Volume VI, Issue 10
Author: Nolini Kanta Gupta
Editor’s Note: Sri Aurobindo, the Avatar of the Future, has opened the possibility for the transmutation of earthly existence. The present existence composed of the particles of entities such as ignorance and sorrow and incapacity will be replaced by one with entities of light and joy and love, of peace and strength and wideness. In this short essay, Nolini Kanta Gupta elaborates on this supreme and inevitable destiny. Originally titled ‘Towards the Future’, it is excerpted from Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta, Vol. 2, pp. 303-304.
We open with a passage from Sri Aurobindo:
“Man, limited, yearns to the Infinite; relative, is attracted in all things towards their absolute; artificial in Nature, drives towards a higher ease, mastery and naturalness that must for ever be denied to her inconscient forces and half-conscient animals; full of discords, he insists upon harmony; possessed by Nature and to her enslaved, is yet convinced of his mission to possess and master her.
“What he aspires to, is the sign of what he may be. He has to pass by a sort of transmutation of the earthly metal he now is out of flawed manhood into some higher symbol. For Man is Nature’s great term of transition in which she grows conscious of her aim; in him she looks up from the animal with open eyes towards her divine ideal.”
The Buddhists consider being as a stream of consciousness, a ceaseless flow of sensations. An individual formation, a creature, a human person has no permanent self-identity. It is like the Heraclitean river where one does not bathe twice in the same water.
Besides, what is more interesting, it is not an uninterrupted continuous flow with no gap or hiatus, but a movement of disconnected units. It is an unending series of disparate moments of consciousness. The sense of continuity is a make-believe, an illusion.
We know today, thanks to modern science, of the mystery of particles. The ultimate constituents of the material world consist of particles (or wave-particles), that is to say, packets of material energy strung together or merely juxtaposed, but held together somehow. Now the Buddhists added that these are particles of energy no doubt, but the energy is not mere material, i.e., electrical energy; they are desire-energy. Human being or consciousness is an aggregate of cells of desire-energy. The task man has before him—the alchemy or laboratory work man is to do is to empty the cells of desire and so annihilate them; desire gone, cells crumble away—existence becomes Nihil—an inexpressible stillness or tranquillity.
From Renaissance Archives:
Human Destiny: A Critical Choice
There is however another solution. The cells can be emptied of desire, but a new element can be put in the place of desire or desire itself can be transmuted.
Science speaks of the transmutation of material particles, i.e., of material mass into energy—electric, kinetic or radiant energy. An inert mass thus becomes a light particle. And we may conceive of a material body becoming a luminous body, the human form a globe of light.
Yoga envisages precisely such a consummation. But the process is somewhat different. The equation here is not E=mc² but M=C?, M meaning transmuted Matter; the transformation of Matter not into mere energy but into Consciousness, Energy of the Spirit. This happens when the material particle is raised to the potency of infinite Consciousness.
Pursuing the mathematical imagery we may describe the Buddhist equation as desire raised to the power of zero equals Nirvana: D°=Zero. Buddha thought like that. He thought annihilation of desire means annihilation of existence, for he equated desire with existence. But mathematics tells us that anything raised to the power of zero is not zero but one, that is, the unit, the pure existence—Sat (or Sachchidananda as the Vedantists say).
Science and mathematics tell us today of a truth or just point to a truth which a spiritual realisation reveals. It is, as I have already said, the mystery of transformation, or transubstantiation as the Christian faith figures it.
Read more by Nolini Kanta Gupta
This world, this material existence is to be transmuted—the portion of earthly human existence at least, with which we are most concerned. It is at present made of ignorance and sorrow and incapacity, composed of the particles of these entities; poor and sorry as they are, these have to be replaced by entities of light and joy and love, of peace and strength and wideness.
Well, it is a transmutation or transubstantiation of the kind which Nature has already attempted as an experiment; I am referring to the alchemy of fossilisation. The present human formation must be dipped and soaked and held under high pressure in an environment of the desired material or materials that one has in view.
Such an environment does exist. It is pressing from within or from above and is heading towards a resultant material action. It is an awakened dynamic spiritual reality which awaits and is working for its supreme and inevitable destiny.
~ Design: Beloo Mehra
