Patterns of the Present

7: The Future of Humanity

To hope for a true change of human life without a change of human nature is an irrational and unspiritual proposition; it is to ask for something unnatural and unreal, an impossible miracle.¹

– Sri Aurobindo

Some specimens of homo sapiens will, according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, evolve into transitional forms of overmen, who in their turn will render the appearance of the divine species of supramental beings and a new world order possible. “All life for the achieved spiritual or gnostic consciousness must be the manifestation of the realised truth of Spirit; only what can transform itself and find its own spiritual self in that greater Truth and fuse itself into its harmony can be accorded a life-acceptance”, wrote Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine. “What will survive the mind cannot determine, for the supramental gnosis will itself bring down its own truth and that truth will take up whatever of itself has been put forth in our ideals and realisations of mind and life and body. The forms it has taken there may not survive, for they are not likely to be suitable without change or replacement in the new existence; but what is real and abiding in them or even in their forms will undergo the transformation necessary for survival. Much that is normal to human life would disappear. In the light of gnosis the many mental idols, constructed principles and systems, conflicting ideals which man has created in all domains of his mind and life, could command no acceptance or reverence; only the truth, if any, which these specious images conceal, could have a chance of entry as elements of a harmony founded on a much wider basis.”²

Sri Aurobindo, writing before the descent of the Supermind in 1956, had to write in the subjunctive tense. The Mother, speaking after ’56 and having realised the overman, could use a much more affirmative mode and give us some certitude about the future developments, all of which will result from the present potentialities in humanity. It is therefore important to have a clear idea of humanity’s constitution, which is much more complex than generally supposed. (The basic shortcoming in the socialist and Marxist systems, for instance, was that they totally misjudged human nature.)

All human beings may be equal before the law, but they are far from equal in their development and potential. “Inferior mankind gravitates downward from mind towards life and body; average mankind dwells constant in mind limited by and looking towards life and body; superior mankind levitates upward either to idealised mentality or to pure idea, direct truth of knowledge and spontaneous truth of existence; supreme mankind rises to divine beatitude and from that level either goes upwards to pure Sat and Parabrahman or remains to beatify its lower members and raise to divinity in itself and others this human existence.”³

We have already drawn attention to the importance of the human mass, the massive body of humanity, which is the constant cause of man’s “downward gravitation”, and of the diminution and distortion of the ideas, values and standards discovered or acquired by individuals. “In the mass the collective consciousness is near to the inconscient; it has a subconscious, an obscure and mute movement which needs the individual to express it, to bring it to light, to organise it and make it effective. The mass-consciousness by itself moves by a vague, half-formed or unformed subliminal and commonly subconscient impulse rising to the surface; it is prone to a blind or half-seeing unanimity which suppresses the individual in the common movement: if it thinks, it is by the motto, the slogan, the watchword, the common crude or formed idea, the traditional, the accepted customary notion; it acts, when not by instinct or on impulse, then by the rule of the pack, the herd-mentality, the type-law.”⁴

The same, according to Sri Aurobindo, goes for spirituality. “If [in the past] no decisive but only a contributory result, an accretion of some new finer elements to the sum of the consciousness, has been the general consequence and there has been no life-transformation, it is because man in the mass has always deflected the spiritual impulsion, recanted from the spiritual ideal or held it only as a form and rejected the inward change. Spirituality cannot be called upon to deal with life by a non-spiritual-method or attempt to cure its ills by the panaceas, the political, social or other mechanical remedies which the mind is constantly attempting and which have always failed and will continue to fail to solve anything. The most drastic changes made by these means change nothing; for the old ills exist in a new form: the aspect of the outward environment is altered, but man remains what he was; he is still an ignorant mental being misusing or not effectively using his knowledge, moved by ego and governed by vital desires and passions and the needs of the body, unspiritual and superficial in his outlook, ignorant of his own self and the forces that drive and use him.”⁵

“It is pertinently suggested”, writes Sri Aurobindo, “that if such an evolutionary culmination is intended and man is to be its medium, it will only be a few especially evolved human beings who will form the new type and move towards the new life; that once done, the rest of humanity will sink back from a spiritual aspiration no longer necessary for Nature’s purpose and remain quiescent in its normal status. It can equally be reasoned that the human gradation must be preserved if there is really an ascent of the soul by reincarnation through the evolutionary degrees towards the spiritual summit; for otherwise the most necessary of all the intermediate steps will be lacking. It must be conceded at once that there is not the least probability or possibility of the whole human race rising in a block to the supramental level. What is suggested is nothing so revolutionary and astonishing, but only the capacity in the human mentality, when it has reached a certain level or a certain point of stress of the evolutionary impetus, to press forward towards a higher plane of consciousness and its embodiment in the being.”⁶

“Man is an abnormal who has not found his own normality, – he may imagine he has, he may appear to be normal in his own kind, but that normality is only a sort of provisional order; therefore, though man is infinitely greater than the plant or the animal, he is not perfect in his own nature like the plant and the animal. This imperfection is not a thing to be at all deplored, but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us an immense vista of self-development and self-exceeding. Man at his highest is a half-god who has risen out of the animal nature and is splendidly abnormal in it, but the thing which he has started out to be, the whole god, is something so much greater than what he is that it seems to him as abnormal to himself as he is to the animal. This means a great and arduous labour of growth before him, but also a splendid crown of his race and his victory. A kingdom is offered to him beside which his present triumphs in the realms of mind or over external Nature will appear as a rough hint and a poor beginning.”⁷

Having considered this highly idealistic and simultaneously profoundly realistic view – which is the global Aurobindonian view – we are now ready to have a look at the kinds of higher species that, originating from and along with the human species, will people our transformed planet in the future.

The Future Mental and Supra-Mental Populations on Earth

As noted before, all future populations envisaged by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother will be developments of the present potential of humankind. One should always keep in mind Sri Aurobindo’s warning that only the Supermind knows how things will evolve, and that future evolutions are unpredictable and even unimaginable to the contemporary human being. What follows is, however, based on the experience and foresight of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother themselves, and will be documented with quotations from their work.

1. Animal-man. The human condition as it has been ever since homo sapiens appeared is for an important part, not to say for the greatest part, determined by the fact that homo sapiens has inherited the animal characteristics of the primates, physically as well as in his sub-rational psychological make-up. This animal part of his constitution is dominated mainly by the lower vital and the subconscious. How badly rational man, the reasoning being, had overrated himself during the Age of Reason was appallingly proven by some of the main events of the 20th century. Until now, man has explored himself in only a very limited part of his real being, the most superficial part in fact, leaving unexplored the nether and the upper realms in which he also concretely exists.

Animal-man, “the most necessary of all the intermediate steps” as it is put in one of the quotations above, will continue existing as a species, which is not the same as saying that he will continue existing in the same numbers. His destiny is for the most part collective, although he is the first terrestrial being with a sense of individuality. “It is not indeed necessary or possible that the whole race should transform itself from mental into spiritual beings, but a general admission of the ideal, a widespread endeavour, a conscious concentration are needed to carry the stream of tendency to its definitive achievement. Otherwise what will be ultimately accomplished is an achievement by the few initiating a new order of beings, while humanity will have passed sentence of unfitness on itself and may fall back into an evolutionary decline or a stationary immobility; for it is the constant upward effort that has kept humanity alive and maintained for it its place in the front of creation.”⁸

It is essential to keep in mind that, because of the presence of the supramental beings, the whole of the Earth, including the animals and animal-man, will change from a place of order into a place of contented existence. The Supermind is a Consciousness of Harmony, and this harmony, together with its spiritual basis, will be reflected in the whole of terrestrial existence. Freed from its inherent evolutionary impulse, the future animal-man will be satisfied within his limitations and share, as far as his capacities allow, in the universal wonders.

2. Man-man. This will be a species that has realised the full human potential, but without reaching for the spiritual levels above it. The Mother related her vision of this new species, a positive evolution from the animal-human species, as follows: “There was [in her experience of the future] the whole part of humanity that will no longer be altogether animal, that will have benefited from the mental development and created a certain harmony in its life – a vital and artistic, a cultural harmony – in which the large majority will be content to live. They have acquired a kind of harmony and within it they live life as it exists in a civilised environment, rather cultured, that is, with refined tastes and refined habits. And this whole way of life has a certain beauty in which they feel at ease; and unless something catastrophic happens to them, they are happy and contented, satisfied with life.”

“Because these people have discernment, as they are intellectually developed, they may be attracted by the new forces, by that what is new, the future life. For example they may become disciples of Sri Aurobindo in a mental, intellectual way. But they do not feel at all the need to change physically, and if they were compelled to do so, it would in the first place be premature, unjust, and [secondly] it would simply cause a great disorder and disturb their life altogether uselessly.”⁹ It was typical of the Mother (as it was of Sri Aurobindo) that she never wanted to upset people’s convictions. The “mental constructions” – her term – of a person, built up during this life on the basis of former lives, constitutes an integral part of his personality. Trying to change it without a profound understanding of its complexity and possibilities, is a delicate act and may dangerously unbalance a person for the rest of his ongoing existence. Fundamental change, the yoga of transformation, is only for the mature souls capable of undergoing the required tests and ordeals.

This vision of man-man “came after a vision of plants and their spontaneous beauty (it is something so wonderful), then of the animal with such a harmonious life so long as human beings do not come in between, and all that was in its right place. Then [there was the vision] of the true humanity as humanity, that is to say the maximum of what a mental equilibrium can create by way of beauty, harmony, charm, elegance of life and a taste for living – a taste for living in beauty – and of course excluding all that is ugly and low and vulgar. It was a beautiful humanity. Humanity at its maximum, but beautiful. And perfectly satisfied with being human, because it lives harmoniously. And this is perhaps also like a promise of what nearly the whole of humanity will become under the influence of the new creation. It looked to me that this was what the supramental consciousness could make of humanity … It would be something that would have the power to eliminate all errors, all deformations, all the ugliness of the mental life, and [that] then [would be] a very happy humanity, totally satisfied with being human, not at all feeling the need of being anything else than human, but with a human beauty, a human harmony. It was very pleasant. It was as if I lived in it. The contradictions had disappeared. It was as if I lived in that perfection. And it was almost like the ideal conceived by the supramental Consciousness of a humanity become as perfect as it can be. And it was very good.”¹⁰

Sri Aurobindo too wrote about this “true humanity”, even in his series of articles on overman: “The result of the supramental descent need not be limited to those who could thus open themselves entirely and it need not be limited to the supramental change; there could also be a minor or secondary transformation of the mental being within a freed and perfected scope of the mental nature. In place of the human mind as it now is, a mind limited, imperfect, open at every moment to all kinds of deviation from the truth or missing of the truth, all kinds of error and openness even to the persuasions of a complete falsehood and perversion of the nature … there could emerge a true mind liberated and capable of the free and utmost perfection of itself and its instruments, a life governed by the free and illumined mind, a body responsive to the light and able to carry out all that the free mind and will could demand of it.

“This change might happen not only in the few, but extend and generalise itself in the race. This possibility, if fulfilled, would mean that the human dream of perfection, perfection of itself, of its purified and enlightened nature, of all its ways of action and living, would be no longer a dream but a truth that could be made real and humanity lifted out of the hold on it of inconscience and ignorance. The life of the mental being could be harmonised with the life of the Supermind which will then be the highest order above it, and become even an extension and annexe of the Truth-consciousness, a part and province of the divine life … An immense change of human life, even if it did not extend to transformation, would be inevitable.”¹¹

“In the untransformed part of humanity itself there might well arise a new and greater order of mental human beings; for the directly intuitive or partly intuitivised but not yet gnostic [i.e. supramentalised] mental being, the directly or partly illumined mental being, the mental being in direct or part communion with the higher-thought plane would emerge; these would become more and more numerous, more and more evolved and secure in their type, and might even exist as a formed race of higher humanity leading upwards the less evolved in a true fraternity born of the sense of the manifestation of the One Divine in all beings.”¹²

“This opens up roads of realisation into the future”, said the Mother, “possibilities that are already foreseen, when an entire part of humanity, the one which is open consciously or unconsciously to the new forces, will be elevated, as it were, into a higher, more harmonious, more perfect life. Even if in that case individual transformation is not always permissible or possible, there will be a kind of general uplifting, a harmonisation of the whole, which will make it possible that a new order, a new harmony will be established, and that the anguish of the present disorder and struggles will disappear and be replaced by an order allowing a harmonious functioning of the whole.

“There will be other consequences which will tend to eliminate in an opposite way what the intervention of the mind in life has created: perversion, ugliness, a whole mass of distortions that have increased the suffering, the misery, the moral poverty – an entire area of sordid and repulsive misery which turns a great part of human life into something so horrible. This is what must disappear. This is what makes humanity in so many ways infinitely inferior to the animal life in its simplicity and in the natural spontaneity and harmony that it has in spite of everything. Suffering in animals is never so miserable and sordid as it is in an entire section of humanity that has been perverted by the use of a mentality utilised exclusively for egoistic needs.” The Mother concludes: “We must rise beyond, emerge into the Light and the Harmony, or fall back below, into the simplicity of a healthy animal life without perversions.”¹³

3. Overman. Overman, according to the Mother’s definition, is a being born from animal-human parents, as have been all humans in past ages and as they still are today, but who will develop a partly supramentalised consciousness, a Mind of Light. This kind of being will make possible the transition from the human to the supramental species. As the Mother said in April 1972: “The change from the human into the supramental being is being achieved … through the overman. It may be that there will be some overmen – there are some – who will make the transition possible.”¹⁴

Another quotation from the Mother worth repeating in order to imprint it into the memory of all those “who look in the same direction” of a new World, is the following from 1958, when she had accomplished the realisation of the overman: “All those who make an effort to overcome their ordinary nature, all those who try to realise materially the profound experience that has brought them into contact with the divine Truth, all those who, instead of turning to the Hereafter or the On-high, try to realise physically, externally, the change of consciousness they have realised within themselves – all those are apprentice-overmen. Among them, there are countless variations in the success of their efforts. Each time we try not to be an ordinary man, not to live the ordinary life, to express in our movements, our actions and reactions the divine Truth, when we are governed by that Truth instead of being governed by the general ignorance, we are apprentice-overmen, and according to the success of our efforts we are, well, more or less good apprentices, more or less advanced on the way.”

Where are they, then, these apprentice-overmen and apprentice-overwomen? For those related to the Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the first place to look for them is in themselves. Overman or overwoman may be in embryo there. As wrote Nolini Kanta Gupta, one of the close collaborators of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: “Although we may not know it, the New Man – the divine race of humanity – is already among us. It may be in our next neighbour, in our nearest brother, even in myself. Only a thin veil covers it. It marches just behind the line. It waits for an occasion to throw off the veil and place itself in the forefront.”¹⁵ These are important words from a yogi in one of whose birthday cards the Mother wrote: En route vers le surhomme – on the way towards the overman.¹⁶ The occasion to throw off the veil may be one of the unexpected events the future has in store, for “this is the time of the unexpected.” “Now we will see”, said the Mother.

4. The supramental being. To start and lay the foundations of the supramental transformation of the Earth was the mission of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The expectation of a new species beyond man is entirely logical if one accepts the following premises: a) that all is the Brahman, and b) that the Earth, like the universe it spins through, is a field of evolution. The surprising fact may be that the new, higher species, beyond man should appear now. For it is typical of man’s curious psychological set-up, conservative out of egoism, ignorance, and fear, that all important evolutionary events are supposed to have taken place in the past, and that the heralds of a new development on that planet always have been violently countered in the name of the past.

That something is taking place now is undeniable by anyone able to take a step back from the events in recent history and to examine them with an unprejudiced eye. This has never happened before: the growing unification of humanity; a staggering increase of the global population; the establishing of means of worldwide communication, which in its complexity begins to resemble a kind of global nervous system; the emergence of a global awareness; an ever expanding penetration and knowledge of new fields of knowledge, of our macrocosmic environment and the subatomic constitution of Matter, a tendency towards equality of the sexes and of all human beings; an empathy for the animals, our companion species on the planet, and for Mother Earth herself … All this is coming about in an incredibly short time, indicating that it is no longer a matter of evolution but of evolutionary revolution, of evolutionary explosion.

“There is nothing in this future evolution of the being which could be regarded as irrational or incredible”, wrote Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine, “there is nothing in it abnormal or miraculous: it would be the necessary course of the evolution of consciousness and its forces in the passage from the mental to the gnostic or supramental formulation of our existence. This action of the forces of Supernature would be a natural, normal and spontaneously simple working of the new higher or greater consciousness into which the being enters in the course of his self-evolution; the gnostic being accepting the gnostic life would develop and use the powers of this greater consciousness, even as man develops and uses the powers of his mental nature.”¹⁷

Cleaning up the Mess

The Supramental is independent of conditions and circumstances.¹⁸

– Sri Aurobindo

The condition of our overpopulated Earth at present is far from reassuring; actually, many hold that the point of no return has been reached and that spaceship Earth is sailing towards its doom. Then does it still make sense to look forward to the coming of a new species? Will this be materially possible?

In the view of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, it is precisely the presence of the Supramental Force that will save the planet, just as all great disturbances, recent and contemporary, have been caused by its preparation and descent. In the first place: “The Earth will not perish”, asserted the Mother forcefully.¹⁹ In the second place: “In Nature there are no errors”, wrote Sri Aurobindo, “but only the deliberate measure of her paces traced and retraced in a prefigured rhythm, of which each step has a meaning and its place in the action and reaction of her spiritual advance.” To Sri Aurobindo “Nature” was always the great Executrix of the divine Will in its manifestation, and as such the divine Will itself. “We may be sure that if destruction is done, it is because for that end the destruction was indispensable.”²⁰

As the Supermind is a principle of harmony and beauty, the continued existence of a mess like the one created by man-the-mental-being is impossible. “The presence of the liberated and now sovereign supramental light and force at the head of evolutionary Nature might be expected to have its consequences in the whole evolution, an incidence, a decisive stress would affect the life of the lower evolutionary stages; something of the light, something of the force would penetrate downwards and awaken into a greater action the hidden Truth-Power everywhere in Nature. A dominant principle of harmony would impose itself on the life of the Ignorance.”²¹ “A gnostic being will possess not only a truth-conscious control of the realised Spirit’s power over its physical world, but also the full power of the mental and vital planes and the use of their greater forces for the perfection of the physical existence. This greater knowledge and wider hold of all existence will enormously increase the power of instrumentation of the gnostic being on his surroundings and on the world of physical Nature.”²²

“At the same time the involved principle of the gnosis, acting now as an overt, arisen and constantly dynamic force and no longer only as a concealed power with a secret origination or a veiled support of things or an occasional intervention as its only function, would be able to lay something of its law of harmony on the still existing Inconscience and Ignorance. For the secret gnostic power concealed in them would act with a greater strength of its support and origination, a freer and more powerful intervention; the beings of the Ignorance, influenced by the light of the gnosis through their association with gnostic beings and through the evolved and effective presence of the supramental Being and Power in earth-nature, would be more conscious and responsive.”²³

It is not for nothing that the historians scratch their heads in vain to find some meaning in or behind the present developments in the world: to them and to most others all significant facts are negative, or uninterpretable, or unprecedented, or absurd. And life is so full and so fast that many may feel that there is no time left to find out what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother actually have said and who they factually have been. But if one takes the time to find this out, then it is difficult to deny that their view, their conclusions and their predictions concur on all points with the facts of the last century and of the present situation. Prolonging these lines, then, may very well lead towards the New World they stood and stand for. The present darkness would then only be apparent, for, according to them, the Light behind and within is already there.

“This is the problem that is put to us now: with the addition, with the new help of the [supramental] Force that has descended, that is manifesting, that is working, why shouldn’t one take up this enormous game [of Nature] to make it more beautiful, more harmonious, more true? It only needs brains powerful enough to receive the Force and formulate the possible course of action. There must be consciousnesses powerful enough to convince Nature that there are other methods than hers.”

“This looks like madness, but all new things have always seemed madness before they became realities. The hour has come for this madness to be realised. And since we are all here for reasons perhaps unknown to most of you, but nonetheless very conscious reasons, we may set ourselves to accomplish this madness. At least it will be worthwhile living it.”²⁴ Thus spoke the Mother.