Overman

2: Four Pillars

Look Nature through, ’tis neat gradation all.¹

– Edward Young (1683-1765)

Aurobindo and Mirra were from the very beginning aware of the meaning, magnitude and revolutionary portent of their joint undertaking. It was indeed, as Mirra wrote in her diary, “a veritable work of creation”. To put it briefly, Aurobindo and Mirra knew that they were missioned to bring a higher consciousness onto the earth, a consciousness intended to become embodied in a new species beyond present humanity, just as the mental consciousness had embodied itself in a new species beyond the primates. It was their intention to found the Life Divine upon earth, thus fulfilling the promise made to the human species since its beginning. To put it more concretely: they intended to bring to an end the limitations and sufferings that have always been humanity’s lot and turn the earth into the City of God.

They wanted, wrote Sri Aurobindo² in The Life Divine, “to search for the widest, the most flexible, the most catholic affirmation possible and found on it the largest and most comprehensive harmony.”³ “We seek indeed a larger and completer affirmation”,⁴ an affirmation to “square with all the facts of existence”.⁵ They wanted an integral knowledge to be the basis of an integral method (yoga) to transform human life into a divine life on earth. “As in Science, so in metaphysical thought, that general and ultimate solution is likely to be the best which includes and accounts for all so that each truth of experience takes its place in the whole: that knowledge is likely to be the highest knowledge which illumines, integralises, harmonises the significance of all knowledge and accounts for, finds the basic and, one might almost say, the justifying reason of our ignorance and illusion while it cures them; this is the supreme experience which gathers together all experience in the truth of a supreme and all-reconciling oneness.”⁶

Something similar may have been imagined or dreamed of before, but it was certainly never tried out. All expectations of a higher or a better life had always been projected into a hereafter or into an indefinite earthly future. Now, Sri Aurobindo and Mirra had acquired the conviction, based on their spiritual experience, that the time had come to realise the divine life here and now, and that it was they themselves who had to initiate the required transformation in matter, in the body, on earth. If this conception – fantastic, grandiose, utopian! – was true, then the moment of their meeting was indeed “the matrix of New Time”.⁷

“We start from the idea that humanity is moving to a great change of its life which will even lead to a new life of the race,⁸ – in all countries where men think, there is now in various forms that idea and that hope, – and our aim has been [in the Arya] to search for the spiritual, religious and other truth which can enlighten and guide the race in this movement and endeavour. The spiritual experience and the general truths on which such an attempt could be based, were already present to us, otherwise we should have had no right to make the endeavour at all; but the complete intellectual statement of them and their results and issues had to be found.”⁹ Thus wrote Sri Aurobindo in July 1918, in an article that looked back on four years of the Arya.¹⁰

The four main pillars of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra’s thought, as expounded in the Arya, may be summarised as follows.

1. Omnipresent Reality

“An omnipresent Reality is the truth of all life and existence whether absolute or relative, whether corporeal or incorporeal, whether animate or inanimate, whether intelligent or unintelligent; and in all its infinitely varying and even constantly opposed self-expressions, from the contradictions nearest to our ordinary experience to those remotest antinomies which lose themselves on the verges of the Ineffable, the Reality is one and not a sum or concourse. From that all variations begin, in that all variations consist, to that all variations return. All affirmations are denied only to lead to a wider affirmation of the same Reality. All antinomies confront each other in order to recognise one Truth in their opposed aspects and embrace by the way of conflict their mutual Unity. Brahman is the Alpha and the Omega. Brahman is the One besides whom there is nothing else existent.”¹¹ That One Existent is the general experience of all mystics – those adventurers and experimenters and heroes of the spirit who had the courage to commit their lives to apparently intangible realities, and whose daring was rewarded with the direct experience of the Absolute which Indians call by that mantric word: Brahman. The Chandyoga Upanishad says it is “One without a second”, and we find it in Rumi, and in Meister Eckhart who asserted that “Gott ist eins”, God is one.

There is, however, Brahman in its “silent” aspect: the Absolute self-existing, self-sufficient, complete in its infinity and eternity, indefinable and unnameable, as all mystics have confirmed. And there is Brahman in its “active” aspect, manifesting itself in the glory of its infinite riches through all eternity – for in that Being there is neither beginning nor end. “The fundamental truth of Being must necessarily be the fundamental truth of Becoming. All is a manifestation of That.”¹²

According to Indian wisdom, the three ultimate attributes of Brahman are sat, chit and ananda¹³. Existence, Consciousness and Bliss. The Absolute, That, is all-being, all-existence, all-joy. Chit is actually a double term, chit-tapas or chit-shakti: consciousness-force, for in the Absolute everything seen automatically is. There, there is no schism between the seeing will and its execution as there is in humans. Those three ultimate attributes are powers, powers are energies, energies are consciousnesses, consciousnesses are beings, on all levels of the manifestation. For Brahman does not create out of nothing, it manifests all out of its own being, endlessly. “Brahman is in all things, all things are in Brahman, all things are Brahman.”¹⁴

Out of its inexhaustible riches, Brahman creates worlds without number, peopled with beings without number, all sharing in the Existence, Consciousness-Force and Joy according to their place in the universal hierarchy. For those worlds Sri Aurobindo coined the word “typal”, meaning non-evolutionary; they exist outside our limitations and mortality. But among the infinite possibilities within the Absolute there was (is) the venture of the Absolute hiding himself from himself in his opposites, for reasons surpassing our understanding. And as every possibility in the Absolute must of necessity work itself out, Sachchidananda (as Sat-Chit-Ananda is spelled in one word in Anglicised Sanskrit) turned into its opposites: Being became Death, the Light of Consciousness became the Darkness of Ignorance, the Truth of Consciousness became Falsehood, Joy became Suffering. In that manner was the black Inconscient created, as infinite as its luminous Origin and containing in a covert way everything its Origin contains. In that manner was the foundation laid of the adventurous development of this evolutionary world in which our souls, infinite “sparks” of the infinite Fire, chose to participate in order to experience the joy of the recovery and rediscovery of that what they – we – are and have always been: the Glory, the Ecstasy, the Divine.

2. Evolution

“Once the evolutionary hypothesis is put forward and the facts supporting it are marshalled,” wrote Sri Aurobindo, “this aspect of the terrestrial existence becomes so striking as to appear indisputable.”¹⁵ Scandalously new and causing a terrible furore in the West since 1859, when Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, evolution has been part and parcel of the Hindu view of things at least since the time of the Upanishads, which in their turn point back to the Vedas.¹⁶ “… The ancient and eternal truth of Vedanta receives into itself and illumines, justifies and shows us all the meaning of the modern and phenomenal truth of evolution in the universe. And it is so only that this modern truth of evolution which is the old truth of the Universal developing itself successively in Time, seen opaquely through the study of Force and Matter, can find its own full sense and justification, – by illuminating itself with the Light of the ancient and eternal truth still preserved for us in the Vedantic Scriptures. To this mutual self-discovery and self-illumination by the fusion of the old Eastern and the new Western knowledge the thought of the world is already turning.”¹⁷

The clearest sources of evolutionary thinking in the Indian tradition are however to be found in the Puranas, which contain the story of the succession of the Avatars. “The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is itself, as it were, a parable of evolution.”¹⁸ An Avatar, in brief, is a direct incarnation of the Divine in his manifestation to make the next higher step in evolution possible; for the topmost established level of evolution, though driven to develop by the inherent evolutionary impulse, is unable to pierce the existing ceiling of progress. The number of Avatars varies according to the source, but generally ten Avatars are recognised. The dasavatar are the following: Fish, Tortoise (amphibian), Boar (mammal), Man-Lion (transitional beings between the animal kingdom and the hominids), Dwarf (first hominids), Rama-with-the-Ax (homo habilis), Rama-with-the-Bow, the hero of the Ramayana (the mental being, the human as we are), Krishna, protagonist of the Mahabharata (representing the Overmind, the world of the gods and religion), Buddha (shooting straight up to the indefinable Absolute) and Kalki (the future Avatar who represents Supermind). The fundamental evolutionary meaning of this “procession”, theme of one of the most popular dances in the classical Indian styles, is unmistakable.

“He brought them from non-existence into being”, said the great Rumi (1207-73), “from the ‘pen’ of being into the state of minerality, and from the pen of minerality into the state of vegetation, and from the state of vegetation into the state of animality, and from animality into the state of humanity, and from humanity into the state of angelicity, and so forth ad infinitum.”¹⁹ As Sri Aurobindo also wrote in this connection: “Another self-evident conclusion is that there is a graduated necessary succession in the evolution, first the evolution of Matter, next the evolution of Life in Matter, then the evolution of Mind in living Matter, and in this last stage an animal evolution followed by a human evolution. The first three terms of the succession are too evident to be disputable.”²⁰ This gradation has indeed been the general way of viewing existence practically all over the world. “… [It] was [in the West that] the conception of the plan and structure of the world which, through the Middle Ages and down to the late eighteenth century … most educated men were to accept without question – the conception of the universe as a ‘Great Chain of Being,’ composed of an immense, or … infinite, number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents … through ‘every possible’ grade up to the ens perfectissimum [the most perfect being: the Divine]:”²¹ (Arthur Lovejoy)

This hierarchy of levels of existence has been brushed aside by the modern scientific-materialistic mind as magical and mystical. In the “flatland” of science only matter and nothing but matter exists. “… The triumphs of modern science went to man’s head in something of the way rum does, causing him to grow loose in his logic. He came to think that what science discovers somehow casts doubt on things it does not discover; that the success it realises in its own domain throws into question the reality of domains its devices cannot touch. In short he came to assume that science implies scientism: the belief that no realities save ones that conform to the matrices science works with – space, time, matter/energy, and in the end number – exist.” Thus writes Huston Smith, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in his book Forgotten Truth.²²

He is not the only scientifically knowledgeable thinker who protests so vividly against the dogmas of rigid scientism. The economist E.F. Schumacher (d. 1977), author of Small is Beautiful, also rediscovered the same elementary truth, which he set forth in his posthumous, often reprinted book Guide for the Perplexed. And there is, of course, the now widely read Ken Wilber (partly influenced by Sri Aurobindo), in whose synthetic thought-frame the Great Chain of Being occupies a key position. According to him: “After being temporarily derailed in the nineteenth century by a variety of materialistic reductionisms (from scientific materialism to behaviourism to positivism), the Great Chain of Being, the Great Holarchy of Being, is making a stunning comeback.”²³

The Great Chain of Being is known under various names – “a tiered reality” (Smith), “the spectrum of consciousness” (Wilber), “the gradations of being” and “the ascending series of substance” (Sri Aurobindo) – all denoting a cosmic hierarchy of levels in which Matter would be on the lowest rung, and Spirit, or God, or the Supreme Being, on the highest. In The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo writes about the “sevenfold chord of Being”, of which the “notes” are: matter, the vital or life-forces, mind, Supermind, Ananda, Consciousness and Being. On other occasions he mentions eight gradations. But one could also add the Inconscient and the universal subconscious below matter and the four spiritual layers of mind between the mental consciousness and Supermind (these will play an important part in our exposition further on).

One should nonetheless never lose sight of certain facts. First, that Brahman is not only at the very top of the hierarchy, but also at its very bottom and everywhere in between. Sri Aurobindo writes: “The principle of gradation we have accepted is therefore justified provided we recognise that it is one way of organising our experience and that other ways proceeding from other viewpoints are possible. For a classification can always be valid from the principle and viewpoint adopted by it while from other principles and viewpoints another classification of the same things can be equally valid.”²⁴

Secondly, “Consciousness is the great underlying fact”²⁵ everywhere in the manifestation, down from high to low and up from low to high. For Brahman is Consciousness, and Consciousness is Being, and Being is Delight – everywhere and in everything without exception.

Thirdly, Consciousness does not evaporate as it becomes purer; on the contrary it becomes denser, more substantial, more powerful, more Being and Delight. Even the modern religious person is influenced by positivism and materialism to such a degree that everything not material is supposed to be thinner than air and therefore less and less real. Otherwise how could it be that non-material things are not subject to the laws of matter; how could they, as ghosts do, traverse matter and, as the soul supposedly does at the time of death, move about unseen and continue existing in ethereal places?

The truth, though, as re-experienced and re-affirmed by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, is as follows: “Consciousness, as we descend the scale, becomes more and more diminished and diluted, – dense indeed by its coarser crudity, but while that crudity of consistence compacts the stuff of Ignorance, it admits less and less the substance of light; it becomes thin in pure substance of consciousness and reduced in power of consciousness, thin in light, thin and weak in capacity of delight; it has to resort to a grosser thickness of its diminished stuff and to a strenuous output of its obscurer force to arrive at anything, but this strenuousness of effort is a sign not of strength but of weakness. As we ascend, on the contrary, a finer but far stronger and more truly spiritually concrete substance emerges, a greater luminosity and potent stuff of consciousness, a subtler, sweeter, purer and more powerfully ecstatic energy of delight.”²⁶ Therefore Sri Aurobindo, when asked what the substance of the Supermind would be, is reported to have said “lighter than a gas, denser than diamond”. The understanding of the concreteness and power of the spirit in all its aspects is essential knowledge for all who want to explore it.

Putting all that together, it becomes clear that evolution in the view of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra is rather different from evolution as explained by scientific materialism. If Reality in all aspects of its manifestations, however big or small, is always an intimate combination of the gradations mentioned above, then what really happens in the processes and stages of evolution must be something very different from any changes in matter, and much more complex. Vital, mental and supramental elements must necessarily be involved. Evolution is not only physical, it is first and foremost spiritual. “All evolution is in essence a heightening of the force of consciousness in the manifest being so that it may be raised into the greater intensity of what is still unmanifest, from matter into life, from life into mind, from mind into the spirit.”²⁷

Sri Aurobindo wrote even more explicitly: “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 an 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 [as in the meantime it has on several occasions] or may be dropped altogether in the light of a new discovery, but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul’s manifestation in material existence.”²⁸

There is, finally, an important concept to be found in the scheme of things as proposed by Sri Aurobindo and Mirra: the concept of involution. Involution, it goes without saying, is the opposite of evolution. As Sri Aurobindo puts it: “Evolution is an inverse action of the involution.”²⁹ Logic as well as spiritual experience made it clear to him that nothing can evolve which has not previously been involved. The fact of universal evolution is naturally the consequence of the Divine “hiding himself from himself” as mentioned earlier. “This descent of the supreme Reality is in its nature a self-concealing”, writes Sri Aurobindo, “and in the descent there are successive levels, in the concealing successive veils. Necessarily, the revelation takes the form of an ascent; and necessarily also the ascent and the revelation are both progressive” – which summarises the process of involution and evolution. “We have to conceive first of an involution and a self-absorption of conscious being into the density and infinite divisibility of substance, for otherwise there can be no finite variation. Next, an emergence of the self-imprisoned force into formal [material] being, living being, thinking being; and finally a release of the formed thinking being into the free realisation of itself as the One and the Infinite at play in the world and by the release its recovery of the boundless existence-consciousness-bliss that even now it is secretly, really and eternally. This triple movement is the whole key of the world-enigma.”³⁰

3. Supermind

The most obvious gradations of being are the ones that play a directly perceptible role in the constitution of our being and our life: matter, the vital (life-forces) and the mental (rational consciousness). These are therefore the gradations rediscovered and revalued by nonconformist thinkers like E.F. Schumacher and Huston Smith. Yet, as we have seen, the stair of being goes all the way upwards from the Inconscient to the Supreme (as first it has gone all the way downwards).

Looking up from our position on material Mother Earth towards the “heavens” with their hierarchical regions of invisible beings, and normally lacking any conscious connection with those higher worlds, we feel there is a gap between the two realms, between the higher and lower hemispheres of global existence. The very concrete experience of this gap is at the basis of spiritual paths like Buddhism and Advaita, as it is the cause of the Western view which puts God, the angels and the saints in heaven, and suffering humanity on earth, in “the valley of tears”. According to the first view the world is unreal, according to the second view it is worthless and inexplicable. The principal aim of both kinds of spiritual or religious endeavour, in both East and West, consists in escaping as quickly as possible from the absurd ordeal of earthly embodiment into the promised (but not proven) relief of a hereafter.

As we will see further on, the thought of Sri Aurobindo and Mirra, based on their extensively tested spiritual experience, goes radically against such long established views. If all is That, the Brahman or Absolute, then there is no gainsaying that matter and the earth too must be That. They must have a divine meaning because they have a divine essence, for they cannot but be composed of the Divine in its essential attributes of Being, Consciousness-Force and Bliss. This radical reversal by Sri Aurobindo and Mirra of the essential values, declaring the world “worthy”³¹, was based on a spiritual discovery whose time seemed to have come: Supermind, the link between God in his heaven and the human being on his planet.

Mirra as well as Sri Aurobindo had come into contact with “an intermediate link between the two [hemispheres] which can explain them to each other and establish between them such a relation as will make it possible for us to realise the one Existence, Consciousness, Delight in the mould of the mind, life and body. The intermediate link exists. We call it the Supermind or the Truth-Consciousness, because it is a principle superior to mentality and exists, acts and proceeds in the fundamental truth and unity of things and not like the mind in their appearances and phenomenal divisions.”³² It was this discovery, this inner experience and knowledge, that Mirra brought with her when she met Sri Aurobindo and discovered that he had the same realisation. In the West as well as in the East, at the same time, a new light had begun to dawn.

To us, ordinary mortals, Supermind is a mere word. Neither Mirra nor Sri Aurobindo were very happy with it. “The word is ambiguous”, wrote Sri Aurobindo, its coiner, “since it may be taken in the sense of mind itself, super-eminent and lifted above ordinary mentality but not radically changed, or on the contrary it may bear the sense of all that is beyond mind and therefore assume a too extensive comprehensiveness which would bring in even the Ineffable [the Supreme] itself.”³³

Then what is Supermind? Brahman need not manifest itself, it is perfect in its absoluteness and not dependent on any manifestation. If it were dependent on manifestation, it would not be Brahman. Yet for reasons unknowable to beings with a consciousness like ours and which in India are called its lila³⁴, its play, Brahman does manifest. This manifesting power or part of Brahman is called “Supermind” by its discoverers, Sri Aurobindo and Mirra. It should be added at once that this manifesting part or power is nothing subordinate to the Absolute. No part of the Divine is subordinate to the whole – not even our own soul. All parts of the Divine are fully divine, just as all parts of the infinite are infinite. Supermind belongs to the upper hemisphere, together with the Being, Consciousness and Bliss. Again: these are not abstractions but realities, infinite realms of divine glory far beyond our understanding and imagination. As is Supermind.

“We have to regard therefore this all-containing, all-originating, all-consummating Supermind as the nature of the Divine Being, not indeed in its absolute self-existence, but in its action as the Lord and Creator of its own worlds. This is the truth of that which we call God. Obviously this is not the too personal and limited Deity, the magnified and supernatural Man of the ordinary occidental conception; for that conception erects a too human eidolon of a certain relation between the creative Supermind and the ego.”³⁵

Supermind is a Unity-Consciousness, totally and effectively aware of everything, omniscient. Supermind is a Truth-Consciousness containing all existence in a perfect relation of harmony and therefore omnipotent – for, remember, what the Divine sees in itself is. “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 the 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.”³⁶

As all is in all, Supermind was present in the manifestation since its inception. It caused the manifestation – the typal worlds and our evolutionary world – to be and supports them in every detail, for without it they would collapse into non-existence. “This Supermind in its conscious vision not only contains all the forms of itself which its conscious force creates, but it pervades them as an indwelling Presence and a self-revealing Light”, writes Sri Aurobindo. “It is present, even though concealed, in every form and force of the universe … It is seated within everything as the Lord in the heart of all existences, – he who turns them as on an engine by the power of his Maya; it is within them and embraces them as the divine Seer who variously disposed and ordained objects, each rightly according to the thing that it is, from years sempiternal. Each thing in Nature, therefore, whether animate or inanimate, mentally self-conscious or not self-conscious, is governed in its being and in its operation by an indwelling Vision and Power, to us subconscient or inconscient because we are not conscious of it, but not inconscient to itself, rather profoundly and universally conscient.”³⁷

A text like this touches upon the fantastic complexity of matter, able to combine itself in functional clusters, from an atom to a galaxy and with all that there is in between. “Something”, far beyond our imagination, must be directing that show. Confiding the whirling universe to Chance actually demonstrates a greater power of belief than confiding it to a Consciousness. The problem lies in the fact that generally speaking the Western mind still has such a childish idea of “God”. It studies the different theorems of science, but refuses to study the difficult approaches to “God”. This is, however, understandable, for in this it has been misled and cheated so often.

The crucial importance of the discovery of Supermind lies in the fact that Sri Aurobindo and Mirra were convinced that this concealed Consciousness now had to become active as the next stage in the earthly evolution, which means that it would be embodied on the earth in a new species of beings. This Consciousness being divine, the new beings would also be divine. “For Supermind is Superman.”³⁸ As the physical aspects of evolution are the results of an evolution of consciousness, every important evolutionary step depends on two factors. On the one hand there is the unstoppable evolutionary impulse or “nisus” (a word often used by Sri Aurobindo) pushing up from below; on the other hand there is the new consciousness answering, descending from above. For, as noted before, the manifestation encompasses all levels of consciousness in a “stair”, a graded hierarchy of typal worlds. Those levels of consciousness, those worlds, are the evolutionary scale of our world inserted as it were one after the other, hierarchically. After the “miracle” of the phenomena of matter emerging from the Inconscient, there was the “miracle” of the vegetal and animal life-forms taking shape in lifeless matter, followed by the “miracle” of a rationally conscious homo sapiens. Seen like this, a new evolutionary miracle would be a rather logical occurrence.

“The advance [towards supermanhood], however it comes about, will be indeed of the nature of a miracle”, wrote Sri Aurobindo, “as are all such profound changes and immense development; for they have the appearance of a kind of realised impossibility. But God works all his miracles by an evolution of secret possibilities which have been long prepared, at least in their elements, and in the end by a rapid bringing of all to a head, a throwing together of the elements so that in their fusion they produce a new form and name of things and reveal a new spirit. Often the decisive turn is preceded by an apparent emphasising and raising to their extreme of things which seem the very denial, the most uncompromising opposite of the new principle and the new creation.”³⁹

In short, if evolution has a meaning, and if it is the Supreme himself who is evolving in the evolution, then it seems incredible that he would not be able to produce something better than the species that considers itself the top of creation. “This ignorant, imperfect and divided being, with his labouring uncertain thought and half-successful will, this toiling and fluctuating experiment, this field of the attempt at emergence of a thousand things that are striving to be, is no consummation of the struggle of cosmic Force; he is only a laboratory in which Nature seeks for its own concealed secret, makes tentative efforts at what she has been missioned to achieve. As man arose out of the animal, so out of man superman shall come.”⁴⁰

The superman has always been living in humanity’s dreams of power, invulnerability, immortality, boundless knowledge, omnipresence, and of a love permanently as exhilarating and pure as first love. If the longing to fly is there, it may be realised one day in a much simpler and smoother way than airplanes do today. If the longing to talk and see at a distance is there, it may be realised without the complicated and fragile machines needed at present. And those people who have long laboured to acquire a certain knowledge, and are therefore called sages, say that the abiding and ever enraptured love is already present in that dimensionless being hidden behind our heart, and that it can become a constant, conscious state that never turns sour. We – our species – will have to find that out. “It is impossible for the mind to forecast in detail what the supramental change must be in its parts of life-action and outward behaviour or lay down for it what forms it shall create for the individual or the collective existence. For the mind acts by intellectual rule or device or by reasoned choice of will or by mental impulse or in obedience to the life-impulse; but supramental nature does not act by mental idea or rule or in subjection to any inferior impulse: each of its steps is dictated by an innate spiritual vision, a comprehensive and exact penetration into the truth of all and the truth of each thing; it acts always according to inherent reality, not by the mental idea, not according to an imposed law of conduct or a constructive thought or perceptive contrivance.”⁴¹

“We are in respect to our possible higher evolution much in the position of the original Ape of the Darwinian theory”, writes Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine. “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. 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 … It is so that he conceives his gods; it is so that he constructs his heavens. But it is not so that his reason conceives of the possible earth and a possible humanity. His dream of God and Heaven is really a dream of his own perfection; but he finds the same difficulty in accepting its practical realisation here for his ultimate aim as would the ancestral Ape if called upon to believe in himself as the future Man.”⁴²

A last reflection on the subject of superman: no sooner have most people heard the word “superman” pronounced than they associate it with the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900). Sri Aurobindo knew the writings of that “half-luminous Hellenising Slav”, the “apostle who never entirely understood his own message”,⁴³ much better than is commonly supposed. He even appreciated him to a certain degree. “Nietzsche’s idea that to develop the superman out of our present very unsatisfactory manhood is our real business, is in itself an absolutely sound teaching. His formulation of our aim, ‘to become ourselves’, ‘to exceed ourselves’, implying, as it does, that man has not yet found his true self, his true nature by which he can successfully and spontaneously live, could not be bettered. But then the question of questions is there, what is our self, and what is our real nature? What is that which is growing in us, but into which we have not yet grown?”⁴⁴ The gist of Sri Aurobindo’s answers to these questions has been given in the previous pages. To the person who has read them and who has some inkling of Nietzsche’s thinking it should be clear that there is a world of difference between the two ideals of the superman.

4. At the Crossroads of Evolution: “homo sapiens”

Much, if not most, of the confusion in Western philosophy and psychology, and in Western thinking in general, is caused by the defective, distorted image the West has of the human being. The distortion was symptomatic in the doctrine of Christianity, and the materialistic dogma of scientism, which abandoned the world-view of the Great Chain of Being for what Ken Wilber calls “flatland”, has made it worse.

The authentic occult traditions, Hermetism for instance, knew a lot more about the human being than either Christianity or modern Science. The simple reason is that their knowledge was based on occult or spiritual experience.⁴⁵ They also had a far higher opinion of humankind, putting it often above the gods, and always saw the human being as a microcosm, the cosmos in miniature, containing or at least reflecting in itself everything the cosmos contains. The Indian traditions confirm the same insight, and Sri Aurobindo and Mirra, who sometimes referred to a tradition “older than the Veda and the Chaldean tradition”, frequently spoke or wrote about “man, the microcosm”. “All things are potentially contained in that substance that constitutes man … In an essential way, each being contains in itself all the universal potentialities.”⁴⁶

Let us briefly sketch a picture of the self-ignorant wonder that is the human being. Just like the rest of the cosmos it is composed of the gradations of existence that have so far evolved: material, vital and mental. Sri Aurobindo often stressed that the human being is specifically the mental being, the typical embodiment of the mental gradation of the universal manifestation. “The mind pre-eminently is man; he is a mental being and his human perfection grows the more he fulfils the description of the Upanishad, a mental being, Purusha, leader of the life and the body.”⁴⁷ Not only are there in the human these three very apparent elements, there is also a soul, a “divine spark”, which is the cause and support of the triple-layered bodily existence.

Above the rational consciousness there are, moreover, levels of the spiritual consciousness, which we will consider in detail in a subsequent chapter. It is from these levels that humanity gets the fine flower of its intuitions and inspirations; it is from there that it gets its first glimpses of enlightenment; it is through these levels that the great ideas, the great essences descend that shape and change the world. The advanced in Spirit have access to those suprarational levels (which are still far below “Supermind”).

Below matter there is also, as we know, the Inconscient, out of which this evolutionary cosmos has arisen in the course of eons. Actually, it was only when something in the Inconscient itself had evolved and become what Sri Aurobindo and Mirra call the “subconscious” that matter could be formed and evolution take a physical shape. Both these levels of darkness the human being also carries in himself, they cause “the downward gravitation” in him which counteracts every upward effort. They are pure hell, the locus of the impulses that incite the killer and the sadist. They are the constant presence behind all horrors and evil.

Then there is what Sri Aurobindo termed the “subliminal” which constitutes a sort of aura through which other worlds and beings contact and influence us. We are actually constantly surrounded by hundreds of invisible beings of all kinds, by thousands of free floating vital entities, and by clouds of thoughts or shreds of thoughts, some of which gain entrance into our head and are then deemed our own. In fact, a truly personal thought is a rare phenomenon, and so is a truly personal feeling.

All this makes the human being into an extremely complex entity. This complexity is one of the reasons why so few people know themselves, and why their personality consists of many compartments to which their active consciousness has no access. The ordinary human is for the most part ignorant (and indignant when told so), and does not master much of the terrain that is his or her very own dominion.

If all this may seem somewhat abstract or “occult”, the direct effects of the gradations of being on our body and life are very concrete. Firstly, there are the chakras (literally “wheels”), the energy centres in our subtle body which are the gates, as it were, to the universal gradations and forces of being. Normally these centres are almost fully closed, thus protecting us from the inrush of the stupendous cosmic powers for which the human capacities of resistance and mastery are no match. Normally, these chakras can only be opened by a long and patient yogic discipline under the supervision of a qualified guru.

At the bottom of the spine there is the chakra containing the kundalini, the “serpent power”, the direct connection with the universal force of materialisation and therefore the cornerstone of our bodily incarnation. Higher up are three vital chakras, the lowest being the sex centre, then the navel centre commanding vital feelings like anger, fear and greed, while the higher vital feelings (courage, generosity, sympathy and “love”) are dependent on the heart centre. This centre has a double function, for if opened, it also gives access to the soul, whose locus in the human material embodiment is just behind the heart. (This double function is the reason why the emotions and the soul are so often confused and intermingled.) Still higher up there are the three mental chakras: mental expression and communication in the throat, mental concentration and formation between and slightly above the eyes (the “third eye”), and “the thousand-petalled lotus” of the higher mental levels just above the head and touching its crown.

Humanity being what it is at present, the centre above the head does duty for all that is as yet supramental. If other suprarational layers of consciousness grew functional for earthly beings, then higher centres above the head would become active. The Mother has reported this from her own experience. She also said, in a conversation in 1954,⁴⁸ that there are not seven but twelve chakras. This is understandable in the light of what precedes, for the subconscious and the Inconscient, which play such an important role in the life of the human being, certainly must have their own chakra below that of the kundalini. Likewise the levels of Overmind and Supermind must have their physical contact points with a materially incarnated being once they have become actively conscious in that being.

Another direct effect of the gradations of being are the multiple bodies or “sheaths” into which our soul has incarnated. There is not only the most obvious sheath, the material body, there is also a vital and a mental sheath (and potentially a “causal” or supramental one). These bodies together form what Indians call the adhara. This is the reason why, when we leave our material body (in our dreams or when we die), we still exist and move about in our vital and mental bodies. It is the sojourn after death in the vital body, which then has to pass through kindred vital worlds, that is the origin of the belief in “hell”, for the lower vital worlds and the beings dwelling in those worlds can truly be infernal. When the vital body too is discarded, the soul still has to pass through mental worlds before it can enter the soul world, where it then assimilates the experiences of the past life and prepares for the next one.

This view of the human being is at loggerheads with the view materialistic science holds up to us. It is, however, much closer to the facts of human experience and can help us to gain a true understanding of the enigma that we are to ourselves. We are now ready for a look at the position of homo sapiens in evolution. The following quotations from Sri Aurobindo need no comment.

“This evolution, it is sometimes pretended, ends in man, man is the term and end; but this is because we miss the real values of the process. At first indeed we see this Spirit spending numberless millions of years to evolve a material system of worlds empty of life in the beginning, a lesser but vast enough series of millions to develop an earth on which life can inhabit, a lesser series of millions to make possible and train, raise life itself with but a feeble and restricted apparatus of mind; but once it has found a body, a brain, a living apparatus not perfect, but still sufficient, it is no longer concerned mainly with evolving a body or … ⁴⁹ an embodied life can but at last grapple with its own proper business. Evolution henceforth means the evolution of the consciousness, of mind and, if any such thing there be, of what is beyond mind, – and in that case as its last stride has been the evolution of the mental being, man, out of the vital being, the animal, so its next stride will be to evolve out of mental man a greater spiritual and supramental creature.”⁵⁰

“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 his 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.”⁵¹

“If a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our birth into Matter, if it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that has been taking place in Nature, then man as he is cannot be the last term of that evolution: He is too imperfect an expression of the Spirit, Mind itself is a too limited form and instrumentation; Mind is only a middle term of consciousness, the mental being can only be a transitional being. If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and Supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to what exceeds it, then there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at Supermind and supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an evolution of that greater term of the spirit manifesting in Nature.”⁵²

“This is the meaning of our existence here, its futuristic value and inherent trend of power, to rise above ourselves, to grow into gods, to reveal God in a world of material forms and forces. Earth and conscious life upon earth are not a freak of cosmic Chance, a meaningless accident in the vacant history of nebula and electron and gas and plasm; they are the field of a game of the Gods with the destiny of our souls as the stake of their wager. To evolve Godhead out of the mud of matter, some divinest consciousness out of a primal inconscience and a struggling ignorance, immortality out of death, undying bliss out of pain and sorrow, the everlasting Truth out of the falsehoods and denials of this relative world is their great and daring gamble.”⁵³

And lastly: “The animal is man in the making; man himself is that animal and yet the something more of self-consciousness and dynamic power of consciousness that make him man; and yet again he is the something more which is contained and repressed in his being as the potentiality of the divine, – he is a god in the making. In each of these, plant, animal, man, god, the Eternal is there containing and repressing himself as it were in order to make a certain statement of his being. Each is the whole Eternal concealed. Man himself, who takes up all that went before him and transmutes it into the term of manhood, is the individual human being and yet he is all mankind, the universal man acting in the individual as a human personality. He is all and yet he is himself and unique. He is what he is, but he is also the past of all that he was and the potentiality of all that he is not. We cannot understand him if we look only at his present individuality …”⁵⁴