Integral Health
The metaphysical basis for Integral Health — The Alpha and the Omega
Omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet is also fashionably used to denote the culmination or crowning moment of a movement. Teilhard de Chardin used the term Omega Point as the goal or end result of his evolutionary cosmology. Teilhard’s description of the Omega Point makes it a transcendent principle for it is outside the framework where the universe arises. He postulates that it is by the attraction of the Omega Point that the universe moves towards it through progressively higher forms of complexity, consciousness and personality (1).
Teilhard’s Omega Point has often been compared with Sri Aurobindo’s Supermind. However, in Sri Aurobindo’s scheme, the Reality is simultaneously transcendent, universal and individual. The Superconscious Supramental Reality is therefore implicit at all levels of consciousness, in variable degrees of manifestation or dormancy. If evolution moves towards the highest goal through increasing complexity, it has been preceded by an equally complex involutionary movement through which the Supermind principle progressively condensed itself to be finally veiled in the Inconscience, moving through non-evolutionary typal worlds. The fact of the Superconscient creative principle becoming embedded, veiled and dormant in the Inconscience makes the Inconscience a phenomenal and not a fundamental reality. Evolution starts from the Inconscience because whatever has to evolve is already present as a seed in the Inconscience. Sri Aurobindo explains that the evolutionary trajectory can progressively move onwards, surpassing the mind-principle to traverse higher ranges of consciousness till it reaches the Supermind. Thus on one hand the goal of the evolutionary movement is to reach the Supermind so as to make its manifestation possible here on earth itself; while on the other hand, evolution starts from the Inconscience because the potentialities of the Supermind are already involved and dormant in it. This is why the Reality, in Sri Aurobindo’s paradigm is simultaneously the culmination (Omega) of evolution as well as the initiating point of evolution (Alpha):
“Brahman is the Alpha and the Omega. Brahman is the One besides whom there is nothing else existent (2).”
Frank Tipler expanded the idea of the Omega Point to view it as a Transcendent zone analogous to the Christian heaven where past personalities can be relived through a mechanism analogous to resurrection of the dead and therefore leading to omnipotence (3). In Sri Aurobindo’s perspective, the Supramental Consciousness has to manifest not in a far away heavenly Omega but in the earth itself, in the matrix of matter that arises from the Inconscience, the Alpha. Moreover, the resurrection of the dead envisaged by Tipler is replaced in the Aurobindonian paradigm by a transformation of the living along a forward trajectory leading to the appearance of a new species.
Sri Aurobindo asserts that “the Reality is one and not a sum or concourse (4).”
This has enormous bearing in a world-view where perfection has to be achieved in the pursuit of the Omega as well as the realm of the Alpha. When the evolutionary trajectory manifests the Supermind, it accesses a consciousness where perfection already pre-exists as if pre-programmed for execution. The crux of the phenomenon lies in the fact that the evolutionary culmination does not take place in a Transcendent consciousness beyond the manifestation like a heavenly Omega but in the matrix of inconscient matter, in the ground reality, in the bosom of the Alpha.
This crowning achievement of the highest perfection, at once unitary and integral, though containing the multiplicity to be manifest in the ground of Inconscience, the home of divisibility, the zone of imperfection requires a long preparation for which ordinary humanity is not yet ready. Fortunately for humanity, the Mother as a pioneer has accomplished that journey, using her own being as an experimental field so as to sow the seeds of possibility and potentiality for future travellers.
This unique journey through the annals of an evolutionary consciousness requires a preparation of which the most important requisite is to integrate the discordant parts of the being around the ego-surpassing soul-essence, the Psychic Being. A pursuit of Integral Heath that brings harmony and balance is fundamental in this scheme of integration along with a new psychological discipline that can dissect the planes of consciousness mixed up at the surface personality so as to align them properly in the inner ranges of the being around the ego-surpassing fourth-dimensional principle. This integrated being can then traverse the supra-rational cognitive matrices, surpass even the global cognitive field (the Overmind Consciousness) to culminate in the Integral cognitive poise of the Supramental Consciousness.
References
1. de Chardin, T. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Row; 1975.
2. Sri Aurobindo. Birth Centenary Library, Volume 18. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust; 1970, p. 33.
3. Tipler, F. The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead. New York: Doubleday; 1994.
4. Sri Aurobindo. SABCL, Volume 18. p.33.
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