Page 43 - NAMAH-Jan-2020

Namah Insight

we cannot foresee exactly its composition and self-consciousness to super-consciousness will
function — the super-consciousness. mean the difference of a whole world between
man and the divine creature that is to be.
The inflatus of something vast and transcendent, .
something which escapes all our familiar Indeed it is a divine creature that should be
schemes of cognisance and yet is insistent envisaged on the next level of evolution. The
with a translucent reality of its own, we do feel mental and the moral, the psychical and the
sometimes within us invading and enveloping physical transfigurations which must follow
our individuality, lifting up our sense of self the change in the basic substratum do imply
and transmuting our personality into a reality such a mutation, the birth of a new species, as
which can hardly be called merely human. All it were, fashioned in the nature of the gods.
this life of ego-bound rationality then melts The vision of angels and Siddhas, which man
away and opens out the passage for a life is having ceaselessly since his birth, may be
of vision and power. Thus it is the poet has but a prophecy of the future actuality.
felt when he says, “there is this incalculable
element in human life influencing us from the This then, it seems to us, is the immediate
mystery which envelops our being, and when problem that Nature has set before herself.
reason is satisfied, there is something deeper She is now at the parting of the ways. She
than Reason which makes us still uncertain has done with man as an essentially human
of truth. Above the human reason there is a being, she has brought out the fundamental
transcendental sphere to which the spirit of possibilities of humanity and perfected it,
men sometimes rises, and the will may be so far as perfection may be attained within
forged there at a lordly smithy and made the the cadre by which she chose to limit herself;
unbreakable pivot.” — (A.E.) she is now looking forward to another kind
of experiment — the evolving of another life,
This passage from the self-conscient to the super- another being out of her entrails, that will be
conscient does not imply merely a shifting of greater than the humanity we know today,
the focus of consciousness. The transmutation that will be superior even to the supreme that
of consciousness involves a purer illumination, has yet been actualised.
a surer power and a wider compass; it involves
also a fundamental change in the very mode Nature has marched from the unconscious to
of being and living. It gives quite a different the sub-conscious, from the sub-conscious to
life-intuition and a different life-power. The the conscious and from the conscious to the
change in the motif brings about a new form self-conscious; she has to rise yet again from
altogether, a re-casting and re-shaping and re- the self-conscious to the super-conscious. The
energising of the external materials as well. mineral gave place to the plant, the plant
As the lift from mere consciousness to self- gave place to the animal and the animal gave
consciousness meant all the difference between place to man; let man give place to and bring
an animal and a man, so the lift again from out the divine.

Source: The Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta, Volume 1. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo
International Centre of Education; 1970, pp. 42-45.

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