Sri Aurobindo: The bliss of the Brahman can be described as the eternity of an uninterrupted supreme ecstasy. There is no opposition or incompatibility between these two states in the nature of the Brahman.  Bliss there is the keen height and core of peace; peace there is the intimate core and essence of bliss. There is no turbidity or turbulence in the being of the Brahman; its ineffable poignancy is eternal in its self-poise.  The essential mark of the descent of the consciousness from its highest grade in the supreme spirit is the constant diminution of the power of Sachchidananda, the intensity of its force, force of being, force of consciousness, force of bliss.


Sri Aurobindo: The intensity of all these three in the supreme status is ineffable; in the Supermind the intensity of consciousness is ever luminous and undiminished; in overmind it is already diminished and diffuse; the highest intensity of mind is a poor thing in comparison with the splendour of overmind, and so it goes diminishing till it reaches an apparent zero which we call inconscience.  The degree and amount of pain which mind, life and body can bear is by our human standards considerable; but their capacity for pleasure is very limited and pale in its intensity, low in its degree. What we call ecstasy would seem to a god to be ridiculously thin and vapid and edgeless. Its capacity of duration also is pitifully brief and measurable by the moments.  38


Sri Aurobindo: In experience even on the spiritual plane so long as we do not transcend the spirit in mind, there is a difference between peace and Ananda. Peace is the Divine static, Ananda the Divine dynamic. Peace is a negative-positive; it is positive of itself, of status, of eternity, of the essential, of the abstract-concrete, of force in rest. It is or tends to be negative of all that is less than itself, contradictory to itself or more than itself, of the dynamic, of action, of creation, of time and happening, of the substantial concrete, of force in motion. Or when it allows these things or even feels or supports them, it is with a certain disinterested separateness.


Sri Aurobindo: It has essentially the character of the Witness Spirit or at the most of the disinterested Witness-Creator. Ananda is in its every ﬁbre a positive of positives. It afﬁrms and rejoices in all that is native to peace, but it afﬁrms too and rejoices in all that peace negates or regards with a sovereign separateness. Ananda is an all embracing and creative force. There can be in the world’s tangle of conﬂicting forces an Ananda of pain and suffering and in the full manifestation pain and suffering no longer remain themselves but are transformed into Ananda.


Sri Aurobindo: But these opposing differences prove in the end to be part of the separative mental creation, the disjunctive Maya in which we live. In supermind experience peace is always full of Ananda and by its Ananda can act and create; Ananda is for ever full of the divine peace and its most vehement ecstatic intensity contains no possibility of disturbance. At the height of the supramental Inﬁnite peace and Ananda are one.  For there status and dynamis are inseparable, rest and action afﬁrm each other, essence and expression are one indivisible whole.  39


Sri Aurobindo: One that is Two that are Many, — this is the formula of the eternal and timeless manifestation in the worlds of Sachchidananda.  One who is Two and becomes the Two who become Many, — this is the formula of the perpetual manifestation in time in the three worlds of Mind, Life and Matter.  One who is in himself for ever the Two and for ever innumerably All and Eternal and Inﬁnite, this is the indication of the Supreme who is beyond Time and Timelessness in the highest Absolute.


Sri Aurobindo:   The One is Four for ever in his supramental quaternary of Being, Consciousness, Force and Ananda.  Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, these are the eternal Four, the quadruple Inﬁnite.  Brahma is the Eternal’s Personality of Existence ; from him all is created, by his presence, by his power, by his impulse.


Sri Aurobindo: Vishnu is the Eternal’s Personality of Consciousness; in him all is supported, in his wideness, in his stability, in his substance.  Shiva is the Eternal’s Personality of Force; through him all is created, through his passion, through his rhythm, through his concentration.  Krishna is the Eternal’s Personality of Ananda; because [of] him all creation is possible, because of his play, because of his delight, because of his sweetness.  Brahma is Immortality, Vishnu is Eternity, Shiva is Inﬁnity; Krishna is the Supreme’s eternal, inﬁnite, immortal selfpossession, self-issuing, self-manifestation, self-ﬁnding.  40


Sri Aurobindo: As earth when it becomes pot, ﬂoor or oven, never ceases to be earth, so the Being even though it becomes all things and persons, is ever and immutably the same.  Becoming does not cancel Being; after millions of events in a million universes have passed in the Inﬁnite, its inﬁnity remains the same for ever.  The Mayavadins ﬁx their deﬁnition, their rigid iti to the Parabrahman, the Absolute, and say that since it is that, it can never be anything else and therefore the world must be an illusion. But the Absolute is beyond all deﬁnitions, descriptions, qualiﬁcations, he is [not] bound by them, neither by features nor featurelessness, by unity nor multiplicity[.]


Sri Aurobindo: 41  It is said by certain Adwaitists with an unusual largeness of philosophic toleration that the views of all other philosophies are true on the way or at least useful and mark stages in the realisation of the Truth, but the highest realisation is the truth of Monistic Adwaita — there is only the One and nothing else. This concession comes to nothing; for it means that other spiritual experiences are only temporarily helpful delusions or helpful half truths and the only true truth is Adwaita. The dispute remains; for all the other schools also will claim theirs as the highest truth.


Sri Aurobindo: The mind cannot arrive at a perfect toleration, because the mind needs a cut and deﬁned truth opposed or superior to all others. In the supermind, the aspect of the One is true like all other aspects; all are equally true but none solely true.   42  The position taken up by the Illusionists must ﬁrst be ﬁrmly stated; for often there is a great nebulousness in the minds both of its supporters and antagonists which leaves room for much confused thinking and the real issue, the vital point gets obscured.


Sri Aurobindo: We must ﬁrst give this admission to the defence for whatever it is worth, that Illusionism does not afﬁrm the absolute non-existence of the universe but only that it is an existence which is in its beginning and its end a non-existence and in its middle it is an existence which amounts to non-existence.  It is real while it lasts to the mind that creates it; but it is not really real, — it is only phenomenally existent, like a dream, like a hallucination, like the imaginations of a person in delirium.  Three questions arise from this proposition. Is this hallucinatory creation of the universe a truth or is the theory itself a hallucination of the logical mind or of the experiencing consciousness?  Secondly, if true, how does the illusion come about and how is it possible?


Sri Aurobindo: Thirdly, who is the victim of the hallucination?  The whole theory arises from and turns on one original proposition of which it is the logical consequence. It is this that Brahman the one real, original and eternal existence is, ﬁrstly, self-existent, secondly, featureless and relationless, thirdly, unmodiﬁable, immutable, incapable therefore of developing feature and relation, fourthly, solely existent, for there is and can be nothing else but that in existence. None of these original positions about the Brahman imposes itself irrefutably upon the intellect; there are philosophies which deny them one and all and with quite as good a show of logic as any the logical apparatus of the Mayavada can furnish us. In fact, what we ﬁrst see as the one experience of our consciousness is not this at all, but just the opposite.


Sri Aurobindo: We see that every thing reduces itself not to an existence at all, but to a continuity of the action of Force, Karma as the Buddhists call it. We see that this action of Force exists only by an inﬁnite ﬂux of feature and relation, the stream of the Buddhist ﬁgure. Apart from that it is nothing, it is the Buddhist sunya or Nihil, and the reduction of the universe to its original starting point, the escape out of it is not a return to the self-existent, but a return to Nihil, a Nirvana or extinction.  Far, then, from being immutable and incapable of modiﬁcation, it is in its very nature a constant modiﬁcation and mutation.


Sri Aurobindo: Eliminate the stream of becoming and the result is not Being, but a zero. This is the difﬁculty which the Mayavada has to surmount, the logic which it has to refute.  For it cannot be denied that the universe, the thing from which all our conscious experience starts, is such a constant stream of becoming, a round of mutations and modiﬁcations, a mass of features and relations. The question is how is it maintained? what is [it] that gives an appearance of permanence to the impermanent, of stability to the unstable, of a sum of eternal sameness in which all the elements of the sum are in constant instability and all capable of mutation?


Sri Aurobindo: The Buddhist admits that it is done by an action of consciousness, by idea and association, vijnana, sanskara; but ideas and associations are themselves Karma, action of Force, themselves impermanent, only they create an appearance of permanence, by always acting in the same round, creating the same combination of forms and elements, as the ﬂame and stream appear always the same, though that which constitutes them is always impermanent. The modern Materialist says that it is material Force or an eternal Energy which takes the form of Matter and follows always the same inherent law of action. The Mayavadin says on the contrary that it is Consciousness, but a consciousness which is in its reality immutable and unmodiﬁable self-existence, only it produces a phenomenon of constant modiﬁcation and mutation.  How is this possible? There lies the riddle, for it is a direct selfcontradiction.


Sri Aurobindo: To escape from it, he alleges that the phenomenon has no reality at all, but is an illusion.  To deal with this theory at all, we have ﬁrst to admit that consciousness is the cause and continent of the universe and that it exists only in consciousness and not at all in itself. How does he [] propose to prove it? It is by an appeal to reason and experience. Our reason tells us that we have no knowledge of the existence of the universe except by our conscious mentality, no possibility of knowing it; the universe can only be allowed to exist by a consciousness admitting its existence, supporting it by its assent.


Sri Aurobindo: If by any chance, law or process our consciousness can cease ﬁnally to be aware of the universe, then so far as we are concerned, the universe no longer exists; it is annulled to us, it was an illusion from which we are released, as when a dream or hallucination ceases. Any such ﬁnal upshot proves that originally also the universe was non-existent, for otherwise, if it had existed for us eternally without beginning, it would also continue for us eternally without end. But even if it ceases for us, it still continues in existence, is capable of being observed and lived in by others. How is that? We must suppose, that since it exists cosmically, its existence must be admitted and supported by the assent of a universal consciousness by which and for which it is or rather seems to be.


Sri Aurobindo: Well, if by any chance, law or process this universal consciousness ceases ﬁnally to be aware of the universe, then the universe no longer exists for anybody or anything at all; it is proved to be an utter illusion, existent phenomenally only so long as the universal consciousness admitted it, but capable of coming to an end and therefore shown to be non-existent in its beginning and in its end nonexistent. Now our ultimate experience is that there is a last and highest state of consciousness in which the universe does thus cease for the individual to be. What is that state? It is samadhi, a trance of consciousness in which the sole experience is thus expressed, “I am in bliss” and the sole memory brought back is “I was in bliss.” In this state the universe has for the individual no existence; he is released from it.


Sri Aurobindo: Therefore this highest state of experience is one of which only three things can be afﬁrmed, existence, consciousness of existence, bliss of the consciousness of existence; but it is a pure existence without other feature or any relation. But how is this proved to be the ultimate state of our conscious being? Well, it is the knowledge of the sages who have entered into it that it is the ultimate state, it is the knowledge left behind them that they have ﬁnally passed away into it not to return to consciousness of the phenomenal world, and it is conﬁrmed by the authority of the Veda. Reason tells us that such a condition must be the ultimate condition, since it is one inﬁnitely beyond the phenomenal and to which the phenomenal arrives by self-elimination, and being the ultimate it must be also the original: the phenomenal which disappears from it, must originally have been imposed on it. There is no rational escaping from that conclusion.


Sri Aurobindo: Well, the individual soul can escape from consciousness of the universe, but what of the universal consciousness? For so long as the universe goes on existing — and who shall say that it is not for all eternity? — this escape may only prove that the individual soul goes into a state of unconsciousness or absorbed self-consciousness, like a man going to sleep or falling into a trance, while the world goes on around him just as before essentially unaffected and not at all annulled by his unconsciousness of it. But in the ﬁrst place this highest power of the individual consciousness cannot be peculiar to it, for it must be a power of the general and universal; the individual reﬂects the universal, for it is only the law of the universal that can be repeated with individual modiﬁcations in the law of the individual. Secondly, the universal soul is the same in all; for that is the experience of the highest knowledge and consciousness, that there [is] one self in all, featureless, immutable, unmodiﬁable, the same amidst all the changes of phenomena. As this self can draw back that which supports the individual into it, so it is and must be capable of drawing back that which supports the universal.


Sri Aurobindo: In one case the stream of phenomena centred around its individual reﬂection ceases, in the other the stream of phenomena centred around its universal reﬂection. A theory only? But it is justiﬁed by reason acting on our total experience which sees the lower or phenomenal and the higher or eternal and sees how the phenomenal disappears, vanishes away from the face of the eternal.  We have then as a fact a supreme state of existence which is self-existent, the original I am, which is featureless bliss and consciousness of being, immutable, eternal and this seems to be common to all beings, secret in all, the real self of all. But what then of the world?


Sri Aurobindo: It is a mass of constant modiﬁcations of consciousness and being, itself in its nature modiﬁcation of consciousness or of being or of both. It cannot be a modiﬁcation of nothing, it must be a modiﬁcation of something. If consciousness and being are the ﬁrst fact, real, eternal, is it not a modiﬁcation of conscious being, of this real, this eternal something, and itself therefore real? Is it not itself eternal, an eternal continuity of modiﬁcation, uninterrupted continual or else interrupted and recurringly continual? Must we not then suppose two states of the Brahman, a primary state of eternal unmodiﬁed being, a secondary state of eternal continuity of modiﬁcations of being, becomings of the Brahman?


Sri Aurobindo: Does not the Vedantic statement that all comes from the Brahman, exists by it, returns to it, imply that all is eternally contained in it and all are modiﬁcations of it?  In that case, we cannot say that the Eternal Being is absolutely unmodiﬁable. No, says the Illusionist, the supreme eternal self is not only unmodiﬁed, but unmodiﬁable and nothing else but the eternal unmodiﬁable self exists really: all else is seeming. How then do all these modiﬁcations come about? What is the clue to this mystery, the cause of this magic of illusion?


Sri Aurobindo: Maya, answers the Illusionist. And what is Maya? It is a power of the eternal consciousness of Brahman by which there comes about an apparent modiﬁcation of consciousness of which all these modiﬁcations we call the universe are the outcome.  The modiﬁcation is apparent, not real, yet a fact, unreally, nonexistently existent. Maya exists, yet does not exist; and its results too are apparent, not real, yet while Maya lasts, they are a fact we have to deal with, unreally, non-existently existent.


Sri Aurobindo: We have to escape from them, by escaping from Maya. We do not understand. How can the unmodiﬁable consciousness undergo at all even an apparent modiﬁcation, to say nothing of such portentous results of the modiﬁcation? To that there is no explanation, there can be no explanation. It takes place beyond the intellect, before the intellect can at all exist and cannot be understood by the intellect; it must be accepted as a fact; it is a fact that Maya is, it is a fact that Maya can be escaped from, and therefore not being eternal, is transient, is unreal, is not.


Sri Aurobindo: To see this and escape is our only business. Only while it lasts, are we concerned with the modiﬁcations. But what is meant by saying while it lasts and who is it that is subject to it and escapes from it? Is it Brahman who is subject to Maya? No, Brahman the eternally unmodiﬁable consciousness aware only of the bliss of its self-existence cannot be subject to Maya, does not behold this phenomenal illusion.


Sri Aurobindo: For if he did, we returning into that, should also behold it and could not by the returning escape from it. It is the individual soul only that is subject to Maya and escapes from it. But who is this individual soul? Is it the self in the individual, the Jivatman, and is the self in the individual different from the eternal Self? No, the individual self is the eternal Brahman, for there is only one self and not many.


Sri Aurobindo: But then the Jivatman also cannot be subject to Maya or escape from it. There is then nobody subject to it, nobody who escapes.  And really that is so, says the illusionist, but what seems to us now to be the individual self, is a reﬂection of the eternal Self in the mind, and it is that which is subject to Maya and suffers by it. But what then is Mind? It is a result of Maya, it is an illusory movement of consciousness, it is that for which and by which the universe exists.


Sri Aurobindo: Get rid of its action, its movement, and the illusion will cease; you will be free. But then again who is this you? If I am really the eternal, then I, the individual do not exist; my real self, to use a desperately foolish language, — since that means an individual in possession of a self which cannot be, as my individuality is an illusion, — my real self is in eternal bliss and not being affected cannot care whether this false, nonexistently existent I is bound or escapes, suffers or is in bliss. To whom then does it matter? Only to Maya and mind.


Sri Aurobindo: Well, then, it is an affair between Maya and mind, and they can settle it between themselves. Precisely, the Illusionist will reply ; to you, the mental being, it does matter because you are in Maya, you suffer, however phenomenally, however unreally, and the only way to get rid of it is to abolish Maya by abolishing yourself, your mental individuality, her result by which alone she exists; then you will not exist, Maya and the world will exist for other mental beings; but you will undergo extinction in the Brahman, for you Brahman only will exist. How for me, since I can only be either in Maya or out of it, either individually aware of Maya and not of my real self or else non-existent individually? How can ‘I’ be aware of my real self only and of nothing else?


Sri Aurobindo: It is possible; for as the mind falsely reﬂects Brahman by Maya as the individual, so free from Maya, it can truly reﬂect Brahman and it ceases to be individual mind, although in an individual body it still seems to be individually released. Really, it is Brahman expelling Maya from the consciousness, then the mind is taken up into Samadhi, extinguished in Samadhi, and this is the [?prefatory] sign. Fix your mind upon that, look at things practically, and do not ask inconsistent questions, as to how there can be individual salvation when there is no individual self to be saved. These questions do not arise once the release is made, they arise in Maya which is a practical fact and can receive only a practical solution.  Well that is a kind of answer.


Sri Aurobindo: But how am I to know that it is not an evasion of the difﬁculty? What if I say that really the unmodiﬁable Brahman is not the highest truth? that the Brahman is aware at once of his unmodiﬁed eternal self and of his eternally modiﬁed cosmic existence, Akshara and Kshara, but he is himself beyond both, and that my real way of escape is to be the same, to be aware of my eternal self and of all the universe as modiﬁcations of my self; that with this transcendence and universality comes perfect bliss, and that the fact that I, still existing in Maya, can be blissfully aware of one Self everywhere and of all things in the universe is a proof of my assertion?  This seems to me at least as good a theory as your theory of Maya; and if you say, how is that possible, I can either allege reasons or answer like you, it is a supraintellectual fact and we have to take it as a fact and ﬁnd the practical way of realising it. If you want me to reject it in favour of your theory, give me at least some help.


Sri Aurobindo: Make me realise how the world can be nonexistently existent, how the unmodiﬁable can be apparently modiﬁed, how I can exist only beyond the world and yet exist in it so palpably that I must struggle to get out of it, how Brahman exists only beyond Maya and yet by me exists in Maya, how mind is the result of Maya, an instrument to see world and is yet capable of getting rid of Maya and seeing only the Brahman, how being by my individuality subject to Maya, and only able to escape by getting rid of my individuality, I am yet to become individually aware of Brahman and get an individual salvation, while all the rest of the world by which alone I am individual in my experience is still subject to it, how an unreal individual can realise Brahman.  The Mayavadin answers that as it is the Maya power of the Self which creates the ignorance in each individual, so it is the Self in each individual which enables him to have the knowledge by removing from him the Maya power. How this can be, can only be explained by analogies. As a man mistakes a rope for a snake, and then discovers it is a rope and there is no snake, so the mind thinks there is a world where there is only Brahman and discovers in the end that there is only Brahman; — or as a man mistakes mother of pearl for real pearl and runs after it and is then disillusioned and leaves it to go after the reality. As a pot is only a name and form of earth and earth is the only reality, so the world and the individual are only a name and form; break the pot, it will go back to its original earth; break the name and form in the consciousness, get rid of the individual, and there will be only Brahman in the consciousness.


Sri Aurobindo: There are many golden ornaments, but the reality of them all is the gold; it is that alone which has value. So Brahman only is worth having; the rest is name and form and mere vanity. Or if these analogies seem to be only physical images not valid for a supraphysical fact, observe how you dream. The dream has no reality, yet is real to your consciousness while it lasts. The you in the dream is an unreal you; you awake to your real self.


Sri Aurobindo: So the world is a dream; falling asleep to the world, the dream ceases; awake to the Brahman, the dream is convinced of unreality. That is the only possible and a quite sufﬁcient answer.  Is it a sufﬁcient answer? Does it prove the main point that the world consciousness is an apparent and unreal modiﬁcation of the ever unmodiﬁable Brahman and therefore to be dispelled as quickly as possible, so that I may cease to exist, except insofar as I already eternally exist, not at all as I, but as the Brahman?  Above all, does it show that my one practical business is to get rid of a world consciousness which is of no value and has no purpose except self-bewilderment, and become again what I ought never to have ceased to be in my unreal consciousness, as indeed I am still that in my real consciousness, the featureless and immutable Spirit?


Sri Aurobindo: Is the world really a valueless dream, a purposeless delirium of ignorance? Have we no other true spiritual business here except to get out of it? These are the real questions that the soul of man asks of the illusionist thinker, and we have to judge his answer.  43  Existence is not a ﬂuke, a random creation by nobody, a thing that unaccountably happened to be.


Sri Aurobindo: It carries in itself the Word of God, it is full of a hidden Divine Presence.  Existence is not a blind machine that somehow came and started a set ignoble motion without object or sense or purpose.  Existence is a Truth of things unfolding by a gradual process of manifestation, an evolution of its own involved Reality.  Existence is not an illusion, a Maya that had no reason, no business to exist, could not exist, does not exist but only seems to be. A mighty Reality manifests in itself this marvellous universe.


Sri Aurobindo: 44  All that is is the manifestation of a Divine Inﬁnite. The universe has no other reason for existence.  There is an eternal manifestation and there is a temporal manifestation; both are without end or beginning even as That which manifests is without end or beginning. Time and its creations are for ever.


Sri Aurobindo: The temporal manifestation is cast partly in a gradation of enduring types; partly it moves through a long unrolling series of vicissitudes of change and new formation and is evolutionary in its process.  The typal worlds do not change. In his own world a god is always a god, the Asura always an Asura, the demon always a demon. To change they must either migrate into an evolutionary body or else die entirely to themselves that they may be new born into other Nature.


Sri Aurobindo: 45  All that is is the manifestation, even as all that is not is the self-reservation, of a Supreme, an Inﬁnite who veils himself in the play of impersonal forces, in the recesses of a mysterious Inconscience and will at last rediscover here his most intimate presence, his most integral power, light, beauty, Ananda and all vast and ineffable being through a growing illumination of the still ignorant consciousness now evolving in Matter, a consciousness of which Man is only one stage, at once the summit of an ascent that is ﬁnished and the starting point of a far greater ascension that is still only preparing its commencement.  All manifestation that is not evolution is a play and selfformulation of the One Inﬁnite in one term or another of his existence, consciousness-force, Ananda, his self-knowledge, selfpower, self-delight, for the glory, joy and beauty of the play and for no other reason.  All evolution is the progressive self-revelation of the One to himself in the terms of the Many out of the Inconscience through the Ignorance towards self-conscient perfection.


Sri Aurobindo: The evolution has a purpose, but it is a purpose in a circle.  It is not a straight line or other ﬁgure of progression from the not to the is, from the less to the more.  There is no beginning or end of the Universe in space or time; for the universe is the manifestation of the Eternal and Inﬁnite.  Manifestation is not an episode of the Eternal. It is his face and body of glory that is imperishable, it is the movement of his joy and power that needs not to sleep or rest as do ﬁnite things from their labour.


Sri Aurobindo: In the beginning, it is said, was the Eternal, the Inﬁnite, the One. In the middle, it is said, is the ﬁnite, the transient, the many. In the end, it is said, shall be the One, the Inﬁnite, the Eternal.  For when was the beginning? At no moment in Time, for the beginning is at every moment; the beginning always was, always is and always shall be.


Sri Aurobindo: The divine beginning is before Time and in Time and beyond Time for ever. The Eternal Inﬁnite and One is an endless beginning.  And where is the middle? There is no middle; for the middle is only the junction of the perpetual end and the eternal beginning; it is the sign of a creation which is new at every moment.  The creation was for ever, is for ever, shall be for ever.


Sri Aurobindo: The eternal Inﬁnite and One is the magical middle term of his own existence; it is he that is this beginningless and endless creation.  And when is the end? There is no end. At no conceivable moment can there be a cessation. For all end of things is the beginning of new things which are still the same One in an ever developing and ever recurring ﬁgure.


Sri Aurobindo: Nothing can be destroyed for all is He who is for ever. The Eternal Inﬁnite and One is the unimaginable end that is the never closing gate upon new interminable vistas of his glory.  46  Man is a transitional being, he is not ﬁnal. He is a middle term of the evolution, not its end, crown or consummating masterpiece.


Sri Aurobindo: 47  Man is not ﬁnal, he is a transitional being. Beyond him awaits formation the diviner race, the superman.  48  God is the beginning, middle and end of all things; but in the beginning He is concealed, in the middle partly and progressively manifest, in the end revealed.


Sri Aurobindo: The universe is such a manifestation of God under certain conditions and in the terms of a gradually unfolding harmony.  These conditions and the movements which govern the rhythms of the harmony are the universal laws.  In this manifestation the two terms are involution and evolution. The material universe starts from an involution of God in the movement of inconscient Force and the forms of inert Matter and it is impelled by the divine impulse within it to the evolution of God through the increasing manifestation of consciousness and conscious power which must culminate in a perfect and inﬁnite self-knowledge, self-mastery and self-delight.


Sri Aurobindo: By the involution we mean a self-concealing of the Divine in a descent of which the last rung is Matter, by the evolution a selfrevealing of the Divine in an ascent of which the last rung is Spirit.  Since evolution or a gradual self-unfolding is the essential movement of the universe, the impulse of all life in the universe must be to self-fulﬁlment and the realisation of its utmost potentialities. Behind each form of life there is a divine idea which determines its form and its limits and the form circumscribes the potentialities of the life. Therefore the self-fulﬁlment of the life is contained within certain limits ﬁxed by the nature of the life and the law of its being and action which that nature determines.  The idea which thus determines is the cause and the form which thus limits the sign of the Finite in the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: The universe is an inﬁnity creating innumerable ﬁnite expressions of itself in idea and form within its own inﬁnite being. The one and inﬁnite is the soul and reality of each ﬁnite; the multiple ﬁnite is the rhythm, movement and harmony of the inﬁnite.  Therefore in and behind all ﬁnite life in the universe there is an inﬁnite reality seeking to arrive at itself which must in its self-unfolding create ﬁnite forms of life which are yet able in their consciousness and movement to manifest and realise the inﬁnite. Man is such a ﬁnite-inﬁnite and the sole type of such a form of life that yet exists upon the earth.  49


Sri Aurobindo: All life and mind on earth is the story of a Being, a Consciousness, a Power, a Joy that is darkly imprisoned in the apparent inconscience of Matter and is struggling for liberation. Blinded, cabined, drugged, immured, it is yet ever striving to come out of the black cell of this obscurity into its own light, wideness, conscious sight and force, self-aware action, bliss, freedom, harmony, perfection. It starts with small beginnings, as a vibration in the metal, as a feeling out and drawing in and a groping and [?infusing] in the plant, as a crude or minute power of sensory life-urge rising to an instinctive reason and mind and purposeful force in the insect, as a more organised and conscious and emotional, even a roughly and narrowly thinking and planning vital being in the animal, and has persevered till it has broken into some half opening on itself in the thinking, reasoning, willing and aspiring nature of man, the Manu, the mental creature. Here at present it stands not by any means satisﬁed, but it would seem, feeling out for something more entirely itself, some supreme manhood or supermanhood, some beginning of godhead that would be at last its true self-ﬁnding and triumphant manifestation out of matter, even here in this limited and limiting earthly Nature.  This striving and slow outburst of Something that was hidden all along in Matter, in the Inconscient, is the whole sense of Evolution — not the mere development of a more and more organised living body out of protoplasm, as the scientists with their eyes ﬁxed only or mainly on physical things would have it, but the struggle of Consciousness somnambulised in Matter to wake and free, ﬁnd and possess itself more and more completely, the emancipation and slow self-revealing of a Soul secret at ﬁrst in Force and Form, the growth of a Spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: This evolution, it is sometimes pretended, ends in man, man is the term and end; but this is because we miss the real values of the process. At ﬁrst indeed we see this Spirit spending numberless millions of years to evolve a material system of worlds empty in the beginning of life, a lesser but vast enough series of millions to develop an earth on which life can inhabit, a lesser series of millions to make possible and train, raise life itself with but a feeble and restricted apparatus of mind; but once it has found a body, a brain, a living apparatus not perfect, but still sufﬁcient it is no longer concerned mainly with evolving a body or [ . . . ] an embodied life but can at last grapple with its own proper business. Evolution henceforth means the evolution of the consciousness, of mind and, if any such thing there be, of what is beyond mind, — and in that case as its last stride has been the evolution of the mental being, man, out of the vital being, the animal, so its next stride will be to evolve out of mental man a greater spiritual and supramental creature.   50


Sri Aurobindo: All mind and life on earth are the progressive manifestation of a Spirit or Being that has involved itself in Matter and is slowly evolving in Matter, against the inconscient resistance of a ﬁrst rigid material self-formation and under its conditions, its own secret powers and nature. In the Inconscience in which it has involved itself, these powers, this nature seem not only to be hidden but contradicted; cast into their own opposites they emerge with difﬁculty and labour at ﬁrst in ﬂickers and faint glimpses, then growing into a better but still much diminished ﬁgure. But the evolution cannot be considered at an end until these diminished ﬁgures growing more and more free, developed, powerful arrive at their own complete fulﬁlment, revelation of their truth, native perfection, beauty and greatness. This is the aim of terrestrial existence — to reveal in Matter, in Time-Space, in ﬁgure and body what was once self-held only in an eternal unembodied self and spirit.  In order that this evolution might be, an implacable plunge of supreme Consciousness and Being into an apparent void of insentience, inconscience, non-existence was inevitable; for without that plunge, immergence, seeming yet effective annihilation [in] its opposite the creation of that phenomenon of cosmic Energy which we call Matter would have been impossible.


Sri Aurobindo: Yet however effective this appearance is only an appearance. In the void of that Non-Existence all the powers of being are held involved and latent; in the impenetrable darkness of that Inconscience all the possibilities of consciousness lie ready to be evolved; in that insentience is a drowned Delight of Existence which emerging in the contradictory ﬁgures of pleasure and pain can struggle upwards towards cosmic expression of its own truth of the Bliss that supports all things.  To ask why this plunge was taken at all, why such an evolution slow, gratuitous, painful should ever have been undertaken is natural for man struggling painfully with his own transience, ignorance and suffering — inevitable consequences of that plunge or fall — but from the cosmic point of view irrelevant and otiose. A possibility was there in the Inﬁnite and outlined itself for manifestation, the lines of an evolutionary world amidst the numberless possibility or numbered reality of various universes, and it was undertaken because the Spirit in things is afraid of no possibility of itself but is rather ready to sanction all by its will towards manifest existence. To the Cosmic Spirit which sees things as a whole, the working out of this universe or any universe is self-justiﬁed, the obscure labour of the emergence no less than the glory of its completion and ﬁnal perfection in a yet unattained light, bliss and greatness.


Sri Aurobindo: At any rate into this world of evolution something of the eternal spirit has thrown itself, with all in it that consented to the descent and to fulﬁl the world, not to escape from it, is the deepest meaning of the Spirit and Godhead within us and the universe.  This then must be our will in terrestrial existence — being mind in matter to grow into the Spirit, being man-animal to emerge into the Godhead, to expand out of our limited sense of existence into freedom and inﬁnite wideness, out of the half ﬁgure of consciousness we have realised to be illumined into true consciousness, out of weakness to realise divine Mastery, out of the dual experience of pain and pleasure to emerge into possession of the cosmic Bliss of existence, out of the dull chrysalis of our limited selves to ﬂower into oneness with the Divine Self that we are. For this is not an egoistic will in us but the meaning of the Divine Inhabitant for which he has undertaken bodily life and terrestrial existence.   51


Sri Aurobindo: Before there could be any evolution, there must needs be an involution of the Divine All that is to emerge. Otherwise there would be not an evolution, but a successive creation of things new, not contained in their antecedents, not their inevitable consequences or followers in a sequence but arbitrarily willed or miraculously conceived by an inexplicable Chance, a stumblingly fortunate Force or an external Creator.   The long process of terrestrial formation and creation, the ambiguous miracle of life, the struggle of mind to appear and grow in an apparent vast Ignorance and to reign there as interpreter and creator and master, the intimations of a greater something that passes beyond the ﬁnite marvel of mind to the inﬁnite marvels of the Spirit, are not a meaningless and fortuitous passing result of some cosmic Chance with its huge combination of coincidences; they are not the lucky play of some blind material Force. These things are and can be only because of something eternal and divine that concealed itself in energy and form of Matter.


Sri Aurobindo: The secret of the terrestrial evolution is the slow and progressive liberation of this latent indwelling spirit, the difﬁcult appearance, the tardy becoming [of a] divine Something or Someone already involved with all its potential forces in a ﬁrst formal basis of supporting substance, its greater slowly emerging movements locked up in one initial expressive power of Matter.  Man the thinker and seeker would not be here if he were not an embodied portion of an all-conscious Inﬁnite that is superconscient above him but lies also hidden in the inconscience of the material universe.  The development of forms is not the most important or the most signiﬁcant part of the evolutionary process; it is one sign of the thing that is being done, but it is not its essence.  Material form is only a support and means for the progressive manifestation of the Spirit.  If all were chance or play of inconscient or inconsequent Force, there would be no reason why man with all his imperfections should not be the last word of this feat of unconscious intelligence or this haphazard miracle.


Sri Aurobindo: It is because the Divine Spirit is there and his manifestation the meaning of the movement that a new power must emerge in the series that started from Matter.  The material universe would be a waste if wonderful desert if Life had not appeared as the ﬁrst index to some marvellous utility and an ultimate profound and moving signiﬁcance. But life too by itself would be a movement without sequence to its purposeful initiation or any light to its own mystery if in Life there were not concealed an interpretative or at least a seeking power of consciousness that could turn upon its powers and try to grasp and direct them towards their own realised issue.  52  Our life is neither an accident nor a mechanism; it is not a freak of some wide-spread self-organising Chance, nor is it the result of a blind unaccountable material Necessity.


Sri Aurobindo: What we call Chance is a play of the possibilities of the Inﬁnite; what we call Necessity is a truth of things working itself out in a Time-sequence of the Inﬁnite.  It [] seems indeed to be born from a cosmic Inconscience which, pushed somehow towards world-building, does what it can or does what it must but in either case knows nothing of itself or of its own action. Yet is there a meaning in these workings, a conscious intention; our life is led by the will of some secret Being, secret perhaps within its own phenomenon, towards the solution of this packed cosmic Mystery, the unrolling of a willed and mighty Enigma.  What we see in and around us is a play of God, a “Lila”.  It is a scene arranged, a drama played by the One Person with his own multitudinous personalities in his own impersonal existence, — a game, a plan worked out in the vast and plastic substance of his own world-being.


Sri Aurobindo: He plays with the powers and forces of his Nature a game of emergence from the inconscient Self out of which all here began, through the mixed and imperfect consciousness which is all we have now reached, towards a supreme consciousness, a divine nature.  This we cannot now know; our eyes are ﬁxed on a partial outer manifestation which we see and call the universe — though even now we see and know very little of it or about it, know perhaps a few of its processes but nothing fundamental, nothing of its reality, — and an inner partial manifestation which we do not see but experience and feel and call ourselves. Our mind is shut up in a cleft between these two fragments and tends to regard it as the whole of things and the only tangible and real existence.  It is so that the frog regards himself and his well. But we have to grow out of this frog consciousness and exceed the limits of this well.


Sri Aurobindo: In the end we come to perceive that we have a truer and divine being of which our petty personality is only a surface and corrupted output, a truer and divine Consciousness in which we must become self-aware and world-aware discarding our present fragmentary and bounded mental vision of self and things.  The term of our destiny is already known to us; we have to grow from what we are into a more luminous existence, from pleasure and pain into a purer and vaster and deeper bliss, from our struggling knowledge and ignorance into a spontaneous and boundless light of consciousness, from our fumbling strength and weakness into a sure and all-understanding Power, from division and ego into universality and unity. There is an evolution and we have to complete it: a human animality or an animal humanity is not enough. We must pass from the inadequate ﬁgure of humanity into a ﬁgure of the Godhead, from mind to supermind, from the consciousness of the ﬁnite to the consciousness of the Inﬁnite, from Nature into Supernature.


Sri Aurobindo:   This is no vaulting imagination, but the inevitable outcome of our still unfulﬁlled being and incomplete nature, a necessity of the evolutionary world-urge: because things are what they are, this too must be. For things are what they are, but not what they were; they cannot remain for ever what they are, but must grow into what they can be and shall be. And what they shall be can be nothing less than the exceeding of their present imperfection, the fullness of what they have only half become; but it may and must be something more than that, they must grow into their own concealed reality, their nature must reveal what is now concealed, their real self.  The perfection of species or of types is not what is aimed at; the type is often perfect [within its] limits, for it is the limits that make the type; the species too can be perfect in itself, perfect in its own variation of the genus and the genus perfect by the number and beauty or curiosity of its variations.


Sri Aurobindo: But what we see in Nature is that it strives ever to exceed itself, to go beyond what it has yet done. For having achieved in the animal the whole of which animality was capable, it did not in achieving man endeavour to produce the perfect synthetic animal, it began at once working out something more than the animal. Man is to a certain extent a synthesis of several animals; he might even be said to synthetise all, from the worm and the skink, to the elephant and the lion; but as an animal he is terribly imperfect.  His greatness lies in his being more than an animal and by this new nature he has exceeded the animal and made up for all his deﬁciencies even in the region of the struggle for life.  Comparatively defenceless at ﬁrst, he has become the master of the earth; he is not merely; he is a sovereign and the others are not any longer, even if they were ever his equals.


Sri Aurobindo: 53  The world we live in is not a meaningless accident that has unaccountably taken place in the void of Space; it is the scene of an evolution in which an eternal Truth has been embodied, hidden in a form of things, and is secretly in process of unfoldment through the ages. There is a meaning in our existence, a purpose in our birth and death and travail, a consummation of all our labour. All are parts of a single plan; nothing has been idly made in the universe; nothing is vain in our life.


Sri Aurobindo: The evolution is arranged or arranges itself according to this plan. It begins here with a system of worlds which seem to be dead, yet in perpetual motion; it proceeds towards birth and life and consciousness, justifying Matter; it ﬁnds the justiﬁcation of birth in thinking man; [? ] to divinity. A slow [? ] of godhead in Matter, this is the sense of the material universe.  Man is a transitional being, he is not ﬁnal. He is too imperfect for that, too imperfect in capacity for knowledge, too imperfect in will and action, too imperfect in his turn towards joy and beauty, too imperfect in his will for freedom and his instinct for order.


Sri Aurobindo: Even if he could perfect himself in his own type, his type is too low and small to satisfy the need of the universe.  Something larger, higher, more capable of a rich all embracing universality is needed, a greater being, a greater consciousness summing up in itself all that the world set out to be. He has, as was pointed out by a half blind seer, to exceed himself; man must evolve out of himself the divine superman: he was born for transcendence. Humanity is not enough, it is only a strong stepping stone; the need of the world is a superhuman perfection of what the world can be, the goal of consciousness is divinity.  The inmost need of man is not to perfect his humanity, but to be greater than himself, to be more than man, to be divine, even to be the Divine.


Sri Aurobindo: To rest in humanity is to rest in imperfection; the perfect man would be a self-contented ﬁnality of incompleteness. His nature is transitional and there is therefore in it an innate tendency to strive towards something more.  — Unless indeed he turned aside from his destiny, became a two-legged termite content with a perfectly arranged or sufﬁciently comfortable material order. He would [ . . . . . . ] exist, deteriorate or become stable like the ant or the dung-beetle or after attaining complete efﬁciency, disappear like the sloth, the mammoth, the pterodactyl or the dinosaur. His innate reason for existence would have ceased and with it his necessity for being.


Sri Aurobindo: But this cannot be; there is something in him that forbids it.  But this most — that humanity cannot realise itself except by passing into supermanhood.  The saint, the sage, the seer, the inspired man of action, the creator, — these are his summits of being. Beyond him is the supramental being, the spiritual superman.  54


Sri Aurobindo: Our existence in the cosmic order is not an accident, the purposeless freak of a Chance which happened to organise itself into a world or the product of a blind Force which has somehow managed to exist in what we call a void Space and executes there [?soulless] inexplicable revolutions, as if compelled by its own causeless necessity; nor is man the result of a chemical combination of gases by an Energy which has somehow, being radically inconscient, succeeded without intending it to produce consciousness and started writing poems, painting pictures, producing civilisations, conceiving an inexistent God and invisible Creator. There is surely more in it than that; there was [an] Idea somewhere [and if it] has emerged it is because it was [ . . . ] and had to emerge.  If there is an intelligence which has appeared in Matter and is constantly developing its height and its range, this can only be because there was already an intelligence there, asleep, involved, latent or in some way a possibility of Matter, which has come forth from latency when things and conditions were ready. Or else it [is] because behind or in the world immanent in it there is an Intelligence which has created or is manifesting this world and at the right time has sent this power of itself [ . . . . . . . . . ]  The nature of evolution according to physical Science is a development of forms more and more suitable to an increasingly complex and subtle development of Life and incidentally only to a more and more complex and subtle consciousness serving the ends of Life.


Sri Aurobindo: This consciousness is a temporary phenomenon beginning in each form with birth and ending with death of the body. Consciousness then is a circumstance of body and incapable of survival of the body. There is no such thing per se as consciousness. A consciousness not dependent on the body, expressing itself in it as its instrument, a soul or spirit, is therefore a myth, an imagination; if it existed, it would be an unwarrantable intrusion into the nature of things as seen in this material universe; or, since everything in this universe is dependent on Matter, arose from Matter, is a circumstance or result of Matter and returns to Matter, soul too would be a circumstance or result of Matter, would act by it and in it only, would return ﬁnally to Matter. Consciousness itself is a phenomenon of Matter, is nothing but Matter in action, a combination of phenomenal action of chemical or other physical entities and operations and can be nothing else.


Sri Aurobindo: It is unproven and unprovable, — though it may be that it is also not disproved and not disprovable. Either it must be left in a barren light or no light of agnosticism or is at most a matter of faith and not of knowledge.  But all this only means that Science has not any adequate means to deal precisely with the supraphysical nor can it collect and handle all the necessary data; it can deal only with the physical and with the physical side of the supraphysical; and that is not enough. Faith and knowledge are themselves supraphysical things with which Science cannot deal; for psychology at present is not a science; it is only a dispute between different bundles of inferences and guesses.


Sri Aurobindo:  Man is not ﬁnal, he is a transitional being.  This imperfect thinker embarrassed by the limitations of his brain and senses, this ignorant mind seeking after the truth of himself and things and never arriving at a certain knowledge, this stumbling reasoner capable only of speculation and stiff logical conclusions but not of indubitable conclusions or of a complete or direct knowledge, this imperfect liver divided between his reasoning will and his half-governed impulsions and instinctive desires, this thing of bundles of ideas and sensations and lusts and longings, this hunter after forms and formulas, this suffering and sorrowing mixture of wisdom and imbecility we call man is not the ﬁnal essay of Nature, her last word, the crown of her evolution, the summit of consciousness, her master creation.    The central fact, the essential and cardinal signiﬁcance of the evolution is not development and perfection of the outer and instrumental form, but the development [and] increasing perfection of consciousness. If human consciousness had been something complete, consummate, a ne plus ultra, then we could conﬁdently say that here was the summit, here the crown and end of things and beings, here the perfected creation and the supreme terrestrial creator.


Sri Aurobindo: Or if his consciousness though imperfect showed signs that it could arrive [at] the very top of possibility, rule earth and discover heaven, then we might believe that man was the last instrument by which Nature was passing from the terrestrial to the highest stage developing out of her initial inconscience a supreme conscient being.  But man seems to be by his very mould of nature a being with an animal living out of which he grew and a mental boundary beyond which he cannot pass.  For mind is the man, mind cramped into a body and entangled in the intricate machinery of a laborious and precarious physical organism which helps it less than it hampers. Mind’s only data for knowledge are the motions of terrestrial life, the motions and processes of the physical world and its own processes and motions. Its notions about other things are merely speculations, guesses, imaginations; it thinks about them by means of abstractions, it cannot grasp anything concrete.


Sri Aurobindo: It can observe life and know it by observation and inferences from observation or it can know by theory; it can ﬁnd out its constituent parts and its processes. Its knowledge of itself is of the same variety; it traces out the processes of thinking, demarcates the observed constituents of personality; it evaluates men from what they say and do, not from what they are, for that it cannot see. It discovers by analysis or makes a synthesis by ﬁtting together the fragments of things. Eventually it discovers the phenomenon, but misses the reality; it knows things as objects but knows nothing about things in themselves. Reality is beyond its grasp, it is only sure about the appearance.


Sri Aurobindo: This is much for one who emerged out of nescient Matter and started as the ignorant animal, but it is not enough to make of man the crown of creation and the last apex of the evolution.  If man’s knowledge and his way of knowledge are imperfect, still more imperfect are his living and his doing. [His] works sometimes attain perfection. Some men have done well in poetry and the arts and crafts, more have done badly, most are conventional copyists or botchers. In science and works with a scientiﬁc basis, men have certainly done well and their works were often efﬁcient or masterly, for there all is method and rule and there the human mind seeks to master and execute what he has to do and that he can always do.


Sri Aurobindo: Few have insight in works, fewer have any originality.  Journeyman’s work he can do, for man is essentially a journeyman. He is skilful in putting things [up], buildings, a job, a swindle. In pulling down he is perfect, a destroyer ne plus ultra. The world is full of his constructions, but more pervasive is his destruction; but that leaves few traces.


Sri Aurobindo: But still the great doers are few in number, the good doers are many, the poor doers are legion, the evil doers hardly less. All this shows that he is a transitional and evolving animal, the highly evolved are rare, the poorly evolved numerous, the ill-evolved a multitude.  Living is more difﬁcult than doing; though it is universal, and ought to have become easy by practice, it is commonly ill done, almost universally botched or half worked out. Human  society


Sri Aurobindo: is a ramshackle affair; it is top-heavy, over-elaborate and opulent at the top, below a multitudinous level. When he tries to reform his world, he sets out to level everything down towards or even to the worst. He can force all things down to the level of a universal proletariat, but he cannot make of the proletariat a universal aristocracy.   55


Sri Aurobindo: There are two states of being, two levels or limits between which all existence stands or moves, a highest limit of supreme consciousness, an omniscient Superconscience, a nethermost limit of supreme unconsciousness, an omnipotent Inconscience.  The secret of consciousness reveals itself only when we perceive these two limits and the movement between them which we call the universe.  There can be no consciousness without existence, for the consciousness of a Void or a Nihil is a vain imagination, a thing impossible. For Nothing cannot be conscious of anything — cannot be conscious of itself; if it were conscious of itself, it would at once be an existence aware of itself, it would cease to be a Nihil; it would at once be evident that it was all the time an Existence appearing to be Nihil, that it was Being or a Being unconscious, but now grown conscious of its own existence. A void conscious of itself is conceivable, but it would then be a void existence and not Nihil.


Sri Aurobindo: There might be an eternal Non-Being, but that too could not be Nihil; eventually it could only be a supreme superconscient existence exceeding our notion of Being. A true Nihil would necessarily be as incapable of consciousness as of existence; out of it nothing could come as in it nothing could be, neither spirit nor soul nor mind nor Matter.  We have then at one end of things a supreme superconscient existence and [at the other] a supreme inconscient existence and between them we have consciousness in the universe; but both are two states of one Being; what is between also is movement of that one Being between its two ends, its two highest and lowest levels of self-manifestation.  .


Sri Aurobindo: 56  All existence upon earth is an evolution of what has come down from a superconscious Eternity to be involved here in a subconscious Inﬁnite.  That Eternity and this Inﬁnite are the same Essence in opposite powers, but the one appears as a dark shadow of the other.  The Superconscient is hidden from us because it is wrapped in its own being of illimitable light; the Inconscient escapes our search because it is plunged in its own veil of impenetrable darkness.  All that manifested from the Eternal has already been arranged in worlds or planes of its own nature, planes of subtle Matter, planes of Life, planes of Mind, planes of Supermind, planes of the triune luminous Inﬁnite.


Sri Aurobindo: But these worlds or planes are not evolutionary but typal.  A typal world is one in which some ruling principle manifests itself in its free and full capacity and energy and form are plastic and subservient to its purpose. Its expressions are therefore automatic and satisfying and do not need to evolve; they stand so long as need be and do not need to be born, develop, decline and disintegrate.  For evolution to be necessary there must be an opposing medium or recalcitrant instruments or an involution of the thing in its opposite. This is what has happened in the terrestrial world.


Sri Aurobindo: Spirit has to evolve out of matter, consciousness out of the Inconscient, life out of inanimation, mind out of a life that is void of thought; out of mind and its fragmentation and difﬁcult piecing together of things the automatic completeness of the supramental knowledge.  There is a secret self-compulsion in the Inconscient to manifest what is involved — gaoled, suppressed and inactive within it, but also there is a stupendous Inertia, as of some fathomless cosmic sleep, that resists the will to manifest and retards the evolution. There is thus an upward levitation towards the luminous eternity of the Spirit strongly countered by a downward gravitation back towards the Inconscience.  This Inertia was needed in order that the evolution might be gradual by aeonic process and not an explosion of the concealed elements either into a rapid self-ordered typal series or into their original superconscience.  As a consequence of this retarding force what is involved evolves with difﬁculty and slowly.


Sri Aurobindo: Evolution is a struggle between an insistent call to manifestation and an iron retardatory reluctant Inertia. Evolutionary existence is precarious because the downward gravitation back to its source contradicts powerfully both the stress from within towards permanence and the pull from above towards self-transcendence. Matter in our world can easily dissolve into its elements, life sink back into death, mind relapse into unconsciousness. A type evolved, animal or man, struggles slowly and with much difﬁculty into manifestation, it is less difﬁcult for it to disappear, as disappeared the mastodon and the dinosaurus. Hence the law of a precarious impermanence laid on the forms of Matter which is corrected only for a time by the lavish will to reproduction in Nature.


Sri Aurobindo: As the evolution is from the Inconscient, it is not only a precarious but also an ignorant movement feeling its way rather than consciously ﬁnding it. But still its most signiﬁcant term is a growing consciousness which must at last emerge out of ignorance into knowledge. When that happens, the evolution will become a willed and conscious movement, aware of its process and its way, no longer a stumbling search or a precarious growth but a luminous outﬂowering of the Divine.  The call to manifestation is composed of a double current of Force moving between two poles. There is a will or at least an urge in the Inconscient itself, slow, dumb, obscure but imperative and inevitable towards the revelation of its involved contents.


Sri Aurobindo: But there is also a pressure from above from the already established Powers for their manifestation in Space-Time here and for their evolutionary possibilities in the world of Matter. A world of subtle Matter presses on the shapeless Inconscient for the manifestation of forms; a world of essential Life presses on form of Matter for the manifestation of an embodied life; a world of essential Mind presses on animate life for the manifestation of mind in the living body. This compulsion is so great as to contradict and counteract ﬁnally the refusing and retarding Inertia.  Above on the summits of existence is all that is beyond Mind and all that is the complete splendour of the Spirit. These too wait for their hour of manifestation, their turn for revelation in Time and Space and the evolving series of the powers of the Eternal.


Sri Aurobindo: 57  All existence upon earth is an evolution of what has come down from a superconscious Eternity to be involved here in a subconscious Inﬁnite.  The superconscious Eternity to which we tend and the subconscious Inﬁnite from which we rise — for we are a part of both and we stand between them as their developing link — are opposite powers of the same Being, are indeed, in their essence, one and the same Being; but one appears to our experience as a dark and void shadow of the other. The Superconscient is hidden from us because it is wrapped in its own being of illimitable light; the Inconscient escapes our search because it is plunged in its own veil of impenetrable darkness.  What comes down from the Superconscient is self, spirit, the wide and all-containing Essence of the eternal existence.


Sri Aurobindo: It plunges, carrying its powers in it, into an inﬁnite ocean of inconscience,, and hides itself there. It hides itself and its powers from itself — it appears in us as its own opposite.  The Self is an immortal and unseizable essence and substance of all things, it is a pure omnipresent omniscient omnipotent existence. It appears to our experience when we emerge from the subconscient as a mysterious Void or Nihil, indeterminable yet from it all things and forms are, inconscient yet ﬂowering into consciousness, inert yet manifesting enormous energies, lifeless yet the parent of life, insensible yet a fountain of pain and pleasure. This impossibility, this universal contradiction is unreal and born of our ignorance; yet that ignorance is not ours, but a result of the inconscience which was imposed on itself as a veil by the involved Self and Spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: For if that Inconscience were not there, the evolutionary emergence of the Self which is the law and object of this universe would not have been possible; all would have ﬂowered into a manifestation too immediate, too irresistibly powerful in its process, too absolute.  The Self, the Spirit is a pure existence, a spiritual substance that is self-aware and therefore all-aware. It is in its nature an absolute and omniscient consciousness, eternally comprehending all itself, all in itself and would naturally manifest as an absolute, unwalled, indivisible knowledge. It becomes an inconscience out of which consciousness struggles brokenly into light, seeking and groping for itself, groping after signs and intimations of its substance, but ﬁnding at ﬁrst only fragmentary signs and separated forms and objects which seem not itself. The consciousness in the individualised form becomes aware of itself by the shock of things outside that are or seem to be not itself.


Sri Aurobindo: It becomes aware of itself as a separated form and only when it grows more and more deeply self-conscious slowly becomes aware of all outside it as part of its own continuous indivisible existence.  The nature of the Spirit’s consciousness is a self-existent Force which in action becomes a spontaneously self-manifesting or, as it seems to us, self-creating and self-determining energy.  It is omnisciently omnipotent and creates out of itself what it wills under whatever conditions it wills — for its will is that of an inﬁnite and inﬁnitely variable self-aware oneness whose steps, no matter what they are, are by necessity the movement of a perfect Truth and Knowledge. But it is by an equal necessity the very opposite when the manifestation of the Substance of things becomes the working of a void Inconscience. For even if that Inconscience be only apparent because an all-knowledge and its force are hidden there, yet this error, this phenomenon of Inconscience is and was intended to be dynamic and operative.


Sri Aurobindo: In other words, all had to look and appear as the gropings of an Inconscience whose results in their upshot were yet those of an ordered and imperative Intelligence. An inert Soul guiding with a strange and blind sureness the steps of a somnambulist Nature would be no inadequate image of the apparent Spirit of this material universe.  This material world sprung from the subconscious Inﬁnite appears to us as if [it] were the sole actual universe and even perhaps the only creation possible. But that is because we are limited by our senses which we now know to be restricted in their ﬁeld and even there fallible. The material senses by their very nature can perceive only material things and from that our still infantile external reason infers that only material things exist and there is nothing else.


Sri Aurobindo: All forms that are immaterial or of another substance than ours are and cannot but be illusions, hallucinations, unreal images. But a being otherwise constituted in consciousness or sense could well see this world in other ﬁgures than present themselves to ours. Another would see perhaps other worlds made of another, a subtler material or an essentially mental or vital or spiritual substance. A world is only an arrangement of things as experienced by consciousness of the Spirit and this consciousness can see all kinds of things in all kinds of ways according to whatever plane of itself, whatever medium and whatever instruments it has produced for its cosmic purpose. We shall understand nothing of existence if we conﬁne our vision to the particular view of things our primary consciousness and its instruments which are physical impose upon us; for this consciousness is only a surface phenomenon of ourselves and our total being is far deeper, higher and vaster than that, our possibilities extend inﬁnitely beyond their present limit, and the world also is far more complex than the ﬁrst crude inexplicable mystery of Matter would lead us to imagine.


Sri Aurobindo: The immense material world in which we live is not the sole reality but only one of innumerable potential and existent universes; all of them need not have either Matter as we know it or the Inconscient for their base. Indeed this world of matter is itself dependent on many planes of consciousness and existence which are not material; for these have not this gross substance as their foundation or as the medium of their instrumentation of energy and consciousness or their primary condition of existence.  All the powers that are involved here in the inconscient Inﬁnite and that we see rising out of it, — mind, life and what is beyond mind no less than matter itself — have their previous existence and are not merely evolutionary results of Nature in this universe. They have not only a preexistence but also their separate planes of manifestation in which each in turn is, as matter is here, the foundation, the medium of instrumentation, the primary condition of existence.


Sri Aurobindo: 58  All terrestrial existence is the slow surge of a hidden Consciousness mounting up out of an apparent Inconscience towards its own perfect and luminous manifestation. This is the secret of evolution and its signiﬁcance.  There is a spirit secret even in things immobile, — there is an All-Consciousness disguised in the Inconscient. In Matter life is embedded, in Life is an enveloped mind, in Mind is concealed a greater supramental and spiritual being not yet manifested.


Sri Aurobindo: These are the signiﬁcant and illumining terms of the riddle.  Evolution is the labour of Nature, or let us say at once of the Energy of the secret Spirit, working in the semblance and under the limiting conditions of an inconscient Power to release these latencies each in its turn out of their involution in the original Inconscience.  It is an All-consciousness that is working, the force of a selfaware cosmic Spirit, and the emergence of its secret powers is implied in the very nature of existence; therefore the result is inevitable.  Science has discovered a physical evolution hidden in the past history of the earth of which the living record remains in the embryo; but the physical evolution is only an outward sign, means and material condition of a still more secret evolution.  A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness is the inner fact which alone illumines the problem of earth existence and opens to it its true solution; apart from it our life here has no intelligible signiﬁcance.


Sri Aurobindo: Ancient Indian thought discovered an evolution from birth to birth, from the life of tree and plant to the life of insect and animal, from the life of the animal to the life of man, attained with difﬁculty through the ages. This slowly attained human life it took to be the key of release from the bafﬂing circle of the enigma. After some eighty and more lakhs of births, says the Tantra, a soul reaches the human form and consciousness and sooner or later ﬁnds the secret of escape from birth in time into the birthless and deathless Eternity from which it came.  These two discoveries seem at ﬁrst sight quite unconnected and disparate.


Sri Aurobindo: In one it is a physical Life in the cosmos that evolves and the individual is only an ephemeral member of the species, the species a means of this cosmic evolution. Mind is indeed the term and the mental human being the crown of this inexplicable emergence; when human progress is over, when the race decays and perishes, the cosmic evolution will be at an end, for it has nothing more then it can do. In man it has shot its bolt; nothing more is possible. Consciousness emerging out of the Inconscient has achieved this shoddy and splendid, this winging and limping miracle of the ever-seeking creative Mind of Man and sinks back into the Inconscient; its emergence had no discoverable signiﬁcance, its brief play and cessation make no difference to the meaningless rounds of an inconscient universe.  In the Indian view it is the individual that evolves from birth to birth and the hierarchy of the vegetal, animal, human kinds [is] a ﬁxed unchanging ladder for its ascent.


Sri Aurobindo: A successive creation of higher and higher species is envisaged in the Upanishads as well as the Puranas and heredity afﬁrmed as a means of conscious continuity of the human embodiment of the Spirit, but still the evolution is individual and not cosmic, spiritual not physical. Yet here too this persistent phenomenon of spiritual embodiment appearing from the bodiless Spirit and evolving back into the bodiless Spirit seems to be devoid of signiﬁcance.  If stripped of their limitations the two discoveries can be regarded as complementary rather than disparate. There is evidently an evolution; Matter ﬁrst manifests out of the Formless — inanimate in appearance; in Matter life manifests unconscious in appearance; in life mind manifests in the animal but instinctive and irrational in appearance; in life-mind thinking mind appears rational but yet self-ignorant in appearance, — for it seeks to know but yet does not know the secret and signiﬁcance of its own existence. It is not yet undisputed but it is afﬁrmed that in thinking man spirit is moving towards manifestation, spirit aware of itself and of its own secret and signiﬁcance.


Sri Aurobindo: Thus far at least an evolution is indisputable and we may afﬁrm without hesitation that there is a cosmic Existence here which ﬁrst achieves a material manifestation of itself or a manifestation in itself, a material formula, then on that basis a life formulation, a vital formula, on that again a mental formulation, a mind formula. It is possible that on that again it is preparing a spiritual formulation of self-afﬁrmation and self-knowledge which will complete the emergence.  There is also very evidently an evolution of forms, generic and individual in the genus and species, which enables the formulation to be effective, each in its own kind, organised so as to express more and more deﬁnite and superior possibilities of matter, more and more deﬁnite and superior possibilities of life, more and more deﬁnite and superior possibilities of mind, — more than this cannot yet be positively asserted, but this much is asseverable. If we can add that in the mental formula, in the mentalised life and body of man, a spiritual emergence is in process which has not yet reached its full possibility and that possibility is the emergence of the spiritual man or supramental being, then the object of the physical evolution and its significance becomes clear. The evolution of bodies is only a means for the evolution of consciousness and the spiritual formulation will be that in which the cosmic Existence will ﬁnd its own full afﬁrmation, manifest through the original veil of Matter its selfawareness, self-knowledge, self-realisation.


Sri Aurobindo: The Cosmic Spirit hidden in the Inconscience is then the Alpha, its manifestation in the consciousness of spiritualised man the Omega.  59  The evolution of the earth nature is not ﬁnished because it has manifested only three powers out of the seven-fold scale of consciousness that is involved in manifested Nature. It has brought out from its apparent inconscience only the three powers of Mind and Life and Matter.  60


Sri Aurobindo: Matter, one might say from a certain viewpoint, is purely a matter of mathematics. That cannot be said of Mind or of Life.  Then again, Matter is a matter of formulas. Everything purely material is created according to a formula.  Again, Matter is a matter of magic.


Sri Aurobindo: It is a thing of magical and irrational or suprarational formulas.  Lastly, all Matter is, a thing of degrees, measures, quantities.    We ﬁnd that water is produced by a combination in a ﬁxed quantity of the two ﬁrst elements, hydrogen and oxygen. We do not know or do not yet know why this should be so.


Sri Aurobindo: All we can say is that [it] is a ﬁxed law of Nature that when this formula is scrupulously followed without deviation something called water appears, — becomes a phenomenon of material Nature. There seems to be no reason in this miracle. We could partly understand if oxygen and hydrogen by their very nature tended to produce in any combination water or something like water, but only in the ﬁxed amounts could bring out the perfect article.  But this is not the case; only by the ﬁxed relative combination can it be done. This formula then is of the nature of a magic formula.


Sri Aurobindo: Only by pronouncing a ﬁxed combination of words or syllables or sounds can the [ . . . ] magic result follow and not otherwise. Any variation voids the effect and leaves the incantation barren.   Hydrogen itself is produced by a combination of a ﬁxed number of electrons or electric particles of energy in a ﬁxed relative position in their movement. Oxygen is produced by another such combination.


Sri Aurobindo: The elements are alike in kind, it is a positional quantitative [ ]   61  Ether and material space are different names for the same thing.


Sri Aurobindo: Space, in its origin at least if not in its universal character, is an extension of the substance of consciousness in which motion of energy can take place for the relations of being with being or force with force and for the building up of symbolic forms on which this interchange can be supported. Ether is space supporting the works of material energy and the symbolic forms it creates; it is, speaking paradoxically but to the point, immaterial or essential matter[.]  62  Matter is but a form of consciousness; nevertheless solve not the object entirely into its subjectivity. Reject not the body of God, O God lover, but keep it for thy joy; for His body too is delightful even as His spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: Perishable and transitory delight is always the symbol of the eternal Ananda, revealed and rapidly concealed, which seeks by increasing recurrence to attach itself to some typal form of experience in material consciousness. When the particular form has been perfected to express God in the type, its delight will no longer be perishable but an eternally recurrent possession of mental beings in matter manifest in their periods & often in their moments of felicity.  63  Evolution is the one eternal dynamic law and hidden process of the earth-nature.  An evolution of the instruments of the spirit in a medium of matter is the whole fundamental signiﬁcance of the values of the earth-existence.


Sri Aurobindo: All its other laws are its values of operation and process; the spiritual evolution is its one pervading secret sense.    The history of the earth is ﬁrst an evolution of organised forms by the working of material forces.  There follows on this initial stage an evolution of life in the form and an organisation of a hierarchy of living forms by the working of liberated life-forces. The next step is an evolution of mind in living bodies and an organisation of more and more conscious lives by the process of developing mind forces.


Sri Aurobindo: But even this is not the end; for there are higher powers of consciousness beyond mind which await their turn and must have their act in the great play, their part of the creative Lila.     Matter, the medium of all this evolution, is seemingly inconscient and inanimate; but it so appears to us only because we are unable to sense consciousness outside a certain limited range, a ﬁxed scale or gamut to which we have access. Below us there are lower ranges to which we are insensible and these we call subconscience or inconscience.


Sri Aurobindo: Above us are higher ranges which are to our inferior nature an unseizable superconscience.  The difﬁculty of Matter is not an absolute inconscience but an obscured consciousness limited by its own movement, vaguely, dumbly, blindly self-aware, only mechanically responsive to anything outside its own form and force. At its worst it can be called not so much inconscience as nescience. The awakening of a greater and yet greater consciousness in this Nescience is the miracle of the universe of Matter.  This nescience of Matter is a veiled, an involved or a somnambulist consciousness which contains all the latent powers of the Spirit.


Sri Aurobindo: In every particle, atom, molecule, cell of Matter there lives hidden and works unknown all the omniscience of the Eternal and all the omnipotence of the Inﬁnite.  The evolution of forms and powers by which Matter will become more and more conscious until passing beyond form and life and mind it becomes aware with the supernal awareness of the eternal and inﬁnite Spirit in his own highest ranges, this is the meaning of earth existence. The slow self-manifesting birth of God in Matter is the purpose of the terrestrial Lila.     Matter is at once a force and a substance.


Sri Aurobindo: Matter is original being, Brahman made concrete in atomic division; Matter is original substance-force, Brahman-Shakti made active in an obscure involution of the spirit’s powers, in a self-forgetful nescience.  Matter-force casts matter-substance, material Shakti casts Matter-Brahman into form expressive of its own most characteristic powers. When that has been done, the physical world is ready for the splendid intrusion of conscious Life into the force-driven inertia of material substance.  Matter is not the only force, nor the only substance. For Life and Mind too and what is beyond Mind are also forces that are substances but of another kind and degree.


Sri Aurobindo: Spirit is the original force-substance; all these others are kinds and derivations of force of spirit, degrees and modiﬁcations [of] substance of spirit. Matter too is nothing but a power and degree of the spirit; Matter too is substance of the Eternal.  But the Matter that we see and sense is only an outermost sheath and coating; behind it are other subtler degrees of physical substance which are less dense with the atomic nescience and it is easier for Life and Mind to enter into them and operate. If ﬁner invisible physical layers or couches did not exist supporting this gross visible physical world, that world could not abide; for then the ﬁne operations of transmission between Spirit and Matter [could not] be executed at all and it is these that render the grosser visible operations possible. The evolution would be impossible; life and mind and beyond-mind would be unable to manifest in the material universe.


Sri Aurobindo: There is not only this material plane of being that we see, there is a physical life plane proper to the vital physical operation of Nature. There is a physical mind plane proper to a mental physical operation of Nature. There is a physical supermind plane proper to the supramental physical operation of Nature.  There is too a plane of physical spirit power or inﬁnite physical Being-Consciousness-Force-Bliss proper to the spiritual physical operations of Nature. It is only when we have discovered and separated these planes of Nature and of our physical being and analysed the synthesis of their contributions to the whole play that we shall discover how the evolution of vital, mental and spiritual consciousness became possible in inconscient Matter.


Sri Aurobindo: But there is more; for beyond these many couches of the physical existence are other supraphysical degrees, a many layered plane of Life, a many layered plane of Mind, planes of Supermind, of Bliss, of Consciousness Force and of inﬁnite Being on which the physical existence depends for its origination and its continuance. It is higher planes that ﬂood the constantly unfolding unseen energies which have raised its evolution from the obscurity in which it began to the splendour of a light of consciousness to which the highest human mind shall only be the feeble glimmer of a glowworm ﬁre before the sun in its ﬂaming glories.  There is a stupendous hierarchy of grades of consciousness between darkest Matter and most luminous spirit. Consciousness in Matter has to go on climbing to the very top of the series and return with all it has to give us before the evolution can utterly fulﬁl its purpose.


Sri Aurobindo:  Matter, Life, Mind, Supermind or Gnosis, and beyond these the quadruple power of a supreme Being-Consciousness-ForceBliss — these are the grades of the evolutionary ascent from inconscience to the Superconscience.  Life does not wholly come into the earth from outside it; its principle is there always in material things. But, imprisoned in the apparent inanimate inertia or blind force movement of Matter, it is bound by its movements and unable to manifest its own independent or dominant existence.  Life is there in the earth, rock, metal, gas, atom, electron and the other more subtle yet undiscovered forces and particles that constitute material energy and form. It is in everything, but at ﬁrst a hardly detectable presence organised only to support secretly material energies, processes, formations and transformations; it is there as an involved power for the building and expression of Form of Matter, not for the expression of Life.


Sri Aurobindo: It is not in possession of itself, not self-conscious in the form, not pushed towards self-manifestation; a helpless tool and instrument, not a free agent, it is a servant of Matter and a slave of the Form, not the master of the house.  But above the material world there is a plane of dominant Life that presses down upon this material universe and seeks to pour into it whatever it can of its own types, powers, forces, impulsions, manifesting creative godheads. When in the material world form is ready, the Gods and Life-Daemons of this higher plane are attracted to put their creative touch upon Matter. Then there comes a rapid and sudden efﬂorescence of Life; the plant, the animalcule, the insect, the animal appear. A Life-Soul and a Life-Force with its many and always more complex movements are manifested in what seemed once to be inert and inanimate substance.


Sri Aurobindo: Life souls, life minds, animal existences are born and evolve; a new world appears that is born and contained in this world of Matter and yet surpasses it in its own dynamic nature.  64  At each capital step of Nature’s ascent there is a reversal of consciousness in the evolving spirit. As when a climber turns on a summit to which he has laboured and looks down with an exalted and wider power of vision on all that was once above or on a level with him but is now below his feet, the evolutionary being not only transcends his past self, his former now exceeded status, but commands from a higher grade of self-experience and vision, with a new apprehending feeling or a new comprehending sight and effectuating power, in a greater system of values, all that was once his own consciousness but is now below his tops and belongs to an inferior creation. This reversal is the sign of a decisive victory and the seal of a radical progress in Nature.


Sri Aurobindo: The new consciousness attained in the spiritual evolution is always higher in grade and power, always larger, more comprehensive, wider in sight and feeling, richer and ﬁner in faculties, more complex, organic, dominating than the consciousness that was once our own but is now left behind us. There are greater breadths and spaces, heights before impossible, unexpected depths and intimacies. There is a luminous expansion that is the very sign manual of the Supreme upon his work.  Mark too that each of the great radical steps forward already taken by Nature has been inﬁnitely greater in its change, incalculably vaster in its consequences than its puny predecessor.  There is a miraculous opening to an always richer and wider expression, there is a new illuminating of the creation and a dynamic heightening of its signiﬁcances.


Sri Aurobindo: There is in this world we live in no equality of all on a ﬂat level, but a hierarchy of ever-increasing precipitous superiorities pushing their mountainshoulders upwards towards the Supreme.  Plant-life is a most signiﬁcant progress upon the mineral, but the difference is as nothing compared with the gulf that divides the dumb vitality of the plant from the conscious experience of the animal. The hiatus between the animal and the human is so great in consciousness, however physically small, that the scientists’ alleged cousinship of monkey and man looks psychologically almost incredible. And yet the difference between vital animal and mental man is as nothing to that which will be between man’s mind and the superman’s vaster consciousness and richer powers. That past step will be to this new one as the snail’s slow march in the grass to a Titan’s sudden thousand league stride from continent to continent.


Sri Aurobindo: Evolution on the terrestrial plane, even in the dullest brute matter is only in outward appearance a progression of physical function and form; in its essential fact, in its inner meaning, in its signiﬁcant power, it is a progression of consciousness, a spiritual or psychological change.  At each step the spirit heightens its stature, perfects its instruments, organises better its self-expression; a new consciousness comes in, takes up the old and gives it an extended movement and another signiﬁcance, adds greater, richer, more complex movements of which the ﬁrst formulation was incapable.  In the sub-vegetal world all movements, all stimulus, all reaction are of a material and if dynamic, of a mechanically dynamic character. Even the life movements that exist there, as in the mineral, are of the most rigidly automatic, unindividualised and mechanical and external nature, birth, formation, fatigue, sleep, death. Mental or psychic powers and signiﬁcances there are, as an occult knowledge discovers, but of these the form seems not aware; it is something behind the life of the mineral, a consciousness supporting rather than inhabiting it, using but not used by it, that is their possessor.


Sri Aurobindo: In the plant world for the ﬁrst time a true vital consciousness appears in earth Nature.  65  All the trend and purpose of Nature in terrestrial existence is to manifest the yet unmanifested. Her continual aim is to develop out of what has been evolved that which has not been evolved but is waiting to [be] liberated out of latency. This continual evolution is the whole meaning of terrestrial existence.


Sri Aurobindo: What has already been evolved is form of matter with life and mind housed in it, what has yet to be evolved is supermind liberating from their narrow limits and transforming mind and life and matter.  Here on earth and in the material universe matter has been the ﬁrst term, the basis of things, the condition of all that must evolve here. Life can evolve here only so far as it can persuade or compel matter to give it a form and an instrumentation. Mind too has to accommodate itself to the means given it by an organised living body. There is no reason to suppose however that life in itself is limited in its possibilities to the small range realised by the living animal or human body; or the potentialities [of] mind limited to the ﬁeld of powers accorded to it by the brain, nerves and physical senses, its ingenious but still very poor and unreliable instruments here.


Sri Aurobindo: In a world where life and not matter was the ﬁrst term, condition and basis, in a vital world life would be free to organise itself in its own way with a free energy in plastic and pliable forms and its ranges of possibilities would be immense and circumscribed by no rigid limits.   66  But what shall be the gain won for the earth-consciousness we embody by this unprecedented ascent out of mind to whatever may be beyond it and what the signiﬁcance of the supramental change? To what end shall man leave his safe human limits for this godlike but hazardous adventure?


Sri Aurobindo: First consider what was gained when earthly Nature passed from the brute inconscience and inertia of the ﬁrst organised forms in what seems to us inanimate Matter to the vibrant sensibility of the plant range. Life was gained; the gain was the beginning of the mute groping and involved consciousness that reaches out to growth, to sense-vibration, to waking and sleep, to hunger and thirst, to physical pain and pleasure, to a preparation for vital yearnings and a living joy and beauty. That was begun which still is unﬁnished — the ﬁrst step towards a conscious consciousness and what shall yet be the divine Ananda.  In the plant earth-nature achieved a ﬁrst ﬁgure of life, but the creature she made could not possess it, because this ﬁrst organised life-consciousness had feeling and seeking, woke and slept, hungered and was satisﬁed, thirsted and drank and grew and ﬂourished, had pleasure of some contacts and suffered from others, but was still externally blind, dumb, deaf, chained to the soil from which it was born, involved in its own nerve and tissue. It could not get out of this primitive formula, could not get behind its nerve-self as does the vital mind of the animal, still less could turn down from above it to know and realise its own motions as does the thinking and observing mind of man and to control them.


Sri Aurobindo: This was a decisive but an imprisoned gain; for there was still a gross oppression of the original Inconscience which had covered up with the brute phenomenon of Matter and energy of Matter all signs of the Spirit. Nature could nowise stop here, because she held so much in her that was still occult, potential, unexpressed, unorganised, suppressed, latent; the evolution had perforce to go farther. The animal had to replace the plant at the head and top of Nature.  And what then was gained when Nature passed from the obscurity of the plant kingdom to the awakened sense and desire and emotion and the free mobility of animal life? The gain was liberated sense and feeling and desire and courage and cunning and the contrivance of the objects of desire, passion and action and hunger and battle and conquest and the sex-call and play and pleasure, and all the joy and pain of the conscious living creature.


Sri Aurobindo: Not only the life of the body which the animal has in common with the plant but a life-mind that appeared for the ﬁrst time in the earth-story and grew and grew from form to more organised form till it reached in the best the limit of its own formula.  The animal achieved a ﬁrst form of mind, but could not possess it, because this ﬁrst organised mind consciousness was enslaved in a narrow scope, tied to the ﬁrst functionings of the physical body and brain and nerve, tied to serve the physical life and its desires and needs and passions, limited to the insistent uses of the vital urge, to natural longing and feeling and action, bound by its own inferior instrumentation, its spontaneous combinings of association and memory and instinct. It could not get away from them, could not get behind them as man’s intelligence gets behind them to observe them; still less could it turn down on them from above as do human reason and will to control, enlarge, reorder, exceed, sublimate.  67  Mind emerges out of life in matter; it is incapable of manifesting directly in the material form.


Sri Aurobindo: It is there, but it acts mechanically in the somnambulism of an original force of inconscience and inertia. This and no more is what we mean by the inconscience of Matter; for although consciousness is there, it is involved, inorganic, mechanical in its action; it supports the works of Force by its inherent presence, but not by its light of active intelligence. This is why material Nature does the works of a supreme and miraculous intelligence and yet there seems to be no intervention of any indwelling Seer or Thinker.  68  Because man is a mental being, he naturally imagines that mind is the one great leader and actor and creator or the indispensable agent in the universe.


Sri Aurobindo: But this is an error; even for knowledge mind is not the only or the greatest possible instrument, the one aspirant and discoverer. Mind is a clumsy interlude between Nature’s vast and precise subconscient action and the vaster infallible superconscient action of the Godhead.  There is nothing mind can do that cannot be better done in the mind’s immobility and thought-free stillness.  When mind is still, then Truth gets her chance to be heard in the purity of the silence.  Truth cannot be attained by the mind’s thought but only by identity and silent vision.