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The
Evolutionary Process — Ascent and Integration
(some
selections)
...An
evolution in the Inconscience is the beginning, an evolution
in the Ignorance is the middle, but the end is the liberation
of the spirit into its true consciousness and an evolution
in the Knowledge. ...
...
one by one there appear material forms and forces, vegetable
life, animals and half-animal man, developed human beings,
imperfectly evolved or more evolved spiritual beings: but
because of the continuity of the evolutionary process there
is no rigid separation between them; each new advance or formation
takes up what was before. The animal takes up into himself
living and inanimate Matter; man takes up both along with
the animal existence. ...
...
Thus has come about the present status of the evolution of
which man is the now apparent culmination but not the real
ultimate summit; for he is himself a transitional being and
stands at the turning-point of the whole movement. ...
The
metal is fixed in the inconscient and inanimate principle
of matter; ...The plant is fixed in a subconscient action
of the principle of life, ... Man and the animal are both
mentally conscious beings: but the animal is fixed in vital
mind and mind-sense and cannot exceed its limitations, while
man has received into his sense-mind the light of another
principle, the intellect, which is really at once a reflection
and a degradation of the Supermind ...
...But
it must be observed that this ascent, this successive fixing
in higher and higher principles, does not carry with it the
abandonment of the lower grades, any more than a status of
existence in the lower grades means the entire absence of
the higher principles....
In
fact, life, mind, Supermind are present in the atom, are at
work there, but invisible, occult, latent in a subconscious
or apparently unconscious action of the Energy; ...
...
The plant-soul takes, as we may say, a nervous-material view
of its whole physical existence so as to get out of it all
the vital-physical intensity possible; ...The animal being
takes a mentalised sense-view of its vital and physical existence
so as to get out of it all the sense-value possible, much
acuter in many respects than man's as mere sensation or sense-emotion
or satisfaction of vital desire and pleasure. ...But man not
only turns his gaze downward and around him, when he has reached
his higher level, but upward towards what is above him and
inward towards what is occult within him. In him not only
the downward gaze of the universal Being in the evolution
has become conscious, but its conscious upward and inward
gaze also develops. ...
...
But where is the limit of effectuation in the evolutionary
being's self-becoming by self-exceeding? ... At present we
still normally take our first secure stand on the lowest sub-plane
of the intelligence, which we may call the physical-mental,
because it depends for its evidence of fact and sense of reality
on the physical brain, the physical sense-mind, the physical
sense-organs; ... It is our first mental status, but the mental
being cannot remain always at this lowest rung of the human
evolutionary ladder.
Above
physical mind and deeper within than physical sensation, there
is what we may call an intelligence of the life-mind, dynamic,
vital, nervous, more open, though still obscurely, to the
psychic, capable of a first soul-formation, though only of
an obscurer life-soul,—not the psychic being, but a frontal
formation of the vital Purusha. ...
Above
this level of vital mentality and yet more inly extended,
is a mind-plane of pure thought and intelligence to which
the things of the mental world are the most important realities;
those who are under its influence, the philosopher, thinker,
scientist, intellectual creator, the man of the idea, the
man of the written or spoken word, the idealist and dreamer
are the present mental being at his highest attained summit.
...
This
mind of pure intelligence has behind it our inner or subliminal
mind which senses directly all the things of the mind-plane,
is open to the action of a world of mental forces, and can
feel the ideative and other imponderable influences which
act upon the material world and the life-plane but which at
present we can only infer and cannot directly experience:
... To go farther she [Nature] has to bring into the mind
and make active in mind, life and body the spiritual principle.
...
The principle of the process of evolution is a foundation,
from that foundation an ascent, in that ascent a reversal
of consciousness and, from the greater height and wideness
gained, an action of change and new integration of the whole
nature. ... The old inconscient foundation itself will be
made conscious in us by the inflow of light and awareness
from above and its depths annexed to the heights of the spirit.
An integral consciousness will become the basis of an entire
harmonisation of life through the total transformation, unification,
integration of the being and the nature.
-
Sri Aurobindo
...More... —Complete
Article—
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