A metaphysical & scientific study of the evolutionary prospects of the human body in the light of Sri Aurobindo's vision & assurance of the body's divine destiny.
Chapter IX
His knowledge an inview caught unfathomable,
An outview by no brief horizons cut:
He thought and felt in all, his gaze had power.
(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book II, Canto XV, p. 301)
The thing to be gained is the bringing in of a Power of Consciousness (the Supramental) not yet organised or active directly in earth-nature, even in the spiritual life, but yet to be organised and made directly active.
(Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, p. 109)
The overhead ascension is not indispensable for the usual spiritual purposes, — but it is indispensable for the purposes of this Yoga. For its aim is to become aware of and liberate and transform and unite all the being in the light of a Truth-Consciousness which is above and cannot be reached if there is no entirely inward-going and no transcending and upward-going movement.
(Ibid., pp. 179-80)
The Integral Yoga of Transformation has for its objective not merely the supreme realisation of Sachchidananda, but His divine self-expression, the flawless manifestation of the active Brahman, in our divinely transfigured embodied earthly existence.
But the question is: how to realise this goal of our Yoga and what it is that may possibly be the medium of these realising ascensions and world-possessing descents? For, in the actually elaborated evolutionary status of human consciousness, mind represents the highest cosmic principle and power of consciousness so far organised in man the mental being. But this mind-consciousness, even in its highest flights, is no more than a movement in the Ignorance: it is not inherently Truth-Conscious. And hence it is altogether incapable of possessing or even attaining to the Divine; at best it can immobilise itself and rest satisfied with
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Reflections of the sun in waters still1
But it is far from our goal to be contented with "bright or shadowy photographs or films of a distant Reality"2 that the mind can at most achieve for us: we want to ascend to the supreme Reality in full awareness and bring down its dynamic glories and splendours in the play of our waking state.
But we cannot but take note of the fact of spiritual experience certified by most seekers of the Truth that an immense hiatus seems to exist between the supramental Truth-Consciousness and the Mind-Consciousness we normally know of. And unless this seemingly unbridgeable gulf intervening between the two is satisfactorily bridged, we have to forego our dream.
...to plant on earth the living Truth
Or make of Matter's world the home of God.3
In that case, we shall have no other choice than to take a superconscient leap from the station of Mind into the Unknowable beyond and to agree willy-nilly to the following trenchant conclusion of the incredulous Darkness persuading Savitri to abandon her task of world-transformation:
He who would turn to God must leave the world;
He who would live in the Spirit, must give up life;
He who has met the Self, renounces self.
The voyagers of the million routes of mind
Who have travelled through Existence to is end,
Sages exploring the world-ocean's vasts,
Have found extinction the sole harbour safe.4
Indeed, mind fails as an instrument and medium both for our conscious ascension into the Infinite as well as for the dynamic descent and manifestation of the supreme powers of the Spirit. As has been so well said, mind cannot arrive at identity with the Absolute, it can only disappear into it in a swoon or extinction, into St.
1Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, p. 659.
2The Life Divine, p. 272.
3Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, p. 646.
4Ibid., p. 635.
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John of the Cross's 'divine Darkness of the mystic Night.' Also, as a medium of divine expression and action, the mind plane cannot in its very nature allow of the supreme workings native to the divine Consciousness-Force. "The mind spiritualised, purified, liberated, perfected within its own limits may come as near as possible to a faithful mental translation, but...this is after all a relative fidelity and an imperfect perfection....The mind...can take its [the Infinite's] suggestions and act them out in its own way, a way always fragmentary, derivative and subject to a greater or less deformation, but it cannot be itself the direct and perfect instrument of the infinite Spirit acting in its own knowledge." 1
It becomes imperative then for the fulfilment of our divine destiny upon earth that man should be able to raise himself much above the plane of mind and normally and permanently, even in his waking state, live in the supernal heights of the Spirit, also to manifest and organise in his embodied existence new planes and powers of consciousness other than and superior to mind, so that these may offer themselves as the proper media and instrumentation through which the divine Will and Wisdom can freely act and self-express.
But between the Mind and the Spirit, are there other superior planes of spiritual consciousness — not merely static and introspective, but creative and dynamic — which man can possibly hope to ascend? And is it at all possible for man to devlop and organise these supernal planes in his waking consciousness so much so that he may outgrow and transcend his present mental status and become something more than human?
The answer and hope lie in the process of evolutionary elaboration of manifested existence here upon the face of the earth. The results so far achieved by Evolution are indeed truly striking: it is surely a long march from the insentient Matter to the self-conscious mind of man. But who can say that the evolutionary nisus has exhausted itself with the emergence of man the mental being, so that the only possible course left for the embodied soul is how to make an exit from this not too perfect world-existence and take the transcendent leap into the Unknowable and Unmanifest?
As a matter of fact, the evolutionary oestrus is even now very much at work and it is not liable to annul itself until and unless the divine Sachchidananda is fully manifested here in our embodied
1 The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 755-56. (Italics ours)
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existence and 'this earthly life become the life divine.'1 For such is the original intended meaning of creation, this is the secret spiritual sense of the evolutionary march. Thus Savitri answered to refute the conjecture of the sophist Power of doubt and denial:
How sayst thou Truth can never light the human mind
And bliss can never invade the mortal's heart
Or God descend into the world he made ?
If in the meaningless Void the creation rose,
If from a bodiless Force Matter was born,
If Life could climb in the unconscious tree,
If green delight break into emerald leaves
And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower,
If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell,
And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain,
And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh,
How shall the nameless light not leap on men,
And unknown powers emerge from Nature's sleep?
Even now hints of a luminous Truth like stars
Arise in the mind-mooned splendour of Ignorance;
Even now the deathless Lover's touch we feel:
If the chamber's door is even a little ajar,
What then can hinder God from stealing in
Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul ?"2
But the skeptic may still rejoin that the past is no sure guide to the future and plausibility is never equivalent to certainty. So, after establishing the plausibility of our goal of divine transformation of the waking existence, we must now specially point out the steps following which this goal can be realised in practice. And for this we must rely, surely not on philosophical speculation or logical surmisings, but solely on the verdict of the ever-ascending and ever-deepening spiritual exploration of our being and becoming. For, this alone has any real validity in this field.
Now, there are two types of movements of our consciousness through which it becomes possible for us to have access to the deeper and superior reaches of our being a movement inward and an upward ascension.
1Savitri, Book XI, Canto I, p. 711.
2Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, pp. 648-49.
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By the first movement of inward penetration, we seek to break asunder the wall separating our subliminal self from our present surface existence, leave the surface consciousness and live entirely in the realm of our inner mind, inner life, inner subtle-physical and finally in the inmost soul of our being. This inmost soul or the psychic being is the Purusha in the secret heart, hṛdye. guhāyām, a portion of the Divine Self supporting the individual nature.
Now, an enlargement and completion of our actual evolutionary status becomes the very first consequence of such an inwardization of consciousness. For, our inner being is found to possess a dynamism and potentialities much superior to those of our surface mind and life and body. As a -matter of fact, "it is capable of a direct communication with the universal forces, movements, objects of the cosmos, a direct feeling and opening to them, a direct action on them and even a widening of itself beyond the limits of the personal mind, the personal life, the body, so that it feels itself more and more a universal being no longer limited by the existing walls of our too narrow mental, vital, physical existence. This widening can extend itself to a complete entry into the consciousness of cosmic Mind, into unity with the universal Life, even into a oneness with universal Matter."1
But this first result is not all that can be desired. For, however cosmic in scope and perfected in dynamism, our being remains still embedded in the field of diminished cosmic truth, if not in total cosmic Ignorance. If we would transcend the limitations of our present evolutionary status, we must seek to become conscious in what is now superconscient to us and ascend to the native heights of the Spirit not at present accessible to our waking consciousness. Thus, "the psychic movement inward to the inner being, ...must be completed by an opening upward to a supreme spiritual status."2
Now, this is the second — and from our point of view, much more momentous — consequence of an accomplished inward living. For, it is found that once the entry into the inner subliminal realms is successfully undertaken, the inner being exerts a growing pressure on the "strong hard and bright lid of mind, — mind constricting, dividing and separative"3 — that clouds the superconscient from our waking consciousness. This pressure be-
1The Life Divine, p. 276. (Italics ours)
2Ibid, p. 910.
3Ibid., p. 910.
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comes in the end so great that the lid of mind wears thin, opens and disappears, and our consciousness becomes privileged to have a vision of the supernal things. What we see by this upward opening is "an Infinity above us, an eternal Presence or an infinite Existence, an infinity of consciousness, an infinity of bliss, — a boundless Self, a boundless Light, a boundless Power, a boundless Ecstasy."1
But even this 'wide awareness from below' is not sufficient. We must make an actual ascension to the height of the spirit above. Fortunately, this too is an alternative or subsequent result of the inward living. Our consciousness rises up towards the reaches of our being, much beyond the present mental level.
But here a very serious difficulty supervenes and unless this is successfully remedied in time, one may be very well led away from the path of divine transformation of Nature into the silent immobility of the Transcendent and Unmanifest.
Indeed, since the heights to which our consciousness attains in its upward ascension are in general superconscient to our mind, the latter fails to remain awake there and hence considers these ascents as only luminously blank. Thus, our mind-consciousness is tempted to effectuate a short-cut and take a straight jump to the Transcendent. On this line, "the first most ordinary result is a discovery of a vast static and silent Self which we feel to be our real or our basic existence....There may be even an extinction, a Nirvana both of our active being and of the sense of self into a Reality that is indefinable and inexpressible....It is possible to remain in a Nirvana of all individuality, to stop at a static realisation or, regarding all the cosmic movement as a superficial play or illusion imposed on the silent Self, to pass into some supreme immobile and immutable status beyond the universe."2
But fortunately this is not the only possible line of supernormal spiritual experience: the withdrawal from all participation in the world-existence and the immergence or extinction into the Unmanifest is not the only spiritual destiny decreed for the human soul. A supreme divine return from the verge of Nirvana into the world-play is equally possible and this with the undiminished splendours and potencies of all the spiritual wealth amassed at the summits. The choice is indeed hard and difficult. For, the ultimate
1 The Life Divine, p. 911.
2 Ibid., pp. 276-77.
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and definitive withdrawal into the Infinite and Eternity is too alluring a prospect to be easily rejected by the ascending soul. To have instead 'the supernal birth' one must have
...trod along extinction's narrow edge
Near the high verges of eternity.1
This double alternative and the difficulty of choosing between the two have been beautifully depicted in the following passage of Sri Aurobindo's Savitri:
She had risen up from body, mind and life;
She was no more a Person in a world,
She had escaped into infinity.
.........
Only some last annulment now remained,
Annihilation's vague indefinable step:
A memory of being still was there
And kept her separate from nothingness:
She was in That but still became not That.
This shadow of herself so close to nought
Could be again self's point d'appui to live,
Return out of the Inconcievable
And be what some mysterious vast might choose.
Even as the Unknowable decreed,
She might be nought or new-become the All,
Or if the omnipotent Nihil took a shape
Emerge as someone and redeem the world.
Even, she might learn what the mystic cipher held,
This seeming exit or closed end of all
Could be a blind tenebrous passage screened from sight,
Her state the eclipsing shell of a darkened sun
On its secret way to the Ineffable.
Even now her splendid being might flame back
Out of the silence and the nullity,
A gleaming portion of the All-Wonderful,
A power of some all-affirming Absolute,
A shining mirror of the eternal Truth
To show to the One-in-all its manifest face,
1 Savitri, Book II, Canto XV, p. 300.
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To the souls of men their deep identity.
Or she might wake into God's quietude
Beyond the cosmic day and cosmic night
And rest appeased in his white eternity.1
But once we set aside the exit-solution as not conforming to our goal and try instead to become aware in those supernal realms where we could not remain awake before, we find that our consciousness rises to those ascending heights of the Spirit where its immobile status is but the necessary foundation for a greatly potent and luminous dynamism. Once the power to remain awake develops in us, once we rise out of the sphere of mortal mind and look deep and high and far, we discover the splendours of a graded series of planes and powers of consciousness — an intervening spiritual mind-range — serving as links and bridges between the now normal waking mind and 'the native heights of supramental and pure spiritual being.'
It is in these 'radiant altitudes' of the Spirit that "we find the secret we are seeking, the means of the transition, the needed step towards a supramental transformation; for we perceive a graduality of ascent, a communication with a more and more deep and immense light and power from above, a scale of intensities which can be regarded as so many stairs in the ascension of Mind or in a descent into Mind from That which is beyond it."2
In this incessant ascending gradation through which our consciousness rises towards the supramental Truth-Consciousness, four principal ascents may be distinguished. These gradations may be broadly described as 'a series of sublimations of the consciousness' through what Sri Aurobindo has termed Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmind; "there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis.... All these degrees are gnostic in their principle and power; for even at the first we begin to pass from a consciousness based on an original Inconscience and acting in a general Ignorance or in a mixed Knowledge-Ignorance to a consciousness based on a secret self-existent Knowledge and....In themselves these grades are grades of energy-substance of the Spirit... they are
1Savitri, Book VII, Canto VI, p. 549. (Italics Ours).
2The Life Divine, p. 277.
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domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the spiritual being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal Consciousness-Force constituting and organising itself into a higher status.... Each stage of this ascent is a general, if not a total, conversion of the being into a new light and power of a greater existence."1
For the characterisation of this fourfold ascent and the dynamic-spiritual implications thereof, the reader is referred to Chapter XXVI, Book Two ("The Ascent towards Supermind") of Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine. For the continuity of our discussion we content ourselves with only some broad hints about the nature of these four higher grades of our being.
The first ascent out of our normal mentality is into a Higher Mind of automatic and spontaneous Knowledge, where knowledge assumes the nature of Truth-Thought. Its most characteristic movement is "a mass ideation, a system or totality of truth-seeing at a single view;...this thought is a self-revelation of eternal Wisdom, not an acquired Knowledge."2
Beyond the Higher Mind of Truth-Thought is the Illumined Mind of Truth-Sight, a Mind where
There are vasts of vision and eternal suns,
Oceans of an immortal luminousness,
Flame-hills assaulting heaven with their peaks,
There dwelling all becomes a blaze of sight;
A burning head of vision leads the mind,
Thought trails behind it its long comet tail;
The heart glows, an illuminate and seer,
And sense is kindled into identity.3
Thus the characteristic power of the Illumined Mind is not Thought but Vision; it is the field of "the outpourings of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff." And on the dynamic side there is here "a golden drive, a luminous 'enthousiasmos' of inner force and power,...almost a violent impetus of rapid transformation."4
1Ibid., p. 938.
2The Life Divine, p. 940.
3Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, pp. 659-60.
4 The Life Divine, p. 944.
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Next in the order of ascension is the Intuitive Mind whose characteristic power is an intimate and exact Truth-perception which is much more than sight and conception. Intuition is in us "a projecting blade, edge or point of a far-off supermind light entering into and modified by some intermediate truth-mind substance above us....Intuition has a fourfold power. A power of revelatory truth-seeing, a power of inspiration or truth-hearing, a power of truth-touch or immediate seizing of significance,...a power of true and automatic discrimination of the orderly and exact relation of truth to truth."1 Thus
Intuition's lightnings range in a bright pack
Hunting all hidden truths out of their lairs,
Its fiery edge of seeing absolute
Cleaves into locked unknown retreats of self,
Rummages the sky-recesses of the brain,
Lights up the occult chambers of the heart;
Its spear-point ictus of discovery
Pressed on the cover of name, the screen of form,
Strips bare the secret soul of all that is.
Thought there has revelation's sun-bright eyes;
The Word, a mighty and inspiring Voice,
Enters Truth's inmost cabin of privacy
And tears away the veil from God and life.2
Beyond the plane of the Intuitive Mind is a superconscient cosmic Mind, a principle of global knowledge which carries in it 'a delegated light from the supramental gnosis.' The Overmind is in direct contact with the Supramental Truth-Consciousness and represents the 'highest possible status-dynamis' of the Spirit in the spiritual-mind range. 'The cosmic empire of the Overmind'3 represents 'the boundless finite's last expanse'4 and
Time's buffer state bordering Eternity,
Too vast for the experience of man's soul:
All here gathers beneath one golden sky:
The Powers that build the cosmos station take
1 The Life Divine, p. 949.
2 Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, p. 660.
3 4 Ibid., p. 660.
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In its house of infinite possibility;
Each god from there builds his own nature's world;
Ideas are phalanxed like a group of sums;
Thought crowds in masses seized by one regard;
All Time is one body, Space a single book:
There is the Godhead's universal gaze,
And there the boundaries of immortal Mind:1
The Overmind may be considered to be the delegate of Supermind to the lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance; it links the latter with that supramental Gnosis or Truth-Consciousness, "...while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight...This then is the occult link we were looking for; this is the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance."2
With the Overmind we thus reach the line that parts and joins the lower and the upper hemispheres of existence. Here two possibilities open up before the soul. Either it may seek to reach the supreme supracosmic Sachchidananda direct from the spiritualised mind-range and in that process depart out of its cosmic formation into "the eternally static oneness of Sachchidananda or rather pure Sat (Existence), absolute and eternal or else a pure Nonexistence, absolute and eternal."3
But evidently this is not our line. Since we seek to possess divinely our world-being as well as our self-being, we must cross the borderline, pass into the upper hemisphere transcending even the highest reach of spiritual mind and seek to realise Sachchidananda on the plane of Supermind. For, supermind is Sachchidananda's "...power of self-awareness and world-awareness, the world being known as within itself and not outside....[It is] the Truth-Consciousness whether above or in the universe by which the Divine knows not only his own essence and being but bis manifestation also. Its fundamental character is knowledge by identity, by that the Self is known, the Divine Sachchidananda is known, But also the truth of manifestation is known, because this too is That."4
Hence it becomes imperative for the soul to pass through the
1 Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, p. 660.
2 The Life Divine, p. 278.
3 Sri Aurobindo, On Yoga II, p. 261.
4 Ibid., pp. 261, 264.
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supramental realisation if, instead of departing into the Transcendence, it would simultaneously live in the transcendence of the supreme Sachchidananda and possess its world-view too.
But even these supreme ascents accomplished in full spiritual awareness do not prove sufficient for our purpose. These cannot cure our waking consciousness of its apparently irremediable spiritual penury. For that a supreme movement of descent should follow the supreme movement of ascension and Heaven should consent to come down upon Earth. But is that at all possible?
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