Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Triple Transformation - Track 605

Quote from The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo, p.889

Therefore there is a need to study the Vedic experience again. When they said that the situation can be changed, had they really changed the situation? If they had changed the situation why is this present situation still continuing? That means that they were not able to change the situation entirely. In the process of evaluation of the past we can say something was still missing even in the Vedic experience. They made many experiments and they proposed that we can change the situation and we can change the human nature. Sri Aurobindo says here: "there is still much to be done", and this is also the statements of the Veda itself. The Vedic rishis were great scientists, they never claimed more than what they really did. They themselves said that as we rise higher and higher newer peaks reveal themselves before us which are still to be attained, there is still much to be accomplished. It means the Veda itself recognised that the victory was not a complete victory. There was a great victory but that victory which you can call complete victory, by which you can really change the situation, the world order can be changed soil needs to be accomplished: Bhuri aspashtam kartvam – bhuri means a lot, spashta means clarify, kartvam means needed to be done, a lot of clarification still needs to be made. This statement is from the Veda itself.

Now what is it that is to be done, by which the real situation can be changed?

As I have said, Veda itself said that if you really want to change you have to enter into the truth plane – satyam ritam brihat – you have to cross the physical plane, the vital plane, the mental plane and enter into the truth plane. And they tried to bring the truth plane on the lower planes. In this respect much was done but something more was still to be done. It is to that that Sri Aurobindo addresses himself, ‘That which has still to be done, is to bring the truth plane, not only in the individual life but on the collective plane, in the world order’. Not only to reach the supermind which was already reached by the Vedic rishis – the truth plane is the supermind – but to bring that supermind on the lower planes until the physical plane itself is changed. This was the real experiment that Sri Aurobindo did and accomplished, and he said, "this can be done". Sri Aurobindo says: the spiritual man has come but not the supramental being – to reach the supermind is one thing but to bring the supramental being here is another. That is why the process that Sri Aurobindo has proposed is a process of ascent and descent. You rise up to the higher levels of consciousness and bring their light into the lower planes of consciousness until you reach right up to the supermind and then bring down the supermind on the physical plane and transform that too. This process includes the positive sides of other experiences also. The escape from a situation as a temporary phase can be prescribed. You can come out for the present moment to escape from the situation if that is very necessary, only for a temporary phase, but not with the idea of completely escaping altogether and forever. In any case to be able to witness a situation, to control the situation, to master the situation these processes which are a part of escape are also parts of this process; this capacity in any case you must achieve. But then you have to supplement it by the capacity to come back on the situations, rise above the mind into the supermind and then constantly work on the situation to bring supramental knowledge on the physical.

If we read the first paragraph again, we shall understand what Sri Aurobindo says. He says that if the aim was only to return from ignorance and from situations of ignorance and to realise the inner self, then that work has been done already, the path has been found out. If it is only to change the world to some extent, that work also has been done, but if the task that is to be done is to completely change the situation of the world then that work has still not been done. That is still to be done. We shall read again this first paragraph (page 889).

"If it is the sole intention of Nature in the evolution of the spiritual man to awaken him to the supreme Reality and release him from herself, or from the Ignorance in which she as, the Power of the Eternal has masked herself, by a departure into a higher status of being elsewhere, if this step in the evolution is a close and an exit, then in the essence her work has been already accomplished and there is nothing more to be done. The ways have been built, the capacity to follow them has been developed, the goal or last height of the creation is manifest; all that is left is for each soul to reach individually the right stage and turn of its development, enter into the spiritual ways and pass by its own chosen path out of this inferior existence. But we have supposed that there is a farther intention, -- not only a revelation of the Spirit, but a radical and integral transformation of Nature. There is a will in her to effectuate a true manifestation of the embodied life of the Spirit, to complete what she has begun by a passage from the Ignorance to the Knowledge, to throw off her mask and to reveal herself as the luminous Consciousness-Force carrying in her the eternal Existence and its universal Delight of being. It then becomes obvious that there is something not yet accomplished, there becomes clear to view the much that has still to be done, bhuri aspashta kartvam; there is a height still to be reached, a wideness still to be covered by the eye of vision, the wing of the will, the self-affirmation of the Spirit in the material universe. What the evolutionary Power has done is to make a few individuals aware of their souls, conscious of their selves, aware of the eternal being that they are, to put them into communion with the Divinity or the Reality which is concealed by her appearances: a certain change of nature prepares, accompanies or follows upon this illumination, but it is not the complete and radical change which establishes a secure and settled new principle, a new creation, a permanent new order of being in the field of terrestrial Nature. The spiritual man has evolved, but not the supramental being who shall thenceforward be the leader of that Nature".