The Evolution of Consciousness and Planetary Transformation
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An extract from the book The Teachings of Yoga.
In the modern west, we credit Darwin with “discovering” evolution. But Sri Aurobindo, who lived at a time when Darwin's theories were just beginning to circulate and gain attention, recognized that they were a surface-level articulation of a much deeper cosmic phenomenon. He had studied the Vedas, yoga's most ancient texts, and discovered in them hidden teachings that resonated deeply with a comprehensive theory of evolution.
Sri Aurobindo taught that at the base of all manifest reality there is One Single indivisible, eternal, perfect Existence, One Being from which all creation emerges. This One needs nothing, as it is the beginning and end and even the middle of everything that has ever and will ever exist. For the delight of self-discovery, this One has become many, has spun Itself into countless galaxies and solar systems and worlds and beings. All this diversity comes from the One, and actually is made of the One.
And in order to fully immerse in the delight of self-discovery, this One had to completely forget Itself. Eternal consciousness had to become absolute inconscience, all knowledge had to become total ignorance. So the Vastness of Eternal Being, called brahman in the Vedas, the root texts of yoga, cloaked Itself in successive layers of obscurity like a Russian nesting doll. The most superficial, the outermost layer is matter. Inside matter, all the other layers are hidden, and in the center, the deepest layer is the absolute Infinite One, the Divine, God, hiding from Themself in the atoms that comprise the minerals in your bones, in coral reefs, and in the peaks of the Himalayas.
This dive into ignorance was an involution. Then, slowly, over the course of billions of years, a process of evolution peeled away the layers of obscurity. Life, which was hidden within seemingly dead, inert matter, emerged. Life invalidated the entropy that governs matter and rejected inertia. It danced in the face of death, organized itself out of chaos. And then the self-aware mind, which had been lying asleep within life, evolved from where it was hiding within life. Mind transcended the individual death of embodied beings, allowing them to live far into the future as stories passed down, words written, accomplishments remembered. Mind doesn't need to eat another mind in order to grow, and it allows for new and radical possibilities of collaboration.
And what else lies within, hiding inside of mind, waiting to evolve? What new capacities will overcome mind's limitations: the linear thought process, the inability to comprehend wholes and the need to objectify something in order to know it? Sri Aurobindo points to a map described in the ancient Vedas that shows matter, life, mind, and then an intermediate layer between the lower, limited manifestation and the higher, pure Divine that lies at the heart of all creatures and all creation. This map is reflected in the Vedas symbolically as seven rivers (saptasindhavah in Rig Veda Samhita) and the seven worlds (saptalokā in Taitteriya Aranyaka of Yajurveda).
The higher reality is called satchitananda, or being/consciousness/delight. These three aspects describe the qualities of the One that has become Many. The intermediate layer between the higher and the lower, and the bridge between the two, is called vijńana, or gnosis, the wisdom of the heart that knows through identity, that enables an embodied experience of each individual self belonging to the Whole. Sri Aurobindo calls this bridge the supramental consciousness because it is beyond mind, which from our current perspective is the frontier of evolution.
The supramental consciousness is not the mind of steroids. It's not a super or “suped up” version of mind. It's something entirely new, as different from mind as mind is from life. Imagine trying to help a tree understand linguistics or algebra. That's how easy it is for the mental being, whose experience and expectations are defined by thoughts, beliefs, concepts, and linear cause and effect chains, to imagine the supramental consciousness. And yet it is quietly emerging within us as a bridge to self-realization. As we come to experience one human race rather than individual nation states, or as our interdependence on all life begins to replace entitlement to extract resources endlessly from the Earth, we are growing into a supramental awareness. This growth will continue until we see all humans as our family and care for them and the Earth as we would care for a beloved child or sibling.
Evolution traces across billions of years, slowly meandering as nature gradually tries millions of possibilities, hanging on to what works and discarding what doesn't. But evolution traces an exponential curve. The time that it took from mind to evolve out of life is considerably less than the time it took for life to evolve out of matter. And with advances in intercontinental travel and communication, from steam ships to Zoom, we become conscious and intentional participants in our own evolution, and time frames shrink astronomically. Technology grows out of our desire to realize ourselves as one, and it facilitates that realization as well, partly by exposing our inherent interconnectedness, and partly by throwing light on all the times we still act as isolated individuals.
The Divine One secreted Itself within the dense ignorance of matter and then began a process of unveiling through the gradual and intricate processes of Nature. Life emerged from matter, self-regulating and expanding. Then mind emerged from life, with even more capacity for unifying and synthesizing.
And beyond mind is further growth, the evolution of a wisdom that harmonizes opposites, synthesizes truth, experiences the underlying unity of the cosmos. We sit today at the edge of mind’s ability to lead us into the future, and a collective call is arising within human hearts for a new capacity that exceeds mind’s limitations. This new capacity will change everything: even matter itself will be transformed and divinized as we open to the future. What comes is as radical as the change from plant to fish, or from fish to mammal, or from mammal to human being.
GurujiMa also teaches that we are evolving toward a total realization of our deepest nature. The Divine is living within us as our deepest self, and we are in a gradual process of self-discovery. This process takes place over the course of lifetimes, and is also intertwined with the broader evolution of the Earth itself.
The Earth is not an unconscious rock floating through empty space, but a living evolving being, just like us. She is conscious and her consciousness comprises the consciousness of every being that is part of her. She is awakening, and our individual awakening is totally inseparable from her self-realization.
Evolution is not linear. It surges and recedes, drawing forward in great advances and then settling over long periods of integration and assimilation. GurujiMa teaches that we are currently living through a period of major forward movement, where old patterns of consciousness and behavior are falling away to reveal deeper realizations. The Earth is awakening, passing into a new level of self-understanding, and so is every being that is part of her.
Sri Aurobindo wrote that "There are moments when the Spirit moves among [us] and the breath of the Lord is abroad upon the waters of our being; there are others when it retires and [we] are left to act in the strength or the weakness of [our] own egoism. The first are periods when even a little effort produces great results and changes destiny; the second are spaces of time when much labour goes to the making of a little result."
He called these moments of increased evolution the "Hour of God", which he said "is the hour of the unexpected, the incalculable, the immeasurable." These are times when the evolutionary force is pressing upon on us and compelling transformation. The multiple overlapping and inescapable crises of our time are embodiments of this evolutionary force drawing us toward something too marvelous to imagine in the current circumstances. The mind cannot fathom what awaits, feels only the threat of annihilation. But the soul within knows the way through this passage and is sure of the destination.
In the Rig Veda Samhita, the root text of the Sanskritic yoga traditions, Ushā is the soul of the dawn. She rises each day, casting rays of light into the darkness, transforming the darkness to light. She illumines and awakens. And she is not just an embodiment of the material dawn. She symbolizes the succession of divine dawns that unfold the process of evolution. She “blazes and follows the trail of truth”, and she is the “immortal radiant Dawn.”
Ushā unveils the new every day, and with every breath. She opens the door to what was impossible yesterday, ushering in the future, taking us over the horizon into uncharted territory. And she is immortal, eternal. She is always arriving, always drawing us forward beyond comfort and familiarity and toward wholeness, harmony, and truth. As seekers of truth, we can hitch ourselves to her chariot and allow her to carry us out of darkness and into light.
Yoga is life seeking to expand, to exceed itself. Yoga is the emergent future, the rising sun, the persistent evolutionary movement: from the rock to the plant to the fish, amphibian, reptile, bird, mammal, ape, human…and? Refining and assimilating and attempting, testing an endless variety of possibilities, but always expanding, widening.
Life’s emergence from matter was nothing short of miraculous. However it may have happened, a self-organizing, self-individuating, self-preserving tendency developed in the Earth’s primordial waters. Bacteria bloomed and joined to create multi-cellular organisms, algae, plankton. Life diversified and expanded, climbing out of the water and fixing itself on land, flowering and flourishing. And as life individuated further, the self-organizing capacity expanded into fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals, individual untethered beings with proto-brains and proto-egos.
Evolution continued and mind coalesced into a container for consciousness. Mind allows the experience of self as an individual to reach an entirely new level. Mind looks around and sees not-self and differentiates that from self. Mind allows the ego, the container of self-identity, to define, refine, and set like a jelly mold. And mind too grows and expands, faster even than life, because now it can grow without killing. Two minds join and build on each other, expanding exponentially. Before writing, the growth of mind was limited by memory and death, but writing extended learning eternally into the future. Before intercontinental travel, mind was limited by perspective and subject to the perimeters of cultural norms, but now the internet has opened the doors to exponential noetic expansion.
Mind has its own limitations. It cannot easily reconcile conflicting ideas; it cannot see wholes, only pieces. It cannot know another being from the inside, only from the outside. And for this reason, it cannot solve any of the critical global social problems that we face today. What can overcome these limitations? What can overstep these bounds?
Every day we take for granted miracles that could not have been fathomed or believed just 200 years ago, not to mention 2,000 or 2,000,000 years. Consider jet planes from a 17th century perspective, or bananas in New England, motion pictures, laparoscopic heart surgery, vaccines, Wikipedia, Google, or video chatting across continents for free. Our consciousness evolves as technologies shrink the world and demolish barriers to experiencing life through the eyes of the “other”. We begin to tolerate differences in culture, in life experience, in belief systems, and then protect them, and then celebrate them. The future is emerging, and what is to come will be as unimaginable to our modern sensibilities as mind would have been to a bacterium or a fish or a monkey. Evolution is not over. Evolution is now.