Quite
true. It is possible to reach a state where one becomes oblivious to one’s
environment. Those who live in the vital need good weather to stay cheerful,
but those who live in the psychic don’t care about it. In the initial stages,
it is helpful to withdraw from the hustle and bustle of city life but later on,
one has to accept to live in all conditions with equanimity.
Too
much of good weather can also be detrimental to spiritual growth, because it
influences the mind to become excessively optimistic about one’s spiritual
condition. from Comments for IYSATM by Sandeep
If
you had too much good weather, you might never get depressed or not very often.
The invigorating air inflates your inner being and makes you mistake vital
happiness for deeper psychic experiences. This is just something I concluded
after observing some practitioners with polyannish views of spiritual life.
As
for the hustle and bustle being detrimental to meditation, it is based on
apocryphal evidence of another practitioner. The type of exposure required
varies from person to person depending on the stage of their sadhana. There
were people who were allowed by SA&M to experience the world outside the
Ashram, while others were discouraged from doing so.
Darwin’s theory of evolution proposes that all life on
earth has evolved from a common ancestor, that there is individual variation
within every species, and that evolution is mediated by the process of natural
selection due to which, in due course of time, certain traits become
established in the species due to ‘survival of the fittest’.
During
Darwin’s time,
the field of genetics was in a nascent stage, with his contemporary Gregor
Mendel, now known as the father of modern genetics, just initiating
cross-breeding experiments on pea plants. The study of genetic traits has
now substantially expanded into the development of the booming field of
genetics. Today, Darwin’s
theory of evolution has been integrated with Mendelian genetics to form what is
called Neo-Darwinism or the evolutionary synthesis. Evolutionary biology
now recognizes that aside from natural selection, other evolutionary mechanisms
such as adaptation, genetic drift, gene flow and speciation are also involved
in evolution; it differentiates between microevolution and
macroevolution.[7] The theory of evolution is expanding to encompass
evolution of minerals as well. Scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s
Geophysical Laboratory have observed that minerals have also become more
complex with time. They have found that the mineral kingdom co-evolved with
life, and that up to two thirds of the more than 4,000 known types of minerals
on Earth can be directly or indirectly linked to biological activity.
Today there are about 4,400 mineral species but 4 billion years ago, there were
only a dozen minerals on Earth.[8]
Neo-Darwinism
has been challenged by the movement known as Intelligent Design(ID), whose
primary contention is that Darwin’s
theory does not explain the ‘irreducible complexity’ seen in Nature. ID
posits the existence of an extra-cosmic entity which must have created the
world, as adduced by the latent intelligence seen in various instinctive
mechanisms found in Nature. It must also be mentioned that ID is derived
from and sustained by an earlier movement known as Creationism, which sought to
invalidate Darwinian evolution by proposing that the world was created as
described in the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis in the Bible.
Now
we will briefly outline, based on the works of Sri Aurobindo, what we perceive
to be the synthesis between scientism and literalism – between Neo-Darwinism
and Intelligent Design. The Universe can be seen as a Manifestation of
the Divine, a conscious Being evolving itself through self-extension in Time
and Space for the purpose of self-discovery and joy. The Upanishad gives
us the illustrative analogy of a spider spinning a web out of itself. Sri
Aurobindo identified a double
movement of involution and evolution in which Spirit first involves
itself through self-absorption in the Inconscience to create Matter and
then Matter evolves the latent Spirit within through the mechanisms of
Life-principle(Vitality), Mind-principle and so on [9, 10]. The Divine
has become the Universe; it has split itself into souls in order to take part
in self-finding. It clothes itself in new forms (minerals, plants,
animals and man) that are developed in successive stages to represent new
forces breaking out of primordial Inconscience. In a nutshell, we
can say that the Universe was created by a “Differentiation of Consciousness” and in its upward
evolutionary movement, it tries to recover the lost unity through an “Integration of Consciousness”. Therefore,
it can be said that the Universe is involved in a giant “Calculus of Yoga” course.
Sri
Aurobindo contextualizes Darwin’s trope ‘survival of fittest’ while discussing
the development of the Life principle (i.e. vitality). Sri
Aurobindo identified three stages of existence: the dumb will of energy, the
urge to possess, the urge to love. These three stages correspond to the
three defects perceived in individualized evolving life-forms: death, desire
and incapacity. The dumb will of energy is observed in the first
stages of life, where the subconscient will in primitive life-forms is driven
by purely mechanical laws. The second stage is exemplified by higher life
forms which are driven by the instinct to live, and this necessarily induces in
them the principle of struggle as well as adaptation to the environment.
The third stage is discerned in collective packs of animals which exhibit primal
form of love and band together to survive. The preservation of
individuality is moderated with the necessity and desire for interchange and
fusion with other individuals. These three principles are also
inherited and visible in the early stages of human life. As Sri Aurobindo
points out, it is struggle for vital development in evolution which was
expressed in Darwin’s theory of evolution…
Intelligent
Design raises valid questions about abiogenesis (i.e. how life arises out from
inorganic matter) and speciation (i.e. how do new species arise) but is unable
to satisfactorily answer them with a suitable teleology, other than to posit
the existence of an extra-cosmic entity which must be managing the
Universe. On the other hand, Neo-Darwinism only examines the superficial
evolution of forms, and remains unaware of the greater aeonic evolution of
souls as they are reborn in progressively more complex forms, (plant, animal
and human) as determined by the evolution of soul consciousness.
We
present the synthesis of the above ideas as discovered in the works of Sri
Aurobindo and the Mother. Speciation is explained by the fact that
consciousness precedes form in evolution [12]. There exists what is
denoted as the ‘generic prototype’ behind every species, which is like a mold;
it creates the general form that every member of the species will
manifest. What evolutionary biologists describe as sudden variation or
mutation of the species and whose cause or genesis they are at a loss to trace,
is precisely due to an occult change in the consciousness and will of this
prototype [13]. Behind the physical world, there exist gradations of
occult worlds in which the subtle sheaths which correspond the physical body
seen on earth are first prepared and embodied by the reincarnating soul.
In
this first part of your series on evolution, you have brought Intelligent
Design and the Anthropic Principle into alignment with Sri Aurobindo's views on
evolution. Whereas the ID movement undoubtedly takes its roots in the Christian
Right and Creationism, and it is very unlikely that Sri Aurobindo would have
any support for those roots, the arguments of ID need consideration by
themselves for their possibilities of extending the reductionism of purely
materialstic theories. In other words, would the ID hypothesis be completely
rejected by the Auorbondonian view or would it lend itself to adaptation beyond
its Christian or Abrahamic foundations?
The
principle arguments for ID consist of irreducible complexity (Behe, parts of a
living organic unit are all necessary and needed to have evolved together);
specifed complexity (Dembski, coexistence of complexity and specified meaning
implies intelligent creator); and anthropic precision (Guillermo Gonzalez,
constituents of the universe are related in a fine-tuned precision to support
human life on earth; Granville Sewell, negative entropy of evolving complexity
in life forms).
Of
course, al these have been challenged by the Darwinians and shown to be either
non-exclusive or non-provable or not unprovable as explanations. But if
knowledge is to be taken as not reducible to rational proof and alternate forms
of knowledge are to be cultivated towards a future of knowledge by identity,
then forms of intuition need to be given their place and value. In the Life Divine,
Sri Aurobindo often directs or turns an argument based on natural or
phenomenological intuitions. The kinds of intuitions used by artists or poets
in making judgements may seem impossibly subjective to arriving at universal
truths, particularly of the material world, but poets and philosophers like
Goethe and Giordano Bruno developed a cross-disciplinary view of knowledge,
which gave them access also to a new material science.
Science
itself, for that matter, is based on an intuition of a rational description of
the world, reducible to one or at most a system of very few laws. This
intuition takes its root in more primordial intuitive perceptions of the
precision of numbers and proportions in the natural world, established by
Egyptian and Greek geometers such as Pythagoras or Indian astronomers. The
"fine-tuned precision" argument of ID may not be too far out of line
with this intuition, though the question of what is concluded from it is of
prime importance. The visual intuition that products of human technology (eg.
the airplane) remain a functional assemblage of parts, while living things
(eg., a bird) exist as irreducible units of conscious being is one that may
align itself to the irreducible complexity and specified complexity arguments
of ID, and opens a window on the Platonic world of invisible ideal forms which
seek visible manifestations on earth. This kind of intuition also points
towards discontinuity in evolution, each species evoking in mind an image of
discrete distinctiveness, which is what Indian (and from them, East Asian)
artists were supposed to contact in contemplating forms (rupa-bheda,
sadrishya). All this need not immediately suggest an Intelligent Creator,
though it does suggest the immanent, cosmic and transcendent presence of Intelligence
manifesting in the material universe.
The
Anthropic principle privileges life on earth, but in its exclusive variety, as
per its name, it privileges human existence as the meaning of the universe -
the universe exists for the appearance of Man on earth. This resonates out of
the Biblical "Man is created in the image of God." Here not only is
there a divine creator, this creator has prepared the stage for his own
appearance. The human being is potentially this appearance but it is only
through his own incarnation as His Son, Jesus Christ, the perfected human
archetype that the human potential becomes realized. Thesitic evoluitionism is
also based on this mythology, with the difference that in the orthodox ID
version, which is a cover for Creationism, the human being appears without any
precedent, while in Theistic Evolutionism, God gathers his constituents from
scratch (dust, inconscience) developing more and more complex forms of
consciousness and meaning, pyramiding to the appearance of the human.
This
version bears comparison with the Vedic view of the sacrifice of Purusha and
the Vedantic view of man being made in the image of God. In the Aitareya
Upanishad, the gods (faculties of knowlege) drop into the inconscience, marked
by the absence of God and seek a creature to enter into. Prajapati marhsalls
before them the cow, the horse and the human and they choose only the human as
adequate saying "Oh, truly well fashioned." The Purusha who projected
his organs of knowledge and the objects of these organs from these organs now
reverses the operation with the fashioning of a being within the objectivized
world which will house his own powers of knowledge and be able thus to gaze
back with identity completing the circle of nun-dual darshan. The human being
here however is also only potentially made in God's image and needs to use the
power of conscious evolution, yoga to grow beyond this stage. The true image of
God which he is to embody is captured more completely in the Gita. It is hardly
human and apocalyptic to the degree of utter incomprehesibility to the human.
It encompassess all creatures born and unborn, living and non-living forms, all
forms and the formless, the benevolent and the terrible creation, preservation
and destruction swirling time towards its unreachable ultimate. But most
importantly this all-form is a Person, the One and Supreme Person,
purushottama.
In terms of the Integral Evolution of Sri Aurobindo, this Transcendental Person
is both beyond and within the cosmos and its elements as the Intelligence
pressing on the creation from above and pushing for expression from below. In
its immanence, governed by Supermind, it subjects itself to the slow random
processes of natural selection and survival of the fittest, but not without the
jumps only possible through the taking up of nature's approximations by ideal
pre-existent forms and consciousnesses from above. In the human it arrives at
the first sense of enduring personhood. But if such a process is to fulfill
itself it cannot be through the human (even though the human becomes its
launching pad), but through the yet alien gatherer of creatures into its
incomprehensible body, the transdencent-immanent-cosmic Person self-multiplied
in its infinite portions. DB
“Human
progress” clearly refers to a highly complex and many-sided phenomenon, and any
definite assertion regarding its overall character will likely be open to easy
counter examples. And Sri Aurobindo no doubt had a subtle and nuanced way of
describing his own view of the subject. But my point was that if want to
specifically highlight that “human progress itself is very probably an
illusion” sentence as a key statement by Sri Aurobindo of his own view, I think
that's likely incorrect.
Again,
between para 3 that ends with the sentence “it may be as well before proceeding
farther to formulate succinctly the line of thinking which makes such a
construction possible”, and para 12 which begins “This is a line of reasoning
that has a considerable cogency and importance, and it was necessary to state
it, even if too briefly for its importance, in order to meet it”, are 8
paragraphs in which he is giving voice to the anti-evolutionary view. From para
12 on he then deals with those objections and asserts his own views. The
illusion quote comes in para 10, in the midst of the articulation of the
anti-evolutionary ideas. To help see this, look at this sentence from para
5:
“Man
is the summit of this ignorant creation; he has reached the utmost
consciousness and knowledge of which it is capable: if he tries to go farther,
he will only revolve in larger cycles of his own mentality. For that is the
curve of his existence here, a finite circling which carries the mind in its
revolutions and returns always to the point from which it started; mind cannot
go outside its own cycle,—all idea of a straight line of movement or of
progress reaching infinitely upward or sidewise into the Infinite is a
delusion. If the soul of man is to go beyond humanity, to reach either a
supramental or a still higher status, it must pass out of this cosmic
existence, either to a plane or world of bliss and knowledge or into the
unmanifest Eternal and Infinite.”
Surely
he is not here asserting as his own view that the soul of man must pass out of
this cosmic existence to reach a higher status! Even later in para 10 itself
(the same one with the illusion quote), you can read this: “Nothing warrants
the idea that he will ever hew his way out of the half-knowledge half-ignorance
which is the stamp of his kind”, which hardly sounds like the way Sri Aurobindo
typically presents his own view of the spiritual possibilities of
humanity.
Regarding
the much later para 19 which has the “It cannot truly be said that there has
been no such thing as human progress”, it's of course true that the prior
sentence says “It may be conceded that what man has up till now principally
done is to act within the circle of his nature, on a spiral of nature movement,
sometimes descending, sometimes ascending,—there has been no straight line of
progress, no indisputable, fundamental or radical exceeding of his past nature:
what he has done is to sharpen, subtilise, make a more and more complex and
plastic use of his capacities”. In fact these two sentences together look like
a direct reference back to that earlier illusion paragraph. He is now
articulating his own view and “conceding” the “no straight line of progress”,
“no radical exceeding” elements of the earlier quote, but then pointing out its
flaws in the following “It cannot truly be said that there has been no such
thing as human progress” sentence.
Note
again I'm not trying to assert some view of human progress different from the
one you are writing about (although I might later after reading your entire
article :) I'm just suggesting caution in asserting that one particular
illusion quote in the LD as being Sri Aurobindo's statement of his own view in
his own words. Kepler
