Growth
The Ascent of Man — Unity and Diversity
Abstract
Human evolution is an interesting field of study, not just by way of the steps and stages through which mankind has evolved from the animal, but even more interestingly with regard to its ongoing future evolution. It opens doors to a new understanding of our varied constitution but also to the true basis of Unity.
Are human beings a single species? The obvious answer to this question would be, ‘Yes’. It is so because the biological criteria of differentiating one species from another is primarily based on mating and breeding, and because these different breeds still can mate with each other, though there are genetic variations creating different breeds. However, nature does not necessarily work according to human logic. Inter-breeding between certain species does happen and, when we come to human beings, great diversity does exist within the same species.
To say that all human beings are the same is a deep spiritual, and even a fundamental biological truth. But on the ground level, from a practical point of view to say that all human beings are the same is as problematic as saying that everyone has the same blood. The fact is that mixing or infusion of one person’s blood into another, without consideration of the variations between the different blood-group, may turn out to be fatal. The same blood that gives life can become the cause of death. In fact, we could equally say that all creatures, indeed, the basic building-blocks of all the different elements of creation, are the same at the deepest fundamental level. But this underlying unity supports a great degree of variation. Modern socio-political ideologies under the stress of the Time-Spirit, seeking for human unity hastily, often blur the distinctions and try to build a unity based on the surfaces of creation which abounds in variations and variety. The ground of Unity must be first discovered and the variations and their underlying processes and purposes need to be understood before we can truly discover in practice the means to arrive at human unity.
Such a ground of unity exists in the depths of creation. It is this underlying unity that expresses as the interconnectedness of creation at every level of existence. Mystical experience across the world affirms the same ground of Unity and Oneness everywhere and in everything. Having discovered this ground of Unity, mystics are freed from anger, fear and grief. No more deceived by the ever-changing appearances, they are at home everywhere and feel all creatures as their kin. Hatred and jealousy pass away from their heart and the will to possess with its poison fruits of lust and greed, ambition and acquisition, attraction and repulsion leaves them, until by and by they are completely freed from the deceiving ignorance that sees the many as separate entities, each independent of the others. Rather, they see each as an inevitable part of the whole, distinct but not separate, different but not independent of the All. This ground of Unity is found in the spiritual being within us. We can discover it through the doors of the secret soul within us. The mystic key to Unity, the secret lever that can open us to the Universal and the Sole, is there.
But Nature takes delight in creating as many variations as it can conceive and which exceeds even what the most fertile human mind can imagine. These variations are meant to enhance the delight of existence by expanding the delight of oneness into a delight of multiplicity. The Upaniṣads in fact state this as the very reason for creation itself to come into existence. That is why all efforts to create forced unity by manipulating the surfaces of life through enforced uniformity, regimentation, conversion of the different elements into a single type are bound to fail and sometimes quite miserably so. The history of religions is witness to this failure and fall. As long as the spiritual ground from where religion is born is kept intact, things look fine. A spirit of universal brotherhood is felt during this early phase and which flowers in acts of charity and compassion and bears that fruit of the Divine Sacrifice we know as universal love.
But with the passage of time, there is an externalisation and the truth of Unity is twisted into the need of uniformity through custom and tradition. A further decline works like an evil spell, leading to a multiplication of cults and sects and the infighting and quarrels between them, each claiming its own way as the best, each struggling for supremacy over the rest. Then enters into this, twisted truth politics and ambition, greed, fear and money, making it unrecognisable from its parent spiritual experience which is lost or remains as a shell and a crust, at best a folklore, at worst a narrow rigid dogmatic creed whose truth is lost in the maze of a belied system. Still there is always a possibility in religion to discover its spiritual core, at least for an individual who is a sincere seeker of Truth.
But ideological means of building unity often fare even worse. They may not enforce a common code, but they are locked within the boundaries of idea and ideology that is not ready to accept and accommodate other ideologies and their proponents. The rot sets in much earlier than religion, leading to either disillusionment with its attendant cynicism and loss of hope, or else a violent intolerance, a vehement opposition to all other viewpoints different from its own. The rest is history if we carefully study the history of ideologies. They make the same mistake as religions do, of customising and standardising life.
Religions and ideologies, both have failed to find the perfect answer to the problem of Unity in diversity. Nature does it effortlessly because it acts without an egoistic stress on this or that creature. It acts impersonally, universally, pouring itself equally in each element of creation. But this equality keeps everything in its rightful, proper place and in just proportions. Man too, can accomplish this seemingly impossible feat by identifying with the vast Intelligence and Power that operates in the depths of creation. Material nature operates mechanically, but behind its most trivial of operations there lies a vast universal Intelligence. Piercing and penetrating the surfaces of life, we too can enter into these concealed depths and growing, be one with the Intelligence or the Consciousness hidden behind the surfaces, discover the great secret hidden behind the appearances where we see only an endless diversity.
The journey of man
But this journey from our self-identification with the surfaces of life, which is akin to the animal driven by instincts, to the depths where intuitive gleams from a hidden sun enter the inner spaces of our human consciousness, is a long one through many steps and stages. Each of these steps and stages creates a type of humanity, like many intermediary sub-species. The journey itself is called Yoga and its purpose is to accelerate the evolutionary process by making the human being more and more conscious. The process of becoming conscious takes place first without man’s active involvement. It is just as animals evolve out of plants, without even knowing what is going on. They are totally unaware of any Intelligence and Power operating from behind. This Cosmic Intelligence and Power acts, on the one hand, by offering challenges through which a given species must pass.
On the other hand, it acts on the species by pushing it to the extreme limits and the eventual emergence through successive transmutation. Man too, is pushed unconsciously in the same manner through a series of challenges. In the process of navigating and adapting through these challenges, we grow more conscious, discover new possibilities and powers, grow in our fund of knowledge in a graded manner just as a child goes from class to class during its schooling. This itself creates several layers of humanity or sub-species with different degrees of inner development. In the course of this evolution, not only our psychology and sociological behaviour, but even the physiognomy, undergoes a series of changes that are meant to reflect the inner evolution. Until this point, human kind is still labouring in a state that is sub-human, so to say, closer to the animal kind, though a bit more evolved due to the emergence of speech. His emotions and reasoning are only slightly greater in degree than the animal, though the scope and field of its application is enhanced and enlarged. He is, to use the ancient Indian language of the mystics who observed the different evolutionary types of humanity, paśu (more like an animal), vānara (the first human transmuted from an ape), piśāca (the man driven by vital instincts), pramātha (the humanity living in sensation and emotions).
But a stage comes when man grows conscious enough to participate in the evolutionary process through schools and new learning, through quest and seeking, through a conscious effort to study and understand. It is by engaging with this conscious process of learning, discovering, understanding and empowering oneself, that man grows more and more conscious. He evolves disciplines such as Science, Philosophy, Art. He develops the sense of a self, which is yet centred around his bodily needs and vital passions and hungers. Next, he grows into an intellectual kind who lives in a mental ego centring his life around ideas and ideologies.
It is the Asura in man, whose life is centred around the mind and hence he believes himself to be the most superior of all. Ambitious and arrogant, the Asura takes up the Paśu and the Rākṣasa and brings it under control of the intellectual mind. Ordinarily, this is what is generally considered as the most evolved human type. He is the image of a civilised man who has discarded the previous savage stages and arming himself with the intellect lives to stamp his individual and group ego onto the rest of mankind.
The Evolution of man
However, evolution does not stop here. Man, proper evolves as he brings out not only a sharper intellect but a discerning intellect known as buddhi. Buddhi is not just reason alone, for a rudimentary reason can be felt even in the animal. Buddhi is reason with an ability to distinguish between the true from the false. It is the beginning of an early moral and better still, an ethical sense. The Asura may have a brilliant intellect but he uses it to justify the Rākṣasa and the Paśu in him. He has no moral or ethical sense to guide his actions. His only concern in action is to win by might, to impose his will and ideology upon others by force. His religion, if he has any, is that which approves of and aggrandises his individual or collective ego. His God is akin to him, a frightening power who is quick to slay and punish and reward, appeased by human or animal sacrifice. The Asura and Rākṣasa are the original brutes, identified not with their outer qualifications, wealth or position but by their inner qualities (or their lack thereof). His cult is the expansion of the empire of the ego with its ostentatious trapping. His culture a show, a sham and a hypocrisy to aggrandise his ego-self. His is a creed of meaningless violence. His is a cult of the ego, whose purpose is to satisfy his ambitions, lusts, greed and desires. His sense of justice is a brutal tit for tat and his love is all made up of fear, jealousy and domination and possessiveness.
Human evolution begins in the true sense when man begins to part ways with the Asura, trims his ego, refines his nature, makes his desires subservient to a higher ethics, tames the animal rather than justifying it and masters his impulsive tendencies and passions by bringing in a higher ethical principle or a nobler thought to guide his life and actions. And with the coming of this man, religion and ideologies evolve under the pressure of a higher thought and nobler sentiment.
In other words, the evolution of man from the ape has taken two lines of evolution. One is the way of the Titan or the Rākṣasa and the Asura. The other is the way of Mānava (Man) and the deva. Deva here implies a further ennoblement of man along the line of the gods, the devas. Human evolution may get aborted with the Asura or entering the human curve climb beyond humanity to embody beings and energies of the higher consciousness. The Asura is an evolutionary being climbing from below on a stormy and turbulent path. He is a rebel against all that would ennoble man, because it threatens his so-called independent and free/licentious way of life. The deva, in contrast, is an involuntary being, a being of the higher consciousness that descends from above to occupy a human body that has become ready to receive the influx. If the godlike energies try to enter an Asura, his nature reacts and revolts. He is thrown into a state of inner torment and struggle. The only way he can evolve further is by accepting and passing through the human stage.
Man — a transitional being
The ‘humane’ human therefore is a transitional being whose emergence marks the completion of one curve of evolution and the beginning of another. It is at this juncture that we begin to see the stirring of a conscious evolution, the birth of spiritual aspiration, the further evolution of man from the mental thinker to the spiritual seeker. This evolution itself takes a number of lines, creating in its trail some more sub-types. But the difference here is that each of these sub-types lean towards discovering the fundamental unity, not only of mankind but of all creatures.
Until the Asura, evolution proceeds along the line of division. The human is the transition from this state of division to a state of Unity. Though there are a number of lines through which this further evolution continues, there are two basic routes that man has taken in his further spiritual evolution. One way is to enter into the depths of his heart in search of the Divine Reality concealed within him. This journey transmutes the human into a saint. Or he may climb beyond the limits of the mind towards a transmutation of his mind into the mind of the sage. Or, he may open to higher ranges of our spiritual being, to higher faculties than the rational mind, to inspiration and revelation and intuition thereby giving birth to the RRssi or the Seer. Finally, this evolution may lead to an identification with different aspects of the One Divine Reality and we then have the Yogi evolving out of man.
The Yogi too is not final. There is more to come, much more, since evolution cannot cease either with man or with the few beings here and there who have risen beyond man. This further evolution beyond the sage and the saint, beyond even the traditional understanding of the Yogi and the Ṛṣi has been mapped out and revealed by Sri Aurobindo. This further evolution is bound to be collective with its own set of intermediary sub-species, such as the psychicised humanity, the spiritual humanity, the Superman and the Overman and then passing through the gnostic individual and the world-personality, and finally, into the Supramental being. This discussion can be postponed for another time and another article.
But for the moment, it suffices to understand that humanity is not one uniform type but many-layered, many different types that are like the many steps and stages for the animal to evolve towards man and beyond. Once we understand this we can now turn to the practical implications of this evolutionary hierarchy.
Dr. Alok Pandey, an editor of NAMAH and a member of SAIIIHR, is a doctor practising at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
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