to them because they had come to execute it in their own person. The Kingdom of God on Earth was promised to humankind at its origin and the moment of its fulfilment has now arrived, they say. The human being is inwardly mutating into a new, higher, divine being which has no name as yet, though it is sometimes called ‘superman’. Out of the mental being, whether it knows it or not, whether it consciously wants it or not, evolves NOW the supramental being. The Pioneers have already formed the archetype of the new species in themselves and prepared the Earth for its appearance, as we shall see further on in this book. The future on the threshold of the new millennium is not sombre or catastrophic: on Earth, the Earth of unified humankind, the Kingdom of God is being built.

All this does not mean that the world of mankind on Earth has been an enviable one, now or in former times. Somewhere something occurred that has turned our planet into a place of abomination. There are traditions that tell about a moral fall, others about a cosmic accident. Let us conclude this brief introductory note to Sri Aurobindo’s vision with a story told by the Mother more than once. She mentioned that she had the story from a hoary occult tradition and that it carries a profound meaning. Although symbolic, it is a true story.

When the Supreme decided to externalize himself in order to contemplate himself, he first formed within himself the Knowledge and Power of manifestation. This Knowledge-Power or Consciousness-Force is the Great Mother. (Every power and every force is a vibration; every vibration is a consciousness; and every consciousness is a personal being.) The Supreme had decided that Joy and Freedom would form the foundation of his manifestation, the two qualities without which a divine expression of Ananda is impossible — and the Mother, the great Creatrix, of course executed his decision.

After the formation of the fundamental divine Joy and Freedom, the Mother created four Beings. Because from these Four there had to evolve everything else of the exteriorization, they were the incarnation of the divine attributes, the original fountainheads and pillars of creation: 1. Consciousness that is Light; 2. Life; 3. Bliss that is Love; and 4. Truth. They were magnificent and exceedingly powerful beings, for each of them, being the incarnation of a divine attribute, resembled the Godhead almost totally. They possessed the full freedom to enjoy their essential divinity. And it happened that these first Four splendid beings, almost totally resembling the Godhead, became as it were intoxicated by their joy and their freedom, so much so that they began imagining they were equal to the Godhead, nay, that they were the Supreme himself.

As we know, the Supreme is also the One in whom division is impossible. But because in the Four the delusion had arisen by which each one of them imagined he was the Supreme, the delusion of division also arose in the whole of creation. In their consciousness the Four separated from each other and from their Origin, and as à consequence they became the opposite of what they had been at first. The Being of Consciousness and Light became the Lord of Darkness; the Being of Bliss and Love became the Lord of Suffering; the Being of Truth became the Lord of Falsehood; the Being of Life became the Lord of Death. This is how, because of them, the world became as we know it.

When the Great Mother saw the damage her four children had done, she turned towards the Supreme and beseeched him for a means to reverse the disaster.

He then commanded her to pour out her Consciousness of Light into that inconscience, her Truth into that falsehood and her Love into that suffering. And the Great Mother did so, with an even greater intensity than when she had formed the first Four. She plunged into the terror of the Night of the Inconscient and again awoke in it Consciousness, Love and Truth to activate the salvation which would carry the universe back to its Origin of everlasting Bliss. The gradual realization of this salvation we call evolution.

We who are alive now have arrived at the point where evolution has reached the threshold of a supramental, divine world. The realization of this divine world will not happen at the blink of an eye, but the foundations have been laid. And after this there will occur many other and higher developments on Earth, till the Supreme will fully become himself again. But by then ignorance, darkness, death, suffering and falsehood will long have disappeared, because the Four will have been reintegrated into their Origin.