{"id":1552,"date":"2013-07-13T01:35:39","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:35:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1552"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:35:39","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:35:39","slug":"45-evolution-in-the-vedantic-view-vol-18-kena-and-other-upanishads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/18-kena-and-other-upanishads\/45-evolution-in-the-vedantic-view-vol-18-kena-and-other-upanishads","title":{"rendered":"-45_Evolution in the Vedantic View.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

\n

Evolution in the Vedantic View <\/font><\/b>
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

We must not however pass from this idea,1<\/font><\/sup> as it is easy to pass,
\ninto another which is only a popular error,\u2014that evolution is the object of existence. Evolution is not an universal law, it
\nis a particular process, nor as a process has it any very wide applicability. Some would affirm that every particle of matter
\nin the universe is bound to evolve life, mind, an individualised soul, a finally triumphant spirit. The idea is exhilarating, but
\nimpossible. There is no such rigid law, no such self-driven & unintelligent destiny in things. In the conceptions of the Upanishads Brahman in the world is not only Prajna, but Ishwara. He is not subject to law, but uses process. It is only the individual
\nsoul in a state of ignorance on which process seems to impose itself as law. Brahman on the other hand has an omnipotent
\npower of selection and limitation. He is not bound to develop self-conscious individuality in every particle of matter, nor has
\nHe any object in such a colossal and monotonous application of one particular movement of things. He has nothing to gain by
\nevolving, nothing to lose by not evolving. For to Him all being is only a play of His universal self-consciousness, the will so to exist
\nthe only reason of this existence and its own pleasurability its only object in existence. In that play He takes an equal delight in
\nall, He is sama in ananda\u2014an equal delight in the evolved state, the unevolved & the evolving. He is equal also in Being; when
\nHe has evolved Himself in the perfect man, He is no more than He already was in the leaf & clod. To suppose that all existence
\nhas one compelling purpose of growth, of progress, of consummation is to be guilty of the Western error and misunderstand
\nthe nature of being. Existence is already consummate, all change
\n\t\t\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

<\/p>\n

1 It is not known what “idea” Sri Aurobindo is referring to here, or whether the writing<\/i>
\nin which he discussed it has survived.\u2014Ed.<\/i> <\/font> <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 414<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\t\t\t<\/font>
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\n& variety in it is for delight, not for a gain or a development. The Vedantist cannot admit that anything is really developed in
\nthe sense of something new emerging into existence by whatever combination or accident which had no previous being. Nasato
\nvidyate bhavah. That which was not cannot come into existence. The play of Brahman is not in its real nature an evolution, but a
\nmanifestation, it is not an adding of something that was wanting or a developing of something that was non-existent, but merely a
\nmanifesting of something that was hidden. We are already what we shall become. That which is still future in matter, is present
\nin spirit.
\n\t\t\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\nWe say, then, in the Vedanta that if the human form appears
\non earth or the tree grows out of the seed, it is because the human form already exists in the seed that is cast into the womb and
\nthe form and nature of the tree already exists in the seed that is cast into the earth. If there were not this preexistence as idea
\nor implied form in the seed, there would be no reason why any seed should bring forth according to its kind. The form does not
\nindeed exist sensibly in the form of consciousness which we see as matter, but in the consciousness itself it is there, and therefore
\nthere is a predisposition in the matter to produce that form & no other, which is much more than tendency, which amounts to
\na necessity. But how came this preconception into unintelligent matter? The question itself is erroneous in form; for matter is
\nnot unintelligent, but itself a movement of conceiving Spirit. This conceiving Spirit which in man conceives the idea of human
\nform, being one in the mind of the man, in his life principle, in every particle of his body, stamps that conception on the life
\nprinciple so that it becomes very grain of it, stamps it on the material part so that it becomes very grain of it, so that when
\nthe seed is cast into the woman, it enters full of the conception, impregnated with it in the whole totality of its being. We can see
\nhow this works in man; we know how the mental conceptions of the father & mother work powerfully to shape body, life &
\ntemperament of the son. But we do not perceive how this works in the tree, because we are accustomed to dissociate from the tree
\nall idea of mind & even of life. We therefore talk vaguely of the <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 415<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\t\t\t<\/font>
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

law of Nature that the tree shall produce according to its kind without understanding why such a law should exist. Vedanta
\ntells us that the process in the tree is the same as in man, except that mind not being active & self-conscious cannot produce
\nthose variations of delicate possibility which are possible in the human being. The supramental conceiving Spirit stamps,
\nthrough unconscious mind, on the life principle in the tree and on all matter in the tree the conception of its nature & kind so
\nthat the seed falls into earth with every atom of its being full of that secret conception and every moment of the tree’s growth is
\npresided over by the same fixed idea. Not only in thinking man & living tree but in substances in which life & mind are inactive,
\nthis conceiving Spirit presides & determines its law & form. So ‘rthān vyadadhach chhaswatibhyah samabhyah.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n

We must not for a moment imagine that Brahman of the Upanishads is either an extracosmic God entering into a cosmos
\nexternal to Him or that last refuge of the dualising intellect, an immanent God. When Brahman the conceiving Spirit is said
\nto be in life & mind and matter, it is only as the poet is said to be in his own thought and creations; as a man muses in
\nhis mind, as the river pours forward in swirls & currents. It would be easy, by quoting isolated texts from the Upanishads,
\nto establish on them any system whatever; for the sages of the Upanishads have made it their business to see Brahman in many
\naspects, from many standpoints, to record all the most important fundamental experiences which the soul has when it comes into
\ncontact with the All, the Eternal. This they did with the greater freedom because they knew that in the fundamental truth of this
\nAll & Eternal, the most varied & even contradictory experiences found their harmony & their relative truth and necessity to each
\nother. The Upanishads are Pantheistic, because they consider the whole universe to be Brahman, yet not Pantheistic because
\nthey regard Brahman as transcendental, exceeding the universe & in his final truth other than phenomena. They are Theistic
\nbecause they consider Brahman as God & Lord of His universe, immanent in it, containing it, governing & arranging it; yet not
\nTheistic because they regard the world also as God, containing <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 416<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\t\t\t<\/font>
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\nHimself & dwelling in Himself. They are polytheistic because they acknowledge the existence, power & adorability of
\nSurya-Agni, Indra and a host of other deities; yet not polytheistic, because they regard them as only powers and names & personalities of the one Brahman. Thus it is possible for the Isha Upanishad to open with the idea of the indwelling God, Isha
\nvasyam jagat, to continue with the idea of the containing Brahman, Tasminn apo Matariswa dadhati, and at the same time
\nto assert the world, the jagat, also as Brahman, Tad ejati, sa paryagat. That this catholicity was not born of incoherence of
\nthinking is evident from the deliberate & precise nicety [of] statement both in the Gita & the Upanishad. The Gita continually dwells on God in all things, yet it says Naham teshu te mayi, “I am not in them, they are in me”; and again it says God
\nis Bhutabhrit not bhutastha, and yet na cha matsthani bhutani pashya me yogam aishwaram. “I bear up creatures in myself, I
\ndo not dwell in them; they exist in me, & yet they do not exist in me; behold my divine Yoga.” The Upanishads similarly dwell on
\nthe coexistence of contradictory attributes in Brahman, nirguno guni, anejad ekam manaso javiyo, tadejati tannaijati. All this
\nis perfectly intelligible & reconcilable, provided we never lose sight of the key word, the master thought of the Upanishads,
\nthat Brahman is not a Being with fixed attributes, but absolute Being beyond attributes yet, being absolute, capable of all, and
\nthe world a phenomenal arrangement of attributes in Intelligent Being, arranged not logically & on a principle of mutual exclusion, but harmoniously on a principle of mutual balancing & reconciliation. God’s immanence & God’s extramanence, God’s
\nidentity with things & God’s transcendence of things, God’s personality & God’s impersonality, God’s mercy & God’s cruelty
\n& so on through all possible pairs of opposites, all possible multiplicity of aspects, are but the two sides of the same coin,
\nare but different views of the same scene & incompatible or inharmonious to our ideas only so long as we do not see the
\nentire entity, whole vision. <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n In Himself therefore God has arranged all objects according
\nto their nature from years sempiternal. He has fixed from the <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 417<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\t\t\t<\/font>
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

beginning the relations of his movements in matter, mind and life. The principle of diversity in unity governs all of them. The
\nworld is not comprised of many substances combining variously into many forms,\u2014like the elements of the chemist, which now
\nturn out not to be elements,\u2014nor yet of many substances composing by fusion one substance,\u2014as hydrogen & oxygen seem
\nto compose water,\u2014but is always & eternally one substance variously concentrated into many elements, innumerable atoms,
\nmultitudinous forms. There are not many lives composing by their union & fusion or by any other sort of combination one
\ncomposite life, as pluralistic theories tend to suppose, but always & eternally one Life variously active in multitudinous substantial bodies. There are not many minds acting upon each other, mutually penetrative and tending to or consciously seeking unity,
\nas romantic theories of being suppose, but always & eternally one mind variously intelligent in innumerable embodied vitalities. It is because of this unity that there is the possibility of contact, interchange, interpenetration and recovery of unity by
\n& between substance & substance, life & life, mind and mind. The contact & union is the result of oneness; the oneness is not
\nthe result of contact & union. This world is not in its reality a sum of things but one unalterable transcendental integer showing itself to us phenomenally as many apparent fractions of itself,\u2014fractional appearances simultaneous in manifestation, related
\nin experience. The mind & sense deal with the fractions, proceed from the experience of fractions to the whole; necessarily,
\ntherefore, they arrive at the idea of an eternal sum of things; but this totality of sum is merely a mental symbol, necessary to the
\nmind’s computations of existence. When we rise higher, we find ourselves confronted with a unity which is transcendental, an
\nindivisible and incomputable totality. That is Parabrahman, the Absolute. All our thoughts, perceptions, experiences are merely
\nsymbols by which the Absolute is phenomenally represented to the movements of its own Awareness conditioned as matter, life,
\nmind or supermind.
\n\t\t\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n

Just as each of these tattwas, principles of being, movements
\nof Chit, conditions of Ananda which we call life, matter, mind, <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 418<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\t\t\t<\/font>
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\nare eternally one in themselves embracing a diversity of mere transient forms & individual activities which emerge from, abide
\nin & one day return into their totality, material form into the substance of the pancha bhutas, individual life into the oceanic
\nsurge of the world-pervading life principle, individual mind, whenever that is dissolved, into the secret sukshmatattwa or
\nsea of subtle mind-existence, so also these three tattwas & all others that may exist are a diversity embraced in an eternal unity\u2014the unity of Brahman. It is Brahman who moves densely as the stability of matter, forcefully as the energy of life, elastically
\nin the subtlety of mind. Just as different vibrations in ether produce the appearances to sense which we call light & sound,
\nso different vibrations in Chit produce the various appearances to Chit which we call matter, life & mind. It is all merely the
\nextension of the same principle through stair & higher stair of apparent existence until, overcoming all appearances, we come
\nto the still & unvibrating Brahman who, as we say in our gross material language, contains it all. The Sankhya called this essential vibration the kshobha, disturbance in Prakriti, cosmic ripple in Nature. The Vedanta continually speaks of the world
\nas a movement. The Isha speaks of things as jagatyam jagat, particular movement in the general movement of conscious Being steadily viewed <\/i>by that Being in His own self-knowledge, atmani atmanam atmana, self by self in self. This is the motion
\n& nature of the Universe.
\n\t\t\t<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n This then is Matter, a particular movement of the Brahman,
\none stream, one ocean of His consciousness fixed in itself as the substance of form. This is life, mind; other movements, other
\nsuch streams or oceans active as material of thought & vitality. But if they are separate, though one, how is it that they do not
\nflow separately\u2014for obviously in some way they meet, they intermingle, they have relations. Life here evolves in body; mind
\nhere evolves in vitalised substance. It is not enough to say, as we have said, that the conception of Brahman is stamped in grain
\nof mind, through mind in grain of life, through life in grain of matter & so produces particular form. For what we actually start
\nwith seems to be not life moulding matter, but life evolving out <\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 419<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\t\t\t<\/font>
\n\t\t\t<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

of matter or at least in matter. Afterwards, no doubt, its needs & circumstances react on matter & help to mould it. Even if we
\nsuppose the first moulding to be only latent life and mind, the primacy of matter has to be explained.
\n<\/span> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tPage – 420<\/font><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Evolution in the Vedantic View   We must not however pass from this idea,1 as it is easy to pass, into another which is only…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-18-kena-and-other-upanishads","wpcat-35-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552","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=1552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1552\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}