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by V. Murugesu

The 15th August 2002 marks the 130th birth anniversary of Sri Aurobindo. What is the reason for our birth into this earth and what is the meaning and purpose of life? Is it just chance or is it fate? Sri Aurobindo has through his yogic vision explained it. It has been said that throughout the many and varied domains of human adventure seen in the light of Sri Aurobindo's vision of the future, there emerges the one eternal question and dominant theme of our seeking: man has a past and a present, man has an individual life and a collective life and always and above all what does the ultimate flowering of his life on earth mean?

The sum and substance of his teaching is that man is growing and has to grow in consciousness not only in his individual but in his collective life which means the life of social living. Sri Aurobindo believes in evolution not just physical evolution of the forms of species as was propounded by Charles Darwin but in evolution of consciousness. For such a growth nature, as an aspect of the divine, assumes forms necessary that are suitable and adaptable for this growth of consciousness. Originally all was matter, only dead matter. At a certain stage out of Matter came life: what was or appeared to be dead matter became alive. Life was embedded, concealed in matter.

Something cannot come out of nothing. There is a consciousness that is involved. Sri M. P. Pandit who visited Sri Lanka twice in 1977 and 1978 to spread the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and who was one of the chief exponents of the gospel of the life divine, propounded by Sri Aurobindo and the mother has observed that there can be no evolution of anything unless what is evolved was already involved; something has to be there inside before it starts showing up; the seed has to be there in the soil, before the leaves sprout. There can be no evolution without involution and what is involved is the divine spirit, the divine consciousness which has merged, buried itself, and presents itself in a state or form of matter. And this consciousness goes on prodding from inside; it wants to give expression to itself. It takes a long time but in its effort to come out it is constantly supported by a pressure from the higher world, a corresponding world from above. It is a movement from two ends.

But the consciousness inside is still struggling to come out and with the helpful pressure of the life-world above, a life movement breaks forth. It is at first a very slight movement, it comes and dies, appears and disappears and sensibility starts. In course of time it begins to form into little greens and there is the beginning of life-creation - the first vestiges of plant life, the birth of the plant world. This is the first primeval external stirrings of consciousness. It is moved by a newly acquired or awakened pulsation. First comes the simple forms of life and later more complicated forms of life and so on. Each form of life is instinct with consciousness.

The goal and direction towards which human evolution proceeds is to make man perfect in his whole being, not just his physical body, his life-vital and the mind. He must seek his soul, develop his psychic being through spiritual disciplines enunciated by world teachers down the ages and now by Sri Aurobindo and the mother, the avatars of the Supramental Age. When man perfects himself, transforms himself, society too changes and the dream of a Kingdom of God on earth becomes a reality. Sri Aurobindo is not alone in his vision of the spiritual evolution of man. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1st May 1881 to 10th April 1955) was a French Jesuit Missionary. The Encyclopaedia Britannica (Micropaedia Volume IX, p. 865) gives a brief account of his life. He was a philosopher and paleontologist (paleontology is the science that treats of the ancient life of the globe or of fossil organisms, either plant or animal) known particularly for his theory that man is presently evolving mentally and socially towards a final spiritual unity. Blending science and Christianity he declared that the human epic resembles "nothing so much as a Way of the Cross." He was deeply spiritually dedicated. In 1923 he made the first of his paleontological and geological missions to China where he had to remain with the eruption of World War II for its duration. He was involved in the discovery of Peking man's skull and enlarged the field of knowledge on Asia's sedimentary deposits and statigraphical correlations and on the dates of its fossils. Meditation on evolution was an outgrowth of these researches and in 1938 he finished the manuscript of his fundamental work "The Phenomenon of Man."

What he says is very interesting. According to him this universe is a field and the scene of the evolution of a mighty consciousness. It is a divine spirit that is directing its grades. First there is the realm of stone, everything is hard stone. Consciousness is there in the form of stone which he called lithosphere. Afterwards life erupts and creates what he calls biosphere. After a long time, mind, a mental principle comes up and we have what he calls noosphere. Then there is a culmination in a new being, a new consciousness in what he calls Christosphere. It is therefore interesting to see how spirituality and science have met in the spiritual experiences of Sri Aurobindo and the scientific experiments of Teilhard de Chardin. Not all scholars are agreed where the Christosphere is, here or beyond. Some take the view that the Christosphere is beyond the present universe, it is there in the Kingdom and that it is there that the culmination will take place.

But Sri Aurobindo says the culmination is here. Man is intended to grow here into a figure of God. In man the highest powers of knowledge, strength, delight, immortality are to displace the negative ones. The Kingdom of Heaven is to be established here on earth. Earth is the scene of evolution, earth is the field where progress can be made. This earth has something special about it, it is here that the psychic principle, the soul principle, and the law of evolution exists. In Savitri Sri Aurobindo hints about man and his destiny in the following lines:

"And yet a greater destiny may be his,

For the eternal Spirit is his truth,

He can re-create himself and all around

And fashion new the world in which he lives:

He, ignorant, is the knower beyond Time,

He is the Self above Nature, above Fate." (Book One, Canto Five) 

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