From Man Human to Man Divine

XII

The Ever-Ascending March of Man

Sri Aurobindo on Man's Evolutionary Destiny

"An animal creation crept and ran

And flew and called between the earth and sky,

Hunted by death but hoping still to live

And glad to breathe if only for a while.

Then man was moulded from the original brute.

A thinking mind had come to lift life's moods,

A keen-edged tool of a Nature mixed and vague,

An intelligence half-witness, half-machine.

An opening looked up to spheres above

And coloured shadows lined on mortal ground

The passing figures of immortal things;

A fragile human love that could not last,

Ego's moth-wings to lift the seraph soul,

Appeared, a surface glamour of brief date

Extinguished by a scanty breath of Time;

Joy that forgot mortality for a while

Came, a rare visitor who left betimes,

And made all things seem beautiful for an hour,

Hopes that soon fade to drab realities.

And passions that crumble to ashes while they blaze

Kindled the common earth with their brief flame.

A creature insignificant and small

Visited, uplifted by an unknown Power,

Man laboured on his little patch of earth

For means to last, to enjoy, to suffer and die.

A spirit that perished not with the body and breath

Was there like a shadow of the Unmanifest

And stood behind the little personal form

But claimed not yet this earthly embodiment.

Assenting to Nature's long slow-moving toil,

Watching the works of his own ignorance,

Unknown, unfelt the mighty Witness lives

Page 243

---

And nothing shows the Glory that is here.

A Wisdom governing the mystic world.

A Silence listening to the cry of Life,

It sees the hurrying crowd of moments stream

Towards the still greatness of a distant hour.

Unseen here act dim huge world-energies

And only trickles and currents are our share.

Our mind lives far off from the authentic Light

Catching at little fragments of the Truth,

In a small corner of infinity,

Our lives are inlets of an ocean force.

Our conscious movements have sealed origins

But with those shadowy seats no converse hold;

No understanding binds our comrade parts;

Our acts emerge from a crypt our minds ignore.

Our deepest depths are ignorant of themselves;

Even our body is a mystery shop;

As our earth's roots lurk screened below our earth,

So lie unseen our roots of mind and life.

Our springs are kept close hid beneath, within;

Our souls are moved by powers behind the wall.

A thinking puppet is the mind of life:

Its choice is the work of elemental strengths

That know not their own birth and end and cause

And glimpse not the immense intent they serve.

These unwise prompters of man's human heart

And tutors of his stumbling speech and will,

Movers of petty wraths and lusts and hates

And changeful thoughts and shallow emotion's starts,

These slight illusion-makers with their masks,

Painters of the decor of a dull-hued stage

And nimble scene-shifters of the human play,

Ever are busy with this ill-lit scene.

Ourselves incapable to build our fate

Only as actors speak and strut our parts

Until the piece is done and we pass off

Into a brighter Time and subtler Space.

Page 244

---

Thus they inflict their little pigmy law

And curb the mounting slow uprise of man,

Then his too scanty walk with death they close.

This is the ephemeral creature's daily life.

As long as the human animal is the lord

And a dense nether nature screens the soul,

As long as intellect's outward-gazing sight

Serves earthy interest and creature joys,

An incurable littleness pursues his days,

Ever since consciousness was born on earth,

Life is the same in insect, ape and man,

Its stuff unchanged, its way the common route.

Still even in man the plot is mean and poor.

A gross content prolongs his fallen state;

His small successes are failures of the soul,

His little pleasures punctuate frequent griefs:

Hardship and toil are the heavy price he pays.

For the right to live and his last wages death.

Trivial amusements stimulate and waste

The energy given to him to grow and be.

His little hour is spent in little things.

A brief companionship with many jars,

A little love and jealousy and hate,

A touch of friendship mid indifferent crowds

Draw his heart-plan on life's diminutive map.

He is satisfied with his common average kind;

Tomorrow's hopes and his old rounds of thought,

His old familiar interests and desires

He has made a thick and narrowing hedge

Defending his small life from the Invisible;

His being's kinship to infinity

He has shut away from him into inmost self,

Fenced off the greatnesses of hidden God.

He is the crown of all that has been done:

Thus is creations's labour justified;

Page 245

---

This is the world's result, Nature's last poise!

And if this were all and nothing more were meant,

If what now seems were the whole of what must be,

If this were not a stade through which we pass

On our road from Matter to eternal Self,

To the Light that made the world, the Cause of things,

Well might interpret our mind's limited view

Existence as an accident in Time,

Illusion or phenomenon or freak,

The paradox of a creative Thought

Which moves between unreal opposites,

Inanimate Force struggling to feel and know,

Matter that chanced to read itself by Mind,

Inconscience monstrously engendering soul.

A mind looks out from a small casual globe

And wonders what itself and all things are.

Such is our scene in the half-light below.

This is the sign of Matter's infinite,

This the weird purport of the picture shown

To Science the giantess, measurer of her field,

As she pores on the record of her close survey

And mathematises her huge external world,

To Reason bound within the circle of sense,

Or in Thought's broad impalpable Exchange

A spectator in tenuous vast ideas,

Abstractions in the void her currency

We know not with what firm values for its base.

Only religion in this bankruptcy

Presents its dubious riches to our hearts

Or signs unprovisioned cheques on the Beyond:

Our poverty shall there have its revenge.

Our spirits depart discarding a futile life

Into the black unknown or with them take

Death's passport into immortality.

Yet was this only a provisional scheme,

A false appearance sketched by limiting sense,

Mind's insufficient self-discovery,

Page 246

---

An early attempt, a first experiment.

This was a toy to amuse the infant earth;

But Knowledge ends not in these surface powers

That live upon a ledge in the Ignorance

And dare not look into the dangerous depths

Or to stare upward measuring the Unknown.

There is a deeper seeing from within

And, when we have left these small purlieus of mind,

A greater vision meets us on the heights

In the luminous wideness of the Spirit's gaze.

At last there wakes in us a witness Soul

That looks at truths unseen and scans the Unknown;

Then all assumes a new and marvellous face.

The world quivers with a God-light at its core,

In Time's deep heart high purposes move and live,

Life's borders crumble and join infinity.

Our seekings are short-lived experiments

Made by a wordless and inscrutable Power

Testing its issues from inconscient Night

To meet its luminous self of truth and Bliss.

In the symbol pictures drawn by word and thought,

It seeks the truth to which all figures point:

It looks for the source of Light with vision's lamp;

It works to find the doer of all works,

The unfelt Self within who is the guide,

The unknown Self above who is the goal.

All is not here a blinded Nature's task;

A Word, a Wisdom watches us from on high,

A Witness sanctioning her will and works,

An Eye unseen in the unseeing vast;

There is an Influence from a Light above,

There are thoughts remote and sealed eternities;

A mystic motive drives the stars and suns.

In this passage from a deaf unknowing Force

To struggling consciousness and transient breath

A mighty supernature waits on Time.

The world is other than we now think and see,

Page 247

---

Our lives a deeper mystery than we have dreamed;

Our minds are starters in the race to God,

Our souls deputed selves of the Supreme.

In this investiture of fleshly life

A soul that is a spark of God survives

And sometimes it breaks through the sordid screen

And kindles a fire that makes us half-divine.

In our body's cells there sits a hidden Power

That sees the unseen and plans eternity,

Our smallest parts have room for deepest needs;

Even in our skeptic mind of ignorance

A foresight comes of some immense release,

Our will lifts towards it slow and shaping hands.

Each part in us desires its absolute:

Our thoughts covet the everlasting Light,

Our strength derives from an omnipotent Force,

And since from a veiled God-joy the worlds were made

And since eternal beauty asks for form

Even here where all is made of being's dust,

Our hearts are captured by ensnaring shapes,

Our very senses blindly seek for bliss.

And when that greater Self comes sea-like down

To fill this image of our transience,

All shall be captured by delight, transformed:

In waves of undreamed ecstasy shall roll

Our mind and life and sense and laugh in a light

Other than this hard limited human day,

The body's tissues thrill apotheosised,

Its cells sustain bright metamorphosis.

This little being of Time, this shadow-soul,

This living dwarf figure-head of darkened spirit

Out of its traffic of petty dreams shall rise.

Its shape of person and ego face

Divested of this mortal travesty,

Like a clay troll kneaded into a god,

New-made in the image of the eternal Guest,

Page 248

---

It shall be caught to the breast of a white Force

As if reversing a deformation's spell,

Released from the black magic of the Night,

Renouncing servitude to the dark Abyss,

It shall learn at last who lived within unseen

And seized with marvel in the adoring heart

To the enthroned Child-Godhead kneel aware,

Trembling with beauty and delight and love.

But first the spirit's ascent we must achieve

Out of the chasm from which our nature rose.

The soul must soar sovereign above the form

And climb to summits beyond mind's half-sleep;

Our hearts we must inform with heavenly strength,

Surprise the animal with the occult god.

Then kindling the gold tongue of sacrifice,

Calling the powers of a bright hemisphere,

We shall shed the discredit of our mortal state,

Make the abysm a road for heaven's descent,

Acquaint our depths with the supernal Ray

And cleave the darkness with the mystic Fire."

(From Sri Aurobindo's epic-poem Savitri, Book II, Canto V, pp. 158-172.)

Page 249