Sri Aurobindo - a biography and a history

CHAPTER 18

The Supramental Manifesto

I

Month after month, Sri Aurobindo gave the place of honour in the Arya to The Life Divine sequence, a mighty unfoldment of his vision of the future evolution of Man. Long after the Arya had suspended publication, Sri Aurobindo took up the revision of the series of articles, made substantial additions, and published The Life Divine in book form, the first volume in 1939 and the more sumptuous second in 1940. The one-volume American edition (with the Index) came out in 1949, and the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education edition (also in one volume of 1272 pages) followed in 1955. A definitive edition in two volumes has since appeared in 1970 in the Centenary Edition. Along with The Synthesis of Yoga and Savitri, the epic of later years. The Life Divine constitutes a triple glory in the Sri Aurobindo canon. It is basically a treatise on metaphysics, but it is also a work of prose art and a manifesto for the Future. Of almost forbidding bulk, yet the very title 'The Life Divine' fascinates at once, and the power of this fascination never palls.

It is true metaphysical speculations often prove to be arid and inconclusive, offering no key to current perplexity, no clue to get out of our "existential predicament". Milton describes how some of the fallen angels

..apart sat on a hill retired.

In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high

Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate —

Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,

And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.

Of good and evil much they argued then,

Of happiness and final misery,

Passion and apathy, and glory and shame:

Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy!¹

And there is also Omar Khayyam's abrupt dismissal of philosophy:

Myself when young did eagerly frequent

Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument

About it and about: but evermore

Came out by the same Door as in I went.

It is with his mental faculty that man usually tries to pluck the heart of Reality, but he is himself in it and of it, and he finds himself baffled in his attempts to seize it

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in its unity and totality. Didn't Archimedes say that he could lift the world with a lever if only he could station himself for a while elsewhere? Although a strict national comprehension of Reality may thus have to be ruled out, knowledge through realised identity may still be possible. In the course of a letter to a disciple written in 1930, Sri Aurobindo drew a distinction between Western metaphysics and the Yoga of the Indian saints. In the West, an excessive importance has been given always to thought, intellect, the logical reason as the highest means and even as the highest end; "Thought is the be-all and the end-all" in philosophy; and even spiritual experience has been "summoned to pass the tests of the intellect" if such experience is to have any validity at all!² In India the position has been just the reverse. In the East generally, and in India purposively and continuously, while no doubt the metaphysical thinkers have tried to approach ultimate Reality through the intellect, they have assigned only a subordinate status to such mental constructions. On the other hand, "the first rank has always been given to spiritual intuition and illumination and spiritual experience".³ Without their corroboration - or, rather, unless they are made the base - mere intellectual constructions have been dismissed as no more than exercises. Further, the Indian metaphysical thinker - a Yajnavalkya, a Sankara, a Ramanuja - has almost always been a Yogi and a Rishi, one who has armed his philosophy "with a practical way of reaching to the supreme state of consciousness, so that even when one begins with Thought, the aim is to arrive at a consciousness beyond mental thinking".⁴ It is to the credit of a modern German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, that he too has come to realise the limitations of mere Reason; "thinking", he says, "only begins at the point where we have come to know that Reason, glorified for centuries, is the most obstinate adversary of thinking".⁵ Through the isolation and analytical scrutiny of detached things and phenomena, the ancient Greeks started the movement of the physical and biological sciences, and the result is the impressive edifice of modem civilisation. But this gain has also meant, according to Heidegger, the decline and fall of Being; we manufacture so-called understanding of 'things' in their minutiae (or, shall we say, of Being artificially atomised), yet manage to miss the meaning of the background, the Field of Being. The microscopically efficient way of Reason helps us perhaps to con every letter in the Book of Nature - or the Writ of Being - and yet fail to seize the sense of the whole. It is impossible for questing Man to leap towards the Truth so long as he is content to remain locked up in the prison-house of his intellect. If, for the lower knowledge. Reason was the helper, for the higher knowledge. Reason is the bar. The true metaphysician must not only master the uses of the Intellect, he should be able to beyond them too, "self-lost in the vasts of God".⁶

The central problems of philosophy were formulated by Kant in the form of three questions; What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for? These questions carry the content of the Indian concepts of tattva, hita and purusārtha. Perhaps the simplest way of describing The Life Divine would be to call it Sri Aurobindo's symphonic answer to the inter-linked questions pf philosophy

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in the steady light of his own spiritual experiences at Baroda, Alipur, Chandernagore and Pondicherry. As he explained in one of the later issues of the Arya:

The spiritual experience and the general truths on which such an attempt could be based, were already present to us... but the complete intellectual statement of them and their results and issues had to be found. This meant a continuous thinking, a high and subtle and difficult thinking on several lines, and this strain, which we had to impose on ourselves, we were obliged to impose also on our readers.⁷

Without the river itself and the perennial supply of water from mountain heights, there is indeed no question of harnessing the waters or organising a "multi-purpose" project; but this harnessing and organisation too are important, and call for "high and subtle and difficult" cerebrations and technologies. Sri Aurobindo mentions "several lines" of thinking, although all start from a central "spiritual experience", a core of apprehended "general truths". One line of inquiry - indeed, the life-line of the Aurobindonian world-view - became The Life Divine. But there were subsidiary or collateral lines of inquiry as well, and these duly spanned out into undulations of illuminating interpretation and comment. We have thus the several Arya sequences comprising Yoga, sociology, politics, exegesis, cultural history, creative criticism and sheer prophecy. So many pathways, so many horizons; so many stairways of knowledge, so many universes of discourse: how are we to pluck the courage to approach this overawing phenomenon?

Yet all great ideas, all heady leaps of thought, all audacious adventures in the ambience of Consciousness are fundamentally so simple that a child should be able to take them in and experience a surge of pure joy. There must lie behind the manifoldness and complexity of the Aurobindonian revelation a basic unity and a synoptic centre - a nuclear and nectarean core. What is it, then? In brief, Sri Aurobindo felt that it was possible for man to advance yet farther in the evolutionary race and reach a new dynamic status, that of the Superman. But a kind of road-block was barring the way. If that could be removed and it could and indeed would be - the transitional being, the mental man, would give place to the future man, the supramental man; and when man changed, society and its institutions and its activities would change too, and the Life Divine would be established here on the earth.

A "Life Divine" here - "upon this bank and shoal of time"! - isn't this too fantastically good to prove ever true? Like a mirage it has so often teased and deceived us. Like the horizon it has lured us from afar and, at our approach, it has disconcertingly receded into the distance. It is Aldous Huxley who writes thus wistfully, speaking for himself and millions like him:

The earthly paradise, the earthly paradise! With what longing, between the bars of my temperament, do I peer at its bright landscape, how voluptuously sniff at its perfumes of hay and raspberries, of honeysuckle and roast duck, of sun-warmed flesh and nectarines of the sea! But the bars are solid; the earthly

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paradise is always on the further side. Self-hindered, I cannot enter and make myself at home.... The mind is in its own place, and its tendency is always to see heaven in some other place.⁸

But some chosen few, in ancient no less than in modem times, have resisted the notion that heaven must necessarily be in another place, not here on the earth. The assurance was given, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you". And sundry poets have affirmed:

Earth's crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God...⁹

The world is charged with the grandeur of God...¹⁰

...see a World in a grain of sand,

And a Heaven in a wild flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour...¹¹

These are random guesses or bold affirmations, possible only to those auspiciously born, but unintelligible to the purblind mass of humanity. The Aurobindonian world-view is, however, based on a more radical - more revolutionary - spiritual experience; it is not merely the inference of the inherency of the Divine in our terrestrial and temporal existence, but rather the participation in the emergence, the explosion, of the Divine in our life, and consequently in the transformation of man and earth-nature into Superman and supernature. Sri Aurobindo was not a professional or academic philosopher, he was a Yogi who happened to take philosophy also in his stride. He was not a hard-headed "intellectual", he was a sthitaprajña who wielded the intellect with the unlaboured and unconscious assurance of a Master. His was no half-light arrested and obscured by the barrier Mind, but the complete Ray piercing the golden lid and illuminating the face of Truth. Once Sri Aurobindo had won his way to the fount and silent tarn of creative experience, The Life Divine and his other works were merely the channelling of the living waters to the divers contiguous territories of knowledge. As K.D. Sethna once wrote about Sri Aurobindo to a Western correspondent:

His is not an integral philosophy for the sake of philosophy, his is an integral Yoga, and all his philosophising is a statement in mental terms of what he has realised. The Life Divine is nothing except his experience, his realisation. Having attained in constant waking life, and not merely in a sealed samadhi, the reality which he terms Gnosis, he has but laid out in intellectual exposition what the gnostic consciousness is and what Yogic possibilities it holds and what the results of its full descent into our earth-existence will be.... There is a mighty intellect in The Life Divine which we at once feel to be no whit less than Plato's or Spinoza's or Hegel's, but none of these giants was a full-fledged Yogi.

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Sri Aurobindo's intellect is an instrument used by a spiritual realisation: not one sentence anywhere is inspired by the intellect alone.*

Spiritual activity is essentially a harmonising, unitive and blissfully creative experience; intellectual activity is an analytical and differentiative process, though it could also be directed to the tasks of integration and architecture. It is the supreme union of spiritual experience and intellectual activity in The Life Divine that makes it a superb declaration for the future, a sublime announcement of the coming greater Dawn, and a unique "supramental" manifesto of the now evolving Gnostic Age of supermen and supernature.

II

Even a first look, a sweeping glance, at the rich outline and majestic contours of The Life Divine must make one exclaim how greatly it is all planned, with what consummate sureness it has been completed. There are two volumes, each of twenty-eight chapters; but the second volume is nearly three times as expansive as the first, and is itself divided into two parts, each of fourteen chapters:

Volume One: 'Omnipresent Reality and the Universe'

Volume Two: 'The Knowledge and the Ignorance -The Spiritual Evolution'

Part One: 'The Infinite Consciousness and the Ignorance'

Part Two: 'The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution'

From an inquiry into the place of "man-as-he-is" in the universe, the argument proceeds to a discussion of the 'how': "How did the movement from the Knowledge Divine to the Ignorance (avidyā) of mental man take place?"; and this, again, is followed (in Vol. II, Part 2) by the climactic inquiry: "How, then, shall avidya-ridden man surpass his ignorance (and the impotence born of it) and reclaim the sovereignty of the Divine Knowledge or Gnosis or supramental Truth-Consciousness"? Mental man is a transitional being in the evolving history of the earth. He has behind him the geological and prehistoric ages of inanimate or animal existence; but ahead of him lie the plenitudes and puissances of the Life Divine.

The first volume opens magnificently: it is a key beginning as in music, and sets the tone of high seriousness to the entire work:

* Mother India, August 1966, pp. 66-7. In the course of a conversation, Sri Aurobindo is reported to have said on 20 February 1940: "What I have tried to give in the book is a metaphysical foundation of Yoga and a new way of life. Any book of philosophy has to be metaphysical... it is not the language but the thought-substance that may be difficult to follow. If I had written about the Congress in the same language, then you would have understood" (Nirodbaran, Talks with Sri Aurobindo Part II, pp. 197-8). What is important in The Life Divine is not so much the intellectual framework, awe-inspiring though it is, but rather the nectarean thought-substance or spiritual content. Thus, as Jesse Roarke puts it, Sri Aurobindo "can be called a philosopher — loosely — only if the term is taken in its largest sense — a •love of wisdom' that is an attempt to Know, to enlarge one's whole nature in Truth... He deals, not in 'concepts' and provisional formulations, but in realities." (The Advent, September 1972, p. 10).

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The earliest preoccupation of man in his awakened thoughts and, as it seems, his inevitable and ultimate preoccupation, —for it survives the longest periods of scepticism and returns after every banishment, - is also the highest which his thought can envisage. It manifests itself in the divination of Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. The ancient dawns of human knowledge have left us their witness to this constant aspiration; today we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last, - God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.¹²

Man restlessly seeks happiness, harmony, fulfilment, felicity - call it what you will, he has sought it unavailingly down the endless march of the years, or he has found it only to lose it soon after. Human sensibility has been quick to register the "still sad music of humanity", to record the cries that moan the frustrations and manifold hurts of life, the whimpers that reiterate the melancholy truth "Sorrow Is". Power corrupts, knowledge confounds, friendship fails, love degenerates - and life, life, what is it but a thing of nought?

In this predicament, one might either deny the soul's thirst for felicity or life's hunger for the earth. A Papa Karamazov might take the line: Life, life, I'll make no impossible demands on it; life's worth living so long as there's an ounce of vodka or a single woman in the world; let me drink life to the lees! His son, Ivan the intellectual, might call it an "insect's life", but the hardened old sinner recks not. Materialism, of course, needn't degenerate into Karamazovism or mere hedonism, but even at its best it is a one-sided view of life that denies both the nourishment of the Spirit and the hope of tomorrow. On the other hand, the stoic and the ascetic would rather reason as follows: Life is but thus and thus; misery and pain do constitute the badge of our lives; we are hedged on all sides by the insuperable limitations of death, desire and incapacity; and we are fated alas! to undergo

The weariness, the fever, and the fret,

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan...

Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies...

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow

And leaden-eyed despairs;¹³

and hence we should learn (the only knowledge that is worth our while to learn) to minimise our demands upon life. And, after all, life is only for a brief now - let us, then, brave its ills with an unblenching stare, nay, let us ignore them altogether, and soon the everlasting Night will give us release from samsāra, the interlocked fatuity of terrestrial life; the very smell of the earth would be forgotten, and we would then and for all time taste the joys of Heaven, the utter felicity, the bliss of inapprehensible Sachchidananda! And between the two negations - the Materialist

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Denial and the Refusal of the Ascetic - there is the even sharper attitude of immediate rejection of life, like Hamlet's:

Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovered country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Where - or which - is this "undiscovered country"? Heaven? Hell? Purgatory? Or is it (as Svidrigailov of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment images it to be) a mere bathroom somewhere with overhanging spider's webs? It is enough to "puzzle the will" and leave one stranded on the bleak rocks of bewilderment and despair.

This, then, is the human predicament. "Sorrow Is", evil and pain are the duumvirate ruling our terrestrial existence, and there seem to be only two ways of combating, or rather of by-passing, the Enemy. One is the materialistic way of making the best of a bad business, or even revelling in its very sloth and imperfection. The other is the stoical way of patient sufferance or the ascetic way of determined ignoration of life's limitations and tribulations. The materialist would affirm the finality of the phenomenal world, but fiercely deny the Spirit; the ascetic, on the other hand, would affirm the Spirit, but deny the reality of this sullied earth and our sensory perceptions. And yet - notwithstanding the two negations - the cry has ever gone forth from the depths of the human heart that somehow we must seek and find Heaven here, or found it and retain it for ever. We must not deny the Spirit, for the whole obscure current of our existence is up against the tongue's vain denial of the omnipresent Reality. Nor must we curb the flesh and inflict on it a thousand and one injuries of commission and omission, for matter, flesh and the whole objective world are bound sooner or later to take their fearful revenge on all but the staunchest knight-errants of the Spirit. We want an all-inclusive, rather than a severely partial, view of Reality, and we want a philosophy of affirmations rather than a series of refusals and negations.

While Sri Aurobindo repudiates both the Materialist Denial and the Refusal of the Ascetic, he readily recognises "the enormous, the indispensable utility of the very brief period of rationalistic Materialism through which humanity has been passing", as also the "still greater service rendered by Asceticism to life".¹⁴ Modern materialism, in the main a Western phenomenon, has given signal service to questing man by providing him with a considerable body of knowledge regarding the lower planes of existence, just as asceticism, in the main an Eastern and even peculiarly an Indian phenomenon, has served aspiring man by boldly adventuring into the unknown and giving him intimations of the infinitudes of the Spirit.

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It is also clear that neither the Western revolt of Matter against Spirit nor the Indian recoil of Spirit from Matter can yield a harmony. The materialist's Denial is one version of Reality, the ascetic's Refusal is another. The problem therefore is to reconcile the two in a larger and truer synthesis. A hint of such a synthesis is inset in one of Sri Aurobindo's jewelled aphorisms:

Life, Life, Life, I hear the passions cry; God, God, God, is the soul's answer. Unless thou seest and lovest Life as God only, then is Life itself a sealed joy to thee.¹⁵

Life is not divorced from God, and God is never aloof from Life. And the supposed irreconcilables. Matter and Spirit, are not really so irreconcilable, after all; Matter links up with Life and Mind, and Spirit stretches across Sachchidananda (Existence, Conscious-Force, Bliss) towards Mind, and so Matter to Spirit is a whole arc of unity:

...the sharp division which practical experience and long habit of mind have created between Spirit and Matter has no longer any fundamental reality. The world is a differentiated unity, a manifold oneness.... An inalienable oneness generating infinite variety is its foundation and beginning; a constant reconciliation behind apparent division and struggle combining all possible disparates for vast ends in a secret Consciousness and Will which is ever one and master of all its own complex action, appears to be its real character in the middle; we must assume therefore that a fulfilment of the emerging Will and Consciousness and a triumphant harmony must be its conclusion. Substance is the form of itself on which it works, and of that substance if Matter is one end. Spirit is the other. The two are one: Spirit is the soul and reality of that which we sense as Matter; Matter is a form and body of that which we realise as Spirit.¹⁶*

Omnipresent Reality thus comprises both Matter and Spirit, and also the realms between. It is like a stairway, and the way up is but the reverse of the way down:

...we perceive that our existence is a sort of refraction of the divine existence, in inverted order of ascent and descent, thus ranged, -

Existence Consciousness-Force Bliss Supermind

Matter Life Psyche Mind

The Divine descends from pure existence through the play of Consciousness-

* Cf. Viscount Samuel: "Never do we find life produced from 'not-life'; always from something already living. And never will you get mind from 'not-mind'.... Mind and matter are coeval. Prom ambience and ether, both present everywhere and always, the universe is made" (An Unknown Island, 1944, pp. 146-7). And Edwin Conklin the biologist says sarcastically: "The possibility of life originating from accident is comparable to the possibility of the unabridged dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop" (quoted in V. Madhusudan Reddy's Sri Aurobindo's Philosophy of Evolution, 1966).

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Force and Bliss and the creative medium of Supermind into cosmic being; we ascend from matter through a developing life, soul and mind and the illuminating medium of Supermind towards the divine being. The knot of the two, the higher and the lower hemisphere, is where mind and Supermind meet with a veil between them. The rending of the veil is the condition of the divine life in humanity; for by that rending, by the illumining descent of the higher into the nature of the lower being and the forceful ascent of the lower being into the nature of the higher, mind can recover its divine light in the all-comprehending Supermind, the soul realise its divine self in the all-possessing all-blissful Ananda, life repossess its divine power in the play of omnipotent Conscious-Force and Matter open to its divine liberty as a form of the divine Existence. And if there be any goal to the evolution... such a luminous and puissant transfiguration and emergence of the Divine in the creature (man) must be that high-uplifted goal and that supreme significance.¹⁷

Of the "eight principles" from Existence to Matter arranged in an order of descent (or from Matter to Existence in an order of ascent), the three-in-one Sachchidananda is Omnipresent Reality: it is pure Existence that is both Will and Force, and above all it is blissful Existence. And yet it is this Sachchidananda that causes, as a result of the descent or involution, the multiplicity, the disharmony, the oceanic spectacle of suffering and frustration that we seem to witness in th6 world of everyday phenomena. The science of Biology has made intelligible the evolution or emergence of Life from Matter, and of Mind from Life; inanimate matter, living plant, insect, bird or animal, and rational man seem thus to be the three very distinct stages in evolution. But the human mind is unable, as a general rule, to look beyond itself; it is unable to see in the phenomenal world of the dualities a reflection or an immanence or play of manifestation of the triune self-glory of Sachchidananda. It is as though a wall separates the two halves of Reality; it is as though the transparency of the glass is obscured and darkened by a heavy coating of mercury on the other side, with the result that, as Aldous Huxley would point out, the paradise of Sachchidananda is always "on the further side". Of the four "principles" in the lower hemisphere (aparārdha ), we are normally aware of three: Matter (the physical body). Life (nerve-energy or prāna) and Mind. The fourth. Psyche, is the "double soul" in man, the superficial desire-soul of our normal experience and the quintessential psychic-soul that is a portion of the Divine Soul:

...we have a double psychic entity in us, the surface desire-soul which works in our vital cravings, our emotions, aesthetic faculty and mental seeking for power, knowledge and happiness, and a subliminal psychic entity, a pure power of light, love, joy and refined essence of being which is our true soul...¹⁸

Like the subliminal psychic entity which is the true soul, there are also the subliminal or deeper realities of Mind, Life and Matter:

The subliminal mind in us is open to the universal knowledge of the cosmic Mind, the subliminal life in us to the universal force of the cosmic Life, the

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subliminal physicality in us to the universal force-formation of cosmic Matter...¹⁹

There are, then, the two hemispheres, the parārdha of Sachchidananda and the aparārdha of our everyday existence which is one of egoistic isolation, ineffectiveness and misery; but from the subliminal behind the scenes fan out creepers of communication between the prison-house of egoistic individuality and the infinite freedom of cosmic universality. Nevertheless, for all practical purposes, the two hemispheres are distinct and apparently not easily bridgeable. In what amounts to this cosmic stalemate, Sri Aurobindo posits 'Supermind' as the link principle which is also a power of total transformation.

The problem may be posed thus: If Sachchidananda is indeed the Reality, what has turned it into the aparārdha phenomenon that we actually know? After dismissing the philosophies - the noumenal and the idealistic - which recognise the Mind alone as the creator of the worlds of appearance, Sri Aurobindo puts forward his hypothesis (born of his own spiritual experience:

The view I am presenting goes farther in idealism; it sees the creative Idea as Real-Idea, that is to say, a power of Conscious-Force expressive of real being, born out of real being and partaking of its nature and neither a child of the Void nor a weaver of fictions.²⁰

It is beyond the pale and flickering firmament of the Mind that true Knowledge waits "throned in the luminous vast of illimitable self-vision".²¹ This principle, being above or beyond the Mind, could be called Supermind, but since the term is, susceptible to misunderstanding, Sri Aurobindo specifies its connotation by recalling certain Vedic intimations:

Vast all-comprehensiveness; luminous truth and harmony of being in that vastness and not a vague chaos or self-lost obscurity; truth of law and act and knowledge expressive of that harmonious truth of being.. .²²

The link-principle is therefore described as Truth-consciousness or even as supramental Truth-consciousness, and it operates between the unitarian and indivisible Sachchidananda above and the analytic and dividing Mind or mental activity below. This mediating Supermind is both the child of Sachchidananda and the parent of the Mind; by its poise of identity it has total comprehension, and by its power of differentiation it precipitates the processes of the Mind. Further, in Supermind there is no hiatus between knowledge and will, for Supermind is "Real-Idea" which is both knowledge and will in the Idea, for now knowledge is power and to think is to bring the thing itself into being. And, finally, Supermind is no elusive entity to be sought in far-off climes, but is right here all the time; "wherever Mind is, there Supermind must be",²³ for Supermind is involved in Mind even as Mind is involved in Life and Life is involved in Matter.

Of the lower triad Mind-Life-Matter, Mind sheds its separativity and divisiveness as it sends out its creepers towards the Supermind, and so allies itself more and more with the cosmic Intelligence. But how about the other two terms, Life and Matter? At the deeper subliminal level, of course. Life and Matter too

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break through the bars of their isolationist cages and send out their tentacles of cosmic kinship. A little reflection and a close look at the latest discoveries of atomic physics and molecular biology make it clear that Life and Matter are inextricably involved in the cosmic play, "Life" is essentially the same everywhere, from the atom to the supercivilised man, "the atom containing the subconscious stuff and movement of being which are released into consciousness in the animal, with plant life as a midway stage in the evolution".²⁴ In all manifestations of life - insect, bird or animal - the tension is between the two pulls, "the necessity or the will of the separate ego to survive in its distinctness and guard its identity and the compulsion imposed upon it by Nature to fuse itself with others".²⁵ The predicament of man in this respect is no different from that of any other living creature whatsoever, for his ascent from Matter through Life to Mind has only trapped Man in the precarious imbalance of a middle state:

Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state,

A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:

With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,

With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride...

In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;

In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer;

Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err...²⁶

It may be that, on account of its blindness and perversity, the race of man is doomed to "fall by the wayside" and write "Finis" to the human adventure. It is, on the contrary, far more likely that evolutionary Man will at last extricate himself from the grip of the "middle state", achieve the release of the involved Supermind, and make the steep ascent towards the Godhead.²⁷ The snapped link with the divine source will then be restored, the obscuring veil torn asunder, the hiatus finally closed:

...the appearance of a supramental spiritual being who shall impose on his mental, vital, bodily workings a higher law than that of the dividing Mind is no longer impossible... it is the natural and inevitable conclusion of the nature of cosmic existence.²⁸

What, then, are the new ingredients in Aurobindonian metaphysics of life-transformation and world-transformation? Firstly, the conception of the interlinked processes of evolution-involution or ascent-descent; secondly, the principle of integration at every stage of the forward movement of consciousness; and thirdly, the identification of the sovereign creative role of the Supermind. It is, however, important to remember that words like "ascent" and "descent" - or "upward", "downward" or "inward" - have to be understood in a psychological and not a strictly physical sense, and our temporal images are but desperate attempts to convey the realities of extra-temporal processes. Unlike the orthodox scientific evolutionist, Sri Aurobindo affirms that Life cannot emerge from Matter unless it is already involved in it,

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for it is not a spurt of unpredictable chance that throws up the emergent but rather a preordained event in the cosmic plan. Thus even in Matter (that heavy concentration of Inconscience, that triple knot of ignorance, inertia and inconsequence) all the higher emergents, the highest not excluded, are latent; hence the declaration in the Taittiriya Upanishad that "Matter is Brahman". In Sri Aurobindo's words:

Where one principle is manifest in Cosmos, there all the rest must be not merely present and passively latent, but secretly at work.²⁹

The process of evolution (or ascent) is thus a drawing out of the principles and powers that are nascent within and are eager to sprout; it is in the nature of a legitimate and inevitable self-exceeding and open manifestation. And such an effort is invariably facilitated and consummated by a corresponding act of descent from above:

In the spiritual order of things, the higher we project our view and our aspiration, the greater the Truth that seeks to descend upon us, because it is already there within us and calls for its release from the covering that conceals it in manifested Nature.³⁰

Ascent thus ever goes hand in hand with descent, emergence thus always brings about integration in its wake. When Life evolved out of Matter, it did not deny or escape from Matter; it only energised Matter and made it conscious or semi-conscious in animal and plant life. When likewise Mind evolved out of Life, man the mental being did not - indeed he could not - deny either Life or Matter; he only achieved a new integration, a harmony of all three, with the "psyche" as the true master of the ceremonies. This is why Sri Aurobindo views the adventure of Consciousness as a threefold movement: an upward movement - the evolution or the ascent or the emergence; a downward movement - the involution or the descent or the immersion; and an inward movement - the integration, the unification, the transformation. The next preordained evolutionary change, the Supramental, may very well prove to be the climactic upsurge that will end the "original sin" of impotent separatist egoism and make manifest a Divine Life on the earth.

III

The hope of such a divinised life on the earth, although it may seem revolutionary or merely fanciful in the present context, has nevertheless been often seriously entertained in the past, and thinkers and visionaries have glimpsed the possibility, if not always the inevitability, of the Mind successfully casting aside the insignias of its obscuration and perversion and attaining the pure Light and Puissance of the Supermind. The Taittiriya Upanishad, for example, sees in Man several layers of reality and significance: annamaya, prānamaya, manomaya, vijñānamaya and ānandamaya corresponding to the physical man, vital man, mental man, supramental man and the wholly realised man resting in the sachchidānanda consciousness.

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The great crossing has to be from the aparārdha hemisphere of the first three to the parārdha hemisphere of the last two; in other words, from the port of Mind to the bridgehead of Supermind or vijñāna. As V. Chandrasekharam has pointed out:

What the Taittiriya teaches is the discovery by man the mental being of vijñānamaya purusa who is his self..... And the entire teaching of Sri Aurobindo is hinged on the true conception of this Upanishadic vijñāna.... He (man) is to bring down the power of vijñāna into his life here, and free it from evil and suffering. And to that end, he had to transform his nature from top to bottom.³¹

In other and later times, too, these insights and these hopes have sustained men in their darkest moments. The materialist may have been content to make the most of what everyday life happened to offer: the religionist may have ignored present life and patiently looked forward to the life to come "on the other side": and the philosophic mystic may have sought an escape from this "world of Maya" in an immersion in Nirvana. But at all times some few have resolutely avoided all these escape-routes and fastened on the possibility of bridging the apparent gulf between "the ignorance of Nature and the light of the Spirit". As Sri Aurobindo puts it:

It is a keen sense of this possibility which has taken different shapes and persisted through the centuries, - the perfectibility of man, the perfectibility of society, the Alwar's vision of the descent of Vishnu and the Gods upon earth, the reign of the saints, sādhūnām rājyam, the city of God, the millennium, the new heaven and earth of the Apocalypse. But these intuitions have lacked a basis of assured knowledge and the mind of man has remained swinging between a bright future hope and a grey present certitude.³²

It was Sri Aurobindo's chosen mission to supply this "basis of assured knowledge" so that the envisaged possibility could become at last a distinctive and splendorous actuality.

The first volume of The Life Divine begins, as we saw, with a reference to man's primeval and persistent longings for "God, Light, Freedom, Immortality", and concludes with the announcement that a divine life here "is the inevitable outcome and consummation of Nature's evolutionary endeavour".³³ The large aim of the formidable second volume is to set forth in almost overwhelming detail how exactly this founding of the Life Divine on a terrestrial base is to be promoted and ultimately accomplished. But, first, there is the portentous question: How did Ignorance - and its numerous progeny - get so ample a foothold on the earth? From Brahman, from Sachchidananda, - how or why did the decline towards or death-in-life start, how or why did the fall into the chasm of Ignorance or sleep of Matter come about?

Early in the first volume, there is a significant affirmation about the mystic relationship between Pure Existence (Being) and World-existence (Becoming):

World-existence is the ecstatic-dance of Shiva which multiplies the body of

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the God numberlessly to the view: it leaves that white existence precisely where and what it was, ever is and ever will be; its sole absolute object is the joy of the dancing.³⁴

The Infinite breaking up into infinitesimals, the infinitesimals straining and converging back to the Infinite; Consciousness scattering into an infinity of insignificant quanta, and the melting and merging of these into the integrality of Consciousness - both movements are but turns in the "ecstatic dance". The point is elaborated in the second volume in its opening chapters. The truth of the Cosmic paradox is that Infinity is inherent in the infinitesimal:

Thus even the aspect or power of Inconscience, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality, yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-conscious Infinite. It is... the Infinite's power of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency.... It is not a denial, it is one term, one formula of the infinite and eternal Existence.³⁵

Nay more: Reality transcendent (that is, beyond the manifestation), cosmic or universal Reality, and microcosmic Reality or the autonomy of the individual being, these too are not distinct absolutes but only terms of the One Existence, each containing secretly or overtly the other two.

But the question returns: If the universe of our perception and cognition is a creation by self-involution of the Infinite Consciousness, where is the room in it for Ignorance? It cannot be part and parcel of inconscient Matter, for after all Matter is expected ultimately to outgrow the stains and ulcers of the Ignorance. Neither can Ignorance be integral to the Spirit, for in that case Reality will be self-divided at the fountain-source itself - a supposition that must be ruled out altogether. What, then, is Ignorance?

Sri Aurobindo cuts the Gordian Knot by affirming that Ignorance too is Knowledge - only, it is partial or imperfect knowledge. He sees no need to presuppose the existence of a beginningless Power that creates the illusions and unrealities of the world of phenomena. On the contrary, Sri Aurobindo posits

...an original, a supreme or cosmic Truth-Consciousness creative of a true universe, but with mind acting in that universe as an imperfect consciousness, ignorant, partly knowing, partly not knowing, - a consciousness which is by its ignorance or limitation of knowledge capable of error, misrepresentation, mistaken misdirected development from the known, of uncertain gropings towards the unknown, of partial creations and buildings, a constant half-position between truth and error, knowledge and nescience. But this ignorance in fact proceeds, however stumblingly, upon knowledge and towards knowledge; it is inherently capable of shedding the limitation, the mixture, and can turn by that liberation into the Truth-Consciousness, into a power of the original Knowledge.³⁶

There is, indeed, a whole spiral of Knowledge or Consciousness: at the bottom it

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is "the abysm of the unbodied Infinite",³⁷ the shadowy image of nescience or inconscience; at the top it is Knowledge and Superconscience, "the kingdom of the Spirit's power and light";³⁸ and in the middle region, ruled by the divided Mind, it is Ignorance or muddled knowledge, "a coalition of uncertainties".³⁹ "Maya" and "Avidya" are, thus, not the terrible absolutes that they are in Sankara's metaphysics. Ignorance arises on the way, like atmospheric mist or fog, and it will also disappear on the way. It is neither beginningless Maya nor the stain of some original Sin; it is no more than a characteristic colouring at one stage in the descent of Consciousness, and when the counter-movement of ascent passes that stage, the colour will begin to fade and soon pass away, leaving Knowledge stainless and pure.

Still it may be asked; Why should Ignorance - even if it be only a transient eruption - ever arise at all? While attempting to answer this question, Sri Aurobindo refers to the concept of līlā, dismisses the cruder forms of its formulation, and then comes out with his own explanation:

...a God, himself all-blissful, who delights in the suffering of creatures or imposes such suffering on them for the faults of his own imperfect creation, would be no Divinity.... But if the human soul is a portion of the Divinity, if it is a divine Spirit in man that puts on this imperfection and in the form of humanity consents to bear this suffering, or if the soul in humanity is meant to be drawn to the Divine Spirit and is his associate in the play of imperfection here, in the delight of perfect being otherwhere, the Lila may still remain a paradox, but it ceases to be a cruel or revolting paradox... .⁴⁰

Lila or amusement, certainly - but for whom? Not simply for the Divine at the expense of the individual "victims" involved in the play. Rather, it is a game in which these latter are themselves consenting parties eager for the play; if the will of the Divine Purusha made the cosmic creation possible, equally the assent of the individual Purusha must have preceded the individual manifestation. And yet, and yet, why all this bother? Why make a steep descent, muddy oneself with the dirt and blind oneself with the smoke, and then, experience the ardours of a cleansing climb to the heights? To clear up this riddle, Sri Aurobindo can only cite everyday human experience:

.. .it is not altogether a mystery if we look at our own nature and can suppose some kindred movement of being in the beginning as its cosmic origin.... There is no greater pleasure for man himself than a victory which is in its very principle a conquest over difficulties, a victory in knowledge, a victory in power, a victory in creation over the impossibilities of creation, a delight in the conquest over an anguished toil and a hard ordeal of suffering. At the end of separation is the intense joy of union, the joy of a meeting with a self from which we were divided. There is an attraction in ignorance itself because it provides us with the joy of discovery.... If the Infinite's right of various self-manifestation is granted, this too as a possibility of its manifestation is intelligible and has its profound significance.⁴¹

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With regard to the broader question as to how an illimitable Divine Consciousness happened to undergo the process of limitation and separativeness, Sri Aurobindo recalls the ancient concept of tapas or "concentration of power of consciousness" and cites as an epigraph this well-known passage from the Taittiriya Upanishad:

He desired, 'May I be Many', he concentrated in Tapas, by Tapas he created the world; creating, he entered into it; entering, he became the existent and the beyond-existence, he became the expressed and the unexpressed, he became knowledge and ignorance, he became the truth and the falsehood....⁴²

Tapas being the characteristic of sat as well as cit, of the passive as well as the active Brahman and also of Anandamaya, the Bliss of Brahman, the origin of the Ignorance must be sought for in a feat of Tapas that "builds a wall of separation which shuts out the consciousness in each form from awareness of its own total self, of other embodied consciousnesses and of universal being".⁴³ In the act of congealment, water freezes, the free flow ceases, and masses of ice seem to assert their separativity - yet they are the same substance, they Could be warmed up, they could be made to flow together again. The Ignorance - like the solidity of ice - is a vestige put on at one stage during the movement of Consciousness. If there is a "fall", it is but a preparation - a strategic retreat - that facilitates the surer fulfilment of the Divine purpose:

The Ignorance is a necessary, though quite subordinate term which the universal Knowledge has imposed on itself that that movement might be possible, - not a blunder and a fall, but a purposeful descent, not a curse, but a divine opportunity. To find and embody the All-Delight in an intense summary of its manifoldness, to achieve a possibility of the infinite Existence which could not be achieved in other conditions, to create out of Matter a temple of the Divinity would seem to be the task imposed on the spirit born into the material universe.⁴⁴

In Ignorance and Nescience there is no death, only a frenzy or a swoon of the All-Knowledge and All-Will; this swoon and this frenzy are not eternal, - they have come up to the surface of existence for a little while, and they will be exceeded when they have fulfilled their cosmic tasks.*

Perched on the spiral of evolution, man who has awakened from the swoon oft inconscience or nescience is now caught up in the frenzy of the Ignorance, and he¦ cries and gesticulates in terms of "error" and "falsehood":

This then is the origin and nature of error, falsehood, wrong and evil in the consciousness and will of the individual; a limited consciousness growing out of nescience is the source of error, a personal attachment to the limitation and the error born of it the source of falsity, a wrong consciousness governed by the life-ego the source of evil. .. .the emergence of the life-ego is... a machinery

* For a fuller discussion, the reader is referred to my article "The Problem of Evil" in The Advent, April 1946.

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of cosmic Nature for the affirmation of the individual, for his self-disengagement from the indeterminate mass substance of the subconscient, for the appearance of a conscious being on a ground prepared by the Inconscience.... The individual ego is a pragmatic and effective fiction... it is separated by ignorance from other-self and from the inner Divinity, but it is still pushed secretly towards an evolutionary unification in diversity; it has behind itself, though finite, the impulse to the infinite. But this in the terms of an ignorant consciousness translates itself into the will to expand, to be a boundless finite, to take everything it can into itself....

But because it does these things as a separate ego for its separate advantage and not by conscious interchange and mutuality, not by unity, life-discord, conflict, disharmony arise, and it is the products of this life-discord and disharmony that we call wrong and evil. Nature accepts them because they are necessary circumstances of the evolution, necessary for the growth of the divided being; they are products of ignorance.... The evolutionary intention acts through the evil as through the good... this is the reason why we see evil coming out of what we call good and good coming out of what we call evil... our standards of both are evolutionary, limited and mutable.⁴⁵

The supreme Reality is indeed Sachchidananda, which as a deliberate jerk in its līlā resorts to tapas, the Spirit thereby undergoing an involution into material forms, the One scattering into the Many. At the lowest level, where Consciousness is in a swoon, inconscience is the ruling law. The counter-movement of evolution starts from this material level, reaches up during the long aeons of geological time to the level of instinctive life in plant, insect and animal, and encompasses a further leap when out of life evolves mind and Homo Sapiens emerges as the visible crown and roof of creation. The analytical mind of man both clarifies and confuses, both helps and hinders further progress. Mental consciousness is apt to take the part for the whole, to be dazzled by false lights, to defeat itself by the very perfection of its analytical subtlety, careering through an infinity of differentiations, it is apt to forget or deny altogether the integral harmony in which the differences vanish and only the unity remains. The progeny of Evil are real enough, but they are not the ultimate Truth; there are higher and more puissant realities than they, although man the mental being isn't ordinarily aware of them but chooses to be weighed down by the weary burden of the lower dualities. Of course Evil is not outright illusion, and the pictures we form with the aid of our mental consciousness are neither Truth nor Falsehood - they are partly true and partly false. Imperfect as they are, the pictures do not cancel the richer and profounder reality of the living Spirit behind, anymore than a photograph or a painting cancels the fuller reality of the person or object. As the Rishi affirms in Sri Aurobindo's poem:

For grief and pain

Are errors of the clouded soul; behind

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They do not stain

The living spirit who to these is blind ⁴⁶*

Evil and its manifestations, then, are neither an eternal undivine power like Ahriman nor a mere nightmare thrown up by Avidya, but a force with only a limited validity at the mental rung in the evolution-involution stair of Consciousness. Inconscient matter knows neither joy nor pain, neither life nor death; Matter and Energy persist through seeming outward or functional changes, and are undestroyed and indestructible. Plant or animal life experiences the cycle of birth and growth and decay and death, but it is incapable of cerebration, and it indulges in no speculation about good and evil, pain and pleasure. It is man the mental being who has grown the faculty of interpreting phenomena in terms of the dualities. And yet human experience often jerks mental categories into hopeless confusion. Through the pangs of childbirth the mother experiences the ecstasy of fulfilment. Isn't there a terrible beauty in a mimic presentation of Shiva's tāndava dance? Doesn't the football player thrill with a stern physical joy in the very violence of his exertions? The dualities, then, are not watertight compartments but permit, and indeed enforce, reversible reactions. The error and the falsity and the evil have thus ultimately a cosmic purpose of their own, and always it is the Divine Will, untouched by the dualities, that manoeuvres the mind and makes it create these intricate patterns of desire and pain and pleasure and incapacity.

IV

The second Part of the second Volume of The Life Divine - "The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution" - begins with a brilliant summing-up of the conclusions of the first Part and an indication of the ground yet to be covered in the second:

This then is the origin, this the nature, these the boundaries of the Ignorance. Its origin is a limitation of knowledge, its distinctive character a separation of the being from its own integrality and entire reality; its boundaries are determined

* There is also this vivid piece of autobiographical seeming recordation, imbedded in "The Meditations of Mandavya", dated 1913 (Sri Aurobindo, Vol. 5, p. 86):

While on a terrace hushed I walked at night,

He came and stung my foot. My soul surprised

Rejoiced in lover's contact; but the mind

Thought of a scorpion and was snared by forms.

Still, still my soul remembered its delight

Denying mind, and midst the body's pain,

I laughed contented.  

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by this separative development of the consciousness, for it shuts us to our true self and to the true self and whole nature of things and obliges us to live in an apparent surface existence. A return or a progress to integrality, a disappearance of the limitation, a breaking down of separativeness, an overpassing of boundaries, a recovery of our essential and whole reality must be the sign and opposite character of the inner turn towards Knowledge. There must be a replacement of a limited and separative by an essential and integral consciousness identified with the original truth and the whole truth of self and existence.⁴⁷

If the way down is the road to the Ignorance and the Inconscience, the way up is the road to the spiritual Knowledge and the integral consciousness. The three crucial steps of self-achievement in this regard would be, firstly, the discovery of the psychic self or soul (behind the egoistic desire-self), secondly, the awareness of the kinship of our self with the self of all beings (these too being portions of the Divine), and, finally, an awareness of the Divine Being by identity with it, seeing in it the Divine within, the universe Self and the transcendent Divine. This difficult evolutionary process of Becoming, which is going on anyhow, can however he accelerated in the present condition of our self-awareness and ardent aspiration for change. After the immersion of the Spirit as a result of the material devolution, and after the phase of evolution in the Ignorance in transitional Man, now the stress naturally is on spiritual evolution, but in such a way that the triad matter-life-mind may also receive the transforming touch of the Spirit. In his arduous and anxious climb towards the heights, Man seeks support and light from both circumambient Nature and God the invisible Power, but he finds that the divers philosophies and the warring religions only tend to confuse and distract him. Man perseveres nevertheless, and moves from higher to still higher peak, and arrives at more and more synoptic views of unity and harmony:

The quest of man for God, which becomes in the end the most ardent and enthralling of all his quests, begins with his first vague questionings of Nature and a sense of something unseen both in himself and her.... But it is when knowledge reaches its highest aspects that it is possible to arrive at its greatest unity. The highest and widest seeing is the wisest; for then all knowledge is unified in its one comprehensive meaning. All religions are seen as approaches to a single Truth, all philosophies as divergent viewpoints looking at different sides of a single Reality, all Sciences meet together in a supreme Science. For that which all our mind-knowledge and sense-knowledge and suprasensuous vision is seeking, is found most integrally in the unity of God and man and Nature and all that is in Nature.⁴⁸

This faring forward, this labouring upward, this conquest of peak after peak of largeness, unity and harmony is the very pith of the Aurobindonian dialectic of ascent and integration:

The principle of the process of evolution is a foundation, from that foundation an ascent, in that ascent a reversal of consciousness and, from the greater

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height and wideness gained, an action of change and new integration of the whole nature.⁴⁹

Onward and upward, then, out of the Sevenfold Ignorance to the Sevenfold Knowledge, and in individual souls this process of evolution may continue over a period of several births and implicate worlds other than ours. Although Sri Aurobindo has no use for many of the traditional notions about Karma and Rebirth, he nevertheless thinks that, rightly interpreted, the concepts are relevant to the individual Purusha's adventure of consciousness:

.. .if there is an evolution of consciousness in an evolutionary body and a soul inhabiting the body, a real and conscious individual, then it is evident that it is the progressive experience of that soul in Nature which takes the form of this evolution of consciousness: rebirth is self-evidently a necessary part, the sole possible machinery of such an evolution.⁵⁰

Likewise with regard to the role of "worlds" other than ours in this adventure - worlds occult or non-material -, Sri Aurobindo concludes that these other worlds have their reality too, and powers, influences and phenomena do descend from them to this earth and other earths similarly sustained. Worlds that are "supernatural" to us may be "natural" in their own domain and exert an influence, for better or for worse, on earth-born creatures:

.. .given a complex universe and seven principles interwoven in every part of its system and naturally therefore drawn to act upon and respond to each other wherever they can at all get at one another, such an action, such a constant pressure and influence, is an inevitable consequence... inherent in the very nature of the manifested universe.⁵¹

The evolutionary process (involving this and other lives, this and other "worlds"), having now reached the stage of Man the mental being - Man with his languages, crafts, sciences and technologies, his philosophies and religions, his social and political institutions, his arts of life and his menacing arts of death - well, what next? If he cannot (or will not) shed the limitations of his present mentality and grow into the Truth-Consciousness of the Supramental status, he will have to be written off as a failure and the future will lie, perhaps, with another race. But the indications are that Man himself may be able, either to attain the supramental status himself, or at least to make his mind, life and body a responsive field of experimentation were the first decisive advances towards the Supermind may be made. The inner urge towards spiritualisation is already there, and the only question is whether it will prove strong enough to pierce the barrier between Mind and Supermind. Spirituality is really a revolutionary force, as may be seen from this description by Sri Aurobindo:

Spirituality is in its essence an awakening to the inner reality of our being, to a spirit, self, soul which is other than our mind, life and body, an inner aspiration to know, to feel, to be that, to enter into contact with the greater Reality beyond and pervading the universe which inhabits also our own being, to be in communion with It and union with It, and a turning, a conversion, a transformation

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of our whole being as a result of the aspiration, the contact, the union, a growth or waking into a new becoming or new being, a new self, a new nature.⁵²

More sure in its action than religion or occultism, both of which have played an important part in human affairs in the past, spirituality holds out the promise of richer results in the future. Even in past times, spirituality has had its votaries and beneficiaries, and intense spiritual activity has seen the making of "the saint, the devotee, the spiritual sage, the seer, the prophet, the servant of God, the soldier of the spirit".⁵³ But an even more sustained spiritual effort may be necessary if supramentalisation is to take place in the near or in some foreseeable future.

If egoistic mental man is ultimately to change into the spiritual man and Superman, his endeavour to forge ahead in the evolutionary scale must be met, half-way as it were, by a corresponding descent of Consciousness also. And this is how it will surely happen, as it has already happened in the earlier leaps of the evolutionary process. Human aspiration will organise itself into an integral effort to exceed the limitations of the Ignorance; and, simultaneously, the opportune descent of Consciousness will flood the shining tablelands of human endeavour. But in the process of descent, while the lower nature may be raised a little, the higher descending consciousness may suffer "a modification, dilution, diminution", and the resulting change too may have to share these limitations and obscurations. When Life descended into Matter and Mind into Life, they had to suit themselves to the resistance of the lower nature, and hence they were "not able to make a compete transformation of their material into a fit instrument and a changed substance revelatory of their real and native power". Between the great potentiality and the hard reality there falls the shadow of frustration and semi-defeat:

The Life-consciousness is unable to effectuate the greatness and felicity of its mighty or beautiful impulses in the material existence.... The mind is unable to achieve its high ideas in the medium of Life or Matter without deductions and compromises... its clarities of knowledge and will are not matched by its force to mould this inferior substance to obey and express it.... Neither Life nor Mind succeeds in converting or perfecting the material existence, because they cannot attain to their own full force in these conditions; they need to call in a higher power to liberate and fulfil them. But the higher spiritual-mental powers also undergo the same disability when they descend into Life and Matter....

Only the Supermind can thus descend without losing its full power of action.... The Truth-Consciousness, finding evolutionary Nature ready, has to descend into her and enable her to liberate the supramental principle within her; so must be created the supramental and spiritual being as the first unveiled manifestation of the truth of the Self and Spirit in the material universe.⁵⁴

The so-called ascending and descending movements are really the two ends of a

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single life-line of Consciousness, and what is needed is a closing of the gap, a joining, a soldering, an effective restoration of the circuit of the dynamic power of the Truth-Consciousness so that the "Big Change", the spiritual and supramental transformation, can be realised on the earth.

Now at long last we come to the heart of the matter: the Ascent towards the Supermind. Once the awakening to the inner soul-reality of our being and the awareness by identity of our soul-relationship with others and with the universe have been realised - that is the essence of the psychic and spiritual transformations - the stage is set for the supreme supramental adventure. But in that realm of intangibilities, it would not be wise to look for a macadamised road usable by all and sundry. Actually, the "ascending possibilities" must be many, and Sri Aurobindo is content to indicate just one fairly typical line:

This line is, as all must be, governed by the natural configuration of the stair of ascent: there are in it many steps... no gap anywhere... the gradation can be resolved into a stairway of four main ascents... a series of sublimation of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; 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.... Each stage of this ascent is therefore a general, if not a total, conversion of the being into a new light and power of a greater existence.⁵⁵

The steps of ascent or "slow gradations" between Mind and Supermind - Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind - spiritual-mental powers, superconscient so far as mental man is concerned, but definitely below sovereign Supermind. In the Arya, Overmind was not mentioned; it was identified later and found an important place in The Life Divine when it was published in definitive book form. Sri Aurobindo has described, succinctly in chapter xxviii of the first volume and with evocative brilliance of detail in chapter xxvi of the second volume, these four spiritual-mental powers:

If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, - an image which in this experience becomes a reality, - we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force.. .Intuition... an intermediary of a greater Truth-Light.... At the source of this Intuition we discover... an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight... the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance.⁵⁶

In the chapter on 'The Ascent Towards Supermind', Higher Mind is described as "a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity

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of the Spirit" with a basic unitarian sense of being; Illumined Mind has a mind "no longer of higher Thought, but of spiritual light... an intense lustre, a splendour and illumination of the spirit"; Intuition as a fourfold power of revelatory truth-seeing, truth-hearing, truth-touch and truth-discrimination; and Overmind as "a principle of global knowledge which carries in it a delegated light from the supramental Gnosis".⁵⁷ The images are so vivid that it is clear that Sri Aurobindo is only describing what had become, since his first contacts at Alipur, a matter of daily experience for him. Although this "structural map of the ascent to the supramental summit" is more tentative than definitive, the main configuration will stand. And normally the conquest of each peak has to be consolidated before the assault on the next higher peak may be made:

The soul may still be described as a traveller and climber who presses towards his high goal by step on step, each of which he has to build up as an integer but must frequently redescend in order to rebuild and make sure of the supporting stair... but the evolution of the whole consciousness... can be compared to a tide or a mounting flux, the leading fringe of which touches the higher degrees of a cliff or hill while the rest is still below.⁵⁸

The final or culminating assault or heave of the ascending ocean of consciousness is on the supramental citadel itself; Man must now grow into the complete Superman, the supramental being, or the Gnostic being. The induction of the supramental principle and power into the human being must also mean the gradual supramentalisation of man's environment, in other words the transformation of nature into supernature. The "gnostic being" would be the consummation of the climb of the spiritual man:

...his whole way of being, thinking, living, acting would be governed by the power of a vast universal spirituality. All the trinities of the Spirit would be real to his self-awareness and realised in his inner life... all his action would originate from and obey the supreme Self and Spirit's divine governance of Nature.⁵⁹

Supramentalisation or gnosticisation would not, of course, mean a sudden or wholesale annulment of the lower orders and formations of consciousness, from Overmind to Mind, from Mind to Matter: the hierarchy would continue, but would be progressively emptied of the incursions of the Ignorance.

The supramental transformation, the supramental evolution must carry with it a lifting of mind, life and body out of themselves into a greater way of being in which yet their own ways and powers would be, not suppressed or abolished, but perfected and fulfilled by the self-exceeding.⁶⁰

But even if the supramental individuals should be but a few, their influence on the rest would still be profound. The "untransformed part of humanity" must throw up in due course more and more highly evolved beings, some intuitivised, some overmentalised, some in constant communion with the higher thought-planes.⁶¹ Sri Aurobindo also makes it clear that, although it is the elected individual who spearheads each evolutionary advance, he will not by himself be able to bring

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about the transformation of the earth-nature; a "critical mass" of such individuals too would be necessary:

The inner change can begin to take shape in a collective form only if the gnostic individual finds others who have the same kind of inner life as himself and can form with them a group with its own autonomous existence or else a separate community or order of being with its own inner law of life.⁶²

With the appearance of the gnostic being and the beginnings of the gnostic dispensation in earth-nature, the "Life Divine" itself would become no longer a pretext for dreaming and speculative system-building1 but a marvel of daily manifestation and realisation. Indeed, the change from our present to the new gnostic consciousness would prove to be a fundamental change in the very texture, temper and tone of existence:

Our nature, our consciousness is that of beings ignorant of each other, separated from each other, rooted in a divided ego, who must strive to establish some kind of relation between their embodied ignorances.... An innate character of the gnostic consciousness and the instrumentation of Supernature is a wholeness of sight and action, a unity of knowledge with knowledge, a reconciliation of all that seems contrary in our mental seeing and knowing, an identity of Knowledge and Will acting as a single power in perfect unison with the truth of things....⁶³

At the end of this monumental work, Sri Aurobindo refers to the present "evolutionary crisis" in earth-history when two wholly opposed possibilities seem to be open to Man: either an accelerated pursuit of new wants and the "aggressive expansion of the collective ego" that must lead mankind to the Abyss, or a daring spiritual-supramental adventure of consciousness leading to the Life Divine on a terrestrial base. Of this latter possibility Sri Aurobindo writes in his dual role as prophet and forerunner:

.. .what has to be developed is there in our being and not something outside it: what evolutionary Nature presses for, is an awakening to the knowledge of self, the discovery of self, the manifestation of the self and spirit within us and the release of its self-knowledge, its self-power, its native self-instrumentation. It is, besides, a step for which the whole of evolution has been a preparation and which is brought closer at each crisis of human destiny.... Our evolution in the Ignorance with its chequered joy and pain of self-discovery and world-discovery, its half-fulfilments, its constant finding and missing, is only our first state. It must lead inevitably towards an evolution in the Knowledge, a self-finding and self-unfolding of the Spirit, a self-revelation of the Divinity in things in that true power of itself in Nature which is to us still a Supernature.⁶⁴

There is a significant postscript, too - or so it might be called. The Life Divine was published in 1939-40, but when Sri Aurobindo contributed a series of articles in 1949-50 to the Bulletin of Physical Education (since collected as The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, 1952) he mentioned a new concept, a newly realised

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power of consciousness, which he called Mind of Light. This was obviously the result of some striking realisations and developments subsequent to the publication of The Life Divine ten years earlier. The implication in these articles is that, perhaps, it may not always be necessary to march methodically, step by step, markind the milestones on the way to Supermind. Even in The Life Divine there is the suggestion that "a direct and unveiled intervention from above" and "a total submission and surrender of the lower consciousness" might force the pace and ensure the completeness of the transformation;⁶⁵ and it is affirmed that the Supermind "would not annul the evolutionary principle, for Supermind has the power of withholding or keeping in reserve its force of knowledge as well as the power of bringing it into full or partial action".⁶⁶ Suppose the Supermind acted directly on the Mind, skipping so to say the four middle steps, might not mental consciousness be charged then with the Supermind's white radiance of Knowledge and be transformed in consequence as Mind of Light?* Technically it would be below Higher Mind, yet it might be more intrinsically (if feebly) supramental than the four higher states of the spiritual mind and it might also solve humanity's immediate problem of meeting the evolutionary crisis:

A mind of light will replace the present confusion and trouble of this earthly ignorance.... a new humanity uplifted into Light, capable of a spiritualised being and action, open to governance by some light of the Truth-Consciousness, capable even on the mental level and in its own order of something that might be called the beginning of a divinised life.⁶⁷

With the settled rule of the Mind of Light, a "gnostic mentality" may replace the ordinary mentality "even before the Supermind is reached".⁶⁸ In these essays Sri Aurobindo has only thrown a few hints, and there is even a certain ambiguity regarding the exact location of the Mind of Light in the hierarchy of powers. Lesser than the powers of the spiritual-mind, yet a force of pure (if subdued) light, a new power of consciousness that is the result of the direct action of Supermind on Mind - not a pre-existing power like Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition or Overmind! There can be little doubt that this promise of the early realisation - or news of the actual realisation - of the Mind of Light upon the earth must be viewed as the prelude to the coming supramental manifestation, for, if Mind of Light comes (or has come) indeed, can Supermind be far behind?**

* When The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth was published in New York by E.P. Dutton & Company in 1953, it was given the title The Mind of Light.

** For a fuller discussion, of the subject, the reader is referred to Synergist's 'A Divine Life in a Divine Body' (Mother India; June 1952), K.D. Sethna's "The Descent of the Supermind' in Mother India, December 1953, pp. 11ff and Kishor Gandhi's The New Humanity' included in his book. Social Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the New Age (1965).

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V

In the preceding Sections an attempt has been made to present the leading ideas in Sri Aurobindo's magnum opus, often in his own words. It is verily a Manifesto for the Future, a supramental manifesto that holds out the clear promise of an Age of Knowledge and Puissance and Felicity in place of our world of ignorance and division and frustration. And so much of The Life Divine is the recordation of his own adventures and realisations in the invisible realms of consciousness that a direct description of the book becomes, in effect, a portrait as well of his inner life.

The great aim of the Arya was "the formation of a vast synthesis of knowledge, harmonising the divers religious traditions of humanity, occidental as well as oriental", and The Life Divine sequence took a lead in this regard. However, it was when it came out in its revised form as a book that The Life Divine gained world recognition as a metaphysical treatise in excelsis. One profound student of spiritual thought, V. Chandrasekharam, remarked that The Life Divine "has the character of a perfectly natural and inevitable synthesis of all that is valuable in the various main lines of intellectual seeking and vision, of aspiration and discipline, of upward effort and aim, of the Ancient and the Modern world, of the West and the East".⁶⁹ A Western scholar, Charles A. Moore, writes:

This, then, is the true wisdom of the Indian mind. It is truly comprehensive. It includes the insights of the East and the insights of the West. It combines their respective unique emphases.... Sri Aurobindo has thus arrived at a comprehensive and, to all intents and purposes, all-inclusive view of the universe and life, providing a world philosophy which in effect brings together the East and the West.⁷⁰

Otto Wolff, the German Protestant theologian, has also remarked that "it is not only Indians who see in him that last arch of a bridge of human thought and endeavour which leads from the Vedic beginnings to the present, and transcends the ordinary limits of human consciousness". And the English novelist, Dorothy Richardson, once wrote to the present writer after reading The Life Divine: "Has there ever existed a more synthetic consciousness than that of Sri Aurobindo? Unifying he is to the limit of the term."

One seasoned Indian philosopher, the late S.K. Maitra, after making a comparative study of Sri Aurobindo and many Western philosophical thinkers, reached the conclusion:

May we not say that... there is a philosophic yoga which converts the philosophies with which we are familiar into the ideal philosophy, the philosophy that is to be the future philosophy! An outline of this philosophic yoga Sri Aurobindo has given in his writings.⁷¹

'East' and 'West', of course, are blanket terms, and by "East' Professor Maitra meant the Indian philosophical tradition. Being "value-centric", Indian philosophy fuses the existential, logical and value aspects into the unitive vision of

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Sachchidananda. Besides, philosophical theory and yogic practice have gone hand in hand in India. Western philosophy is more theoretical than practical, cosmic rather than individual, and intellectual rather than spiritual; it is also in sympathy with an evolutionary rather than a static or cyclical scheme of things. In Sri Aurobindo's philosophy as outlined in The Life Divine, the traditional Indian view of cyclical change has given place to the Western theory of evolution, but this has been linked up with the ideal of spiritual involution. The Indian stress on the individual's destiny and the Western stress on the cosmic background both find fulfilment in Sri Aurobindo's thought which posits the possibility of individual effort starting the alchemic process of the divinisation of man and nature. Finally, the Indian preoccupation with the Spirit and the Western preoccupation with material life are adroitly and convincingly gathered in Sri Aurobindo's philosophy into a greater affirmation that denies neither Spirit nor Matter, but sees them both in the one utterly inclusive arc of Omnipresent Reality.

Some of Maitra's comparative studies are in the nature of fraternal encounters between philosophers, interesting to watch as well as rewarding in result. Plato and Sri Aurobindo, for example: what a rare concatenation! They were seers and poets both, but Plato's philosophy "is haunted by a sense of incompleteness: its intuition and reason cannot be reconciled with each other".⁷² Plotinus' double trinity of the Divine and of the Human principles is paralleled by Sri Aurobindo's double quartets, the upper and the lower hemispheres divided by a wall of obscuration:

The central idea of the double world-order of both Plotinus and Sri Aurobindo is that the higher world sets the standard for the lower.... But however poor an imitation (of the higher world) it may be, the lower world is not a world of shadows but has a real status.⁷³

Whereas the Hegelian dialectic with its emphasis on continuity creates the impression that we can reach the Absolute as a matter of course, in the Aurobindonian view the ascent is not inevitable but is conditioned by the descent of the higher Consciousness or of Grace at every step of the evolutionary march.⁷⁴ Nicolai Hartmann's dualism of Value and Reality is in sharp contrast to Sri Aurobindo's affirmation that there is but one Value which is also the one Reality (Sachchidananda) .⁷⁵ Bergson and Sri Aurobindo, "two thinkers of the greatest creative power of the present day", were both prophets of Evolution, both "volcanic" thinkers, and if for the European philosopher "the ultimate destiny of man... is to be one with the life-current... to be identical with God", for the Indian philosopher man's destiny is to exceed himself and become the Gnostic Being.⁷⁶ Again, A.N. Whitehead the "most systematic thinker in the West today as Sri Aurobindo is in the East", took all knowledge for his province like his Indian contemporary, but his philosophy of Organism is a pretty colourless abstraction - "a structure that hangs in mid-air, having neither a foundation nor any roof'⁷⁷ - as compared with Sri Aurobindo's inspiring vision of the Divine Lotus of Gnostic Life springing out of the ooze of the Life in the Ignorance. And, finally, although Nietzsche and Sri Aurobindo both emphasised the fact that "if the world is really to be raised to a higher level,

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it can only be done through a new and higher race of men and not through individual salvation of individual men", their respective images of the coming Superman were very different:

What Nietzsche means by a Superman is a Titan or Asura and not a god. It is quite otherwise, however, with Sri Aurobindo, whose Superman is the God-Man who excels man not in physical strength or in the power to rule and to conquer, but in things of the spirit.⁷⁸

But of course - while these filiations and deviations between Sri Aurobindo and Western philosophers are interesting enough - there could be no question of any direct influence in either direction.

Of other European thinkers, Martin Heidegger the Existentialist, G. I. Gurdjieff the prophet of the new gnosticism, and Teilhard de Chardin the Jesuit evolutionist come closer to Sri Aurobindo than the others already mentioned. Here, again, any similarities that we may perceive do not necessarily indicate - much less prove - any derivative "influence". If Sri Aurobindo "saw" things first and didn't merely think his way to them, Heidegger too minimised the importance of mere thinking, and set far greater store on living, experiencing, realising. In this, and in other respects as well (for example, the emphasis on the need to transform the earth rather than to save our souls), "Heidegger and Aurobindo, without knowing of the existence of each other, agree at depths".⁷⁹ According to Heidegger, essential or fundamental thinking takes the complementary forms of (1) thinking that utters Being; (2) poetising that names the Holy, and (3) thanking that is a sacrificial offering through total devotion to Being with the aim of illuminating the basic truth of things. Heidegger the philosopher found in Holderlin his perfect poetic counterpart, but Sri Aurobindo the author of The Life Divine discovered in himself his own ideal poetic "other half. Thus what is uttered in The Life Divine was to be named and celebrated in concrete detail and vision-terms in Savitri, the creation of his later years.

The Gnostic system associated with Gurdjieff (and his disciple, P. D. Ouspensky) has no doubt certain resemblances with Sri Aurobindo's, but the differences are more importance still. "Know thyself is the beginning of Gurdjieff's system, as indeed it is the beginning of all spiritual knowledge. What is man? - a machine, a clock (so to say) with seven springs or minds functioning, these centres being the intellectual, the emotional, sex, the instinctive, the moving, the higher emotional and the higher intellectual, the last two generally quiescent in most people! A machine, functioning mechanically; and man's normal condition is one of sleep, and he lives somnambulistically from birth to death. Only when he awakes from this dream-life to real life can he escape from this automatism and learn to live a life of his own. What we talk of as phenomena are the result of three forces: active, passive and neutralising (or downward, upward and integrating). These forces are in perfect harmony in the Absolute, but down the scale of creation (or 'involution' as Sri Aurobindo might call it), they separate, mingle, separate again and the divers worlds, the suns, the planets, the earth and the moon, come into

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existence. It is just as possible to go down the Ray of Creation as it is to go up, as possible to go on sleeping as to wake up and act! While Gurdjieff's system, as a system, looks formidably complicated and elaborately self-explanatory, the question arises whether it is drawn upon a fount of original spiritual experience or is no more than a tour de force of the speculative intellect. It is in this respect that Sri Aurobindo's Supermind has a decisive advantage over Gurdjieff's "Enneagram" and its transformations. In the course of a review-article, D.S. Savage wrote in 1950:

The Consciousness which is identical with Being can be no other than the Divine Consciousness, or Supermind, of which a thinker like Sri Aurobindo is able to assert: "Supermind sees the universe and its contents as itself in a single indivisible act of knowledge, an act which is its life, which is the very movement of its self-existence." This insight is very far from both Ouspensky and Gurdjieff, for with them the entire process of knowledge is reversed, and instead of a primary spiritual intuition which is only afterward elaborated by the reasoning mind, the analytical intellect begins from material existence and, endeavouring to climb upwards by its own strength, succeeds only in converting everything it finds into its own image and likeness.*

There may be some faint seeping of an ancient and genuine gnosis in Gurdjieff's system, but it doesn't seem to show to any potent effect.

The objection to the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky system - namely, its lack of religious affiliation or of a grounding on some seminal spiritual experience - cannot, however, be raised in respect of the French Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin's, as outlined principally in the posthumously published work. The Phenomenon of Man (1960). Born to orthodoxy in a Catholic family, Teilhard entered the Society of Jesus. During the time of his theological training at Hastings in Sussex, he seems to have become increasingly conscious "of a profound ontological total drift of the universe" around him, filling the whole horizon of his consciousness.⁸⁰ When the first world war broke out, he was in it throughout, and it was while serving as a stretcher-bearer that he started wrestling with the "first and last" things. Returning to the Order, he became a palaeontologist and did some outstanding research during his long stay in China. Since his childhood days, Teilhard had been gripped by the world of phenomena - especially the material world - and subsequent to the spiritual experience at Hastings and during the dreary years of the war and the long years afterwards, he thought out his conclusions, based on the insights provided by his scientific studies and research and also his own intuitions into the ultimate truth of things. He threw out hints of these speculations in his letters, but the actual formulation was made in Le Milieu divin ('The Divine Milieu') written W 1926-7 and Le Phénomène humain ('The Phenomenon of Man') written some

* The Spectator, 28 April 1950, in the review-article "The New Gnosticism'. In his A Study of Gurdjieff's Teaching (1957), Kenneth Walker also has tried in one or two places to read Gurdjieff's teaching in the light of Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga.

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ten years later. The works, however, couldn't be published in his lifetime, but after his death at the age of seventy-four in 1955, these and other writings of his have been published and widely discussed, and have won for him a place among the great philosophical thinkers of our time.

Sri Aurobindo, a Vedantic revolutionary and poet, Fr. Teilhard, a Roman Catholic and biologist: they were not professional philosophers, philosophy came to them -just as cosmic consciousness came to them suddenly, unexpectedly, overwhelmingly, to Sri Aurobindo in 1908 in the Alipur jail and to Teilhard during the war of 1914-8. Besides, both Sri Aurobindo*and Teilhard saw earth-history and human history in terms of Evolution, the adventure pointing towards the ultimate divinisation of man; and like Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard also saw Evolution interlinked with Involution:

...let it be noted that, by the very fact of the individualisation of our planet, a certain mass of elementary consciousness was originally imprisoned in the matter of earth.... the early earth is itself, and in its totality, the incredible complex germ we are seeking.⁸¹

...if the universe, regarded sidereally, is in process of spatial expansion (from the infinitesimal to the immense), in the same way and still more clearly it presents itself to us, physico-chemically, as in process of organic involution upon itself (from extremely simple to the extremely complex)... ⁸²

And the Aurobindonian Supermind finds its parallel in the Teilhardian concept of the Omega Point:

Only one reality seems to survive and be capable of succeeding and spanning the infinitesimal and the immense: energy - that floating, universal entity from which all emerges and into which all falls back as into an ocean; energy, the new spirit; the new god. So, at the world's Omega, as at its Alpha, lies the Impersonal.⁸³

There is also, in Teilhard's treatment of the problem of pain and individual human suffering, the same assumption as in Sri Aurobindo that the incidence of such evil is inseparable from the evolutionary process.

Again, both Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin took the material world as seriously as they did the Spirit. If Sri Aurobindo wrote on 20 May 1915: "Heaven we have possessed, but not the earth; but the fullness of the Yoga is to make, in the formula of the Veda, 'Heaven and Earth equal and one' ", Teilhard wrote in 1934 in his Comment Je crois ('How I Believe'):

If, as a result of some interior revolution, I were successively to lose my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, my faith in the Spirit, I think that I would still continue to believe in the World.... I surrender myself to this undefined faith in a single and infallible World, wherever it may lead me.⁸⁴

If Sri Aurobindo disapproved certain Hindu "orthodoxies" like the popular doctrines of Mayavada and Karma, Teilhard disliked no less and chafed under the excessive legalism and sacerdotalism of the Church. But Teilhard himself was only too ready to equate Hinduism with Mayavada and the theory of karma:

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India - the region par excellence of high philosophic and religious pressures.... But however efficacious these currents for ventilating and illuminating the atmosphere of mankind, we have to recognise that, with their excessive passivity and detachment, they were incapable of building the world.... Phenomena regarded as an illusion (Maya) and their connections as a chain (Karma), what was left in these doctrines to animate and direct human evolution?⁸⁵

And yet, over twenty years before Teilhard wrote these lines, Sri Aurobindo had already formulated his Supramental Manifesto, showing how the pace of human evolution was to be accelerated and how the rebuilding of the world was to be promoted with a view to the establishment of the Life Divine upon the earth.

Again, if Sri Aurobindo goes back to the Gita, the Upanishads and above all to the Veda to secure corroboration for his Yogic insights and overhead realisations, Teilhard likewise finds support for his intuitions, not in the Sermon on the Mount, but in St. Paul's utterances and assurances. In Teilhard's view. Evolution has been facilitated so far by a tendency in the functioning of the universe towards increasing complexity-consciousness, and the next evolutionary jump may very well mean the convergence of humanity upon itself and the universal reign of something akin to cosmic consciousness. Hasn't St. Paul said that, in the fullness of time, all things might be gathered in Christ, "both which are in heaven and which are on the earth"? ⁸⁶ The "fall", then, interpreted in a cosmic sense, would only mean the swoon of the Spirit in Matter - the deviation from the Spirit's "oneness, integrality and harmony that was the necessary condition for the great plunge into the Ignorance which is the soul's adventure in the world and from which was born our suffering and aspiring humanity".⁸⁷ The Movement of Evolution would now take the world back to the Cosmic Christ - or what practically comes to the same thing, to Sachchidananda. And this reunion and transfiguration will be achieved through a supreme efflorescence of Love or Love charged with knowledge, power and beauty (satyam, śivam, sundaram).

Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard: Vedanta and Christianity - these are four intersecting circles of spiritual experience and thought with a substantial common ground between them. Eva Olsson has made a fair-minded attempt to compare Sri Aurobindo's thought with Christian theology and practice, noting the main affinities as well as differences between them. "Sin" has no place in Sri Aurobindo's system, and the role of Evil is muted; Christ was certainly an avatar, but not the only one, the unique incarnation. As against these differences, both Christianity and Sri Aurobindo firmly believe that "Man is only a step in the development of creation to be superseded, transformed, perfected"; and not Man only, but all creation is to be transformed as well. In Eva Olsson's words:

Sri Aurobindo's message calls men back to the life process itself. Christ did the same, but as centuries have passed, we seem to have become forgetful of that call.⁸⁸

On the other hand, K.D. Sethna pleads persuasively that the Teilhardian intuitions

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and insights, amplified by the Aurobindonian revelations and affirmations, should pave the way for what he calls a "Vedantic Christianity". Teilhard's "Cosmic Christ" must lead "to an Indianised Christianity giving prominence to Pantheos but holding the transcendent Divine as its prime concept"; and Christ would be one among the great avatars, and for Christians the chosen avatar of worship or ista devatā⁸⁹ And what is needed is not Teilhard cut down Procrustes like to what may pass for orthodox Christianity or Sri Aurobindo straight-jacketed into traditional Vedanta but a dynamic new force, infused by a sense of urgency and the spirit of modern science, a force for revolutionary change and transformation of man's and the earth's nature:

[Teilhard's] natural connections are with spiritual India through scientific Europe and, by an inspired gathering up of several strands of spiritual India, his system provides pointers in the direction of the luminous largeness of Sri Aurobindo. Teilhard can be fulfilled in his proper role by nothing except this largeness which overpasses all religions and their possible dialogue and ushers in a new age of comprehensive spirituality - both individual and collective - where the Phenomenon of Man will be a part of a Divine Milieu in the most explicit, concrete and complete sense.⁹⁰

So, then, the East and the West at their quintessential best would be meeting purposively and creatively, after all. The four circles of spiritual experience and thought may be distinctive enough, yet if the intersection of the four provides a significant common area of agreed strategy for the future, that would be a spur to the great evolutionary endeavour that is to lift Man to the height of "greater Man" or Superman and unite all in the mystic body of "Cosmic Christ" or Sachchidananda.

One final question: How about the other great religions of our time? Islam, for example, and Buddhism; and also - how about Marxism, which is as good as a religion for millions? In the course of three lectures on 'Evolution and the Modern World' given at St. Stephen's College, Delhi, in 1970, Professor R.C. Zaehner made a comparative evaluation of Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin, and incidentally discussed their thought in relation to Marxism:

Vedānta - Marxism - Christianity. In this at least Teilhard and Aurobindo agree: these, they think, are the only possible alternatives before mankind, - the three 'religions' of modern man.*

Islam comes into the picture also because, in Muhammad Iqbal (and his Asrar-i-Khudi or 'The Secrets of the Self), "Islam found its own Aurobindo". As for Buddhism, it represents "the same kind of spirituality as Sankara's Vedanta; it is not primarily interested in this world". There is Zen Buddhism, of course, but "Zen is cosmic consciousness; and would be duly gathered into the integral and

* This and the following quotations are taken from the mimeographed copy of the lectures that I have with me. The lectures have since been published with the title. Evolution in Religion: A Study in Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin (1971).

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convergent vision of Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard". The question therefore reduces itself to this: What shall we do with Marxism? Although both Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard were in full sympathy with its humanistic philosophy, they couldn't appreciate its denial of the Spirit or applaud its political translation in Russia or China. Sri Aurobindo's views on this question are succinctly stated in some of his "aphorisms":

The communistic principle of society is intrinsically as superior to the individualistic as is brotherhood to jealousy and mutual slaughter; but all the practical schemes of Socialism invented in Europe are a yoke, a tyranny and a prison.

If communism ever re-establishes itself successfully upon earth, it must be on a foundation of soul's brotherhood and the death of egoism... .⁹¹

The classless society prophesied by Marx and Engels hasn't materialised so far because democracy, socialism and communism haven't been able in actual practice to end the human tendency to egoistic separativity, assertiveness and rivalry and their attendant evils of exploitation in economic life and corruption, violence and liquidation in political life. It is only when the spiritual revolution resulting in the cracking of the human ego comes about that the godheads of the soul -justice, liberty, equality, brotherhood - will be realised on a permanent basis in a "kingdom of the saints" as was dreamt of by Christianity, Islam and Puranic Hinduism.⁹² That would be the divinised society of the future, and that would also be the true communistic society.*

* At the Bombay Seminar on 'Sri Aurobindo and Indian Literature' (14 May 1972), more than one Urdu scholar (K.A. Faruqi, Malik Ram, Waheed Akhtar) referred to the similarities between Sir Mohammad Iqbal and Sri Aurobindo. Both had been critical of Sankara's Mayavada. Both had visualised a great future for the present unfinished man. And Akhtar added: "The comparative study of Iqbal and Aurobindo can reveal, not only certain similarities, but also their identity.... Both Iqbal and Aurobindo based their thought on the spirituality of the orient and were opposed to the intellectualism of the West.... Both aimed at the spiritualisation of scientific knowledge."

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