Volume VI, Issue 11-12
Author: Shraddhanjali Nayak
Editor’s Note: Man is a transitional being, says Sri Aurobindo. Read this reflection on the next inevitable step in the evolution, the coming of a new species.
Human being has been on a never-ending exploration of the unknown. He has been hopping from one milestone to another. But he has failed to reach to something which is fundamentally absolute and absolutely fundamental.
The quest of science for the most fundamental particle or energy field has led to pathbreaking discoveries. Scientific mind now also acknowledges the possibility of a higher consciousness to which a deeper self-culture (spiritual seeking, by another name) can access and which can give one a sense of deep meaning to an otherwise mechanistic life.
But mankind is still baffled by questions about creation, purpose and the absolute knowledge. From his early days man has evolved and travelled a journey of millions of years. He has developed science, arts, philosophy, literature, spirituality and more. But he has still not figured it all out.
Read:
Human Destiny – A Critical Choice
Every new discovery of science has an upgrade and every concept of spirituality is interpretative and subjective. What is then fundamental and absolute? In this whole process of trying to figure out the unknown when we pause and orient our intriguing gaze to ourselves, a hard hitting realisation stares us into our face. We are not the final creation of nature.
We are after all, a species, one among many. Human species is not where nature punctuates its evolutionary saga with a full stop. Mankind, today sitting on the pinnacle of its civilization, having understood laws of nature by means of objective validation and scrupulous understanding through science, having discovered plethora of means to tackle his life challenges, having witnessed zeniths in arts, literature, social set-up and having established new vertices every day in the growth of technology to a point of incorporating automated intelligence in artificial systems is still a helpless creature in front of the mystery of the universe. Man looks outward at the universe and try to find its mechanism but fails to understand its own doom.
We don’t need any complicated analysis. A simple understanding of the evolutionary process of nature can help us understand this hard-hitting realization as an inevitable fact. Let us look at things logically.
The primordial substance, the crust which appeared on the earth is matter: matter with no movement on its own will because it had no life force in it. Then, arrived the microorganisms and plant life, which along with the previous element of matter, now had a new element in them called life. This life force brought the ability to grow, to expand, to move but not a complete free movement and with the inability to understand and emote.
Sri Aurobindo on
The Evolutionary Crisis and Human Destiny
It was time for another step in the evolutionary ladder by bringing out the animals. The animals carried within them, the previous elements of matter and life with the incorporation of a new element: mind. This new species had free movement. It had an ability to emote and a mind to exploit for its benefits, though not fully.
We can see that each species carries the previous elements of its predecessors with a new developed element. The advent of human being was monumental as this species came with the instillation of the mundane element of ‘matter’, the vital force of ‘life’ and the explorative and highly functional capacity of ‘mind’. If you consider a human to be an electronic device then the hardware is matter, the electronic energy is life and the software is mind.
So, if there is a species coming after human being, what will be the next element that would be incorporated in it? Though we may not exactly term it, but definitely the next essence will be ‘beyond mind’. The next species may have sheer intuitive capacity as an ordinary attribute. It might have hold on the absolute knowledge. What our mind today experiences as higher order skills might be an ordinary mundane function for it.
More than a century ago, Sri Aurobindo, in his book “The Life Divine” and other timeless marvelous works, terms the next evolutionary essence as Supermind and the next species as Superman.
Also read:
Sri Aurobindo’s Concept of Evolution and Superman
Sri Aurobindo writes in his work “Essays Divine and Human”,
“Man may himself become the superman, he may become all that he is not now; but for that he must exceed himself… He must discover and release the spiritual godhead within him, realise his divine possibilities, be himself the giant potential something, the divine someone who has been struggling into emergence out of the original plasm that imprisoned it since began the mystery of terrestrial Nature.”
Words like divine, spiritual godhead might not seem to resonate with the logical pathway the rational mind has followed to understand evolutionary process. But haven’t we all, at some point in our lives felt or experienced something which fails to be analyzed by reason or logic? Of course, we have. Faith, intuition, meditative experiences and many more such experiences are not yet completely understood by the rational mind. Possibilities can exist beyond the rational mind. This might be the next essence which nature wants to incorporate in the upcoming species.
An upgrade of the human software, an upgrade of the human mind, is the next step in the evolutionary process. With new faculties beyond mind, the new species might be closer to understanding man’s primeval quest of creation, purpose and the absolute knowledge.
About the author:
Hailing from Odisha, Shraddhanjali Nayak has been working as a Chemistry lecturer since 2016. A devotee of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo, she has been pursuing their written works to understand their Vision of the Future. She does not experience any conflict between her work as a science educator or a scientific researcher and her complete faith in Sri Aurobindo’s futuristic vision for human race.
~ Design: Beloo Mehra
