Sri Aurobindo uses Supermind as a vehicle to reconcile history and spirit, the temporal with the eternal

Re: Sri Aurobindo and Evolution: A Critical Perspective : 2008 (occult slippages and cultural considerations) by ned on Sat 09 Feb 2008 03:20 PM PST Profile Permanent Link

I have been discussion the whole idea of evolutionary spirituality with a Sufi friend. There is "horizontal" (biological and cultural) evolution and "vertical" evolution. When we speak of the "vertical" ascension of the soul to the Divine, I feel Sri Aurobindo is only really using "evolution" as a metaphor. Because in this process, what's happening is not really a progression in time, but a transcendence of history altogether (time emerges as the Eternal Now). So the process of Supramentalization would presumably lead to the end of history. Thoughts, anyone?

Reply by Rich on Sun 10 Feb 2008 09:09 AM PST Profile Permanent Link

Certainly there seems to be a rupture with our present experience of history, but he does suggest a supramental time vision -trikaladristi-. So rather then being an end to history it maybe better understood as a radical discontinuity, or a transformation of history in which we -or the superman/woman- will come to experiences it not as the linear progression of time but rather in its simultaneity of past, present, future.

Sri Aurobindo uses Supermind as a vehicle to reconcile history and spirit, the temporal with the eternal. Unfortunately, the complexity in such a bold vision is that in asserting that the “progressive evolution of history” through the descent of a timeless spirit, will result in the salvation of history itself, one must engage two very different interpretative schemes, one physical/historical the other mythological/metaphysical.

We mortals seem to have problems reconciling those perspectives. Which means there is the same tendency in a belief system which envisages salvation trough supramentalization as prevalent among those religions whose revelation is the transformation of history through a final rapture, namely to collapse the multi-dimensionality with which it resonates in our soul life to a one dimensional literalization as historical prophecy