{"id":1618,"date":"2013-07-13T01:36:02","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:36:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1618"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:36:02","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:36:02","slug":"37-rebirth-and-soul-evolution-vol-13-essays-in-philosophy-and-yoga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/13-essays-in-philosophy-and-yoga\/37-rebirth-and-soul-evolution-vol-13-essays-in-philosophy-and-yoga","title":{"rendered":"-37_Rebirth and Soul Evolution.html"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\t\t\tRebirth and Soul Evolution <\/font><\/b>
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\n\t\t\tT<\/font>HE IDEAS<\/b> that men currently form about life and things are for the most part pragmatic constructions They are forms of a reason which is concerned with giving only such a serviceable account to itself of its surroundings as shall make a sufficient clue to our immediate business of the growth, action, satisfaction of the personality, something feasible, livable, effective for our journeying in Time, something viable in the twofold French sense of the word Whether it corresponds to or is directly in touch with any real reality of things seems to be very much a matter of accident It seems to be sufficient if we can persuade our facile and complaisant reason of its truth and find it serviceable and fruitful in consequences for thought, action and life-experience It is true that there is another unpragmatic reason in us which labours to get rid of this demand of the intellectual and vital personality; it wants to look at the real truth of things without veils and without any object, to mirror the very image of Truth in the still waters of a dispassionate, clear and pure mentality But the workings of this calmer greater reason are hampered by two tremendous difficulties First, it seems next to impossible to disengage it entirely from the rest of ourselves, from the normal intellectuality, from the will to believe, from that instinct of the intelligence which helps the survival, by a sort of subtle principle of preference and selection, of the way of thinking that suits our personal bent or the accomplished frame of our nature And again, what is the Truth that our reason mirrors? It is after all some indirect image of Truth, not her very self and body seen face to face; it is an image moulded from such data, symbol, process of Reality,
\n\t\t\t\u2014if any real Reality there is, \u2014as we can gather from the very limited experience of self and existing things open to human mind So that unless there be some means by which knowledge can burst through all veils  
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\n\t\t\tto the experience of the very Reality itself, or unless there be some universal Logos, divine Mind or Supermind, which knows itself and all things and our consciousness can reflect or get into touch with that, a pursuing insufficiency and uncertainty must always keep its baffling grasp upon even the highest power and largest walk of our reason and beset all the labour of human knowledge.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNowhere are these disabilities more embarrassing than in those fundamental questions of the nature of the world and of our own existence which yet most passionately interest thinking humanity because this is in the end the thing of utmost importance to us, since everything else, except some rough immediate practicality of the moment, depends on its solution And even that, until this great question is settled, is only a stumbling forward upon a journey of which we know not the goal or the purpose, the meaning or the necessity The religions profess to solve these grand problems with an inspired or revealed certainty; but the enormity of their differences shows that in them too there is a selection of ideas, separate aspects of the Truth,
\n\t\t\t\u2014the sceptic would say, shows of imagination and falsehood, \u2014and a construction from a limited spiritual experience In them too there is an element of chosen and willed believing and some high pragmatic aim and utility, whether that be the soul’s escape from the sorrow or unreality of existence or celestial bliss or a religio-ethical sanction and guidance The philosophical systems are very obviously only feasible selective constructions of great reflective ideas More often these are possibilities of the reason much rather than assured certainties or, if founded on spiritual experience, they are still selective constructions, a sort of great architectural approach to some gate into unknowable Divine or ineffable Infinite The modern scientific mind professed to rid us of all mere intellectual constructions and put us face to face with truth and with assured truth only; it claimed the right to rid man of the fantastic encumbrance of religion and the nebulous futilities of metaphysical philosophy But religion and philosophy have now turned upon science and convicted her, on her own statement of facts, of an equal liability to the two  
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\n\t\t\tuniversal difficulties of human reason The system of science seems to be itself only another feasible and fruitful construction of the reason giving a serviceable account to itself of the physical world and our relations to it, and it seems to be nothing more And its knowledge is fatally bound by the limitation of its data and its outlook Science too creates only a partial image of Truth stamped with a character of much uncertainty and still more clearly imprinted with the perverse hallmark of insufficiency.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWe have to recognise that human reason, moving as it does from a starting-point of ignorance and in a great environing circle of ignorance, must proceed by hypothesis, assumption and theory subject to verification of some kind convincing to our reason and experience But there is this difference that the religious mind accepts the theory or assumption,
\n\t\t\t\u2014to which it does not at all give these names, for they are to it things felt,
\n\t\t\t\u2014with faith, with a will of belief, with an emotional certainty, and finds its verification in an increasing spiritual intuition and experience The philosophic mind accepts it calmly and discerningly for its coherent agreement with the facts and necessities of being; it verifies by a pervading and unfailing harmony with all the demands of reason and intellectualised intuition But the sceptical mind
\n\t\t\t\u2014not the mind of mere doubt or dogmatic denial which usually arrogates that name, but the open and balanced mind of careful, impartial and reserved inquiry,
\n\t\t\t\u2014gives a certain provisional character to its hypotheses, and it verifies by the justification of whatever order or category of ascertainable facts it takes for its standard of proof and invests with a character of decisive authority or reality There is room enough for all three methods and there is no reason why our complex modern mind should not proceed simultaneously by all of them at once For if the sceptical or provisional attitude makes us more ready to modify our image of Truth in the light of new material of thought and knowledge, the religious mind also, provided it keeps a certain firm and profound openness to new spiritual experience, can proceed faster to a larger and larger light, and meanwhile we can walk by it with an assured step and go securely about our principal business of the growth and perfection of our being The  
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\n\t\t\tphilosophic mind has the use of giving a needed largeness and openness to our mentality,
\n\t\t\t\u2014if it too does not narrow itself by a closed circle of metaphysical dogma,
\n\t\t\t\u2014and supports besides the harmony of our other action by the orderly assent of the higher reason.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn this matter of the soul and rebirth the initial hypothesis now lies quite open to us; the barrier has fallen For if there is one thing now certain it is that physical science may give clues of process, but cannot lay hold on the reality of things That means that the physical is not the whole secret of world and existence, and that in ourselves too the body is not the whole of our being It is then through something supraphysical in Nature and ourselves which we may call the soul, whatever the exact substance of soul may be, that we are likely to get that greater truth and subtler experience which will enlarge the narrow rigid circle traced by physical science and bring us nearer to the Reality There is nothing now to bar the most rational mind,
\n\t\t\t\u2014for true rationalism, real free thought need no longer be identified, as it was for some time too hastily and intolerantly, with a denial of the soul and a scouting of the truths of spiritual philosophy and religion,
\n\t\t\t\u2014there is nothing to prevent us from proceeding firmly upon whatever certitudes of spiritual experience have become to us the soil of our inner growth or the pillars on our road to self-knowledge These are soul realities But the exact frame we shall give to that knowledge, will best be built by farther spiritual experience aided by new enlarged intuitions, confirmed in the suggestions of a wide philosophic reason and fruitfully using whatever helpful facts we may get from the physical and the psychic sciences These are truths of soul process; their full light must come by experimental knowledge and observation of the world without us and the world within.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe admission of the soul’s existence does not of itself lead, by its own necessity, by any indispensable next step, to the acceptance of rebirth It will only bring in this indispensable consequence if there is such a thing as a soul evolution which enforces itself always and is a constant part of the order of existence and the law of the time process Moreover some kind
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\n\t\t\tof admission of an individual soul is a first condition of the truth \t\t\tof rebirth For there is a plausible theory of existence which
\n\t\t\tadmits an All-Soul, a universal being and becoming of which \t\t\tthe material world is some sensible result, but does not admit any
\n\t\t\tat all abiding truth of our spiritual individuality The All-Soul may continually develop, may slowly yet urgently evolve its
\n\t\t\tbecoming; but each individual man or apparent individual \t\t\tbeing is to this way of thinking only a moment of the All-Soul and
\n\t\t\tits evolution; out of that it rises by the formation which \t\t\twe call birth and it sinks back into it by the dissolution which we
\n\t\t\tcall death But this limiting idea can only stand if we credit \t\t\ta creative biological evolution and its instrument of physical
\n\t\t\theredity with the whole causation of all our mental and spiritual \t\t\tbeing; but in that case we have no real soul or spirit, our soul
\n\t\t\tpersonality or spiritual becoming is a fruit of our life and body \t\t\tNow the question of rebirth turns almost entirely upon the one
\n\t\t\tfundamental question of the past of the individual being and its \t\t\tfuture If the creation of the whole nature is to be credited to the
\n\t\t\tphysical birth, then the body, life and soul of the individual \t\t\tare only a continuation of the body, life and soul of his ancestry,
\n\t\t\tand there is no room anywhere for soul rebirth The individual \t\t\tman has no past being independent of them and can have no
\n\t\t\tindependent future; he can prolong himself in his progeny, \u2014the \t\t\tchild may be his second or continued self, as the Upanishad puts it,
\n\t\t\t\u2014but there is no other rebirth for him No continued stream \t\t\tof individuality presided over by any mental or spiritual person
\n\t\t\tvictoriously survives the dissolution of the body On the other \t\t\thand, if there is any element in us, still more the most important
\n\t\t\tof all, which cannot be so accounted for, but presupposes a past \t\t\tor admits a future evolution other than that of the race mind and
\n\t\t\tthe physical ancestry, then some kind of soul birth becomes \t\t\ta logical necessity.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNow it is just here that the claims of physical
\n\t\t\tand vital \t\t\tevolution and heredity seem to fail, \u2014as a cause of our whole mental
\n\t\t\tand spiritual being Certainly it has been shown that our \t\t\tbody and the most physical part of our life action are very largely
\n\t\t\tthe results of heredity, but not in such a way as to exclude an  
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\n\t\t\tassisting and perhaps really predominant psychical cause other than
\n\t\t\tthe ancestral contribution It has been shown if you will \t\t\tthat our conscious vitality and those parts of mind which depend
\n\t\t\tupon it, something of temperament, something of character, certain impulses and predispositions, are to a great extent shaped
\n\t\t\t\u2014or
\n\t\t\tis it only influenced? \u2014by evolutionary heredity; but not \t\t\tthat they are entirely due to this force, not that there is no soul,
\n\t\t\tno spiritual entity which accepts and makes use of this \t\t\tinstrumentation, but is not its created result or helplessly subject
\n\t\t\tto it in its becoming Still more are the higher parts of our mind \t\t\tmarked with a certain stamp of spiritual independence They are not
\n\t\t\taltogether helpless formations of evolutionary heredity But \t\t\tstill all these things are evidently very much under the influence
\n\t\t\tof environment and its pressures and opportunities And we may \t\t\tdraw from that, if we choose, a limiting conclusion; we may say that
\n\t\t\tthey are a phase of the universal soul, a part of the process \t\t\tof its evolution by selection; the race, not the individual, is the
\n\t\t\tcontinuous factor and all our individual effort and acquisition, \t\t\tonly in appearance, not really independent, ceases with death,
\n\t\t\texcept so much of our gain as is chosen to be carried on in the \t\t\trace by some secret will or conscious necessity in the universal
\n\t\t\tbeing or the persistent becoming.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut when we come to our highest spiritual elements, we find that
\n\t\t\there we do arrive at a very clear and sovereign independence We can carry on far beyond any determination by
\n\t\t\tenvironment or the pressure of the race-soul our own soul \t\t\tevolution by the governing force of our spiritual nature Quite
\n\t\t\tapart from any evidence of an after-life on other planes or any \t\t\tmemory of past births, this is sufficient warrant for a refusal to
\n\t\t\taccept as sufficient any theory of the ephemeral being of \t\t\tthe individual and the sole truth of the evolutionary Universal
\n\t\t\tCertainly, the individual being is not thereby shown to be independent of the All-Soul; it may be nothing but a form of it in time
\n\t\t\tBut it is sufficient for our purpose that it is a persistent soul \t\t\tform, not determined by the life of the body and ceasing with its
\n\t\t\tdissolution, but persisting independently beyond For if it is \t\t\tthus independent of the physical race continuity in the future, if  
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\n\t\t\tit thus shows itself capable of determining its own future soul
\n\t\t\tevolution in time, it must have had secretly such an independent existence all through and it must have been determining in
\n\t\t\treality, though no doubt by some other and indirect insistence, \t\t\tits past soul evolution too in time Possibly it may exist in the
\n\t\t\tAll-Soul only during the universal continuity, may have arisen \t\t\tfrom it in that, may pass into it eventually Or on the contrary it
\n\t\t\tmay exist in it prior to, or it is better to say, independent of \t\t\tthe universal continuity, and there may be some kind of eternal
\n\t\t\tindividual But it is sufficient for the theory of rebirth that a \t\t\tsecret soul continuity of the individual does exist and not alone a
\n\t\t\tbrute succession of bodies informed by the All-Soul with a \t\t\tquite ephemeral illusion of mental or spiritual individuality.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThere
\n\t\t\tare theories of existence which accept the individual \t\t\tsoul, but not soul evolution There is, for instance, that singular
\n\t\t\tdogma of a soul without a past but with a future, created by the \t\t\tbirth of the body but indestructible by the death of the body But
\n\t\t\tthis is a violent and irrational assumption, an imagination \t\t\tunverified and without verisimilitude It involves the difficulty of
\n\t\t\ta creature beginning in time but enduring through all eternity, an immortal being dependent for its existence on an act of
\n\t\t\tphysical generation, yet itself always and entirely unphysical \t\t\tand independent of the body which results from the generation These
\n\t\t\tare objections insuperable to the reason But there is too \t\t\tthe difficulty that this soul inherits a past for which it is in no
\n\t\t\tway responsible, or is burdened with mastering propensities \t\t\timposed on it not by its own act, and is yet responsible for its
\n\t\t\tfuture which is treated as if it were in no way determined by that \t\t\toften deplorable inheritance, damnosa hereditas<\/i>, or that
\n\t\t\tunfair creation, and were entirely of its own making We are made \t\t\thelplessly what we are and are yet responsible for what we are,
\n\t\t\t\u2014or
\n\t\t\tat least for what we shall be hereafter, which is inevitably \t\t\tdetermined to a large extent by what we are originally And we have
\n\t\t\tonly this one chance Plato and the Hottentot, the fortunate child of saints or Rishis and the born and trained criminal
\n\t\t\tplunged from beginning to end in the lowest fetid corruption of \t\t\ta great modern city have equally to create by the action or belief  
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\n\t\t\tof this one unequal life all their eternal future This is a paradox
\n\t\t\twhich offends both the soul and the reason, the ethical sense \t\t\tand the spiritual intuition.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThere is too the kindred idea, behind
\n\t\t\twhich a truth obscurely \t\t\tglimmers, that the soul of man is something high, pure and great
\n\t\t\twhich has fallen into the material existence and by its use of its \t\t\tnature and its acts in the body must redeem itself, must return to
\n\t\t\tits own celestial nature But it is evident that this one earthly \t\t\tlife is not sufficient for all to effect that difficult return, but
\n\t\t\trather most may and do miss it entirely; and we have then either \t\t\tto suppose that an immortal soul can perish or be doomed to eternal
\n\t\t\tperdition or else that it has more existences than this \t\t\tpoor precarious one apparently given to it, lives or states of being
\n\t\t\twhich intervene between its fall and the final working out \t\t\tof a sure redemption But the first supposition is subject to all
\n\t\t\tthe difficulties of that other paradox Apart from the problem \t\t\tof the reason of the descent, it is difficult to see how straight
\n\t\t\tfrom celestial being these different souls should have lapsed \t\t\timmediately to such immense differences of gradation in their fall
\n\t\t\tand in such a way that each is responsible for the otherwise \t\t\tcruel and unequal conditions under which he has to determine so
\n\t\t\tsummarily his eternal future Each must surely have had a \t\t\tpast which made him responsible for his present conditions, if he is
\n\t\t\tto be held thus strictly to account for all their results and the \t\t\tuse he makes of his often too scanty, grudging and sometimes quite
\n\t\t\thopeless opportunity The very nature of our humanity \t\t\tsupposes a varying constituent past for the soul as well as a
\n\t\t\tresultant future.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tMore reasonable therefore is a recent theory which suggests that a
\n\t\t\tspirit or mental being has descended from another and \t\t\tgreater plane and taken up the material existence when the physical
\n\t\t\tand the animal evolution had proceeded far enough for a \t\t\thuman embodiment upon earth to be possible He looks back to a long
\n\t\t\tseries of human lives, beginning from that point, which \t\t\thas brought each of us to his present condition, and forward to a
\n\t\t\tstill continuing series which will carry all by their own degrees \t\t\tand in their own time to whatever completion, transfiguration,  
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\n\t\t\treturn awaits the self-embodying human soul and is the crown of its
\n\t\t\tlong endeavour But here again, what is it that brings about \t\t\tthis connection of a spiritual being and higher mental nature and a
\n\t\t\tphysical being and lower animal nature? what necessitates this \t\t\ttaking up of the lower life by the spirit which here becomes man? It
\n\t\t\twould seem surely that there must have been some previous \t\t\tconnection; the possessing mental or spiritual being must all the
\n\t\t\ttime have been preparing this lower life it thus occupies for a \t\t\thuman manifestation The whole evolution would then be an ordered
\n\t\t\tcontinuity from the beginning and the intervention of \t\t\tmind and spirit would be no sudden inexplicable miracle, but a
\n\t\t\tcoming forward of that which was always there behind, an open \t\t\ttaking up of the manifested life by a power which was always
\n\t\t\tsecretly presiding over the life evolution.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tWhat this theory of rebirth supposes is an evolution of being in the
\n\t\t\tmaterial world from matter to embodied mind and a universal spirit which ensouls this evolution, while our individual
\n\t\t\tspirits exist in the universal and follow their upward course to \t\t\twhatever purposed consummation or liberation or both may beckon to
\n\t\t\tus at its end Much more than this it may mean, but \t\t\tthis at least; a soul evolution the real fact, an assumption of
\n\t\t\thigher and higher forms the first appearance We might indeed \t\t\tallow a past and future for the human soul, but place them below and
\n\t\t\tabove this terrestrial plane and admit only one casual \t\t\tor purposeful existence upon earth But this would mean two orders
\n\t\t\tof progressive existence unconnected and yet meeting for \t\t\ta brief moment There would be an errant individual human soul
\n\t\t\tintervening in the ordered terrestrial evolution and almost immediately passing out without any connecting cause or necessity But
\n\t\t\tespecially it leaves insufficiently explained the phenomenon \t\t\tof the largely terrestrial animal being and nature of this spiritual
\n\t\t\tand supra-terrestrial entity, this soul, its struggle for
\n\t\t\tliberation, \t\t\tand the infinitely varying degrees in which in different bodies it
\n\t\t\thas succeeded in dominating the lower nature A past terrestrial \t\t\tsoul evolution sufficiently accounting for these variations and
\n\t\t\tdegrees of our mixed being and a future soul evolution that \t\t\thelps us progressively to liberate the godhead of the spirit, seem  
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\n\t\t\tthe only just and reasonable explanation of this labour of a
\n\t\t\tmatter-shackled soul which has attained a variable degree of \t\t\thumanity in the midst of a general progressive appearance of the
\n\t\t\tlife, mind and spirit in a material universe Rebirth is the \t\t\tonly possible machinery for such a soul evolution.<\/span><\/p>\n

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