VIII. Will to Reason Men are drama-loving creatures who enjoy nothing more whole-heartedly than inventing versions of themselves to be expressed in play, dance, song, ritual, or in written words — in the fresh images of literature or in the staid concepts of philosophy or science. The one overpowering attribute of these self-dramatizers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the domain of science, has been the will to reason. As a natural consequence of which science threatens to dominate and explain all the aspects of life. Of man's genesis there are many fascinating ancient versions, with a few of which we have already dealt. Here we describe a

XX. The Ego and the Psychic The Purusha, the inner Self, no larger than the size of a man's thumb. Swetaswatara Upanishad.1 It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the Daemon of Socrates, the in ner light or inner voice of the mystic. The Life Divine.2 He that has known from the very close this Eater of sweetness, the Jiva, the self within that is lord of what was and what shall be, shrinks not thereafter from aught nor abhors any. Katha Upanishad.3 The Individual Self is, in its essence, considered identical with the Absolute itself in a particular poise of being, — with the Absolu

V. The Mysticism of Matter Matter has always been and will always be one of the main objects of physics. "Matter is an aspect of the nature of things."1 The most obvious thing about the world of matter is its immense variety. The Greeks seem to have been impressed chiefly by the densities and forms of the various kinds of matter. Thus they classified matter into four elements which, given in order of density, are earth, water, air and fire. They took one of them as primordial and set out to derive the others from it either by a process of condensation or by one of rarefaction.3 A more important scientific product of Greek thought was the Democritean theory of atoms

XXVII. The Triple Transformation Out of compassion for them, I, lodged in their self, by the blazing lamp of knowledge destroy the darkness which is born of ignorance. Gita1 Evolutionary Nature intends not merely a revelation of the spirit, but a radical and integral transformation of Nature. She strongly wills to effectuate a true manifestation of the embodied life of the Spirit, to complete what she has begun by a passage from the Ignorance to the Knowledge and to reveal herself as the luminous Consciousness-Force carrying in her the eternal Existence and its universal Delight of being. It then becomes obvious that there is much yet

MOVEMENT TWO THE EVOLUTION PROCESS XXI. Involution and Evolution The theory of evolution has been the keynote of the thought of the nineteenth century. It has not only affected all its science and its thought, but powerfully influenced its moral temperament, its politics and its society. The important corollary effects of this great change are the failure of religious spirit and the breaking-up of religious beliefs and the consequent victory of the economic men over the idealist. At present the materialistic view of the world is rapidly collapsing and with it the materialistic statement of the evolution theory must disappear. Modern European thought

FOREWORD It is a pleasure to write these few lines by way of a foreword to this thesis by Dr. Madhusudan Reddy on the concept of evolution in the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo and the problem of human destiny. Dr. Madhusudan Reddy published his 'Sapphires' of song a few years ago and I was glad to write about them, being a rhymester myself. But layman as I am, I hesitate to speak about a learned philosophical thesis. For Sri Aurobindo has been to me a force transforming the lives of countless individuals rather than a philosopher who has his place on the bookshelves in university libraries. He wrote out of the fullness of life and vision and he promotes in the reader a

8. From Realisation to Application (i) The Long Transition Since its origination in the times of ancient Greeks, psychology has undergone several laudable changes in the West. The long psycho-cultural process was set in motion with the leap from animal to human status. This new birth of manifest life projected the human animal into dimensional time and inaugurated the process of conscious self-awareness. And, in our own times, both scientists and psychologists are competing with one another to have a dynamic view of the human conditions. They seem to be shedding old conceptual and instrumental paradigms for new ones to enable them to new-underst

9. The Sevenfold Ignorance It is the growth from a half-animal humanity into a spiritual and supramental being that would be the character of the evolutionary process. It means the passage of the force of consciousness from the mental, vital and physical into the infinite power of the Spirit. To begin with we are ignorant of our source, of the source and support of the universe around us, — the truth of our being and becoming. This, as Sri Aurobindo calls it, is the original ignorance. In addition, we suffer from a constitutional Ignorance that exercises a form of self-restriction to the material-vital existence. With the result, our knowledge is partial and limited,

7. The Many Minds — Towards Truth-Consciousness (i) The Five Minds Sri Aurobindo speaks of Five Minds functioning in the body-consciousness. Ordinarily we are aware of only three of these — the physical mind, the vital mind and the mental mind. The other two, the psychic mind and the spiritual mind belong to the domain of the Integral Yoga Psychologist. It is because of the presence of these latter that man aspires to transcend his earthly limitations and gain entry into the luminous regions of liberated intelligence. The universe is a magical unfoldment, as it were, between two limits — the superconscient and the Incon-scient — the two levels of manife

5. Integral Yoga Psychology (i) Man by his very nature is spiritual. He is a dynamic psyche ever evolving, always integrating with the universe around him. He is a self-conscious mode of the infinite and the eternal though at present limited because of the compulsions of Nature's evolutionary process. He is a dual expression of both Being and Becoming, and manifests simultaneously the static and dynamic aspects of Reality. The static truth of his inmost existence — the impersonal eternal dimension — sanctions and supports, as it were, his creative nature, the historical dimension. The two dimensions, though distinguishable, are in fact inseparable.