Page 26 - NAMAH-Jan-2024

Namah Vol. 31, Issue 4, 15th January 2024

still frowned upon by orthodox science, but “Heredity upon which Science builds its
it thrives and yields its results in spite of concept of life evolution, is certainly a power,
the anathema of the doctors. It leads us into a machinery for keeping a type of species in
by-paths of psychical research, hypnotism, unchanged being: the demonstration that
mesmerism, occultism and all sorts of strange it is also an instrument for persistent and
psychological gropings (20).” He then progressive variation is very questionable;
proceeded to describe that though we do not its tendency is conservative rather than
have here, ”…..the assured clearness and firmly evolutionary, — it seems to accept with
grounded positivism of the physical method”, difficulty the new character that the Life-
yet facts emerge pointing out to dimensions Force attempts to force upon it. All the facts
of personality behind our superficial waking show that a type can vary within its own
mind like the ‘subliminal self’, which specifications of nature, but there is nothing
though inconscient to the superficial mind is to show that it can go beyond it. It has not
nevertheless itself conscient of the superficial yet been really established that ape-kind
mind and endowed with surprising faculties developed into man; for it would rather
....(21).” What Sri Aurobindo hinted in 1915 seem that a type resembling the ape,
finds echo in parapsychological research as but always characteristic of itself and not
well as in the non-traditional, experiential of ape-hood, developed within its own
approach employed by transpersonal researchers tendencies of nature and became what
since the 1960s. we know as man, the present human being...
The progress of Nature from Matter to Life,
Comments on Heredity from Life to Mind, may be conceded: but
there is no proof yet that Matter developed
into Life or Life-energy into Mind-energy;
all that can be conceded is that Life has
manifested in Matter, Mind in living
Matter.... Animal species in coming into
birth may begin with a like rudimentary
embryonic or fundamental pattern for all,
it may follow out up to a stage of certain
similarities of development on some or all
of its lines; there may too be species that
In his 1915 essaytitled 'Evolution', Sri Aurobindo are twy-natured, amphibious, intermediate
had commented that heredity was only a between one type and another: but all this
material shadow of soul-reproduction, of the need not mean that the types developed one
rebirth of Life and Mind into new forms (22), from another in an evolutionary series. Other
a statement that has to be understood in its forces than hereditary variation have been at
mystical sense. This comment was not made work in bringing about the appearance of new
to undermine the scientific foundation of characteristics; there are physical forces such
heredity but to place heredity in its proper as food, light-rays and others that we are only

perspective in the matrix of consciousness. beginning to know, there are surely others
He was more forthright in The Life Divine: which we do not yet know; there are at work

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