Preparing for the Miraculous

1: Adam Kadmon and the Evolution

The Cosmic Purusha

The Mother has told several times of a very old tradition at the origin of the Vedic and the Chaldean branches of wisdom and spirituality. According to this tradition, the One, wanting to know himself, manifested as the Great Mother and thus became two. And the Great Mother, in her turn, manifested the attributes of the One – Truth, Light or Consciousness, Life, and Ananda or Bliss – as the main elements of the manifestation. But, relates the tradition, a crucial mistake happened which made Truth turn into falsehood, Light into darkness and ignorance, Bliss into suffering, and Life into death.

“The Creative Power implored the Supreme Origin, asking for a special intervention which could save this corrupted universe; and in reply to this prayer there was emanated from the Supreme Origin a special Entity of love and consciousness, who cast himself directly into the most inconscient matter to begin there the work of awakening. In the old narratives this Being is described as stretched out in a deep sleep at the bottom of a very dark cave.”

This very old story about an accident on the threshold of creation, for which the Great Mother was held responsible, is also the foundation story of all schools of Gnosticism; according to the gnostic myths, souls (sparks of the Divine) get lost in the world of the Ignorance and can only be saved by a redeemer who reminds them of their origin. In the Bible, Satan (originally the Angel of Light) revolts against God and becomes the devil. The Mother herself has more than once told the same story in its complete form: the four attributes of the Divine – truth, light, life and bliss – in their boundless egoistic pride deemed themselves equal to be the very Divine and therefore turned into the great Asuras: the Lords of Falsehood, Darkness, Suffering and Death. (In one of his sonnets Sri Aurobindo called them “the iron Dictators”. They are also known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.)

The “special Entity,” emanated by the Divine to save the world, is described in the narratives of the old traditions “as stretched out in a deep sleep at the bottom of a very dark cave, and in his sleep prismatic rays of light irradiate from him and gradually penetrate in all the elements of the Inconscient.” Without this direct divine permeation the world of Ignorance and Darkness could never have evolved back towards its Origin.

During her second visit to Tlemcen, in 1907, when working with Max Théon, the Mother descended in trance into the “total Inconscient” at the bottom of the manifestation. Suddenly she found herself in front of a cave in which there was that special Entity, “a Being of iridescent light, lying on one side and with its head resting in its hand.” She had trained herself to talk in trance, and when she reported to Théon what she saw, he replied that it was “the immanent Divine at the bottom of the Inconscient.” But then something remarkable happened: the Being opened its eyes, thereby indicating that the time of wakeful, conscious action had come.

While still at Tlemcen, the Mother had another, related experience which she narrated many years later, in 1961. She had learned to leave the successive sheaths of the body “with great dexterity… I could halt on any plane, do what I had to do there, move around freely, see, observe, and then speak about what I had seen.” Once, having left behind the most subtle body sheath, she passed “beyond all possible forms, even all thought forms,” in a domain where one experienced total unity – unity in “something that was the essence of Love.” Quite unexpected, and to her amazement, she there found herself “in the presence of the principle, the principle of the human form. … It was an upright form, standing just on the border between the world of forms and the Formless” like a kind of norm, model or archetype. “At that time nobody had ever spoken to me about it,” for no one she knew had ever seen anything like it. But she felt at once the special importance of her experience. “Afterwards [at least thirteen years later], when I met Sri Aurobindo and talked to him about it, he told me: ‘It is surely the prototype of the supramental form.’ I saw it several times again, later on, and this proved to be true.”

We remember that the Mother said that the story about what she usually called “the accident,” the fall into the Inconscient, was under different names known in the ancient wisdom traditions. “In every country, every tradition, the event has been presented in a special way, with different limitations, different details or particular features, but, truly speaking, the origin of all these stories is the same.” It is the gnostic story, rediscovered and revived in the great periods of the history of humankind (as we shall see). And we remember that, at the beginning of the evolution as well as at its end, there is a divine archetype determining the development of Life on Earth.¹

Sri Aurobindo too has written about such archetype, which he called “the body of the creative Deity.” When considering the four varnas – brahmins, kshatriyas, vaishyas, and shudras – he mentions the Purushasukta of the Vedas “where the four orders are described as having sprung from the body of the creative Deity, from his head, arms, thighs and feet. To us,” he comments, “this is merely a poetical image. As if this were all, as if the men of those days would have so profound a reverence for mere poetical figures like this of the body of Brahma. … We read always our mentality into that of these ancient forefathers and it is therefore that we can find in them nothing but imaginative barbarians. … The image was to these seers a revelative symbol of the unrevealed and it was used because it could hint luminously to the mind what the precise intellectual word, apt only for logical or practical thought or to express the physical and superficial, could not at all hope to manifest. To them this symbol of the Creator’s body was more than an image, it expressed a divine reality. Human society was for them an attempt to express in life the cosmic Purusha. … Man and the cosmos are both of them symbols and expressions of the same hidden reality.” ²

Man as a microcosm contains the macrocosm within him. The structure of his person is expressed in society as the fundamental characteristics of the brahmin, kshatriya, vaishya and shudra. These four “varnas,” writes Sri Aurobindo elsewhere, are in various degrees the characteristics of each human being, man and woman. They are universal properties and should not be confused with the four “castes,” which are no more than their calcified caricature. It is in the human individual and in the human society that we find “the cosmic Purusha” or the divine archetype mirrored.

As the idea of a universal archetype is common to the fundamental wisdom traditions everywhere, so is the idea of the principal four fundamental human characteristics and the ways they are worked out in society. “It is noticeable,” writes Sri Aurobindo, “that both in Europe and in Asia there was a common tendency, which we cannot trace to any close interchange of ideas and must therefore attribute to the operation of the same natural cause and necessity, towards the evolution of a social hierarchy based on a division according to four different social activities [i.e. the varnas]. … The spirit, form and equipoise worked out were very different in different parts of the world according to the bent of the community and its circumstances, but the initial principle was almost identical.” ³ This is, for instance, the reason why in the European Middle Ages we find society dominated by the clergy (brahmins) and the knights (kshatriyas), a social order soon expanded with the merchants (vaishyas). So strong became the presence of the latter, rightly called “the third estate,” that it resulted in the upheaval known as the French Revolution, which was almost immediately followed by the rise of the proletariat (shudras) and their mass movements of socialism and communism.

Thus we may conclude that, according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and the traditions they refer to, there is the presence of a divine archetype resembling the human form above or behind the evolution. The knowledge of this form has been and still is common wisdom in East and West. It is this form – here understood in the philosophical Platonic sense as “idea” – which we find in the course of the evolution of life on Earth gradually expressed in the shape of the human being. This form is also the inspiration of the knowledge at the base of the occult schemata of the world, e.g. the chakras, the chain of being, the astrological structure of the human being, and the sephiroth in the Kabbalah.

Primordial Man

The pure spiritual knowledge is the great treasure heedfully kept in India, and which she is now communicating to the world for its further evolution. Yet this knowledge, though often truncated, has also been a part of other great wisdom traditions through the ages.

“The ideas of the Upanishads,” writes Sri Aurobindo, “can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras and Plato and form the profounder part of Neoplatonism and Gnosticism with all their considerable consequences to the philosophical thinking of the West.” In his remarkable series of articles on the pre-Socratic sage Heraclitus, he writes for instance that in one of Heraclitus’ sayings “we are reminded of the Vedic Fire which is hymned as the upbuilder of the worlds, the secret Immortal in men and things, the periphery of the gods. … We are reminded of the Vedic thunderbolt, that electric Fire, of the Sun who is the true Light, the Eye, the wonderful weapon of the divine pathfinders Mitra and Varuna.” And we read in one of Sri Aurobindo’s letters: “The Vedic Rishis were mystics of the ancient type who everywhere, in India, Greece, Egypt and elsewhere, held the secret truths and methods of which they were in possession as very sacred and secret things, not to be disclosed to the unfit who would misunderstand, misapply, misuse and degrade the knowledge.” ⁴

Garth Fowden describes those wisdom traditions in the following terms: “They were none of them religions of the masses, because all taught that salvation comes through knowledge [‘gnosis’]. Knowledge may be imparted suddenly, by revelation, to whomever the teacher deems worthy, as was the wont of certain Gnostics; or it might be learned by long study as among the Platonists, not a few Gnostics and, it seems, the Hermetists. But however acquired, it was always the possession of an elite. Hence the tendency within these milieux towards the emergence of a two-tier structure, with a small group of teachers, the ‘elect’, taking responsibility for the instruction of a much larger group of what the Platonists and Manicheans appropriately called ‘listeners’.” ⁵

Secrecy on penalty of death was imposed not only by the Pythagoreans but by all mystery cults. A striking illustration is this passage from Apuleius’ Golden Ass: “So listen, and be sure to believe that what you hear is true. I [an initiate] drew near to the confines of death and trod the threshold of Proserpina, and before returning I journeyed through all the elements. At dead of night I saw the sun gleaming with bright brilliance. I stood in the presence of the gods below and the gods above, and worshipped them from close at hand. Notice, then, that I have referred to things which you are not permitted to know, though you have heard about them. So I shall communicate only what can be communicated without sacrilege to the understanding of non-initiates.”

Egypt and Greece

An important though forgotten or disparaged source of much of the spirituality in the ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean was Egypt. This is insufficiently realized because the minds of most Egyptologists have remained closed to spiritual values, forced as they felt to comply with the positivism of their academic environment and the dominant Abrahamic religions. It is only recently that authors like Martin Bernal (Black Athena) and Christos Evangeliou (The Hellenic Philosophy: Between Europe, Asia and Africa) have shown how frequent the exchanges around the eastern Mediterranean were in ancient times, and how deeply Egypt’s highly developed culture, occultism and spirituality had penetrated into pre-classical Greece.

The spirit behind the Egyptian temples, the pyramids and the animal masks of the gods has surfaced around the beginning of the Common Era in writings which are called Hermetica. These hermetic texts gained enormous influence after being rediscovered during the Renaissance, bought by Cosimo de’ Medici and translated by Marsilio Ficino. Long suspected of not being genuine, they have gradually gained acceptance as expressions of the authentic wisdom in such centres of ancient Egypt as Heliopolis, Hermopolis, and the great temples of Luxor and Memphis.

“Or are you ignorant, Asclepius,” one reads in the text of the same name, “that Egypt is the image of heaven? Moreover, it is the dwelling place of heaven and all the forces that are in heaven. It is proper for us to speak the truth, our land is the temple of the world.” And another text in the Codex Hermeticus says: “Hermes often used to say to me that those who read my books will think that they are very simply and clearly written, when in fact, quite on the contrary, they hide the meaning of the words, and will become completely obscure when later on the Greeks will want to translate our language into their own, which will bring a complete distortion and obfuscation of the text. Expressed in the original language, the discourse conveys its meaning clearly; for the very quality of the sounds and the intonation of the Egyptian words contains in itself the force of the things said.” The mantric vibration of the esoteric Egyptian compositions was a sufficient barrier to exclude exoteric outsiders at a time that what we now know as one world was still divided into many worlds.

But what interests us more specifically is the Primordial Human, the cosmic Purusha, of which all humans are the image. What have the hermetic writings to say about this? Their core is that “the essence of Man is the God within,” and that the goal of the initiate is “an actual assumption of the attributes of God, in short: divinization.” The way of Hermes is the way of immortality, and the goal is reached when the purified soul has realized God, “so that the reborn man, although still a composite of body and soul, can be fairly called a god.” (Fowden) Such realizations are not possible without a concrete knowledge of what later will be called the chain of being or the sephiroth, against the background of reincarnation. The possibility of these realizations was what the Egyptian priests carried to the islands and the mainland of primitive Greece, together with the statues of their gods, when they founded the mysteries at Dodona, those of the Kabiroi, and probably most others including Delphi. The theos anèr, the divine Man, seems to have been known also by those people who dedicated their lives to becoming what, as they discovered, they were the living image of.

Gnosticism

Gnosticism, again centred around the eastern Mediterranean, was a spiritual movement of many shades that, like Hermetism, became widespread in the first centuries of the common era. (Christianity first took shape as a gnostic sect.) Yet the thinking assimilated by Gnosticism can be traced back through most of the previous history. Direct influences are discernible of Pythagoranism, Platonism, the ascetic schools referring back to Socrates, and Neoplatonism. Gnosticism also enriched itself with Hermetism, and it has inherited undeniable elements of oriental thought, especially Indian. It should once more be remembered that there were frequent exchanges between the cultures and religions of those times. Persons on a quest of spiritual truth were in most cases also adventurous travellers. And missionaries, e.g. those sent by Emperor Ashoka, were a well-known phenomenon. (There was a Judeo-Buddhist group of Therapeutae in the neighbourhood of Alexandria.)

How close Christianity has been to Gnosticism is shown by the furore with which all remainders of the latter, and there were many, were branded as heretic and inexorably destroyed by the early Christian Church. What remained known of Gnosticism were the quotations of it found in Christian polemical texts – till 1945, that is, when by an incredible coincidence a treasure trove of gnostic texts was found in Egypt, at Nag Hammadi. The texts not burned in the cooking fire of the mother of one of the finders have been deciphered and translated. There were fragments and some complete books of all the sources mentioned in the previous paragraph, and there were also several unknown gospels, the ones that had found no place besides the accepted four in the New Testament.

Essential ideas of the Upanishads can be found also here; in fact, they form the foundation on which Gnosticism has worked out its cosmic and supracosmic vision, albeit with other names and sometimes quite baroque variations. There is a transcendent, ineffable God (the passive Brahman). For reasons surpassing our understanding (his Lila), this God wanted to know himself by manifesting himself, by making himself concrete in the glories of his infinity. His Knowledge and Power of manifestation, the Great Mother, is called by many names in Hinduism as well as in Gnosticism (Eva, Barbelo, Sophia…). All went well in the manifestation of the higher worlds, but through a “mistake” or, as the Mother called it, an “accident,” the creation of the lower world, the one we live in, was entrusted to a Demiurge, a “blind god” (Samael), also called Yadalbaoth.

Here we are back to the basic Gnostic myth, which the Mother confirmed by telling it more than once in her own way, although with the warning that there was a deeper meaning beneath the story as told to children. Because of the ill-begotten creation by the Demiurge, the divine manifestation became divided into two: the greater part, where all worlds and levels of existence were perfect heavens, and the nether part, ruled by the blind god (by the Gnostics also identified with the Yahweh of the Bible), and where there is ignorance, suffering and death. Sometimes souls, sparks of the divine, happen to fall into the nether world, the material hemisphere. Recovery from the fallen state can only be brought about through remembrance of their true, original state, i.e. through knowledge (“gnosis”), revealed to them by a Redeemer.

In Gnosticism the Primeval Man is named Anthropos (man), Protanthropos (first or primal human), Adam or Adamas. The relationships between the spiritual principles are quite often explained in the way of human relationships, as sexual or family ties.

This superficial or exoteric meaning has led to the misunderstandings which rendered Gnosticism suspect, not unintentionally. Yet, names of Man and Woman or Husband and Wife for the absolute Being, who is the creator, and his Knowledge or Power, who is the creatrix, are common to most high religions. In Hinduism, for instance, they are Purusha and Prakriti or Ishvara and Shakti. The principle of the universal manifestation is then their Son, the true and perfect Anthropos or Adamas, divine as his parents are, from whom all things originate, and who is seen as “an incorruptible and endless light.” This “pre-existent man” was none other than the archetypal man perceived by the Mother, or the cosmic Purusha mentioned by Sri Aurobindo. As the light not darkened by matter but at its origin, he is what Sri Aurobindo has called the Supermind or archetypal Superman.

Kabbalah

One of the biblical expressions that have entered into the common language is that “man is created in the image of God.” The interpretation of this saying given in the spiritual and occult traditions rather differs from the way it is commonly understood. For the biblical book of Genesis tells of two ways in which Adam was created. In the one he was at first alone, and God gave him a mate to lighten his solitude; in the other God created Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. The latter version would mean that Adam was man-woman, potentially androgynous, and that the separation of the sexes resulted from an operation upon Adam’s bisexual body.

This becomes meaningful if one knows that the divine Purusha, the Supramental Being at the origin of creation, is the gnostic Adam who is not bi-sexual but a-sexual. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have stressed time and again that the supramental being is asexual, and that the sexes are a means created by Nature on her lower levels to attain her ends. In this way the Genesis myth of the creation of Adam and Eve is incorporated in the basic knowledge of one of the great traditional systems, the Chaldean.

What Sri Aurobindo called “the cosmic Purusha” is also an important element in the great occult system of the Kabbalah, developed mainly in northern Spain and southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries (and which also designed the Tarot). In the Kabbalah the divine archetype is called Adam Kadmon, meaning Primal or Primordial Man, and sometimes also “the High Man” or “the Heavenly Man.” Adam Kadmon is “the embodiment of all divine manifestations,” he is “the creative deity.” In his supernatural body he contains the ten sephiroth, the principles of the manifestation, by whose power the human body too is constructed. Gershom Sholem, the noted authority on the Kabbalah, wrote in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism: “Adam Kadmon is a first configuration of the divine light which flows from the essence of En-Sof [the absolute, self-existent Being] into the primeval space … He therefore is the first and highest form in which the divinity begins to manifest itself. … From his eyes, mouth, ears and nose the lights of the sefiroth burst forth…”

Gnosis in Sri Aurobindo

The wealth of the spiritual and occult traditions in the past is immense and as diverse as the cultural backgrounds against which it developed, which are the one humanity in its various forms. The glimpses of those traditions in the previous paragraphs may illustrate Sri Aurobindo’s reminder that the great dynamic ideas at the basis of the Indian spirituality have been a common possession of humanity’s richest cultures. Much of these wisdom traditions has been misunderstood and often deformed in ridiculous caricature by their modern rediscoverers or commentators. The dominant positivist spirit has no understanding for such wisdom and condemns it with supercilious disdain.

For those acquainted with Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s view of things it will have become clear that the divine Being witnessed by the Gnostics, the Kabbalists, and even in several of the most ancient mysteries, must either be what Sri Aurobindo called the Supermind or something closely related it. Every kind of consciousness is a being, every being is a kind of consciousness. Which is why Sri Aurobindo stated in The Life Divine that “Supermind is Superman.” The Supermind is the intermediary Power between Sachchidananda, i.e. the ultimate attributes of the Godhead as conceivable by the human intellect and spiritual experience, and the mental ranges at the disposal of the human being. It is “the beginning and end of all creation and arrangement, the Alpha and the Omega, the starting point of all differentiation, the instrument of all unification … It has the knowledge of the One, but is able to draw out of the One its hidden multitudes; it manifests the Many, but does not lose itself in their differentiations …” ⁶ The supramental species to succeed the human species in the terrestrial evolution is of the essence of the divine Consciousness and Being here called “Supermind”, and will, in the infinity of time to follow, be as varied and glorious as are the potentialities of the Supermind.

So much aware was Sri Aurobindo of the gnostic tradition and its values that, when writing the Arya, he used the term “gnosis” time and again as equivalent to the term “Supermind.” He noted for instance: “This full power of the consciousness is supermind or gnosis – supermind because to reach it we have to pass beyond and turn upon mind as the mind itself has passed and turned upon life and inconscient matter, and gnosis because it is eternally self-possessed of Truth and in its very stuff and nature it is dynamic substance of knowledge.” ⁷

Gnosis means knowledge, but of a special, higher kind: it is effective knowledge, insight that saves or leads one to the Truth. In the cosmic scheme of the Gnostics it was the knowledge, brought down to them by a Saviour, that would allow them to return to the supra-terrestrial worlds from which they had fallen into the terrestrial world of darkness, suffering and forgetfulness. For Sri Aurobindo and the Mother gnosis is the knowledge of the complete scheme of things which grants the understanding of the next step in the evolution on Earth, and the means to participate in its realization. It is “a growing gnosis lifted beyond our human mentality and partaking of the light and power of the Divine.” ⁸ (The symbol of this gnosis or supermind is the Sun.) Later Sri Aurobindo will use the term gnosis less often, but even in 1950 the Mother said: “The gnostic life is certain.”

An essential difference between the wisdom traditions and Sri Aurobindo’s worldview is that in the former traditions all developments were cyclic. Creation or manifestation ran its course but had no goal, and would start its wheeling again and again ad infinitum. (The Hebrews were the first for whom history had an aim, and therefore a direction and a sense.) In many of those traditions the universe was divided into a good and a bad half, for ever. They were Manichean, a view which may have originated among the Zoroastrians. In such a cosmic constellation individual beings can be saved when lost in the bad world, but never that world itself. What is explained as a plunge of the Godhead into its contrary cannot be corrected. The world is evil and only an escape into a Hereafter or into Nothing can put an end to the cycles of suffering. Sri Aurobindo on the contrary, in his “complete and catholic affirmation,” has drawn the unconditional conclusion from the Vedantic statement that “All is That” – if All is That, the world too must be That, therefore it must be intrinsically good and have a sense.

Some of the main elements of Sri Aurobindo’s integral synthesis evidently stem from Vedic and Vedantic roots, but he was also thoroughly aware of the great non-Indian wisdom traditions and has integrated them in the formulation of his experience. On the other hand, Sri Aurobindo’s synthetic view illuminates the knowledge and profundity of the wisdom traditions. To them belonged great seers, mystics, and what one would now call yogis. Among them were, in those bygone times, our brothers and sisters in the quest for the Truth and a truly meaningful life. The riches of the wisdom traditions fascinate anybody who has the patience and the perceptivity to study and understand them. And knowledge of them puts the importance of the Aurobindian revolution in perspective.

Positivist and Spiritual Evolution

The central theme of this talk is that the macrocosm, and in it the human being as the microcosm, are brought about by a divine creative Force above and behind them, which Sri Aurobindo calls “Supermind.” What Sri Aurobindo called Supermind, and what he and the Mother discovered through their own experience, was partially known in the great wisdom traditions under various names such as the Cosmic Purusha, Protanthropos, Adamas or Adam Kadmon, and the Primordial Man (“Supermind is Superman”). While in the traditions this knowledge remained limited and often deformed within the context of their cosmic vision, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother completed it in an unconditional revalidation of the Earth, as part of the supramental manifestation, and the evolution of Life on it.

Such an interpretation of the origin of Life on planet Earth and explanation of the evolution of Life is, of course, totally unacceptable, not to say absurd, to the positivist biological sciences in the present day. With Darwin the biological sciences have tried to adapt their findings to the materialistic and mathematical tenets of the physical sciences. In this they followed the spirit of their times, the nineteenth century, when, as one author puts it, God gradually disappeared like the smile of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, and Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God resounded through the vaults of the Western mind.

Today this mentality has not softened among some of the most prominent savants and widely read publicists. Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, wrote: “Only one causal force produces evolutionary change in Darwin’s world: the unconscious struggle among individual organisms to promote their own personal reproductive success – nothing else, and nothing higher.” And Richard Dawkins made his famous proclamation: “It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution [meant is Darwinian evolution], that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” Alister McGrath comments on this attitude: “Some might draw the conclusion that Darwinism encourages agnosticism. Far from it: for Dawkins, Darwin impels us to atheism [actually to anti-theism]. It is not merely that evolution erodes the explanatory potency of God, it eliminates God altogether.”

This “scientific” conclusion concerning evolution and the human being is in keeping with the positivist premises. “There is no reason to single out the human line as special, except for our chauvinistic interest in it. … There is no way in which we can claim to be ‘better’ than Aegyptopithecus [an early monkey], or the miocene apes, only different,” writes John Gribbin. Scott Atran could not agree more: “Human beings are accidental and incidental products of the material development of the universe, almost wholly irrelevant and readily ignored in any general description of its functioning.” (It might be noted here that, according to the latest paleontological findings, the origin of Homo sapiens and even that of his closest relatives, the big apes, remains unknown.)

If the animosity with which the aforementioned authors, and many others, condemn and belittle any form of non-materialism as animism, mysticism, hallucination and simply mental aberration shows one thing, it is that none of them have any notion of what they are attacking. Some of them, like Daniel Dennett, candidly confess as much. They are not aware that the God and the religions which they declare to be pests to humanity belong within the so-called “Abrahamic” tradition, by which the Western societies are still profoundly influenced. Of the wisdom traditions and the oriental spiritualities, with their countless generations of seers, saints, yogis and spiritual masters, and with their immense treasures of knowledge, they have no idea.

The spirit of faith has, as its source and touchstone, the spiritual experience. “The ancient Indians through their yogic insight found the idea of similar evolution, which the modern scientists are finding out by observation and research. In the Tantras this kind of evolution has been described in detail,” writes Sri Aurobindo. And: “In the old Indian versions of this theory evolution, heredity and rebirth are three companion processes of the universal unfolding, evolution the progressional aim, rebirth the mean method, heredity one of the physical conditions.” ⁹

According to Sri Aurobindo’s scheme of things, the creative Supermind has unfolded itself in the immense hierarchic range of worlds which he calls the involution, from the highest Supermind itself all the way down to Matter, and below Matter to the dark Inconscient. We remember that, at the request of the Great Mother and by a special intervention of the manifesting Divine, a recovery of the lost Godhead became possible. In the succeeding climb upwards of the evolution, we Homo sapiens, the mental being, are somewhere halfway up on the ladder, which is a gradation of consciousness. But every step in the ascension necessitates a response from the corresponding level in the already existing hierarchy of worlds. The evolution and the forms it takes are determined from on high, and ultimately from the Supermind, the creative Being emanating (as rendered in the sephiroth, the chakras and the chain of being) the structures of the macro- and microcosm. “For the evolution proceeded in the past by the upsurging, at each critical stage, of a concealed Power from its involution in the Inconscience, but also by a descent from above, from its own plane, of that Power already self-realized in its own higher natural province.” ¹⁰ “That is what we call evolution which is an evolution of Consciousness and an evolution of the Spirit in things and only outwardly an evolution of species.” ¹¹

In one of her Entretiens (1957) the Mother spoke as follows: “According to spiritual and occult knowledge, consciousness precedes form, consciousness by self-concentration produces its forms. Whereas, according to the materialist idea, it is form which precedes consciousness and makes it possible for consciousness to manifest. For those who have some knowledge of the invisible worlds and a direct perception of the play of forces, there is no possible doubt: it is necessarily consciousness which produces a form in order to manifest. The way things are arranged on earth, it is quite certainly a consciousness of a higher order which penetrates a form and helps to transform it, so that this form may become – either immediately or through successive generations – capable of manifesting that consciousness. For those who have the inner vision and knowledge, this is absolutely beyond doubt. It is impossible for it to be otherwise. But those who start from the other end, from below, will not admit it. But, all the same, it is not for ignorance to dictate knowledge to wisdom! … Conception precedes manifestation and expression.”

“A theory of spiritual evolution,” writes Sri Aurobindo, “is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution and physical life-evolution [e.g. the Darwinian theory]; it must stand on its own inherent justification: it may accept the scientific account of physical evolution as a support or element, but the support is not indispensable. The scientific theory is concerned only with the outward and visible machinery and process, with the detail of Nature’s execution, with the physical development of things in Matter and the law of development of Life and Mind in Matter; its account of the process may have to be considerably changed or may be dropped altogether in the light of new discovery, but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evolution, and evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul’s manifestation in material existence.” ¹²

We can only now begin to appreciate how clear and detailed Sri Aurobindo’s knowledge of the physical as well as of the spiritual elements of evolution was. When he wrote the Arya, from 1914 till 1921, and when later he revised some of its contents for publication in book form, his spiritual knowledge seemed often to disagree with the ever changing scientific findings and hypotheses, and therefore to be incongruous. Today, however, his evaluation of the life in plants and the mind in animals is being validated in practically every new issue of the science magazines. The missing link is still missing, though now under the name of “common ancestor.” Punctuated equilibrium, the sudden appearance of new species, became a fashionable biological term only in 1972, when the like-named theory was launched by Eldredge and Gould. That the human species has hardly if at all evolved, as evidenced by some of the splendid paleolithic cave paintings from 40,000 years ago, is now commonly accepted. The age of the neolithic civilizations is constantly pushed back, and the existence of previous civilizations, which disappeared from the surface of the Earth without a trace, is on the verge of becoming an acceptable hypothesis. “Intelligent design” (not to be confused with creationism), the inevitable conclusion that the “irreducible complexity” of Nature’s workings cannot but be the planned result of an Intelligence, will be for some time to come the hot issue between positivist science and less dogmatic viewpoints. All this was already present and articulated in the writings of Sri Aurobindo, and in many of the “French classes” of the Mother, decennia ago, but an informed mental predisposition is needed to discern it there.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s synthetic, integral vision is also an approach of absolute realism, because its norm is Truth. Spirituality is not a matter of seeking refuge in the margins of life, but of accepting and confronting it in all its aspects, big and small, pleasant and painful. For such is how the Cosmic Purusha has made us, and such is how It has made the world in which our souls have chosen to incarnate. “[The most ancient Vedanta] is the best previous foundation of that which we seek now to rebuild and although, as with all knowledge, old expression has to be replaced to a certain extent by new expression suited to a later mentality and old light has to merge itself into new light as dawn succeeds dawn, yet it is with the old treasure as our initial capital or so much of it as we can recover that we shall most advantageously proceed to accumulate the largest gains in our new commerce with the ever-changeless and ever-changing Infinite.” (Sri Aurobindo) ¹³

Addendum on the Cosmic Purusha

“In a famous hymn of the Rig-Veda (X.90), the ultimate creative singularity is envisioned as a macranthropos or giant man, called purusha. This primordial superbeing is described as having ‘a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet’. The purusha pervades the world and transcends it by ‘ten fingers’. Only one quarter of the macranthropos can be found in the realm of creation, while three quarters are said to be immortal in the heavenly domain.

“Through the purusha’s self-sacrifice the world was created. His mind is said to have been given to the Moon; his eyes to the Sun; his breath to the air element; his navel to the midspace; his head to the sky; his feet to the earth; and so on. Even the structure of ancient India’s society was thought to have been preordained by his self-sacrifice, since the purusha’s mouth gave rise to the brahmin estate; his arms to the warrior estate; his thighs to the people at large; and his feet to the servile estate.

“The symbolic representation of the universe in the shape of the Cosmic Man found expression in a distinctive approach to architecture, sculpture, and literature. The purpose of all human creation was not only to preserve the unity of the macranthropos but also to recapitulate the purusha’s original creative sacrifice that produced the cosmos itself. More than that, all human activity – whether sacred or secular (which is really a modern distinction) – was to be modelled on the Cosmic Man. The very purpose of life was to know the great mystery of existence, which is the mystery of the purusha.”

Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley:

In Search of the Cradle of Civilization, p. 219.