Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: Yoga of Evolution

Yoga of Evolution-I

There is a close connection between evolution and yoga; it may even be said that the evolutionary process is basically a yogic process and that yoga is the conscious application of the processes of evolution and principles underlying those processes in order to accelerate the process of natural evolution. However, Yoga and its processes leave behind the ordinary tardy method of slow and confused growth through the evolution of Nature. As Sri Aurobindo points out: “The natural evolution is at its best an uncertain growth under cover, partly by the pressure of the environment, partly by a groping education, and an ill-lighted purposeful effort, an only partially illumined and half-automatic use of opportunities with many blunders and lapses and relapses; a great portion of it is made up of apparent accidents and circumstances and vicissitudes – though veiling a secret intervention and divine guidance. In yoga we replace this confused, crooked crab-motion by a rapid, conscious and self-directed evolution which is planned to carry us, as far as can be, in a straight line towards the goal set before us.”¹

There are, according to Sri Aurobindo, three stages in the process of evolution. An involution of the spirit in the inconscience is the beginning. Evolution in the ignorance with its play of possibilities of a partial developing knowledge is the middle. A consummation in a deployment of the spirit’s self-knowledge and self-power of its divine being and consciousness is the culmination. It is admitted that the two stages that have already occurred seem at first sight to deny the possibility of the later consummating state of the cycle, but it is stressed that logically they imply its emergence. For, it is argued, if the inconscience has evolved consciousness, the partial consciousness already reached much surely evolve into complete consciousness. It is contended that it is a supramentalised, perfected and divinised life for which the earth-nature is secretly seeking, and that a progressive manifestation of this kind can only have for its secret of significance the evolution of a Being in a perfect Becoming.

These three stages of evolution and the processes that can be observed in these stages can provide with us with a clue as to how the processes of evolution can be applied scientifically on the evolutionary process itself. This scientific application is the central principle of yoga.

For the development of yoga depends on a scrupulous examination of the level at which evolution has reached in our present human consciousness and whether the psychological workings of the human being can be so handled that the causes of the slowness of the natural functionings can be eliminated for purposes of introducing into the evolutionary process those principles and methods which would facilitate its hastening. Yoga, as Swami Vivekananda has said, may be regarded as a means of compressing one’s evolution into a single life or a few years or even a few months of the bodily existence.

In this light, yoga no more remains as something mystic or abnormal which has no relation to the ordinary processes of the World-Energy or the purpose she keeps in view in her subjective and objective self-fulfilment. Yoga reveals itself rather as an intense and exceptional use of the powers that Nature has already manifested or is progressively organising in her less exalted but more general operations. As Sri Aurobindo points out, “Yogic methods have something of the same relation to the customary psychological workings of man as the scientific handling of the natural force of electricity or of steam to the normal operations of steam and of electricity. And they, too, are formed upon a knowledge developed and confirmed by regular experiment, practical analysis and constant result.” ²

In this light, all natural evolution and life is subconscious yoga, and all life can become in the human being a conscious yoga, co-terminus with life itself, so that one can say in a more perfect and luminous sense: “All life is yoga.”

Yoga of Evolution-II

The integral yoga that Sri Aurobindo and The Mother have proposed is thus a yoga of evolution, based on the perception that the human being is a transitional being and that the contemporary crisis through which humanity is passing today can be resolved only through even a farther evolution that could eventually bring about mutation of the human species. This Yoga has been developed by their experimentation carried on day after day for years and decades, so as to perfect it for purposes of the supramental manifestation on the earth. If we study the life and work of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, we shall see that prior to their first meeting on 29th March 1914, both of them had a vast and laborious period of preparation. From that momentous date, when The Mother came from France to India and met Sri Aurobindo, they consecrated themselves entirely to the task of discovering the most effective means of meeting what seemed to be insuperable obstacles that the contemporary crisis presented. From that day, they began to prepare new conditions on the earth so that humanity could not only survive the crisis but also arrive at the fulfilment of the deepest aspirations for lasting peace, unity and harmony.

Both Sri Aurobindo and The Mother insisted on the scientific rigour with which research and experimental work needed to be conducted. They required, therefore, a laboratory, a laboratory where experimentation could be carried on for human evolution through the yoga of evolution towards the eventual transformation that would be needed to lift humanity towards its highest possible development and its eventual mutation into a new humanity or superhumanity.

They created the needed laboratory, at Pondciherry, which came to be known as the Sri Aurobindo Ashram from 1926 onwards, and it became a place of an unprecedented experiment in evolution. To this laboratory came men and women, who offered themselves to undergo a process of active support and collaboration and to respond to the evolutionary and yogic demands of the experiment under the constant guidance of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother. Outwardly, this laboratory provided to each one a specific work that would be suitable to the integral development of personality. Inwardly, this work provided to each one the maximum challenge of the difficulties which have to be overcome and thoroughly replaced by a new consciousness of mutuality, goodwill and harmony. Each individual came with his or her possibilities but also with the obstinate difficulties of the un-regenerate nature. This laboratory, its work and its history, reveals a continuous burning of the fire of aspiration and a continuous movement of achievements. When the work reached a certain point of achievement, it was decided to expand the work of the laboratory so as to include the task of educating children in a new way so that right from early stages of formation, they would breathe the atmosphere of the yoga of evolution, the yoga of universal peace and harmony and the yoga of the ideal of perfection. This nucleus of children and teachers is what came to be known in 1959 as the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.

In the meantime, in 1950, Sri Aurobindo left his body, purposely and deliberately, as a strategic means of hastening the process of the yoga of evolution. In 1956, the work reached a culminating point when the Supermind descended on the earth and began to manifest. The Mother’s supreme majesty, power and force are manifest in the declaration that She made of that momentous event. She described this event in the following text:

First Supramental Manifestation

(During the common meditation on Wednesday, the 29th February 1956)

This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine.

As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that “THE TIME HAS COME”, and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces.

Then the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow.”³

On 3rd February 1958, The Mother had a radical experience, with reference to which, she made a long statement, in which she said:

“The supramental world exists in a permanent way, and I am there permanently in a supramental body. … I now know that for the two worlds to join in a constant and conscious relationship what is missing is an intermediate zone between the existing physical world and the supramental world as it exists. This zone has yet to be built, both in the individual consciousness and in the objective world and it is being built. …”⁴

Towards the end of 1958, The Mother came to a precision and formulated the central question that she was exploring: “”How does one FIX the supermind in the body?”

Then on July 24, 1959, she had a radical experience, in respect of which she stated:

“For the first time the supramental light entered directly into my body, without passing through the inner beings. It entered through the feet (a red and gold colour – marvellous, warm, intense) and it climbed up and up. And as it climbed, the fever also climbed because the body was not accustomed to this intensity. As all this light neared the head, I thought I will burst and that the experience would have to be stopped. But then, I very clearly received the indication to make the Calm and Peace descend, to widen all this body-consciousness and all these cells, so that they could contain the supramental light. So I widened, and as the light was ascending, I brought down the vastness and an unshakeable peace. And suddenly, there was a second of fainting.

I found myself in another world, but not far away (I was not in a total trance). And this world was almost as substantial as the physical world. There were rooms – Sri Aurobindo’s room with the bed he rests on – and he was living there, he was there all the time: it was his abode. …

And Sri Aurobindo was there, with a majesty, a magnificient beauty. He had all his beautiful hair as before. It was also concrete, so substantial – he was even being served some kind of food. I remained there for one hour… I spoke to Sri Aurobindo, for I had some important questions to ask him about the way certain things are to be realised. He said nothing. He listened to me quietly and looked at me as if all my words were useless: he understood everything at once. …

I remained in that state for two full days, two days of absolute felicity. And Sri Aurobindo was with me for the whole time, the whole time – when I walked, he walked with me, when I sat down, he sat next to me.

…

Sri Aurobindo gave me two days of this – total bliss. But all the same, by the end of the second day I realised that I could not continue to remain there, for the work was not advancing. The work must be done in the body; the realisation must be attained here in this physical world, for otherwise it is not complete. So I withdrew from that world and set to work here again.”⁵

In the psychological system, which has been developed by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, there are, in the physical, several distinguishable elements: the gross physical, the subtle physical, the physical mind and the cellular mind. The gross physical is what we see with our physical eyes and what we touch and perceive with our physical senses. The subtle physical is what lies behind our gross physical – that which Mother has described in her experience of Sri Aurobindo in his abode of the subtle physical. The physical mind is that part of our mentality which is entirely at the service of the physical, which is rooted in the physical, which makes our perception of sensations possible. It is also called mental-physical, since it is the mind that sub-serves the physical, and it is as mechanical and repetitive as the physical. The cellular mind is the mind of the cells, the mind which is overtly active in the animals, but which has been overlaid in our human psychology by the physical mind. The physical mind, as a product of evolution, evolved in Matter under the pressures of difficulties, even, of suffering; hence, there is in it an imprint of pessimism and defeatism, which is the greatest obstacle in the task of fixing the supramental consciousness in the body. The physical mind is like a layer on the mind of the cells, it covers up the normal dumb occult consciousness of the cellular mind; the cellular mind, too, under the magic spell of the physical mind betrays a reflected pessimism. But as The Mother discovered, pessimism and the resultant illness, disease or death do not form a normal part of the mind of the cells.

This was a major discovery, paving the way for FIXING the supermind in matter. If the activities of the physical mind can be clarified, controlled, mastered, silenced, and if the mind of the cells can be allowed to function in its purity without being overlaid by the magic spell of the physical mind, and if the mind of the cells can receive and fix the supramental vibrations, a new rhythm of supramental functioning in the body can be established. The cellular mind is, in fact, a link between the purely material substance and the physical mind, and it is the real fixer. Under the influence of the physical mind, it fixes in its movement the repetitive operation of pessimism and of defeatism; but if – and it is here that the repetition of the mantra finds its justification in the yogic process – a new vibration is applied in the cellular mind, it will fix that new vibration.

The Mother’s experiences, after the 29th February 1956, related increasingly to the physical mind and to her experiences of fixing the Supermind in the mind of the cells and in the body-consciousness and of the transformation of the body. After 1959, The Mother met Sri Aurobindo daily in the subtle physical. Her discoveries were momentous, particularly in regard to the nature and origin of Pain and Death. Gradually, she was building a new body – material body – of the supramental light and power. And this entire field of experiences and discoveries was like a virgin forest, and it was in this forest that The Mother hewed a path and a curve of development. There were experiences from day to day, from hour to hour, and many of them have been recorded in the volumes of The Mother’s Agenda.

Between 1959 and 1968, three simultaneous and interrelated processes were going on in The Mother’s body. Firstly, there was a progressive dissolution of the inconscience at its utmost bottom. Secondly, there was infiltration, permeation and invasion of the Supermind in the cellular consciousness and in the physical consciousness so as to counteract Falsehoods in Matter, Life and Mind. Thirdly, there was the gradual transformation of the body by means of the collaboration and change of the physical and cellular mind and by means of radical changes in various functionings of organs and faculties. At the collective level, too, some radical changes were appearing in the functioning of the Ashram. The Mother was placing individuals more and more into conditions where synthesis, unity and harmony would become imperative. A greater and greater stress was laid on the creation of collective consciousness.

Already we find, in the Agenda of 1961, certain indications of the idea of an ideal city which could be a habitation of a collective life and which could serve as the embryo or seed of the future supramental world. In the words of The Mother:

“What I myself have seen … was a plan that came complete in all details, but that does not at all conform in spirit and consciousness with what is possible on earth now (although, in its most material manifestation, the plan was based on existing terrestrial conditions). It was an idea of an ideal city, nucleus of a small ideal country, having only superficial, extremely limited contacts with the old world. One would already have to conceive (it is possible) of a power sufficient to be at once a protection against aggression or bad will (this would not be the most difficult protection to provide) and a protection (which can just barely be imagined) against infiltration and admixture… From the social or organisational standpoint, these problems are not difficult, nor from the standpoint of inner life; the problem is the relationship with what is not supramentalised – preventing infiltration or admixture, keeping the nucleus from falling back into an inferior creation during the transitional period.”⁶

She added: “The realisation under community or group conditions would clearly be far more complete, integral, total and probably more perfect than any individual realisation, which is always, necessarily – necessarily – extremely limited on the external material level, because it is only one way of being, one mode of manifestation, one microscopic set of vibrations that is touched.”⁷

In due course, something of the idea of an ideal city began to take shape. In 1968, she found the world preparing itself to permit the launching upon a crucial experiment in the task of the realisation of human unity. And she inaugurated a new laboratory for conducting this experiment. This laboratory has been named by her “Auroville”. On February 28, 1968, at the time of the inauguration, she announced the Charter for Auroville through which she gave Auroville to humanity as a whole and called upon people wishing to come to Auroville to consecrate themselves to unending education, constant progress, and to the material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual human unity.

UNESCO welcomed this laboratory, which was designed for the meeting of the East and the West, and it declared its support, through several resolutions of its General Conference, to the aims and objectives of Auroville. With the founding of this township, doors were opened to the entire humankind to participate in the unique experiment initiated and developed by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.

While Auroville continued to grow, the experiences and realisations of the momentous process of the supramental manifestation continued to follow its inevitable march.

On the 1st January 1969, The Mother had an experience of “new consciousness”, which was later on described by her as the consciousness of the superman, an intermediate between the human and the supramental being. Speaking of this, Mother said:

“It was luminous, smiling, and so benevolent, BECAUSE OF POWER; I mean to say that kindness, in human beings, is generally rather weak, in the sense that it does not like to fight, it does not like to struggle; but it is not that at all. A benevolence which imposes itself. …

It interested me because it was totally new. And so concrete! Concrete like that … like what, usually, the physical consciousness considers as “the others,” concrete like that. It means that it did not pass through some inner being, through the psychic being, it came DIRECTLY to the body.”⁸

The advent of this New Consciousness may be regarded as a crucial development of The Mother’s yoga of the Body. Indeed, this consciousness was a superman consciousness working through The Mother’s body, – a body, human in origin but thoroughly purified and refined, right up to the cellular level and thus capable of the operations of the Supermind – directly in the physical body.

It is true that the entire physical body was not yet fully transformed, but it was yet a vehicle in which the subtle physical was so much supramentalised that its real matter – which The Mother had described as something much more dense and compact and plastic than the gross physical that we see – could manifest, operate and produce results in and through the outer body.

In the beginning of 1970, The Mother spoke of the replacement of knowledge-processes in her body by a new perception which was total, something that comprehended at the same time hearing, vision, and knowledge. There was, she said, no differentiation among her organs. She pointed out that new consciousness insisted on surpassing all divisions and all exclusiveness, including the great division of life and death. The Mother discovered “over-life” which is at once life and death, or which is rather something that cannot be described either as life or as death but some other third state in which contradiction between life and death is overcome.

On 14 March 1970, The Mother spoke to Satprem, during which she made a momentous statement that the work that Sri Aurobindo had given to her was accomplished. Speaking of this accomplishment of the work, she said:

“Previously, those who had inner experiences used to say: Yes, up there it is like that, but here…’ Now the but here’ soon will not be any more. We are making the conquest of that, that formidable change: that the physical life must be directed by the superior-consciousness and not by the mental world. It is the change of the authority … it is difficult. It is laborious. It is painful. Naturally, there will be some damage, but … But really, one can see – one can see. And that is the REAL CHANGE. That’s what will allow new Consciousness to express itself. And the body learns – it learns its lesson – all the bodies, all the bodies. …

…

Obviously, it will take time for it to be truly established. There, it is the battle. From all sides, on every plane, there is an assault of things from the outside which come to say: `Nothing has changed’ – but it is not true, it not true, the body knows that it is not true. And now it knows, it knows in which sense. …

…

And now I see, I see how his (Sri Aurobindo’s) departure and his work so… so immense, indeed, so constant, in this subtle physical, how much, how much it has helped! How he has (Mother makes a gesture of triturating matter), how much he has helped to prepare things, to change the structure of the physical.

All the experiences that others had had, those of entering into contact with superior-worlds, they left the physical here as it is. (How to say?) From the beginning of existence until Sri Aurobindo’s departure, I was in the consciousness that one can climb up, one can know, one can have all the experiences (in fact, one had them), but when one came in the body, … it was these old for-mi-da-ble mental laws which governed everything. And then, all these years have been years to prepare – to prepare – to free oneself and to prepare --, and these last days, it was … ah! The PHYSICAL confirmation, made by the body, that it had changed.

It must be “worked out” as one says, it has to be realised in all details, but the change IS DONE – the change is done. …

…

The physical is CAPABLE of receiving the Superior Light, the Truth, the true Consciousness and to ma-ni-fest it.

…

It took … a little more than one year for this consciousness to WIN this victory. And yet, naturally, it is visible only to those who have inner vision, but … but it is done.

(Long Silence)

This was that, the work that Sri Aurobindo had given to me. Now, I understand.

…

It seems … it seems like a miracle in the body. …

And everything becomes clear.

We shall see. …”⁹

The Mother reiterated, during her conversation with Satprem on 29.4.1970, that the object to be accomplished was the change in the physical consciousness, that the change in the physical appearance was a secondary consequence, and that would be the last thing to change. She said emphatically, that the thing that had to be accomplished was accomplished. In her own words:

“… We believe that this, this appearance (Mother refers to her body), this is … this appears to be for the ordinary consciousness the most important – it is evidently the last thing that will change. And it appears, for the ordinary consciousness that it will be the last thing to change because it is the most important: it will be the surest sign. But it is not that at all! … It is not that at all.

It is this change IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS, -- which has been produced, -- which is the most important thing. All the rest they are consequences. And here, in this world, this material world, this appears to us to be the most important because it is … it is all upside down, I do not know how to explain.

For us, when this (the body) will be visibly something different from what it is, one will say “Ah! Now thing is done.” This is not true: the thing IS DONE. This (the body), is a secondary consequence…”¹⁰

As a result of this victory, The Mother was moving forward towards the change even of the gross physical, so as to manifest a new divine body. But this was the evolutionary adventure, and, as she said on 7th April, 1973, in a conversation with Satprem:

“Sometimes I wonder, “Does the Lord want me to leave?” I am quite … quite willing, you know, so that’s not the point; but does He want me to stay? ... No answer. No answer, except “Transformation”. And that is …”¹¹

The Mother had two visions of her “new body”. On 24th March 1972, while describing her second vision, She said:

“Yes, I WAS like that. It was me; I didn’t look at myself in a mirror, I say myself like this (Mother bends her head to look at her body), I was … I just was like that.

… It was around four in the morning, I think. And perfectly natural – I mean, I didn’t look in a mirror, it felt perfectly natural. I only remember what I saw (gesture from the chest to the waist). I was covered only with veils, so I only saw … What was very different was the torso, from the chest to the waist: it was neither male nor female.

But it was lovely, my form was extremely svelte and slim – slim but not thin. And the skin was very white, just like my skin. A lovely form. And no sex – you couldn’t tell: neither male nor female. The sex had disappeared.

The same here (Mother points to her chest), all that was flat. I don’t know how to explain it. There was an outline reminiscent of what is now, but with no forms (Mother touches her chest), not even as much as man’s. A very white skin, very smooth. Practically no abdomen to speak of. And no stomach. All that was slim.

I didn’t pay any special attention, you see, because I was that: it felt perfectly natural to me …

But this form is in the subtle physical, isn’t it?

It must be already like that in the subtle physical.

But how will it pass into the physical?

That’s the question I don’t know. … I don’t know.

I don’t know.

Also, clearly, there was none of the complex digestion we have now, or the kind of elimination we have now. It didn’t work that way.

But how? … Food is already obviously very different and becoming more and more so – glucose, for instance, or substances that don’t require an elaborate digestion. But how will the body itself change? … That I don’t know. I don’t know.

You see, I didn’t look to see how it worked, for it was completely natural to me, so I can’t describe it in detail. Simply, it was neither a woman’s body nor a man’s – that much is certain. And the outline was fairly similar to that of a very young person. There was a faint suggestion of a human form (Mother draws a form in the air): with a shoulder and a waist. Just a hint of it.

I see it but.… I saw it exactly as you see yourself, I didn’t even look at myself in the mirror. And I had a sort of veil, which I wore to cover myself.

It was my way of being (there was nothing surprising in it), my natural way of being.

That must be how it is in the subtle physical.

But what’s mysterious is the transition from one to the other.

Yes – how?

But it’s the same mystery as the transition from chimpanzee to man.

Oh, no, Mother! It’s more colossal than that! It’s more colossal for, after all, there isn’t that much difference between a chimpanzee and a man.

But there wasn’t such a difference in the appearance either (Mother draws a form in the air): there were shoulders, arms, legs, a body, a waist. Similar to ours. There was only….

Yes, but I mean the way a chimpanzee functions and the way a man functions are the same.

They are the same.

Well, yes! They digest the same, breath the same….

Whereas here….

No, but here too there must have been breathing. The shoulders were strikingly broad (gesture), in contrast. That’s important. But the chest was neither feminine nor even masculine: only reminiscent of it. and all that – stomach, abdomen and the rest – was simply an outline, a very slender and harmonious form, which certainly wasn’t used for the purpose we now use our bodies.

The two different things – totally different – were procreation, which was no longer possible, and food. Though even our present food is manifestly not the same as that of chimpanzees or even the first humans; it’s quite different. So now, it seems we have to find a food that doesn’t require all this digesting…. Not exactly liquid, but not solid either.

And there’s also the question of the mouth – I don’t know about that – and the teeth? Naturally, chewing should no longer be necessary, and therefore teeth wouldn’t be either … But there has to be something to replace them. I haven’t the slightest idea what the face looked like. But it didn’t seem too, too unlike what it is now.

What will change a great deal, of course – it had acquired a prominent role – is breathing. That being depended much on it.

Yes, he probably absorbs energies directly.

Yes. There will probably be intermediary beings who won’t last, you see, just as there were intermediary beings between the chimpanzee and man.

But I don’t know, something has to happen that has never before happened.”¹²

Indeed, Mother’s consciousness was clearer and greater than ever. She was the seer par excellence. She was living with a new mode of being that was turned exclusively towards the Divine with complete self-effacement right up to the cells in utter surrender. And yet, she had all the dynamism of a hero-warrior engaged in the battle to fight all that resisted or obstructed the effort to bring about the rule of the divine supermind on the earth. On November 14, 1973, at midnight, she began to feel that she might get paralysed. She asked to walk. She said: `I want to walk, otherwise I’ll become paralysed.’ She held on to the arm of one of the attendants and walked… until she turned blue.

During the next days, she would ask to be lifted from her chaise longue. On the night of November 16, she again asked to walk: `I want to walk,’ she said. She continued to fight till the very end. On the afternoon of the 17th, the signs of choking grew worse. At 7.10 p.m. her doctor massaged her heart. At 7.25 p.m. her breathing stopped.

Such is the account we can make, extremely briefly, of the one who had attained that victory, which consisted of the supramental change in the physical consciousness. We may say that as a result of this victory, a new supramental body was already built, – the body that could be visible to the inner vision which can see a new Matter that is more dense than subtle physical and yet less dense than the gross physical that we can see and touch with our gross physical eyes and gross physical tactile sensation. The body that stopped breathing was only that gross body which had been used as a pedestal for that new supramental body, which is at work and which is carrying on the yoga of evolution, for the multiplication of the intermediate bodies that need to appear as a transition between the human body and the divine body.

Theories of Evolution and Sri Aurobindo’s Concept of Supramental Manifestation

Theories of Evolution and Sri Aurobindo’s Concept of Supramental Manifestation

The process of evolution was detected in ancient times. Both in India and in Greece, there were important ideas of evolution. In modern times, the theory of evolution is mainly the work of Linnaeus (1707-78), Buffon (1707), Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Lamarck (1744-1829), Charles Darwin (1809-82) and his followers.

On the Origin of Species written by Charles Darwin (1859) gave details and demonstrations of his scientific theory of evolution, according to which, life on the earth evolved by a gradual and yet continuous process from the earliest forms of living organisms to the latest product, man. Natural selection, variation and heredity are said to be the factors through the operation of which new species arise out of existing ones. When new characters are produced by the variability of organisms, natural selection decided their survival or death. If the characters do not adapt to their environment, they are eliminated in the competition. If, on the other hand, they equip themselves better for the struggle, they tend to survive. The offsprings of the successful tend to resemble the parents in exhibiting the favoured variation to a greater degree than the parents, and a new type becomes established by a continuous piling up of small useful accretions through many generations.

The two original components of Darwin’s theory were (i) that evolution is gradual, and (ii) that the nature of the change is dictated by natural, not divine, selection. Both of these are closely interlinked, and both are at the heart of controversy today, as they were in Darwin’s time.

Many naturalists accepted Darwin’s gradualism because it accorded well with what they saw in living species. But critics could not accept that all the world’s marvellous species and their extraordinary structures such as those of the eye, could have arisen only by chance. Some biologists accepted that minor changes might be the result of natural selection, but held that beyond extremes within a range of variation, a new species could not arise by natural selection alone. The only way in which the boundaries of species might be breached, they contended, would be through a sudden jump.

Palaeontologists who dug up and classified the remains of extinct species raised another major objection to gradualism. They argued that if Darwin were right, they should be able to find a series of specimens that could be laid out in a gradual continuum from one major type of animal to another. If, for example, reptiles evolved into mammals, there should be fossils representing every gradation between these two groups. Instead, the palaeontologists found more gaps than continua. Darwin conceded this, but he though that further researches would reveal the intermediate links. As it turned out, only a few links have been found, and this issue is a part of today’s controversy.

There are biologists today who maintain that the evolutionary process jumps from one species to another. Their theory is called ‘saltationism’ (from Latin saltāre to leap).

The early geneticists maintained that plants and animals sometimes produce offsprings with unusual abnormalities or variations that could be considered well outside the normal range of variation. These odd offsprings were called sports. Hugo di Vries, an early Dutch geneticist, also observed that the sports undergo some kind of permanent, large scale alteration of the hereditary units. He called the change a mutation. On the other hand, gradual changes or variations were called by him fluctuations.

In the early twentieth century, evolutionists were divided into two camps. There were geneticists, who saw only evidence for sudden discontinuous change or mutation. They supported the saltationist view. On the other hand, there were naturalists who supported Darwinian gradualism. By the 1930s, however, the rift between these two camps came to be healed by a new evolutionary theory that Julian Huxley named the ‘modern synthesis’. As part of the new theory, Dobshansky emphasised the need for what he called isolating mechanisms. He recognised that a new species could not emerge from an old one in the wild, if its early members continue to breed with the parent stock. The novel features would either be swamped by the existing species, causing the entire species to evolve slightly. If part of the species population is to split from the parent stock, it must be isolated from the larger population of the stock. A river, mountain range, or some other geographic feature must prevent the small variant group from breeding with its original stock. Eventually, the isolated population would become so different that biological differences would prevent inbreeding.

In 1972, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge asserted that evolutionists had become too rigid in insisting on gradualism. They put forth a new theory that reduced gradualism to a rare event and named the dominant phenomenon ‘punctuated equilibria’. According to them, species are, for most of their existence, in evolutionary equilibrium or stasis. They change very little, if at all. But once in a while the stasis is punctuated by a sudden ‘speciation event’; somehow, a small population of the parent species begins evolving rapidly and, within a relatively few generations, becomes a distinct species.

However, there are evolutionists who continue to stick to the gradualist view, and at the moment, there is no clear resolution in sight. The present debates point to the possibility of the emergence of a new scientific theory which might give a better understanding of the intrinsic ‘how’ of the evolutionary process.

There is still a deeper question. Why do variations occur? Whether they are small or great, gradual or abrupt, we cannot trace them to the influence of the environment. For types without variations seem to be just as well adapted as those with them. Darwin’s view of chance variations is virtually a confession of his inability to explain the source of variations.

Modifications and variations do not come singly but in complexes, involving many minor and consequential modifications and variations. Each single small variation is not independently selected. In other words, the organisms seem to ‘vary’ as a whole.

Bergson pointed out that the molluscs in the order of evolution proceed by steady steps to develop an eye, which resembles very much the eye developed by the independent line of vertebrates. How does it happen, he asked, that similar effects appear in different lines of evolution brought about by different means? How could the same small variations occur in two independent lines of evolution if they were purely accidental? According to Bergson, the two series must have been governed by a common vital impulse to this useful end. There is something more in evolution than merely mechanical urge. He is inclined to attribute a ‘rudiment of choice’ to the species which, travelling by different paths, reach the same goal. Given a new situation, the ‘urge’ (élan vital), common to all members, leads them to meet it by a new method.

According to Bergson, it is the inner urge, or life force, or an upward drive that incites the whole species in a definite direction. The striving of the organism is the creative effort to which evolution is due.

The biological theory of evolution assumes that life always came from life. Herbert Spencer questioned this assumption and attempted to give a philosophical account of the rise of the living from the non-living, the mental from the non-mental. According to him, the differences between these are due to the degree of the complexity of the organisation. But still the question why life should evolve out of Matter or in Matter is not explained. Why should life occur at all? The theory of the survival of the fittest does not carry us far. Life has little survival value as compared with matter from which it is supposed to have sprung. A rock survives for hundreds of millions of years, while even the oldest tree is only a few thousand years old. If survival was the aim of nature, life would never have appeared.

Other significant philosophical theories have also come to be formulated. According to Samuel Alexander, the whole process of the universe is a historic growth from space-time. The original matrix is space-time. Time is the mind of space. In course of time, space-time breaks up into finites of ever-increasing complexity. At certain points in the history of things, finites assume new empirical qualities which are distinctive levels of experience – primary qualities, matter; and secondary qualities, life and mind. As explained in his book Space, Time and Deity, the cosmic process has now reached the human level, and man is looking forward to the next higher quality of deity. According to him, men of religious genius are preparing mankind for this next stage of development. The divine quality or deity is a stage in time beyond the human. The whole world is now engaged in the production of deity. As time is the very substance of reality, no being can exhaust the future. Even God is a creature of time.

Alexander’s philosophy is called the philosophy of emergent evolution. According to him, when physical structure assumes a certain complexity, life ‘emerges’ as something new. When the physical structure alters in complexity, as it does when it produces a central nervous system, ‘mind’ emerges, and the gap between life and conscious behaviour is supposed to be covered. Alexander finds the explanation in a nisus or thirst of the universe for higher levels. It is the nisus that is creative; that satisfies the thirst.

But is nisus an unconscious drive coming by degrees to consciousness in man? Unless we assume the nisus to be a spiritual power ever drawing on its resources and ever expressing new forms, Alexander’s whole account becomes unsatisfactory.

Lloyd Morgan, who comes very close to Alexander in his account of emergent evolution, acknowledges God as the nisus through whose Activity emergents emerge, and the whole course of emergent evolution is directed. According to him, God is not the emergent deity, but an Activity within which qualities emerge. God is the breath from the whole movement, the deep root which feeds the whole tree. The course of history is the gradual coming of God to Himself. Lloyd Morgan contends that emergent evolution is not predictable. But it is not strictly undetermined like Bergson’s creative evolution, not only unpredictable for human minds, but in principle for all minds. Lloyd Morgan infers the coming of divinity from the purposeful direction of the universe, and he is inclined to make his God completely immanent. He maintains that the whole course of events subsumed under evolution is the expression of God’s purpose.

Lloyd Morgan is basically an adherent of Spinoza, and although he speaks of ‘emergence’ in the evolutionary process, one suspects that changes occur according to rule, and there is no spontaneity.

According to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), the evolutionary process cannot be described or evaluated in terms of its origin. What comes later is more than what was there earlier. There is, according to him, a developing process marked by increasing complexity. It is true that the powers and properties of matter, life, mind, history and values are not entirely different. They interpenetrate and produce an increasing complexity and concentration. In man evolution becomes conscious of itself. Tracing the story of evolution, he examines the phenomena, big and small, from subatomic particles and cells to stellar galaxies, biospheric and noo-spheric. There are, according to him, two complementary tendencies in the evolutionary process, differentiation and integration. In his paleontological studies, he found that evolution tends towards unification.

According to him, all energy is essentially psychic. In his book The Phenomenon of Man, he conceives for man a superhuman future and presents a transcendental vision of omega-workings. Evolution is pushing man towards a higher goal, an omega point, which can be described as collective divinity. A cosmic divine manifestation is in the making.

Whitehead, who recalls the Platonic view of the cosmic process, maintains that nothing can emerge in the evolutionary process of the universe if its constituents were not already in existence. The qualities which are said to emerge historically in the philosophy of Alexander are ingredients into events from the beginning, according to Whitehead. The ingredience of eternal objects into events is the explanation of the historical becoming. He admits that at every step there is the emergence of what is genuinely new. Every event, according to him, is a miracle, but it embodies an idea from beyond the developing series of events in the universe. Whitehead suggests an eternal order and a creative reality. The cosmic series has a nisus towards the eternal order which is beyond itself, though it is increasingly realised in the cosmic.

According to Whitehead, an actual event is the meeting point of a world of actualities, on the one side, and a world of ideal possibilities, on the other. Like Plato, Whitehead believes in eternal objects. He maintains that eternal objects in their interaction with creative passage issue in actuality, reckoning with space-time, limitation, causal push or drag of the past, and that ultimate irreducibility which we may only call God. It is God who envisages the realm of possibilities and the world of settled fact as to focus them on each occasion for the creation of something new. It is He who determines the ideal plans of events by the imposition of His nature. In the words of Whitehead, “The universe exhibits a creativity with infinite freedom, and a realm of forms with infinite possibilities; but this creativity and these forms are together impotent to achieve actuality apart from the completed ideal harmony, which is God.” God, according to Whitehead, is the home of the universals and their ideal harmony.

‘Ingressive evolution’ is a phrase that aptly describes Whitehead’s theory. There is, according to Whitehead, a progressive ingression and incorporation into the cosmic series of the eternal order which God embraces in himself. The ‘primordial’ nature of God is the conceptual consciousness of the possibilities capable of harmonious concurrent realisation. These possibilities are called by Whitehead ‘eternal objects’. They are eternal forms or ideas, to use the Platonic expression, but unlike Platonic ideas, they are not substances, but possibilities, conceptually realised in God. They are not imaginary or abstract. Some of them are apprehended as possibilities logically prior to their manifestation in existence, and others as symbols of values that we pursue. The relation of form to the temporal world is that of potentialities to actualities. In the view of Whitehead, the temporal actualities realise the possibilities surveyed in God’s nature. The order and purpose we see in the world is the result of actuality fulfilling the highest possibilities it sees before itself, which is the vision of God as relevant for it.

According to Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), evolution presupposes an involutionary process. If Life evolves in Matter, and Mind in Life, it must be because Life is involved in Matter and Mind in Life. The material Inconscience is the involved Super-conscience. Evolution is fundamentally a spiritual phenomenon. It is a phenomenon of an evolutionary self-building of Spirit on a base of Matter, which is itself a formation of spiritual reality. There is first an involutionary foundation in which all that is to evolve is present, although not yet manifested or not yet organised. An original Inconscience without any previous deployment from consciousness cannot evolve consciousness. In the evolutionary process, there is a development of a triple character. An evolution of forms of Matter, more and more subtly and intricately organised so as to admit the action of a growing, a more and more complex and subtle and capable organisation of consciousness is the indispensable physical foundation. An upward evolutionary progress of the consciousness itself from grade to higher grade, an ascent, is the evident spiral line or emerging curve that, on this foundation, the evolution must describe. A taking up of what has already been evolved into each higher grade as it is reached and a transformation more or less complete so as to admit of a total changed working of the whole being and nature, an integration, must be also part of the process, if the evolution is to be effective.

The end of the evolutionary process would be to manifest the supramental consciousness-force in material body. “The Supermind”, according to Sri Aurobindo, “is in its very essence a truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and world-knowledge and a right consciousness and the right use of our existence in the universe. The Supermind, because it is a truth-consciousness, has this knowledge inherent in it and this power of true existence; its course is straight and can go direct to its aim, its field is wide and can even be made illimitable. This is because its very nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but possesses it in its own right; its steps are not from nescience or ignorance into some imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing widenesses to the utter vasts and to very to very infinitude. On its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an evolutionary movement of its own graded self-manifestation by which it would eventually reveal its own highest heights it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance and error: it starts form truth and light and moves always in truth and light. As its knowledge is always true, so too its will is always true; it does not fumble in its handling of things or stumble in its paces. In the Supermind feeling and emotion do not depart from their truth, make no slips or mistakes, do not swerve from the right and the real, cannot misuse beauty and delight or twist away from the a divine rectitude. In the Supermind sense cannot mislead or deviate into the grossnesses which are here its natural imperfections and the cause of reproach, distrust and misuse by our ignorance. Even an incomplete statement made by the Supermind is a truth leading to a further truth, its incomplete action a step towards completeness. All the life and action and leading of the Supermind is guarded in its very nature from the falsehoods and uncertainties that are our lot; it moves in safety towards its perfection. Once the truth-consciousness was established here on its own sure foundation, the evolution of divine life would be a progress in felicity, a march through light to Ananda.” ¹³

Man is a transitional being, and the spiritual man is the sign of the new evolution. The intention of Nature in the evolution of the spiritual man is not merely to awaken him to the supreme Reality and release him from herself. There is a further intention – not only a revelation of the Spirit but a radical and integral transformation of Nature. The spiritual man has evolved, but not the supramental being who shall thenceforward be the leader of that nature. There is thus something that is not yet accomplished, and there becomes clear to view the much that has still to be done; ‘there is a height still to be reached, a wideness still to be covered by the eye of vision, the wing of the will, the self-affirmation of the Spirit in the material universe.’

A distinctive feature of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of evolution is that it is not speculative; its premises and conclusions are tested on the anvil of experimentation. ‘The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?’¹⁴ Indeed, Sri Aurobindo made an experiment upon his entire integral being, using it as an evolutional laboratory, so as to evolve and manifest higher and higher grades of consciousness reaching up to the supermind and to supramentalise the human body to the furthest extent possible. Even when he left his body, he assigned the task to his collaborator, whom he called The Mother (1878-1973), to continue the task of the supramentalisation and integral transformation.

Sri Aurobindo discovered in the ancient systems of Yoga some of the basic clues for the experiment. He did not, however, find in any one of them the secret that would enable him to eventually bring about the mutation of the human species. He and The Mother, therefore, experimented, day after day, for years and decades, and they developed a synthesis of Yoga and laboured to perfect it.

The practical necessity of this experiment was not merely to advance knowledge; nor was this experiment directed towards seeking any personal gain, gratification or glory. But Sri Aurobindo and The Mother saw that the contemporary human crisis cannot truly be met without the evolutionary saltation or mutation. There are, according to them, only two alternatives before mankind today; either a revolutionary and evolutionary ascent towards the supramental manifestation on the earth or abyss.

An account of the momentous experiments undertaken by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother cannot truly be given; they can only be glimpsed from the records they have left. Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Letters on Yoga, The Mother, The Surpamental Manifestation upon Earth, and The Mother’s own account of the supramental action on the earth, recorded by Satprem (born 1924) and published in 13 volumes as l’Agenda de Mére, give us some indications of both the secret and the fulfilment of their momentous experiments.

Indeed, if the human body were a functioning of Matter, and if Matter were merely chemical and nothing more, then it is obvious that any divinisation or divine transformation of the body or of anything else would be nothing but an illusion, an imagination, a senseless and impossible chimera. But even if we suppose a soul or a conscious will at work in the body, it could not arrive at a divine transformation if there were no radical change in the bodily instrument itself and in the organisation of its material workings. As Sri Aurobindo points out, ‘A radical transformation of the functioning and, it may well be, of the structure and certainly of the too mechanical and material impulses and driving forces of the bodily system would be imperative… A total transformation of the body would demand a sufficient change of the most material part of the organism, its constitution, its processes and its set-up of nature.’ Sri Aurobindo conceives of the possibility where all the physical life and its necessary activities could be maintained and operated by higher agencies and grades of consciousness in a freer and ampler way and by a less burdensome and restricting method. The evolutionary urge, he maintains, would proceed to a change of the organs themselves in their material working and use and diminish greatly the need of their use and even of the existence of some or many of them.

According to Sri Aurobindo, this might well be a part of a supreme total transformation of the body, though this too might not be final. He admits that to envisage such changes is to look for ahead and minds attached to the present form of things may be unable to give credence to their possibility.

Something there is in us or something has to be developed, perhaps a central and still occult part of our being containing forces whose powers in our actual and present make-up are only a fraction of what could be, but if they became complete and dominant would be truly able to bring about with the help of the light and force of the soul and the supramental truth-consciousness the necessary physical transformation and its consequences. This might be found in the system of Chakras revealed by Tantric knowledge and accepted in the systems of Yoga, conscious centres and sources of all the dynamic powers of our being organising their action through the plexuses and arranged in an ascending series from the lowest physical to the highest mind centre and spiritual centre called the thousand-petalled lotus where ascending Nature, the Serpent Power of the Tantrics, meets the Brahman and is liberated into the Divine Being. These centres are closed or half closed within us and have to be opened before their full potentiality can be manifested in our physical nature: but once they are opened and completely active, no limit can easily be set to the development of their potencies and the total transformation to be possible.

At the same time, Sri Aurobindo acknowledge that all does not have to be fundamentally changed; on the contrary, all that is still needed in the totality has to be preserved, but all has to be perfected. ‘The human body has’, says Sri Aurobindo, ‘in it parts and instruments that have been sufficiently evolved to serve the divine life; these have to survive in their form, though they must be still farther perfected, their limitations of range and use removed, their liability to defect and malady and impairment eliminated, their capacities of cognition and dynamic action carried beyond the present limits.’¹⁵ On the other hand, new powers have also to be acquired by the body which our present humanity could not even dream of or could only imagine. In Sri Aurobindo’s own words:

‘The body itself might acquire new means and ranges of communication with other bodies, new processes of acquiring knowledge, a new aesthesis, new potencies of manipulation of itself and objects. It might not be impossible for it to possess or disclose means native to its own constitution, substance or natural instrumentation for making the far near and annulling distance, cognising what is now beyond the body’s cognisance, acting where action is now out of its reach or its domain, developing subtleties and plasticities which could not be permitted under present conditions to the needed fixity of a material frame. These and other numerous potentialities might appear and the body become an instrument immeasurably superior to what we can now imagine as possible. There could be an evolution from a first apprehending truth-consciousness to the utmost heights of the ascending ranges of the supermind and it may pass the borders of the supermind proper itself where it begins to shadow out, develop, delineate expressive forms of life touched by a supreme pure existence, consciousness and bliss which constitute the worlds of a highest truth of existence, dynamism of Tapas, glory and sweetness of bliss, the absolute essence and pitch of the all-creating Ananda. The transformation of the physical being might follow this incessant line of progression and the divine body reflect or reproduce here in a divine life on the earth something of this highest greatness and glory of the self-manifesting Spirit.’¹⁶

Theories of Evolution and Sri Aurobindo’s Concept of Complete Person

Theories of Evolution and Sri Aurobindo’s Concept of Complete Person

We are in search of an adequate concept of complete person.

The search that has been presented to us so far cannot be considered to be as complete as it might seem, considering that important evolutionary theories also need to be presented and considered.

The process of evolution was detected in ancient times. Both in India and in Greece, there were important ideas of evolution. In modern times, the theory of evolution is mainly the work of Linnaeus (1707-78), Buffon (1707), Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Lamarck (1744-1829), Charles Darwin (1809-82) and his followers.

On the Origin of Species written by Charles Darwin (1859) gave details and demonstrations of his scientific theory of evolution, according to which, life on the earth evolved by a gradual and yet continuous process from the earliest forms of living organisms to the latest product, man. Natural selection, variation and heredity are said to be the factors through the operation of which new species arise out of existing ones. When new characters are produced by the variability of organisms, natural selection decided their survival or death. If the characters do not adapt to their environment, they are eliminated in the competition. If, on the other hand, they equip themselves better for the struggle, they tend to survive. The offsprings of the successful tend to resemble the parents in exhibiting the favoured variation to a greater degree than the parents, and a new type becomes established by a continuous piling up of small useful accretions through many generations.

The two original components of Darwin’s theory were (i) that evolution is gradual, and (ii) that the nature of the change is dictated by natural, not divine, selection. Both of these are closely interlinked, and both are at the heart of controversy today, as they were in Darwin’s time.

Many naturalists accepted Darwin’s gradualism because it accorded well with what they saw in living species. But critics could not accept that all the world’s marvellous species and their extraordinary structures such as those of the eye, could have arisen only by chance. Some biologists accepted that minor changes might be the result of natural selection, but held that beyond extremes within a range of variation, a new species could not arise by natural selection alone. The only way in which the boundaries of species might be breached, they contended, would be through a sudden jump.

Palaeontologists who dug up and classified the remains of extinct species raised another major objection to gradualism. They argued that if Darwin were right, they should be able to find a series of specimens that could be laid out in a gradual continuum from one major type of animal to another. If, for example, reptiles evolved into mammals, there should be fossils representing every gradation between these two groups. Instead, the palaeontologists found more gaps than continua. Darwin conceded this, but he thought that further researches would reveal the intermediate links. As it turned out, only a few links have been found, and this issue is a part of today’s controversy.

But there is still a deeper question. Why do variations occur? Whether they are small or great, gradual or abrupt, we cannot trace them to the influence of the environment. For types without variations seem to be just as well adapted as those with them. Darwin’s view of chance variations is virtually a confession of his inability to explain the source of variations.

Modifications and variations do not come singly but in complexes, involving many minor and consequential modifications and variations. Each single small variation is not independently selected. In other words, the organisms seem to `vary’ as a whole.

Bergson pointed out that the molluscs in the order of evolution proceed by steady steps to develop an eye, which resembles very much the eye developed by the independent line of vertebrates. How does it happen, he asked, that similar effects appear in different lines of evolution brought about by different means? How could the same small variations occur in two independent lines of evolution if they were purely accidental? According to Bergson, the two series must have been governed by a common vital impulse to this useful end. There is something more in evolution than merely mechanical urge. He is inclined to attribute a rudiment of choice’ to the species which, travelling by different paths, reach the same goal. Given a new situation, the urge’ (élan vital), common to all members, leads them to meet it by a new method.

According to Bergson, it is the inner urge, or life force, or an upward drive that incites the whole species in a definite direction. The striving of the organism is the creative effort to which evolution is due.

The biological theory of evolution assumes that life always came from life. Herbert Spencer questioned this assumption and attempted to give a philosophical account of the rise of the living from the non-living, the mental from the non-mental. According to him, the differences between these are due to the degree of the complexity of the organisation. But still the question why life should evolve out of Matter or in Matter is not explained. Why should life occur at all? The theory of the survival of the fittest does not carry us far. Life has little survival value as compared with matter from which it is supposed to have sprung. A rock survives for hundreds of millions of years, while even the oldest tree is only a few thousand years old. If survival was the aim of nature, life would never have appeared.

Other significant philosophical theories have also come to be formulated. According to Samuel Alexander, the whole process of the universe is a historic growth from space-time. The original matrix is space-time. Time is the mind of space. In course of time, space-time breaks up into finites of ever-increasing complexity. At certain points in the history of things, finites assume new empirical qualities which are distinctive levels of experience – primary qualities, matter; and secondary qualities, life and mind. As explained in his book Space, Time and Deity, the cosmic process has now reached the human level, and man is looking forward to the next higher quality of deity. According to him, men of religious genius are preparing mankind for this next stage of development. The divine quality or deity is a stage in time beyond the human. The whole world is now engaged in the production of deity. As time is the very substance of reality, no being can exhaust the future. Even God is a creature of time.

Lloyd Morgan, who comes very close to Alexander in his account of emergent evolution, acknowledges God as the nisus through whose Activity emergents emerge, and the whole course of emergent evolution is directed. According to him, God is not the emergent deity, but an Activity within which qualities emerge. God is the breath from the whole movement, the deep root which feeds the whole tree. The course of history is the gradual coming of God to Himself. Lloyd Morgan contends that emergent evolution is not predictable. But it is not strictly undetermined like Bergson’s creative evolution, not only unpredictable for human minds, but in principle for all minds. Lloyd Morgan infers the coming of divinity from the purposeful direction of the universe, and he is inclined to make his God completely immanent. He maintains that the whole course of events subsumed under evolution is the expression of God’s purpose.

Lloyd Morgan is basically an adherent of Spinoza, and although he speaks of `emergence’ in the evolutionary process, one suspects that changes occur according to rule, and there is no spontaneity.

According to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), the evolutionary process cannot be described or evaluated in terms of its origin. What comes later is more than what was there earlier. There is, according to him, a developing process marked by increasing complexity. It is true that the powers and properties of matter, life, mind, history and values are not entirely different. They interpenetrate and produce an increasing complexity and concentration. In man evolution becomes conscious of itself. Tracing the story of evolution, he examines the phenomena, big and small, from subatomic particles and cells to stellar galaxies, biospheric and noo-spheric. There are, according to him, two complementary tendencies in the evolutionary process, differentiation and integration. In his paleontological studies, he found that evolution tends towards unification.

According to him, all energy is essentially psychic. In his book The Phenomenon of Man, he conceives for man a superhuman future and presents a transcendental vision of omega-workings. Evolution is pushing man towards a higher goal, an omega point, which can be described as collective divinity. A cosmic divine manifestation is in the making.

Whitehead, who recalls the Platonic view of the cosmic process, maintains that nothing can emerge in the evolutionary process of the universe if its constituents were not already in existence. The qualities which are said to emerge historically in the philosophy of Alexander are ingredients into events from the beginning, according to Whitehead. The ingredience of eternal objects into events is the explanation of the historical becoming. He admits that at every step there is the emergence of what is genuinely new. Every event, according to him, is a miracle, but it embodies an idea from beyond the developing series of events in the universe. Whitehead suggests an eternal order and a creative reality. The cosmic series has a nisus towards the eternal order which is beyond itself, though it is increasingly realised in the cosmic.

Ingressive evolution’ is a phrase that aptly describes Whitehead’s theory. There is, according to Whitehead, a progressive ingression and incorporation into the cosmic series of the eternal order which God embraces in himself. The primordial’ nature of God is the conceptual consciousness of the possibilities capable of harmonious concurrent realisation. These possibilities are called by Whitehead `eternal objects’. They are eternal forms or ideas, to use the Platonic expression, but unlike Platonic ideas, they are not substances, but possibilities, conceptually realised in God. They are not imaginary or abstract. Some of them are apprehended as possibilities logically prior to their manifestation in existence, and others as symbols of values that we pursue. The relation of form to the temporal world is that of potentialities to actualities. In the view of Whitehead, the temporal actualities realise the possibilities surveyed in God’s nature. The order and purpose we see in the world is the result of actuality fulfilling the highest possibilities it sees before itself, which is the vision of God as relevant for it.

According to Sri Aurobindo, the urge to exceed oneself is inherent in the human being. This urge of self-exceeding manifests in the divination of the Godhead, the impulse towards perfection, the search after pure Truth and unmixed Bliss, the sense of a secret immortality. He points out that this aspiration can be discerned in the texts of the ancient dawns of human civilisation, and we find that even when it is banished during the periods of scepticism, it returns and seizes humankind. Referring to the contemporary humanity, he points out that even though satiated, it is not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature and that it is preparing to return to its primeval longings. He concludes: “The earliest formula of Wisdom promises to be its last, -- God, light, freedom and immortality.”¹⁷

Sri Aurobindo admits that these persistent ideals of the race contradict its normal experience, but he points out that they are affirmed by verifiable and repeatable experiences which are attainable at higher and deeper levels of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo states:

“To know, possess and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self-existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfactions besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in a world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessities, to discover and realise the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation, -- this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organisation of consciousness for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradiction of the unrealised ideals with the realised fact is a final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view of the world’s workings, that direct opposition appears rather as a part of Nature’s profoundest method and the seal of her completest sanction.”¹⁸

According to Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), evolution presupposes an involutionary process. If Life evolves in Matter, and Mind in Life, it must be because Life is involved in Matter and Mind in Life. The material Inconscience is the involved Super-conscience. Evolution is fundamentally a spiritual phenomenon. It is a phenomenon of an evolutionary self-building of Spirit on a base of Matter, which is itself a formation of spiritual reality. There is first an involutionary foundation in which all that is to evolve is present, although not yet manifested or not yet organised. An original Inconscience without any previous deployment from consciousness cannot evolve consciousness. In the evolutionary process, there is a development of a triple character. An evolution of forms of Matter, more and more subtly and intricately organised so as to admit the action of a growing, a more and more complex and subtle and capable organisation of consciousness is the indispensable physical foundation. An upward evolutionary progress of the consciousness itself from grade to higher grade, an ascent, is the evident spiral line or emerging curve that, on this foundation, the evolution must describe. A taking up of what has already been evolved into each higher grade as it is reached and a transformation more or less complete so as to admit of a total changed working of the whole being and nature, an integration, must be also part of the process, if the evolution is to be effective.

Man is a transitional being, and the spiritual man is the sign of the new evolution. The intention of Nature in the evolution of the spiritual man is not merely to awaken him to the supreme Reality and release him from herself. There is a further intention – not only a revelation of the Spirit but a radical and integral transformation of Nature. The spiritual man has evolved, but not the supramental being who shall thenceforward be the leader of that nature. There is thus something that is not yet accomplished, and there becomes clear to view the much that has still to be done; `there is a height still to be reached, a wideness still to be covered by the eye of vision, the wing of the will, the self-affirmation of the Spirit in the material universe.’

A distinctive feature of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of evolution is that it is not speculative; its premises and conclusions are tested on the anvil of experimentation. `The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious cooperation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?’¹⁹ Indeed, Sri Aurobindo made an experiment upon his entire integral being, using it as an evolutional laboratory, so as to evolve and manifest higher and higher grades of consciousness reaching up to the supermind and to supramentalise the human body to the furthest extent possible. Even when he left his body, he assigned the task to his collaborator, whom he called The Mother (1878-1973), to continue the task of the supramentalisation and integral transformation.

Sri Aurobindo discovered in the ancient systems of Yoga some of the basic clues for the experiment. He did not, however, find in any one of them the secret that would enable him to eventually bring about the mutation of the human species. He and The Mother, therefore, experimented, day after day, for years and decades, and they developed a synthesis of Yoga and laboured to perfect it.

The practical necessity of this experiment was not merely to advance knowledge; nor was this experiment directed towards seeking any personal gain, gratification or glory. But Sri Aurobindo and The Mother saw that the contemporary human crisis cannot truly be met without the evolutionary saltation or mutation. There are, according to them, only two alternatives before mankind today; either a revolutionary and evolutionary ascent towards the supramental manifestation on the earth or abyss.

An account of the momentous experiments undertaken by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother cannot truly be given; they can only be glimpsed from the records they have left. Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine, The Synthesis of Yoga, Letters on Yoga, The Mother, The Surpamental Manifestation upon Earth, and The Mother’s own account of the supramental action on the earth, recorded by Satprem (born 1924) and published in 13 volumes as l’Agenda de Mére, give us some indications of both the secret and the fulfilment of their momentous experiments.

The concept of complete person that emerges from this vast and unprecedented experiment is that of a being whose self-exceeding has reached a point where the limitations of egoistic consciousness have been broken and who has become capable of universality and transcendence as also of that mutuality of relationships correspond to a state of consciousness that is described as follows in the Isopanishad:

यस्तु सर्वाणि भूतानि आत्मन्येवानुपश्यति । सर्वभूतेषु चात्मानं ततो न विजुगुप्सते ॥६॥ यस्मिन् सर्वाणि भूतानि आत्मैवाभूद् विजानतः । तत्र को मोहः कः शोक एकत्वमनुपश्यतः ॥७॥

But he who sees everywhere the Self in all existences and all existences in the Self, shrinks not thereafter from aught.

He in whom it is the Self-Being that has become all existences that are Becomings, for he has the perfect knowledge, how shall he be deluded, whence shall he have grief who sees everywhere oneness?²⁰

According to Sri Aurobindo, this state of consciousness for the individual is prepared by a long and conscious development of fourfold personality of knowledge, power, harmony and skill. The individual moving towards the growth of complete person will not only continue to transcend the limitations of inertia, obscurity, of tamas, but also the limitations of rajasic feverish and egoistic and blind impulse of egoistic assertion and dynamism, and even the limitations of light and balance or equilibrium that are limited to the narrow grooves of mental consciousness that manifests in rationality, ethical character and aesthetic sensitivity and creativity. In the course of the development towards ever-progressive completeness, the individual will break the limitations of what Indian psychology terms the rajasic and sattvic nature; there will be the growth and development of what can be called super-nature or of what Bhagavadgita terms as parā prakriti. Powers of knowledge, heroism, harmony and skills will manifest the super-nature that is marked by calm strength, luminous love and will that is guided by illumination and enthused by the motive of service to be rendered to all and to uplift all by developing and utilising skills that can remove progressively the causes of suffering and ignorance.

The fourfold personality will mark not any static poise of stagnation but a continuous dynamic poise of equilibrium expressing internal integrality of all the parts and planes of being. Such an integral personality may properly be called a member of a growing nucleus of a new humanity or even of super-humanity. The complete person is an evolutionary being, but a stage will be reached where the evolutionary process crosses the limitations of Ignorance which is a constant movement from error to knowledge and will dwell more and more in a new consciousness that will be liberated from ignorance so as to permit movement from knowledge to knowledge. Such a being that lives in knowledge and manifests dynamics of knowledge integrally may properly be described as superman. But Sri Aurobindo’s concept of superman is totally different from the superman conceived by Nietzsche. Nietzcheian superman manifests an enlarged personality, a magnified and exaggerated ego, an increased power of mind, an increased power of vital force, a force that aims at domination over humanity, and enlarges but does not transform the forces of human Ignorance. The superman conceived by Sri Aurobindo will be a self-realised being which serves humanity to find its own self-exceeding and self-fulfilment by the revelation of the divinity that is striving for birth within it. While describing supermanhood, Sri Aurobindo states:

“Unity is the secret, a complex, understanding and embracing unity. When the full heart of Love is tranquillised by knowledge into a calm ecstasy and vibrates with strength, when the strong hands of Power labour for the world in a radiant fullness of joy and light, when the luminous brain of knowledge accepts and transforms the heart’s obscure inspirations and lends itself to the workings of the high-seated Will, when all these gods are founded together on a soul of sacrifice that lives in unity with all the world and accepts all things to transmute them, then is the condition of man’s integral self-transcendence. This and not a haughty, strong and brilliant egoistic self-culture enthroning itself upon an enslaved humanity is the divine way of supermanhood.”²¹

It is significant that the aim of education for the complete person is rising at frontiers of the highest endeavours of the contemporary world and is being pressed forward in the field of education. It is significant that there is undeniable pressure to explore human personality at different levels of consciousness – subconscious, conscious and superconscious. It is significant that the theme of value-oriented education is being explored more and more intensively and imperatively so as to develop education that is devoted not only to the domain of moral values but also to the integration of rational, scientific, ethical and aesthetic values. Above all, it is salutary for humanity that educationists are now obliged to define and devise ways and methods of integral education that admits the sovereignty of spiritual education as distinguished dearly from religious education.

It is in this context that the exercise that we have undertaken now will be considered to be directly relevant to the highest purposes of education for today and tomorrow.

Notes

1. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga - I: Self-Surrender in Works - The Way of the Gita

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2. Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga - I: Life and Yoga

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3. The Mother, Words of the Mother - III: Messages for the Supramental Manifestation upon Earth

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4. The Mother, Mother's Agenda — 1951-1960: February 3, 1958

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5. The Mother, Mother's Agenda — 1951-1960: October 6, 1959

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6. The Mother, Mother's Agenda — 1961: July 18, 1961

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7. The Mother, Mother's Agenda — 1961: July 18, 1961

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8. The Mother, Notes on the Way: 4 January 1969

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9. The Mother, Mother's Agenda — 1970: March 14, 1970

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10. The Mother, Mother's Agenda — 1970: April 29, 1970

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11. The Mother, Mother's Agenda — 1972-1973: April 7, 1973

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12. The Mother, Mother's Agenda — 1972-1973: March 25, 1972

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13. Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga: Supermind and the Life Divine

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14. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine - I: The Human Aspiration

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15. Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga: The Divine Body

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16. Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga: The Divine Body

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17. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine - I: The Human Aspiration

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18. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine - I: The Human Aspiration

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19. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine - I: The Human Aspiration

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20. Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad: Isha Upanishad

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21. Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga: The Superman

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