An
original creative or evolutionary Power there must be: but, although
Matter is the first substance, the original and ultimate Power is not
an inconscient material Energy; for then life and consciousness would
be absent, since Inconscience cannot evolve consciousness nor an inanimate
Force evolve life. There must be, therefore, since Mind and Life also
are not that, a secret Consciousness greater than Life-Consciousness
or Mind-Consciousness, an Energy more essential than the material Energy.
Since it is greater than Mind, it must be a supramental Consciousness-Force;
since it is a power of essential substance other than Matter, it must
be the power of that which is the supreme essence and substance of all
things, a power of the Spirit. There is a creative energy of Mind and
a creative Life-Force, but they are instrumental and partial, not original
and decisive: Mind and Life do indeed modify the material substance
they inhabit and its energies and are not merely determined by them,
but the extent and way of this material modification and determination
are fixed by the inhabitant and all-containing Spirit through a secret
indwelling light and force of Supermind, an occult gnosis,—an invisible
self-knowledge and all-knowledge. If there is to be an entire transformation,
it can only be by the full emergence of the law of the Spirit; its power
of Supermind or gnosis must have entered into Matter and it must evolve
in Matter. It must change the mental into the supramental being, make
the inconscient in us conscious, spiritualise our material substance,
erect its law of gnostic consciousness in our whole evolutionary being
and nature. This must be the culminating emergence or, at least, that
stage in the emergence which first decisively changes the nature of
the evolution by transforming its action of Ignorance and its basis
of Inconscience.
This
movement of evolution, of a progressive self-manifestation of the Spirit
in a material universe, has to make its account at every step with the
fact of the involution of consciousness and force in the form and activity
of material substance. For it proceeds by an awakening of the involved
consciousness and force and its ascent from principle to principle,
from grade to grade, from power to power of the secret Spirit, but this
is not a free transference to a higher status. The law of action, the
force of action of each grade or power in its emergence is determined,
not by its own free, full and pure law of nature or vim of energy, but
partly by the material organisation provided for it and partly by its
own status, achieved degree, accomplished fact of consciousness which
it has been able to impose upon Matter. Its effectivity is in some sort
made up of a balance between the actual extent of this evolutionary
emergence and the countervailing extent to which the emergent power
is still enveloped, penetrated, diminished by the domination and continuing
grip of the Inconscience. Mind as we see it is not mind pure and free,
but mind clouded and diminished by an enveloping nescience, mind labouring
and struggling to deliver knowledge out of that nescience. All depends
upon the more or less involved or more or less evolved condition of
consciousness,—quite involved in inconscient matter, hesitating
on the verge between involution and conscious evolution in the first
or non-animal forms of life in matter, consciously evolving but greatly
limited and hampered in mind housed in a living body, destined to be
fully evolved by the awakening of the Supermind in the embodied mental
being and nature.
To
each grade in this series achieved by the evolving Consciousness belongs
its appropriate class of existences,—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. There are
furrows left by the transitional process or separating demarcations
settled by the fixed habit of Nature: but these distinguish one series
from another, serve perhaps to prevent a fall back of what has been
evolved, they do not cancel or cut the continuity of the evolution.
The evolving Consciousness passes from one grade to another or from
one series of steps to another either by an imperceptible process or
by some bound or crisis or, perhaps, by an intervention from above,—some
descent or ensouling or influence from higher planes of Nature. But,
by whatever means, the Consciousness secretly indwelling in Matter,
the occult Inhabitant, is able thus to make its way upward from the
lower to the higher gradations, taking up what it was into what it is
and preparing to take up both into what it will be. Thus, having first
laid down a basis of material being, material forms, forces, existences
in which it seems to be lying inconscient, though in reality, as we
know now, always subconsciently at work, it is able to manifest life
and living beings, to manifest mind and mental beings in a material
world, and must therefore be able to manifest there Supermind also and
supramental beings. 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. Evolution, being thus continuous, must have at
any given moment a past with its fundamental results still in evidence,
a present in which the results it is labouring over are in process of
becoming, a future in which still unevolved powers and forms of being
must appear till there is the full and perfect manifestation. The past
has been the history of a slow and difficult subconscious working with
effects on the surface,—it has been an unconscious evolution; the
present is a middle stage, an uncertain spiral in which the human intelligence
is used by the secret evolutionary Force of being and participates in
its action without being fully taken into confidence,—it is an
evolution slowly becoming conscious of itself; the future must be a
more and more conscious evolution of the spiritual being until it is
fully delivered into a self-aware action by the emergent gnostic principle.
-
Sri Aurobindo
