FROM MAN HUMAN TO MAN DIVINE Sri Aurobindo's Vision of the Evolutionary Destiny of Man FROM MAN HUMAN TO MAN DIVINE Sri Aurobindo's Vision of the Evolutionary Destiny of Man What now we see is a shadow of what must come. - Sri Aurobindo JUGAL KISHORE MUKHERJEE SRI AUROBINDO INTERNATIONAL CENTRE OF EDUCATION. PONDICHERRY First Edition: 21.2.1990 ISBN (S.C.) 81-7058-232-6 ISBN (H.C.) 81-7058-233-4 © Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust 1990 Published by Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry 605002 Printed at Sri Aurobin

V SIGHT, MORE SIGHT... (The Ascent of Sight as a Faculty of Knowledge) "His is a search of darkness for the light. A progress leap from sight to greater sight" (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Savitri, Part One, pp. 65, 161.) "All this she saw and inly felt and knew Not by some thought of mind but by the self. A light not born of sun or moon nor fire, A light that dwelt within and saw within Shedding an intimate visibility, Made secrecy more revealing than the word: Our sight and sense are a fallible gaze and touch And only the spirit's vision is wholly true." (Savitri, Bk. VII, Canto V, p. 525.) "O

PUBLISHERS' NOTE This is a companion volume to the other book by the same author, The Destiny of the Body, which too has been published by us some time back under the auspices of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry. The Destiny of the Body dealt with the particular question of the evolutionary possibilities of man's physical existence including his body. The present volume, From Man Human to Man Divine, widens and intensifies the scope of investigation and treats man as a species in general and studies his lowly past beginnings, his present achievements and failures and, of course, his glorious evolutionary future. All the human

I MAN: HIS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE (An Essay on the Marvel that is Man) "It is the Son of Man who is supremely capable of incarnating God." (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine.) In His Own Image Homo sapiens, "wise man": such is the term employed by the modern anthropologist to denote his own tribe, Man, considered as a distinct biological species. And in the coining of this particular nomenclature he is perhaps but echoing the age-old sense of supremacy and self-pride that man has ever displayed since the distant dawn when he first awoke and saw the panorama of creation all around. Is he not "but a little lower than God"1 if there is

XII THE EVER-ASCENDING MARCH OF MAN Sri Aurobindo on Man's Evolutionary Destiny "An animal creation crept and ran And flew and called between the earth and sky, Hunted by death but hoping still to live And glad to breathe if only for a while. Then man was moulded from the original brute. A thinking mind had come to lift life's moods, A keen-edged tool of a Nature mixed and vague, An intelligence half-witness, half-machine. An opening looked up to spheres above And coloured shadows lined on mortal ground The passing figures of immortal things; A fragile human love that cou

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY VIS-A-VIS SRI AUROBINDO'S VISION OF DIVINE MANHOOD "Yet was their wisdom circled with a nought: Truths they could find and hold but not the one Truth: The Highest was to them unknowable. By knowing too much they missed the Whole to be known: The fathomless heart of the world was left unguessed And the Transcendent kept its secrecy." (Sri Aurobindo, Savitri,p.271) Prometheus and Ganymede The human spirit has ever oscillated between two extreme and opposite ideals. Goethe has well characterised them as, on one side, the ideal symbolised by Prometheus, a passion for 'Vernunft und Wissenschaft des M

ON PHYSICAL TRANSFORMATION* By Wisdom all these are guided and have their firm abiding in Wisdom. For Wisdom is the eye of the world, Wisdom is the sure foundation.1. (Aitareya Upanishad, III.3.) We want an integral transformation, the transformation of the body and all its activities. Formerly when one spoke of transformation, one meant solely the transformation of the inner consciousness. One endeavoured to discover in oneself the deeper consciousness and rejected the body and its activities as a burden and a useless thing, so that one might be engaged solely in the inner development. Sri Aurobindo declared that that is not suffi

IX THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN RELATIONS "All problems of existence are essentially problems of harmony." (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 2.) The Dream of Harmony Ever since the dawn of human history, man has been actuated by a persistent dream of triple harmony: harmony within man himself, social harmony between man and man, and harmony between man and the world around him. But to the man of our epoch, all these three basic harmonies have come to appear as so many vain and ineffectual dreams. For, as J.W. Krutch has aptly remarked, one of the most shocking features of our age is that "man's inhumanity to man" has reached

VI SIGHT BEHIND THOUGHT "All that escaped conception's narrow noose Vision descried and gripped; their seeing thoughts Filled in the blanks left by the seeking sense." Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book II, Canto XI, p. 268. "The impersonal truth of things can be rendered into the abstract formulas of the pure reason, but there is another side of truth which belongs to the spiritual or mystic vision and without that inner vision of realities the abstract formulation of them is insufficiently alive, incomplete. The mystery of things is the true truth of things; the intellectual presentation is only truth in representation, i

INTRODUCTION: A View, in Advance, of What the Book is About The book From Man Human to Man Divine bears an unusual title and, as the title indicates, it deals with the evolutionary destiny of man. Man's past, present and future have been thoroughly discussed here in the wide perspective of the total earthly existence. Some cardinal problems besetting man's advance in his present evolutionary status have been put into focus, analysed in all their ramifications and then their probable evolutionary solutions delineated, based on the revelations made by the great seer-philosopher Sri Aurobindo. Nothing is here offered as mere dogmatic assertions to be either accepted or reject