Patterns of the Present

5: Science, Scientism, Modern Technology

We must look existence in the face in whatever aspect it confronts us and be strong to find within as well as behind it the Divine.¹

– Sri Aurobindo

And tell me: is that story, sung by mystics and sages the world over, any crazier than the scientific materialistic story, which is that the entire sequence is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing? Listen very carefully: just which of those two stories actually sounds totally insane? ²

– Ken Wilber

Science is certainly one of the great accomplishments, not to say the main accomplishment, of reason in the centuries subsequent to the Middle Ages. It has changed the world to an enormous degree and seems to be triumphant everywhere. And not only has it changed our world: it is considered by many to be the only reliable instrument and even the ultimate source of knowledge.

1. Is Science the Dominating Paradigm Today?

For many of the best-known scientists, philosophers and other kinds of learned and looked-up-to people (medical doctors, psychologists, professors, generals, captains of industry, philosophers, etc.) who are influential in shaping the present worldview, science is the dominant paradigm. They are quite supercilious if not aggressive about it and send the doubters of their reductionist-positivist-materialistic paradigm ruthlessly to the sidelines. At many universities and think tanks, at many enterprises and in many professions it is simply not safe to question the radical scientific outlook.

One example of this outlook is the January 1998 special issue of Time, titled The New Age of Discovery: A Celebration of Mankind’s Exploration of the Unknown. A promising, wide-ranging subject matter indeed, attractive to anyone concerned with the problems and expectations of what in 1998 was still the coming millennium. A few quotations will show better than any comment what sort of mental attitudes were offered to the reader.

• “In the past decade or so evolutionary theory has yielded a mind-blowing discovery: it has pried open the neatly-arranged toolbox that is our mind. Just as Gray’s Anatomy laid bare the human frame, so Darwinian scientists are beginning to write the owner-occupier’s manual to that hitherto most recondite of mysteries: human nature. Yes, human nature does exist and it is universal. Our minds and brains, just like our bodies, have been honed by natural selection to solve the problems faced by our ancestors over the past two million years. Just as every normal human hand has a precision-engineered opposable thumb for plucking, so every normal human mind enters the world bristling with highly specialized problem-solving equipment. And these capacities come on stream during development as surely as the toddler’s first faltering steps or the adolescent’s acne and ecstasy … All this apparent design has come about without a designer. No purpose, no goals, no blueprints. Natural selection is simply about genes replicating themselves down the generations …” (Helena Cronin: “The Evolution of Evolution”, p. 53)

• “Evolution depends upon errors in reproduction … There is nothing mysterious about evolution. It is no more than genetics plus time.” (Steve Jones: “Going Nowhere, Very Fast”, p. 54)

• “There is good reason to believe that consciousness is not only caused by neurobiological states but actually is these neurobiological states. As Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the molecular structure of DNA in 1953, has suggested: ‘“You”, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.’ And yet something else may be needed – not some divine spark or soul, but some as yet unknown aspect of brain activity …” (Steve Jones, ibid.)

It should in fairness be said that the editors of Time gave a chance for other voices to be heard too, but the general trend of the issue is predominantly techno-scientific in accordance with the reigning paradigm of materialism.

Here are some other examples of scientism picked more or less at random. Charles Panati, former science editor of Newsweek, writes in his book Breakthroughs: “Fifty years ago, Sigmund Freud predicted that every mental event would one day be traced to chemical reactions in the brain. Today, scientists are proving him right. Not that their 1960s’ analogy of the brain as a complex computer is wrong, but scientists are learning that a more fundamental and fruitful approach to understanding the brain’s functions is to view it as a giant chemistry set. For the first time scientists are measuring minuscule amounts of brain chemicals, tagging them and tracing their intricate pathways. Memory, concentration, fear – even aggression – have all recently been identified as chemical events”, (p. 136) – “We can be both smugly pleased and profoundly disappointed that such emotions as joy, love, aggression, and fear are firmly rooted in the chemical soil of the brain. The fact may make us seem less human, but at the same time more wondrous in design.” (p. 142) – “Dream images, [Harvard psychiatrists Allan Hobson and Robert Mc Carleay] contend, amount to little more than the efforts of the logical brain trying to make sense of the body’s electrical impulses it receives while you’re sleeping.” (p. 157)

On 28 November 2000, the New Indian Express carried an article under the title: “Love or hate, it’s all in the brain”. “Why do we love some people and hate others? Why do we befriend some, despise others? Well, bless or blame the brain for how we react to people and to the environment around us … In fact, the brain establishes one million connections every second. But the brain decides which connections to retain and which to discard … While the size and shape of the brain has remained the same since the Stone Age, man has been able to change the very face of the earth using his mental ability. This is because we are making our brains smarter by establishing new links and allowing the neurons to chat in a language that gives meaning to our actions.”

Richard Dawkins, the leading proponent of sociobiology and author of some best-selling books like The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker, writes in River out of Eden (1995): “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference … DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.” Francis Crick is quoted above; here follows an opinion from his co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, James Watson. The journalist of the French magazine Courrier International first writes: “He [James Watson] has proposed to modify the genetic code not of one single individual but of the future generations.” Then he quotes Watson’s words: “Some will have to show the courage to intervene in the germinal [i.e. genetic and therefore definitive] line without being sure of the result. Besides (and nobody dares to say this): if we could create better humans through an addition of genes, deriving from plants or animals, why not take the chance? What is the problem?”³ If there were an award for ideas of science-gone-bonkers, this pronouncement by a scientist of worldwide renown would be one of the chief contenders.

It goes without saying that this small string of quotations is only meant to be illustrative. For the full picture we turn to Huston Smith: “The reductionistic moment has not abated. Beginning with consciousness, we find Daniel Dennett telling us that ‘materialism in one form or another is the reigning orthodoxy among philosophers of the mind’ and Carl Sagan saying in his The Dragons of Eden that his fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings – what we sometimes call ‘mind’ – ‘are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology and nothing more’ … ‘Biologists’, Harold Morowitz, professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale tells us, ‘have been moving relentlessly toward hardcore materialism.’ Francis Crick [him again!], co-discoverer of DNA, agrees: ‘The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.’ And Morowitz again: As physiologists study the activity of living cells in terms of processes carried out by organelles of living cells and other subcellular entities, the study of life at all levels, from social to molecular behaviour, has in modern times relied on reductionism as the chief explanatory concept.”⁴

Nevertheless, there is obviously more than scientism (i.e. dogmatic science) in the contemporary world. The adherents of the main religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity, are counted in the hundreds of millions. The Pope draws crowds of hundreds of thousands; in the year 2001 the participants in the Kumbha Mela, at Allahabad in India, the greatest human gathering ever, numbered seventy million; tens of thousands have marched on the White House in Washington for one Christian cause or another; and tens of thousands perform the haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca year after year. In France one talks about “the Buddhist wave”⁵, for in the country of Descartes (Descartes, c’est la France!) there are now 600,000 Buddhists, half of them Asiatics, the other half native Frenchmen. In The Netherlands, a much smaller country than France, there are 250,000 Buddhists. The presence and influence of Freemasonry in Western society is undiminished. The New Age movement has spread its rainbow branches all over the globe. Occultism has always been very much alive as a subterranean current in the European landscape of the mind, even in the Age of Reason and the positivist 19th century; today it is experiencing a general revival to which the countless publications in the bookstores from 1970 onwards bear testimony.

One telling example in support of this: on 7 December 2000, L’Express published an enquiry about “The astonishing influence of the astrologers”. There are no less than 10,000 astrologers in France, and one Frenchman out of ten consults them. They are asked for advice by many of the prominent people in the land, ambassadors as well as financiers and politicians. It is known that Charles de Gaulle, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Boris Yeltsin, François Mitterand and king Juan Carlos of Spain have sought astrological advice. Most of the politicians in India regularly consult their favourite astrologer.

Science, long presumed to be unshakable because based on mathematics, is more and more called into question. In this context it is of primary importance to recall that the giants of science never put on the strait-jacket of scientism. Ken Wilber has done yeoman service to all interested in the topic covered in this section by selecting Quantum Questions: Mystic writings of the world’s great physicists. There we read for instance the following words of a theoretical physicist of the calibre of Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976): “1. Modern science, in its beginnings, was characterised by a conscious modesty; it made statements about strictly limited relations that are only valid within the framework of these limitations. 2. This modesty was largely lost during the nineteenth century. Physical knowledge was considered to make assertions about nature as a whole. Physics wished to turn philosopher, and the demand was voiced from many quarters that all true philosophers must be scientific. 3. Today [this was first published in 1971] physics is undergoing a basic change, the most characteristic trait of which is a return to its original self-limitation. 4. The philosophic content of science is only preserved if science is conscious of its limits. Great discoveries of the properties of individual phenomena are possible only if the nature of the phenomena is not generalised à priori. Only by leaving open the question of the ultimate essence of a body, of matter, of energy, etc., can physics reach an understanding of the individual properties of the phenomena that we designate by these concepts, an understanding which alone may lead us to real philosophical insight.” (p. 73, emphasis in the text) A “runaway national best-seller” in the USA was John Horgan’s remarkable book The End of Science. Horgan is a former senior writer at Scientific American (and has now published the no less remarkable The Undiscovered Brain). Two brief quotations from his contribution to the aforementioned issue of Time will have to suffice. “I suspect that the more intelligent or aware or enlightened we become – whether through drugs or meditation or genetic engineering or artificial intelligence – the more we will be astonished, awestruck, dumbfounded by consciousness, and life, and the whole universe, regardless of the power of our scientific explanations … Consciousness would only be truly understood not from the outside but from the inside, not through science but through experience.” (pp. 266-67, emphasis in the text) And: “Consciousness is arguably the most philosophically resonant problem posed by the mind, but it is also arguably the most intractable and impractical problem … Given their poor record to date, I fear that neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, and other fields addressing the mind might be bumping up against fundamental limits of science. Scientists may never completely succeed in healing, replicating, or explaining the human mind. Our minds may always remain, to some extent, undiscovered.” (pp. 3 and 10)

Let us return now to Sri Aurobindo: “The attempts of the positive critical reason to dissect the phenomena of the religious life sound to men of spiritual experience like the prattle of a child who is trying to shape into the mould of his own habitual notions the life of adults or the blunders of an ignorant mind which thinks fit to criticise patronisingly or adversely the labours of a profound thinker or a great scientist. At the best even this futile labour can extract, can account for only the externals of the things it attempts to explain; the spirit is missed, the inner matter is left out, and as a result of that capital omission even the account of the externals is left without real truth and has only an apparent correctness.”⁶

2. Sri Aurobindo, the Mother, and Science

In an article published in the Arya in 1918, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “Admit, – for it is true, – that the age of which materialism was the portentous offspring and in which it had figured first as petulant rebel and aggressive thinker, then as a grave and strenuous preceptor of mankind, has been by no means a period of mere error, calamity and degeneration, but rather a most powerful creative epoch of humanity. Examine impartially its results. Not only has it immensely widened and filled in the knowledge of the race and accustomed it to a great patience of research, scrupulosity, accuracy, – if it has done that only in one large sphere of inquiry, it has still prepared for the extension of the same curiosity, intellectual rectitude, power for knowledge to other and higher fields, – not only has it with an unexampled force and richness of invention brought and put into our hands, for much evil, but also for much good, discoveries, instruments, practical powers, conquests, conveniences which, however we may declare their insufficiency for our higher interests, yet few of us would care to relinquish, but it has also, paradoxical as that might at first seem, strengthened man’s idealism. On the whole, it has given him a kindlier hope and humanised his nature … Now that we have founded rigorously our knowledge of the physical, we can go forward with a much firmer step to a more open, secure and luminous repossession of mental and psychic knowledge. Even spiritual truths are likely to gain from it,⁷ not a loftier or more penetrating, – that is with difficulty possible, – but an ampler light and fuller self-expression.”⁸ This passage is typical of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother who never forgot that everything is the Brahman and that therefore everything has its value and significance; yet, they also saw the big picture and knew where to place everything in the general framework. They were the advocates of a “spiritual realism” for whom “the touch of Earth is always reinvigorating to the son of Earth, even when he seeks a supraphysical knowledge. It may even be said that the supraphysical can only be really mastered in its fullness … when we keep our feet firmly on the physical.”⁹ And was it not their aim to transform Matter, a process that necessarily demands a continuous attention to it and a direct knowledge of it? But: “Neither the laws nor the possibilities of physical Nature can be entirely known unless we know also the laws and possibilities of supraphysical Nature; therefore the development of new and the recovery of old mental and psychic sciences have to follow upon the perfection of our physical knowledge, and that new era is already beginning to open upon us. But the perfection of the physical sciences was a prior necessity and had to be the first field for the training of the mind of man in his new endeavour to know Nature and possess his world.”¹⁰ One would be mistaken if one thought that Sri Aurobindo, “mystic and poet”, had no notion of science. Until now this aspect of his writings has been almost entirely overlooked, possibly because his commentators were but little scientifically inclined. Once again a few passages from his works will have to do.

• “Not only in the one final conception, but in the great line of its general results Knowledge, by whatever path it is followed, tends to become one. Nothing can be more remarkable and suggestive than the extent to which modern Science confirms in the domain of Matter the conceptions and even the very formulae of language which were arrived at, by a very different method, in the Vedanta, – the original Vedanta, not the schools of metaphysical philosophy, but of the Upanishads. And these, on the other hand, often reveal their full significance, their richer contents only when they are viewed in the new light shed by the discoveries of modern Science, – for instance, that Vedantic expression which describes things in the Cosmos as one seed arranged by the universal Energy in multitudinous forms. Significant, especially, is the drive of Science towards the Vedic idea of the one essence with its many becomings … It will be evident that essential Matter is a thing non-existent to the senses and only, like the Pradhana of the Sankyas, a conceptual form of substance; and in fact the point is increasingly reached where only an arbitrary distinction in thought divides form of substance from form of energy.”¹¹ This was written before the formulation of the theory of quantum mechanics.
• “Spiritual experience tells us that there is a Reality which supports and pervades all things as the Cosmic Self and Spirit, can be discovered by the individual even here in the terrestrial embodiment as his own self and spirit, and is, at its summits and in its essence, and infinite and eternal Being, Consciousness and Bliss [Sachchidananda] of existence. But what we seem to see as the source and beginning of the material universe is just the contrary – it wears to us the aspect of a Void, an infinite of Non-Existence, and indeterminate Inconscient, an insensitive blissless Zero out of which everything has yet to come.

“When it begins to move, evolve, create, it puts on the appearance of an inconscient Energy which delivers existence out of the Void in the form of an infinitesimal fragmentation, the electron – or perhaps some still more impalpable minute unit, then the atom, the molecule, and out of this fragmentation builds up a formed and concrete universe in the void of its infinite. Yet we see that this unconscious Energy does at every step the works of a vast and minute Intelligence fixing and combining every possible device to prepare, manage and work out the paradox and miracle of Matter and the awakening of a life and a spirit in Matter; existence grows out of the Void, consciousness emerges and increases out of the Inconscient, an ascending urge towards pleasure, happiness, delight, divine bliss and ecstasy is inexplicably born out of an insensitive Nihil …”¹²

Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri, on which he was working almost till the day he passed away, contains many passages that are pure science but formulated in the mantric lines of the seer. The following is one of these passages:

At first was only an etheric Space:

Its huge vibrations circled round and round

Housing some unconceived initiative:

Upheld by a supreme original Breath

Expansion and contraction’s mystic act

Created touch and friction in the void,

Into abstract emptiness brought clash and clasp:

Parent of an expanding universe

In a matrix of disintegrating force,

By spending it conserved an endless sum.

On the heart of Space it kindled a viewless Fire

That, scattering worlds as one might scatter seeds,

Whirled out the luminous order of the stars.

An ocean of electric Energy

Formlessly formed its strange wave-particles

Constructing by their dance this solid scheme,

Its mightiness in the atom shut to rest;

Masses were forged or feigned and visible shapes;

Light flung the photon’s swift revealing spark

And showed, in the minuteness of its flash

Imaged, this cosmos of apparent things.

Thus has been made this real impossible world,

An obvious miracle or convincing show.¹³

As the Mother said: “If [science] moves in a very definite direction, if it progresses sufficiently, if it does not come to a halt on the way, the scientists will find the same thing the mystics have found, that the religious people have found, that everybody has found, because there is only one thing to be found. There are not two, there is only one.”¹⁴ The Mother generally spoke very highly of science. “I must say that the scientific method is a marvellous discipline. What is remarkable is that the method recommended by the Buddha to get rid of the desires and the illusion of the world, is also one of the most marvellous disciplines ever known on the earth. They are at the two opposite ends, they are both excellent. Those who follow the one or the other in all sincerity truly prepare themselves for the yoga. A small something somewhere will suffice to make them leave their rather narrow viewpoint on the one side or the other, and allow them to reach an integrality which will lead them to the supreme Truth and mastery.”¹⁵

In the 1950s, the Mother said several times that she foresaw the possibility that science and spirituality would join. Fundamentally there is nothing to prevent this, as both are in search of one thing only: the Truth. The reason of the divergence of science and spirituality was no other than the narrow dogmatism of the Catholic Church at the time of the post-Renaissance. The burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno and the condemnation of Galileo Galilei will forever remain emblematic of Rome’s sectarian, dogmatic attitude. “It is not impossible to foresee the development in which the two will unite in a very deep and close understanding of the essential truth,”¹⁶ said the Mother in 1957. “One step more and [the scientists] will enter into the Truth,”¹⁷ she said a few months later.

Unfortunately, the hardened position of scientism, which had become a Church in its own right, would make the Mother gradually adopt the position which Sri Aurobindo had formulated in a letter to a disciple some twenty years earlier: “The physicist is not likely to be the bridge-builder.” He explained in another letter: “The physical scientists have their own field with its own instruments and standards. To apply the same tests to phenomena of a different kind is as foolish as to apply physical tests to spiritual truth. One can’t dissect God or see the soul under a microscope. So also the subjection of disembodied spirits or even of psychophysical phenomena to tests and standards valid only for material phenomena is a most false and unsatisfactory method. Moreover, the physical scientist is for the most part resolved not to admit what cannot be neatly packed and labelled and docketed in his own system and its formulas.”¹⁸

On the whole, science has two important accomplishments to its credit. One is the unification of mankind. “Science pursuing its cold and even way has made discoveries which have served on one side a practical humanitarianism, on the other supplied monstrous weapons to egoism and mutual destruction; it has made possible a gigantic efficiency of organisation which has been used on one side for the economic and social amelioration of the nations and on the other for turning each into a colossal battering-ram of aggression, ruin and slaughter. It has given rise on the one side to a large rationalistic and altruistic humanitarianism, on the other it has justified a godless egoism, vitalism, vulgar will to power and success. It has drawn mankind together and given it a new hope and at the same time crushed it with the burden of a monstrous commercialism.”¹⁹

“There are many conditions and tendencies in human life at present [i.e. after the end of the First World War] which are favourable to the progress of the internationalist idea. The strongest of these favourable forces is the constant drawing closer of the knots of international life, the multiplication of points of contact and threads of communication and an increasing community in thought, in science and knowledge. Science especially has been a great force in its direction; for science is a thing common to all men in its conclusions, open to all in its methods, available to all in its results: it is international in its very nature; there can be no such thing as a national science, but only the nations’ contributions to the work and growth of science which are the indivisible inheritance of all humanity. Therefore it is easier for men of science or those strongly influenced by science to grow into the international spirit and the entire world is now beginning to feel the scientific influence and to live in it.

“Science also has created that closer contact of every part of the world with every other part, out of which some sort of international mind is growing. Even cosmopolitan habits of life are now not uncommon and there are a fair number of persons who are as much or more citizens of the world as citizens of their own nation. The growth of knowledge is interesting the peoples in each other’s art, culture, religion, ideas and is breaking down at many points the prejudice, arrogance and exclusiveness of the old nationalistic sentiment. Religion, which ought to have led the way, but owing to its greater dependence on its external parts and its infrarational rather than its spiritual impulses, has been as much, or even more, a sower of discord as a teacher of unity, – religion is beginning to realise, a little dimly and ineffectively as yet, that spirituality is after all its own chief business and true aim and that it is also the common element and the common bond of all religions.”²⁰

The second accomplishment of science is that; by its technological realisations which have become the normal environment of humanity at the present time, it is building a transitional world between the human being of the bygone civilisations and the new species in the making. This extremely important role of science, seen in the perspective of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, has not yet been generally perceived.

Thanks to science every person living at present is developing a kind of global consciousness, whether he wants it or not. Television and radio put him in direct contact with his fellow beings everywhere. Telegraph, telephone, fax and the Internet allow him to communicate with his antipodes. He can cover short distances in motorised vehicles and long distances in airplanes. Events in one place of the globe have a direct impact on the life in another place, be it nearby or far-off. Film and television allow for an expanded experience never known before. Electric power turns darkness into daylight and loosens him from the otherwise inescapable rhythm of day and night.

These may seem platitudes, but they acquire a striking significance if one recalls some of the characteristics of the supramental being as described by the Mother e.g. in her talks at the Playground and in a series of encounters with a young disciple, Mona Sarkar, as reported by him in two slim volumes which he has called Sweet Mother I and II. The gross physical body is heavy, extremely limited in its possibilities, vulnerable, deficient in its perceptions, bound to its age, subject to illness and death, and not unjustly felt by some as a prison. The supramental body will be a body of light, with lightness as one of its characteristics, being able to go where it wishes in an instant and to be at two or more places simultaneously. It will have a supramental, i.e. divine consciousness, even more powerful than the cosmic consciousness; it will contain everything into itself and be present in all things … True, there is no comparing the capacities of the supramental being with those put at our disposal by the advanced technology of our day. But the portent of the latter becomes very clear if we compare the physical capacities and the horizon of awareness of “ancient man” with those of the supramental being: then the fact that we, at present, live in a kind of intermediate world between what man has been for millennia and the supramental being becomes obvious. The difference between the supramental being and the human being at the very beginning of the Third Millennium is enormous, even unimaginable. Nonetheless, it definitely looks as if our technological wonderworld has its share in preparing the species for a quantum leap that otherwise might be impossible.

Science and materialism have had a third important function, already indicated more than once in this and the previous chapters: to direct man’s attention to Matter and to increase his knowledge of Matter, which is his “footing”. Matter is the direct object of the supramental transformation. Reason, science and commercialisation have now focussed humanity on Matter to a degree unknown at any time in the history of humanity. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were of course aware of the blatant spiritual shortcomings of a materialistic humanity, but they also appreciated its merits – no doubt because Matter is the level where the supramental transformation has to take place, and is taking place.

The Future Science

There is the pressure on human life of an Infinite which will not allow it to rest too long in any formulation.²¹

– Sri Aurobindo

Materialism, tied up in its circular reasoning that there is only matter because there cannot be anything but matter, has to fade away because of the deficiencies inherent in it as a thought system and as a scientific tool. The Great Chain of Being, in other words the knowledge of the gradations of the manifestation, so obvious to an unprejudiced observer, has been the foundation of all profound thinking; more important, it has been the foundation of all spiritual realisation and knowledge. “Neither the laws nor the possibilities of physical Nature can be entirely known unless we know also the laws and possibilities of supraphysical Nature; therefore the development of new and the recovery of old mental and psychic sciences have to follow upon the perfection of our physical knowledge, and that new era is already beginning to open upon us.”²²

“Science has overpassed itself”, wrote Sri Aurobindo already at the beginning of the 20th century, “and must before long be overtaken by a mounting flood of psychological and psychic knowledge which cannot fail to compel quite a new view of the human being and open a new vista before mankind. At the same time the Age of Reason is visibly drawing to an end …”²³ – “The human mind is beginning to perceive that it has left the heart of almost every problem untouched and illumined only outsides and a certain range of processes. There has been a great and ordered classification and mechanisation, a great discovery and practical result of increasing knowledge, but only on the physical surface of things. Vast abysses of Truth lie below in which are concealed the real springs, the mysterious powers and secretly decisive influences of existence. It is a question whether the intellectual reason will ever be able to give us an adequate account of these deeper and greater things or subject them to the intelligent will as it has succeeded in explaining and canalising, though still imperfectly, yet with much show of triumphant result, the forces of physical Nature … In this limited use of the reason subjected to the rule of an immediate, an apparent vital and physical practicality man cannot rest long satisfied. For his nature pushes him towards the heights; it demands a constant effort of self-transcendence and the impulsion towards things unachieved and even immediately impossible.”²⁴

“All insistence on the sole or the fundamental validity of the objective real takes its stand on the sense of the basic reality of Matter. But it is now evident that Matter is by no means fundamentally real; it is a structure of Energy: it is becoming even a little doubtful whether the acts and creations of this Energy itself are explicable except as the motions of power of a secret Mind of Consciousness of which its processes and steps of structure are the formulas. It is therefore no longer possible to take Matter as the sole reality. The material interpretation of existence was the result of an exclusive concentration, a preoccupation with one movement of Existence, and such an exclusive concentration has its utility and is therefore permissible; in recent times it has justified itself by the many immense and the innumerable minute discoveries of physical Science. But a solution of the whole problem of existence cannot be based on an exclusive one-sided knowledge; we must know not only what Matter is and what are its processes, but what mind and life are and what are their processes, and one must know also spirit and soul and all that is behind the material surface: only then can we have a knowledge sufficiently integral for a solution of the problem.” (The Life Divine, pp. 652-53)

“Science is in its own way an occultism”, writes Sri Aurobindo, “for it brings to light the formulas which Nature has hidden and it uses its knowledge to set free operations of her energies which she has not included in her ordinary operations and to organise and place at the service of man her occult powers and processes, a vast system of physical magic, – for there is and can be no other magic than the utilisation of secret truths of being, secret powers and processes of Nature. It may even be found that a supraphysical knowledge is necessary for the completion of physical knowledge, because the processes of physical Nature have behind them a supraphysical factor, a power and action mental, vital or spiritual which is not tangible to any outer means of knowledge.”²⁵ Compare this with what Huston Smith writes in his book Forgotten Truth: “Ninety per cent of the scientist’s universe (some say ninety-nine per cent) is at present invisible; no instruments pick it up, but calculations require that it be posited to account for the gravitational pull on the rims of galaxies. Instruments may yet be invented that will bring this ‘dark matter’ to light, but even if they are, we will still be left with the wave packets from which particles derive. No scientist expects that those packets will ever be observed. So science is conceding that invisibles exist, and more. It also concedes that these invisibles precede the visible and create or in some way give rise to it.”²⁶

“Since its very soul is the search for Knowledge, [science] will be unable to cry a halt”, Sri Aurobindo predicted. “As it reaches the barriers of sense-knowledge and of the reasoning from sense-knowledge, its very rush will carry it beyond and the rapidity and sureness with which it has embraced the visible universe is only an earnest of the energy and success which we may hope to see repeated in the conquest of what lies beyond, once the stride is taken that crosses the barrier. We see already that advance in its obscure beginnings.”²⁷ [written ca. 1920]

Yes, there may be interesting times ahead.

In 1958, a student of the Ashram school asked the Mother: “Mother, can physical science by its progress open to occultism?” The Mother answered: “It does not call it ‘occultism’, that is all. It’s only a matter of words. They are making sensational discoveries – which people with occult knowledge already knew thousands of years ago. They have taken a big detour and are now arriving at the same thing … They will end up practising occultism without knowing that they are doing so. For, in fact, as soon as one draws close, however slightly, to the truth of things, and when one is sincere in one’s search, when one does not remain satisfied by mere appearances, when one really wants to find something and goes deep, deep behind the appearances, then one begins to advance towards the truth of things. And as one comes closer to it, well, one rediscovers the knowledge that others, who began by going within, brought back from their inner discoveries. It’s only the method and the path that are different, but the thing discovered will be the same, because there are not two things to be found, there is only one. It will necessarily be the same … But how hard [the scientists] have been working! [Their work] is, moreover, very respectable.”²⁸

“There things will remain from the labour of the secularist centuries”, wrote Sri Aurobindo, “truth of the physical world and its importance, the scientific method of knowledge, – which is to induce Nature and Being to reveal their own way of being and proceeding, not hastening to put upon them our own impositions of idea and imagination, – and last, though very far from least, the truth and importance of the earth life and the human endeavour, its evolutionary meaning. They will remain, but will turn to another sense and disclose greater issues. Surer of our hope and our labour, we shall see them all transformed into light of a vaster and more intimate world-knowledge and self-knowledge.”²⁹

Grumbling humanity

… the quite imaginary perfection of the ideal past …³⁰

– Sri Aurobindo

The crux of the matter is that we are living in a world which we create ourselves, and that we depend on its shortcomings instead of depending on its qualities.³¹

– Andrei Tarkovsky

Reading the commentators on the present times – philosophers, academic luminaries, journalists, columnists, opinion makers of all kinds, religious leaders … – is like wading through a swamp of discontent. This is an era of transition, indeed very much so. But how come that the present world is interpreted so negatively by the people living in it? Have considerable parts of humanity ever had it better? Are the glasses of “those whose temperament and imagination dally lovingly with an ideal past”³² not too rosy-coloured because of a lack of perspective and an insufficient knowledge of the past resulting in an idealisation of it?

“Actually, people are never happy … The reason probably is that Western man never has known how to live in the present”, writes Michel Winock. “All of us are living with the opinion that the past was better. In most cases this is nothing but an illusion. As nowadays we can interrogate with some precision the main currents of public opinion, we can measure the load of dissatisfaction weighing on the people, even when they become richer, live to a greater age, and acquire an amelioration of their living conditions their grandparents could not have dreamed of. For nothing is more difficult than to live in the present tense: the past tense and, better still, the conditional tense save us from the worries and uncertainties of everyday life. Nothing is more dreadful than to live in the instability of days following one after the other, the near future always remaining insecure. The very same persons who, when interviewed in the past about their existence, denied its advantages, imagine today that same past as lost happiness. Yesterday is always better than today. Nostalgia is a malady of the senile.”³³ – “The sigh of the extreme conservative mind for the golden age of the past, which was not so golden as it appears to an imaginative eye in the distance”, writes Sri Aurobindo, “is a vain breath blown to the winds by the rush of the car of the Time-Spirit in the extreme velocity of its progress.”³⁴

“I find this contemporary cult of pessimism scandalous”, writes Christiane Collange, a French journalist, in her Merci, mon siècle (Thank you, my century), in which she thanks the 20th century for all the marvels and ameliorations it has brought into so many lives. She fully agrees with Michel Winock: “Happiness does not have a very good reputation with us; optimism is accused of irresponsibility; enjoyment, small or big, does not yet occupy the place it deserves to have; satisfaction in its various forms hardly dares to be experienced and to show itself in broad daylight. On the contrary suffering, difficulty and bad luck give right to social consideration; sacrifice and austerity are still considered to be exemplary; pessimism is widely publicised.”³⁵

Just one example of the current evaluation of one of the wonders of the present world: television. “Television alienates the mind, shows everyone the same, transmits the ideology of those who produce it, corrupts the imagination of the children, reduces the curiosity of the adults, puts the thinking mind to sleep, is an instrument of political control, dictates the way in which we think, manipulates the information, imposes dominant cultural models (not to say bourgeois models), shows systematically only one part of reality omitting the urban classes, the middle classes, the tertiary classes, life in the countryside, the world of the labourer, marginalizes the regional languages and cultures, causes passivity, destroys the interpersonal relations within the family, eradicates the reading habit and all ‘difficult’ forms of culture, incites to violence, to vulgarity and pornography, prevents the children from becoming adults”, etc., for a whole page more. This sorry litany has been assembled from statements in diverse publications by the French philosopher Luc Ferry and published in his book L’Homme-Dieu.³⁶ Similar litanies could be made about the radio, the computer, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, and the cinema.

It might therefore be interesting to give one or two examples of how things were in times gone by. We will not choose what would now be considered the “inhuman” instance of the “care” for the babies as practised let us say less than two centuries ago, a time when child mortality was a fact of everyday life, and also documented in the same book by Ferry. Or the medieval relation between husband and wife, which according to contemporary standards should be one of mutual appreciation if not love. Or the way the victorious party in whatever kind of past war was generally supposed to behave towards the defeated. Or the way household personnel and workers, not to speak of the serfs, were treated. Some well-documented history lessons on these subjects might give the earthlings of the present day a more realistic understanding of life in the past and of the dissimilarity with their own normal, contemporary, “human” world.

We choose, firstly, a brief evocation of life in Elizabethan London. “Most Elizabethans have bad breath, rotting teeth, constant stomach disorders, and scabs or running sores all over their skin. Things are no better on a public scale. The city ditches are used as toilets. Butchers throw dead animal carcasses into the street to rot. Housewives nonchalantly toss putrid garbage into the river [Thames]: Poor people are buried in mass graves, and the bodies of the rich, lying beneath the church building in burial vaults, force the congregation to evacuate because the stench of the decomposition is too strong …”³⁷ Our second example is a description of the river Seine in Paris as recently as 1880: “The banks of the Seine presented us with a sad view: the river, full with waste of all kinds (vegetables, hair, animal carcasses, etc.), was really abhorrent; a grey slime, in which that organic refuse got stuck, accumulated all along the border; it caused an active fermentation resulting in gas bubbles of an often considerable dimension.”³⁸

That pessimism is ingrained in man is understandable if we consider his nature. He incarnates in body after body at a stage of evolution that still is completely problematical, in a time of transition when most of his physical and psychological composition still is predominantly animal-like. The dominant level of his nature – and this is still very little understood – is his subconscious, so much so that it may be said that the conscious part of his personality is not much more than a few leaves floating on a mud pool. It is the subconscious that determinates his vital being, full of fright, insecurity, egoism, aggression, cruelty. And it is his vital being that predominantly determines his mentalisations and thinking. Add to that a physical body subject to injury, illness and death, subject to a sexual urge that may be unsubduable, confused and insecure, and a life in the company of beings in the same tangled situation – and one has more than sufficient reason for a sort of ineradicable constitutional pessimism. Sri Aurobindo wrote that this condition humaine (human condition) was susceptible to the “downward gravitation”, the easy giving in to the burden and even evil of life, contrary to the upward movement of any idealistic human endeavour and the spiritual effort.

Another factor contributing to the pessimism and negative evaluation of the present period is that the appreciation of its values is in most cases the opinion of the mass, of average man. In our time “elitism” is a dirty word. It is an assumption of postmodernism that “high” and “low” have to be mingled, and therefore that mass culture is what suits our era. It is rather astonishing that many of the cleverest heads of our time, mostly French proponents of what is known as “structuralism”, found pleasure, authority and power in contending that the individual, the subject, is dead. Often quoted words in this context are the very last phrase of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: “[If the thesis of this book is correct] then one can certainly wager that man will be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.”³⁹

Structuralism, like all important philosophical movements, was based on a kernel of truth, but, like all important philosophical movements, a truth deformed by its exaggeration and exclusiveness. “By individual we mean normally something that separates itself from everything else and stands apart, though in reality there is no such thing anywhere in existence; it is a figment of our mental conceptions useful and necessary to express a partial and practical truth”, writes Sri Aurobindo. But he adds: “It is necessary to insist, that by the true individual we mean nothing of the kind but a conscious power of being of the Eternal, always existing by unity, always capable of mutuality. It is that being which by self-knowledge enjoys liberation and immortality.”⁴⁰ Alas – and here we touch again upon the fundamental flaw in the Western world view and the vain groping of its thought for truth, reality, reliable fundamentals – the essential structure of the human being and the manifestation it is part of remain unrecognised, and therefore constitute the enormous underwater part of the iceberg while Western thought and comprehension dance, more and more in desperation, on the surface of its visible top.

In contrast to the above, thus forming one of the many apparent contradictions in this transitional time, is the fact that humanity enjoys at present, especially in the West, one of the high seasons, if not the highest ever, of individualism. “There is no doubt that the right to be absolutely oneself, to enjoy life at its fullest, is inseparable from a society that has posited the free individual as a cardinal value … We are experiencing a second individualist revolution … It is everywhere the search for an own identity and no longer universality that motivates the social and individual actions … Hedonist and personalist individualism has become lawful and does not meet with opposition any longer … This is a personalised society where the important thing is to be oneself … The postmodern culture is a vector for the widening of individualism …” All these quotations are from a widely influential book by Gilles Lipovetsky L’Ère du vide – Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain (The Era of Emptiness: Essays on contemporary individualism) first published in 1983.⁴¹

The individual, however, seems scarcely capable of bearing the freedom it has gained and which is, as we have seen in a previous chapter, the chief realisation of the Western effort. Isn’t it amazing that everything man has been dreaming of throughout all of history becomes problematic once he gets it – for example unheard of material possibilities and individual freedom to a high degree? “No political ideology is able to fire the masses any longer. Postmodern society has no more idols or taboos, no glorious image of itself, no animating historical project. Henceforward we are dominated by emptiness,”⁴² writes Lipovetsky. An explanation may be that material well-being as such is no fulfilment of the needs and the growth of the soul, and that full individuality can be realised only when the human being will be recognised for what it is, in all its aspects. This should be kept in mind when reflecting on the generalised malaise humanity is subject to at a time that, materially, people never had it so good.

“Peace we do not have, but we do have abundance!” says the Frenchman Jacques Lacarrière. “I often maintain that in a supermarket of today one can find the near-totality of what the human being has dreamt to have since the time he was living in caves.”⁴³ We listen once more to the British historian Eric Hobsbawm: “Let us not forget that, measured by whatever standard, the majority of the individuals live better at the end of the 20th century, this in spite of the terrible catastrophes that occurred in it … After all, India has not known a famine since 1943. Apart from a few rare exceptions, the human beings no longer have to live with hunger in the major part of the world. This means that, for the very first time, the production is up to the demand of the mass of the population. In the developed countries people live no longer in the age of the elementary necessities and can choose what they want instead of having to choose between having nothing to eat and not having a roof over their head. They do not have to worry anymore about their daily bread, except in order to decide whether they prefer a sandwich or a toast with cooked or smoked ham on a bed of fresh or dry tomatoes … The productive growth and the availability of the riches are enormous, and the majority of the world population has benefited from them. This is a characteristic of the 20th century that has to be taken into consideration when one evaluates the good and bad aspects of an era …”⁴⁴

Christiane Collange, with the practical eye of a journalist, a housewife and a grandmother of twelve, thanks the 20th century for the following reasons: the improvements in the field of health; the lessening of the burden of daily life; the liberalisation of the human relations; the revolutions in the field of communications; the improvements in transportation; the heightening of personal well-being; the better opportunities for children; the widening of the cultural availabilities; and the choices women have acquired. It is an impressive list – still more impressive when compared to the lives of our ancestors.

“In contrast to the picture propagated by certain media”, she writes optimistically, “materialism, violence and hatred are not omnipresent in our society; on the contrary, the indications of the ‘new age’ are everywhere and signal an intense need to find meaning again, to develop affective ties of a better quality, rather than to wallow in consumption or to immure oneself within a hardened egocentrism. All the observers of our mentalities discern this new tendency towards a higher human value.”⁴⁵

She is not the only one to report positive signs. Even Gilles Lipovetsky writes: “The crisis of the modern societies is in the first place cultural or spiritual”; and: “Simultaneously with the revolution of the information science, the postmodern societies experience an ‘inner revolution’, an immense ‘change of consciousness’ (‘awareness movement’), an unprecedented dedication to the knowledge and accomplishment of oneself as demonstrated by the proliferation of psy-groups, techniques of expression and communication, meditation and oriental gymnastics.”⁴⁶ Often quoted are the words of André Malraux: “The 21st century will be spiritual or it will not be.”

Putting everything together, it becomes clear that any negative interpretation of the facts of our present world can be countered with a positive interpretation of the very same facts, as shown in the enumeration of the topics in Collange’s book.⁴⁷ This positive interpretation is possible because we are living in a time of transition when a certain past is dying and a certain future is being born. The change on all levels of life is so bewildering because the transition is a tremendous one, from the human being to the supramental, divine being. Not only can the period in which we live be called “postmodern”; it can also, and with better justification, be called “presupramental”. It bears repetition that the vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is the only one applicable to times like these, because their vision did not originate from human shortsightedness, however philosophical, but from a suprarational avataric knowledge and intention. Whether the world knows it or not, a Force is acting and will not be countermanded.

Between the descent of the rational mind and the first human beings about one million years elapsed, according to the Mother. Now that the Supermind has descended things will go faster. She and Sri Aurobindo estimated that it would be three hundred years before the visible, concrete appearance of the first supramental being. But in the meantime Overman and Overwoman are taking the lead in the march of humanity, and what is necessary to happen will be worked out through them, unseen.