{"id":125,"date":"2013-07-13T01:26:05","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:26:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=125"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:26:05","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:26:05","slug":"32-the-superman-vol-16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16\/32-the-superman-vol-16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16","title":{"rendered":"-32_The Superman.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n


\nThe Superman<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
\n                       
\n<\/span>T<\/span><\/b>HE
\nideal of the Superman has been brought recently into much notice, some not very
\nfruitful discussion and a good deal of obloquy. It is apt to be resented by
\naverage humanity because men are told or have a lurking consciousness that here
\nis a claim of the few to ascend to heights of which the many are not capable, to
\nconcentrate moral and spiritual privileges and enjoy a domination, powers and
\nimmunities hurtful to a diffused dignity and freedom in mankind. So considered, supermanhood is nothing more important than a deification of the rare or
\nsolitary ego that has out-topped others in the force of our common human
\nqualities. But this presentation is narrow and a travesty. The gospel of true
\nsupermanhood gives us a generous ideal for the progressive human race and should
\nnot be turned into an arrogant claim for a class or individuals. It is a call to
\nman to do what no species has yet done or aspired to do in terrestrial history,
\nevolve itself consciously into the next superior type already half foreseen by
\nthe continual cyclic development of the world-idea in Nature\u2019s fruitful
\nmusings. And when we so envisage it, this conception ranks surely as one of the
\nmost potent seeds that can be cast by thought into the soil of our human growth.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>Nietzsche first cast it, the mystic of Will-worship, the troubled,
\nprofound, half-luminous Hellenising Slav with his strange clarities, his violent
\nhalf-ideas, his rare gleaming intuitions that came marked with the stamp of an
\nabsolute truth and sovereignty of light. But Nietzsche was an apostle who never
\nentirely understood his own message. His prophetic style was like that of the
\nDelphic oracles which spoke constantly the word of the Truth but turned it into
\nuntruth in the mind of the hearer. Not always indeed; for sometimes he rose
\nbeyond his personal temperament and individual mind, his European inheritance
\nand environment, his revolt against the Christ-idea, his war against current
\nmoral values and spoke out the Word as he had heard it,\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-275<\/span>
\n 
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

the
\nTruth as he had seen it, bare, luminous, impersonal and therefore flawless and
\nimperishable. But for the most part, this message that had come to his inner
\nhearing vibrating out of a distant infinite like a strain caught from the lyre
\nof far-off Gods, did get, in his effort to appropriate and make it nearer to
\nhim, mixed up with a somewhat turbulent surge of collateral ideas that drowned
\nmuch of the pure original note.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>Especially, in his concept of the Superman he never cleared his mind of a
\npreliminary confusion. For if a sort of human godhead is the goal to which the
\nrace must advance, the first difficulty is that we have to decide to which of
\ntwo very different types of divinity the idea in us should owe allegiance. For
\nthe deity within may confront us either with the clear, joyous and radiant
\ncountenance of the God or the stern convulsed visage of the Titan. Nietzsche
\nhymned the Olympian, but presented him with the aspect of the Asura. His hostile
\npre-occupation with the Christ-idea of the crucified God and its consequences
\nwas perhaps responsible for this distortion as much as his subjection to the
\nimperfect ideas of the Greeks. He presents to us a super- man who fiercely and
\narrogantly repels the burden of sorrow and service, not one who arises
\nvictorious over mortality and suffering, his ascension vibrant with the
\ntriumph-song of a liberated humanity. To lose the link of Nature\u2019s moral
\nevolution is a capital fault in the apostle of supermanhood; for only out of the
\nunavoidable line of the evolution can that emerge in the bosom of a humanity
\nlong tested, ripened and purified by the fire of egoistic and altruistic
\nsuffering.\n<\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>God and Titan, Deva and Asura, are indeed close kin in their differences;
\nnor could either have been spared in the evolution. Yet do they inhabit opposite
\npoles of a common existence and common nature. The one descends from the light
\nand the infinity, satisfied, to the play; the other ascends from the obscurity
\nand the vagueness, angry, to the struggle. All the acts of the God derive from
\nthe universal and tend to the universal. He was born out of a victorious
\nharmony. His qualities join pure and gracious hands and link themselvs together
\nnaturally and with delight as in the pastoral round of Brindavan, divine Krishna
\ndominating and holding together its perfect circles. To<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-276<\/span>
\n 
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

evolve
\nin the sense of the God is to grow in intuition, in light, in joy, in love, in
\nhappy mastery; to serve by rule and to rule by service; to be able to be bold
\nand swift and even violent without hurt or wickedness and mild and kindly and
\neven self-indulgent without laxity or vice or weakness; to make a bright and
\nhappy whole in oneself and, by sympathy, with mankind and all creatures. And in
\nthe end it is to evolve a large impersonal personality and to heighten sympathy
\ninto constant experience of world- oneness. For such are the Gods, conscious
\nalways of, their universality and therefore divine.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>Certainly, power is included. To be the divine man is to be self-ruler
\nand world-ruler, but in another than the external sense. This is a rule that
\ndepends upon a secret sympathy and oneness which knows the law of another\u2019s
\nbeing and of the world\u2019s being and helps or, if need be, compels it to realise
\nits own greatest possibilities, but by a divine and essentially an inner
\ncompulsion. It is to take all qualities, energies, joys, sorrows, thoughts,
\nknowledge, hopes, aims of the world around us into ourselves and return them
\nenriched and transmuted in a sublime commerce and exploitation. Such an empire
\nasks for no vulgar ostentation or golden trappings. The gods work oftenest
\nveiled by light or by the storm-drift; they do not disdain to live among men
\neven in the garb of the herdsman or the artisan; they do not shrink from the
\ncross and the crown of thorns either in their inner evolution or their outward
\nfortunes. For they know that the ego must be crucified and how shall men consent
\nto this if God and the gods have not shown them the way? To take all that is
\nessential in the human being and uplift it to its most absolute term so that it
\nmay become an element of light, joy, power for oneself and others, this is
\ndivinity. This, too, should be the drift of supermanhood.\n<\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>But the Titan will have nothing of all this; it is too great and subtle
\nfor his comprehension. His instincts call for a visible, tangible mastery and a
\nsensational domination. How shall he feel sure of his empire unless he can feel
\nsomething writhing helpless under his heel,<\/span> \u2014 <\/i>if
\nin agony, so much the better? What is exploitation to him, unless it diminishes
\nthe exploited? To be able to coerce, exact, slay, overtly, irresistibly, <\/span>\u2014 it is this that<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-277<\/span>
\n 
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\nfills
\nhim with the sense of glory and dominion. For he is the son of division and the
\nstrong flowering of the Ego. To feel the comparative limitation of others is
\nnecessary to him that he may imagine himself immeasurable; for he has not the
\nreal self-existent sense of infinity which no outward circumstance can abrogate.
\nContrast, division, negation of the wills and lives of others are essential to
\nhis self-development and self-assertion. The Titan would unify by devouring, not
\nby harmonising; he must conquer and trample what is not himself either out of
\nexistence or into subservience so that his own image may stand out stamped upon
\nall things and dominating all his environment.
\n            In Nature, since it started from division and egoism, the Titan had to come
\nfirst; he is here in us as the elder god, the first ruler of man\u2019s heaven and
\nearth. Then arrives the God and delivers and harmonises. Thus the old legend
\ntells us that the Deva and the Asura laboured together to churn the ocean of
\nlife for the supreme draught of immortality, but, once it had been won, Vishnu
\nkept it for the God and defrauded the fiercer and more violent worker. And this
\nseems unjust; for the Asura has the heavier and less grateful portion of the
\nburden. He begins and leads; he goes his way hewing, shaping, planting: the God
\nfollows, amends, concludes, reaps. He prepares fiercely and with anguish against
\na thousand obstacles the force that we shall use: the other enjoys the victory
\nand the delight. And therefore to the great God Shiva the stained and stormy
\nTitan is very dear, <\/span>\u2014 Shiva who
\ntook for himself the fierce, dark and bitter poison first churned up from the
\nsea of life and left to others the nectar. But the choice that Shiva made with
\nknowledge and from love, the Titans made from darkness and passion,<\/span> \u2014 desirous
\nreally of something very different and deceived by their stormy egoism.
\nTherefore, the award of Vishnu stands, to the God shall fall the crown and the
\nimmortality and not, unless he divinise himself, to the proud and strenuous
\nAsura.
\n 
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

           
\n<\/span>For what is supermanhood but a certain divine and harmonious absolute of
\nall that is essential in man? He is made in God’s image, but there is this
\ndifference between the divine Reality and its human representative that
\neverything which in the one is unlimited, spontaneous, absolute, harmonious,
\nself-<\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage-278<\/span><\/span>
\n 
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

possessed
\nbecomes in the other limited, relative, laboured, discordant, deformed,
\npossessed by struggle, kept by subservience to one’s possessions, lost by the
\ntransience and insecurity which come from wrong holding. But in this constant
\nimperfection there is always a craving and an aspiration towards perfection.
\nMan, limited, yearns to the Infinite; relative, is attracted in all things
\ntowards their absolute; artificial in nature, drives towards a higher ease,
\nmastery and naturalness that must for ever be denied to her inconscient forces
\nand half-conscient animals; full of discords, he insists upon harmony; possessed
\nby Nature and to her enslaved, is yet <\/i>convinced of his mission to possess
\nand master her. What he aspires to is the sign of what he may be. He has to pass
\nby a sort of transmutation of the earthly metal he now is out of flawed manhood
\ninto some higher symbol. For Man is Nature’s great term of transition in which
\nshe grows conscious of her aim; in him she looks up from the animal with open
\neyes towards her divine ideal.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n           
\n<\/span>But God is complex, not simple; and the temptation of the human intellect
\nis to make<\/span> a<\/span> short
\ncut to the divine nature by the exclusive worship of one of its principles.
\nKnowledge, Love whose secret word is Delight, Power and Unity are some of the
\nNames of God. <\/i>But though they are all divine, yet <\/i>to follow any of
\nthem exclusively is to invite, after the first energy is over, His departure
\nfrom us and denial; for even unity, exclusively pursued, ceases to be a true
\noneness. Yet this error we perpetually commit. Is it Love, in whose temple we
\nadore? Then we shut its gates upon Power as a child of the world and the devil
\nand bid Knowledge carry elsewhere her lack of sweetness and remoteness from the
\nheart\u2019s fervour. We erect an idol of Power and would pass all else through the
\nfire of Moloch before its sombre and formidable image, expelling Love with scorn
\nas a nurse of weaklings and degrading Knowledge to the position of a squire or
\neven a groom of Force. Or we cultivate Knowledge with a severe aloofness and
\nausterity to find at last the lotus of the heart dulled and fading,<\/span> \u2014 happy
\nif its more divine faculties are not already atrophied,<\/span> \u2014 and
\nourselves standing impotent with our science while the thunders of Rudra crash
\nthrough and devastate the world we have organised so well by our victorious and
\nclear-<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-279<\/span><\/span>
\n 
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

minded
\nefficiency. Or we run after a vague and mechanical zero we call unity and when
\nwe have sterilised our secret roots and dried up the wells of Life within us,
\ndiscover, unwise unifiers, that we have achieved death and not a greater
\nexistence. And all this happens because we will not recognise the complexity of
\nthe riddle we are set here to solve. It is a great and divine riddle, but it is
\nno knot of Gordius, nor is its all-wise Author a dead King that he should suffer
\nus to mock his intention and cut through to our will with the fierce impatience
\nof the hasty mortal conqueror.<\/p>\n

         
\nNone of these oppositions is more constant than that of Power
\nand Love. Yet neither of these deities can be safely neglected. What can be more
\ndivine than Love? But followed exclusively it is impotent to solve the world\u2019s
\ndiscords. The worshipped Avatar of love and the tender saint of saints leave
\nbehind them a divine but unfollowed example, a luminous and imperishable but
\nineffective memory. They have added an element to the potentialities of the
\nheart, but the race cannot utilise it effectively for life because it has not
\nbeen harmonised with the rest of the qualities that are essential to our
\nfullness. Shall we therefore turn round and give ourselves to Power with its
\niron hands of action and its hard and clear practical intellect? The men of
\npower may say that they have done a more tangible work for their race than the
\nsouls of Love, but it is a vain advantage. For they have not even tried to raise
\nus beyond our imperfect humanity. They have erected a temporary form or given a
\nsecular impetus. An empire has been created, an age or a century organised, but
\nthe level of humanity has not been raised nearer to the secret of a Caesar or a
\nNapoleon. Love fails because it hastily rejects the material of the world’s
\ndiscords or only tramples them underfoot in an unusual ecstasy; Power, because
\nit seeks only to organise an external arrangement. The world\u2019s discords have
\nto be understood, seized, transmuted. Love must call Power and Knowledge into
\nthe temple and seat them beside her in a unified equality; Power must bow its
\nneck to the yoke of Light and Love before it can do any real good to the race.
\nUnity is the secret, a complex, understanding and embra-\n<\/p>\n

\nPage-280<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

cing
\nunity. When the full heart of Love is tranquillised by knowledge into a calm
\necstasy and vibrates with strength, when the strong hands of Power labour for
\nthe world in a radiant fullness of joy and light, when the luminous brain of
\nknowledge accepts and transforms the heart’s obscure inspirations and lends
\nitself to the workings of the high-seated Will, when all these gods are founded
\ntogether on a soul of sacrifice that lives in unity with all the world and
\naccepts all things to transmute them, then is the condition of man\u2019s integral
\nself-transcendence. This and not a haughty, strong and brilliant egoistic
\nself-culture enthroning itself upon an enslaved humanity is the divine way of
\nsuper- manhood.<\/p>\n

\nPage-281<\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Superman                           THE ideal of the Superman has been brought recently into much notice, some not very fruitful discussion and a good deal…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16","wpcat-5-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}