Hitler and his God

Man is a Transitional Being

One of Sri Aurobindo’s aphorisms says: “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.” 934 In other words, the place of the human being is somewhere on the upward ladder, though not at the top. Man is not the king of creation but only its provisional leader, and the evolution ahead may be as long as was the past evolution, supposed it can be measured in time. “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 co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god.” 935 In both quotations “superman” means the next evolutionary step or steps which will surpass us as much as we surpass the animal.

“Man is a transitional being, he is not final. He is too imperfect for that, too imperfect in capacity for knowledge, too imperfect in will and action, too imperfect in his turn towards joy and beauty, too imperfect in his will for freedom and his instinct for order. Even if he could perfect himself in his own type, his type is too low and small to satisfy the need of the universe. Something larger, higher, more capable of a rich all-embracing universality is needed, a greater being, a greater consciousness summing up in itself all that the world set out to be … Man must evolve out of himself the divine superman: he was born for transcendence. Humanity is not enough.” 936

The human being occupies a special, awkward position in the cosmic process of evolution: it stands at its crossroads, it is the X, the incomplete, problematical, self-questioning being in between the hemispheres of lower and higher Nature. “Man is an abnormal who has not found his own normality – he may imagine he has, he may appear to be normal in his own kind, but that normality is only a sort of provisional order; therefore, though man is infinitely greater than the plant or the animal, he is not perfect in his own nature like the plant and the animal. This imperfection is not a thing to be at all deplored, but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us an immense vista of self-development and self-exceeding. Man at the highest is a half-god who has risen up out of the animal Nature and is splendidly abnormal in it, but the thing which he has started out to be, the whole god, is something so much greater than what he is that it seems to him as abnormal to himself as he is to the animal.” 937

Man’s being is as complex as his evolutionary position, stretched out between a long and for the most part forgotten yesterday and a boundless tomorrow. His body “is not the whole even of our physical being; this gross density is not all of our substance. The oldest Vedantic knowledge tells us of five degrees of our being, the material, the vital, the mental, the ideal, the spiritual or beatific, and to each of these grades of our soul there corresponds a grade of our substance, a sheath as it was called in the ancient figurative language. A later psychology found that these five sheaths of our substance were the material of three bodies [contained within each other], gross physical, subtle and causal, in all of which the soul actually and simultaneously dwells, although here and now we are superficially conscious only of the material vehicle. But it is possible to become conscious in our other bodies as well and it is in fact the opening up of the veil between them and consequently between our physical, psychical and ideal personalities which is the cause of those ‘psychic’ and ‘occult’ phenomena that are now beginning to be increasingly though yet too little and too clumsily examined, even while they are too much exploited.” 938 In other words, each human being contains all the degrees of the cosmic evolution within him. It is, as the traditions say, a “microcosm”. “Man, the microcosm, has all these planes in his own being, ranged from the subconscient to his superconscient existence.” 939