Hitler and his God

“In Matter Lies the Crux”

It is significant that Sri Aurobindo often writes Matter with a capital M. In the cosmic “world stair” of the degrees of substance and their corresponding realms, it was Matter on which his spiritual vision as well as his transforming yogic effort was focused. He had the courage to draw the logical conclusion of the Upanishadic statement that all is the Brahman; if so, then “Matter also is the Brahman and it is nothing other than or different from the Brahman.” “Matter is a form of Spirit, a habitation of Spirit, and here in Matter itself there can be a realization of the Spirit.” 940

“In Matter undoubtedly lies the crux; that raises the obstacle [to the spiritual effort]: for because of Matter Life is gross and limited and stricken with death and pain; because of Matter Mind is more than half blind, its wings clipped, its feet tied to a narrow perch and held back from the vastness and freedom above of which it is conscious. Therefore the exclusive spiritual seeker is justified from his viewpoint if, disgusted with the mud of Matter, revolted by the animal grossness of Life or impatient of the self-imprisoned narrowness and downward vision of Mind, he determines to break from it all and return by inaction and silence to the Spirit’s immobile liberty. But that is not the sole viewpoint, nor, because it has been sublimely held or glorified by shining and golden examples, need we consider it the integral and ultimate wisdom. Rather, liberating ourselves from all passion and revolt, let us see what this divine order of the universe means, and, as for this great knot and tangle of Matter denying the spirit, let us seek to find out and separate its strands so as to loosen it by a solution and not cut through it by a violence. We must state the difficulty, the opposition first, entirely, trenchantly, with exaggeration if need be, rather than with diminution, and then look for the issue.” 941

This is the Aurobindonian spiritual revolution. For it may be remembered that any spiritual effort in the course of humanity’s existence has had the liberation from Matter, from this painfully burdensome world, as its aim. Sri Aurobindo, however, accords to Matter the recognition it intrinsically deserves as a form of the Spirit. In concrete terms: if the Divine has manifested this world, and if we are born in it, then there must be an intention behind both facts, for the consciousness of the Divine is an infallible Truth-Consciousness also in all of its manifestation. “The touch of Earth is always invigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only be really mastered in its fullness – to its heights we can always reach – when we keep our feet firmly on the physical. ‘Earth is His footing’, says the Upanishad whenever it images the Self that manifests in the universe. And it is certainly the fact that the wider we extend and the surer we make our knowledge of the physical world, the wider and surer becomes our foundation for the higher knowledge, even for the highest, even for the Brahmavidya [knowledge of Brahman].” 942

The evolutionary cosmos is one of “the vast self-extensions of the Brahman” in a divine act of seeing which simultaneously is an act of creation. The mode of consciousness involved in this act of divine Self-manifestation Sri Aurobindo calls “Truth-Consciousness” or “Supermind”, “the real creative agency of the universal existence”. The Supermind is not an inflated or supreme degree of the human mental consciousness as we know it, and “lies far beyond the possibility of any satisfying mental scheme or map of it or any grasp of mental seeing and description. It would be difficult for the normal unillumined or untransformed mental conception to express or enter into something that is based on a consciousness ; even if they were seen or conceived by some enlightenment or opening of vision, another language than the poor abstract counters [i.e. clichés] used by our mind would be needed to translate them into terms by which their reality could become at all seizable to us. As the summits of human mind are beyond animal perception, so the movements of Supermind are beyond the ordinary human mental conception …” 943

“Mental nature and mental thought are based on a consciousness of the finite; supramental nature is in its very grain a consciousness and power of the Infinite. Supramental nature sees everything from the standpoint of oneness and regards all things, even the greatest multiplicity and diversity, even what are to the mind the strongest contradictions, in the light of that oneness; its will, ideas, feelings, sense are made of the stuff of oneness, its actions proceed upon that basis. Mental nature, on the contrary, thinks, sees, wills, feels, senses with division as a starting-point and has only a constructed understanding of unity; even when it experiences oneness, it has to act from the oneness on a basis of limitation and difference. But the supramental, the divine life is a life of essential, spontaneous and inherent unity.” 944

According to Sri Aurobindo evolution cannot stop or be stopped in its tracks, and the appearance of the supramental being, the Aurobindonian superman, is inevitable. “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.” 945 Yet, as in all appearances of a new, higher species in evolution there will be transitional beings without which the gigantic leap from the human to the supramental being would not be possible.