Untitled Document

In this instalment, we shall discuss briefly the concept of evolution as it is understood in the philosophy of Integralism of Sri Aurobindo, one of the key-concepts we need to understand Savitri’s stand in her colloquy with the God of Death. The Webster Dictionary defines evolution as “a process of change in a certain direction; a process of continuous change from a lower, simpler, or worse to a higher, more complex, or better state”. Since Charles Darwin brought it to the Western world with the publication of his The Origin of the Species, evolution has been a very influential concept not only in the physical sciences but also in sociology, politics and literary criticism. It has influenced decisively the moral temperament of the last two centuries.

Evolution asks the fundamental questions which have always fascinated us, namely, “How have we as a species become what we are?” and “Does the past of our species hold any clue to our future?” All human cultures have their own theories to explain the origin of the world, of man and other creatures. Most religions have their own creation myths and through them explain the origin of all living beings as the creation of an omniscient God.

The modern theory of evolution was first propounded by Charles Darwin in his 1859 publication entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Along with Copernicus, Galileo and Newton, Darwin is regarded as one of revolutionary thinkers who ushered in the modern era of scientific thinking on all matters concerning man and his life here on earth. They gave several severe jolts to the medieval Christian beliefs about God and his place in human life. All these new ideas had the effect of making God suddenly redundant! Physical phenomena such as tides and eclipses had now an explanation in terms of natural laws. To Darwin goes the credit of showing on the basis of detailed evidence that evolution had occurred, that diverse organisms share common ancestors, and that living beings have changed drastically over the course of the earth's history. In an important sense, he extended to the living world the idea of nature as a system of matter in motion governed by natural laws.

Darwin was amazed by the diversity of the beaks of certain birds in Galápagos Islands, a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean, constituting a province of Ecuador, about 1,050 km (about 650 mi) off the western coast of South America. This is where he did his basic research as a natural scientist. He found that each species had a unique beak tailored to its specific diet. From this he theorised that the dozen or so variations arose from a single ancestor whose descendants spread out and adapted to different conditions, eventually evolving into different species. This idea became the cornerstone of his theory of evolution. Did God, the supreme intelligence, condescend to design different beaks to these birds according to their diet?

Darwin’s great achievement was that he suggested a plausible mechanism for evolution. To a world brought up to see the hand of God in every part of Nature, he suggested a different creative force altogether – an undirected, morally neutral process called natural selection. Others characterised it as “survival of the fittest”. He was very much aware of the fact that in the animal world there is a continuous struggle to survive and reproduce against the prevalence of predators, disease, and a finite food supply. The winners in this struggle must have some small advantage over those who fall behind and perish. Darwin’s critical insight was that organisms which by chance are better adapted to their environments – a faster fox or deer – have a better chance of surviving and passing those characteristics on to the next generation. The latter is now known as “the passing on the genes”. Better adaptation to circumstances may mean different things according to the context of environment. These small changes passed on from generation to the next culminate in the emergence of an entirely new species. Darwin wrote: “From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals directly follows”.

This theory had a more troubling implication. Until then it was a general belief among Christians that man was made by God in his own image. In a later publication entitled The Descent of Man, Darwin explicitly linked human beings to the rest of the animal kingdom by way of the apes. Darwin put man at the very summit of the original scale, he also said,” that man with all his noble qualities – still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin”. This makes it clear that Darwin not only contradicted the Biblical account of a six-day creation, but also undercut the very basis of most theistic religions. Darwin thus made it possible, as pointed out by a fellow biologist, for one to be an intellectually honest atheist.

According to Darwin, a process called natural selection accounts for the variations in living forms. In nature, many more individuals are created than can survive to maturity. Certain individuals survive because they have some advantage over the others; they are more successful in reproducing and in passing on their particular advantages to succeeding generations. It is in this way that living forms change over time.

Darwin’s theory created a virtual storm in scientific and social circles of his time. Christians, who believed in a literal interpretation of the Genesis, aggressively denied Darwin’s theory for the simple reason that it was incompatible with the gradual evolution of humans and other organisms by natural processes. The Biblical account of genesis maintains that all kinds of organisms abruptly came into existence at the Creation, that the world is only a few thousand years old, and that the Noachian Flood was an actual event in which only one pair of each animal species survived. These and other related Christian beliefs are contrary to the evolutionary origin of man from nonhuman animals.

In fact, this issue is still simmering in the United States of America. In the 1920s the four states in the U.S., namely, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee, prohibited the teaching of evolution in their public schools. It was as late as 1968 that the Supreme Court of the United States declared unconstitutional any law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. Since that time Christian Fundamentalists have been trying to find ways of introducing into schools the intelligent-design theory of the creation of this universe. In the 1980s Arkansas and Louisiana passed acts requiring the balanced treatment of evolution-science and creation-science in the schools.

Modern science, following Darwin in the main, has tried with considerable success to explain the process of evolution. Natural selection, and later studies in genetics, appear to confirm that on the outside, evolution is governed by changes in the environment. However, the origin of life itself remains hazy in biology and takes recourse to chance and probability far more often then it should. Moreover, science does not offer us any clues as to the future. It also states that there is no visible end towards which evolution is moving. There is, in other words, no intention, aim or purpose in the process of evolution. In effect, it does not answer the key questions we started out with. As Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, the Western idea of evolution is the statement of a process of formation, not an explanation of our being. It is limited to the physical and biological data of Nature, and does not attempt except in a summary or a superficial fashion to discover its own meaning, but is content to announce itself as the general law of a quite mysterious and inexplicable energy.

The Darwinian theory of evolution starts with assumption that all evolved out of indeterminate matter. “Hence it conceives the world as a sort of automatic machine which has somehow happened. No intelligent cause, no aim, no raison d'être, but simply an automatic deployment, combination, chance self-adaptation of means to end without any knowledge or intention in the adaptation. This is the first paradox of the theory and its justification must be crushing and conclusive if it is to be finally accepted by the human mind.”[1]

In other words, evolution is the path the Divine has chosen to unveil himself in the world in which he manifested himself. Evolution itself is the yoga which this creation is going through, and we who are born here in this evolutionary world are the carriers of the evolutionary baton. In other words, we are all yogis, some are conscious yogis in the sense they try to accelerate their evolution and others are also yogis who have left it to Nature to lead them along the evolutionary path. Since it is the individual who evolves and grows into a more and more developed and perfect consciousness, obviously this cannot be done in the course of brief span of a single human life. The evolving consciousness must come back to this evolutionary world again and again through what is called rebirth. The great composer and director Gustave Mahler once wrote, “ We all return; it is this certainty that gives meaning to life and it does not make the slightest difference whether in a later incarnation we remember the former life. What counts is not the individual and his well-being, but the great aspiration towards the Perfect and the Pure which goes on in each incarnation.”[3]

This, in brief, is Sri Aurobindo’s theory of spiritual evolution. Evolution has been perceived in the West as a phenomenon which masks the face of God, while for Sri Aurobindo it is a process by which the face of God behind and in this creation is gradually unveiled. So, for Sri Aurobindo evolution is no reason to dispense with God. It in fact establishes God on a much firmer basis. Let us now look at Sri Aurobindo’s theory in some detail.

What we call evolution may be described as a journey which begins from the fundamental Reality or the Pure Existent or Sat. Another aspect of this fundamental reality is movement. This movement is a movement of the Sat, and this aspect of the Sat is called Consciousness-force or Chit. The stability of the Sat and the movement of the Chit are only our psychological representations of the Absolute, which is beyond stability and movement. Sri Aurobindo has expressed this basic insight of Indian spirituality in this beautiful sentence: “World-existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva which multiplies the body of the god numberlessly to the view: it leaves that white existence precisely where and what it was, ever is and ever will be; its sole object is the joy of the dancing.”[4]

This journey of the Consciousness-Force begins from the eternal Centre, in the Divine, and takes place in Him. In fact the whole movement may be said to be He. “Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground.”[5] He is outside space, outside time, pure Being, pure Consciousness, where all is in a state of involution, contained yet formless. When He ‘becomes’ Force, we call it “She”. This is Force separated from Consciousness, She from Him, and the voyage begins. Shakti or Force flings herself forth in an outburst of joy, to play at finding Him again in Time. But it is a perpetual beginning, not fixed anywhere in time; when we say ‘first’ the Being and ‘then’ the Becoming, we fall into the illusion of a spatio-temporal language, just as when we say ‘high’ and ‘low’, because like our vision of the world, our language is limited and false. In reality Being and Becoming are two simultaneous faces of the same eternal fact – the universe is a perpetual phenomenon, as perpetual as the Silence beyond time. The perpetual passage from Being to Becoming, we may call a devolution. The Supreme Consciousness ultimately devolves into matter.

This happens gradually, a result of incessant fragmentation of consciousness worked through successive planes. Once the Play starts at the summit, it will not stop until the single Consciousness-Force has realised all the possibilities, even those which seem to be the absolute opposite of the eternal Player. At the other end of the spectrum, consciousness is obscured, and hidden in the densest inconscience. When the devolution is complete we have Matter. In Savitri, Sri Aurobindo has talked about the various aspects of spiritual evolution in glorious poetic language. I quote one such passage below:

As one drawn by the grandeur of the Void
The soul attracted leaned to the Abyss:
It longed for the adventure of Ignorance
And the marvel and surprise of the Unknown
And the endless possibility that lurked
In the womb of Chaos and in Nothing's gulf
Or looked from the unfathomed eyes of Chance.
It tired of its unchanging happiness,
It turned away from immortality:
It was drawn to hazard's call and danger's charm,
It yearned to the pathos of grief, the drama of pain,
Perdition's peril, the wounded bare escape,
The music of ruin and its glamour and crash,
The savour of pity and the gamble of love
And passion and the ambiguous face of Fate.
A world of hard endeavour and difficult toil,
And battle on extinction's perilous verge,
A clash of forces, a vast incertitude,
The joy of creation out of Nothingness,
Strange meetings on the roads of Ignorance
And the companionship of half-known souls
Or the solitary greatness and lonely force
Of a separate being conquering its world,
Called it from its too safe eternity.
A huge descent began, a giant fall:
For what the spirit sees, creates a truth
And what the soul imagines is made a world.
A Thought that leaped from the Timeless can become,
Indicator of cosmic consequence
And the itinerary of the gods,
A cyclic movement in eternal Time.
Thus came, born from a blind tremendous choice,
This great perplexed and discontented world,
This haunt of Ignorance, this home of Pain:
There are pitched desire's tents, grief's headquarters.
A vast disguise conceals the Eternal's bliss.”
Page: 455

Sri Aurobindo has stated succinctly in one of his letters what evolution is and what it is all about. “The creation has descended all the degrees of being from the Supermind to Matter and in each degree it has created a world, reign, plane or order proper to that degree. In the creating of the material world there was a plunge of this descending Consciousness into an apparent Inconscience and an emergence of it out of that Inconscience, degree by degree, until it recovers its highest spiritual and supramental summits and manifests their powers here in Matter.”[6] The manifestation of the Being in our universe takes the shape of an involution which is the starting-point of an evolution, - Matter the nethermost stage, Spirit the summit. In the descent into involution there can be distinguished seven principles of manifested being, seven gradations of the manifesting Consciousness of which we can get a perception or a concrete realisation of their presence and immanence here or a reflected experience.[7]

SAT

ANANDA

CHIT

SUPER MIND

MIND

VITAL

PHYSICAL

Everything seems to point to a spiritual and not merely a physical evolution. We discover that the Inconscient from which all starts is apparent only, for in it there is an involved Consciousness with endless possibilities, a consciousness not limited but cosmic and infinite, a concealed and self-imprisoned Divine, imprisoned in Matter but with every potentiality held in its secret depths. Out of this apparent Inconscience each potentiality is revealed in its turn, first organised Matter concealing the indwelling Spirit, then Life emerging in the plant and associated in the animal with a growing Mind, then Mind itself evolved and organised in Man.[8]

With man, we come to a very crucial point in our evolutionary story. Now She (Force) has the possibility of finding Him (Consciousness). Our humanity is the conscious meeting place of the finite and the infinite and to grow more and more towards the Infinite even in this physical birth is our privilege. A special phenomenon is also seen in physical nature: at the preceding stages, the profusion of plant life seems to subside once the animal stage is reached, and the profusion of the animal type subsides when man arrives on the scene. It does not seem that Nature has created any new animal or plant since man has come. In other words, these other species have become stationery and have achieved a static perfection in their own types. Now man, even though he is now set in his type is far from satisfied, far from perfect – he has not the joy or the harmony.

Man is an abnormal who has not found his own normality,—he may imagine he has, he may appear to be normal in his own kind, but that normality is only a sort of provisional order; therefore, though man is infinitely greater than the plant or the animal, he is not perfect in his own nature like the plant and the animal. This imperfection is not a thing to be at all deplored, but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us an immense vista of self-development and self-exceeding.[9] Indeed, if we were ‘perfect’ and without error, we would be a stationary species, just like bacteria or the chimpanzee.

So the journey of evolution is not yet over. In a beautiful letter Sri Aurobindo writes, “This evolution, this spiritual progression—does it stop short here in the imperfect mental being called Man?… There is at least the possibility, there comes at a certain point the certitude, that there is a far greater consciousness than what we call Mind, and that by ascending the ladder still farther we can find a point at which the hold of the material Inconscience, the vital and mental Ignorance ceases; a principle of consciousness becomes capable of manifestation which liberates not partially, not imperfectly, but radically and wholly this imprisoned Divine. In this vision each stage of evolution appears as due to the descent of a higher and higher Power of consciousness, raising the terrestrial level, creating a new stratum, but the highest yet remain to descend and it is by their descent that the riddle of terrestrial existence will receive its solution and not only the soul but Nature herself find her deliverance.[10]

And again, with regard to evolution and the glorious future which awaits us, Sri Aurobindo has said:

We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true and just as the impulse towards Life which she has planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse towards Mind which she has planted in certain forms of Life…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 co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God?[11]

There is an ascending evolution in nature which goes from the stone to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from animal to man. Because man is, for the moment, at the summit of the ascending evolution, he considers himself as the final stage in this ascension and believes that there can be nothing on earth superior to him. In this he is mistaken. In his physical nature he is yet almost wholly an animal, a thinking and speaking animal, but still an animal in his material habits and instincts. Undoubtedly nature cannot be satisfied with such an imperfect result; she brings out a being which will be to man what man is to the animal, a being who will remain a man in its external form, and yet whose consciousness will rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance.

Man is indeed a transitional being, and in spite of our terrible condition today, we are assured of a better tomorrow, or at least a day after. At the moment, we turn and toss in our beds of misery and suffering, one is search of his heaven, the other in search of his earth, unable to join the two ends. But the time is now to seize the day and take on the burden, or the joy, of evolution in our own hands and to seek to fulfil consciously the evolutionary intention in the universe.

But is such a consummation possible? Listen to this reassurance from Sri Aurobindo: “…whatever be the heavy weight of strife and suffering and darkness in the world, yet if there is this as its high result awaiting us, all that has gone before may not be counted too great a price by the strong and adventurous for the glory that is to come. At any rate the shadow lifts; there is a Divine Light that leans over the world and is not only a far-off incommunicable Lustre.”[12]

The following reply that Savitri gives to the God of Death (already quoted in instalment 280) and the optimistic note in it can now be better understood in the light of Sri Aurobindo’s concept of evolution.

(Mangesh Nadkarni retired as professor of Linguistics a few years ago. He enjoys sharing with as many people as possible what he receives from his study of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother)

[1] Sri Aurobindo: Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, Volume: 13 [CWSA], Page: 171.
[2] Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 47.
[3] Quoted in Georges Van Vrekhem: From Man to Superman, Paragon House, Minnesota, 1998.p. 90.
[4] Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, Volume: 18-19 [SABCL] p. 78.
[5] Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, Volume: 18-19 [SABCL] Page: 122;
[6] Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, Volume: 22-23-24 [SABCL]), Page: 1
[7] Volume: 18-19 [SABCL] (The Life Divine), Page: 662
[8] Volume: 22-23-24 [SABCL] (Letters on Yoga), Page: 25
[9] Sri Aurobindo: The Human Cycle, Volume: 25 [CWSA] Page: 234
[10] Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, Volume: 22-23-24 [SABCL], Page: 25
[11]ri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, Volume: 18-19 [SABCL], Page: 3
[12] Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, Volume: 22-23-24 [SABCL], Page: 25