Evolution, Religion and the Unknown God

15: Intelligence that is Consciousness that is Being

Neither the laws nor the possibilities of physical Nature can be entirely known unless we know also the laws and possibilities of supraphysical Nature.

This is what we call evolution which is an evolution of Consciousness and an evolution of the Spirit in things and only outwardly an evolution of species.

Sri Aurobindo

West and East

Science, a search for objective truth, is in every one of its aspects and practices intertwined with the cultural and religious ideas of its time – as we have seen throughout our exploration of evolution and the evolutionary theories. We have also found that modern science, a product of the Western mind, reasons almost exclusively within the framework of the main Western religion, Christianity. This defines its references to history and scripture, and its concept of God. Might there then be something worthwhile Eastern spirituality has to tell about modern science in general and evolution in particular?

In 1949, Sri Aurobindo wrote in a message: “East and West have the same human nature, a common human destiny, the same aspiration after a greater perfection, the same seeking after something higher than itself, something towards which inwardly and even outwardly we move. There has been a tendency in some minds to dwell on the spirituality or mysticism of the East and the materialism of the West; but the West has had no less than the East its spiritual seekings and, though not in such profusion, its saints and sages and mystics; the East has had its materialistic tendencies, its material splendours, its similar or identical dealings with life and Matter and the world in which we live. East and West have always met and mixed more or less closely, they have powerfully influenced each other and at the present day are under and increasing compulsion of Nature and Fate to do so more than ever before.”¹

The outward Western and the Eastern approach of the underlying Truth differ considerably. These too are Kuhnian paradigms, centuries old, of which the tenets have hardened to the point of apparently becoming irreconcilable. While theoretical physics is regarded with awe by the uninitiated, all matters psychological, philosophical and religious in West and East are supposed to be accessible to anyone. All the same: “It is not every untrained mind that can follow the mathematics of relativity or other difficult scientific truths or judge of the validity either of their result or their process. All reality, all experience must indeed, to be held as true, be capable of verification by a same or similar experience, so, in fact, all men can have a spiritual experience and can follow it out and verify it in themselves, but only when they have acquired the capacity or can follow the inner methods by which that experience and verification are made possible.” (Sri Aurobindo, LD 650-51²)

Given the millennia of its history, the riches of its secular and spiritual literature, and the exceptional beings representing great peoples and large spiritual movements, a closer acquaintance with the unfamiliar East should at least be worth our interest. But true understanding always requires a long and assiduous effort, something the impatient West is rarely willing to make. Yet, what particular interests are resisting to provide, the trend of history seems to be bringing about in the rapid integration of humanity.

The basic concept behind all worldviews, affirmations or denials, is always the concept of the Fundamental, or Ultimate, or Essential, or Divine, or That: ‘God’. In the Vedanta this is called “Brahman,”³ the Absolute, the One. “Brahman is the Alpha and the Omega. Brahman is the One besides whom there is nothing else existent.” (LD 33) For “Brahman is in all things, all things are in Brahman, all things are Brahman.” (LD 139) As an Upanishad says: “O Brahman, thou art this old man and boy and girl, this bird, this insect.” (LD 328)

The One as omnipresent Reality crucially differs from the Western concept of God. The One is in this old man, this rock, this raindrop, while Jahweh, and consequently the Christian God, resides above, outside his creation. Christian theology condemns the inherence of the One in his manifestation as pantheism. So it has done with stoicism and Spinozism, and so it does with what is vaguely named ‘orientalism’. What it does not realize is that the One, Brahman, is more complex than this: there is the silent or passive Brahman (‘the Ineffable’) and the active, manifesting Brahman. “In fact, the Brahman is one not only in a featureless oneness beyond all relation, but in the very multiplicity of the cosmic existence.” (LD 641) From this follows that the One does not ‘create’: as there is nothing but itself, it can only manifest itself from itself. (Contemporary gender sensitivity together with the line of this argument necessarily lead in this case to the use of the neutral ‘it’.) All is That. Evolution is an unfolding in the One.

The view that God is in each being, and therefore in the heart of each human being, is not foreign to the West, but has been ruthlessly suppressed by the religious institutions which held that God could only be approached through them. Direct personal experience of God was forbidden. ‘Mystics’, people who had direct experiences and confessed they had them, were persecuted, even those later canonized as saints, and many were cruelly executed as heretics. Therefore all “God within” movements had to go underground, as one finds in the fascinating history of Gnosticism, spiritual alchemy, Hermetism, Rosicrucianism, and Western spiritual occultism in general.

In the beginning of the first chapter we have already learned that evolution is inherent in the texts of the ancient Seers, because it is how things actually are. “In certain aspects the old Vedantic thinkers anticipate us,” noted Sri Aurobindo, “they agree with all that is essential in our modern ideas of evolution. … The Puranas admit the creation of animal forms before the appearance of man and in the symbol of the Ten Avatars trace the growth of our evolution from the fish through the animal, the man-animal and the developed human being to the different stages of our present incomplete evolution.” (EDH 385)

The “avatar” represents a divine intervention in the earthly evolution when it has reached a stage where, without such an intervention, it cannot go further. Statues of these avatars, pictured symbolically at evolutionary key periods, are found everywhere in the temples of India and of countries where Hinduism spread in the past: Fish (eight ninths of evolution took place in water), Tortoise (amphibian), Boar (mammal), Dwarf (hominid), Rama with the ax (Homo habilis or ergaster), Rama with the bow (Homo sapiens), followed by the spiritual evolution of humanity in Krishna, the Buddha, and Kalki, the future avatar. This “procession of the avatars” is unmistakable. It should be clear that “avatar” in this context has no relation to the present degradation of this concept in some sectarian movements. It is also noteworthy that the Hindu concept of the avatar is applicable to the person and incarnation of Jesus the Christ on Earth, the one and only, while the Hindu series of avatars sustains the evolution of consciousness in its increasing complexity.

“Once the evolutionary hypothesis is put forward and the facts supporting it are marshaled, this aspect of the terrestrial existence becomes so striking as to appear indisputable,” (LD 836) wrote Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) in The Life Divine, the first and major formulation of his evolutionary vision. Trained as a classical scholar at Cambridge, he also acquired an encompassing command of the rich literature of India in her various languages, and penetrated ever deeper in her ancient scriptures as he advanced in his own spiritual experience. A radical in spirituality as he was in the liberation politics of his country, he concluded that the fundamental truth of Veda and Vedanta had to be accepted and put into practice unconditionally. If all is That, if all is the One, the logical consequence of this premise is tremendous: matter too is the One, the Earth and everything on it is the One; life on Earth is not an error or an illusion, it has its meaning in the One because the One is meaning. The aim of true spirituality, therefore, should not be an escape to a Hereafter or Nirvana, it should be the realization of the earthly potential, the transformation of our earthly existence – practically speaking the realization of the next step in evolution.

The magnitude of this logical conclusion has been little realized until now, and still less put into practice. Rooted in the Hindu spiritual tradition, it nevertheless confronts head on some of its major movements, like the illusionist teachings of Shankara and the Buddha. Matter, our own substance, is like everything else the One. “Matter itself is substance and power of spirit and could not exist if it were anything else, for nothing can exist which is not substance and power of Brahman … Matter is a form of Spirit, a habitation of Spirit, and here in Matter itself there can be realization of Spirit.” (LD 761, 665) It should therefore be the aim of spirituality not to try to escape by the shortest way from this earthly life into everlasting ecstasy or nonexistence, but to grow into the One and collaborate with its intentions in this material realm of its manifestation. This must be the reason our souls have incarnated here, and if they are “a spark of the Divine” it must be the rationale of their incarnation.

Sri Aurobindo was not only a classical scholar and a generally recognized master of the English language, he was also widely read in cultural, political and scientific matters. His evaluation of science was not the negation by the stereotypical bearded mystic, it was positive. Behind the mono-dimensional view of scientific materialism he saw the contribution of science to the integration of humanity, and its enlarging of the knowledge and conditions of the physical realm necessary for the evolutionary step forward which he saw as imminent. “For that vast field of evidence and experience which now begins to reopen its gates to us, can only be safely entered when the intellect has been severely trained to a clean austerity … It became necessary for a time to make a clean sweep at once of the truth and its disguise in order that the road might be clear for a new departure and a surer advance. The rationalistic tendency of materialism has done mankind this great service.” (LD 11)

Involution and Evolution

Ignoring a problem does not solve it. How did life appear in matter? How does an organism consisting only of matter produce consciousness? The mind-body problem remains vividly discussed though unexplained, and the present gross materialistic stance of neurobiology, that all is matter and that consequently life and consciousness are (epi)phenomena of matter, raises more questions than it answers. A television set is made of material components, yet nobody will contend that the news reader, the ice skater or the soap opera on the screen is produced by the material components of the set.

“We do not see or know, but it is expounded to us [by materialistic science] as a cogent account of Nature-process, that a play of electrons, of atoms and their resultant molecules, of cells, glands, chemical secretions and physiological processes manages by their activity on the nerves and brain of a Shakespeare or a Plato to produce or could be perhaps the dynamic occasion for the production of a Hamlet or a Symposium or a Republic; but we fail to discover or appreciate how such material movements could have composed or necessitated the composition of these highest points of thought and literature … These formulae of Science may be pragmatically correct and infallible, they may govern the practical how of Nature’s processes, but they do not disclose the intrinsic how or why; rather they have the air of formulae of a cosmic Magician, precise, irresistible, automatically successful each in its field, but their rationale is fundamentally unintelligible.” (Sri Aurobindo, LD 299)

One explanation is the following. “Nothing can evolve out of Matter which is not therein already detained.” (LD 87) Put in the broader context: evolution can only be the result of a previous “involution”, “evolution is an inverse action of the involution.” (LD 853) “In a sense, the whole of creation may be said to be a movement between two involutions, Spirit in which all is involved and out of which all evolves downward to the other pole of Matter, Matter in which all is involved and out of which all evolves upwards to the other pole of Spirit.” (LD 129) (It may be noted that Sri Aurobindo sometimes uses the word ‘creation’ where ‘manifestation’ is meant, as nothing can be created anew from outside the One – there is no ‘nothing’ – and all that exists is manifested by the One out of itself.)

The universal scheme behind the terrestrial evolution may be drafted as follows. There is the silent Brahman, the Ineffable, which can only be known by the highest spiritual experience. One and the same is the active Brahman which manifests its inexhaustible infinity in endless time and timelessness. Manifestation has been and will be always. At the top of the gradations of the eternal manifestation are the worlds of the three ultimate attributes of the One: sat (existence), chit (consciousness), ananda (often translated as bliss, the quintessence of supreme ecstasy). The fourth domain of this upper hemisphere has been called “Supermind” by Sri Aurobindo. It is the manifesting consciousness of the One, the unity-consciousness or truth-consciousness, the knowledge that is truth that is power.

This Supermind is not something like the human mind at its highest potential. It is a supra-mind from which our human mind derives, but which is as different from it as the sunlight is from the ray of a distant star. It is what some scientists have intuited behind the complexities of nature, what is present in nature and supports it everywhere. It is the real “mind of God.” In fact, it is what is called ‘God’ in the purest sense.

From the domains of the Supermind descend the worlds of the lower hemisphere, those with which we are more familiar: mind, life, matter. Seen as such, the One has projected itself into its contrary, which means that below matter – already an astonishing degree of organization as modern science has found out – there are still deeper, darker levels, those of the subconscient and of the inconscient foundation. Nevertheless, all is and remains the One in every differentiation: “Matter too is the Brahman,” and so are life and mind. “All is in each as well as each in all.” (LD 21) “The One is the fundamental truth of existence.” (LD 358) “All is fundamentally the same substance, the same consciousness, the same force, but in different forms and powers and degrees of itself.” (LD 120)

There are countless worlds on every level of the manifestation, from the highest to the lowest, from sat, chit, ananda and the brilliances of the Supermind to the worlds of mind and life, higher and lower. There is “this world that we see and those other worlds that we do not see.” (LD 42) “You speak as if the evolution were the sole creation,” Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter. “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 being. The fact of being prior to the evolution does not make them undifferentiated.” (LY 385) Yet he called those non-material worlds “typal,” meaning that their beings – gods, angels, demons big and small – are not subjected to change, but that they are perfect and perfectly happy in their state, however evaluated by us.⁴

Ours is not a typal but an evolutionary world. As all possibilities exist in the One, there was, and always is, also the possibility of taking on the appearance of its contrary: infinite oneness becomes infinite fragmentation; light becomes darkness, truth falsehood, bliss suffering, eternal existence death. While embodied in matter, this “appearance” may seem rather harsh to us, but the One remains always one, even when apparently split up into the infinitesimal. This adventure of the One to rediscover and recover itself explains the evolution as an increase in consciousness, which on the human level has become self-conscious, but which is on the whole gamut of existence only somewhere halfway.

This view is as vast as it is concrete and detailed. “The emergence of the movement from the Immutable [the One] is an eternal phenomenon and it is only because we cannot conceive it in that beginningless, endless, ever new-moment which is the eternity of the Timeless that our notions and conceptions are compelled to place it in a temporal eternity of successive duration to which are attached the ideas of an always recurrent beginning, middle and end. … The universe persists or always comes back into manifestation because the will to become is eternal and must be so since it is the inherent will of an eternal Existence.” (LD 76, 669)

There is, on the other hand, the full awareness of the apparent insignificance of planet Earth in the universe, repeated with spite time and again in the writings of scientific materialists, and called “the Copernican Principle.” Our Earth, “this minute island of life,” spins “in a small corner of the universe … inconspicuous among the immensities.” Still, this appraisal is the result of “the illusion of size, of quantity, that induces us to look on the one as great, the other as petty.” (LD 73) For the Earth, “a habitable planet in an uninhabitable system,” is connected to the other worlds, and those other worlds have access here.

“The experiment of human life on an earth is not now for the first time enacted,” wrote Sri Aurobindo in one of his old and now deciphered notebooks. “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. (EDH 141)

The gradations, planes or levels of being constitute the backbone of all schools of wisdom since ancient times. In the Hindu scriptures the worlds of matter (or substance), life and mind are known as “the three strides of Vishnu.” “Matter is only energy in action, and as we know in India, energy is force of consciousness in action.” (LY 222) “There is no such thing as the self-evident Matter posited by nineteenth century Science,” (LY 224) leading to the circle of metaphysical materialism, its magic formula, that all is matter because there is nothing but matter.

If such is Reality, then a time will come that science, physical and biological, will have to confront and accept it. No doubt, Galileo’s method, developed into what became called the scientific method, was a necessary start to get a grip on the aspect of reality perceptible by the senses. But it is now clear to open-minded theorists that a new and huge step will have to be taken. The indications of this necessity are many and of critical importance: the unsolved incompatibility between relativity and the quantum theories; the conflict between the Einsteinian and Bohrian concepts of reality; the public statement by leading physicists that physics is in crisis; the new discoveries in genetics which call ‘Darwinism’ into question …

“The material interpretation of existence was the result of an exclusive concentration, a preoccupation with one movement of Existence, and such an exclusive concentration has it utility and is therefore permissible; in recent times it has justified itself by the many immense and the innumerable minute discoveries of physical Science. But a solution of the whole problem of existence cannot be based on an exclusive one-sided knowledge; we must know not only what Matter is and what are its processes, but what mind and life are and what are their processes. And one must know also spirit and soul and all that is behind the material surface: only then can we have a knowledge sufficiently integral for a solution of the problem.” (LD 652)

In the course of our exploration, we have seen on several occasions how the gradations of the Chain of Being influenced instinctively the thought of even some of the most hardened materialistic thinkers and scientists, e.g. Bertrand Russell and Jacques Monod. The reason is that reality exceeds the artificial separations constructed by the mind, not vice versa, and that the workings of reality, or nature, cannot be overlooked permanently. By way of illustration: “I suppose a matter-of-fact observer, if there had been one at the time of the unrelieved reign of inanimate Matter in the earth’s beginning, would have criticized any promise of the emergence of life in a world of dead earth and rock and mineral as an absurdity and a chimera; so too, afterwards he would have repeated this mistake and regarded the emergence of thought and reason in an animal world as an absurdity and a chimera. It is the same now with the appearance of supermind in the stumbling mentality of the world of human consciousness and its reasoning ignorance.” (LY 8-9) For if “all evolution is in essence a heightening of the force of consciousness in the manifest being” (LD 720), why should it stop at humanity?

That matter is energy had become a supposedly understood platitude till the atomic bombs showed what the equation actually meant. To the acceptance and understanding of the equation matter=energy=consciousness, the mind of humanity has not yet arrived, although it is one of its oldest occult truths. “The inconscience of Matter is itself a hooded consciousness.” (EDH 165) “Matter is a blind form of the Spirit.” (EPY 571) If material energy is that powerful, how powerful is the power of consciousness which it contains? Powerful enough to create quasars, galaxies and multiple universes, and to perform the wonders of the subatomic world which can be represented schematically, but which surpass the imagination.

“The material universe is only the façade 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. There are vital, mental and spiritual ranges behind which give the material its significance.” (LY 212) “Earth is the foundation and all the [typal] worlds are on the earth, and to imagine a clean-cut or irreconcilable difference between them is ignorance; here and not elsewhere, not by going to some other world, the divine realization must come.” (LY 178) But this is another matter.

Mother Nature

The ancient cultures felt nature as a bountiful Mother bringing forth and caring for the world and the countless things and beings in it. However, this Mother, good and generous on most occasions, could also be severe in her actions. For one of her many aspects was the Queen of the Universe laying down its laws – Maya in India, Maat in Egypt – and on occasion apparently overruling them all as Fate. Behind her decisions were the cosmic objectives, unfathomable by the human mind.

A time came that science was given to the human race, which felt that knowledge would mean power. For his knowledge to be effective, the scientist had to be convinced that his intellect was the supreme instrument by which he could formulate the laws of the universe. The combined effort of scientists and technicians, to which many of the best minds dedicated their lives, has worked wonders: in a short time it has changed the Earth, in the process making humanity one. But of Mother Nature they have explored only the most superficial aspect, the material one. Now they are increasingly feeling restricted by the mental walls within which they have immured themselves. Breaking them down may be a painful enterprise, but it will be necessary.

“I mean by Nature only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us,” wrote Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species.⁵ The word “only” in this sentence tells us that he wanted to transfer nature, as the whole of life’s evolution on Earth, within the rational domain of scientific materialism from that of divine Providence, the Great Mother of the religion of his culture. “Natural laws” should determine the precise way in which mechanisms or processes function, preferably in mathematical formulae, although Darwin would have been satisfied with “ascertaining sequences of events”.

He too dedicated his life to science, to finding out the ways of “transmutationism”, the processes of evolution. He guessed or hypothesized, everything duly considered, that new species would appear through the gradual accumulation of minute changes, adaptation, and natural selection. Constant research has discovered many wonderful mechanisms and processes of life; diligent searching has revealed a vertiginous diversity of life in the Earth’s past, as well as dramatic changes in the planet itself. The sciences utilized for the study of evolution have accumulated a wealth of data suggesting “sequences of events”. But theories keep cropping up or reappearing, and rock-solid ‘laws’, in the strict sense of the word, have not been established.

Scientific theories depend on the understanding of reality, in this context another word for nature. If reality consists of the Chain of Being, then science, as we have seen, must take into account the levels other than matter. If all is the One, then nature in her entirety is the One. “What Nature does is in reality done by the Spirit.” (LD 355) “All her works are instinct with an absolute intelligence,” (SY 91) which is a supra-rational, supra-mental intelligence conscious of the whole of Existence in a simultaneous perception within and without Time. In the One, in Brahman, there cannot be anything that is not the One or Brahman – this is the supreme monotheism – nor can there be any ‘error’, for then the One would not be perfect. This leads to the logical conclusion: “When we speak indeed of the errors of Nature, we use a figure illegitimately borrowed from our human psychology and experience, for in Nature there are no errors but only the deliberate measure of her paces traced and retraced in a prefigured rhythm, of which each step has a meaning and its place in the action and reaction of her gradual advance.” (IHU 99)

“If we look carefully at these workings of Nature, once we put aside the veil of familiarity and our unthinking acquiescence in the process of things as natural because so they always happen, we discover that all she does in whole or in parts is a miracle, an act of some incomprehensible magic. The being of the Self-existence and the world that has appeared in it are, each of them and both together, a suprarational mystery. There seems to us to be a reason in things because the processes of the physical finite are consistent to our view and their law determinable, but this reason in things, when closely examined, seems to stumble at every moment against the irrational or infrarational and the suprarational: the consistency, the determinability of process seems to lessen rather than increase as we pass from matter to life and from life to mentality; if the finite consents to some extent to look as if it were rational, the infinitesimal refuses to be bound by the same laws and the infinite is unseizable. As for the action of the universe and its significance, it escapes us altogether …” (LD 326-27)

Words like ‘magic’, ‘suprarational’ and ‘infrarational’ may easily evoke the misty ‘mysticism’ so scathingly derided by the positivist mind. But this would be in direct contradiction with the accuracy the humans and their world have been explored for centuries by the Western and especially the Eastern spiritual genius, of which modern science has no knowledge. In the introduction to Le Passage de la matière à la vie selon le Bouddha Gauthama (the transition from matter to life according to the Buddha Gauthama) by Emmy Guittès, the publisher writes: “This little book is a real revelation, for it changes everything one thought one knew about the ignorance of the past centuries! The composition of the atom and the explosive effects of its splitting, the relativity of time, the expansion of the universe, an energy which is in constant transformation but never exhausted, an incalculable number of miniature universes repeated infinitely, life and death of the stars, and many other scientific processes have been expounded by Siddhartha Gauthama, the Buddha, and included in the voluminous Abbidhama.”⁶
From Sri Aurobindo’s writings we choose three topics related to science.

“We can say that the Big Bang theory is currently regarded as a well-established theory, the standard-model acceptable to most physicists, and that the questions that remain do not cast serious suspicions on it,” wrote Kitty Ferguson in 1994.⁷ In 1933, however, the universe was still assumed to be eternal and unchanging, and the Big Bang model, endorsed by Einstein, blatant nonsense. Around 1950 the controversy raged between Hoyle, Bondi and Gold’s Steady State model of the universe and the theory of the explosion at the beginning of time. Sri Aurobindo finished his epic Savitri shortly before his passing in 1950. Aware of the competing trends in science, he wrote nonetheless:

A Mystery’s process is the universe.

At first was laid a strange and anomalous base,
A void, a cipher of some secret Whole,
Where zero held infinity in its sum
And All and Nothing were a single term …

A slow reversal’s movement then took place:
A gas belched out from some invisible Fire,
Of its dense rings were formed these million stars … (Sav 100-01)

Decades before he had already noted, interpreting the old scriptures: “As in the immobile ether arises, first sign of the creative impulse of Nature, vibration, Shabda, and this vibration is a line of etheric movement, is ether contacting ether in its own field of mobile self-force and that primal stir is sufficient to initiate all forms and forces, even such is the original movement of the Infinite.” (EDH 198) The language is quite different from the modern scientific terminology (to Sri Aurobindo ‘ether’ was ‘space’). But the point is that what at the time was a controversial novel theory is stated as fact in a magnum opus intended to contain his spiritual heritage. Moreover, terms like “anomalous base” and “the etheric movement of vibration” bring to mind the quantum theory according to which virtual particles arise continuously out of “the void” and may be at the origin of the universe.

Another topic is the ancient concept of pralaya, the cyclic origin and extinction of the universe. This was even recently thought to belong to the old Hindu lore, just like the cycles of time were part of the mythology of ancient Greece. But see, not only is the universe now supposed to have evolved from a magic primeval particle, the question “what came before the Big Bang” has become scientifically legitimate, as has the question what to expect after the Big Crunch, when our universe dies. Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok have published a book with the title Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang. “They say they were motivated to form a new theory as the big bang came to require more and more exotic elements – inflation, dark matter, dark energy – to make it fit observations.”⁸ And string theory has spawned not only the possibility of a multitude of universes, a ‘multiverse’, but an infinity of them.

Paul Steinhardt writes: “In the cyclic model, the Big Bang is not the beginning but, rather, an event that has been repeating every trillion years, extending far into the past. Borrowing ideas from string theory, the cyclic model proposes that each bang is a collision between our tri-dimensional world and another three-dimensional world along an extra spatial dimension. Each bang creates new hot matter and radiation that begins a new period of expansion, cooling, galaxy formation, and life, but space and time exist before and after the bang.”⁹ How shall the intellectual outsider choose between this mathematical hypothesis and the ancient wisdom – which is only wisdom if it is knowledge, though not necessarily mental knowledge? “What will happen,” asks Claude Allègre, “if it is proven tomorrow that the big bang does not define the beginning of everything, but only the beginning of one episode among the innumerable which the universe has known, and if one proves that, finally, the history of the cosmos is nothing but alternating periods of expansion and contraction?”¹⁰

A third topic could be called accelerando e crescendo, the acceleration and intensification of the cosmic evolution. In The Life Divine (LD 932), Sri Aurobindo wrote: “The first obscure material movement of the evolutionary Force is marked by an aeonic graduality.” This is the evolution of the material universe from the Big Bang to the formation of the solar system and planet Earth. “The movement of life-progress proceeds slowly but still with a quicker step.” This is the evolution of life on Earth from its origin, now estimated at about 4 billion years ago, till the appearance 2 million years ago of our own species, now spread in great numbers in all habitable parts of the planet. “Mind can still further compress the tardy leisureliness of Time and make long paces of the centuries.” The acceleration and intensification of mind in science and technology has presently reached such a momentum that it causes a global sense of insecurity, not to say outright fear for tomorrow. The curve of this acceleration and intensification is an undeniable illustration that the universe, with humanity as a decisive element, is reaching a point where something drastic has to happen, if it is not already happening.

“In a seminal academic paper delivered to a NASA colloquium Vernor Vinge wrote: ‘I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.’ He is anticipating the possibility of greater-than-human intelligence. He is talking about some form of transcendence. … As a metaphor for mind-boggling social change, the ‘singularity’ has been borrowed from math and physics. In those realms, singularities are the points where everything stops making sense.¹¹ … Some people think we are approaching such a Singularity – a point where our everyday world stops making sense. They think that is what happens when The Curve goes almost straight up. … He believes some sort of fundamental transcendence will happen soon.”¹² In Sri Aurobindo’s language this reads: “When the conscious Spirit intervenes, a supremely concentrated pace of evolutionary swiftness becomes possible.” (LD 932)

Evolution Two-Tiered

“We can no longer suppose that God or some Demiurge¹³ has manufactured each genus and species ready-made in body and in consciousness and left the matter there, having looked upon his work and seen that it was good,” wrote Sri Aurobindo. “It has become evident that a secretly conscious or an inconscient Energy of creation has effected the transition by swift or slow degrees, by whatever means, devices, biological, physical or psychological machinery – perhaps having made it, did not care to preserve as distinct forms what were only stepping stones and had no longer any function nor served any purpose in evolutionary Nature. But this explanation of the gaps¹⁴ is little more than a hypothesis which as yet we cannot sufficiently substantiate. It is probable at any rate that the reason for these radical differences is to be found in the working of the inner Force and not in the outer process of the evolutionary transition …” (LD 709-10)

In this passage Sri Aurobindo avows the difference between the outer, materialistic (e.g. ‘Darwinian’) explanation of evolution, and its explanation (e.g. his own) through an inner Force. Yet, he also points out that ascribing the works of nature to “an inconscient Energy of creation” – or to an Intelligence as in the theory of intelligent design – is a hypothesis which has not been sufficiently substantiated. Let us see how he himself accounts for the workings of evolution.

We have now a rudimentary idea of the general framework of the universal manifestation. The ineffable, passive One remains eternally absorbed in itself; the active One, which is one and the same, manifests itself in a scale of the gradations of existence, from the highest to the lowest – to the apparent opposite of its essential attributes. Every gradation of this involution represents a ‘multiverse’ of typal worlds and beings. “The creation has descended all the degrees of being from the Supermind to Matter and in each degree it has created a world, reign, plane or order proper to that degree.” (LY 1)

Our world emerges from the densest point of the One’s involution into its contraries; it evolves from the Negation, the utter Inconscient, and climbs up step after previously established step, thus integrating the aspects of the One extant in eternity. “Before there could be any evolution, there must needs be this involution of the Divine All that is to emerge. Otherwise there would have been not an ordered and significant evolution, but a successive creation of things unforseeable, not contained in their antecedents, not their inevitable consequences or right followers in sequence.” (EDH 162)

On our Earth, the gradations that have been integrated until now are the three lower ones: matter, life, mind. Our eyes are only able to perceive what we call ‘matter’, but this Earth, and the life and mental consciousness on it, remain connected to their involutionary planes of origin. “The immense material world in which we live is not the sole reality but only one of innumerable potential and existent universes; all of them need not have either Matter as we know it or the Inconscient as we know it for their base. Indeed, this world of Matter is itself dependent on many planes of consciousness and existence which are not material; for these have not this gross substance as their foundation or as the medium of their instrumentation of energy and consciousness or their primary condition of existence.” (EDH 241)

Crucial to the understanding of this view is that the One (for reasons of its own which can only be ananda or delight) has chosen to plunge into its opposite which we call the Inconscient. But the One can never be two, consequently the Inconscient is also the One, and all the attributes of the One are contained, though hidden, in the Inconscient. The first manifestation out of the Inconscient is Matter, already a high degree of organization (as particle physics has discovered). And it is on this basis of Matter that the gradations of the involution are recovered and one by one built up again, up to their Origin.

All the levels of being are aspects of the One and therefore interdependent. They are all present in the Inconscient out of which they evolve. “Only what is involved can evolve.” (EPY 560) Yet, the establishment of one level, or step, in the evolution requires a total concentration of the manifesting power on that step, a limitation to its potencies, otherwise nothing could be stable, fixed, moulded. This means that each level of evolution – matter, life, mind – has a ‘ceiling’ which it cannot pierce; for a higher level to be integrated upon Earth a response from the corresponding typal level is necessary. Evolution is two-tiered: emergence form below, descent from above.

For life to appear on our planet, powers and being of the life worlds had to embody in its Matter. For the human being to walk on this Earth, the powers and beings of the mental worlds had to incarnate on it. “Man is a being from the mental worlds whose mentality works here involved, obscure and degraded in a physical brain.” (EDH 158) The material embodiment restricts the free abilities of the typal worlds. “Immense ranges of powers, influences, phenomena descend covertly upon us from the Overmind and the higher mental and vital ranges, but of these only a part, a selection, as it were, or restricted number can stage and realize themselves in the order of the physical world.” (LD 780)

“Man cannot by his own effort make himself more than man … But, still, mental man can open to what is beyond him” and call for supra-mental powers “to work in him and to do what the mind cannot do.” (EDH 170) Because the human being has awareness it can be conscious of this aspiration. In the less or not aware lower organisms, this aspiration might be called an ‘urge’ or ‘need’, as intuited by Lamarck. “In the subjective order, we find that what shapes itself to us as a life-intention, life-impulse, life-formation here, already exists in a larger, more subtle, more plastic range of possibilities, and these pre-existent forces and formations are pressing upon us to release themselves in the physical world also; but only a part succeeds in getting through and even that emerges partially in a form and circumstance more proper to the system of terrestrial law and sequence. This precipitation takes place, normally, without our knowledge.” (LD 774)

If all this may seem rather abstract, its application to the present day search for factual coherence in the theories of evolution becomes very concrete. Dogmatic Darwinian gradualism prevented paleontology from taking the fossil record at face value; the enormous gaps in it, the ‘missing links’, were a priori held to be provisional and were expected to be filled up when in course of time more transitory species would be found. Till some theorists, annoyed with the unreality of this view, decided to accept the logical conclusions suggested by the situation, namely that the gaps are real and will not go away. We remember the words of Ernst Mayr: “According to Darwinian theory, evolution is a populational phenomenon and should therefore be gradual and continuous. This should be true not only for microevolution [on the genetic scale] but also for macroevolution [on the scale of species and higher], and for the transition between the two. Alas, this seems to be in conflict with observation … Discontinuities [i.e. gaps] are overwhelmingly frequent … The discontinuities are even more striking in the fossil record. New species appear in the fossil record suddenly, not connected with their ancestors by a series of intermediaries. Indeed there are rather few cases of continuous series of gradually evolving species.”¹⁵

In 1972 Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge came forward with their theory of punctuated equilibrium: species have appeared suddenly, fully formed, and have kept their form for the duration of their existence. (The most striking example of a sudden appearance of new phyla – a phylum is a distinct way of building an animal – is the so-called “Cambrian explosion”, around 550 million years ago, when most of the still existing species originated in a relatively very short time, a ‘geological moment’. The Cambrian fauna was unrelated to its predecessors on Earth, the pre-Cambrian or Ediacaran fauna. The sudden and decisive event of the astonishing Cambrian explosion shocked the world of knowledge, and even made the cover of Time magazine in 1995.

Still more recent research ties the evolution of life, of its complexity and increasing consciousness, to the dramatic catastrophes our Earth has been subject to.¹⁶ Life survived periods of total glaciation, when the planet looked like a snowball, and of infernal increases in heath after gigantic volcanic eruptions of its inner fire and impacts from meteorites. It also survived a quasi continuous shifting of the land masses, now called continents. Through all that it developed from microscopic molecules to (eukaryotic) cells with a nucleus, to conglomerations of cells, structured organisms, the countless species which are extinct, and those that still exist.

Each time nature has produced something unexpected, spectacular, sudden, ‘magical’, for which science has many hypotheses but no valid explanation. In Sri Aurobindo’s view of a two-tiered evolution, the changes are not consequences effectuated only in matter: they are prepared on other levels of existence, vital and mental, and embodied in matter when life on Earth is ready for them. To our reason and logic these changes may appear incomprehensible, bizarre, and for the most part superfluous, if not bungled. But all are products of nature’s “laboratory”, and Nature, on Earth the material manifestation and gradual incarnation of the One, “makes no mistakes.” Our science is the effort of our limited mentality, to which the ground of things, as well as their beginning and end, is not yet comprehensible.

“Thus the whole view of evolution begins to change,” concluded Sri Aurobindo. “Instead of a mechanical, gradual, rigid evolution out of indeterminate Matter by Nature-Force we move towards the perception of a conscious, supple, flexible, intensely surprising and constantly dramatic evolution by a superconscient Knowledge which reveals things in Matter, Life and Mind out of the unfathomable Inconscient from which they rise.” (EPY 174) What the theoretical mind of scientific materialism still holds to be a play of ‘chance’, of inexplicable coincidences, acquires meaning. “But what is Chance, after all? It is only a word, a notion formed by our consciousness to account for things of which we have no true knowledge – and it does not account for them.” (EDH 299)

Homo sapiens

“The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature, it is said, worked out man,” wrote Sri Aurobindo. (LD 4) In spite of the opinion of some learned men who think that they could have done better, the human product from nature’s workshop does not seem too bad. “An Upanishad declares that the Self or Spirit after deciding on life-creation first formed animal kinds like the cow and the horse, but the gods – who are in the thought of the Upanishads powers of Consciousness and powers of Nature – found them to be insufficient vehicles, and the Spirit finally created the form of man which the gods saw to be excellently made and sufficient and they entered into it for their cosmic functions. This is a clear parable of the creation of more and more developed forms till one was found that was capable of housing consciousness.” (LD 837)

Nature’s “mental being”, like the other fixed forms or species it has worked out, cannot by itself evolve into a higher embodiment of consciousness. “All the facts show that a type [i.e. a species] can vary within its own specification of nature, but there is nothing to show that it can go beyond it.” While ‘Darwinism’ assumes smooth gradual transitions between the species, the fossil record, as we have seen, suggests otherwise – and so did Sri Aurobindo. Emergence from below and descent from above seems to be the explanation of all distinct forms of speciation. “It has not yet been really established that ape-kind developed into man; for it would rather seem that a type resembling the ape, but always characteristic of itself and not of apehood, developed within its own tendencies of nature and became what we know of man, the present human being.” (LD 829)

“The type resembling the ape but always characteristic of itself” seems to have appeared 6 million years ago, according to the latest, sometimes very contradictory, interpretations of the fossil finds. The various types of “hominids” which then followed are called “australopithecines;” they walked upright, and the size of their brains increased steadily. “There were two major spurts of brain enlargement, one between 2 and 1.5 million years ago, which seems to be related to the appearance of Homo habilis, and a less pronounced one between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago.”¹⁷ “The earliest known [sub-species of] Homo first appear in the fossil record about 2.5 million years ago, around the age of the oldest known stone tools. They are different from other hominids in some striking ways: the have opposable thumbs and big brains. … Modern humans evolved in Africa between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago.”¹⁸ At least two other human species coexisted for some time with Homo sapiens, the Neandertals, and the little people whose bones were lately discovered on an island in the Indonesian archipelago, Homo floresiensis. This brief outline of the evolution leading to our species as it is today may illustrate “the appearance in animal being of a type similar in some respects to the ape-kind but already from the beginning endowed with the elements of humanity.” (LD 842)

“It is quite conceivable,” wrote Sri Aurobindo, “that such an evolution from below and such a descent from above cooperated in the appearance of humanity in earth-nature. The secret psychical entity already there in the animal might have itself called down the mental being, the Mind-Purusha, into the realm of living Matter in order to take up the vital-mental energy already at work and lift it into a higher mentality. But this would still be a process of evolution, the higher plane only intervening to assist the appearance and enlargement of its own principle in terrestrial Nature.” (LD 840)

“Man is a type among many types so constructed, one pattern among the multitude of patterns in the manifestation in Matter. He is the most complex that has been created, the richest in content of consciousness and the curious ingeniousness of his building; he is the head of the earthly creation, but he does not exceed it. Even as others, so he too has his own native law, limits, special kind of existence; within those limits he can extend and develop, but he cannot go outside them. … He is what he always was in the early beginnings of civilization; he continues to manifest the same capacities, the same qualities and defects, the same efforts, blunders, achievements, frustrations. If progress there has been, it is in a circle, at most perhaps in a widening circle. … Nothing warrants the idea that he will ever hew his way out of the half-knowledge half-ignorance which is the stamp of his kind, or, even if he develops a higher knowledge, that he can break out of the utmost boundary of the mental circle. ” (LD 831-32)

“We are in respect to our possible higher evolution much in the position of the original Ape of the Darwinian theory. It would have been impossible for that Ape leading his instinctive arboreal life in primeval forests to conceive that there would be one day an animal on the earth who would use a new faculty called reason upon the materials of his inner and outer existence, who would dominate by that power his instincts and habits, change the circumstances of his physical life, build for himself houses of stone, manipulate Nature’s forces, sail the seas, ride the air, develop codes of conduct, evolve conscious methods for his mental and spiritual development. And if such a conception would have been possible for the Ape-mind, it would still have been difficult for him that by any progress of Nature or long effort of Will and tendency he himself could develop into that animal.” (LD 55)

We have noted repeatedly with how much malice positivist biologists have brought the human down from the supreme position among creatures he was supposed to occupy before the life sciences converted to evolution. “We are merely neotenous apes that happen to be slightly cleverer than our cousins.” (V.S. Ramachandran¹⁹) “Homo sapiens is a mammal and a primate, a member of the Class Mammalia and the order Primates that includes the monkeys, apes, and their kin. The forces of evolution that operate on other kinds of organisms have shaped humanity just as inexorably, and they continue to do so today.” (Burton Guttman²⁰) “Since Darwin, it is no longer useful to ask: ‘Why has a particular species been created?’ It is not scientifically productive to assume that the huge panoply of millions of species exists with regard to and somehow because of human beings. Similarly, it is no longer useful to suppose that we, as individuals, are the center of the universe, either.” (David Barash²¹)

Yet the human, evolved from the animal, is more than the animal: he is a mental being to a degree which essentially differs from that of the nascent mentality in the animal. It is the powers of the mind-world which have caused his body to walk upright, his brain to expand and his throat to produce language. “Man, because he has acquired reason and still more because he has indulged his power of imagination and intuition, is able to conceive an existence higher than his own, and even to envisage his personal elevation beyond his present state into that existence. His idea of the supreme state is an absolute of all that is positive to his own concepts and desirable to his own instinctive aspiration – Knowledge without its negative shadow of error, Bliss without its negation in experience of suffering, Power without its constant denial by incapacity, purity and plenitude of being without the opposing sense of defect and limitation. It is so that he conceives his gods; it is so that he constructs his heavens. … His dream of God and Heaven is really a dream of his own perfection.” (LD 55-6)

He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast …

Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey of all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

(Alexander Pope, 1688-1744)

The human, seen not only as his material body but in the total composition of his being, is a “microcosm,” thus called of old by people who seemed to know. The evolutionary layers which have built up the human are integrated into his constitution. The centres through which they support him, and through which he can enter into contact with them, are called chakras in India. They are located in the ethereal substance of the spine. At its bottom is the centre of matter, with above it the lower vital or sex centre. Behind the navel is the centre of the middle vital (anger, fear), and behind the heart that of the higher vital, of the noble feelings. In the throat is the centre of mental expression, and between the eyes that of mental concentration (the third eye). And just above the head is the “lotus with a thousand leaves” which opens to the levels which earthly beings normally do not yet reach .

What is more, in the human too there is the presence of the One without which nothing can exist. “This spark of Divinity is there in all terrestrial living beings from the earth’s highest to its lowest creatures.” (LY 281) True spirituality is not a matter of superstition or mental negation of facts the mind cannot grasp: it is a matter of experience, prepared by longtime patient attention and accurate perception. Science has its value within the limits it has imposed on itself. Of another kind is the value of the experiences and formulations of the countless seekers after truth in their life-long exploration of domains which differ from those acknowledged by the Western mind.. The constitution of the human being is complex; this complexity is upheld by the centre of his being, “the divine spark” in him, his soul or psychic being, which is the cause and reason of his existence. Again, the truth of this statement can only be ascertained by direct personal experience.

This is a third view, other than scientific materialism and the Christian doctrine. It holds that evolution is real, because it is a movement of and within the Real or One, and that the human being is its highest evolutionary attainment, though not the final one. “We believe in the constant progression of humanity and we hold that that progression is the working out of a Thought in Life which sometimes manifests itself on the surface and sometimes sinks below and works behind the mask of external forces and interests. When there is this lapse below the surface, humanity has its periods of apparent retrogression or tardy evolution, its long hours of darkness or twilight during which the secret Thought behind works out one of its phases by the pressure mainly of economic, political and personal interests ignorant of any deeper aim within. When the Thought returns to the surface, humanity has its periods of light and of rapid efflorescence, its dawns and splendid springtides; and according to the depth, vitality, truth and self-effective energy of the form of Thought that emerges is the importance of the stride forward that it makes during these Hours of the Gods in our terrestrial manifestation.” (EPY 140)

“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.” (LD 4)

“The impersonal truth of things can be rendered into the abstract formulas of the pure reason, but there is another side of truth which belongs to the spiritual or mystic vision and without that inner vision of realities the abstract formulation of them is insufficiently alive, incomplete. The mystery of things is the true truth of things; the intellectual presentation is only truth in representation, in abstract symbols, as if in a cubist art of thought-speech, in geometric figure. It is necessary in a philosophic inquiry to confine oneself mostly to this intellectual presentation, but it is as well to remember that this is only the abstraction of the Truth and to seize it completely or express it completely there is needed a concrete experience and a more living and full-bodied language.” (LD 357)

“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 element, but the support is not indispensable. The scientific theory is concerned only with the outward and visible machinery and process, with the detail 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, as progression of the soul’s manifestation in material existence.” (LD 836)

“Earth-life is not a lapse into the mire of something undivine, vain and miserable, offered by some Power to itself as a spectacle or to the embodied soul as a thing to be suffered and then cast away from it; it is the scene of the evolutionary unfolding of the being which moves towards the revelation of a supreme spiritual light and power and joy and oneness, but includes in it also the manifold diversity of the self-achieving spirit. There is an all-seeing purpose in the terrestrial creation; a divine plan is working itself out through its contradictions and perplexities which are the sign of the many-sided achievement towards which are being led the soul’s growth and the endeavour of Nature.” (LD 680)