“A mutual debt binds man to the Supreme:
His nature we must put on as he put ours;
We are sons of God and must be even as he:
His human portion, we must grow divine.
Our life is a paradox with God for key.” (CWSA 33: 67)
The Purpose of Creation
“The universe is an objectivisation of the Supreme, as if He had objectivised himself outside of himself in order to see himself, to live himself, to know himself, and so that there might be an existence and a consciousness capable of recognising him as their origin and uniting consciously with him to manifest him in the becoming. There is no other reason for the universe. The earth is a kind of symbolic crystallisation of universal life, a reduction, a concentration, so that the work of evolution may be easier to do and follow. And if we see the history of the earth, we can understand why the universe has been created. It is the Supreme growing aware of himself in an eternal Becoming; and the goal is the union of the created with the Creator, a union that is conscious, willing and free, in the Manifestation.
That is the secret of Nature. Nature is the executive Force, it is she who does the work.” 7 May 1958 (CWM 9: 321)
Sri Aurobindo’s Vision of a Divine Life for Humanity upon the Earth
“There is an ascending evolution in nature which goes from the stone to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from the animal to man. Because man is, for the moment, the last rung at the summit of the ascending evolution, he considers himself as the final stage in this ascension and believes there can be nothing on earth superior to him. In that he is mistaken. In his physical nature he is yet almost wholly an animal, a thinking and speaking animal, but still an animal in his material habits and instincts. Undoubtedly, nature cannot be satisfied with such an imperfect result; she endeavours to bring out a being who will be to man what man is to the animal, a being who will remain a man in its external form, and yet whose consciousness will rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance.
Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men. He told them that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness, but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness, the Truth-consciousness, and capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, good and beautiful, happy and fully conscious. During the whole of his life upon earth, Sri Aurobindo gave all his time to establish in himself this consciousness he called supramental, and to help those gathered around him to realise it.” 24 July, 1951 (CWM 12: 116)
The February 29, 1956 manifestation of the Supramental in the subtle physical layer of the Earth brought about by the Mother marks an important and most crucial milestone in the evolutionary march on earth. The above manifestation – the manifestation of a divine dynamism far greater than any that had ever before manifested in the terrestrial nature – makes the eventual realization of Sri Aurobindo’s vision a certainty. Speaking about it the Mother said, “…what has happened, the really new thing, is that a new world is born, born, born. It is not the old one transforming itself, it is a new world which is born. And we are right in the midst of this period of transition where the two are entangled – where the other still persists all-powerful and entirely dominating the ordinary consciousness, but where the new one is quietly slipping in, still very modest, unnoticed – unnoticed to the extent that outwardly it doesn’t disturb anything very much, for the time being, and that in the consciousness of most people it is even altogether imperceptible. And yet it is working, growing – until it is strong enough to assert itself visibly.” (CWM 9: 150)
“The descent of the supramental is an inevitable necessity in the logic of things and is therefore sure. It is because people do not understand what the supermind is or realise the significance of the emergence of consciousness in a world of “inconscient” Matter that they are unable to realise this inevitability. I suppose a matter-of-fact observer if there had been one at the time of the unrelieved reign of inanimate Matter in the earth’s beginning would have criticised any promise of the emergence of life in a world of dead earth and rock and mineral as an absurdity and a chimaera; so too afterwards he would have repeated his mistake and regarded the emergence of thought and reason in an animal world as an absurdity and a chimaera. It is the same now with the appearance of supermind in the stumbling mentality of this world of human consciousness and its reasoning ignorance.” (CWSA 28: 287)
While the complete realization of the vision of a divine life may be looked upon as something of the distant future, the decisive turning of the collective human mind – leaving aside all narrowness of the traditional religious mind, philosophical intelligence and politico-economic “isms” – towards the integral spiritual ideal which aims at the perfection of life in matter – something that all the above narrowness have miserably failed to accomplish – by the power of the Spirit has become imperative for the safety of the human race; for it alone can form the basis for the realization of human unity in a rich and organized diversity. Human Unity has become indispensable for the solution of some of the most dangerous collective problems facing humanity – especially problems such as the race for ever more potent and dangerous arms, the extension of national and individual human rivalries to outer space, and a looming ecological and environmental disaster.” (The Evolutionary Crisis Before Humanity: Sri Aurobindo Divine Life Trust, Khetan Mohalla, Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan 2025: PP. 15-17)
