Notebook on Evolution

<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#ffffc0" link="#0000ff" vlink="#800080" alink="#ff00ff"> <a NAME="bio"></a> <table BORDER=0 CELLPADDING=4 WIDTH="72%" > <tr> <td> <menu> <li>  <font face="Georgia"><A href="#intro">Intoduction</A></font> <li>  <font face="Georgia"><A href="#Contents">Contents</A></font> <li>  <font face="Georgia"><A href="#Downloads">Downloads</A></font></li> </menu> </td> <td> <center> <h2> <font face="Georgia"><font color="#ff0000">T</font><font color="#ff0700">h</font><font color="#ff0f00">e </font><font color="#ff1e00">M</font><font color="#ff2600">o</font><font color="#ff2d00">t</font><font color="#ff3500">h</font><font color="#ff3d00">e</font><font color="#ff4400">r</font></font> <hr WIDTH="25%"></h2></center> <center> <h1> <font face="Georgia"><font color="#ff0000">N</font><font color="#ff0700">o</font><font color="#ff0f00">t</font><font color="#ff1600">e</font><font color="#ff1e00">b</font><font color="#ff2600">o</font><font color="#ff2d00">o</font><font color="#ff3500">k</font><font color="#ff3d00"> <br> </font><font color="#ff4c00">O</font><font color="#ff5400">n </font><font color="#ff6300">E</font><font color="#ff6b00">v</font><font color="#ff7200">o</font><font color="#ff7a00">l</font><font color="#ff8200">u</font><font color="#ff8900">t</font><font color="#ff9100">i</font><font color="#ff9900">o</font><font color="#ffa000">n</font></font></h1></center> </td> </tr> </table> <hr WIDTH="50%"> <center> <h3> <b><font face="Georgia">Biographical Note</font></b></h3></center> <table width="100%" border=0> <tr> <td width="48%" valign="TOP"> <img src="images/mother11.gif" width=160 height=190 border=0 alt="Mother" align="LEFT"> <p><font face="Georgia">As a young girl growing up in Paris, where she was born in 1878 as Mirra Alfassa, <b>MOTHER</b> had a natural contact with and access to an invisible reality. Despite a very materialistic background, going out of her body, reliving scenes from past lives, or knowing things without ever having learned them before was as natural as breathing. Her studies of mathematics, music and painting did not offer any explanation for the strange experiences she was having, but they allowed her to know and befriend some of the great minds and artists of the time. In 1897, she married Henri Morisset, a pupil of Gustave Moreau.</p> <p>The first practical clues to her inner life were given to her by Max Théon, a strange character and master occultist who, recognizing her gifts, invited her to his property of Tlemcen in Algeria to explore occultism. In 1914, a chance trip to the then French colony of Pondicherry in India led her to Sri Aurobindo, in whom she found not only the answers to all the experiences she had been having since her childhood, but also their deep significance for her future life. After a five-year stay in Japan, she returned to India and to Sri Aurobindo in 1920, never to leave again.</p> <p>As disciples began gathering around Sri Aurobindo and Mother, the "Ashram" was formed and, in 1926, when Sri Aurobindo withdrew from public view to pursue the "Integral Yoga," he put her in charge of the material and spiritual needs of a growing population of sadhaks. After Sri Aurobindo's passing in 1950, she decided to continue his work at the roots of the human condition and, from 1962 to 1973, painstakingly uncovered, in her body, subtle mechanisms of the consciousness of the cells that may be the key to understanding the limitations of our physical life and to unlocking a new way of being in the body.</P></font> </td> <td> </td> <td width="48%" valign="TOP" align="LEFT"> <img src="images/sa11.gif" width=160 height=193 border=0 alt="Sri Aurobindo" align="LEFT"> <p><font face="Georgia">Born in 1872, in Calcutta, <b>SRI AUROBINDO</b> was sent at the age of seven to England for his education. Emerging from King's College in Cambridge at the age a twenty, he returned to India and began militating for the freedom of his country. After leaving the service of the Maharaja of Baroda and a teaching position at the local College, Sri Aurobindo founded and edited a political daily, the Bande Mataram, and soon emerged as a leader of the freedom movement against British rule. Suspected of a bombing attempt against the life of a British magistrate, he would spend a year in jail awaiting trial.</p> <p>That year of forced isolation revolutionized the orientation of his life from an outward-directed focus to an inward-directed one. "It is not just a revolt against the British empire that we must wage, but a revolt against the whole universal Nature!" he exclaimed.</p> <p>Acquitted but still pursued by the British police, he moved to French India, in Pondicherry, where he began the "yoga" in earnest. He withdrew into the solitude of his room in 1926 to devote himself more completely to his inner work, while disciples began gathering around him and the Mother, who had joined him a few years earlier.</p> <p>Sri Aurobindo passed away in 1950, leaving a written work that comprises poetry, plays, philosophical essays, and an enormous body of letters about his work and yoga.</P></font> </td> </tr> </table> <hr width="50%"> <h3><a NAME="intro"></a><b><font face="Georgia">Introduction</font></b></h3> <blockquote><font face="Georgia">Evolution remains a mystery, even after the Bible, even after Darwin. One sees the creature "being evolved" as the object of many random mutations whose sum adds up to a new coherence in matter, while the other sees it as the exquisite recipient of a new, ready-made Order.</font> <p><font face="Georgia">Neither gives the creature the time of day.</font> <p><font face="Georgia">What if these "models" were a bit . . . patriarchal and mechanistic in their approach, the product of a dual ignorance of God and of matter? What if the creature mattered? What if it had <i>always</i> mattered, from the plant to the amoeba to the archaeopteryx and finally to the human? What if it were, in fact, a subject, and maybe even a partner in its own evolution?</font> <p><font face="Georgia">This is what this "Notebook on Evolution" is about.</font> <p><font face="Georgia">But right away, a problem of language arises: Language can never describe or explain evolution, because it can never be more intelligent than we are, since it comes <i>after</i> the being. Explanations and communications will wait until a fully developed new status in matter has emerged.</font> <p><font face="Georgia">Therefore there is nothing easier than to laugh away the stuttered communications attempts of a future species. It must not have been easy, one and a half million years ago, for a first hominid in East Africa to sit among his contemporaries while strange new mental vibrations stirred in his small brain. For sure, something was happening, but how could he possibly convey in ape language the beginnings of the mental tidal wave that would produce Einstein? He must have looked rather foolish and weird sitting there, wondering.</font> <p><font face="Georgia">Mother wondered a lot. She spent years wondering about the strange new vibrations stirring in, and sometimes overwhelming, her body. She too could not find the words to "describe" or "explain" what was going on in and around her. And since God is always the first and last refuge of the unknown, the natural repository of what we cannot put into an equation, she spoke of a "Supreme Consciousness," of "Supramental Force," or just "That," to try to circumscribe and tame the unnamable  which, nevertheless, would remain a mystery until the very end.</font> <p><font face="Georgia">In 1961, at the age of 83, after a lifetime devoted to the Spirit and to spiritual actions, she repudiated the whole spiritual reference as a "total illusion": "The feeling that <i>all</i> one has lived, <i>all</i> one has known, <i>all</i> one has done is a total illusion. It's one thing to have the spiritual experience of the illusion of material life (I found it marvelous and so beautiful, it was one of the loveliest experiences of my life); but now it is the whole spiritual construction as one has lived it that is becoming a total illusion!</font> <p><font face="Georgia">Not the same illusion, but a far more serious illusion."</font> <p><font face="Georgia">What is there beyond the spiritual illusion, at the end of all metaphors, when "God" Himself seems to fail?</font> <p><font face="Georgia">"Call it anything you like, it doesn't matter," she said. "It's the Perfection, the Power, the Knowledge we must become."</font> <p><font face="Georgia">"Something  a new way of being."</font> <p><font face="Georgia">This <i>Notebook</i> is about that "something," a communication attempt  perhaps from the next species after man  each person will have to make sense of, or not.</font> <p><font face="Georgia">The evolution of the species is everywhere around us. It is the most current and ongoing and unstoppable phenomenon in the world. Yet no one seems to pay very much attention to it, except for a few scholarly specialists who report their findings about <i>other</i> species at international conferences or in remote scientific journals. Paradoxically, the human species never studies or observes itself as a part of the evolutionary movement. The one inexorable process that determines our fate on earth far more significantly than any other and far transcends our petty differences of race-religion is left out of all human preoccupations. We investigate every phenomenon in the universe, from the galactic bombardment of elusive neutrino particles in vast pools of water beneath the earth's surface to the speed of the Continental Drift, but strangely we never so much as glance at ourselves as an evolving species. No external endeavor is too great, no outward exploration too remote for our ingeniousness, but we become thunderstruck at the mere notion of turning the microscopes on ourselves.</font> <p><font face="Georgia">Mother never used a microscope, either.</font> <p><font face="Georgia">The first dramatic change of the next species is a new set of eyes, a strikingly different way of looking at reality. Like the modern high-altitude telescopes, built far away from the interference of city lights in order to peer into the origin of the universe, we learn to look past the pre-imposed meaning of our immediate senses in order to capture the twinkling lights of the next reality. We learn to see and feel the future in the present.</font> <p><font face="Georgia">What happens when the lights of the city are left far behind and only the immense blue-black night shines overhead? Is there "something" out there in the darkness? Is it possible that dreaming hard enough, yearning long enough, burning intensely enough will make that future something appear by force, as it were, through the sheer intensity of a flame of aspiration? <i>Can one peer desperately enough into the future to compel it into the present?</i></font> <p><font face="Georgia">The next species  the species after man  is not found at the end of a mental microscope any more than the feathered bird was found in the coils of the reptile; it is found at the end of all human artifices and conceptions:</font> <p><font face="Georgia">"The anguish had reached its peak: the sense of the futility of all human efforts to embrace and understand what is beyond the human. What is truly <i>true</i> besides all our conceptions? And it ended in a slight little movement, just as a child would have who knows nothing, tries nothing, understands nothing  but who abandons himself. A little movement of such simplicity, such ingenuousness, such an extraordinary sweetness. . . . And instantaneously came <i>the</i> Certitude  the lived Certitude."</font> <p><font face="Georgia">Will we be wise enough to become children again? Will we trade some of our ingenuity for more ingenuousness? Will we be able to let go of our mental shackles and stare down the future with the gaze of purity and innocence?</font> <p><font face="Georgia">The future of our species is already there, wholly formed beyond the horizon of our mental night. Our task is to bring it here by bridging that obscure gulf, by piercing the engulfing night by dint of a relentless innocence.</font> <p><font face="Georgia">"It seems that the main question was to create a physical being capable of bearing the Power that wants to manifest. And so this body is being accustomed to it. It's as if it had suddenly caught a glimpse of such a marvelous horizon ahead  overwhelmingly marvelous! Yet it is allowed to receive only as much of this as it can bear. It's very much a matter of plasticity: to be able to withstand and to offer no resistance to the Power that wants to manifest."</font> <p><font face="Georgia">Nevertheless, isn't this is an untenable position to be in? How can a reptile manifest the future winged bird? How long can a human body, with its needs, its natural functions, bear the appearance of a totally new way of being without breaking or exploding? Mother's last years on this earth testify to an excruciating and impossible contradiction: "If it were a question of ending something and beginning something <i>else</i>, it might be possible to do. But to keep a body alive while <i>at the same time</i> allowing for a new functioning and a transformation  that makes for a very difficult combination to realize."</font> <p><font face="Georgia">But she never once looked back. Instead, she wore down the contradiction bit by bit, abandoning herself more and more to "the Power that wants to manifest." In the end, her body had become infused with such overpowering energy that her unsuspecting visitors found themselves either transfixed and mesmerized, or else fleeing in fright. "There isn't any 'I.' It's almost like an empty shell. Yet there is this formidable, all-embracing Force. . . . As if a superhuman Power were trying to manifest through thousands of years of impotence."</font> <p><font face="Georgia">Can one human body alone transform itself enough to escape the laws of <i>Homo sapiens</i>? Then what about the rest of humanity?</font> <p><font face="Georgia">Yet discovering the code of the next species in one body is to discover it in all bodies and for the entire species. Is it possible that this code has already been discovered but that we don't know it?</font> <p><font face="Georgia">"Why the hurry?" some might say. "Wait for Nature to do it."</font> <p><font face="Georgia">"Yes," Mother replied, "Nature will do it in a few million years, wasting countless lives and things in the process."</font> <p><font face="Georgia">At a time when one species  ours  seems to have exceeded the entire "carrying capacity" of the Earth, when 27,000 species a year are lost due in great part to the 500,000 trees that are cut <i>every hour </i>in tropical forests around the world; when every natural system on the planet is disintegrating and the land, water, air and sea have been transformed from life-supporting systems into repositories for waste; when the immune system of every unborn child may soon be adversely and irrevocably affected by the persistent toxins in our food, air and water  we may no longer have the time to take our time.</font> <p><font face="Georgia">In the following pages, Mother relates her own experience.</font></p></blockquote> <h3> <font face="Georgia"></font></h3> <table BORDER=0 WIDTH="100%" > <tr VALIGN=center> <td> <h3> <font face="Georgia">Contents</font></h3> </td> <td> <div align=right><a NAME="Contents"></a><A href="#bio"> <img src="images/retop.gif" width=67 height=61 border=0 alt=""> </td> </tr> </table> <font face="Georgia"><A href="#bio">Biographical Note</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="#intro">Introduction</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_sa.htm"> Sri Aurobindo</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_issue.htm">The Issue</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_chall.htm">The Challenge</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_supra.htm">1956-1958 - The Supramental Manifestation</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_open.htm">1958-1959 - The Opening of the Body</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_prob.htm">1960  Probing the Body</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_1break.htm">1961  The First Breakthrough</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_2break.htm">1962  The Second Breakthrough</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_call.htm">1963  The Call of the Cells</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_kneading.htm">1964  The Kneading of Matter</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_change.htm">1965  The Change of Government</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_newfunct.htm">1966  The New Functioning</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_newtype.htm">1967  The New Type on Earth</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_acc.htm">1968  The Acceleration</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_newcons.htm">1969  The New Consciousness</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_endsepara.htm">1969  The End of Separation</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_oldhabit.htm">1969-1970 - The Old Habit of Death</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_livcontra.htm">1970  The Living Contradiction</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_newlife.htm">1971-1972 - The New Life of the Body</A></font> <br><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_newcond.htm">1972-1973 - A New Condition in Matter</A></font> <p><font face="Georgia"><A href="f_biblio.htm">Bibliography of Sri Aurobindo and Mother</A></font> <center> <p><a NAME="Downloads"></a></center> <p> <hr width="50%"><br> <font size="3" face="Georgia">Download PDF or MS Word version of the complete book for off-line viewing or printing.<br> Right-click on one of the following links, and select Save Link As.<br> <br> PDF format<br> <br> <li><A href="evolution.pdf">PDF file without bookmarks (688 kb)</a><br> <li><A href="evolution.zip">Zip-compressed PDF file with bookmarks (744 kb)</a><br> <li><A href="evolution.pdf.sit">Stuffit-compressed PDF file for Mac with bookmarks (675 kb)</a><br> <br> MS Word format<br> <br> <li><a href="evolution.doc.sit">Stuffit-compressed Word file (146 kb)</a><br> <li><a href="evolution.doc.zip">Zip-compressed Word file (226 kb)</a><br> <br> Programs for compression and reading<br> <br> <li><a href="http://www.aladdinsys.com/StuffIt/">Download free Stuffit Expander (Mac & Windows)</a><br> <li><a href="http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html"> Download free Acrobat Reader for viewing PDF files</a></font> <br> <hr width="50%"> <center> <p><A href="mailto:info@nextspecies.8m.com"> <img src="images/emailbut.gif" width=35 height=36 border=0 alt="" align="MIDDLE"></A> <font face="Georgia"> Email: <A href="mailto:info@nextspecies.8m.com">info@nextspecies.8m.com</A></font></center> <table BORDER=0 WIDTH="100%" > <tr> <td><font color="#ffffff"><counter></font></td> <td><div align=right><A href="#bio"> <img src="images/retop.gif" width=67 height=61 border=0 alt=""></A></div></td> </tr> </table></p> </body>