1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution

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object:1.01 - Adam Kadmon and the Evolution
book class:Preparing for the Miraculous
author class:George Van Vrekhem
subject class:Integral Yoga
class:chapter

1
Adam Kadmon and the Evolution

The Cosmic Purusha
The Mother has told several times of a very old
tradition at the origin of the Vedic and the Chaldean
branches of wisdom and spirituality. According to this
tradition, the One, wanting to know himself, manifest-
ed as the Great Mother and thus became two. And the
Great Mother, in her turn, manifested the attri butes of the
One Truth, Light or Consciousness, Life, and Ananda
or Bliss as the main elements of the manifestation. But,
relates the tradition, a crucial mistake happened which2
made Truth turn into falsehood, Light into darkness and
ignorance, Bliss into suffering, and Life into death.
The Creative Power implored the Supreme Origin,
asking for a special intervention which could save this
corrupted universe; and in reply to this prayer there was
emanated from the Supreme Origin a special Entity of love
and consciousness, who cast himself directly into the most
inconscient matter to begin there the work of awakening. In
the old narratives this Being is described as stretched out in
a deep sleep at the bottom of a very dark cave.

This very old story about an accident on the threshold
of creation, for which the Great Mother was held responsi-
ble, is also the foundation story of all schools of Gnosticism;
according to the gnostic myths, souls (sparks of the Divine)
get lost in the world of the Ignorance and can only be saved
by a redeemer who reminds them of their origin. In the
Bible, Satan (originally the Angel of Light) revolts against
God and becomes the devil. The Mother herself has more
than once told the same story in its complete form: the four
attri butes of the Divine truth, light, life and bliss in their
boundless egoistic pride deemed themselves equal to be
the very Divine and therefore turned into the great Asuras:
the Lords of Falsehood, Darkness, Suffering and Death.
(In one of his sonnets Sri Aurobindo called them the iron
Dictators. They are also known as the Four Horsemen of
the Apocalypse.)

The special Entity, emanated by the Divine to save
the world, is described in the narratives of the old tradi-
tions as stretched out in a deep sleep at the bottom of a
very dark cave, and in his sleep prismatic rays of light irra-
diate from him and gradually penetrate in all the elements
of the Inconscient. Without this direct divine permeation
the world of Ignorance and Darkness could never have
evolved back towards its Origin.
During her second visit to Tlemcen, in 1907, when
working with Max Thon, the Mother descended in trance
into the total Inconscient at the bottom of the manifesta-
tion. Suddenly she found herself in front of a cave in which
there was that special Entity, a Being of iridescent light,
lying on one side and with its head resting in its hand.
She had trained herself to talk in trance, and when she
reported to Thon what she saw, he replied that it was the
immanent Divine at the bottom of the Inconscient. But
then something remarkable happened: the Being opened
its eyes, thereby indicating that the time of wakeful, con-
scious action had come.
While still at Tlemcen, the Mother had another, related
experience which she narrated many years later, in 1961.
She had learned to leave the successive sheaths of the body
with great dexterity... I could halt on any plane, do what I
had to do there, move around freely, see, observe, and then
speak about what I had seen. Once, having left behind
the most subtle body sheath, she passed beyond all possi-
ble forms, even all thought forms, in a domain where one
experienced total unity unity in something that was the
essence of Love. Quite unexpected, and to her amazement,
she there found herself in the presence of the principle,
the principle of the human form. ... It was an upright form,
standing just on the border between the world of forms and
the Formless like a kind of norm, model or archetype. At
that time nobody had ever spoken to me about it, for no
one she knew had ever seen anything like it. But she felt at
once the special importance of her experience. Afterwards
[at least thirteen years later], when I met Sri Aurobindo and
talked to him about it, he told me: 'It is surely the prototype
of the supramental form.' I saw it several times again, later
on, and this proved to be true.
We remember that the Mother said that the story about
what she usually called the accident, the fall into the4
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Inconscient, was under different names known in the an-
cient wisdom traditions. In every country, every tradition,
the event has been presented in a special way, with differ-
ent limitations, different details or particular features, but,
truly speaking, the origin of all these stories is the same. It
is the gnostic story, rediscovered and revived in the great
periods of the history of humankind (as we shall see). And
we remember that, at the beginning of the evolution as well
as at its end, there is a divine archetype determining the
development of Life on Earth. 1
Sri Aurobindo too has written about such archetype,
which he called the body of the creative Deity. When con-
sidering the four varnas brahmins, kshatriyas, vaishyas, and
shudras he mentions the Purushasukta of the Vedas where
the four orders are described as having sprung from the
body of the creative Deity, from his head, arms, thighs and
feet. To us, he comments, this is merely a poetical image.
As if this were all, as if the men of those days would have
so profound a reverence for mere poetical figures like this
of the body of Brahma. ... We read always our mentality
into that of these ancient forefa thers and it is therefore that
we can find in them nothing but imaginative barbarians. ...
The image was to these seers a revelative symbol of the un-
revealed and it was used because it could hint luminously
to the mind what the precise intellectual word, apt only for
logical or practical thought or to express the physical and
superficial, could not at all hope to manifest. To them this
symbol of the Creators body was more than an image, it
expressed a divine reality. Human society was for them an
attempt to express in life the cosmic Purusha. ... Man and
The references to the works of Sri Aurobindo follow the online edition by the
Sri Aurobindo Ashram for the volumes of the Complete Works published there
until February 2011.
1 See in LAgenda de Mre the conversation of 7 November 1961.
5
the cosmos are both of them symbols and expressions of
the same hidden reality. 2
Man as a microcosm contains the macrocosm within
him. The structure of his person is expressed in society as the
fundamental characteristics of the brahmin, kshatriya, vaishya
and shudra. These four varnas, writes Sri Aurobindo else-
where, are in various degrees the characteristics of each hu-
man being, man and woman. They are universal properties
and should not be confused with the four castes, which
are no more than their calcified caricature. It is in the hu-
man individual and in the human society that we find the
cosmic Purusha or the divine archetype mirrored.
As the idea of a universal archetype is common to the
fundamental wisdom traditions everywhere, so is the idea
of the principal four fundamental human characteristics
and the ways they are worked out in society. It is noticea-
ble, writes Sri Aurobindo, that both in Europe and in Asia
there was a common tendency, which we cannot trace to
any close interchange of ideas and must therefore attri bute
to the operation of the same natural cause and necessity, to-
wards the evolution of a social hierarchy based on a division
according to four different social activities [i.e. the varnas].
... The spirit, form and equipoise worked out were very dif-
ferent in different parts of the world according to the bent
of the community and its circumstances, but the initial prin-
ciple was almost identical. 3 This is, for instance, the reason
why in the European Middle Ages we find society domi-
nated by the clergy (brahmins) and the knights (kshatriyas),
a social order soon expanded with the merchants (vaishyas).
So strong became the presence of the latter, rightly called
the third estate, that it resulted in the upheaval known as
2 Sri Aurobindo: The Human Cycle, pp. 9-10.
3
Id., p. 375.6
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the French Revolution, which was almost immediately fol-
lowed by the rise of the proletariat (shudras) and their mass
movements of socialism and communism.
Thus we may conclude that, according to Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother, and the traditions they refer to, there is the
presence of a divine archetype resembling the human form
above or behind the evolution. The knowledge of this form
has been and still is common wisdom in East and West. It
is this form here understood in the philosophical Platonic
sense as idea which we find in the course of the evolu-
tion of life on Earth gradually expressed in the shape of the
human being. This form is also the inspiration of the knowl-
edge at the base of the occult schemata of the world, e.g. the
chakras, the chain of being, the astrological structure of the
human being, and the sephiroth in the Kabbalah.
Primordial Man
The pure spiritual knowledge is the great treasure
heedfully kept in India, and which she is now communi-
cating to the world for its further evolution. Yet this knowl-
edge, though often truncated, has also been a part of other
great wisdom traditions through the ages.
The ideas of the Upanishads, writes Sri Aurobindo,
can be rediscovered in much of the thought of Pythagoras
and Plato and form the profounder part of Neoplatonism
and Gnosticism with all their considerable consequences
to the philosophical thinking of the West. In his remark-
able series of articles on the pre-Socratic sage Heraclitus,
he writes for instance that in one of Heraclitus sayings
we are reminded of the Vedic Fire which is hymned as the
upbuilder of the worlds, the secret Immortal in men and
things, the periphery of the gods. ... We are reminded of the
Vedic thunderbolt, that electric Fire, of the Sun who is the
7
true Light, the Eye, the wonderful weapon of the divine
pathfinders Mitra and Varuna. And we read in one of Sri
Aurobindos letters: The Vedic Rishis were mystics of the
ancient type who everywhere, in India, Greece, Egypt and
elsewhere, held the secret truths and methods of which
they were in possession as very sacred and secret things,
not to be disclosed to the unfit who would misunderstand,
misapply, misuse and degrade the knowledge. 4
Garth Fowden describes those wisdom traditions in
the following terms: They were none of them religions of
the masses, because all taught that salvation comes through
knowledge [gnosis]. Knowledge may be imparted sudden-
ly, by revelation, to whomever the teacher deems worthy,
as was the wont of certain Gnostics; or it might be learned
by long study as among the Platonists, not a few Gnostics
and, it seems, the Hermetists. But however acquired, it
was always the possession of an elite. Hence the tendency
within these milieux towards the emergence of a two-tier
structure, with a small group of teachers, the elect, taking
responsibility for the instruction of a much larger group of
what the Platonists and Manicheans appropriately called
listeners. 5
Secrecy on penalty of death was imposed not only by
the Pythagoreans but by all mystery cults. A striking il-
lustration is this passage from Apuleius Golden Ass: So
listen, and be sure to believe that what you hear is true. I
[an initiate] drew near to the confines of death and trod the
threshold of Proserpina, and before returning I journeyed
through all the elements. At dead of night I saw the sun
gleaming with bright brilliance. I stood in the presence of
the gods below and the gods above, and worshipped them
4 Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, p. 103.
5
Garth Fowden: The Egyptian Hermes, p. 19.8
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from close at hand. Notice, then, that I have referred to
things which you are not permitted to know, though you
have heard about them. So I shall communicate only what
can be communicated without sacrilege to the understand-
ing of non-initiates.
Egypt and Greece
An important though forgotten or disparaged source
of much of the spirituality in the ancient civilizations
around the Mediterranean was Egypt. This is insufficient-
ly realized because the minds of most Egyptologists have
remained closed to spiritual values, forced as they felt to
comply with the positivism of their academic environment
and the dominant Abrahamic religions. It is only recently
that authors like Martin Bernal (Black Athena) and Christos
Evangeliou (The Hellenic Philosophy: Between Europe, Asia
and Africa) have shown how frequent the exchanges around
the eastern Mediterranean were in ancient times, and how
deeply Egypts highly developed culture, occultism and
spirituality had penetrated into pre-classical Greece.
The spirit behind the Egyptian temples, the pyramids
and the animal masks of the gods has surfaced around the
beginning of the Common Era in writings which are called
Hermetica. These hermetic texts gained enormous influence
after being rediscovered during the Renaissance, bought by
Cosimo de Medici and translated by Marsilio Ficino. Long
suspected of not being genuine, they have gradually gained
acceptance as expressions of the au thentic wisdom in such
centres of ancient Egypt as Heliopolis, Hermopolis, and the
great temples of Luxor and Memphis.
Or are you ignorant, Asclepius, one reads in the text
of the same name, that Egypt is the image of heaven?
Moreover, it is the dwelling place of heaven and all the forc-
es that are in heaven. It is proper for us to speak the truth,
9
our land is the temple of the world. And another text in
the Codex Hermeticus says: Hermes often used to say to me
that those who read my books will think that they are very
simply and clearly written, when in fact, quite on the con-
trary, they hide the meaning of the words, and will become
completely obscure when later on the Greeks will want to
translate our language into their own, which will bring a
complete distortion and obfuscation of the text. Expressed
in the original language, the discourse conveys its meaning
clearly; for the very quality of the sounds and the intona-
tion of the Egyptian words contains in itself the force of the
things said. The mantric vibration of the esoteric Egyptian
compositions was a sufficient barrier to exclude exoteric
outsiders at a time that what we now know as one world
was still divided into many worlds.
But what interests us more specifically is the Primordial
Human, the cosmic Purusha, of which all humans are the
image. What have the hermetic writings to say about this?
Their core is that the essence of Man is the God within,
and that the goal of the initiate is an actual assumption of
the attri butes of God, in short: divinization. The way of
Hermes is the way of immortality, and the goal is reached
when the purified soul has realized God, so that the reborn
man, although still a composite of body and soul, can be fair-
ly called a god. (Fowden) Such realizations are not possible
without a concrete knowledge of what later will be called the
chain of being or the sephiroth, against the background of
reincarnation. The possibility of these realizations was what
the Egyptian priests carried to the islands and the mainland
of primitive Greece, together with the statues of their gods,
when they founded the mysteries at Dodona, those of the
Kabiroi, and probably most others including Delphi. The
theos anr, the divine Man, seems to have been known also
by those people who dedicated their lives to becoming what,
as they discovered, they were the living image of.10
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Gnosticism
Gnosticism, again centred around the eastern Mediter
ranean, was a spiritual movement of many shades that,
like Hermetism, became widespread in the first centuries
of the common era. (Christianity first took shape as a gnos-
tic sect.) Yet the thinking assimilated by Gnosticism can be
traced back through most of the previous history. Direct in-
fluences are discernible of Pythagoranism, Platonism, the
ascetic schools referring back to Socrates, and Neoplaton-
ism. Gnosticism also enriched itself with Hermetism, and
it has inherited undeniable elements of oriental thought,
especially Indian. It should once more be remembered that
there were frequent exchanges between the cultures and
religions of those times. Persons on a quest of spiritual truth
were in most cases also adventurous travellers. And mis-
sionaries, e.g. those sent by Emperor Ashoka, were a well-
known phenomenon. (There was a Judeo-Buddhist group
of Therapeutae in the neighbourhood of Alexandria.)
How close Christianity has been to Gnosticism is shown
by the furore with which all remainders of the latter, and
there were many, were branded as heretic and inexorably
destroyed by the early Christian Church. What remained
known of Gnosticism were the quotations of it found in
Christian polemical texts till 1945, that is, when by an
incredible coincidence a treasure trove of gnostic texts was
found in Egypt, at Nag Hammadi. The texts not burned in
the cooking fire of the mother of one of the finders have
been deciphered and translated. There were fragments and
some complete books of all the sources mentioned in the
previous paragraph, and there were also several unknown
gospels, the ones that had found no place besides the ac-
cepted four in the New Testament.
Essential ideas of the Upanishads can be found also
here; in fact, they form the foundation on which Gnosticism
11
has worked out its cosmic and supracosmic vision, albeit
with other names and sometimes quite baroque variations.
There is a transcendent, ineffable God (the passive Brah-
man). For reasons surpassing our understanding (his Lila),
this God wanted to know himself by manifesting himself,
by making himself concrete in the glories of his infinity. His
Knowledge and Power of manifestation, the Great Mother,
is called by many names in Hinduism as well as in Gnosti-
cism (Eva, Barbelo, Sophia...). All went well in the manifes-
tation of the higher worlds, but through a mistake or, as
the Mother called it, an accident, the creation of the lower
world, the one we live in, was entrusted to a Demiurge, a
blind god (Samael), also called Yadalbaoth.
Here we are back to the basic Gnostic myth, which the
Mother confirmed by telling it more than once in her own
way, although with the warning that there was a deeper
meaning beneath the story as told to children. Because of
the ill-begotten creation by the Demiurge, the divine mani-
festation became divided into two: the greater part, where
all worlds and levels of existence were perfect heavens, and
the nether part, ruled by the blind god (by the Gnostics also
identified with the Yahweh of the Bible), and where there is
ignorance, suffering and death. Sometimes souls, sparks of
the divine, happen to fall into the nether world, the mate-
rial hemisphere. Recovery from the fallen state can only be
brought about through remembrance of their true, original
state, i.e. through knowledge (gnosis), revealed to them
by a Redeemer.
In Gnosticism the Primeval Man is named Anthropos
(man), Protanthropos (first or primal human), Adam or
Adamas. The relationships between the spiritual principles
are quite often explained in the way of human relation
ships, as sexual or family ties.12
e l e v e n tal k s
This superficial or exoteric meaning has led to the
misunderstandings which rendered Gnosticism suspect,
not unintentionally. Yet, names of Man and Woman or
Husband and Wife for the absolute Being, who is the crea-
tor, and his Knowledge or Power, who is the creatrix, are
common to most high religions. In Hinduism, for instance,
they are Purusha and Prakriti or Ishvara and Shakti. The prin-
ciple of the universal manifestation is then their Son, the
true and perfect Anthropos or Adamas, divine as his par-
ents are, from whom all things originate, and who is seen
as an incorruptible and endless light. This pre-existent
man was none other than the archetypal man perceived
by the Mother, or the cosmic Purusha mentioned by Sri
Aurobindo. As the light not darkened by matter but at its
origin, he is what Sri Aurobindo has called the Supermind
or archetypal Superman.
Kabbalah
One of the biblical expressions that have entered into
the common language is that man is created in the image of
God. The interpretation of this saying given in the spiritual
and occult traditions rather differs from the way it is com-
monly understood. For the biblical book of Genesis tells of
two ways in which Adam was created. In the one he was at
first alone, and God gave him a mate to lighten his solitude;
in the other God created Eve from one of Adams ribs. The
latter version would mean that Adam was man-woman, po-
tentially androgynous, and that the separation of the sexes
resulted from an operation upon Adams bisexual body.
This becomes meaningful if one knows that the divine
Purusha, the Supramental Being at the origin of creation, is
the gnostic Adam who is not bi-sexual but a-sexual. Sri Au-
robindo and the Mother have stressed time and again that
the supramental being is asexual, and that the sexes are a
13
means created by Nature on her lower levels to attain her
ends. In this way the Genesis myth of the creation of Adam
and Eve is incorporated in the basic knowledge of one of
the great traditional systems, the Chaldean.
What Sri Aurobindo called the cosmic Purusha is
also an important element in the great occult system of the
Kabbalah, developed mainly in northern Spain and south-
ern France in the 12th and 13th centuries (and which also
designed the Tarot). In the Kabbalah the divine archetype
is called Adam Kadmon, meaning Primal or Primordial
Man, and sometimes also the High Man or the Heaven-
ly Man. Adam Kadmon is the embodiment of all divine
manifestations, he is the creative deity. In his supernat-
ural body he contains the ten sephiroth, the principles of
the manifestation, by whose power the human body too
is constructed. Gershom Sholem, the noted authority on
the Kabbalah, wrote in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism:
Adam Kadmon is a first configuration of the divine light
which flows from the essence of En-Sof [the absolute, self-
existent Being] into the primeval space ... He therefore is
the first and highest form in which the divinity begins to
manifest itself. ... From his eyes, mouth, ears and nose the
lights of the sefiroth burst forth...
Gnosis in Sri Aurobindo
The wealth of the spiritual and occult traditions in the
past is immense and as diverse as the cultural backgrounds
against which it developed, which are the one humanity
in its various forms. The glimpses of those traditions in
the previous paragraphs may illustrate Sri Aurobindos
reminder that the great dynamic ideas at the basis of the
Indian spirituality have been a common possession of hu-
manitys richest cultures. Much of these wisdom traditions
has been misunderstood and often deformed in ridiculous14
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caricature by their modern rediscoverers our commentators.
The dominant positivist spirit has no understanding for such
wisdom and condemns it with supercilious disdain.
For those acquainted with Sri Aurobindo and the
Mothers view of things it will have become clear that the
divine Being witnessed by the Gnostics, the Kabbalists, and
even in several of the most ancient mysteries, must either
be what Sri Aurobindo called the Supermind or something
closely related it. Every kind of consciousness is a being,
every being is a kind of consciousness. Which is why Sri Au-
robindo stated in The Life Divine that Supermind is Super-
man. The Supermind is the intermediary Power between
Sachchidananda, i.e. the ultimate attri butes of the Godhead
as conceivable by the human intellect and spiritual experi-
ence, and the mental ranges at the disposal of the human
being. It is the beginning and end of all creation and ar-
rangement, the Alpha and the Omega, the starting point of
all differentiation, the instrument of all unification ... It has
the knowledge of the One, but is able to draw out of the
One its hidden multitudes; it manifests the Many, but does
not lose itself in their differentiations ... 6 The supramen-
tal species to succeed the human species in the terrestrial
evolution is of the essence of the divine Consciousness and
Being here called Supermind, and will, in the infinity of
time to follow, be as varied and glorious as are the potenti-
alities of the Supermind.
So much aware was Sri Aurobindo of the gnostic tra-
dition and its values that, when writing the Arya, he used
the term gnosis time and again as equivalent to the term
Supermind. He noted for instance: This full power of
the consciousness is supermind or gnosis supermind be-
cause to reach it we have to pass beyond and turn upon
6 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 134.
15
mind as the mind itself has passed and turned upon life
and inconscient matter, and gnosis because it is eternally
self-possessed of Truth and in its very stuff and nature it is
dynamic substance of knowledge. 7
Gnosis means knowledge, but of a special, higher kind:
it is effective knowledge, insight that saves or leads one to
the Truth. In the cosmic scheme of the Gnostics it was the
knowledge, brought down to them by a Saviour, that would
allow them to return to the supra-terrestrial worlds from
which they had fallen into the terrestrial world of darkness,
suffering and forgetfulness. For Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother gnosis is the knowledge of the complete scheme of
things which grants the understanding of the next step in
the evolution on Earth, and the means to participate in its
realization. It is a growing gnosis lifted beyond our human
mentality and partaking of the light and power of the Di-
vine. 8 (The symbol of this gnosis or supermind is the Sun.)
Later Sri Aurobindo will use the term gnosis less often, but
even in 1950 the Mother said: The gnostic life is certain.
An essential difference between the wisdom traditions
and Sri Aurobindos worldview is that in the former tradi-
tions all developments were cyclic. Creation or manifes-
tation ran its course but had no goal, and would start its
wheeling again and again ad infinitum. (The Hebrews were
the first for whom history had an aim, and therefore a direc-
tion and a sense.) In many of those traditions the universe
was divided into a good and a bad half, for ever. They were
Manichean, a view which may have originated among the
Zoroastrians. In such a cosmic constellation individual be-
ings can be saved when lost in the bad world, but never that
world itself. What is explained as a plunge of the Godhead
7 Sri Aurobindo: Essays Divine and Human, p. 164.
8 Sri Aurobindo: Essays in Psychology and Yoga, p. 537.16
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into its contrary cannot be corrected. The world is evil and
only an escape into a Hereafter or into Nothing can put an
end to the cycles of suffering. Sri Aurobindo on the contra-
ry, in his complete and catholic affirmation, has drawn
the unconditional conclusion from the Vedantic statement
that All is That if All is That, the world too must be That,
therefore it must be intrinsically good and have a sense.
Some of the main elements of Sri Aurobindos integral
synthesis evidently stem from Vedic and Vedantic roots,
but he was also thoroughly aware of the great non-Indian
wisdom traditions and has integrated them in the formula-
tion of his experience. On the other hand, Sri Aurobindos
synthetic view illuminates the knowledge and profundity
of the wisdom traditions. To them belonged great seers,
mystics, and what one would now call yogis. Among them
were, in those bygone times, our brothers and sisters in the
quest for the Truth and a truly meaningful life. The riches
of the wisdom traditions fascinate anybody who has the pa-
tience and the perceptivity to study and understand them.
And knowledge of them puts the importance of the Auro
bindian revolution in perspective.
Positivist and spiritual evolution
The central theme of this talk is that the macrocosm, and
in it the human being as the microcosm, are brought about
by a divine creative Force above and behind them, which
Sri Aurobindo calls Supermind. What Sri Aurobindo
called Supermind, and what he and the Mother discovered
through their own experience, was partially known in the
great wisdom traditions under various names such as the
Cosmic Purusha, Protanthropos, Adamas or Adam Kad-
mon, and the Primordial Man (Supermind is Superman).
While in the traditions this knowledge remained limited
and often deformed within the context of their cosmic
17
vision, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother completed it in an
unconditional revalidation of the Earth, as part of the su-
pramental manifestation, and the evolution of Life on it.
Such an interpretation of the origin of Life on planet
Earth and explanation of the evolution of Life is, of course,
totally unacceptable, not to say absurd, to the positivist
biological sciences in the present day. With Darwin the bio-
logical sciences have tried to adapt their findings to the ma-
terialistic and mathematical tenets of the physical sciences.
In this they followed the spirit of their times, the nine-
teenth century, when, as one author puts it, God gradually
disappeared like the smile of Lewis Carrolls Cheshire Cat,
and Nietzsches declaration of the death of God resounded
through the vaults of the Western mind.
Today this mentality has not softened among some of
the most prominent savants and widely read publicists.
Stephen Jay Gould, for instance, wrote: Only one causal
force produces evolutionary change in Darwins world: the
unconscious struggle among individual organisms to pro-
mote their own personal reproductive success nothing
else, and nothing higher. And Richard Dawkins made his
famous proclamation: It is absolutely safe to say that, if
you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution
[meant is Darwinian evolution], that person is ignorant,
stupid or insane (or wicked, but Id rather not consider
that). Alister McGrath comments on this attitude: Some
might draw the conclusion that Darwinism encourages
agnosticism. Far from it: for Dawkins, Darwin impels us to
atheism [actually to anti-theism]. It is not merely that evo-
lution erodes the explanatory potency of God, it eliminates
God altogether.
This scientific conclusion concerning evolution and
the human being is in keeping with the positivist premises.18
e l e v e n tal k s
There is no reason to single out the human line as special,
except for our chauvinistic interest in it. ... There is no way
in which we can claim to be better than Aegyptopi thecus
[an early monkey], or the miocene apes, only different,
writes John Gribbin. Scott Atran could not agree more:
Human beings are accidental and incidental products of
the material development of the universe, almost wholly
irrelevant and readily ignored in any general description
of its functioning. (It might be noted here that, according
to the latest paleontological findings, the origin of Homo
sapiens and even that of his closest relatives, the big apes,
remains unknown.)
If the animosity with which the aforementioned au-
thors, and many others, condemn and belittle any form of
non-materialism as animism, mysticism, hallucination and
simply mental aberration shows one thing, it is that none of
them have any notion of what they are attacking. Some of
them, like Daniel Dennett, candidly confess as much. They
are not aware that the God and the religions which they
declare to be pests to humanity belong within the so-called
Abrahamic tradition, by which the Western societies are
still profoundly influenced. Of the wisdom traditions and
the oriental spiritualities, with their countless generations
of seers, saints, yogis and spiritual masters, and with their
immense treasures of knowledge, they have no idea.
The spirit of faith has, as its source and touchstone, the
spiritual experience. The ancient Indians through their
yogic insight found the idea of similar evolution, which
the modern scientists are finding out by observation and
research. In the Tantras this kind of evolution has been de-
scribed in detail, writes Sri Aurobindo. And: In the old In-
dian versions of this theory evolution, heredity and rebirth
are three companion processes of the universal unfolding,
19
evolution the progressional aim, rebirth the mean method,
heredity one of the physical conditions. 9
According to Sri Aurobindos scheme of things, the
creative Supermind has unfolded itself in the immense
hierarchic range of worlds which he calls the involution,
from the highest Supermind itself all the way down to Mat-
ter, and below Matter to the dark Inconscient. We remem-
ber that, at the request of the Great Mother and by a spe-
cial intervention of the manifesting Divine, a recovery of
the lost Godhead became possible. In the succeeding climb
upwards of the evolution, we Homo sapiens, the mental be-
ing, are somewhere halfway up on the ladder, which is a
gradation of consciousness. But every step in the ascension
necessitates a response from the corresponding level in the
already existing hierarchy of worlds. The evolution and
the forms it takes are determined from on high, and ulti-
mately from the Supermind, the creative Being emanating
(as rendered in the sephiroth, the chakras and the chain of
being) the structures of the macro- and microcosm. For
the evolution proceeded in the past by the upsurging, at each
critical stage, of a concealed Power from its involution in the
Inconscience, but also by a descent from above, from its own
plane, of that Power already self-realized in its own higher
natural province. 10 That is what we call evolution which is
an evolution of Consciousness and an evolution of the Spirit
in things and only outwardly an evolution of species. 11
In one of her Entretiens (1957) the Mother spoke as
follows: According to spiritual and occult knowledge,
consciousness precedes form, consciousness by self-con-
centration produces its forms. Whereas, according to the
9
Arya, vol. 5, p. 509.
10 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, pp. 1002-1003.
11 Sri Aurobindo: On Himself, p. 105.20
e l e v e n tal k s
materialist idea, it is form which precedes consciousness
and makes it possible for consciousness to manifest. For
those who have some knowledge of the invisible worlds
and a direct perception of the play of forces, there is no pos-
sible doubt: it is necessarily consciousness which produces
a form in order to manifest. The way things are arranged
on earth, it is quite certainly a consciousness of a higher
order which penetrates a form and helps to transform it, so
that this form may become either immediately or through
successive generations capable of manifesting that con-
sciousness. For those who have the inner vision and knowl-
edge, this is absolutely beyond doubt. It is impossible for
it to be otherwise. But those who start from the other end,
from below, will not admit it. But, all the same, it is not for
ignorance to dictate knowledge to wisdom! ... Conception
precedes manifestation and expression.
A theory of spiritual evolution, writes Sri Aurobindo,
is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution
and physical life-evolution [e.g. the Darwinian theory]; it
must stand on its own inherent justification: it may accept
the scientific account of physical evolution as a support or
element, but the support is not indispensable. The scientific
theory is concerned only with the outward and visible ma-
chinery and process, with the detail of Natures execution,
with the physical development of things in Matter and the
law of development of Life and Mind in Matter; its account
of the process may have to be considerably changed or
may be dropped altogether in the light of new discovery,
but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a spiritual evolu-
tion, and evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the souls
manifestation in material existence. 12
We can only now begin to appreciate how clear and
detailed Sri Aurobindos knowledge of the physical as
12 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 868 (emphasis added).
21
well as of the spiritual elements of evolution was. When he
wrote the Arya, from 1914 till 1921, and when later he re-
vised some of its contents for publication in book form, his
spiritual knowledge seemed often to disagree with the ever
changing scientific findings and hypotheses, and therefore
to be incongruous. Today, however, his evaluation of the
life in plants and the mind in animals is being validated in
practically every new issue of the science magazines. The
missing link is still missing, though now under the name
of common ancestor. Punctuated equilibrium, the sud-
den appearance of new species, became a fashionable bio-
logical term only in 1972, when the like-named theory was
launched by Eldredge and Gould. That the human species
has hardly if at all evolved, as evidenced by some of the
splendid paleolithic cave paintings from 40,000 years ago,
is now commonly accepted. The age of the neolithic civili-
zations is constantly pushed back, and the existence of pre-
vious civilizations, which disappeared from the surface of
the Earth without a trace, is on the verge of becoming an
acceptable hypothesis. Intelligent design (not to be con-
fused with creationism), the inevitable conclusion that the
irreducible complexity of Natures workings cannot but
be the planned result of an Intelligence, will be for some
time to come the hot issue between positivist science and
less dogmatic viewpoints. All this was already present and
articulated in the writings of Sri Aurobindo, and in many of
the French classes of the Mother, decennia ago, but an in-
formed mental predisposition is needed to discern it there.
Sri Aurobindo and the Mothers synthetic, integral vi-
sion is also an approach of absolute realism, because its
norm is Truth. Spirituality is not a matter of seeking refuge
in the margins of life, but of accepting and confronting it
in all its aspects, big and small, pleasant and painful. For
such is how the Cosmic Purusha has made us, and such is
how It has made the world in which our souls have chosen22
e l e v e n tal k s
to incarnate. [The most ancient Vedanta] is the best previ-
ous foundation of that which we seek now to rebuild and
although, as with all knowledge, old expression has to be
replaced to a certain extent by new expression suited to a
later mentality and old light has to merge itself into new
light as dawn succeeds dawn, yet it is with the old treasure
as our initial capital or so much of it as we can recover that
we shall most advantageously proceed to accumulate the
largest gains in our new commerce with the ever-change-
less and ever-changing Infinite. (Sri Aurobindo) 13

23
Addendum on the Cosmic Purusha
In a famous hymn of the Rig-Veda (X.90), the ultimate
creative singularity is envisioned as a macranthropos or
giant man, called purusha. This primordial superbeing is
described as having a thousand heads, a thousand eyes, a
thousand feet. The purusha pervades the world and tran-
scends it by ten fingers. Only one quarter of the macran-
thropos can be found in the realm of creation, while three
quarters are said to be immortal in the heavenly domain.
Through the purushas self-sacrifice the world was
created. His mind is said to have been given to the Moon;
his eyes to the Sun; his breath to the air element; his navel
to the midspace; his head to the sky; his feet to the earth;
and so on. Even the structure of ancient Indias society was
thought to have been preordained by his self-sacrifice,
since the purushas mouth gave rise to the brahmin estate;
his arms to the warrior estate; his thighs to the people at
large; and his feet to the servile estate.
The symbolic representation of the universe in the
shape of the Cosmic Man found expression in a distinc-
tive approach to architecture, sculpture, and literature. The
purpose of all human creation was not only to preserve the
unity of the macranthropos but also to recapitulate the pu-
rushas original creative sacrifice that produced the cosmos
itself. More than that, all human activity whether sacred
or secular (which is really a modern distinction) was to
be modelled on the Cosmic Man. The very purpose of life
was to know the great mystery of existence, which is the
mystery of the purusha.
Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley:
In Search of the Cradle of Civilization, p. 219.2

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