The Evolution of Man
Rather naïvely, Homo sapiens takes for granted that he is as he is — and this is nothing more than a corollary of the ordinary nature of the mind.
The representational mind believes whatever it thinks it experiences through the senses; therefore it believes itself to be what it takes itself to be, to the point of excluding a priori the very possibility it simultaneously, and blindly, assumes: man is the product of evolution, nature itself is evolution—life in fieri—this is the essence of phenomenal reality for human beings, and yet Homo sapiens denies that his own evolution might already be underway. He acknowledges it, certainly, but only by relegating it, if not to an indefinite future, then to millennia hence—whereas this evolution not only can already be occurring, but is intrinsically occurring.
According to Western science, evolution must be an evolution of matter. By chance, mutations within matter—specifically, genetic mutations—occur, and evolution is said to take place when such mutations become stabilised within a multitude of individuals. And on this basis, mental evolution is therefore merely an eventual accessory to the modification of matter. Naturally, this point of view is purely retrograde, as is every form of “science” grounded in representation: what the scientist today knows through his senses is simply that life exists, and that matter and consciousness exist; and from this his rational faculty can only infer that mind derives from matter, and that the elusive something named “life” arose through fortuitous chance.
Śrī Aurobindo’s point of view is, by contrast, that evolution is in itself a spiritual fact: Nature itself, for Śrī Aurobindo, is the evolution of Spirit within Matter. For him, the present human being cannot therefore be the ultimate term of evolution, for he “is too imperfect an expression of the Spirit”. The human being as he now is, is the mental man, who indeed lives in the self-deception of believing himself to be the I—and this is the root of his intrinsic imperfection, of which history at large and the affairs of each individual are but mere chronicle. He may, certainly, and far less rarely than is commonly believed, find himself in a superior state, the Overmind; yet this condition of liberation from representation remains, if you will, partial and in any case individual.
The present mental man is a “man of transition”, precisely because the consciousness that lies at his root is dulled by Matter.
When one attains the Supermind, the pure consciousness that is in man is released from the limitations of Matter, the individual dimension evaporates, and consciousness finds itself as it has always essentially been: assimilated to the divine. And it is for this reason that the supramental yoga must involve the body, so as to render it divine and therefore capable of reflecting consciousness as Supermind.
Here, then, is the final point of Śrī Aurobindo’s experience: in this condition it becomes possible for the avatāra to bring the Supermind down upon Earth, or—put more precisely—for the Supermind to descend to Earth through the avatāra, with the aim of provoking the supramental evolution of the human species.
The supramental evolution, moreover, is simply a return of pure consciousness to its condition anterior to finding itself imprisoned in the body—as countless voices, in East and West alike, have repeated for millennia.
That the human being as known through history is in fact closer to animal brutishness than to a form of intelligence capable of transcending egoic domination is plainly evident to anyone. Domination is inherent in ordinary human nature; it is not a matter of listing wars or sequences of crimes, but of the fact that anyone, daily and by necessity, places even the slightest satisfaction of one of his own attachments before a greater harm that he knows—or should or could know—will be inflicted upon others. This is not a matter of “selfishness”, of whims, of crude ignorance or vulgar greed; it is human nature itself (as YHWH acknowledged to Noakh after the Flood: no further floods would be sent, because human nature is evil) that is installed in a condition of subordination to what it believes to be the only thing that exists vitally and existentially: namely, the I.
The descent of supramental light nullifies the darkness on which man feeds—the ignorance of his own true nature. Access to the Overmind likewise brings about the cutting of attachments and the disappearance of the I, yet only at the individual level (certainly, the bodhisattva of Mahāyāna Buddhism works compassionately for the awakening of others, but even the Buddha could not awaken anyone exaiphnes, all at once, and the same holds for any realised master—if only because Kuṇḍalī, as Gopi Krishna says, is a current of millions of volts, unbearable for a nervous system made of copper wires). But the descent of the Supermind can cause the disappearance of the I even in one who does not in the least realise that taking the I to be oneself is the very error.
The descent of supramental light can thus bring about the evolution of the human species, from its present rational and mental condition to a divine and deathless state, for all human beings.
This is the aim of Śrī Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga.
And Śrī Aurobindo began in fact to bring this aim into effective manifestation within reality.
Naturally, Śrī Aurobindo was fully aware that, at least in the beginning, only a very few would be able to participate effectively in the evolutionary Work by becoming channels for the Supermind—those few who might indeed reach the superhuman heights he envisaged; yet once the process had begun, anyone would be able, and can still, to contribute to its realisation.
Śrī Aurobindo also describes, albeit succinctly, what he did and how he did it—that is, in what manner he actualised the Supermind within terrestrial reality. He implemented it by penetrating, on the one hand, into the cells of the body, and on the other, into the collective unconscious.
Jung’s archetypes are acknowledged by Śrī Aurobindo and by many contemporary yogīn, yet, as earlier observed, in fact they have been contemplated in the yoga for millennia; Freud explored a fraction of the unconscious, believing it to be the root of the individual, while Jung stumbled upon the archetypes but named them, thereby entifying them and thus remaining trapped within them. (One recalls that, for the Greek Parmenides—misunderstood by every Western philosopher except Heidegger, even though Plato himself stated that the authentic meaning of the great Eleatic was already incomprehensible in his own day—the error of mortals lies in to onomazein, “giving names to things”: that is, creating entities, believing oneself to be the I, falling into representation. And it is no surprise that Tibetan Tantra, ancient and modern, repeats in text after text that the error of the ordinary mind is precisely “giving names to things”.)
For the yoga, the unconscious—individual and collective—is a layer of the mind, precisely the sheath encountered beneath the conscious, a layer that, like the conscious itself, is a shell (kośa) that conceals the uncontaminated nature of the mind, which is “pure and empty capacity to know”, as the masters of Dzogchen say (though this is a definition composed of four words, each of which, as understood by discursive thought, misleads: the nature of the mind is not immaculate with respect to something impure, it is not mere absence, it is not possibility in the sense of being eventual, nor is there anyone who knows nor anything to be known).
The first step of every yoga, of every esoteric doctrine, and of what Nietzsche and Heidegger disclose, is the surpassing of representation. Śrī Aurobindo, naturally, speaks of this moment, but for him it is essentially implicit, since his Integral Yoga gathers within itself all the preceding yoga.
Śrī Aurobindo reveals the light of the Supermind in his writings, but above all he brings it to actually irradiate the unconscious. The supramental light purifies the individual unconscious and the collective unconscious—and what are called its archetypes—from their muddy and putrescent dimension; it frees the human species from the malodorous ballast that drags the mind down into mazes of fear and superstition. The unconscious is "the last fortress (seemingly impregnable) of the Ignorance”; the Supermind is the light that disperses the darkness. (Here the Johannine saying, and men loved darkness rather than light, is brought to its inner truth: they willed the darkness—they accepted being deprived of the light.)
Its purpose is to make it easier for all to surpass representation and the other shells that preclude the Divine Life.
Śrī Aurobindo undertook this work—through many years and with great labor—for the benefit of humanity as a whole; others may continue it.
And it is precisely in this light that the parallel between Nietzsche’s Übermensch and Śrī Aurobindo’s supramental man becomes manifest, especially considering that for Nietzsche the overman is not an individual goal pursued for its own sake, but the direction humanity must take in order to overcome its condition of subjection to the various idols created by the I for purposes of self-consolation. (In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche sounds the contemporary idols with a little hammer to hear whether they are full—thus intrinsically existent—or empty; and of course they are all empty.) In Nietzsche’s age the most deep-rooted idol was the God created by Christianity, and perhaps it still is today; but it now stands beside the idol of blindly materialistic reason, even though—as then and now—the true totem remains morality, which is, theoretically, the metaphysics of believing oneself to know.
It is only the overman who abides beyond good and evil; this is impossible for the mental man, who believes himself to be his own I. To believe oneself to be one’s own I is precisely—regardless of whether one’s attachments are egoistic or altruistic—in creating the idols of good and evil (which, in fact, is tautological within Sacred Science). And this is exactly what the Buddha Śākyamuni said, and after him hosts of yogīn and rinpoche: one who attains nirvāṇa is “beyond good and evil”, free of attachments because no longer merely an I. Yet it is certainly true that Nietzsche, a solitary pioneer and forerunner of the depths of the mind no longer firmly anchored in common reality, suffered from certain excessive enthusiasms which, in their vehemence, clouded his understanding of the truths he had intuited; and this is precisely what Śrī Aurobindo observes: “Especially, in his concept of the Superman he never cleared his mind of a preliminary confusion… Nietzsche hymned the Olympian but presented him with the aspect of the Asura. His hostile preoccupation with the Christ-idea of the crucified God and its consequences was perhaps responsible for this distortion, as much as his subjection to the imperfect ideas of the Greeks. He presents to us sometimes a superman who fiercely and arrogantly repels the burden of simple sorrow and service, not one who arises victorious over mortality and suffering, his ascension vibrant with the triumph-song of a liberated humanity”.
Śrī Aurobindo wrote extensively about the Supermind and the dimension of supramental evolution, but very little—and only in scattered hints—about the actual realisation of his immense Work. During the twenty-four years he spent in Pondicherry, he lived in his rooms, writing no new texts except for what is regarded as his supreme work, the poem Savitri, in which poetry, always in English, allows him to circumvent with ease the limitations of discursive expression. Savitri is, in fact, the only text of Śrī Aurobindo that may be called truly operative, whereas his other writings, composed in the years prior, sketch a map of his pathways through the beyond-human domains.
The aim of the evolution of the human race is the central theme of the eight brief essays that Śrī Aurobindo addressed to the young members of his āśrama, written in 1949 shortly before he left the body and later collected in The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth. These texts do not include the practical aspects of Śrī Aurobindo’s yoga, nor accounts of his actual transmutational Work as avatāra; nevertheless, they constitute a summa of the dimensions of Integral Yoga, beginning with the importance of the body—both as something that must be preserved for earthly life and, above all, as something that must be truly known in order to be made divine. Śrī Aurobindo sets, in these pages, the essential character of the Supermind in its being “a Truth-consciousness which knows by its own inherent right of nature, by its own light: it has not to arrive at knowledge but possesses it” (this essential feature is common to the various mystical and esoteric experiences: true knowledge radiates from within the mind, from its very Base; it is not the product of sensory contacts). And he then describes the evolutionary aim of the manifestation of the Supermind in humanity: “a new humanity would then be a race of mental beings on the earth and in the earthly body, but delivered from its present conditions in the reign of the cosmic Ignorance so far as to be possessed of a perfected mind, a mind of light which could even be a subordinate action of the supermind or Truth-consciousness, and in any case capable of the full possibilities of mind acting as a recipient of that truth and at least a secondary action of it in thought and life. It could even be a part of what could be described as a divine life upon earth and at least the beginnings of an evolution in the Knowledge and no longer entirely or predominantly in the Ignorance”.
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Continue in Part VI