A companion volume to 'The Destiny of the Body,' this explores man as a species, his past beginnings, present achievements & failures, his evolutionary future.
VIII
The Age of Anxiety
The twentieth century has been called the 'Age of Human Predicament'. The man of our epoch has been suffering from an all-pervading sense of anxiety with its background of frustration, maladjustment and inner disintegration. The art of the time, and more comprehensively its literature, reflect in various ways manifestations of this constant undercurrent of anxiety. Thomas Hardy's novels have given a poignant picture of mankind's predicament in the universe. Hardy saw mankind 'swept from darkness to darkness, like a straw on a torrent, by a ruthless, mysterious and ignoble force.' And W.H. Auden (whose first master was Hardy), in his long poem Age of Anxiety, gives this account of modern man:
...crazed we come and coarsened we go
Our wobbling way: there's a white silence
Of antiseptics and instruments
At both ends, but a babble between
And a shame surely.
In fact, those who are born in this age feel the loss of faith; they are the spiritually displaced; they are the culturally uprooted; they are the traditionless. The old gods, the old verities and the old values are dying out. The conventions and convictions of centuries are dissolving like a dream. Faith, hope and charity are held to belong to empty churches. There is a void to-day in men's minds which dogmatic religions are unable to fill. Modern man feels himself to be completely debarred from the transcendent world and from the fulfilment of his metaphysical and religious needs and desires. The consciousness of such an inability induces a crisis of intellectual despair and of metaphysical sickness. Man feels as though paralysed by dread of nothingness. He finds himself to be in a state of giddiness and of a tragic feeling of a situation without issue. It is not without some profound import that T.S. Eliot, the 'dry poet', sings of the spiritual deserts of our time.
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In this age of human predicament, in this epoch of spiritual malady, the Heideggerian Angst has taken possession of the minds of men. Modern man is verily in a state of utter alienation.
The Crisis of the Alienated Man
The man of our epoch has been described as an alienated man. As Frederick Copleston has aptly remarked, modern man is alienated from the Divine; he is alienated from the world around him; he is alienated from the society he lives in; he is alienated even from his own self. God, if He exists, is hidden from him; the physical cosmos is indifferent to him; society is divided and stands always on the brink of an abyss; man is a riddle even to himself and can find in himself no final reassurance.
Modern man is indeed alienated from God. Many people find it very difficult to believe in Him. Some seem to themselves to be conscious of the absence rather than of the presence of God. Even if he exists, He appears to hide Himself rather than reveal Himself. Or perhaps He is doomed to remain for ever the Deus absconditus!. In despair, modern man cries out with Goetz1:
"I implored and begged for a gesture; I addressed my messages to Heaven: no response! Heaven does not know even my name. I used to ask myself all the time: what could I possibly be in the eyes of God? Now I know the answer: Nothing. God does not see me, God does not hear me, God does not know me. Dost thou see this void above our heads? This is God... Dost thou see this pit in the earth? This is again God. Silence, this is God. Absence, this is God. God, it is the loneliness of men... If God exists, man is Nothing."
In this mood of utter anguish, modern man is taught with insistence in terms of imposing polysyllables that religion is the result of the sense of guilt that arises from the Oedipus Complex and that various major religious notions are 'patently infantile... incongruous with reality."2 On the other hand, he is made to believe that:
1.A character in Jean-Paul Sartre's play, Le Diable et le Bon Dieu.
2.Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, quoted by G. Grisson and C.H. Gibbs-Smith in Ideas, p. 334.
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"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the kindliness of a heartless world, the soul of souless circumstance. Religion is the opiate of the people. The removal of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for its real happiness... Criticism of religion disillusions man so that he may think, act, and shape the world as one who is disillusioned and come to full understanding, so that he may move on his own axis and thus be his own sun. Religion is but the false sun which revolves round him while he is not yet fully self-aware."3
As a result of all such teachings, the platform of man's faith has collapsed and he is now living in what Martin Heidegger has termed the 'Epoch of Indigence'. In this age of spiritual poverty modern man lives in total oblivion of Divinity, and what is, according to Heidegger, still more tragic is the fact that even the consciousness of this 'absence' of the Divine has progressively volatilised in the hearts of men, so much so that they no longer suffer this sense of want. In Sartrian hyperbole, God is dead to modern man!
Modern man is alienated from the world around him. The physical cosmos seems to him alien in the sense that it is indifferent to man's ideals and hopes and strivings. It is not the geocentric, and indeed anthropocentric, cosmos of earlier days but a vaster universe in which human existence and history appear as transitory and casual events. As a result, modern man suffers from a sense of miserable insecurity in relation to a universe whose awful and indifferent vastness has overwhelmed his imagination through the popularization of the findings of scientists. "Man is in one sense a king and in another sense a castaway. He is a king because he is the highest known being in the universe, and at the same time he is a castaway just because he is unique — man's wishes, aims, and hopes find no response - no, not even an echo - in the rest of the universe; and, compared with non-human nature's vast, blind momentum, man's power - even the collective power of human society - is pitifully puny. So this king, with all his unparalleled gifts and potentialities finds himself in the tragic position of being marooned in a kingdom which is not, after all, his own — a kingdom whose ways are not man's ways and whose thoughts, if it
3. Karl Marx, Introduction to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy, quoted by Grisson and G. Smith, op. cit..
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has any thoughts, are not man's thoughts. For man, the world into which he is born without his leave being asked is a world that, for him, is meaningless and merciless."4 Modern man fails to grasp the real significance of this unintelligible world and in this heartless cosmos he longs in vain to find a heart.
Yet if man, apparently alienated from God and set in an alien world, turns for reassurance to human society, he finds a riven society, a society divided and in ferment. He sees powerful forces threatening him as a free individual and striving to subject him to a crushing tyranny extending even to the mind. In this age of all-round decomposition, forces are at work that threaten the breakdown of the social structure as he knows it. Modern man can hardly find in society at large and in social tradition a sure answer to the questions which perplex him day and night.
Furthermore, the individual has become an enigma to himself. He has been told, for example, that matter is the unique cosmic reality and spirit only an epiphenomenon, a self-creation of matter in the process of its development from the simple to the more and more complex combinations of its basic elements. Thus, 'consciousness' does not, and cannot, act since it has no energy of its own; it is merely 'given off' by the workings of the brain — the 'ineffectual ghost of an entity.'
He has also been told that he is purely a mechanical being, a creature made up of automatic reflexes. Thus all his apparently purposeful actions are nothing but reflex reactions to stimuli; for, has it not been scientifically demonstrated that a frog could perform apparently purposeful actions even when its brain and with it, presumably, its 'consciousness' had been totally removed? — "a frog with half a brain having destroyed more theology than all the doctors of the Church with their whole brains could build up again!"5
Modern man has been reminded that his conscious life is the expression of hidden subconscious drives, impulses and urges, and the self, as it exists for consciousness, is only a composite formed of disparate tendencies.
Then, again, on the threshold of this 'Age of Anxiety', Darwin taught that man evolved from the humblest form of life by a
4.Arnold J. Toynbee, "Modern View of Man" in Man's Right to Knowledge, p. 2
5.Quoted by John Passmore in Hundred Years of Philosophy, p. 79.
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process of natural selection that was quite automatic; and, in particular, "instead of Adam, our ancestry is traced to the most grotesque of creatures."
Finally, the problem of free-will has been given a new twist by the Marxist assertion that man is not, after all, such a free agent as he is supposed to be; he is not altogether the 'captain of his own soul' and capable of making his own choices; for man never is and never can be anything except the product of economic conditions; his philosophy, his code of ethics, his religion, even his tastes and preferences, are not, as he thinks, his free choice, but simply what he must believe because of the environment in which he has grown up.6
All these various assertions have coalesced to undermine man's self-assurance and left him wondering what he really is. But the thinking individual cannot so easily reconcile himself to this vision of man whether it goes by the name of Destiny, Necessity or Scientific Law. Thus modern man breaks out in an unrestrained multi-protest against all that demands his complete and unchallenged submission.
The 'Free' Man Protests
In this background of poor, humanity's afflicted will struggling in vain with ruthless destiny, we may recall the attitude of Dostoievsky's hero in Letters from the Underworld who refuses to remain passive before the wall that bears the inscription, 'Necessity'; he would rather break his head against such a wall than let it obstruct his path.
Modern man's protest is the free individual's protest against all tendency to depersonalisation. Thus his first protest is against that sort of logical analysis that purports to declare that he is nothing more than the factors in which he can be analysed and whatever is more is just a phantom or at best a quality. Is an active agent nothing more than a quality?
Modern man protests against all forms of monism or totalitarian philosophy that threaten the dignity, independence and individual value of the human person. His is the protest of the personal against the impersonal. He protests against the naturalist's assertion:
6. Joseph Wood Krutch, "The Mode View of Man", in Man's Right to Knowledge, p. 28.
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"You are a transitory resultant of physical process"; he protests again against the absolutist Idealist when the latter declares: "You are an unreal appearance of the Absolute". For both these combine to persuade him that personality is no more than an illusion.
Modern man opposes the Hegelian doctrine that human personality vanishes into the Family, the Community, the Absolute. He detests this 'rarefication of existence', this 'auto-destruction of his personal self. And in modern times when the absolute supremacy of the State has considerably reduced individual liberty and, in certain countries, the individual citizen has been reduced to serfdom, he protests against the notion that he is nothing more than the meeting-point of social influences and that he would but think and act as society wants him to think and act. Totalitarian attempts to standardise man's thoughts and actions are repugnant to him. He raises his voice of protest when he is told that there can be no rights for the individual, as the individual is nothing; he is 'a multitude of one million divided by one million', and the whole existing generation is only 'manure for the future.'
Finally, modern man voices his protest against the 'typing' of the human being by society. He reacts against that particular view of man and his world according to which individuality is a defect and man discovers his true nature only if he allows himself to be fully absorbed into a function - so becoming a philosopher, a guardian, a citizen. In the modern functionalisation of life, the tendency of the individual is "to appear both to himself and to others as an agglomeration of functions"7; a man is not primarily a human person, he is an embodied function, a railwayman, a clerk, a civil servant, a schoolmaster, a trade-union official, whatever it may be. Marxism functionalises man in one way, Freudianism in another; in either case the freedom and uniqueness of the human person are overlooked.
Man Looks to Philosophy
Now in this background of the anguished protest of the 'free' individual against totalitarianism and impersonal functionalisation, to whom or to what should modern man turn for a way of
7. Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existence, p. 1.
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salvation? Who can offer a message of succour and hope to this alienated individual thrown back on himself and yet unable to find in himself the answers to the problems that beset him?
Belief in traditional religions has waned and this has been followed by doubt concerning the absolute character and universal applicability of religious values and of moral teachings. At the same time it is now realised more clearly than ever that science cannot provide man with a normative morality or with a mystic fervour to lean upon. So, it is no matter for surprise that modern man looks for an integrated view of his whole existence, which would act as a guide not merely for thinking but also for action in this perplexing world.
Indeed, in recent times, man has tended to become the central theme of almost all philosophical thinking. The outlook of this present age is essentially humanistic. The world has become impatient with every philosophy that cannot give primacy to man and his insistent problems.
But what is this human individual? He has a multiple essence. He is in nature, he is in history. He belongs not merely to the material realm but also to the biological; not merely to the biological, but also to the social. For he is indeed a socio-moral creature: he is a member of association, bearing rights and duties. And finally he belongs not merely to the social but also to the spiritual. It may well be that there are other realms to which he belongs, of which he is not aware as yet.
Thus it becomes imperative that man the multi-dimensional being should be treated integrally in all his aspects. But everywhere in current philosophical thinking, whether in Materialism or in Absolute Idealism, in philosophical anthropology or in modern social philosophies, one finds the mistake of the fallacy of reductionism, the mistake of reducing to one aspect all the rest and thus offering an all-too-partial one-sided picture of man. It is no wonder, then, that modern man fails to find his heart's fulfilment in any of the prevalent philosophies. Indeed, he is haunted by a lack of faith in himself, in his destiny and also in the destiny of the world.
This is an age of unbelief. It is an age not so much unlit by belief as lacking the very capacity to believe. But, as one thinker has pointed out, in this period of all-round disintegration "when life itself has become dim and its very forms are stiffening, there are
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always some intense natures to whom it is intolerable that there should not already be new and greater faiths in sight. We are too profoundly religious to be able to endure this precarious predicament."8
Message of Divine Manhood
But modern man need not live any more in this 'precarious predicament'. For if we care to look around and scan the horizons of thought, we shall see that there already exists an integral philosophy of life that embraces in its synthetic sweep Man, Cosmos and the Transcendent. This is Sri Aurobindo's Yoga-Philosophy of Divine Humanism.
This philosophy offers man a new hope to live by and a glorious ideal to strive after. For, it is not concerned with man in his actuality alone; it concerns itself equally, or even more, with man in his potentiality, with man as he is bound to evolve into. For it is above all a forward-looking philosophy that wants to pull man out of the morass in which he has placed himself and spur him on to the marvellous adventure of self-discovery and self-exceeding. And it is, for that matter, no mere system of thought, it is above all a philosophy of action, a practical guide to integral living. Not only does this philosophy reveal to mankind the glorious vistas of the future awaiting the probe of aspiring men; but, what is still more important, it shows to blinded humanity the proper path to tread to reach this goal.
The present essay is an attempt to show, although in brief, how all those problems that are troubling most the mind and heart of modern man find their solution in this Philosophy of Integralism. Is there at all a meaning behind this colossal world-existence? Of what worth is the individual in this immense cosmic drama? Does his existence bear any relevance here? Is there any sense and purpose behind the march of humanity, and if so, what is it? What should be the goal of man the individual and of the human race? Is there any truth in the notion of human free-will, or is man a mere creature of circumstances? What is meant, after all, by God or the Absolute? Does He exist at all? And if He exists, is there any way of encountering Him? What should be the proper relation of man
8. Quoted in Man's Right to Knowledge, p. 14.
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the individual to other individuals and to the community of men? How can he realise his age-old dream of three basic harmonies: cosmical harmony between man and world, social harmony between man and man and biopsychical harmony within man himself? And finally what about Death, that dreadful, ineluctable eventuality? Does it not set to nought and mock with a derisive laughter all hopes and aspirations, toils and strivings of the individual man?
Let us discuss all these and related questions in the light of Sri Aurobindo's thought.
The World and Its Riddle
The very first question that baffles modern man is as regards the meaning of terrestrial life and of human existence. Or perhaps it seems absurd to him to ask for the sense of the world. In fact, Albert Camus, the philosopher of "the absurd", makes this the theme of his philosophy. In his play Le Malentendu, a representative character exclaims: "The world itself is not reasonable and I am entitled to say so, I who have tasted of the world, from creation to destruction." For Camus, as for many other persons of this age, the world and human life are absurd, or at least they appear as absurd, once their irrational and meaningless character is clearly perceived. "Get up, tramway,'four hours' work, a meal, sleep, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday in the same rhythm... One follows this path without difficulty most of the time. One day, however, arises the question 'Why?""9 The human reason is naturally impelled to seek for the meaning of the world and of human life and history in particular; but, according to Camus, it can find no meaning in either of them. "This world in itself is not reasonable, one can say that of it. But the absurd is the confrontation of this individual world with the desperate desire for clarity, the appeal of which resounds in the depths of man.... The absurdity arises from this confrontation of the human appeal with the irrational silence of the world.... The irrational, the human nostalgia and the absurd which arises from their tête-à-tête, these are the three personages of the drama."10
But this view of the world is admittedly repugnant to man. In
9. Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe.
10. Ibid.
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Camus's play Caligula, Cherea asserts that he rejects the world as Caligula sees it, "because I want to live and to be happy. I believe that one can neither live nor be happy if one pushes the absurd to all its conclusions.... To lose one's life is a little thing and I shall have the courage to do so if necessary; but to see the meaning of this life dissipated, to see our reason for existing disappear, that is what is unbearable. One cannot live without meaning."11
But, Sri Aurobindo assures us, human existence, and for that matter world-existence, have an important meaning and aim: they are neither a purposeless illusion nor a fortuitous accident. Nor is world-existence a bundle of illogicalities simply because our mind and reason fail to grasp its total significance. After all, our mind is still an imperfect instrument groping after true knowledge; it is neither global in its operations nor integral in its probe. Human reason accustomed to deal with the finite cuts the whole reality into segments and laysstress, sometimes on one part, sometimes on another, as if they constituted the entire reality. But it is not altogether inconceivable that what appear as contradictions and elements of irrationality to a reason based on the finite and partial view may not be contradictions to a vision or a larger reason based on the infinite. And, as a matter of fact, this cosmos with all its contents has grown out of the action of the Infinite, and the consciousness to which the origin and movement of this colossal phenomenon belongs and to which they stand "as it were automatically justified... is a cosmic and not an individualised human intelligence; it sees in larger spaces, it has another vision and cognition, other terms of consciousness than human reason and feeling."12
Thus, to understand fully the world-process of the Infinite and the Time-process of the Eternal, to discover the reality and significance of our existence as conscious beings in the material universe, it is altogether imperative that our consciousness outgrows the domain of the finite reason and finite sense and awakens to a global reason and spiritual sense in touch with the consciousness of the Infinite and responsive to the logic of the Infinite, "whose sequences are not the steps of thought but the steps of existence". For then and then alone our way of knowing would be appropriate to that which is to be known and we would come to
11.Albert Camus, Caligula, p. 35.
12.Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 28.
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see that world-existence is not a mere magic void of all reason; there is a logic in it, because there are relations and connections infallibly seen and executed. But this logic is not of the mind or of the intellect, it is a spiritual and supramental reason that is operative here in this cosmos. In fact, what is magic to our finite reason is nothing but the logic of the Infinite.13
Now, there have been in the field of thought three main conceptions which we can form of existence. First, the theory of the sole reality of Matter asserts that consciousness is only an operation of material energy in matter, and our existence here is an inconsequential freak of Matter itself or of some Energy building up Matter. There is a blind mechanical necessity of some kind, the nature of which would be that of a fixed processus bound to certain initial and general determinations of which all the rest is the consequence. Second, our existence is the arbitrary fantasy of a supracosmic Creator. A free infinite Being or God somehow or other creates out of something or out of nothing, in reality or only in conception, a world of the necessity of his will in which all things, all creatures are bound as the victims of a necessity, although internal and spiritual, to some kind of arbitrary predestination. Third, world-existence is an inexplicable freak of the Spirit, which possesses no basic reality; it has an illusory significance which vanishes into nothingness as soon as true knowledge dawns.
It is easy to see that all these three conceptions pushed to their logical conclusion deny any essential significance to the world or to human life. In fact, they are only partial approaches and embody partial truths, and therefore cannot take into adequate account or explain the total rhythm of this world-phenomenon. What is needed is some largest Truth in which all these and other seeings find their justification and get reconciled. What is called for is some highest knowledge which illumines, integralises, harmonises the significance of all knowledge and gathers together all experience in the Truth of a supreme and all-reconciling oneness. As we shall see, Sri Aurobindo's vision of the world and of man answers fully to these demands.
The present appearance of our terrestrial being is a veiled and partial figure, and to limit ourselves to that first figure of the
13. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 329.
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moment, to the present formula of an imperfect humanity and base our world-conceptions on this appearance alone, as if that were an abiding truth for all times, is to exclude our divine possibilities. We have to bring a wider meaning into our human life and manifest in it the much more that we secretly are. We have to recognise the purport of our whole complex human nature in its right place in the cosmic movement and give its full legitimate value to each part of our complex being and many-sided aspiration; we have to find out the key of their unity as well as their difference; and this finding must be by a synthesis and integration. But this finding of the sense of human life as well as that of the world-existence — wherein "it is impossible to ignore the drive of set purpose, the guidance of apparent blind tendency, the sure eventual or immediate coming to the target sought"14 — can be made only in the bosom of an integral spiritual illumination. And Sri Aurobindo's Yoga-Philosophy arises out of such an integral vision and not merely out of an ineffectual speculative mind. Thus, this philosophy embodies not simply a well-reasoned structure of thought but, above all, the Truth of existence.
Let us now see what are these fundamental truths of the reality and its manifestation that Sri Aurobindo's integral vision reveals to us.
Key to the World-Enigma
"There is a Permanent above the transience of this manifested world we live in;"15 there exists a supreme Consciousness beyond and above "this limited consciousness in whose narrow borders we grope and struggle";16 there is an Absolute beyond and behind every relative form and figure in this universe. The Non-Being at the one end and the universe at the other are not negations that annul this supreme Existence: they are rather different states of this absolute Real Existence, its obverse and reverse affirmations.
This pure Existence, this Brahman, this "omnipresent Reality is the truth of all life and existence whether absolute or relative, whether corporeal or incorporeal, whether animate or inanimate, whether intelligent or unintelligent; and in all its infinitely varying and even constantly opposed self-expressions, from the contradictions
14.Sri Aurobindo. The Life Divine, p. 89.
15,16. Sri Aurobindo, On Yoga, II, Tome One, p. 25.
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nearest to our ordinary experience to those remotest antinomies which lose themselves on the verges of the Ineffable, the Reality is one and not a sum or concourse. From that all variations begin, in that all variations consist, to that all variations return. All affirmations are denied only to lead to a wider affirmation of the same Reality. All antinomies confront each other in order to recognise one Truth in their opposed aspects and embrace by the way of conflict their mutual Unity. Brahman is the Alpha and the Omega. Brahman is the One besides whom there is nothing else existent."17
This absolute Reality is in its nature indefinable: there is no experience by which It can be limited, nor is there any conception by which It can be defined.18 It is ineffable by mental thought and language; It is beyond the grasp of the ineffectual probe of separative mental consciousness. But there is a spiritual consciousness, a knowledge by identity which can seize this reality in its fundamental aspects and its manifold powers and forms and figures.
This Absolute is then "the ineffable Reality overtopping and underlying and immanent and essential in all that we can call existence or non-existence". This world is a manifestation of the Real who has created it or rather manifested it in His own infinite Being: the creation is nothing but the manifestation of the Timeless Eternal in Time Eternity. Each thing created is a form of that manifest Divine Existence, each is divine in itself by the spiritual presence within it, whatever its appearance, its figure or character in Nature. The supreme Truth-Aspect thus manifesting itself founds all things and secretly supports and pervades all things. It is "the absolute beginning, end and continent"19 of everything in manifestation. All relatives, all aspects and all semblances are the supreme Brahman, the Absolute. In fact, Brahman is at once the Transcendent and incommunicable, the supracosmic Existence that sustains the cosmos, the Cosmic Self that pervades all things, but also the self of each individual and can be discovered by the individual even here in the terrestrial embodiment.
But this primary, ultimate and eternal Existence, this Brahman,
17.Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 33.
18.Ibid., p. 33.
19.Ibid., p. 91.
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this Sat "is not merely bare existence, or a conscious existence-whose consciousness is crude force or power; it is a conscious existence the very term of whose being, the very term of whose consciousness is bliss.... In other words, that which has thrown itself out into forms is a triune Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, Sachchidananda, whose consciousness is in its nature a creative or rather a self-expressive Force capable of infinite variation in phenomenon and form of its self-conscious being and endlessly enjoying the delight of that variation. It follows that all things that exist are what they are as terms of that existence, terms of that conscious force, terms of that delight of being. Just as we find all things to be mutable forms of one immutable being, finite results of one infinite force, so we shall find that all things are variable self-expression of one invariable and all-embracing delight of self-existence.In everything that is, dwells the conscious force and it exists and is what it is by virtue of that conscious force; so also in everything that is, there is the delight of existence and it exists and is what it is by virtue of that delight."20
Thus, the world is real because of the Reality that secretly sustains it; the world is real because it is in its essence nothing else than the self-manifestation of the supreme Brahman. But by no account can it be described in its actual state as the perfect expression of Sachchidananda. In fact, as it is, it is strongly marked with inadequacy, imperfection, suffering and evil. Incon-science and ignorance and not Consciousness; death and imperma-nence and not the permanent Existence; pain and suffering and not the essential Delight seem to be the very badge of worldly existence. But the question is: do these negative attributes constitute the essential character and the very condition of all manifestation, or are they merely besetting circumstances, phenomena of passage preparing for and leading to some other glorious and perfect expression that is still in the womb of the future? In other words, "Is this world an unchanging succession of the same phenomena always or is there in it an evolutionary urge, an evolutionary fact, a ladder of ascension somewhere from an original apparent Inconscience to a more and more developed consciousness, from each development still ascending, emerging on highest heights not yet within our normal reach. If so, what is
20. The Life Divine, pp. 91-92.
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the sense, the fundamental principle, the logical issue of that progression?"21
Now Sri Aurobindo's vision of integral existence testifies to "such a progression as a fact - to a spiritual and not merely a physical evolution."22 The supreme Reality, here in this manifested world, has taken upon itself the aspect of a Becoming in Time, and this Becoming is essentially evolutionary in its character. There is a truth of that reality, which is manifesting, working itself out, evolving here, and that is the significance and meaning of our being and life. "The physical evolution is only an outward sign, the more and more complex and subtle development of a supporting structure, the growing exterior metre mould of form which is devised to sustain in matter the rising intonations of the spiritual harmony. The spiritual significance finds us as the notes rise; but not till we get to the summit of the scale can we command the integral meaning of that for which all these first formal measures were made the outward lines, the sketch or the crude notation. Life itself is only a coloured vehicle, physical birth a convenience for the greater and greater births of the Spirit."23
The progressive revelation of a great, transcendent, luminous Reality with the multitudinous relativities of the worlds as means and material, condition and field - this, then, is the meaning of the universe.24 And it is the evolution of consciousness and life as distinguished from form-evolution - that is the real significance of the whole affair; for all this evolution is in its essential truth a growing of the Self in material Nature to the conscious possession of its spiritual being.
But evolution carries with it, in its intrinsic sense, in the idea at its root, the necessity of a previous involution. For the spiritual process of evolution is a self-creation, not a making of what never was, but a bringing out of what was implicit in the Being and inherent in the very beginning. In fact, what is happening in the world is that the ignorance is seeking and preparing to transform itself by a progressive illumination of its darkness into the Knowledge that is already inherent and concealed within it. And in this process of progressive self-revelation, all that evolves already existed involved, passive or otherwise active, but in either
21, 22. Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 25.
23.Sri Aurobindo, The Problem of Rebirth (1969 ed.), p. 75.
24.Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p, 42.
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case concealed from us in the shell of material Nature. "Matter could not have become animate if the principle of life had not been there constituting Matter and emerging as a phenomenon of life-in-matter; life-in'matter could not have begun to feel, perceive, think, reason, if the principle of mind had not been there behind life and substance, constituting it as its field of operation and emergent in the phenomenon of a thinking life and body: so too spirituality emerging in mind is the sign of a power which itself has founded and constituted life, mind and body and is now emerging as a spiritual being in a living and thinking body.... Spirit is a final evolutionary emergence because it is the original involutionary element and factor. Evolution is an inverse action of the involution: what is an ultimate and last derivation in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution; what was original and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last and supreme emergence."25 Thus the significance of terrestrial existence is concealed at the outset by the involution of the Spirit, the Divine Reality, in a dense material Inconscience. Here in this material world or at its basis Sachchidananda has hidden himself in what seem to be his opposites:."a Void, an infinite of Non-Existence, an indeterminate Inconscient, an insensitive blissless Zero"26 out of which everything has to evolve. When this inevitable evolution — this emergence of the involved Being and Consciousness — begins its course of ascent, it first develops, as it is bound to develop in the inverse order, Matter and a material universe; in Matter, Life appears and living physical beings; in Life, Mind manifests and embodied thinking and living beings. Thus also, the Delight of existence involved at the base emerges from the original insen-tience into the contrary forms of pleasure and pain. And this is the actual state of the evolutionary ascent with Mind and Man as its highest products.
But Sachchidananda has yet to emerge fully in manifestation. Therefore this evolution, this spiritual progression cannot stop short with Mind and with the imperfect mental being called Man. Mind is too imperfect an expression and man too hampered and burdened a creature to be the last terms of evolution. So, in the nature of things, evolution is bound to proceed and bring out in its ascending march a far greater consciousness than what we call Mind, a supreme Truth-consciousness — or what Sri Aurobindo
25.Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 853.
26.Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle, p. 158.
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calls Supermind — that by its manifestation will liberate not partially, not imperfectly as at present, but radically and wholly the imprisoned Divine.27 This Supermind manifesting the Spirit's self-knowledge and whole knowledge will bring about, by an inherent necessity and inevitability, the dynamic manifestation here of the divine Existence, Consciousness and Delight of Existence. It is this that is the significance of the plan and order of the terrestrial evolution and it is this necessity that has determined and must determine in future all its steps and degrees, its principles and its process.
Such is then the evolutionary significance attached by Sri Aurobindo to cosmic existence.The self-effectuation of the Spirit in the world, a great and long self-weaving in Time, is the ultimate secret of evolution and inner sense of this universe. For in Sri Aurobindo's integral vision, it is true that "the supra-cosmic Reality stands as the supreme Truth of being; to realise it is the highest reach of our consciousness. But it is this highest Reality which is also the cosmic being, the cosmic consciousness, the cosmic will and life: it has put these things forth, not outside itself but in its own being, not as an opposite principle but as its own self-unfolding and self-expression. Cosmic being is not a meaningless freak or phantasy or a chance error; there is a divine significance and truth in it: the manifold self-expression of the spirit is its high sense, the Divine itself is the key of its enigma. A perfect self-expression of the spirit is the object of our terrestrial existence."28
And this self-expression of the Spirit in the world has, as we have seen above, three distinct phases: an involution of Sachchida-nanda in the Inconscience is the beginning; an evolution in the ignorance with its play of the possibilities of a partial developing knowledge and delight is the middle — man's imperfection is nothing but the sign of a transitional state, a growth not yet completed; finally, a consummation and a supreme fulfilment of the Divine Existence-Consciousness-Bliss in manifestation is the culmination.
To summarise in Sri Aurobindo's own illuminating words: "A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling spirit, is then the key-note, the central significant
27.Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, p. 26.
28.Sri Aurobindo. The Life Divine, p. 679.
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motive of the terrestrial existence. This significance is concealed at the outset by the involution of the Spirit, the Divine Reality, in a dense material Inconscience; a veil of Inconscience, a veil of insensibility of Matter hides the universal Consciousness-Force which works within it, so that the Energy, which is the first form the Force of creation assumes in the physical universe, appears to be itself inconscient and yet does the works of a vast occult Intelligence. The obscure mysterious creatrix ends indeed by delivering the secret consciousness out of its thick and tenebrous prison; but she delivers it slowly, little by little, in minute infinitesimal drops, in thin jets, in small vibrant concretions of energy and substance, of life, of mind, as if that were all she could get out through the crass obstacle, the dull reluctant medium of an inconscient stuff of existence. At first she houses herself in forms of Matter which appear to be altogether unconscious, then struggles towards mentality in the guise of living Matter and attains to it imperfectly in the conscious animal. This consciousness is at first rudimentary, mostly a half subconscious or just conscious instinct; it develops slowly till in more organised forms of living Matter it reaches its climax of intelligence and exceeds itself in Man, the thinking animal who develops into the reasoning mental being but carries along with him even at his highest elevation the mould of original animality, the dead weight of subconscience of body, the downward pull of gravitation towards the original Inertia and Nescience, the control of an inconscient material nature over his conscious evolution, its power for limitation, its law of difficult development, its immense force for retardation and frustration. This control by the original Inconscience over the consciousness emerging from it takes the general shape of a mentality struggling towards knowledge but itself, in what seems to be its fundamental nature, an Ignorance. Thus hampered and burdened, mental man has still to evolve out of himself the fully conscious being, a divine manhood or a spiritual and supramental supermanhood which shall be the next product of the evolution. That transition will mark the passage from the evolution in the Ignorance to a greater evolution in the Knowledge, founded and proceeding in the light of the Superconscient and no longer in the darkness of the Ignorance and Inconscience."29
29. Sri Aurobindo. The Life Divine, pp. 824-25.
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