The
spiritual process of evolution is then in some sense a creation, but
a self-creation, not a making of what never was, but a bringing out
of what was implicit in the Being. The Sanskrit word for creation signifies
a loosing forth, a letting out into the workings of Nature. The Upanishad
in a telling figure applies the image of the spider which brings its
web out of itself and create the structure in which it takes its station.
That is applied in the ancient Scripture not to the evolution of things
out of Matter, but to an original bringing of temporal becoming out
of the eternal infinity; Matter itself and this material universe are
only such a web or indeed no more than a part of it brought out from
the spiritual being of the Infinite. But the same truth, the same law
holds good of all that we see of the emergence of things from involution
in the material energy. We might almost speak here of a double evolution.
A Force inherent in the Infinite brings out of it eternally the structure
of its action in a universe of which the last descending scale is based
upon an involution of all the powers of the Spirit into an inconscient
absorption in her self-oblivious passion of form and structural working.
Thence comes an ascent and progressive liberation of power after power
till the Spirit self-disclosed and set free by knowledge and mastery
of its works repossesses the eternal fullness of its being which envelopes
then and carries in its grasp the manifold and unified splendours of
its nature. At any rate, the spiritual process of which our human birth
is a step and our life is a portion, appears as the bringing out of
a greatness, asya mahimänam, which is secret, inherent and
self-imposed, absorbed in the form and working of things. Our world-action
figures an evolution, an outrolling of a manifold Power gathered and
coiled up in the crude intricacy of Matte. The upward progress of the
successive births of things is a rise into waking and larger and larger
light of a consciousness shut into the first hermetic cell of sleep
of the eternal Energy.
There
is a parallel in the Yogic experience of the Kundalini, eternal Force
coiled up in the body in the bottom root vessel or chamber, mulädhära,
pedestal, earth-centre of the physical nervous system. There she slumbers
coiled up like python and filled full of all that she holds gathered
in her being, but when she is struck by the freely coursing breath,
by the current of Life which enters into search for her, she awakes
and rises flaming up the ladder of the spinal cord and forces open centre
after centre of the involved dynamic secrets of consciousness till at
the summit she finds, joins and becomes one with the Spirit. Thus she
passes from an involution in inconscience in inconscience through a
series of opening glories of her powers into the greatest eternal superconscience
of the Spirit. This mysterious evolving Nature in the world around us
follows even such a course. Inconscient being is not so much a matrix
as a chamber of materialised energy in which are gathered up all the
powers of the Spirit; they are there, but work in the conditions of
the material energy, involved, we say, and therefore not apparent as
themselves because they have passed into a form of working subnormal
to their own right scale where the characteristics by which we recognise
and think we know them are suppressed into a minor and an undetected
force of working. As Nature rises in the scale, she liberates them into
their recognisable scales of energy, discloses the operations by which
they can feel themselves and their greatness. At the highest summit
she rises into the self-knowledge of the Spirit which informed her action,
but because of its involution or concealment in the forms of its workings
could not be known in the greatness of its reality. Spirit and Nature
discovering the secret of her energies become one at the top of the
spiritual evolution by a soul in Nature which awakens to the significance
of its own being in the liberation of the highest truths it comes to
know that its births were the births, the assumptions of form of an
eternal Spirit, to know itself as that and not a creature of Nature
and rises to the possession of the revealed, full and highest power
of its own real and spiritual nature. That liberation, because liberation
is self-possession, comes to us as the crown of a spiritual evolution.
We
must consider all the packed significance of this involution. The spirit
involved in material energy is there with all its powers; life, mind
and a greater supramental power are involved in Matter. But what do
we mean when we say that they are involved, and do we mean that all
these things are quite different energies cut off from each other by
an essential separateness, but rolled up together in an interaction,
or do we mean that there is only one Being with its one energy, varying
shades of the light of its power differentiated in the spectrum of Nature?
When we say that Life is involved in Matter or in material Force, for
of that Force Matter seems after all to be only a various self-spun
formation, do we not mean that all this universal working, even in what
seems to us its inconscient inanimate action, is a life-power of the
spirit busy with formation, and we do not recognise it because it is
there in a lower scale in which the characteristics by which we recognise
life are not evident or are only slightly evolved in the dullness of
the material covering? Material energy would be then Life packed into
the density of Matter and feeling out in it for its own intenser recognisable
power which it finds within itself in the material concealment and liberates
into action. Life itself would be an energy of a secret mind, a mind
imprisoned in its own forms and quivering out in the nervous seekings
of life for its intenser recognisable power of consciousness which it
discovers within the vital and material suppression and liberates into
sensibility. No doubt, practically, these powers work upon each other
as different energies, but in essence they would be one energy and their
interaction the power of the Spirit working by its higher on its lower
forces, depending on them at first, but yet turning in the scale of
its ascent to overtop and master them. Mind too might only be an inferior
scale and formulation derived from a much greater and supramental consciousness,
and that consciousness too with its greater light and will a characteristic
originating power of spiritual being, the power which secret in all
things, in mind, in life, in matter, in the plant and the metal and
the atom assures constantly by its inevitable action the idea and harmony
of the universe. And what is the Spirit itself but infinite existence,
eternal, immortal being, but always a conscious self-aware being,—and
that is the difference between the materialist's mechanical monism and
the spiritual theory of the universe,—which here expresses itself
in a world finite to our conceptions whose every movement yet bears
witness to the Infinite? And this world is because the Spirit has the
delight of its own infinite existence and the delight of its own infinite
self-variation; birth is because all consciousness carries with it power
of its own being and all power of being is self-creative and must have
the joy of its self-creation. For creation means nothing else than a
self-expression; and the birth of the soul in the body is nothing but
a mode of its own self-expression. Therefore all things here are expression,
form, energy, action of the Spirit; matter itself is but form of Spirit,
life but power of being of the Spirit, mind but working out of consciousness
of the Spirit. All Nature is a display and a play of God, power and
action and self-creation of the one spiritual Being. Nature presents
to Spirit at once the force, the instrument, the medium, the obstacle,
the result of his powers, and all these things,
obstacle as well as instrument, are the necessary elements for a gradual
and developing creation.
-Sri
Aurobindo
