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Sri Aurobindo
From "The Human Cycle"
Chapter 22
The Necessity of the Spiritual Transformation
(Arya - May 1918)
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 mind - for man is a mental being - and operate through our as yet imperfect
mental instruments to give this life force a conscious orientation and
a conscious method. 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.
It is a vague sense of this truth and of the very different and in this
respect inferior character of human life that makes the thinker, when
dissatisfied with our present conditions, speak of a life according to
Nature as the remedy for all our ills. An attempt to find such a rule
in the essential nature of man has inspired many revolutionary conceptions
of ethics and society and individual self-development down to the latest
of the kind, the strangely inspired vitalistic philosophy of Nietzsche.
The common defect of these conceptions is to miss the true character of
man and the true law of his being, his Dharma.
Nietzsche's idea that to develop the superman out of our present very
unsatisfactory manhood is our real business, is in itself an absolutely
sound teaching. His formulation of our aim, to become ourselves,
to exceed ourselves, implying, as it does, that man has not
yet found all his true self, his true nature by which he can successfully
and spontaneously live, could not be bettered. But then the question of
questions is there, what is our self, and what is our real nature? What
is that which is growing in us, but into which we have not yet grown?
It is something divine, is the answer, a divinity Olympian, Apollonian,
Dionysiac, which the reasoning and consciously willing animal, man, is
labouring more or less obscurely to become. Certainly, it is all that;
but in what shall we find the seed of that divinity and what is the poise
in which the superman, once self-found, can abide and be secure from lapse
into this lower and imperfect manhood? Is it the intellect and will, the
double-aspected buddhi of the Indian psychological system? But this is
at present a thing so perplexed, so divided against itself, so uncertain
of everything it gains, up to a certain point indeed magically creative
and efficient but, when all has been said and done, in the end so splendidly
futile, so at war with and yet so dependent upon and subservient to our
lower nature, that even if in it there lies concealed some seed of the
entire divinity, it can hardly itself be the seed and at any rate gives
us no such secure and divine poise as we are seeking. Therefore we say,
not the intellect and will, but that supreme thing in us yet higher than
the Reason, the spirit, here concealed behind the coatings of our lower
nature, is the secret seed of the divinity and will be, when discovered
and delivered, luminous above the mind, the wide ground upon which a divine
life of the human being can be with security founded.
When we speak of the superman, we speak evidently of something abnormal
or supernormal to our present nature, so much so that the very idea of
it becomes easily alarming and repugnant to our normal humanity. The normal
human does not desire to be called out from its constant mechanical round
to scale what may seem to it impossible heights and it loves still less
the prospect of being exceeded, left behind and dominated, - although
the object of a true supermanhood is not exceeding and domination for
its own sake but precisely the opening of our normal humanity to something
now beyond itself that is yet its own destined perfection. But mark that
this thing which we have called normal humanity, is itself something abnormal
in Nature, something the like and parity of which we look around in vain
to discover; it is a rapid freak, a sudden miracle. Abnormality in Nature
is no objection, no necessary sign of imperfection, but may well be an
effort at a much greater perfection. But this perfection is not found
until the abnormal can find its own secure normality, the right organisation
of its life in its own kind and power and on its own level. 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 be at 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.
What precisely is the defect from which all his imperfection springs?
We have already indicated it, - that has indeed been the general aim of
the preceding chapters, - but it is necessary to state it now more succinctly
and precisely. We see that at first sight man seems to be a double nature,
an animal nature of the vital and physical being which lives according
to its instincts, impulses, desires, its automatic orientation and method,
and with that a half-divine nature of the self-conscious intellectual,
ethical, aesthetic, intelligently emotional, intelligently dynamic being
who is capable of finding and understanding the law of his own action
and consciously using and bettering it, a reflecting mind that understands
Nature, a will that uses, elevates, perfects Nature, a sense that intelligently
enjoys Nature. The aim of the animal part of us is to increase vital possession
and enjoyment; the aim of the semi-divine part of us is also to grow,
possess and enjoy, but first to possess and enjoy intelligently, aesthetically,
ethically, by the powers of the mind much more than by the powers of the
life and body, and, secondly, to possess and enjoy, not so much the vital
and physical except in so far as that is necessary as a foundation and
starting-point, a preliminary necessity or condition, a standing-ground
and basis, but things intellectual, ethical and aesthetic, and to grow
not so much in the outward life, except in so far as that is necessary
to the security, ease and dignity of our human existence, but in the true,
the good and the beautiful. This is the manhood of man, his unique distinction
and abnormality in the norm of this inconscient material Nature.
This means that man has developed a new power of being, - let us call
it a new soul-power, with the premiss 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. In doing this lies his svadharma, his true rule and way
of being, the way of his perfection and his real happiness. Failing in
this, he fails in the aim of his nature and his being, and has to begin
again until he finds the right path and arrives at a successful turning-point,
a decisive crisis of transformation. 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. The transformation of
his life into the image of the true, the good and the beautiful seems
as far off as ever; if ever he comes near to some imperfect form of it,
- and even then it is only done by a class or by a number of individuals
with some reflex action on the life of the mass, - he slides back from
it in a general decay of his life, or else stumbles on from it into some
bewildering upheaval out of which he comes with new gains indeed but also
with serious losses. He has never arrived at any great turning-point,
any decisive crisis of transformation.
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. The intruder interferes constantly with the normal life, scolds,
encourages, discourages, lectures, manipulates, readjusts, lifts up only
to let fall, but has no power to transform, alchemise, re-create. Indeed
it does not seem itself quite to know where all this effort and uneasy
struggle is meant to lead us, - sometimes it thinks, to a quite tolerable
human life on earth, the norm of which it can never successfully fix,
and sometimes it imagines our journey is to another world whither by a
religious life or else an edifying death it will escape out of all this
pother and trouble of mortal being. Therefore these two elements live
together in a continual, a mutual perplexity, made perpetually uneasy,
uncomfortable and ineffectual by each other, somewhat like an ill-assorted
wife and husband, always at odds and yet half in love with or at least
necessary to each other, unable to beat out a harmony, yet condemned to
be joined in an unhappy leash until death separates them. All the uneasiness,
dissatisfaction, disillusionment, weariness, melancholy, pessimism of
the human mind comes from man's practical failure to solve the riddle
and the difficulty of his double nature.
We have said that this failure is due to the fact that this higher power
is only a mediator, and that thoroughly to transform the vital and physical
life in its image is perhaps not possible, but at any rate not the intention
of Nature in us. It may be urged perhaps that after all individuals have
succeeded in effecting some figure of transformation, have led entirely
ethical or artistic or intellectual lives, even shaped their life by some
ideal of the true, the good and the beautiful, and whatever the individual
has done, the race too may and should eventually succeed in doing; for
the exceptional individual is the future type, the forerunner. But to
how much did their success really amount? Either they impoverished the
vital and physical life in them in order to give play to one element of
their being, lived a one-sided and limited existence, or else they arrived
at a compromise by which, while the higher life was given great prominence,
the lower was still allowed to graze in its own field under the eye more
or less strict or the curb more or less indulgent of the higher power
or powers: in itself, in its own instincts and demands it remained unchanged.
There was a dominance, but not a transformation.
Life cannot be entirely rational, cannot conform entirely to the ethical
or the aesthetic or the scientific and philosophic mentality; mind is
not the destined archangel of the transformation. All appearances to the
contrary are always a trompe l'oeil, an intellectual, aesthetic or ethical
illusion. Dominated, repressed life may be, but it reserves its right;
and though individuals or a class may establish this domination for a
time and impose some simulacrum of it upon the society, Life in the end
circumvents the intelligence; it gets strong elements in it - for always
there are traitor elements at work - to come over to its side and re-establishes
its instincts, recovers its field; or if it fails in this, it has its
revenge in its own decay which brings about the decay of the society,
the disappointment of the perennial hope. So much so, that there are times
when mankind perceives this fact and, renouncing the attempt to dominate
the life-instinct, determines to use the intelligence for its service
and to give it light in its own field instead of enslaving it to a higher
but chimerical ideal.
Such a period was the recent materialistic age, when the intellect of
man seemed decided to study thoroughly Life and Matter, to admit only
that, to recognise mind only as an instrument of Life and Matter, and
to devote all its knowledge to a tremendous expansion of the vital and
physical life, its practicality, its efficiency, its comfort and the splendid
ordering of its instincts of production, possession and enjoyment. That
was the character of the materialistic, commercial, economic age of mankind,
a period in which the ethical mind persisted painfully, but with decreasing
self-confidence, an increasing self-questioning and a tendency to yield
up the fortress of the moral law to the life-instinct, the aesthetic instinct
and intelligence flourished as a rather glaring exotic ornament, a sort
of rare orchid in the button-hole of the vital man, and reason became
the magnificent servant of Life and Matter. The titanic development of
the vital Life which followed, is ending as the Titans always end; it
lit its own funeral pyre in the conflagration of a world-war, its natural
upshot, a struggle between the most efficient and civilised
nations for the possession and enjoyment of the world, of its wealth,
its markets, its available spaces, an inflated and plethoric commercial
expansion, largeness of imperial size and rule.
For that is what the great war signified and was in its real origin, because
that was the secret or the open intention of all pre-war diplomacy and
international politics; and if a nobler idea was awakened at least for
a time, it was only under the scourge of Death and before the terrifying
spectre of a gigantic mutual destruction. Even so the awakening was by
no means complete, nor everywhere quite sincere, but it was there and
it was struggling towards birth even in Germany, once the great protagonist
of the vitalistic philosophy of life. In that awakening lay some hope
of better things. But for the moment at least the vitalistic aim has once
more raised its head in a new form and the hope has dimmed in a darkness
and welter in which only the eye of faith can see chaos preparing a new
cosmos.
The first result of this imperfect awakening seemed likely to be a return
to an older ideal, with a will to use the reason and the ethical mind
better and more largely in the ordering of individual, of national and
of international life. But such an attempt, though well enough as a first
step, cannot be the real and final solution; if our effort ends there,
we shall not arrive. The solution lies, we have said, in an awakening
to our real, because our highest self and nature, - that hidden self which
we are not yet, but have to become and which is not the strong and enlightened
vital Will hymned by Nietzsche, but a spiritual self and spiritual nature
that will use the mental being which we already are, but the mental being
spiritualised, and transform by a spiritual ideality the aim and action
of our vital and physical nature. For this is the formula of man in his
highest potentiality, and safety lies in tending towards our highest and
not in resting content with an inferior potentiality. To follow after
the highest in us may seem to be to live dangerously, to use again one
of Nietzsche's inspired expressions, but by that danger comes victory
and security. To rest in or follow after an inferior potentiality may
seem safe, rational, comfortable, easy, but it ends badly, in some futility
or in a mere circling, down the abyss or in a stagnant morass. Our right
and natural road is towards the summits.
We have then to return to the pursuit of an ancient secret which man,
as a race, has seen only obscurely and followed after lamely, has indeed
understood only with his surface mind and not in its heart of meaning,
- and yet in following it lies his social no less than his individual
salvation, - the ideal of the kingdom of God, the secret of the reign
of the Spirit over mind and life and body. It is because they have never
quite lost hold of this secret, never disowned it in impatience for a
lesser victory, that the older Asiatic nations have survived so persistently
and can now, as if immortal, raise their faces towards a new dawn; for
they have fallen asleep, but they have not perished. It is true that they
have for a time failed in life, where the European nations who trusted
to the flesh and the intellect have succeeded; but that success, speciously
complete but only for a time, has always turned into a catastrophe. Still
Asia had failed in life, she had fallen in the dust, and even if the dust
in which she was lying was sacred, as the modern poet of Asia has declared,
- though the sacredness may be doubted, - still the dust is not the proper
place for man, nor is to lie prostrate in it his right human attitude.
Asia temporarily failed not because she followed after things spiritual,
as some console themselves by saying, - as if the spirit could be at all
a thing of weakness or a cause of weakness, - but because she did not
follow after the spirit sufficiently, did not learn how entirely to make
it the master of life. Her mind either made a gulf and a division between
life and the Spirit or else rested in a compromise between them and accepted
as final socio-religious systems founded upon that compromise. So to rest
is perilous; for the call of the Spirit more than any other demands that
we shall follow it always to the end, and the end is neither a divorce
and departure nor a compromise, but a conquest of all by the spirit and
that reign of the seekers after perfection which, in the Hindu religious
symbol, the last Avatar comes to accomplish.
This truth it is important to note, for mistakes made on the path are
often even more instructive than the mistakes made by a turning aside
from the path.
As it is possible to superimpose the intellectual, ethical or aesthetic
life or the sum of their motives upon the vital and physical nature, to
be satisfied with a partial domination or a compromise, so it is possible
to superimpose the spiritual life or some figure of strength or ascendency
of spiritual ideas and motives on the mental, vital and physical nature
and either to impoverish the latter, to impoverish the vital and physical
existence and even to depress the mental as well in order to give the
spiritual an easier domination, or else to make a compromise and leave
the lower being to its pasture on condition of its doing frequent homage
to the spiritual existence, admitting to a certain extent, greater or
less, its influence and formally acknowledging it as the last state and
the finality of the human being.
This is the most that human society has ever done in the past, and though
necessarily that must be a stage of the journey, to rest there is to miss
the heart of the matter, the one thing needful. Not a humanity leading
its ordinary life, what is now its normal round, touched by spiritual
influences, but a humanity aspiring whole-heartedly to a law that is now
abnormal to it until its whole life has been elevated into spirituality,
is the steep way that lies before man towards his perfection and the transformation
that it has to achieve.
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. For that
is still retired in our depths and waits for our transcendence of the
ego and the discovery of the true individual in whose universality we
shall be united with all others. To transfer from the vital being, the
instrumental reality in us, to the spirit, the central reality, to elevate
to that height our will to be and our power of living is the secret which
our nature is seeking to discover. All that we have done hitherto is some
half-successful effort to transfer this will and power to the mental plane;
our highest endeavour and labour has been to become the mental being and
to live in the strength of the idea.
But the mental idea in us is always intermediary and instrumental; always
it depends on something other than it for its ground of action and therefore
although it can follow for a time after its own separate satisfaction,
it cannot rest for ever satisfied with that alone. It must either gravitate
downwards and outwards towards the vital and physical life or it must
elevate itself inwards and upwards towards the spirit.
And that must be why in thought, in art, in conduct, in life we are always
divided between two tendencies, one idealistic, the other realistic. The
latter very easily seems to us more real, more solidly founded, more in
touch with actualities because it relies upon a reality which is patent,
sensible and already accomplished; the idealistic easily seems to us something
unreal, fantastic, unsubstantial, nebulous, a thing more of thoughts and
words than of live actualities, because it is trying to embody a reality
not yet accomplished. To a certain extent we are perhaps right; for the
ideal, a stranger among the actualities of our physical existence, is
in fact a thing unreal until it has either in some way reconciled itself
to the imperfections of our outer life or else has found the greater and
purer reality for which it is seeking and imposed it on our outer activities;
till then it hangs between two worlds and has conquered neither the upper
light nor the nether darkness. Submission to the actual by a compromise
is easy; discovery of the spiritual truth and the transformation of our
actual way of living is difficult: but it is precisely this difficult
thing that has to be done, if man is to find and fulfil his true nature.
Our idealism is always the most rightly human thing in us, but as a mental
idealism it is a thing ineffective. To be effective it has to convert
itself into a spiritual realism which shall lay its hands on the higher
reality of the spirit and take up for it this lower reality of our sensational,
vital and physical nature.
This upward transference of our will to be and our power of life we have,
then, to make the very principle of our perfection. That will, that power
must choose between the domination of the vital part in us and the domination
of the spirit. Nature can rest in the round of vital being, can produce
there a sort of perfection, but that is the perfection of an arrested
development satisfied with its own limits. This she can manage in the
plant and the animal, because the life and the body are there at once
the instrument and the aim; they do not look beyond themselves. She cannot
do it in man because here she has shot up beyond her physical and vital
basis; she has developed in him the mind which is an outflowering of the
life towards the light of the Spirit, and the life and the body are now
instrumental and no longer their own aim. Therefore the perfection of
man cannot consist in pursuing the unillumined round of the physical life.
Neither can it be found in the wider rounds of the mental being; for that
also is instrumental and tends towards something else beyond it, something
whose power indeed works in it, but whose larger truth is superconscient
to its present intelligence, supramental.
The perfection of man lies in the unfolding of the ever-perfect Spirit.
The lower perfection of Nature in the plant and the animal comes from
an instinctive, an automatic, a subconscient obedience in each to the
vital truth of its own being. The higher perfection of the spiritual life
will come by a spontaneous obedience of spiritualised man to the truth
of his own realised being, when he has become himself, when he has found
his own real nature. For this spontaneity will not be instinctive and
subconscient, it will be intuitive and fully, integrally conscious. It
will be a glad obedience to a spontaneous principle of spiritual light,
to the force of a unified and integralised highest truth, largest beauty,
good, power, joy, love, oneness. The object of this force acting in life
will and must be as in all life growth, possession, enjoyment, but a growth
which is a divine manifestation, a possession and enjoyment spiritual
and of the spirit in things, - an enjoyment that will use, but will not
depend on the mental, vital and physical symbols of our living.
Therefore this will not be a limited perfection of arrested development
dependent on the repetition of the same forms and the same round of actions,
any departure from which becomes a peril and a disturbance. It will be
an illimitable perfection capable of endless variation in its forms, -
for the ways of the Spirit are countless and endless, - but securely the
same in all variations, one but multitudinously infinite.
Therefore, too, this perfection cannot come by the mental idea dealing
with the Spirit as it deals with life. The idea in mind seizing upon the
central will in Spirit and trying to give this higher force a conscious
orientation and method in accordance with the ideas of the intellect is
too limited, too darkened, too poor a force to work this miracle. Still
less can it come if we chain the spirit to some fixed mental idea or system
of religious cult, intellectual truth, aesthetic norm, ethical rule, practical
action, way of vital and physical life, to a particular arrangement of
forms and actions and declare all departure from that a peril and a disturbance
or a deviation from spiritual living. That was the mistake made in Asia
and the cause of its arrested development and decline; for this is to
subject the higher to the lower principle and to bind down the self-disclosing
Spirit to a provisional and imperfect compromise with mind and the vital
nature. Man's true freedom and perfection will come when the spirit within
bursts through the forms of mind and life and, winging above to its own
gnostic fiery height of ether, turns upon them from that light and flame
to seize them and transform into its own image.
In fact, as we have seen, the mind and the intellect are not the key-power
of our existence. For they can only trace out a round of half-truths and
uncertainties and revolve in that unsatisfying circle. But concealed in
the mind and life, in all the action of the intellectual, the aesthetic,
the ethical, the dynamic and practical, the emotional, sensational, vital
and physical being, there is a power that sees by identity and intuition
and gives to all these things such truth and such certainty and stability
as they are able to compass. Obscurely we are now beginning to see something
of this behind all our science and philosophy and all our other activities.
But so long as this power has to work for the mind and life and not for
itself, to work in their forms and not by its own spontaneous light, we
cannot make any great use of this discovery, cannot get the native benefit
of this inner Daemon.
Man's 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. We shall be on
the right road to become ourselves, to find our true law of perfection,
to live our true satisfied existence in our real being and divine nature.
Sri Aurobindo
in "The Human Cycle" - SABCL Volume
15 - pages 218-230
published by Sri
Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
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