Patterns of the Present

1: The Big Picture

Always he is the traveller of the cycles and his road is forward.¹

– Sri Aurobindo

Spiralling Upwards

If the global change now in progress has the importance Sri Aurobindo and the Mother ascribed to it, it must be seen in a much larger perspective than the academic historians are willing to accept. Only when perceived in the context of humanity and its evolution, of our planet Earth and its evolution, and therefore of the universe, can one begin to grasp what the present transition from “the lower hemisphere” of Ignorance, Falsehood and Darkness to “the higher hemisphere” of Knowledge, Truth and Light actually means.

It is often thought that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s view of evolution was straightforwardly linear. But simple linearity, like flawless symmetry, is a typical child of the human mind, of the intellectual interpretation and ordering of things. More than once one meets in Sri Aurobindo phrases like “much too symmetrical to be true” and warnings against erring by rigidity and substituting “a mental straight line for the coils and zigzags of Nature”²: (“Nature” in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s writings is always a concrete Being, in fact an emanation or personality of the Universal Mother charged with the manifestation of the universe and everything in it.) The unity of the Truth that is All can to our mind only be represented as global. This too is a metaphor and a symbol, of course, but the one that is best suited to represent the unthinkable, the unfathomable to mental beings like us.

“The idea of human progress itself is very probably an illusion”, writes Sri Aurobindo taking the broad view, “for there is no sign that man, once emerged from the animal stage, has radically progressed during his race-history;³ at most he has advanced in knowledge of the physical world, in Science in the handling of his surroundings, in his purely external and utilitarian use of the secret laws of Nature. But otherwise he is what he always was in the early beginnings of civilisation; 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 a widening circle. Man today is not wiser than the ancient seers and sages and thinkers, not more spiritual than the great seekers of old, the first mighty mystics, not superior in arts and crafts to the ancient artists and craftsmen.” Didn’t a recent expert opinion tell us that art has not improved on the wall paintings at Lascaux? And Sri Aurobindo continues: “The old races that have disappeared showed as potent an intrinsic originality, invention, capacity of dealing with life and, if modern man in this respect has gone a little farther, not by any essential progress but in degree, scope, abundance, it is because he has inherited the achievements of his forerunners. 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 boundary of the mental circle”⁴:

Nonetheless, in The Life Divine he also writes: “It may be conceded that what man has up till now principally done is to act within the circle of his nature, on a spiral of nature-movement, sometimes descending, sometimes ascending, – there has been no straight line of progress, no indisputable, fundamental or radical exceeding of his past nature: what he has done is to sharpen, subtilise, make a more and more complex and plastic use of his capacities. It cannot truly be said that there has been no such thing as human progress since man’s appearance or even in his recent ascertainable history; for however great the ancients, however supreme some of their achievements and creations, however impressive their powers of spirituality, of intellect or of character, there has been in later developments an increasing subtlety, complexity, manifold development of knowledge and possibility in man’s achievements. In his politics, society, life, science, metaphysics, knowledge of all kinds, art, literature; even in his spiritual endeavour, less surprisingly lofty and less massive in power of spirituality than that of the ancients, there has been this increasing subtlety, plasticity, sounding of depths, extension of seeking.

“There have been falls from a high type of culture, a sharp temporary descent into a certain obscurantism, cessations of the spiritual urge, plunges into a barbaric natural materialism; but these are temporary phenomena, at worst a downward curve of the spiral of progress. This progress has not indeed carried the race beyond itself, into a self-exceeding, a transformation of the mental being. But that was not to be expected; for the action of evolutionary Nature in a type of being and consciousness is first to develop the type to its utmost capacity by just such a subtilisation and increasing complexity till it is ready for her bursting of the shell, the ripened decisive emergence, reversal, turning over of consciousness on itself that constitutes a new stage in the evolution …

“If 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 was the method of the human evolution, the appearance in the human being of a spiritual type resembling mental-animal humanity but already with the stamp of the spiritual aspiration on it would be the obvious method of Nature for the evolutionary production of the spiritual and supramental being.”⁵ This, now, is the privileged moment of the bursting of the shell, of the ripened decisive emergence, of the great reversal in consciousness; it is the moment of the appearance of the overman, enabling the embodiment of the superman.

“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 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.”⁶

Sri Aurobindo wrote about the cyclic movement of the evolution of humanity: “In the history of man everything seems now to point to alternations of a serious character, ages of progression, ages of recoil, the whole constituting an evolution that is cyclic rather than in one straight line. A theory of cycles of human civilisation has been advanced[^;] we may yet arrive at the theory of cycles of human evolution, the Kalpa and Manwantaras of the Hindu theory. If its affirmation of cycles of world-existence is farther off from affirmation, it is because they must be so vast in their periods as to escape not only all means of observation, but all our means of deduction or definite inference.”⁷ According to the Hindu scriptures, the four Ages or yugas are the Krita or Golden Age, the Treta or Silver Age, the Dwapara or Bronze Age and the Kali or Iron Age. Together they cover the enormous span of 4,310,000 (human) years. (Hindu scripture also speaks about a “year of Brahman” which equals 360 human years.)

“Every world creation begins in the perfection of the Krita Age, progressively deteriorates throughout the Treta and Dwapara until the final destruction comes at the end of every Kali – only to give way once more to a recreation in a new Krita, and so on.”⁸ Talking about the cycles, the Mother once used the occult symbol of a Snake biting its own tail. In the course of the cycles there is “a progressive descent from the most subtle to the most material.”⁹ The end of the Kali Yuga represents the most material point in the whole development, specifically on the Earth, which, as we will see, occupies a very special place in the universe. As a new Golden Age will follow the Iron Age, it is precisely at this end – the point where the Snake bites its tail – that the Work of change to enter the Golden Age can be done in its most concentrated and most effective form.

The cycles of the human evolution are not exact and eternal repetitions of a given sequence of events, as is for instance Nietzsche’s “eternal return”, but “cycles of a growing but still imperfect harmony and synthesis”. Nature brings man back “violently to her original principles, sometimes even to something like her earlier conditions so that he may start afresh on a larger curve of progress and self-fulfilment.”¹⁰ The spiralling movement is double: widening, to include ever larger portions of the divine manifestation, and upward, towards the divine perfection.

“There have been beautiful civilisations like the one which left something like an occult memory of a continent that might have linked India with Africa and of which no trace remains – unless certain human races be the remnants of that civilisation”, said the Mother. “There are civilisations like that which disappear suddenly and which are followed by a long period full of darkness, inconscience, ignorance, with very primitive races apparently so close to the animals that one asks oneself whether there is really any difference. And so there is there a big dark hole and [humanity] has to pass through upheavals of all kinds. But then, all of a sudden, there emerges something at the top, something higher than before, with greater qualities, a greater realisation – as though all the time spent in the night and of work in the night had prepared Matter so that it might express something higher. Then again another darkness, oblivion: the earth again becomes barbarous, obscure, ignorant, wretched. And some thousands of years later suddenly a new civilisation emerges.¹¹ – Until now one has always fallen back.¹²” It was the Mother and Sri Aurobindo’s constant endeavour to found their supramental creation “to front the years”, in a way that there would not be any falling back this time, or as Sri Aurobindo put it “not to repeat the old fiasco”.

More than once the Mother recalled what her former teacher, Max Théon, had told her in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains: “The traditions say that a universe is created, then withdrawn in pralaya¹³; then a new one appears, and so on. And according to them we should be the seventh universe, and being the seventh universe we are the one that will not return into pralaya but progress continuously without ever drawing back. It is because of this, moreover, that there is in the human being this need of permanence and of an uninterrupted progress: it is because the time has come.”¹⁴ But she said also, when battling in the swamps of the subconscious: “In the subconscious there is the memory of bygone pralayas, so it is this memory that always gives the feeling that everything will be dissolved, that everything will collapse.”¹⁵

Times Before History

“Not one hundred-thousandth part of what has been has still a name preserved by human Time,”¹⁶ wrote Sri Aurobindo, who was never given to exaggeration, in a letter to a disciple. In the Arya he had already written: “Emerging from the periods of eclipse and the nights of ignorance which overtake humanity, we assume always that we are instituting new knowledge. In reality, we are continually rediscovering the knowledge and repeating the achievement of the ages that have gone before us, – receiving again out of the ‘Inconscient’ the light that it had drawn back into its secrecies and now releases once more for a new day and another march of the great journey.”¹⁷ His very reasonable argument in this is that the ten thousand years of our “official” history cannot suffice to develop the human mind from primitivism to the capacity of civilisation. “The time-limit allowed for the growth of civilisation is still impossibly short and in consequence an air of unreality hangs over the application of the evolutionary idea to our human development.”¹⁸ The Mother, on her side, confirmed that “the historic period is too short”. We have already seen her reference to a continent that might have linked India with Africa and of which no trace remains. “Very long ago there have been great and beautiful civilisations perhaps as advanced materially as ours. Looked at from a certain standpoint, the most modern culture seems no more than a repetition of ancient cultures …”¹⁹ she said in 1929. And in 1951, under the threat of a third world war, she said: “There have been many civilisations on the Earth. There are scientists who try to rediscover what has been, but nobody can say for certain what was there. The major part of those civilisations is completely lost. I am speaking of civilisations preceding the one that is for us historical. Well, if thousands of years would again be needed to start another one … But we have been told that the Work to be done, that the promised Realisation is going to take place now. It is going to take place now because the framework of the present civilisation seems favourable as a platform or a base for building upon. But if this civilisation is destroyed, upon what are we going to build? First the ground must be prepared to be able to build …”²⁰ Science is pushing back the time of the origin of the human species nearly every five years, and the fact that there have been civilisations which disappeared from the surface of the Earth seems irrefutable to anybody with an open mind. From where did the suddenly flourishing civilisation of Egypt get its amazing theoretical and practical knowledge – a knowledge that after a resplendent beginning gradually deteriorated? Another case in point: “The evidence presented by the ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any known cultures, of a true civilisation of an advanced kind, which either was localised in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in some respects, was more advanced than the civilisation of Greece and Rome. In geodesy, nautical science, and mapmaking it was more advanced than any known culture before the 18th century of the Christian Era. It was only in the 18th century that we developed practical means of finding longitude. It was in the 18th century that we first accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Not until the 19th century did we begin to send out ships for exploration into the Arctic or Antarctic Seas and only then did we begin the exploration of the bottom of the Atlantic. The maps indicate that some ancient people did all these things … More than a quarter of a century after its publication, the evidence of Hapgood’s book [^Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, 1966] remains as solid and unshaken as ever.”²¹ This agrees with what Sri Aurobindo had to say in an unfinished essay written before 1914: “The time-limit allowed for the growth of civilisation is still impossibly short and in consequence an air of unreality hangs over the application of the evolutionary idea to our human development. Nor is this essential objection cured by any evidence of the modernity of human civilisation. Its great antiquity is denied merely on the absence [of] affirmative data; there are no positive indications to support the denial; but where data are scanty, such a negative basis is in the last degree unsound and precarious. We can no longer argue that no ancient civilisations can have existed of which the traces have entirely perished and that prehistoric means, necessarily, savage and undeveloped. History on the contrary abounds with instances of great societies which were within an ace of disappearing without leaving any visible memorial behind them, and recent excavations have shown that such disappearances in ancient times have been even not uncommon. We cannot have exhausted all that the earth contains.²² There should be the remains of other civilisations yet undiscovered and there may well have been yet others which because of the manner of their disappearance or for other causes have left no traces at all whether upon the surface of the earth or under it.”²³

“Our observation is bad because, prepossessed by the fixed idea of a brief and recent emergence from immemorial barbarism, imagining Plato to have blossomed in a few centuries out of a stock only a little more advanced than the South Sea islander, we refuse to seek in the records that still remain of a lost superior knowledge their natural and coherent significance”, writes Sri Aurobindo. “We twist them rather into the image of our own thoughts or confine them within the still narrow limits of what we ourselves know and understand. The logical fallacy we land in as the goal of our bad observation is the erroneous conception that because we are more advanced than certain ancient peoples in our own especial lines of success, as the physical science, therefore necessarily we are also more advanced in other lines where we are still infants and have only recently begun to observe and experiment, as the science of psychology and the knowledge of our subjective existence and of mental forces. Hence we have developed the exact contrary of the old superstition that the movement of man is always backward to retrogression.”²⁴

There seem to be three principles of discovery at least as reliable as Murphy’s Law: every line of discovery broadens from the limited to the boundless, from the simple to the complex, from the imaginable to the mind-boggling. This has been valid for all branches of discovery pursued by the positive sciences in their exploration of the cosmos, the planet, the living beings, the body, the cell, the atomic and subatomic world, etc. It will be equally valid for the inner worlds, their beings, man, the soul of man, the occult and spiritual capacities of man, and his possibilities of transformation. Science has remained limited by its dominant principle of positivist materialism. The “future science”, as foreseen by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, will break through the barrier of what is perceptible by the senses, and will proceed “from within outwards”.

A certain awareness of the vastness of human time before our recorded period of history is a necessity to realise the importance of “the giant point” at which the evolutionary development has now arrived. For if it is true that we are in a period of transition from the lower to the higher hemisphere of existence, then homo sapiens must have exerted and exhausted all his possibilities, which may have been much more varied and richer than we, judging by our present capacities, suppose. Just as every Avatar takes up the whole past of humanity in order to bring it a step further, now humanity itself must take up its whole past to go beyond itself, at least in some of its representatives: the present overmen and overwomen.

The working out of all its capacities may be the reason that humanity had to regress time and again in order to attain “to something higher than before”, as the Mother said. Sri Aurobindo is quite positive about this frequent regression. Writing for instance about the still existing primitive stages of the human development, he made the proviso: “… if it is indeed such [i.e. primitive] and not, in what we still see of it, a fall or vestige, a relapse from a higher knowledge belonging to a previous cycle of civilisation or the debased remnants of a dead or obsolete culture …”²⁵ This would explain many of the mysteries now covered by forests, deserts and oceans. “The savage is perhaps not so much the first forefather of civilised man as the degenerate descendant of a previous civilisation … Barbarism is an intermediate sleep, not an original darkness …”²⁶

The following text on this topic by Sri Aurobindo, part of a commentary on the Isha Upanishad, deserves to be quoted extensively. “The Puranic account supposes us to have left behind the last Satya period, the age of harmony, and to be now in a period of enormous breakdown, disintegration and increasing confusion in which man is labouring forward towards a new harmony which will appear when the spirit of God descends again upon mankind in the form of the Avatara called Kalki, destroys all that is lawless, dark and confused and establishes the reign of the saints, the Sadhus, those, that is to say, – if we take the literal meaning of the word Sadhu, – who are strivers after perfection. Translated, again, into modern language more rationalistic but, again, let me say, not necessarily more accurate, this would mean that the civilisation by which we live is not the result of a recent hotfooted gallop forward from the condition of the Caribbee and Hottentot, but the detritus and uncertain reformation of a great era of knowledge, balance and adjustment which lives for us only in tradition, but in a universal tradition, the Golden Age, the Saturnia regna, of the West, our Satyayuga or age of the recovered Veda.

“What then are these savage races, these epochs of barbarism, these Animistic, Totemistic, Naturalistic and superstitious beliefs, these mythologies, these propitiatory sacrifices, these crude conditions of society? Partly, the Hindu theory would say, the ignorant fragmentary survival of defaced and disintegrated beliefs and customs, originally deeper, simpler, truer than the modern, – even as a broken statue by Phidias or Praxiteles or a fragment of an Athenian dramatist is at once simpler and nobler or more beautiful and perfect than the best work of the moderns, – partly, a reeling back into the beast, an enormous movement of communal atavism brought about by worldwide destructive forces in whose workings both Nature and man have assisted.

“Animism is the obscure memory of an ancient discipline which put us into spiritual communion with intelligent beings and forces living behind the veil of gross matter sensible to our limited material organs. Nature worship is another side of the same ancient truth. Fetishism remembers barbarously the great Vedic dogma that God is everywhere and God is all and that the inert stone and rock, things mindless and helpless and crude, are also He; in them, too, there is the intelligent Force that has built the Himalayas, filled with its flaming glories the sun and arranged the courses of the planets. The mythologies are ancient traditions, allegories and symbols. The savage and the cannibal are merely the human beast, man hurled down from this ascent and returning from the sattwic or intelligent state into the tamasic, crumbling into the animal and almost into the clod by that disintegration through inertia which to the Hindu idea is the ordinary road to disappearance into the vague and rough material of Nature out of which we were made. The ascent of man, according to this theory, is not a facile and an assured march; on the contrary, it is a steep, a strenuous effort, the ascent difficult, though the periods of attainment and rest yield to us ages of golden joy, the descent frightfully easy.”²⁷

“A Habitable Planet in an Inhabitable System”²⁸

This earth alone is not our teacher and nurse;

The powers of all the worlds have entrance here.²⁹

“[Sri Aurobindo] does not take the whole universe into account”, said the Mother when commenting upon a passage of The Life Divine. “He has taken terrestrial life, that is, our life here, on the Earth, as a symbolic and concentrated representation of the raison d’être of the entire universe. In fact, according to very old traditions, the Earth, from the deeper spiritual point of view, has been created as a symbolic concentration of universal life so that the work of transformation may be done more easily, in a limited, concentrated “space”, so to say, where all the elements of the problem are gathered together so that, in this concentration, the action may be more total and effective.”³⁰

On another occasion she said: “The universe is an objectivation of the Supreme, as if he had objectivised himself outwardly in order to see himself, to experience himself, to know himself, and so that there might be an existence and a consciousness capable of recognising him as their origin and of uniting consciously with him to manifest him in the becoming. There is no other reason for the universe. The Earth is a kind of symbolic crystallisation of universal life, a reduction, a concentration, so that the work of evolution may be easier to do and follow. And if we consider the history of the Earth, we can understand why the universe has been created. It is the Supreme growing aware of himself in an eternal Becoming; and the goal is the union of the created with the Creator, a union that is conscious, voluntary and free, in the Manifestation.”³¹

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have restored the Earth to its former central place in the cosmos, not physically but symbolically. It is the bhumi, the place of material evolution. After Copernicus and at a time when the search for extraterrestrial life is one of the fads of official science, this may come as something like a shock. Or rather it might have come as a shock in 1957, at the time the above quotations were spoken. In recent years the experts seemed to be changing their opinions. John Horgan, for instance, former senior writer at Scientific American and the author of the influential The End of Science and The Undiscovered Mind: “Physicists think that the existence of a highly technological civilisation here on earth makes the existence of similar civilisations elsewhere highly probable. The real experts on life – biologists – find this view ludicrous, because they know how much plain luck is involved in evolution. Harvard palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould has said that if the great experiment of life were re-run a million times over, chances are it would never again give rise to mammals, let alone mammals intelligent enough to invent television.”³²

(Gould’s opinion, however, is limited, for it takes gross material evolution as the only possibility. According to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother there is life everywhere in the universe, but in different shapes and densities of substance, generated by and adapted to the heavenly body on which it originated. When the Mother touched upon this subject in a private conversation, she said that “even our way of thinking depends on our form”, and that nothing allows us to suppose that life elsewhere should be similar to the life form we know and are. ‘’There is only one thing, one vibration that seems to be really universal: the vibration of Love.”³³)

Another quotation in this context is from Charles Panati, formerly head physicist at RCA and a Newsweek science editor. “Preposterous as it sounds, and despite the statistical evidence against it, the pre-Copernican idea that we are the centre of the universe has regained popularity. Proposed by cosmologist George Ellis of the University of Cape Town, the theory is unacceptably anthropocentric, yet, surprisingly, it does not violate current astronomical observations … Curiously enough, just when (or because?) so many scientists are searching for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI), a number of astronomers and biologists are becoming increasingly vocal about the possibility of the existence of ETI being infinitesimally small. Some have gone so far as to recall the centuries-old notion, now referred to as the ‘anthropic principle’ that we are alone in the universe. ‘The chances are overwhelming,’ says physicist John Wheeler, ‘that the earth is the sole outpost of life in the universe.’”³⁴ It should be noted again that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never say that the Earth is the topographical centre of the universe, but its “symbolic” centre, and that according to them extraterrestrial life abounds, though not in our familiar gross material form.

“The formation of the Earth as we know it – this infinitesimal point in the immense universe – was made precisely in order to concentrate the transformational effort upon one point”, said the Mother. “It is as if it were a symbolic point created in the universe to be able to radiate the work, done upon this one point, into the entire universe … From the astronomical point of view the Earth is nothing, it is a very small accident. From the spiritual point of view [however] it is a voluntary symbolic formation. And as I already said, it is only upon the Earth that the Presence is found, the direct contact with the supreme Origin, the presence of the divine Consciousness hidden in all things. The other worlds were organised more or less ‘hierarchically’, if one may put it like that, but the Earth has a special formation due to the direct intervention, without any intermediary, of the supreme Consciousness in the Inconscient … I have taken care to tell you that that emanation [i.e. the formation of the Earth] was a symbolic creation, and that all action on this special point radiates out into the whole universe. Don’t forget this, and don’t start saying that the cause of the formation of the Earth was some part projected from the sun, or that a scattering nebula gave birth to the sun and all its satellites, or whatever.”³⁵

Later the Mother repeated this and added: “For the convenience and necessity of the Work, the whole universe was concentrated and condensed symbolically in a grain of sand which is called the Earth. On it there is the symbol of everything. Everything that is to be changed, everything that is to be transformed, everything that is to be converted, is here. This means that if one concentrates on this work and does it here, all the rest will follow automatically. Otherwise there would be no end to it – and no hope.”³⁶ That this was not merely a supposition or a theoretical point – Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were always practical – is proven by the fact that she reiterated this point several times in the course of the years. “By transforming the Earth one can, through ‘contagion’ or analogy, transform the universe, for the Earth is the symbol of the universe.”³⁷ Thus was the Earth rehabilitated.

As the Mother said: “It is only upon the Earth that the Presence is found … the presence of the divine Consciousness hidden in all things.” This presence is the psychic presence, and her words mean that only the beings on the Earth have a soul. To put it more clearly – for the soul is one of the least understood issues in religion and philosophy, especially in the West – the divine Consciousness is present, “hidden”, in everything upon the Earth; in beings belonging to the vital world, even the amoeba and the snail, this Presence may be called “the divine spark”; in human beings there is an evolving “psychic being” with the divine spark as its core and growing around it. It is the psychic being that makes the human specifically human and that takes on the various adharas on its way to supermanhood or divinity. Supermanhood becomes possible when the psychic being is fully developed, i.e. when it has gone through the whole cycle of incarnations and consciously becomes what it eternally was and is in its Origin.

“All knowledge in all traditions, in any part of the Earth, says that the psychic formation is a terrestrial formation, and that the growth of the psychic being is something that takes place upon Earth. But once they [i.e. the psychic beings] are fully formed and free in their movement, they can go anywhere in the universe, they are not limited in their movement. But their formation and growth belong to the terrestrial life, for reasons of concentration.”³⁸ – “One thing is certain: that this marvellous fact of the divine Presence in Matter, which is at the origin of the formation of the psychic being, belongs as such to life on the Earth.”³⁹ – “In the whole creation the Earth has a place of distinction, because unlike any other planet it is evolutionary with a psychic being at its centre.”⁴⁰

The Mother has forcefully asserted at the time a nuclear war was a real possibility that “the Earth will not disappear”, meaning that it will go on existing to make that full development of its evolution possible. After its transformation, its divinisation, the possibility of its disappearance does not even exist any more. “The Earth will not be destroyed”, she said.⁴¹

Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;

Earth is the heroic spirit’s battlefield,

The forge where the Archmason shapes his works.

Thy servitudes on earth are greater, King,

Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.⁴²

The Human Cycle

Are the astronomical figures that determine the Yugas in the Hindu mythology to be taken literally? “Too much weight need not be put on the exact figures about the Yugas in the Purana. Here again the Kala and the Yugas indicate successive periods in the cyclic wheel of evolution, – the perfect state, decline and disintegration of successive ages of humanity followed by a new birth – the mathematical calculations are not the important element. The argument of the end of the Kali Yuga already come or coming and a new Satya Yuga coming is a very familiar one and there have been many who have upheld it.”⁴³ The last sentence may be seen as Sri Aurobindo’s way of confirming the argument. Practically speaking, the important point is the actual, momentous transition from the Kala to the Satya Yuga. It is the fundamental sense of our lives at present on this planet – the point where the Snake of Time bites its own tail.

In The Human Cycle, a sociological work of the first order, Sri Aurobindo proposes another cycle of human evolution from the Satya to the Kala Yuga and beyond. The idea came to him when reading Karl Lamprecht (1856-1915), “one of the first scholars to develop a systematic theory of psychological factors in history”. Lamprecht “supposed that human society progresses through certain distinct psychological stages which he terms respectively symbolic, typal and conventional, individualist and subjective … Obviously, such classifications are likely to err by rigidity and to substitute a mental straight line for the coils and zigzags of Nature.”⁴⁴ Sri Aurobindo widened the scope of the classification and adapted it to his own view.

“Wherever we can seize human society in what to us seems its primitive beginnings or early stages … we do find a strongly symbolic mentality that governs or at least pervades its thought, customs and institutions. Symbolic, but of what? We find that this social stage is always religious and actively imaginative in its religion; for symbolism and a widespread imaginative or intuitive religious feeling have a natural kinship and especially in earlier or primitive formations they have gone always together … The symbol then is of something which man feels to be present behind himself and his life and his activities – the Divine, the Gods, the vast and deep unnameable, a hidden, living and mysterious nature of things. All his religious and social institutions, all the moments and phases of his life are to him symbols in which he seeks to express what he knows or guesses of the mystic influences that are behind his life and shape and govern or at the least intervene in its movements.”⁴⁵ The word “religious” in this context clearly does not have the common meaning connected with a dogmatic, institutional religion, but rather means what now we would call “spiritual”.

As an example of the symbolic mentality Sri Aurobindo gives “the far-off Vedic age which we no longer understand”, precisely because the symbolic mentality is no longer ours and much has come in between. (There is no known example in the West, except perhaps to some extent the ancient Gallic, druidic society or societies.) “The theory that there was nothing in the sacrifice except a propitiation of Nature-gods for the gaining of worldly prosperity and of Paradise, is a misunderstanding by a later humanity which had already become profoundly affected by an intellectual and practical bent of mind, practical even in its religion and even in its own mysticism and symbolism, and therefore could no longer enter into the ancient spirit … From this symbolic attitude came the tendency to make everything in society a sacrament, religious and sacrosanct, but as yet with a large and vigorous freedom in all its forms … The spiritual idea governs all; the symbolic religious forms which support it are fixed in principle; the social forms are lax, free and capable of infinite development”⁴⁶ – in contrast with the rigidity that will be the hallmark of the following stages.

“The second stage, which we may call the typal, is predominantly psychological and ethical; all else, even the spiritual and religious, is subordinate to the psychological idea and to the ethical ideal which expresses it. Religion becomes then a mystic sanction for the ethical motive and discipline, Dharma; that becomes its chief social utility, and for the rest it takes a more and more otherworldly turn. The idea of the direct expression of the divine Being or cosmic Principle in man ceases to dominate or to be the leader and in the forefront; it recedes, stands in the background and finally disappears from the practice and in the end even from the theory of life.

“This typal stage creates the great social ideals which remain impressed upon the human mind even when the stage itself is passed. The principal active contribution it leaves behind when it is dead is the idea of social honour”⁴⁷ – the honour of the brahmin (the priest and man of knowledge), the kshatriya (the knight and ruler), the vaishya (the man of exchange and commerce) and the shudra (the worker and servant). Although the four castes are here denominated by their Sanskrit names, they have had their exact counterparts in the West.

The third, conventional stage of human society “is born when the external supports, the outward expressions of the spirit or the ideal, become more important than the ideal, the body or even the clothes more important than the person. Thus in the evolution of caste, the outward supports of the ethical fourfold order, – birth, economic function, religious ritual and sacrament, family custom, – each began to exaggerate enormously its proportions and its importance in the scheme. At first, birth does not seem to have been of the first importance in the social order, for faculty and capacity prevailed; but afterwards, as the type fixed itself, its maintenance by education and tradition became necessary and education and tradition naturally fixed themselves in a hereditary groove … Birth, family custom and remnants, deformations, new accretions of meaningless or fanciful religious sign and ritual, the very scarecrow and caricature of the old profound symbolism, became the riveting links of the system of caste in the iron age of the old society.”⁴⁸

“Then there arrives a period when the gulf between the convention and the truth becomes intolerable and the men of intellectual power arise, the great ‘swallowers of formulas’, who, rejecting robustly or fiercely or with the calm light of reason, symbol and type and convention, strike at the walls of the prison-house and seek by the individual reasonal moral sense or emotional desire the Truth that society has lost or buried in its white sepulchres. It is then that the individualistic age of religion and thought and society is created; the Age of Protestantism has begun, the Age of Reason, the Age of Revolt, Progress, Freedom. A partial and external freedom, still betrayed by the conventional age that preceded it into the idea that the Truth can be found in outsides, dreaming vainly that perfection can be determined by machinery, but still a necessary passage to the subjective period of humanity through which man has to circle back towards the recovery of his deeper self and a new upward line or a new revolving cycle of civilisation.”⁴⁹

“The inherent aim and effort and justification, the psychological seed-cause, the whole tendency of development of an individualistic age of mankind, all go back to the one dominant need of rediscovering the substantial truths of life, thought and action which have been overlaid by the falsehood of conventional standards no longer alive to the truth of the ideas from which their conventions started.” However, “the need of a developing humanity is not to return always to its old ideas. Its need is to progress to a larger fulfilment in which, if the old is at all taken up, it must be transformed and exceeded. For the underlying truth of things is constant and eternal, but its mental figures, its life forms, its physical embodiments call constantly for growth and change …”

“The individualistic age is, then, a radical attempt of mankind to discover the truth and law both of the individual being and of the world to which the individual belongs. It may begin, as it began in Europe, with the endeavour to get back, more especially in the sphere of religion, to the original truth which convention has overlaid, defaced and distorted; but from that first step it must proceed to others and in the end to a general questioning of the foundations of thought and practice in all the spheres of human life and action. A revolutionary reconstruction of religion, philosophy, science, art and society is the last inevitable outcome. It proceeds at first by the light of the individual mind and reason, by its demand on life and its experience of life; but it must go from the individual to the universal. For the effort of the individual soon shows him that he cannot securely discover the truth and law of his own being without discovering some universal law and truth to which he can relate it. Of the universe he is a part; in all but his deepest spirit he is its subject, a small cell in that tremendous organic mass: his substance is drawn from its substance and by the law of its life the law of his life is determined and governed. From a new view and knowledge of the world must proceed his new view and knowledge of himself, of his power and capacity and limitations, of his claim on existence and the high road and the distant or immediate goal of his individual and social destiny.”⁵⁰

“… In his study of himself and the world [man] cannot but come face to face with the soul in himself and the soul in the world and find it to be an entity so profound, so complex, so full of hidden secrets and powers that his intellectual reason betrays itself as an insufficient light and a fumbling seeker: it is successfully analytical only of superficialities and of what lies just behind the superficies. The need of a deeper knowledge must then turn him to the discovery of new powers and means within himself … All these tendencies, though in a crude, initial and ill-developed form, are manifest now in the world and are growing from day to day with a significant rapidity. And their emergence and greater dominance means the transition from the rationalistic and utilitarian period of human development which individualism has created to a greater subjective age of society. The change began by a rapid turning of the current of thought into large and profound movements contradictory of the old intellectual standards, a swift breaking of the old tables. The materialism of the nineteenth century gave place first to a novel and profound vitalism which has taken various forms from Nietzsche’s theory of the Will to be and Will to Power as the root and law of life to the new pluralistic and pragmatic philosophy …

“These tendencies of thought, which had until yesterday a profound influence on the life and thought of Europe prior to the outbreak of the Great War, especially in France⁵¹ and Germany, were not a mere superficial recoil from intellectualism to life and action, – although in their application by lesser minds they often assumed that aspect; they were an attempt to read profoundly and live by the Life-Soul of the universe and tended to be deeply psychological and subjective in their method. From behind them, arising in the void created by the discrediting of the old rationalistic intellectualism, there has begun to arise a new Intuitionalism, not yet clearly aware of its own drive and nature, which seeks through the forms and powers of Life for that which is behind Life and sometimes even lays as yet uncertain hands on the sealed doors of the Spirit.”⁵²

Sri Aurobindo wrote this in 1927 when revising The Human Cycle. To his inner eye the line of development was distinctly discernible, and his vision would be confirmed by its realisation – as can be read in his and the Mother’s biographies and partly in the following chapters of this book. But the working out of this line of development had to be done in spite of the terrible resistance of the opposing forces resulting in a clash, or rather a series of clashes; and whether it would succeed or fail could not be foreseen at the time. There came, for instance, the direct attack on Sri Aurobindo when he broke his thigh; there came the outbreak of the Second World War, of which the real causes and implications are not yet understood by the historians; and there came the necessity of his conscious and voluntary descent into death – all of this, and much more, a saga worthy of the unwinding of the cycles and their arrival at “the giant point” of the turn into “the subjective age”.

One should not be misled by the word “subjective”, which may be seen as rather narrow considering the unimaginably large development it indicates. The subjective age represents everything Sri Aurobindo and the Mother foresaw for the future. The twentieth century has been branded the cruellest, most absurd period in history ever. Certainly, cruelty and apparent absurdity were among its main characteristics, but its true significance may prove to be quite different.