Change and evolution
Change, as we have seen, has a direction. We may move backward or forward depending upon where we stand at the present moment. And yet, in the larger scheme of things, even a seeming or actual backward movement is often merely a preparation to leap towards the future. It is like the tiger that steps back, holds its breath as if he had stopped advancing but in effect he is simply gathering strength to leap upon his object. So too, when we sometimes hasten along Time’s uncertain roads, we do so in one part of our nature while the rest lingers behind. This is an uncomfortable position since all things seek a state of stability, balance and harmony. There are then only two options left with us, — either to coerce all the other parts to follow the highest leader or else for the leader to stop and wait awhile while the others catch up. To leave our other parts and forge ahead is to create a dislocation, an imbalance. Sometimes Nature may like to work this way for a special task at hand. It does not mind the abnormal if something much needed gets done. Such are often the types of genius in whom the mould gets broken while Nature surges ahead in one part or aspect. But this is not the general movement of Nature in man or elsewhere. If one part tends to surge ahead at the expense of others, there is a rebound and recoil since all things are interconnected. Everything within and outside must be taken up and integrated.
It is this that makes evolutionary change a difficult and challenging task. Generally change is a horizontal process, a moving in circles, though with an ever-widening circumference. But at times Nature is keen to bring out new possibilities. It seeks to enhance its scope and power. It wants to shoot into the Beyond and takes a vertical flight of ascension. There are many vertical leaps that fail or fall short of its high aim. But after many such approximations Nature is able to fulfil the task it has undertaken. The leap that seemed abnormal to the unaccustomed eye establishes itself as the next level of normalcy and the supernatural becomes natural. This radical leap, resulting in not just a cosmetic or temporary change in a few but an enduring change of the very law of a group, is an evolutionary change.
While the initial few attempts are going on, the rest can wait and watch. But when things are ready and Nature is prepared to fulfil itself since the Time has come, then we cannot simply wait and watch. We must choose, — either take advantage of the high ultimate surge and leap ahead or else fall back and collapse like a broken reed. We either embrace the change or else are broken and left aside by the advancing floods. Such is a moment of evolution that has come upon man where he must make a crucial choice of his destiny, — to evolve or collapse. Unlike the animal, it is given to man as part of the burden of his destiny that he is at least partially the author of his future. Unlike the animal species, he can collaborate or resist the evolutionary pressure through the choices he makes, — not only choice of his actions but also choice of thought, choice of feelings, choosing one kind of subjective state over another. Instead of being driven by blind instinct or mechanical habits of the past, man can choose to move towards an increasing freedom of his members, — freedom not as it is generally understood, but the freedom that comes from mastery and inner change. The Mother(1) reveals to us so succinctly,
“Anything that suppresses, diminishes or lessens cannot bring freedom. Freedom has to be experienced in the whole of life and in all sensations ”(p.196).
Elimination or transformation
To choose ‘evolution’ does not necessarily imply elimination. Elimination can bring a release and an escape. It is like suppressing a movement that is causing conflict. Suppression is not the answer. It is simply going into a state of denial. Very often the thing we suppress within us takes strange and twisted forms and appears before us in dreams and projections. We start seeing in others what we have suppressed within us. This can go as far as seeing almost everyone else except ourselves in a bad light. The right way is rather to first see and acknowledge that all human beings are capable of every movement. We all have a common animal inheritance and are therefore prone to certain tendencies and propensities in greater or lesser measure. Besides our common animal past, we also share certain common traits that come as part of our being human. The acute sense of individuality in which we rejoice and suffer is again an almost universal thing. This gives us on the one hand an acute sense of separation from all others and everything else around us, and on the other hand creates much misunderstanding and confusion. What is interesting to observe is that Nature does not create individualities by keeping some movements while eliminating others in different persons. It cannot do that since Nature moves and acts as a whole. The differences are created simply by changing the stress on the different elements. We are conscious of few movements and unconscious of others. It is this way that different types of humanity are created. But everything is there latent or active in all. When we suppress we simply shift things from our personal sphere of consciousness to the unconscious domain. This is far from freedom.
Besides, even where we share common things on the surfaces of our life and are conscious of similar elements, the ego sense within us gives to each thing a different mask. Even when two persons like or do the same thing, they do it for different reasons. Equally, the same tendency takes different forms of expression in different people. All this makes the work of conscious evolution a difficult one. Even the first few steps within our large subjective domain bring us face to face with the subconscious elements that lie hidden and unseen. A conflict ensues, an effort at a new balance of forces and energies continues until we have found the right key to integration. The soul of a man who seeks to evolve consciously is a battlefield where immense forces come into play, to help and to hinder. But in the end he discovers that everything, all without exception, that which seemed to push him forward and that which seemed to pull him backward, that which he called good and that which he called bad, were but temporary constructs of his ignorance. In reality everything came to help the process of change. Going deeper he discovers a Wisdom transcending our relative notions of good and bad, that worked unseen only to hasten our journey through the bright and the dark patches of our journey. The key is to bring everything before the Light of this Unseen Wisdom, through faith, through aspiration, through sincerity, above all through the will for changing it into its truth.
This is the secret. According to yogic experience, all things are simply a deformation of a deeper Truth. Even things that appear to us high and beautiful are deformations. It is simply a question of degree. The deformation is due to the condition of Nature in which it is poised or aligned within us with regard to the Truth. But this deformation yet conceals within it the seed of a Truth like the grain of wheat inside the chaff or the embryo within the womb. For a long time the deforming mask, or the mantle so to speak, is needed for the baby to grow. But when the time is ripe, the mantle begins to reflect something of the Truth that it hides within. His indirect reflection is still a distortion. Yet it is to this lesser distortion or rather an indirect reflection of the inner Truth that is growing within us that we give the name of ‘good’ while the grosser, denser masks are called ‘bad’. But, in reality they are simply two stages of the same thing. All evil is simply a good in preparation or a good that must pass away and give birth to a greater good. Persisting beyond its due time, it becomes evil like an over-ripe fruit. There is yet a third stage where the mantle of Nature changes completely under the pressure of the growing Light of Truth. Instead of covering and hiding the Truth it becomes a total transparence, a clear crystalline channel. But to reach that third stage it is important for man to rise beyond the dual consciousness of good and bad and transform both into a greater becoming.
The process for this change is not through an adjustment of Nature, a change on the surfaces, a painting and glossing over our difficulties. Rather, it comes by the pressure of the growing Light. The focus therefore has to be in increasing the Light, in feeding the Truth that is growing within the womb of our human nature, by nourishing and nurturing it as one nourishes and nurtures a child. Instead of struggling constantly with nature and trying hard to throw away certain things everything must be gently and quietly brought in contact with the growing Light within us. Slowly everything in nature begins to align itself to this inner Truth; gradually the spell of deformation is undone by unlocking a Power that was always within us. Instead of being preoccupied with the bright and the dark sides of nature, devising means to remove one and increase the other, we need to focus on opening the hidden doors of this Power within us and letting Its Light flood our being. That is the path of conscious evolution of which man is supposed to be the herald.
Embracing change
Turning the leaf of Time does not depend upon man’s effort. It is like the changing of seasons. Seasons change despite us and our wanting it this way or that makes no difference to them. But the wise one is he who is prepared for the change, is not caught unaware and even knows the fruits of each season so that he enjoys the full benefit of the change. But the foolish one keeps lamenting about what is gone and by doing so pits himself against the forward march of Nature. Not only does this make him miserable but also very soon he becomes like an obsolete product of Nature that has outlived its purpose, sometimes only with an antique value for the curious collector.
Let us then embrace the Future that is emerging. The future is for those who have the soul of a hero. A hero is someone who is willing to step out of his or her fixed positions, entrenched in worn-out ideas and forms to which one clings out of habit or simply because they provide to our ego safe zones of comfort. A hero is someone who is willing to renounce immediate success for the greater Truth that stares into his eyes. Above all a hero is someone who is not afraid of anything and therefore can stand up for what he believes to be true and beautiful and good, even if it might appear for the moment, to be a temporary construction of his mind. Yet it can serve as a scaffolding for his ascension provided he is, at the same time, willing to leave that safe stair as greater horizons greet his vision and draw his footsteps towards yet more difficult and challenging peaks.
This is the hope for the future, a radical change, a completer cure for the human condition in which good and evil walk hand in hand and often bring paradoxical results. The truth is that good and evil are human conceptions concealing behind their fair and ugly face something else, something that is far greater than both, something that is yet unborn and waits for its hour within us.
To embrace or rather to collaborate with the change is not easy. It means, first of all, not to cling to what must pass away with time. When we conceive the future we do so in terms of the present, projecting the trajectory of the past. But Nature does not seem to always work like that. The great transitions are also great leaps from one loop of Time onto another. Could the fish ever conceive of a reptile or a bird? Could the chimpanzee, comfortable in his forest dwelling, ever think of computers and multi-storeyed buildings and flying machines and atomic energy? Even fire was difficult for its conception. No stretch of imagination or scientific brain-storming or statistical analysis of the existing data of the animal world could foresee the coming of man. Yet we can always look back and trace the path that Nature took with all its expected and unexpected twists and turns that baffle our rational intelligence, its dropping of this line and then taking up of another, using Intuition’s sure technique. And when it comes to the present evolutionary crisis of which Sri Aurobindo spoke and prepared the field, which the Mother fulfilled in Her life and works, all our preconceived notions come to a halt. We are face to face with a mystery far greater than the mind can ever conceive, imagine and envisage. It is a radical departure from life and evolution in Ignorance to the blossoming of life in Light and Freedom and Joy. It needs courage and faith to walk this sunlit path of the soul. Man prefers narrow roads to broader ones.
The radical leap that Sri Aurobindo speaks of and for which He worked and sacrificed his life is the emergence upon earth of a New Species, a species as different from man as the human being is different presently from the animal world that he has surpassed and tamed and co-inhabits. Just to get an idea of it we can imagine how much effort, — physical, moral, psychological, spiritual goes into realising what or who we truly are. We are all told that man carries within him divinity concealed. But to realise that divine potential within us we have to labour and struggle hard often with little initial success. One success story of a spiritual blossom is punctuated with many approximations and quite a few failures. Of course, people always claim things but the reality is quite different. In every cult we have a number of persons who arrive, who cross a certain boundary of Ignorance that entitles them to at least glimpse if not realise and become that secret divine Self that is lodged within them. This is so because the moment we enter earth —nature and take upon ourselves the human body, built by earth’s evolutionary journey so far, we also take up all the past evolutionary layers. Every one of us carries within himself not only an imprisoned godhead and a concealed divinity but also the animal and the beast. That is why evolution is such a strenuous and long process. Each of these layers works as a shield preventing us from going within. What should be a natural blossoming of a mental being into a spiritual one becomes such a laborious process!
To put it in a nutshell, Nature in us does not actively support this great discovery. It even resists the process and prefers to repeat its habitual movements rather than walk with royal ease into the future. And when the doors of a higher consciousness open, the mental being may well get confused and flounder, losing its present normal, even if precarious, balance of humanity. Such beings, unable to adapt to the so-called normal life of mentalised humanity, are either misunderstood or else withdraw into some inner or outer quietude. Sometimes they are worshipped but for very human ends. Generally their actions are misunderstood for even when they seem to act humanly, the origin and impulse to act, the motive and the consciousness involved is very different.
Spiritual evolution does not mean creating a few spiritual individuals here or there. It means that a whole new type of humanity emerges for whom the spiritual consciousness would be as natural as thinking and breathing is today for mental man. This is the new type of being that the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have envisaged as the next emergence, — a being whose station of consciousness and mode of knowledge and power for action will ‘naturally and effortlessly’ come from higher ranges of consciousness that are concealed from our vision right now.
This New Consciousness is already active upon earth, preparing man and creating earthly conditions that would facilitate this next evolutionary cycle. The great upheavals, the revolutionary changes, the unexpected events and circumstances, the sudden departures of thoughts challenging old paradigms and fixed formulas of life and society, the rapidly changing equations between different layers and sections of humanity, the unprecedented discoveries with far-reaching consequences, the breaking of old patterns and institutions are all early pointers towards the preparation going on for this new arrival. On the one side, we witness a great destruction, a loss of old values and long-established authorities. On the other hand we see a flurry of activities in every field, a new base being laid down for a new construction for another kind of life. Quite naturally we get bewildered. But instead of getting dismayed because we do not understand the divine Intention or are unable to see the divine Purpose, we need to have faith, the faith that is consistent with logic as well as spiritual experience, — that if there is a divine Wisdom that is hidden deep within creation and is at its Source and Origin as well as working in its heart as the Master of works and life, then He knows His steps and is leading us even when we do not see it. We need to remember that this is the ‘hour of the unexpected’.
