Supramental Consciousness in Sir Aurobindo's the Life Divine

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In the present book, the author has attempted to show how the concept of 'Supramental Consciousness' occupies the central place in the conceptual structure of Sri Aurobindo's philosophical master piece The Life Divine'. The conceptual structure of our thought and talk is confined to the objects and entities accessible to our day-to-day experience. Of course, we do refer to subatomic particles as well as astronomical bodies but some amount of stage setting is done by way of analogical extension from our ordinary concepts. We experience material bodies or matter but Spirit does not fit into that scheme. They appear as opposites. However, our ancients had aspirations for light of knowledge and spirituality, freedom from mechanical causality and immortality etc. We now call them ancient values, but they had lived such values. Our failure to live up to these values is because the spiritual texts of yore have not been rightly read and understood. We have a concept of Absolute which is static and definitional. They used Saccidananda for the same which is full of content and not pure or empty. It is conscious force and delight of things and beings. Mayavadins declare that apart from Absolute everything else is illusory.

The evolutionary thesis of Darwin and others as regards the origin of species which went straight against the theory of special or outright creation, might have been like an act of confession of murder, as Darwin felt when his book was published in 1859, but its essential contribution was that evolution was a process of growth and development from a common ancestor. The speciation was due to a struggle for existence, natural selection of those who adapted to climatic conditions and environment and got the advantage of genetic favorable traits. From such a premise Sri Aurobindo argues that if nature has selected man, and endowed the species with consciousness, then the onus lies on man, of any further development. Nature has done her job. But she is slow, wasteful and sometimes faltering, limping and leaping. Now that man is conscious, he can lend his helping hands and thought, and co-operate with forces of Nature to work out the future destiny of man. But what is it that lies in store for man? How has Nature done her job? Has man, by now, exhausted all possibilities (potentialities) of development? Is Nature still continuing her work? Is she going to bring out the future species even if we, the humans, do not co-operate with her?

A study of Nature reveals that she has not changed her ways. She is still slow and gradual. She is kind to have brought out human species and she is unkind to those species that could not adapt or read her ways. Whatever little we know from her pattern of behavior, by repeated and repeatable experiences, is only a glimpse of truth and there is still a beyond. Our knowledge is limited in the sense that our mind or intellect is content to live with the parameters of empirical knowledge i.e. with dualities and divisions. The opposites remain unreconciled. Reason enters into antinomies when it tries to think through them.