classes ::: George_Van_Vrekhem, Integral_Yoga, chapter,
children :::
branches :::
see also :::

Instances, Classes, See Also, Object in Names
Definitions, . Quotes . - . Chapters .


object:1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle
book classPreparing for the Miraculous
author class:George Van Vrekhem
subject class:Integral Yoga
class:chapter

Science and Scientism
In the path of the Integral Yoga each person has his
or her own way, for the simple reason that in each person
the constitutional and incarnational difficulties to become
aware of and master vary. Yet the integrality of the Auro
bindian Yoga should never be overlooked, however lim
ited and fractional our individual effort still may be. In the
attempt at self-perfection based on the combined psycho
logical faculties of the human being knowledge, devotion
or works each of these faculties can only be neglected at118
e l e v e n tal k s
the peril of gross reduction of the integrality, the condition
of the intended divine transformation.
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have often stressed the
need for a clear mind and ever expanding knowledge. Sri
Aurobindo writes e.g. in The Life Divine: In any total ad
vance or evolution of the Spirit, not only the intuition, in
sight, inner sense, the hearts devotion, a deep and direct
life-experience of the things of the Spirit have to be devel
oped, but the intellect also must be enlightened and satis
fied, our thinking and reflecting mind must be helped to
understand, to form a reasoned and systematized idea of
the goal, the method, the principle of this highest develop
ment and activity of our nature and the truth of all that lies
behind it. 1
Science is fundamentally a form of knowledge, it is the
mind searching for the Truth behind the workings of Na
ture. Its importance, combined with the wonders of technol
ogy, is evident in the world in which we live. Unfortunately
its unprejudiced search for Truth was turned into a dogma
tized positivist or materialistic system, for historical reasons
which we will see later. The result has been that academic
science has divided the integrality of the human experience
into two separate spheres: the sphere of the materially per
ceptible and the sphere of the non-material, at best treated
agnostically but more often with supercilious disdain. Sci
ence metaphysically dogmatized became Scientism.
The hypothetical gap between science and religion or
spirituality turned into a cause of serious tension, for in
stance during the late Renaissance when Galileo Galilei
was put on trial by the Inquisition of the Catholic Church.
The Galileo Affair had a catastrophic effect on the Church,
1
Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 910.b e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
119
putting her in discredit for her inability to accept the de
velopment of the sciences. Her condemnation of Galileo re
mains the big mistake which nothing can efface and makes
the Church into an enemy of science for ever. (Jacques
Arsac) 2 The nineteenth century hardened the standpoint
of Scientism while generally weakening religious faith. The
polemical tension between both survives in the present,
witness the quarrel between Scientism on the one hand and
Creationism or Intelligent Design on the other.
Science is now thought by many to be the only source
of true knowledge, which should be clear from the fact that
it can prove its affirmations mathematically and experi
mentally, and that it has conquered the Earth. Yet the first
affirmation is contradicted by the many discredited scien
tific theories left by the wayside, and by the recently gained
awareness that scientific systems depend on the temporar
ily dominant paradigm. The second affirmation, that of sci
ences worldwide triumph, can also be questioned if one
realizes how much technology differs from theoretical sci
ence, which may lead to the conclusion that the triumph
should not be claimed by the theoretical scientist but by the
engineer. Although nowadays the two often overlap, sci
ence is about abstract knowing, technology about practical
making.
Science is also the privileged domain of people with a
knack for complicated mathematics and an extensive train
ing in them. This has led to the image of the scientist, more
specifically the physicist, as a sort of higher being with an
intellect out of the ordinary, who indeed sometimes seeks
to understand the mind of God (cf. Albert Einstein and
Stephen Hawking). The acceptance of such a view would
put science and the crucial decisions made by scientists
2
Jacques Arsac: La science et le sens de la vie, p. 15.120
e l e v e n tal k s
in our societies beyond the reach of the general public. It
would also mean certain defeat for religion and spirituality
in any comparison or confrontation with science, for sci
ence has the hard arguments at its disposal, while religion
and spirituality seem to reason in the clouds or apparently
have to resort to wondrous, improbable experiences.
It is, moreover, from their high perch and relying on
their mathematical training that some scientists perorate
about matters outside their formulas or laboratories, mat
ters about which they know just as much or as little as any
body else. In other words, their scientific training does not
substantiate their ideas about psychology, religion or spirit
uality. Thinking that they are putting down the mysticism,
superstitions and hallucinations of religion and spiritual
ity, they are in fact depreciating their own search for Truth
which, if it exists, is One, approached in whatever way. The
West, because of its centuries old Judeo-Christian tradition,
is only familiar with religion as a matter of knowledge and
prayer, and with a God outside his creation. The scientists
and science writers who have any notion of a divine Pres
ence within, and of a possible identification with this Pres
ence, are still exceptions.
Sri Aurobindos appreciation of science:
But, first, it is well that we should recognize the enor
mous, the indispensable utility of the very brief period of
rationalistic Materialism through which humanity has
been passing. For that vast field of evidence and experience
which now begins to reopen its gates to us, can only be safe
ly entered when the intellect has been severely trained to a
clear austerity. 3
The scientist is man the thinker mastering the forces
of material Nature by knowing them. Life and Matter are
3
Id., p. 10.b e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
121
after all our standing-ground, our lower basis, and to know
their processes and their own proper possibilities and the
opportunities they give to the human being is part of the
knowledge necessary for transcending them. 4
Three things will remain from the labour of the sec
ularist centuries: truth of the physical world and its im
portance, the scientific method of knowledge which is to
induce Nature and Being to reveal their own way of being
and proceeding ... and last, though very far from least,
the truth and importance of the earth life and the human
endeavour, its evolutionary meaning. 5
La nuova scienza
As mentioned in passing above, an integral and usu
ally overlooked factor in the thinking of modern science
is its Judeo-Christian background. The science of the so-
called Hellenistic period in Greece and Alexandria had
reached a high level of development with figures of genius
like Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Aristarchus of Samos, Hip
parchus and Ptolemy. Marvin Minsky regrets the course
history has taken, for he is of the opinion that science could
now already have been much more advanced if its progress
had not succumbed to the spread of monotheistic religions.
As early as 250 BC, Archimedes was well on the way toward
modern physics and calculus. So, in an alternate version of
history (in which the pursuits of science did not decline),
just a few more centuries could have allowed the likes of
Newton, Maxwell, Gauss, and Pasteur to anticipate our
present state of knowledge about physics, mathematics, and
biology. 6
4 Sri Aurobindo: The Human Cycle, p. 78.
5 Sri Aurobindo: Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, p. 195.
6 In John Brockman (ed.): What Are You Optimistic About? p. 195.122
e l e v e n tal k s
Out of the originally quite diverse Christian move
ment grew a structured and authoritarian Catholic Church
which became, from about 400 CE, the official religion of
the Roman Empire. This organization, because of its hier
archical structure and its faith, survived the collapse of the
Empire and became the dominant institution in the Middle
Ages. Its holy book, the Bible, was supposed to be the Word
of God and therefore indubitable truth, together with its
interpretations by the Church Fathers. What remained of
the former Greek and Roman culture was used as a source
of reference, integrated to a certain degree into the belief
system of the Church. Any culture has its myths, legends
and explanations which support and give meaning to its
life. The myths and legends of the Old and New Testament
became the mental baggage and source of reference of
Western thought, which is still heavily influenced by them
even today.
However, for the Catholic Church too, as for all life and
its manifestations on Earth, the time arrived that its hierar
chical structure and authority began to falter. This period
of questioning, roughly from the 14th to the 17th century,
we call the Renaissance, synonymous with the urge of re
discovery and exploration in matters intellectual and artis
tic as well as physical. New continents on the globe were
discovered, and so were new realms of the mind. What ex
isted on Earth was so much more, and apparently equally
worthy and humane, than the limited world which until
then had been thought the only civilized one. A new spirit
of astonishment, exaltation and daring led to the nuova sci-
enza, a new science eagerly connecting with the forgotten
or forbidden knowledge of the ancients, but also with pre
viously discarded occult practices and wisdom traditions.
The stuff of ancient Hebrew tribes and of the alleged
reminiscences about Christ and primitive Christianity wasb e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
123
now put to the test of reason and found for the most part to
be invention, superstition, fabulation, and sometimes out
right errors or lies. Intellectuals invested themselves with
the right of scepticism and dared to exert it publicly and
in their writings, even at the risk of their possessions, their
career, or their lives. The Enlightenment was a period of
heroism, fully aware that the negation of an old intellectual
and religious paradigm and the construction of a new one
would result in revolt as the precondition of a new world.
Few people of the present day realize how much they owe
to the activist thinkers of centuries not that long past.
It was against this 17th century background that the
scientific revolution took place. The principles then formu
lated by Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, and a host of
less well-known natural philosophers, are still the pillars
supporting positivist or materialistic science today. All can
be found, worded in various ways, in the works of Galileo 7 ,
the Catholic scientist to whom they were the keys to deci
pher the book of Nature.
1. Science must be about matter.
This tenet is nowadays so self-evident that one hardly
finds it mentioned any more in writings on science. Yet at
the time it was a hard-won rule which created a split be
tween things material and non-material. Then the prevalent
view was still that of the Chain of Being, the hierarchical lad
der of (in ascending order) matter, the life force, mental con
sciousness, and the spirit. The new, materialistic statement
directly implicated the definition and interpretation of Real
ity, and therefore of God. It was one of the main causes in the
attitude of the Church towards the new science of which
Galileo was seen as the harbinger and figurehead. The sole
7 It is a strange fact that, while all scientists are normally referred
to by their last name, Galileo Galilei is always mentioned by his first
name.124
e l e v e n tal k s
validation of matter or, in other words, of that which could
be perceived by the senses, would gradually lead to dis
trust and doubt of the non-material, of religion (more spe
cifically Catholic authoritarianism), and ultimately of God.
The principle of the sole validity of matter is still the cause
of widespread dispute among philosophers, theologians,
and people living the spiritual life.
2. Science has no grasp of wholes, but reduces all things to
parts consisting of smaller parts consisting of still smaller parts.
This is called reductionism. The reason of its central util
ity in science is, again, that science is an activity of the mind,
and that the mind cannot handle wholes. Sri Aurobindo
has explained this aspect of the mind quite clearly on many
occasions. Its way of functioning is analytic or dividing (i.e.
reductionist) because it can only know by separation and
distinction, and has at the most a vague and secondary ap
prehension of unity and infinity for though it can synthe
size its divisions, it cannot arrive at a true totality. 8 None
theless the biologist Richard Lewontin warns: Whatever
the faults of reductionism, we have accomplished a great
deal by employing reductionism as a methodological strat
egy. It is, after all, reductionist science that has made our
modern world. Yet the increasing awareness that we need
much more comprehensive [i.e. holistic] and much less re
ductionist understanding may be a sign of a new sort of
science that is being forged at the moment.
3. All changes in matter are brought about by external forces.
This excludes any kind of internal movement or life.
The history of the formulation of the laws of motion is
fascinating, if only because of the difficulties Galileo and
his predecessors had to reckon with. The principle of the
external forces is closely connected with the principle of
the exclusivity of matter. Here again a drastic cut is made
8
Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 133.b e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
125
between matter and everything else. The reason seems to
be the physiological restrictions of the evolutionary human
being, who can only measure things perceived by the sens
es. The phenomena of life are obvious but for the most part
indefinable, and this goes still more for the phenomena of
the mind and the spirit. The result will be that living beings
are studied as complex compounds of material elements,
and that the mind will be declared a function of a material
brain. Any time scientific materialists tackle matters of the
spirit with the concepts and instruments of their science,
they venture beyond their ken and produce for the most
part nonsense.
4. Science can only work with the primary qualities of
things: extension, motion, and mass. Secondary qualities, like
colour, scent or taste, are effects of the primary qualities.
This principle illustrates clearly how the scientific meth
od by which is mostly understood the method of physics
reduces the world to a kind of abstract rendition of its
real appearance, a black-and-white version of the fantastic
diversity it really shows. Here again a reduction is made to
what is measurable and quantifiable, in other words usable
in the composition of mathematical formulae.
5. The language of science is mathematics, based on meas-
urement.
According to this principle what cannot be measured
cannot be known exactly. However, each measurement is
the application of a theoretical mindset, as is the registra
tion of each fact. Consequently, the way Reality is seen by
scientific materialism is the outcome of a complex prejudice
originated within the framework of a scientific theory a
temporarily accepted consensus now called paradigm.
Where once (around the year 1900) the science of physics
was assumed to be complete, without anything basically
new to be expected, the growing awareness of the relative126
e l e v e n tal k s
value of any theory of physics has changed that outlook
completely, and led to the realization that the science of to
morrow may be quite different from the science of today.
6. In science all guesses, hypotheses or theories have to be
tested as to their truth and validity.
This was the principle of the unconditional necessity
of the experiment which has remained and will remain for
ever valid. The need of the experiment was the direct con
sequence of the doubt of any affirmations by any authority,
until the Renaissance so docilely accepted in all places of
learning and teaching. The natural philosopher (as Isaac
Newton still called himself) became an experimenter who
communicated the results of his findings to other experi
menters; they, in their turn, could then examine and try to
repeat them. The experiment is at the heart of the scien
tific method. It was the experiment, supported by novel
scientific instruments, that opened a whole new world first
in cosmology and physics, then in biology.
The intellectual adventure of the Renaissance evolving
into the Enlightenment, also called the Age of Reason, is
one of the great episodes in the history of a part of human
ity, Western Europe, which would become of importance
to the whole of it. It was a struggle to bring life in phase
with reality, more particularly material reality, this against
a religious worldview which disdained life on Earth and
supported its dogmatic affirmations with a literature from
bygone times, outmoded despite being declared the eter
nal Word of God. It seems rather paradoxical that the Bi-
ble throughout the history of Christianity remained inter
twined with the heathen literature and philosophy of
the ancient Greeks and Romans. The Renaissance brought
these classical treasures to the fore again, and the Enlight
enment would rely on them as the basis for its humanistic
outlook on life.b e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
127
The radical materialism of some Enlightenment phi
losophers, added to the general attitude of pragmatism
and scepticism the right to question anything now de
clared to be the birthright of any human led inevitably to
the decline of the angry and vengeful God of the Hebrews,
whom Christs Father of Love had not succeeded in replac
ing. Moreover, experts now investigated the text of the Bi-
ble with the same objectivity as they examined any other
text, and found numerous surprisingly human features
in the Word of God. This, and the increasing resistance
against the very human and corrupt mammoth institution
that was the Catholic Church, led in the 19th century to
Gods funeral, the title of a book by A.N. Wilson in which
he writes: It seemed as if there were no good arguments
left for religion. If, either for emotional reasons or because
you believed in religion as a socially conservative cement,
you wished to preserve the forms, you could only do so at
the expense of the intellect. 9
In the present era of postmodern confusion, accord
ing to the Aurobindian view not the symptom of decadence
but the sign of transition and rebirth, most of these prob
lems and unresolved tensions between science, religion and
spirituality remain not only alive, they also spread, carried
by the necessity of scientific education or training, through
out our technological world. In this situation the words of
George Tyrell are worth remembering: One has to pass
through atheism to faith; the old God must be pulverized
and forgotten before the new can reveal himself to us. 10
Knocking Man off his pedestal
In 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus, in his Revolutionibus
de Orbium Coelestium published when on his deathbed,
9
A.N. Wilson: Gods Funeral, p. 441.
10 Id., p. 461.128
e l e v e n tal k s
showed mathematically that the Earth orbiting around the
Sun was a more correct proposition than the Sun orbiting
around the Earth. As at that time the general belief was that
the Earth was the centre of the cosmos, a belief that was an
article of faith, Copernicus demonstration came as a se
vere shock, for if it proved to be true Earth would lose its
privileged position in Gods creation, of which the Human
would no longer be the king.
Especially the Catholic Church, appointed custodian
by Jesus Christ of everything true, reacted vehemently to
defend verities contained in the books of the Ancient Testa-
ment. Did one not read there: On that day when the Lord
delivered the Amorites into the hands of Israel, Joshua spoke
with the Lord, and he said in the presence of Israel: Stand
Still, O Sun, over Gideon, and Moon, you also, over the Val
ley of Aijalon. And the Sun stood still and the Moon halted,
till the people had vengeance on their enemies. Was this
not sufficient proof for all believers that it was the Sun that
was moving, not the Earth? And could not anybody see this
on any day with his own eyes?
Nevertheless, the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic system
had to make place for the Copernican, but only after much
conflict and confrontation, the best-known episode of which
is Galileos trial and condemnation by the Inquisition. In the
long run science triumphed over superstition, something Sci
entism vividly remembers and keeps reminding humanity
of. For what it calls the Copernican Principle means that,
as in nature there are no values, everything consists of the
same elementary matter and nothing is more or less, higher
or lower than anything else. For this reason the Copernican
Principle is also called the Principle of Mediocrity.
In a previous talk 11 we have already wondered about
the strange pleasure some positivist scientists seem to find
11 See talk 5, 2012 and 1956: Doomsday?b e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
129
in denigrating all values and targeting especially humanity
for degradation. To quote one example among innumerable
ones: the biologist Lynn Margulis writes about the tena
cious illusion of special dispensation which humanity im
agines it possesses, but which belies its true status as up
right mammalian weeds. Earth is going to die ... the Sun
is going to die ... the Universe is going to die ... is in our
contemporary science literature an often repeated litany of
perdition. That this is going to happen in billions of years,
while the very first life-forms on Earth are thought to have
appeared 3.8 billion years ago, and Homo sapiens only 2 mil-
lion years ago, is not taken into account. Such pronounce
ments do indeed substantiate the truth of the Mothers say
ing: Materialism is the gospel of death. What is the fun
a certain breed of scientists may find in divulging a con
viction meant to belittle and to hurt, while they should be
aware that Science is a matter of process which has no room
for metaphysical conclusions?
The New Scientist of 20 December 2008 examined the
question: Who did most to knock man off his pedestal?
Was it the tandem Copernicus-Galileo who removed us
from the centre of the universe? Or was it the tandem Lin
naeus-Darwin who put an end to the illusion that humans
are created in the image of God and placed them among
the animals? But then there is also the question: what is a
human being, and what kind of human being is Science
talking about?
The Copernican theory
Copernicus world and reasoning were much more
complex and varied than generally assumed. He was after
all a man of the Renaissance trying to make sense of the old
and new cultural influences crisscrossing through his time.
For the central position of the Sun, for instance, he argued
in the following way: In the middle of everything stands130
e l e v e n tal k s
the Sun. For in this most beautiful temple who could place
this lamp in any other better place than one from which it
can illuminate all other things at the same time? This Sun
some people call appropriately the light of the World, oth
ers its Soul or Ruler. [Hermes] Trismegistos calls it the Vis
ible God, Sophocles Electra calls it the All-Seeing. Thus the
Sun, sitting on its Royal Throne, guides the revolving fam
ily of the stars. 12 The mentality of Nicolaus Copernicus
seems to have been rather different from the gross mate
rialistic evaluation of nature which uses his name in the
formulation of the Copernican Principle.
What is more, Copernicus, as often thought, did not re
duce the Ptolemaic number of circles required to make the
solar system go round, he increased it from forty to forty-eight,
as painstakingly counted by Arthur Koestler in Sleepwalkers.
And Copernicus stuck to the inviolability of the circle, since
classical times the paragon of heavenly perfection and the
reason why Copernicus still needed so many cycles and epi
cycles to make his model fit the data of observation. There
fore, when we talk today about the Copernican system we
usually mean a system of the universe quite different from
that described in Copernicus De revolutionibus ... It should
be more properly be called Keplerian or at least Keplero-
Copernican ... It has been well said that the significance of
Copernicus lay not so much in the system he propounded as
in the fact that the system he did propound would ignite the
great revolution in physics that we associate with the names
of Galileo, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton. The so-called
Copernican revolution was really a later revolution of Gali
leo, Kepler, and Newton. 13 In fact, Galileos spyglass or
optick tube did more for the acceptance of the heliocentric
system than Copernicus famous book.
12 Derek Gjertsen: Science and Philosophy, p. 155.
13 J. Bernard Cohen: The Birth of a New Physics, pp. 25 and 52.b e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
131
It may therefore be concluded that the Copernican
Principle or the Principle of Mediocrity could never have
been devised by Copernicus himself nor by one of his
contemporaries. It is a weapon in the arsenal of Scientism
forged during the decline of Western religion and the as
cendancy of positivist science. Bertrand Russell, formerly
the mouthpiece of anti-religious rationalism, defined the
Principle as follows: The earth is one of the smaller planets
of a not particularly important star, a very minor portion
of the Milky Way which is one of a very large number of
galaxies; and altogether the idea that we who crawl about
on this little planet are really the centre of the universe is
one which I dont think would occur to anybody except
us. 14 Here Russell was speaking about a universe with a
very large number of galaxies of which Copernicus could
not have had an idea and Russell himself would probably
wonder at the cosmological marvels and riddles that have
been discovered since he made his voice heard.
The picture of the cosmos has changed in amazing
ways since Aristotle, then Ptolemy, then Copernicus, Gali
leo and Newton, then Einstein, and it is changing today
with the powerful telescopes on and above earth. Another
question altogether is whether all this has taken the human
being out of the centre of the universe. If the humans were
only material things on planet earth, one could say yes. But
as they are mental and spiritual beings, they will always
perceive the world, including its picture as developed by
Science, from the centre that they are themselves.
The naked ape
Was it Charles Darwin, more than Nicolaus Coperni
cus, who knocked man from his pedestal? In the public
mind nowadays Charles Darwin is the giant who thought
14 Russell on Religion, p. 93.132
e l e v e n tal k s
out the theory of evolution and thereby initiated a radi
cal shift in the conception humans had of themselves. This,
like so much else in popular science, is a misconception. It
might be said that Darwin was the midwife who, in 1859,
presented the theory of evolution to the world, or that he
was the cause that all of a sudden the evolution theory be
came the focus of attention and consternation. For how to
admit that among our ancestors and those of Christ there
had been a monkey?
In the first half of the 19th century theories of evolu
tion were in the air. What was more, the great French biolo
gist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck had formulated one that was
fully worked out and coherent, although not fully justified
which was not possible with the means at the disposal of
biologists at the time (and even now). Secondly, Darwins
own theory was far from fully justified scientifically. He
never touched on the origin of species, even though so pro
claiming in the title of On the Origin of Species, could only
sketch the formation of species by natural selection, and
had not a clue about the inheritance of the natural charac
teristics in animals, now called genetics.
Darwin was also a recluse who did not undertake any
long-distance travels after his adventurous five-year voy
age on the Beagle. The ones who did campaign to spread
his ideas were his friends and admirers, most of them ar
dent freethinkers with T.H. Huxley as their ringmaster.
They enjoyed shocking the prim moralistic Victorian socie
ty of their time with the new message: that all living beings
consisted of nothing but matter, should be studied in the
way physics studied material things, and that in the course
of the evolution everything had always developed from a
previous material something, like the primates from the
monkeys and consequently the humans from the primates.
The human became nothing but an animal, an evolvedb e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
133
naked ape living in a society which was a human zoo
(titles of books by Desmond Morris).
The human media repeat day by day how animal-like
humans are, and those animalized humans, on an average,
seem to care little about it. If scientists say so, it must be
true. Besides, who still cares about values, metaphysics, or
God forbid! mysticism? The late Stephen Jay Gould,
a Harvard biologist and science writer of world-fame, was
one of the chief propagators of the idea that human be
ings were a fluke, not an inevitable outcome of increasing
mammal intelligence. He wrote for instance that, if Pikaia
had not survived, we would not have been here. Pikaia, an
animal from the Cambrian era, was a soft-bodied darting
swimmer, now thought to be the ultimate grandparent of
all vertebrate animals. But if any other strategic link in the
evolutionary chain had not been there before or after Pikaia,
we would not have been here either!
Gould: We are here because an odd group of fishes
had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs
for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze en
tirely during an ice age 15 ; because a small and tenuous
species [Homo sapiens], arising in Africa a quarter of a mil
lion years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and
by crook. We may yearn for a higher answer but none
exists. And Richard Dawkins, whose name is now often
associated in importance with the name of Darwin, wrote
in The Selfish Gene: The argument of this book is that we,
and all other animals, are machines created by our genes.
... We are all survival machines for the same kind of repli
cator molecules called DNA.
15 At the time Gould wrote these words, it was not yet known that the
earth had frozen over (snowball earth) at least two times, 2.5 billion
and 800 to 600 million years ago.134
e l e v e n tal k s
It is now increasingly recognized that the past of the
terrestrial evolution has been a concatenation of huge ca
tastrophes and extinctions, but also that after each of those
catastrophes life made a step forward, as if the ordeal had
been a precondition for its growth. The evolution of con
sciousness and knowledge cannot be accounted for unless
there is already a concealed consciousness in things with its
inherent and native powers emerging little by little, wrote
Sri Aurobindo already in The Life Divine. Further, the facts
of animal life and the operations of the emergent mind in
life impose on us the conclusion that there is in this con
cealed consciousness an underlying Knowledge or power
of knowledge which by the necessity of the life-contacts
with the environment comes to the surface. 16 To be able to
accept such a conclusion, however, one must have an open,
plastic mind, not a mind brainwashed by authority, profes
sional (de)formation or historical formulation of any kind,
even scientific. For if the search for knowledge and truth is
ineradicable from the human mind, its findings have with
out exception been proven to be partial or provisional.
The second law of thermodynamics
A third, less often noted argument in the negative view
propagated by Scientism is the second law of thermody
namics, the study of the transformations of energy. The first
law of thermodynamics is the law of conservation of energy.
Its second law is the law of increase of entropy or molecular
disorder, which states that, over time, closed systems tend
toward greater states of disorder. This increase in entropy
must, in the opinion of positivist science, inevitably lead to
universal degradation.
The secrets of evolution, which are the secrets of life,
are time and death, wrote Carl Sagan. (Once again we
16 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 635.b e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
135
are reminded of the Mothers saying that materialism is the
gospel of death.) The Earth, the Sun, our galaxy, the billions
of galaxies of our universe: all that is not living but dying.
Indeed, life is about half over. Our estimates are that the
first living organisms appeared on earth in the order of 3 to
4 billion years ago, and we know from stellar evolution that
our Sun will expand and burn up the Earth in another 3 to
4 billion years, putting an end to everything, writes Rich
ard Lewontin. George Smoot is even more explicit: Corag-
gio, domani sar peggio! (Be courageous, tomorrow will be
worse!) ... The long-term future is bleak: entropy will con
tinue to increase ... Every physical process in the universe
follows the second law of thermodynamics ... We face a
continuous downward spiral of no return. Entropy is un
forgiving. Many scientists look worried these days ... To
become even a guarded optimist, you have to think hard. 17
(William Calvin)
However, the consequences of the second law are valid
and verifiable only in case of the evolution of a system that
is energetically isolated, in other words: closed. Biological
systems are not closed. And is the universe a closed sys
tem? ... When the laws of thermodynamics are applied to
living organisms there seems to be a problem, writes Paul
Davies. One of the basic properties of life is its high degree
of order, so when an organism develops or reproduces, the
order increases. This is the opposite of the second laws bid
ding. The growth of an embryo, the formation of a DNA
molecule, the appearance of a new species and the increas
ing elaboration of the biosphere as a whole are all examples
of an increase of order and a decrease of entropy. 18 The
famous law of increase of entropy describes the world as
17 The last quotes are from a collection of short essays by scientists,
edited by John Brockman: What Are You Optimistic About?
18 Paul Davies: The Origin of Life, p. 28.136
e l e v e n tal k s
evolving from order to disorder; still, biological or social
evolution shows us the complex emerging from the sim
ple. How is this possible? How can structure arise from
disorder? ... There is an obvious contradiction between the
static view of dynamics and the evolutionary paradigm of
thermodynamics. 19 (Ilya Prigogine )
In one of his first though least known books, Quantum
Questions, Ken Wilber examines the metaphysics of the
20th century physicists, quoting some of them extensively.
His conclusion is clear and convincing. The physicists who
worked out the two great revolutions of relativity and quan
tum mechanics Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrdinger,
Eddington, and others were also profound philosophers
and even, Wilber writes, mystics. The reason was that they
felt themselves confronted with the essence of things, with
Reality as such and with everything Reality may stand for.
For some three decades they were rethinking the founda
tions of existence, and although their vantage point was
that of scientific materialism, they were capable of expand
ing their horizon sufficiently to encompass the big ques
tions within it, even those beyond Judeo-Christianity.
The great theoretical physicists of the following gen
eration Dirac, Feynman, Weinberg, Hawking were very
differently focused (at least most of them). To them the
big questions led to nothing but confrontational and use
less verbiage; what counted was to solve the mathematical
problems posed by the accepted paradigms. The rest one
could speculate or joke about, but it could only be meaning
fully approached after the bases of physics (fundamentally
the Grand Unified Theory) would be found. As they saw it,
everything had come about by the universal laws and con
stants, obeying Chance. The following are two examples of
19 Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers: Order out of Chaos, p. xxix.b e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
137
this mentality. Steven Weinberg: The more the universe
seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless. ...
The effect to understand the universe is one of the very few
things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce,
and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. 20 Peter Atkins:
We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of
change is decay. At root there is only corruption and the
unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left
is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we
peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the Uni
verse. 21
The biologists, eager to insert the various branches of
their science within the framework of physics, have adopt
ed this view with a vengeance. If the human accepts this
message of science [actually of Scientism] in its full mean
ing, then he must wake up from his dream lasting thou
sands of years to discover his total solitude, his radical
foreignness. He knows now that, like a Gypsy, his place
is in the margin of the universe where he has to live in a
universe deaf to his music, indifferent to his hopes as it is
to his sufferings and crimes. 22 This is a paragraph from
Jacques Monods famous Chance and Necessity, called a
book of desperate metaphysics.
The way scientists like Stephen Hawking have become
superstars, whose slightest pronouncements are regurgitat
ed by the media ad nauseam, is pathetic. About Hawkings
latest bestseller, The Grand Design, one finds in Scientific
American of November 2010: Physics, the book states, can
now explain where the universe came from and why the
laws of nature are what they are. The universe arose from
20 Steven Weinberg: The First Three Minutes, p. 155.
21 In Richard Dawkins: Unweaving the Rainbow, p. xi.
22 Jacques Monod: Le hasard et la ncessit, p. 216.138
e l e v e n tal k s
nothing courtesy of the force of gravity, and the laws of
nature are an accident of the particular slice of universe we
happen to inhabit. God may exist, Hawking told Larry
King, adding, but science can explain the universe with
out the need for a creator.
Paul Davies has put it all together: There is a sizeable
group of scientists who ... wish to diminish or even besmirch
human significance, and with it the significance of human
qualities such as intelligence and understanding. For these
scientists any suggestion of a teleological trend or progres
sive evolution towards consciousness, or even towards great
er complexity, is anathema. Their arguments, however, also
carry barely concealed overtones of an ideological agenda
[Scientism]. In this respect they are little different from those
who have decided in advance on this or that religious inter
pretation of nature, and then shoehorn the scientific facts to
fit their preconceived beliefs. Meanwhile, it has to be admit
ted, most scientists stick with something like position A [the
absurd universe] and get on with their work, leaving the big
questions to philosophers and priests. 23
Two notes in the margin
In conclusion of this section, the following notes may
throw a special light on its contents.
What was the real centre of the universe?
In his classic work The Great Chain of Being, Arthur
Lovejoy has the following remark: The geocentric cos
mography served rather for mans humiliation than for his
exaltation, and Copernicanism was opposed partly on the
ground that it assigned too dignified and lofty a position
23 Paul Davies: The Goldilocks Enigma, p. 303.b e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
139
to his dwelling-place ... The centre of the world was not a
place of honour; it was rather the place farthest removed
from the Empyrean, the bottom of the creation, to which its
dregs and baser elements sank. The actual centre, indeed,
was Hell; in the spatial sense the medieval world was liter
ally diabolocentric. Though surprising, this is logical be
cause hell, the abyss or bottomless pit, was always felt to
be located below the earthly life. And Lovejoy quotes John
Wilkins, who wrote in 1640 about the vileness of our earth,
because it consists of a more sordid and base matter than
any other part of the world; and therefore must be situated
in the centre, which is the worst place, and at the greatest
distance from those purer incorruptible bodies, the heav
ens. 24
Galileo Galilei seems at one time to have been of the
same opinion, if only for matters of expediency. Galileo
circulated La Bilancetta in manuscript form and it became
a success. It established him as a mathematician to be reck
oned with. The academic establishment welcomed him with
open arms, and asked him to apply his mathematical abil
ity to what was to them a far more important problem: the
calculation of the exact location and dimensions of Hell, as
described in Dantes Inferno. Galileo took his assigned task
seriously ... Over the course of two lectures to the Florentine
Academy he used mathematical arguments to demonstrate
that Hell must have a shape like a cone, with the point at
the centre of the earth and the circular boundary of the sur
face passing through Jerusalem. ... His argument convinced
the aristocratic audience, and he was rewarded with a lec
tureship in mathematics at the University of Pisa, where he
soon realized that he had got the mathematics of Hell badly
wrong. (Len Fisher ) 25
24 Arthur Lovejoy: The Great Chain of Being, pp. 101-02.
25 Len Fisher: Weighing the Soul The Evolution of Scientific Beliefs, p. 94.140
e l e v e n tal k s
Earth special
As we have seen, it is the main tenet of the Copernican
Principle that there is nothing special or privileged about
our location in the universe. The spiritual view of Sri Au
robindo and the Mother says exactly the opposite, as has
been considered in another talk. 26 In the present context
the following quotations must suffice.
The Mother: In the immensity of the astronomical
skies, earth is a thing absolutely without interest and with
out importance, but from the occult and spiritual point of
view, earth is the concentrated symbol of the universe. ...
For the convenience and necessity of the work, the whole
universe has been concentrated and condensed symboli
cally in a grain of sand which is called the earth. And there
fore it is the symbol of all: all that is to be changed, all that
is to be transformed, all that is to be converted is here. This
means that if one concentrates on this work and does it
here, all the rest will follow automatically. 27
Sri Aurobindo: Earth is the foundation and all the
worlds are on the earth and to imagine a clean-cut or irrec
oncilable difference between them is ignorance; here and
not elsewhere, not by going to some other world, the divine
realization must come.
Evolution takes place on earth and therefore the earth
is the proper field for progress. 28
The Mothers strong statement speaks volumes: La
terre, on ne la dtruit pas ! the Earth will not be destroyed!
26 See talk 5, 2012 and 1956: Doomsday?
27 The Mother: Entretiens 1953, 23 September.
28 Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, pp. 178 and 111.b e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
141
What is a human being?
Scientific materialism reduced the human being to a
complex chance agglomeration of material elements, emerg
ing as forms in a coincidental evolution. The image it found
pleasure in destroying in the Western mind was that of an
original human being given form by a Creator in his own
image from the dust of the Earth. This is one of the numer
ous mythical stories about the origin of man. In this case the
image after which he was made must have been that of an
anthropomorphic God, in other words a God himself made
in the image of man!
Still there is a truth behind this myth. 29 When writ
ing about the four varnas brahmins, kshatriyas, vaishyas,
and shudras Sri Aurobindo mentioned the Purushasukta
of the Vedas where the four orders are described as hav
ing 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, but to the seers among the ancient
forefathers it was a revelative symbol of the unrevealed ...
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 cosmos are both of them symbols and expres
sion of the same hidden reality. 30
What Sri Aurobindo calls here the cosmic Purusha
was also known in various ancient occult traditions. Gnos
ticism knew an Anthropos, Protanthropos, Adam or Ada
mas. The Kabbalah knew Adam Kadmon, the Primal or
Primordial Man, sometimes also called the High Man or
the Heavenly Man. Whatever the names given, all could
be considered to be the same divine archetype from whose
29 See talk 1: Adam Kadmon and the Evolution.
30 Sri Aurobindo: The Human Cycle, pp. 9-10.142
e l e v e n tal k s
supernatural body the manifestation, the macrocosm, con
tinuously came forth, as well as the human being in his
structural complexity, the microcosm. It is because of the ex
istence of this archetype that life in the evolution has gradu
ally taken on the shape which, for the time being, culminates
in the human body. Far from being a gratuitous outgrowth
somewhere in the universe, the evolution is a process of
Consciousness and has an aim, directed or projected by the
cosmic Purusha. This Sri Aurobindo called the Supramental
Being. Everything in existence is supported by it, guided by
it, and will ultimately be fulfilled by it.
According to Sri Aurobindo the human is the men
tal being who appeared on earth at a certain moment in
its evolution. In the popular mind man, as Darwin said,
is still a descendant of the ape, but today paleoanthropol
ogy could neither tell you which ape nor when the event
took place. Sri Aurobindo had already written in the Arya:
With regard to man especially there is still an enormous
uncertainty as to how he, so like and yet so different from
the other sons of Nature, came into existence. 31 One finds
this now confirmed in some of the most recent publications
by experts in this matter, e.g. Friedemann Schrenk in Die
Frhzeit des Menschen [the early times of the human being],
and Pascal Picq in Les origines de lhomme [the origins of the
human being]. Schrenk writes: The origin of the species
Homo is one of the most controversial problems in paleo
anthropology, despite or because of all the new [fossil]
finds. And Picq: The human does not descend from the
chimpanzee or the bonobo, nor the other way around. If
we share that many common characteristics, it is because
they have been transmitted to us by a common ancestor
who lived in Africa some 7 million years ago. That ances
tor remains unknown.
31 Arya, vol. V, p. 506.b e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
143
Most important in this context is the Aurobindian view
of what one might call the double movement in evolu
tion. The manifestation is the result of a plunge by the Di
vine into his contrary, thereby creating the glorious scale
of the worlds, from the highest expressions of the divine
Consciousness to the lowest, those of the Inconscient. Thus
was established the Chain of Being: in descending order
spirit, mind, the life forces, and matter. In its urge to regain
the divine Origin, the evolution is the slow re-conquest of
the original and central Consciousness, ascending the exist
ing scale step by step. The downward movement Sri Auro
bindo has called involution and the upward movement
evolution. To accede to a new, higher step in the evolu
tion a double movement is needed: the inner urge on the
existing level, obeying the evolutionary aim of re-conquest,
and an answer from the corresponding higher step in the
involution. What is here summarized in an abstract way
means that, in order to realize the urge in Nature to exceed
the level of the primates, a response from the worlds of the
mind was needed, and not only an answer but a participa
tion, an incarnation of the mental life in the life of the pri
mates. The human is that being that has in him the mental
characteristics from the worlds of the mind incarnated in
the material unfolding of the terrestrial evolution.
Human beings are the sons and daughters of Mother
Earth. As such they carry in them the evolutionary gra
dations of their formation matter, the life forces, mind.
Because these evolutionary gradations correspond to the
cosmic gradations, the human being is rightly called a mi
crocosm. The gradations are concretely expressed in what
yogic experience has called the chakras, lined up in the
subtle body along the backbone. Through the chakras, the
human being is tuned to the universal forces, even though
unaware of it. All the time the universal forces are pour
ing into him without his knowing it. He is aware only of144
e l e v e n tal k s
thoughts, feelings, etc., that rise to the surface and these he
takes for his own. Really they come from outside in mind
waves, vital waves, waves of feeling and sensation, etc.,
which take particular form in him and rise to the surface
after they have got inside. 32 (Sri Aurobindo)
So what is a human being? Present-day scientific ma
terialism assures us that there is no reason to single out
the human line [in the evolution] as special, except for our
chauvinistic interest in it. ... There is no way in which we
can claim to be better than Aegyptopithecus [an early
monkey] or the Miocene apes, only different. They were
well adapted to the world in which they lived, and we are
well suited to the world in which we live. 33 (Mary and
John Gribbin)
The great Persian mystical poet, Rumi, saw the hu
man otherwise but that was still in what the West calls
its Dark Ages:
First man appeared in the class of inorganic things,
Next he passed therefrom into that of plants.
For ages he lived as one of the plants,
Remembering naught of his inorganic state so different;
And when he passed from the vegetative to the animal state
He had no remembrance of his state as a plant ...
Again, the great Creator, as you know,
Drew man out of the animal into the human state.
Thus man passed from one order of nature to another,
Till he became wise and knowing and strong as he is now.
Of his first souls he has now no remembrance,
And he will be again changed from his present soul ... 34
32 Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, p. 313.
33 Mary and John Gribbin: Being Human, p. 119.
34 Translation E.H. Winfield, 1898.b e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
145
In the Western Age of Reason, Alexander Pope wrote
in his famous Essay on Man (1733):
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast ...
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey of all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurld;
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
In the spiritual view, now as well as in the past, the hu
man being is an incarnated soul, in other words the Divine
incarnated to fulfil His purposes on Earth. This has always
been sensed and even concretely experienced by people in
all climes called seers, great souls, yogis or mystics, even
when their mentality was restricted by the knowledge and
thought patterns proper to their ages. Now the times seem
to have ripened and may bear fruit in the realization by ma
ture souls of their presence in this material world, trans
formed by a higher Consciousness. The anthropocentric il
lusion will then be changed into a divine Reality. Which is
why Sri Aurobindo had Narad say to Savitris royal father:
Earth is the chosen place of mightiest souls;
Earth is the heroic spirits battlefield ...
Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king,
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven. 35
This alone [the realization of the Divine] is mans real
business in the world and the justification of his existence,
without which he would be only an insect crawling among
other ephemeral insects on a speck of surface mud and wa
ter which has managed to form itself amid the appalling
immensities of the physical universe. 36
35 Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, p. 686.
36 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 48.



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