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Everywhere about us we see this paroxysmal shattering of all the old forms: our borders, our churches, our laws, our morals are collapsing on all sides. They are not collapsing because we are bad, immoral, irreligious, or because we are not sufficiently rational, scientific or human, but because we have come to the end of the human ! To the end of the old mechanism—for we are on our way to SOMETHING ELSE. The world is not going through a moral crisis but through an "evolutionary crisis." We are not going towards a better world—nor, for that matter, towards a worse one—we are in the midst of a MUTATION to a radically different world, as different as the human world was from the ape world of the Tertiary Era. We are entering a new era, a supramental Quinary. We leave our countries, wander aimlessly, we go looking for drugs, for adventure, we go on strike here, enact reforms there, foment revolutions and counterrevolutions. But all this is only an appearance; in fact, unwittingly, we are looking for the new being. We are in the midst of human evolution. And Sri Aurobindo gives us the key. It may be that the sense of our own revolution escapes us because we try to prolong that which already exists, to refine it, improve it, sublimate it. But the ape may have made the same mistake amid its revolution that produced man; perhaps it sought to become a superape, better equipped to climb trees, hunt and run, a more agile and clever ape. With Nietzsche we too sought a "superman" who was nothing more than a |
colossalization of man, and with the spiritualists a supersaint more richly endowed with virtue and wisdom. But human virtue and wisdom are useless! Even when carried to their highest heights they are nothing more than the old poverties gilded over, the obverse of our tenacious misery. "Supermanhood," says Sri Aurobindo, "is not man climbed to his own natural zenith, not a superior degree of human greatness, knowledge, power, intelligence, will, . . . genius, . . . saintliness, love, purity or perfection." (The Hour of God, XVII.7. 2.) It is SOMETHING ELSE, another vibration of being, another consciousness. But if this new consciousness is not to be found on the peaks of the human, where then, are we to find it? Perhaps, quite simply in that which we have most neglected since we entered the mental cycle, in the body. The body is our base, our evolutionary foundation, the old stock to which we always return, and which painfully compels our attention by making us suffer, age and die. `'In that imperfection," Sri Aurobindo assures us, `'is the urge towards a higher and more many-sided perfection. It contains the last finite which yet yearns to the Supreme Infinite.... God is pent in the mire ... but the very fact imposes a necessity to break through that prison." (Dilip K. Roy, Sri Aurobindo Came to Me, p. 415.) |