The Destiny of the Body

Chapter V

The Evolutionary Waking

"The Inconscient is a sleep or a prison, the conscient a round of...the wanderings of a dream: we must wake into the super-conscious where all darkness of night and half-lights cease in the self-luminous bliss of the Eternal."

(Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 640)

Following the purposeful involutionary plunge of Sachchidananda into "the Inconscient's boundless sleep"¹, commences the 'obverse manifestation', the inevitable process of evolution, by which the Consciousness-Force involved in the form and activity of inert material substance gradually wakes again and brings out by degrees all the hidden powers inherent in "the original self-existent spiritual Awareness."²

Evolution is no doubt an inverse action of the involution, but not in the sense of "a withdrawing, a subtilization, plane after plane, leading to a reabsorption into the One Unmanifest."³ It takes place in Matter itself; it is in essence the gradual emergence and heightening of the force of consciousness in the manifest being, leading to an ever greater manifestation of the divine Consciousness-Force in the manifested material universe. Thus in this progressive evolutionary awakening of the involved Consciousness and Force and its ascent from principle to principle, from grade to grade, from light to more light, "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."⁴

So it is that at the end of the involutionary phase of manifestation when Sachchidananda lay self-shrouded in 'the inconscient swoon of things', there took place 'a slow reversal's movement' and was begun the process of 'unmasking of the Spirit in

¹ The expressions put within quotation marks and bearing no specific references are all taken from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri.

² The Life Divine, p. 552.

³ Sri Aurobindo, The Future Evolution of Man, p. 146.

⁴ The Life Divine, p. 853. (Italics ours)

Page 184

---

things.' Out of the Inconscient, Existence appeared in a first evolutionary form as substance of Matter, and an apparently inconscient Energy

...made in sleep this huge mechanical world¹

Thus

In this whirl and sprawl through infinite vacancy

The Spirit became Matter and lay in the whirl,

A body sleeping without sense or soul...

Still consciousness was hidden in Nature's womb,

Unfelt was the Bliss whose rapture dreamed the worlds.

Being was an inert substance driven by Force.²

'Lost in slumber, mute, inanimate', the material universe 'awaited life and sense and waking Mind.' The evolutionary nisus was at work to waken the 'earth-nature's heavy doze'. So, Matter's sleep was stirred by 'buried memories recalling the lost spheres' from which was taken

The wide and prone leap of a godhead's fall.³

Then,

A little the Dreamer changed his poise of stone.⁴

And

A scene was set for Nature's conscious play.

Then stirred the Spirit's mute immobile sleep;

The Force concealed broke dumbly, slowly out.

A dream of living broke in Matter's heart.⁵

Thus, in Matter Life appeared and living physical beings. Consciousness, asleep and non-apparent in Matter, emerged at first in the guise of 'tranced vibrations' of plant life:

An inarticulate sensibility...

Ran through its somnolent torpor and there stirred

¹ Savitri, Book II, Canto I, p. 101.

² Ibid., Book II, Canto V, pp. 154-55.

³ Ibid., Book II, Canto I, p. 99.

^{4 5} Ibid., Book II, Canto V, p. 156.

Page 185

---

A vague uncertain thrill, a wandering beat,

A dim unclosing as of secret eyes.¹

In this way

A godhead woke but lay with dreaming limbs;

Her house refused to open its sealed doors...

At first she raised no voice, no motion dared:...

Only she clung with her roots to the safe earth,

Thrilled dumbly to the shocks of ray and breeze

And put out tendril fingers of desire;...

Absorbed she dreamed content with beauty and hue.²

Then came a higher type of awareness, the desire-sense and the desire-thrill of the primary animal forms:

At last the charmed Immensity looked forth:

Astir, vibrant, hungering, she groped for mind;

Then slowly sense quivered and thought peered out;

She forced the reluctant mould to grow aware.³

But the evolutionary process was not to stop at this first imperfect formulation of conscient life. Consciousness strove towards self-finding through successive forms of animal organisms more and more adapted to its completer expression. These "luminous stirrings prompted brain and nerve" and

An animal creation crept and ran

And flew and called between the earth and sky.⁴

Thus the awakening Consciousness-Force manifested in developing animal forms "a life-mind perception...and at its back an obscure consciousness-sight and feeling of things."⁵ Then, under a further compulsion of the imprisoned consciousness struggling to come out to the surface, there emerged, topping everything else so far achieved, a conscious mentality in the form of mentally perceptible sensation and conceptual thought and reason comrehending and apprehending and combining its data of knowledge.

^{1 2 3} Savitri, Book II, Canto V, p. 157.

⁴ Ibid., p. 158.

⁵ The Life Divine, p. 610.

Page 186

---

Thus, "man was moulded from the original brute" and evolutionary Nature, in and through man, looked for the first time overtly upon the world and wondered at "the works wrought in her mystic sleep":

A Mind began to see and look at forms

And groped for knowledge in the nescient Night.¹

But the travail of the emerging consciousness has not yet ended; for, the awakening so far achieved in evolution is very much maimed and incomplete, and our journey back out of 'our long self-loss' in 'the swoon of the Inconscience' towards a superconscient Light and Sight, has not yet been accomplished. "In man the energising Consciousness [appearing] as Mind...is still a partial and limited, not an integral power of itself, but a first conceptive potentiality and promise of integral emergence is visible. That integral emergence is the goal of evolving Nature."²

Thus the cosmic sleep and the somnambulist dream-state have by no means terminated with man and his mind-consiousness. As a matter of fact, man's present condition is at best a state of half-sleep and half-waking, a state of veritable somnambulist torpor with 'inconstant blink of mortal sight.' For, spiritually, sleep denotes a poise of consciousness in which we are ignorant of the fundamental truths of existence — existence whether individual, cosmic or transcendent — and of the Reality that is at the basis of all things; while the dream state signifies that particular status in which we may be aware of this "reality" but only in a distorted, disfigured and topsy-turvy way.³ Man, thus, proves to be a creature asleep in most parts of his being and dreaming in the little in which he has gained partial awakening. As a matter of fact,

Our mind lives far from the authentic Light

Catching at little fragments of the Truth,⁴

and our normal human awareness which is really no better than

¹ Savitri, Book II, Canto I, p. 101.

² The Life Divine, p. 684.

³ Cf. anyathā grhṇataḥ svapno nidrā tattvamajānataḥ. (Gaudapadacharyya, Māṇḍukya-kārikā)

⁴ Savitri, Book II, Canto V, p. 161.

Page 187

---

'a bright body of ignorance' is, because of the very circumstance of a separative ego-centred existence in a material, spatial and temporal universe, reducible to a state of sevenfold blindness. Thus,

"We are ignorant of the Absolute which is the source of all being and becoming; we take partial facts of being, temporal relations of the becoming for the whole truth of existence, — that is the first, the original ignorance. We are ignorant of the spaceless, timeless, immobile and immutable Self; we take the constant mobility and mutation of the cosmic becoming in Time and Space for the whole truth of existence, — that is the second, the cosmic ignorance. We are ignorant of our universal self, the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, our infinite unity with all being and becoming; we take our limited egoistic mentality, vitality, corporeality for our true self and regard everything other than that as not-self, — that is the third, the egoistic ignorance. We are ignorant of our eternal becoming in Time; we take this little life in a small span of Time, in a petty field of Space, for our beginning, our middle and our end, — that is the fourth, the temporal ignorance. Even within this brief temporal becoming we are ignorant of our large and complex being, of That in us which is superconscient, subconscient, intraconscient, circumconscient to our surface becoming; we take that surface becoming with its small selection of overtly mentalised experiences for our whole existence, — that is the fifth, the psychological ignorance. We are ignorant of the true constitution of our becoming; we take the mind or life or body or any two of these or all three for our true principle or the whole account of what we are, losing sight of that which constitutes them and determines by its occult presence and is meant to determine sovereignly by its emergence their operations, — that is the sixth, the constitutional ignorance. As a result of all these ignorances, we miss the true knowledge, government and enjoyment of our life in the world; we are ignorant in our thought, will, sensations, actions, return wrong or imperfect responses at every point to the questionings of the world, wander in a maze of errors and desires, strivings and failures, pain and pleasure, sin and stumbling, follow a crooked road, grope blindly for a changing goal, — that is the seventh, the practical ignorance."¹

¹ The Life Divine, pp. 654-55.

Page 188

---

We see then that, although undoubtedly 'the crown of all that has been done so far', man with his 'intelligence half-witness, half-machine' cannot possibly be the ultimate product of the process of evolution. For his

Mind's insufficient self-discovery,

An early attempt, a first experiment¹

is no better than '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.²

Mind-consciousness appears thus to be only an intermediate stage

...through which we pass

On our road from Matter to eternal Self,

To the Light that made the worlds, the Cause of things.³

The evolutionary awakening of consciousness has thus still to proceed until Supermind or Gnosis, the Power of Truth-Consciousness of Sachchidananda, emerges in evolution to become the governing principle of embodied material existence. For, then, the manifested being will be in secure possession of an integral consciousness and an integral Sight; there will then be no more a state of sleep but instead a state of permanent wakefulness, no longer a dividing line of demarcation compartmentalising the inner and outer domains of existence, no more any difference between the subjective and objective provinces of experience:

¹ Savitri, Book II, Canto V, pp. 167-68.

²Ibid., p. 168.

³Ibid., p. 166.

Page 189

---

all will then be fused into an unadulterated Unity, the evolving being will be fully aroused from the 'stone-grip' of an involutionary sleep, and the cycle of self-oblivion and subsequent self-discovery by the soul descended into ignorance will be accomplished. Sachchidananda will then stand fully revealed in his robe of Matter and

Nature steps into the eternal Light.

Then only ends the dream of nether Life.¹

But that Golden Dawn, the overt emergence of the Supra-mental Consciousness, heralding the annulment of the nescient sleep of Night, is still lying in the womb of the future. In the meantime, does man, the mind-conscient being, possess no possibility whatsoever of contacting those superconscient as well as subliminal ranges of being which rise high above and penetrate deep behind that particular psychological stratum to which we ordinarily ascribe the name of mentality? As we shall presently see, the situation is not so desperate as it appears at first sight, for we shall meet with the paradox that whereas our waking state is in fact a state of sleep, the sleep of our physical being opens the doors to a greater waking. And therein lies the most important function of sleep with normally untapped and undreamt-of possibilities.

¹ Savitri, Book II, Canto V, p. 154.

Page 190