But
here we have to observe two particularities of this human and at present
highest development, which bring us to the heart of the matter. First,
this taking up of the lower parts of life reveals itself as a turning
downward of the master eye of the secret evolving spirit or of the universal
Being in the individual from the height to which he has reached on all
that now lies below him, a gazing down with the double or twin power
of the being's consciousness-force,—the power of will, the power
of knowledge,—so as to understand from this new, different and
wider range of consciousness and perception and nature the lower life
and its possibilities and to raise it up, it also, to a higher level,
to give it higher values, to bring out of it higher potentialities.
And this he does because evidently he does not intend to kill or destroy
it, but, delight of existence being his eternal business and a harmony
of various strains, not a sweet but monotonous melody the method of
his music, he wishes to include the lower notes also and, by surcharging
them with a deeper and finer significance, get more delight out of them
than was possible in the cruder formulation. Still in the end he lays
on them as a condition for his continued acceptance their consent to
admit the higher values and, until they do consent, he can deal harshly
enough with them even to trampling them under foot when he is bent on
perfection and they are rebellious. And that indeed is the true inmost
aim and meaning of ethics, discipline and askesis, to lesson and tame,
purify and prepare to be fit instruments the vital and physical and
lower mental life so that they may be transformed into notes of the
higher mental and eventually the supramental harmony, but not to mutilate
and destroy them. Ascent is the first necessity, but an integration
is an accompanying intention of the spirit in Nature.
This
downward eye of knowledge and will with a view to an all-round heightening,
deepening and subtler, finer and richer intensification is the secret
Spirit's way from the beginning. 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; for it seems to
have some intense excitations of a mute life-vibration in it,—perhaps,
though that is difficult for us to imagine, more intense relatively
to its lower rudimentary scale than the animal mind and body in its
higher and more powerful scale could tolerate. 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. Man, looking downward from the plane of will and
intelligence, abandons these lower intensities, but in order to get
out of mind and life and sense a higher intensity in other values, intellectual,
aesthetic, moral, spiritual, mentally dynamic or practical,—as
he terms it; by these higher elements he enlarges, subtilises and elevates
his use of life-values. He does not abandon the animal reactions and
enjoyments, but more lucidly, finely and sensitively mentalises them.
This he does even on his normal and his lower levels, but, as he develops,
he puts his lower being to a severer test, begins to demand from it
on pain of rejection something like a transformation: that is the mind's
way of preparing for a spiritual life still beyond it.
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. The animal lives as if satisfied
with what Nature has done for it; if there is any upward gaze of the
secret spirit within its animal being, it has nothing consciously to
do with it, that is still Nature's business: it is man who first makes
this upward gaze consciously his own business. For already by his possession
of intelligent will, deformed ray of the gnosis though it be, he begins
to put on the double nature of Sachchidananda; he is no longer, like
the animal, an undeveloped conscious being entirely driven by Prakriti,
a slave of the executive Force, played with by the mechanical energies
of Nature, but has begun to be a developing conscious soul or Purusha
interfering with what was her sole affair, wishing to have a say in
it and eventually to be the master. He cannot do it yet, he is too much
in her meshes, too much involved in her established mechanism: but he
feels,—though as yet too vaguely and uncertainly,—that the
spirit within him wishes to rise to yet higher heights, to widen its
bounds; something within, something occult, knows that it is not the
intention of the deeper conscious Soul-Nature, the Purusha-Prakriti,
to be satisfied with his present lowness and limitations. To climb to
higher altitudes, to get a greater scope, to transform his lower nature,
this is always a natural impulse of man as soon as he has made his place
for himself in the physical and vital world of earth and has a little
leisure to consider his farther possibilities. It must be so not because
of any false and pitiful imaginative illusion in him, but, first, because
he is the imperfect, still developing mental being and must strive for
more development, for perfection, and still more because he is capable,
unlike other terrestrial creatures, of becoming aware of what is deeper
than mind, of the soul within him, and of what is above the mind, of
Supermind, of spirit, capable of opening to it, admitting it, rising
towards it, taking hold of it. It is in his human nature, in all human
nature, to exceed itself by conscious evolution, to climb beyond what
he is. Not individuals only, but in time the race also, in a general
rule of being and living if not in all its members, can have the hope,
if it develops a sufficient will, to rise beyond the imperfections of
our present very undivine nature and to ascend at least to a superior
humanity, to rise nearer, even if it cannot absolutely reach, to a divine
manhood or supermanhood. At any rate, it is the compulsion of evolutionary
Nature in him to strive to develop
upward, to erect the ideal, to make the endeavour.
-
Sri Aurobindo
