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The
Evolution of Consciousness
All
life here is a stage or a circumstance in an unfolding progressive
evolution of a Spirit that has involved itself in Matter and
is labouring to manifest itself in that reluctant substance.
This is the whole secret of earthly existence.
But
the key of that secret is not to be found in life itself or
in the body; its hieroglyph is not in embryo or organism,—for
these are only a physical means or base: the one significant
mystery of this universe is the appearance and growth of consciousness
in the vast mute unintelligence of Matter. The escape of Consciousness
out of an apparent initial Inconscience,—but it was there
all the time masked and latent, for the inconscience of Matter
is itself only a hooded consciousness—its struggle to
find itself, its reaching out to its own inherent completeness,
perfection, joy, light, strength, mastery, harmony, freedom,
this is the prolonged miracle and yet the natural and all-explaining
phenomenon of which we are at once the observers and a part,
instrument and vehicle.
A
Consciousness, a Being, a Power, a Joy was here from the beginning
darkly imprisoned in this apparent denial of itself, this
original night, this obscurity and nescience of material Nature.
That which is and was for ever, free, perfect, eternal and
infinite, That which all is, That which we call God, Brahman,
Spirit, has here shut itself up in its own self-created opposite.
The Omniscient has plunged itself into Nescience, the All-Conscious
into Inconscience, the All-Wise into perpetual Ignorance.
The Omnipotent has formulated itself in a vast cosmic self-driven
Inertia that by disintegration creates; the Infinite is self-expressed
here in a boundless fragmentation; the All-Blissful has put
on a huge insensibility out of which it struggles by pain
and hunger and desire and sorrow. Elsewhere the Divine is;
here in physical life, in this obscure material world, it
would seem almost as if the Divine is
not but is only becoming, theos ouk estin alla gignetai.
This gradual becoming of the Divine out of its own phenomenal
opposites is the meaning and purpose of the terrestrial evolution.
Evolution
in its essence is not the development of a more and more organised
body or a more and more efficient life—these are only
its machinery and outward circumstance. Evolution is the strife
of a Consciousness somnambulised in Matter to wake and be
free and find and possess itself and all its possibilities
to the very utmost and widest, to the very last and highest.
Evolution is the emancipation of a self-revealing Soul secret
in Form and Force, the slow becoming of a Godhead, the growth
of a Spirit.
In
this evolution mental man is not the goal and end, the completing
value, the highest last significance; he is too small and
imperfect to be the crown of all this travail of Nature. Man
is not final, but a middle term only, a transitional being,
an instrumental intermediate creature.
-
Sri Aurobindo
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