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SRI AUROBINDO

ESSAYS IN PHILOSOPHY AND YOGA

SHORTER WORKS — 1910-1950

APPENDIX I

Chapter I. The Human Aspiration

Argument in Brief

A search for God, (for a spiritual or divine Reality within oneself and behind, above or within the phenomenon of existence,) for perfection, for freedom, for an absolute Truth and Bliss, for immortality has been the persistent preoccupation of the highest human thought since the earliest times. This preoccupation seems to be a perpetual element in man's nature; for it survives the longest periods of scepticism.

This aspiration is in contradiction with his present existence and normal experience of himself which is that of a mortal being full of imperfections, ego-ridden, largely animal, subject to transitory joys and much pain and suffering, bound by mechanical necessity. But the direct contradiction between what he is and what he seeks to be need not be a final argument against the validity of his aspiration. For such contradictions are part of Nature's general method; the aspiration may be realisable either by a revolutionary individual effort or by an evolutionary general progress.

The problems of existence are problems of harmony. Discords and disorder of the materials, oppositions, demand a solution by accordance, by the discovery of a harmony. Thus the accordance of an inanimation and inertia in a containing Matter and the active indwelling stress of Life is Nature's first problem, its initial difficulty; its perfect solution would be immortality in a material body. The accordance of an unconscious Matter and an unconscious or half-conscious Life with a conscious Mind and Will is her second problem; the possession of a direct and perfect instrumentation of knowledge in a living body would be its complete solution. The accordance of a mortal mind, life and body with a secretly indwelling immortal spirit is the final problem; the spiritualisation or divinisation of mind, life and body, a divine life, would be the perfect solution. The search after these solutions by the human being is not irrational; it is rather the very effort and striving of Nature within him.

Life appears in Matter, Mind in Life because they are already there. Matter is a form of veiled Life; Life a form of veiled Mind; Mind may well be a form and veil of a higher power, the Spirit, which is supramental in its nature. Nature has implanted an impulse towards life in certain forms of Matter and evolves it there, a similar evolutionary impulse towards mind in certain forms of life, an impulse in certain minds towards what is beyond Mind, towards the unveiling of Spirit, the evolution of a spiritual being. Each impulse justifies itself by the creation of the necessary organs and faculties.

There is therefore no reason to put a limit to evolutionary possibility by taking our present organisation or status of existence as final. The animal is a laboratory in which Nature has worked out man; man may very well be a laboratory in which she wills to work out superman, to disclose the soul as a divine being, to evolve a divine nature.

12.1940