Sri Aurobindo

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Sri Aurobindo

• The Human cycle

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Vital-Physical
OUR NORMAL conduct of life, whether the
individual or the social, is actually governed by
the balance between two complementary
powers,first, an implicit will central to the
life and inherent in the main power of its action
and, secondly, whatever modifying will can come
in from the Idea in mindfor man is a mental
beingand operate through our as yet imperfect
mental instruments to give this life force a
conscious orientation and a conscious method.
3
Life normally finds its own centre in our vital
and physical being, in its cravings and its
needs, in its demand for persistence,
growth, expansion, enjoyment, in its reachings
after all kinds of power and possession and
activity and splendour and largeness. The first
self-direction of this Life-Force, its first
orderings of method are instinctive and either
entirely or very largely subconscient and
magnificently automatic the ease, spontaneity,
fine normality, beauty, self-satisfaction,
abundant vital energy and power of the subhuman
life of Nature up to the animal is due to
its entire obedience to this instinctive and
automatic urge. (218/232)
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We have seen that there are necessarily three
stages of the social evolution or, generally, of
the human evolution in both individual and
society. Our evolution starts with an
infrarational stage in which men have not yet
learned to refer their life and action in its
principles and its forms to the judgment of
the clarified intelligence for they still act
principally out of their instincts, impulses,
spontaneous ideas, vital intuitions or obey a
customary response to desire, need and
circumstance,it is these things that are
canalised or crystallised in their social
institutions. (173/184) Man proceeds by various
stages out of these beginnings towards a rational
age in which his intelligent will more or
less developed becomes the judge, arbiter and
presiding motive of his thought, feeling and
action, the moulder, destroyer and recreator of
his leading ideas, aims and intuitions.
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Finally, if our analysis and forecast are
correct, the human evolution must move through a
subjective towards a suprarational or spiritual
age in which he will develop progressively a
greater spiritual, supra-intellectual and
intuitive, perhaps in the end a more than
intuitive, a gnostic consciousness. And as with
the psychological life of individuals, so must it
be with the ages of his communal existence these
may be marked off from each other by the
predominant play of one element, its force may
overpower the others or take them into itself or
make some compromise, but an exclusive play seems
to be neither intended nor possible. (174/185)
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we may not realise the element of reason in a
primitive theory of life or of spirituality in a
barbaric religion, because it appears to us to be
made up of symbols and forms to which a
superstitious value is attached by these
undeveloped minds. But this is because the reason
at this stage has an imperfect and limited action
and the element of spirituality is crude or
undeveloped and not yet selfconscious
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In order to hold firmly their workings and make
them real and concrete to his mind and spirit
primitive man has to give them shape in symbols
and forms to which he clings with a barbaric awe
and reverence, because they alone can embody for
him his method of self-guidance in life. For the
dominant thing in him is his infrarational life
of instinct, vital intuition and impulse,
mechanical custom and tradition, and it is that
to which the rest of him has to give some kind of
primary order and first glimmerings of light. The
unrefined reason and unenlightened spirit in him
cannot work for their own ends they
are bond-slaves of his infrarational nature.
(175/186)
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the infrarational stage of society may arrive at
a very lofty order of civilisation. It may have
great intuitions of the meaning or general
intention of life, admirable ideas of the
arrangement of life, a harmonious, well-adapted,
durable and serviceable social system, an
imposing religion which will not be without its
profundities, but in which symbol and ceremonial
will form the largest portion and for the mass of
men will be almost the whole of religion. In this
stage pure reason and pure spirituality will not
govern the society or move large bodies of men,
but will be represented, if at all, by
individuals at first few, but growing in number
as these two powers increase in their purity and
vigour and attract more and more votaries.
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Life organises itself at first round the
ego-motive and the instinct of ego-expansion is
the earliest means by which men have come into
contact with each other the struggle
for possession has been the first crude means
towards union, the aggressive assertion of the
smaller self the first step towards a growth into
the larger self. All has been therefore a
half-ordered confusion of the struggle for life
corrected by the need and instinct of
association, a struggle of individuals, clans,
tribes, parties, nations, ideas, civilisations,
cultures, ideals, religions, each affirming
itself, each compelled into contact,
association, strife with the others. For while
Nature imposes the ego as a veil behind which she
labours out the individual manifestation of
the spirit, she also puts a compulsion on it to
grow in being until it can at last expand or
merge into a larger self in which it
meets, harmonises with itself, comprehends in its
own consciousness, becomes one with the rest of
existence. To assist in this growth Life-Nature
throws up in itself ego-enlarging,
ego-exceeding, even ego-destroying instincts and
movements which combat and correct the smaller
self-affirming instincts and movements, she
enforces on her human instrument impulses of
love, sympathy, self-denial, self-effacement,
self-sacrifice, altruism, the drive towards
universality in mind and heart and life,
glimmerings of an obscure unanimism that has not
yet found thoroughly its own true light and
motive-power. (157/167)
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Mental-Vital
The ideal and practical reason of man labours to
find amidst all this the right law of life
and action it strives by a rule of moderation
and accommodation, by selection and rejection or
by the dominance of some chosen ideas or powers
to reduce things to harmony, to do
consciously what Nature through natural selection
and instinct has achieved in her animal kinds, an
automatically ordered and settled form and norm
of their existence. But the order, the structure
arrived at by the reason is always partial,
precarious and temporary. It is disturbed by a
pull from below and a pull from above. For these
powers that life throws up to help towards the
growth into a larger self, a wider being, are
already reflections of something that is beyond
reason, seeds of the spiritual, the absolute.
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REASON using the intelligent will for the
ordering of the inner and the outer life is
undoubtedly the highest developed faculty of man
at his present point of evolution it is the
sovereign, because the governing and
self-governing faculty in the complexities of our
human existence. Man is distinguished from other
terrestrial creatures by his capacity for seeking
after a rule of life, a rule of his being and his
works, a principle of order and self-development,
which is not the first instinctive, original,
mechanically self-operative rule of his natural
existence.
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The principle he looks to is neither the
unchanging, unprogressive order of the fixed
natural type, nor in its process of change
the mechanical evolution we see in the lower
life, an evolution which operates in the mass
rather than in the individual, imperceptibly to
the knowledge of that which is being evolved and
without its conscious cooperation. He seeks for
an intelligent rule of which he himself shall be
the governor and master or at least a partially
free administrator. He can conceive a progressive
order by which he shall be able to evolve and
develop his capacities far beyond their original
limits and workings he can initiate an
intelligent evolution which he himself shall
determine or at least be in it a conscious
instrument, more, a cooperating and constantly
consulted party. The rest of terrestrial
existence is helplessly enslaved and tyrannised
over by its nature, but the instinct of man when
he finds his manhood is to be master of his
nature and free. (94/102)
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at present it is this which is at work a
self-conscious soul in mind, mental being,
manomaya purusa, struggles to arrive at some
intelligent ordering of its self and life and
some indefinite, perhaps infinite development of
the powers and potentialities of the human
instrument. (95/103)
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All action, all perception, all aesthesis and
sensation, all impulse and will, all imagination
and creation imply a universal, many-sided force
of knowledge at work and each form or power of
this knowledge has its own distinct nature and
law, its own principle of order and arrangement,
its logic proper to itself, and need not follow,
still less be identical with the law of nature,
order and arrangement which the intellectual
reason would assign to it or itself follow if it
had control of all these movements. But the
intellect has this advantage over the others that
it can disengage itself from the work, stand back
from it to study and understand it
disinterestedly, analyse its processes, disengage
its principles.
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Reason, exists for the sake of knowledge, can
prevent itself from being carried away by the
action, can stand back from it, intelligently
study, accept, refuse, modify, alter, improve,
combine and recombine the workings and
capacities of the forces in operation, can
repress here, indulge there, strive towards an
intelligent, intelligible, willed and
organised perfection. Reason is science, it is
conscious art, it is invention. It is observation
and can seize and arrange truth of facts it
is speculation and can extricate and forecast
truth of potentiality. It is the idea and its
fulfilment, the ideal and its bringing
to fruition. It can look through the immediate
appearance and unveil the hidden truths behind
it. It is the servant and yet the master of all
utilities and it can, putting away all
utilities, seek disinterestedly Truth for its own
sake and by finding it reveal a whole world of
new possible utilities. (96/105)
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In the other spheres of human consciousness and
human activity it may be thought that it has the
right to the sovereign place, since these move on
the lower plane of the rational and the finite or
belong to that border-land where the rational and
the infrarational meet and the impulses and
the instincts of man stand in need above all of
the light and the control of the reason. In its
own sphere of finite knowledge, science,
philosophy, the useful arts, its right, one would
think, must be indisputable. But this does not
turn out in the end to be true. Its province may
be larger, its powers more ample, its action more
justly self-confident, but in the end everywhere
it finds itself standing between the two other
powers of our being and fulfilling in greater or
less degree the same function of an intermediary.
On one side it is an enlightenernot always
the chief enlightenerand the corrector of our
life-impulses and first mental seekings, on the
other it is only one minister of the veiled
Spirit and a preparer of the paths for the coming
of its rule.
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This is especially evident in the two realms
which in the ordinary scale of our powers stand
nearest to the reason and on either side of it,
the aesthetic and the ethical being, the
search for Beauty and the search for Good.
(127/137)
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Where the greatest and most powerful creation of
beauty is accomplished and its appreciation and
enjoyment rise to the highest pitch, the rational
is always surpassed and left behind. The creation
of beauty in poetry and art does not fall within
the sovereignty or even within the sphere of
the reason. The intellect is not the poet, the
artist, the creator within us creation comes by
a suprarational influx of light and power which
must work always, if it is to do its best, by
vision and inspiration. It may use the intellect
for certain of its operations, but in proportion
as it subjects itself to the intellect, it
loses in power and force of vision and diminishes
the splendour and truth of the beauty it creates.
(128/137)
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Psychic and spiritual/supramental
The secret of the transformation lies in the
transference of our centre of living to a higher
consciousness and in a change of our main power
of living. This will be a leap or an ascent even
more momentous than that which Nature must at one
time have made from the vital mind of the animal
to the thinking mind still imperfect in our human
intelligence. The central will implicit in life
must be no longer the vital will in the life and
the body, but the spiritual will of which we have
now only rare and dim intimations and glimpses.
For now it comes to us hardly disclosed,
weakened, disguised in the mental Idea but it is
in its own nature supramental and it is its
supramental power and truth that we have somehow
to discover. The main power of our living must be
no longer the inferior vital urge of Nature which
is already accomplished in us and can only whirl
upon its rounds about the ego-centre, but that
spiritual force of which we sometimes hear and
speak but have not yet its inmost secret.
(227/241)
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This means that man has developed a new power of
being, let us call it a new soul-power, with the
premise that we regard the life and the body also
as a soul-power,and the being who has done that
is under an inherent obligation not only to
look at the world and revalue all in it from this
new elevation, but to compel his whole nature to
obey this power and in a way reshape itself in
its mould, and even to reshape, so far as he
can, his environmental life into some image of
this greater truth and law. (221/235)
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Now this is precisely what man has failed to do.
He has effected something, he has passed a
certain stage of his journey. He has laid some
yoke of the intellectual, ethical, aesthetic rule
on his vital and physical parts and made it
impossible for himself to be content with or
really to be the mere human animal. But more
he has not been able to do successfully.
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The main failure, the root of the whole failure
indeed, is that he has not been able to shift
upward what we have called the implicit will
central to his life, the force and assured
faith inherent in its main power of action. His
central will of life is still situated in his
vital and physical being, its drift is
towards vital and physical enjoyment, enlightened
indeed and checked to a certain extent in its
impulses by the higher powers, but
enlightened only and very partially, not
transformed,checked, not dominated and uplifted
to a higher plane. The higher life is still only
a thing superimposed on the lower, a permanent
intruder upon our normal existence.
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Mans road to spiritual supermanhood will be open
when he declares boldly that all he has yet
developed, including the intellect of which he is
so rightly and yet so vainly proud, are now
no longer sufficient for him, and that to uncase,
discover, set free this greater Light within
shall be henceforward his pervading preoccupation.
Then will his philosophy, art, science,
ethics, social existence, vital pursuits be no
longer an exercise of mind and life, done for
themselves, carried in a circle, but a means
for the discovery of a greater Truth behind mind
and life and for the bringing of its power into
our human existence.