<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>5.htm</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=windows-1252">
</head>
<body>

<table border="0" width="100%" cellpadding="6">
	<tr>
		<td>
		<p align="center" style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
		<b>
		<font face="Times New Roman"><i>Evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness</i> </font>
		</b>
		<p align="justify" style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
		&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">EVEN the Vedic Rishis used to refer to the ancients, more
ancient than they themselves. &quot;The ancients&quot;, they said,
&quot;worshipped Agni, we too the moderns in our turn worship
the same godhead&quot;.<b> </b> Or again, &quot;Thus spoke our forefathers&quot;;&nbsp; or, &quot;So have we heard from those who have gone before us&quot;
and so on. </font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Indeed, the tradition in the domain of spiritual discipline
seems to have been always to realise once again what has
already been realised by others, to rediscover what has already
been discovered, to re-establish ancient truths. Others have
gone before on the Path, we have only to follow. The teaching,
the realisation is handed down uninterruptedly through
millenniums from Master to disciple. In other words, the
idea is that the fundamental spiritual realisation remains the
'same always and everywhere: the name and the form only
. vary according to the age and the surroundings. The one
reality is called variously, says the Veda. Who can say when
was the first dawn! The present dawn has followed the track
of the infinite series that has gone by and is the first of the
infinite series that is to come. So sings Rishi Kanwa. For the
core of spiritual realisation is to possess the consciousness,
attain the status of the Spirit. This Spirit may be called God
by the theist or Nihil by the Negativist or Brahman (the One)
by the Positivist (spiritual). But the essential experience of a&nbsp;
cosmic and transcendental reality does not differ very much.
So it is declared that there is only one goal and aim, and there
are, at the most, certain broad principles, clear pathways
which one has to follow if one is to move in the right direction,
advance smoothly and attain infallibly: but these have been
well marked out, surveyed and charted and do not admit of </font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
<font face="Times New Roman">Page 54</font><hr>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">serious alterations and deviations. The spiritual aspiration is
a very definite and unitary movement and its fulfilment is
also a definite and invariable status of the consciousness. The
spiritual is a typal domain, one may say, there is no room here
for sudden unforeseen variation or growth or evolution. </font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Is it so in fact ? For, if one admits and accepts the evolutionary character of human nature and consciousness, the
outlook becomes somewhat different. According to this view,
human civilisation is seen as moving through progressive
stages: man at the outset was centrally lodged in and occupied
with his body consciousness, he was an <i>annamaya purusa;</i> then
he raised himself and centred in the vital consciousness and
so became fundamentally a <i>pranamaya purusa;</i> next he climbed
into the mental consciousness and became a <i>manomaya purusa;</i> from that level again he has been attempting to go further
beyond. On each plane the normal life is planned according
to the central character, the law—dharma—of that plane. One can have the religious or spiritual experience on each of
these planes, representing various degrees of growth and
evolution according to the plane to which it is attached. It is
therefore that the Tantra refers to three gradations of spiritual
seekers and accordingly three types or lines of spiritual discipline: the animal 
(<i>pasu bhava),</i> the heroic <i>(vira bhava)</i> and
the godly or divine <i>{deva bhava).</i> The classification is not
merely typal but also hierarchical and evolutionary in
character. </font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The Divine or the spiritual consciousness, instead of being
a simple unitary entity, is a vast, complex, stratified reality.
&quot;There are many chambers in my Father's mansion&quot;, says
the Bible: many chambers on many stories, one may add.
Also there are different levels or approaches that serve different
seekers each with his own starting-point, his <i>point de repaire.
</i>When one speaks of union with the Divine or of entering into
the spiritual consciousness, one does not refer to the same<br>
identical truth or reality as any other. There is a physical
Divine, a vital Divine, a mental Divine; and beyond the mind
, —from where one may consider that the region of true spirit
begins—there are other innumerable modes, aspects, manifestations of the Divine. </font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; As we say, there are not only aspects of the Divine, but </font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
<font face="Times New Roman">Page 55</font><hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">there are also levels in him. The spiritual consciousness rises
tier upon tier and each spur has its own view and outlook,
rhythm and character. Now, as long as man was chiefly
preoccupied with his physico-vital or mentalised physico-vital activities, as long as the burden of his body and life and
even mind lay heavy on him and their gravitational pull was
normally very strong, almost irresistible, the spiritual impulse
in him acted generally and fundamentally as a movement of
escape from them into <i>some</i> thing beyond. It was a negative
movement on the whole and it was enough to dissociate,&nbsp;
reject, sublimate the lower status and somehow rise into
something which is not that <i>(neti):</i> the question was not
important at that stage of the human consciousness about a&nbsp;
scientific scrutiny of the Beyond, its precise constitution and
composition. </font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; But once there is the possibility gained of a more normalised,
familiar and wider reconnaissance of the Beyond, when the
human being has been mentalised to a degree and in a manner
that makes it inevitable for him to overpass to a higher status
and live there habitually, then it becomes an urgent matter of
concern to know and find out where one goes exactly, on
which level and in what domain, once one is beyond. The
question, it is true, engaged the attention of the ancients too; but it was more or less an interesting inquiry, a good part 
speculative and theoretical; it had not the reality and insistence of the need of the hour. We have today chalked out
an almost exhaustive science of the inferior consciousness,
of the lower hemisphere—of course, so far as it is possible for
such a science to be exhaustive moving in the light of the
partial and inferior consciousness. In the same way we need at
the present hour a complete and precise science of the Divine<br>
Consciousness. As there is a logic of the finite, there is also a
logic of the infinite, not merely its magic, and that too has to
be discovered and laid out. </font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Thus, the highest and most comprehensive description of
the Divine is perhaps the formula Sat-chit-ananda. But even
so, it is a very general and, after all, an inadequate description.
It has to be filled in and supplemented by other categories
as well, if one may say so. For Sat-chit-ananda presents to us
the Sat Brahman. There is also the Asat Brahman. And again </font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
<font face="Times New Roman">Page 56</font><hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">we must accept a reality which is neither Sat nor Asat—<i>nasadasinno sadasit,</i> says the Veda. And as for the filling up of
the details in an otherwise almost blank and featureless
infinity, Sri Aurobindo's charting of that vast unknown—with
the categories of the Supermind and its various levels, of the
Overmind and its levels too, all forming the Divine Status and 
Consciousness—is a new, almost a revolutionary revelation, just the required science which the present world
needs and demands and for which it has been prepared through
all the cycles of evolution. </font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This means to say that with the knowledge that is given us
today, one can determine more or less definitely the altitudes
to which the various spiritual realisations of the past rose
and one can see also the degrees or graded stages of the
evolution of the spiritual consciousness. A broad landmark
can be noted here which concerns us at the present moment.
The spiritual consciousness has been rising to higher and
higher peaks and possessing them one after another. At the
present moment we are at a crisis, at a crucial crossing. The
spiritual consciousness attained till now and securely held in
human possession (in man's inner nature) is confined to the
highest level of the mind with some infiltration from the Over-mind and through that, as a springing board, a leap into an
indefinite, almost a blank Beyond. Now the time is come and
the conditions are ready for the spiritual consciousness in
humanity to arrive at the status above the Overmind to the
Supermind, and make that a living reality and build in and
through that its normal consciousness. </font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; A progressive revelation of higher .and higher and more
integral states of the spiritual consciousness in and through
the realisations of mystics and sages and seers—divine men—
—of all ages, such is the process of evolution that marks the
life of man upon earth. This spiritual evolution, however, may
not be obviously visible in the external life and character of
man: it has been a phenomenon more in his inner being and
consciousness, an occult phenomenon. Hence there has
intervened a veil, wall of separation between the two. The
veil has not been rent precisely because the very highest
spiritual potential has not been reached and brought into
play. The call of the present age is just to do away with this </font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
<font face="Times New Roman">Page 57</font><hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">veil, make of human nature a unified, a streamlined entity,
a complete incarnation of the spiritual consciousness in the
fullness of its own nature at its source and origin.&nbsp; </font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 58<hr>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="right"><b><font size="2"><a href="-00_Contents">
			<span style="text-decoration: none">HOME</span></a></font></b></p></td>
	</tr>
	</table>
<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;

</body>
</html>