INTRODUCTION

YOGA, THE ACCELERATING FACTOR OF EVOLUTION

Can evolution stop at man, the thinking animal?

Man is a transitional being, a middle term of evolution. A pygmy and a dwarf, man is an infrarational animal whose evolution has just begun. The evolution from man to divine man is an even more momentous event than the evolution
from animal to thinking animal. And the moment is NOW.

Civilisations, nations, societies, socio-political organisations, clashing socio-economic patterns are undermined by a global crisis which is the transition to a new era. Humanity is facing the shattering of all traditional values, all conventions. Established patterns of behaviour, family and non- family structures, alternative modes of communal living, multifarious creeds and traditional paths have reached a dead end. There are no longer any dogmas to hold onto, no compromises, no surrogates of any sort. All our certainties, all our "isms" - religions, ideologies, the myriad neuroses we have been clinging to, in the vain attempt to escape the crossroads - disintegrate. Even scientific beliefs that have been dominant for centuries, and which have moulded an entire civilisation, are being blown away. We have entered a no-man's land, with all the features leading towards the emergence of a new species. Impending danger and chaos are but the daring splendour of an unprecedented adventure into the unknown, in quest of one's inmost Self. In man, in all.

We have reached the turning point of evolution. A new era, a new world are dawning. The superstructures of an entire age are being swept away. This triggers tremendous fears, gigantic resistances build up. Yet the border line has to be crossed, paving the way to that age of the Spirit, heralded by an ever-increasing number of spiritual pioneers, which is the next stage of the evolutionary ascent.

The values of what Sri Aurobindo calls the objective age are growing obsolete. Those of the subjective age are coming forward. There is an urge from deep within, an overall need for introspection, a plunge towards the roots of one's being, a thirst and quest to give birth from one's inner dimension to a new being and a new society, expressing, in the multi-farious aspects of life, that sparkle which still keeps eluding man. Yet even this age will be surpassed by the soul's unending errand towards the unveiling of the Spirit. The transition from the objective to the subjective age, and the prelude to the spiritual age, are the crossroads we have reached. To comply with senescent structures, hampering any further growth from within or from without - or to take a leap into the future, and reveal, and BE the Self and All: this is the choice awaiting all of us. The Atman.

Sri Aurobindo stressed that yoga is the accelerating factor of evolution, since each path of yoga brings to perfection one or more aspects of human nature. But Integral Yoga is the essence of all yogic paths, as revealed by Sri Aurobindo's experience and early sadhana. In Integral Yoga all parts and planes of one's being, all one's fragmented personalities, must be reunited and reorganised around the evolving soul, the flame burning in one's inmost temple. Integral Yoga emphasises not just the uplifting but the total transformation of the being, from the heights of divine mind down to the most obscure, obstinate and apparently inert layers of Inconscience. A transformation so radical and complete demands the integration and transmutation of our subliminal and subconscient nature as well, of all the ancestral automatisms of the physical mind, a spiritualisation and supramentalisation down to the very cells of the body. The Supreme Consciousness must descend into each energy centre, each plane of the being, each molecule, each atom, replacing entirely the ordinary consciousness and its mechanical laws. This is the path to Immortality.

The answer to the quest of contemporary man, when all the rest has failed, is the journey which has been seen in flashes

by seers of all times. It was up to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to hand over to humankind a path which is a science, a true crucible out of which a species of divine beings is to be born.

The future... Will it be the embryo of a new race, the incubator of a new world - or stagnation into an endless crisis? The glory of the most beautiful fairy-tale ever told, a fairy-tale which is already reality - or ignorance, struggle, division? This is the crossroad. The answer is Consciousness.

The Great Adventure... And truly a thirst, a need, a need - the need for THAT. She said, "...the 'Something' one is in need of, the Love one is in need of, the Truth one is in need of, the supreme Perfection one is in need of - and that is all. The formulas... the fewer formulas there are the better. But that: a need, which the Thing-alone can satisfy - nothing else, no half-measure, only that. And then, you go!..."

At the Master's lotus feet
   
An Aurovilian       

Auroville, November 17th, 1993

Liberation

    I have thrown from me the whirling dance of mind
        And stand now in the Spirit's silence free;
    Timeless and deathless beyond creature-kind,
        The centre of my own eternity.

    I have escaped and the small self is dead;
        I am immortal, alone, ineffable;
    I have gone out from the universe I made,
        And have grown nameless and immeasurable.

    My mind is hushed in a wide and endless light,
        My heart a solitude of delight and peace,
    My sense unsnared by touch and sound and sight,
        My body a point in white infinities.

    I am the one Being's sole immobile Bliss:
    No one I am, I who am all that is.

Collected Poems, p. 133

AT PRESENT MANKIND IS UNDERGOING

AN EVOLUTIONARY CRISIS IN WHICH IS CONCEALED

A CHOICE OF ITS DESTINY.

                                                                                 SRI AUROBINDO

    If a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our birth into Matter, if it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that has been taking place in Nature, then man as he is cannot be the last term of that evolution: he is too imperfect an expression of the Spirit, Mind itself a too limited form and instrumentation; Mind is only a middle term of consciousness, the mental being can only be a transitional being. If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and Supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to what exceeds it, then there is no reason why man himself Should not arrive at Supermind and supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an evolution of that greater term of the Spirit manifesting in Nature.

The Life Divine, pp. 846-7

Man is an abnormal who has not found his own normality, - he may imagine he has, he may appear to be normal in his own kind, but that normality is only a sort of provisional order; therefore, though man is infinitely greater than the plant or the animal, he is not perfect in his own nature like the plant and the animal. This imperfection is not a thing to beat all deplored, but rather a privilege and a promise, for it opens out to us an immense vista of self-development and self-exceeding. Man at his highest is a half-god who has risen up out of the animal Nature and is splendidly abnormal in it, but the thing which he has started out to be, the whole god, is something so much greater than what he is that it seems to him as abnormal to himself as he is to the animal. This means a great and arduous labour of growth before him, but also a splendid crown of his race and his victory. A kingdom is offered to him beside which his present triumphs in the realms of mind or over external Nature will appear only as a rough hint and a poor beginning.

The Human Cycle, p. 220

Man in himself is little more than an ambitious nothing. He is a littleness that reaches to a wideness and a grandeur that are beyond him, a dwarf enamoured of the heights. His mind is a dark ray in the splendours of the universal Mind.
His life is a striving, exulting, suffering, an eager passion - tossed and sorrow-stricken or a blindly and dumbly longing petty moment of the universal Life. His body is a labouring perishable speck in the material universe. This cannot be the end of the mysterious upward surge of Nature. There is something beyond, something that mankind shall be; it is seen now only in broken glimpses through rifts in the great wall of limitations that deny its possibility and existence. An immortal soul is somewhere within him and gives out some sparks of its presence; above an eternal spirit overshadows him and upholds the soul-continuity of his nature. But this greater spirit is obstructed from descent by the hard lid of his constructed personality; and that inner luminous soul is wrapped, stifled, oppressed in dense outer coatings. In all but a few the soul is seldom active, in most hardly perceptible. The soul and spirit in man seem rather to exist above and behind his nature than to be a part of his external and visible reality. They are in course of birth rather than born in Matter; they are for human consciousness possibilities rather than things realised and present.

Man's greatness is not in what he is, but in what he makes possible. His glory is that he is the closed place and secret workshop of a living labour in which supermanhood is being made ready by a divine Craftsman. But he is admitted too to a yet greater greatness and it is this that, allowed to be unlike the lower creation, he is partly an artisan of this divine change; his conscious assent, his consecrated will and participation are needed that into his body may descend the glory that will replace him. His aspiration is earth's call to the supramental creator.

If earth calls and the Supreme answers, the hour can be even now for that immense and glorious transformation.

The Hour of God, pp. 8-9

Man is a transitional being; he is not final. For in man and high beyond him ascend the radiant degrees that climb to a divine supermanhood. There lies our destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring but troubled and limited mundane existence.

We mean by man mind imprisoned in a living body. But mind is not the highest possible power of consciousness; for mind is not in possession of Truth, but only its ignorant seeker. Beyond mind is a supramental or gnostic power of consciousness that is in eternal possession of Truth. This supermind is at its source that dynamic consciousness, in its nature at once and inseparably infinite wisdom and infinite will of the divine Knower and Creator. Supermind is superman; a gnostic supermanhood is the next distinct and triumphant evolutionary step to be reached by earthly nature.

The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth's evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the-intention of the inner Spirit and the logic of Nature's process.

The appearance of a human possibility in a material and animal world was the first glint of some coming divine Light, the first far-off promise of a godhead to be born out of Matter. The appearance of the superman in the human world will be the fulfilment of this divine promise. Out of the material consciousness in which our mind works as a chained slave is emerging the disk of a secret sun of Power and Joy and Knowledge. The supermind will be the formed body of that radiant effulgence.

Supermanhood is not man climbed to his own natural zenith, not a superior degree of human greatness, knowledge, power, intelligence, will, character, genius, dynamic force, saintliness, love, purity or perfection. Supermind is something beyond mental man and his limits; it is a greater consciousness than the highest consciousness proper to human nature.

The Hour of God, p. 7

The Silence

    Into the Silence, into the Silence,
    Arise, O Spirit immortal,
    Away from the turning Wheel, breaking the magical Circle.

    Ascend, single and deathless:
    Care no more for the whispers and the shoutings in the darkness,

    Pass from the sphere of the grey and the little,
    Leaving the cry and the struggle,
    Into the Silence for ever.

    Vast and immobile, formless and marvellous,
    Higher than Heaven, wider than the universe,
    In a pure glory of being,
    In a bright stillness of self-seeing,
    Communing with a boundlessness voiceless and intimate,

    Make thy knowledge too high for thought, thy joy too deep for emotion;

    At rest in the unchanging Light, mute with the wordless self-vision,

    Spirit, pass out of thyself; Soul, escape from the clutch of Nature.

    All thou hast seen cast from thee, O Witness.
    Turn to the Alone and the Absolute, turn to the Eternal:

    Be only eternity, peace and silence,
    O world-transcending nameless Oneness,
    Spirit immortal.

Collected Poems, p. 567

Beyond the Silence

    Out from the Silence, out from the Silence,
    Carrying with thee the ineffable Substance,
    Carrying with thee the splendour and wideness,
    Ascend, O Spirit immortal.
    Assigning to Time its endless meaning,
    Blissful enter into the clasp of the Timeless.
    Awake in the living Eternal, taken to the bosom of love of the Infinite,

    Live self-found in his endless completeness,
    Drowned in his joy and his sweetness,
    Thy heart close to the heart of the Godhead for ever.

    Vast, God-possessing, embraced by the Wonderful,
    Lifted by the All-Beautiful into his infinite beauty,
    Love shall envelop thee endless and fathomless,
    Joy unimaginable, ecstasy illimitable,
    Knowledge omnipotent, Might omniscient,
    Light without darkness, Truth that is dateless.
    One with the Transcendent, calm, universal,
    Single and free, yet innumerably living,
    All in thyself and thyself in all dwelling,
    Act in the world with thy being beyond it.
    Soul, exceed life's boundaries; Spirit, surpass the universe.

    Outclimbing the summits of Nature,
    Transcending and uplifting the soul of the finite,
    Rise with the world in thy bosom,
    O Word gathered into the heart of the Ineffable.
    One with the Eternal, live in his infinity,
    Drowned in the Absolute, found in the Godhead,
    Swan of the supreme and spaceless ether wandering winged through the universe,
    Spirit immortal.

Collected Poems, p. 568