“At the time of this experience, Mitchell was 124,000 miles in theair. From his seat, he could look out the spacecraft’s window and seea vast universe in front of him. All around them, everywhere, werebillions of stars and galactic clusters, ten times more than one cannormally see from the ground of the planet. In front of him, and set

against this backdrop, was Earth. She hung there in space andappeared to him as a gigantic, round, living organism. Here was ourEarth, the mother that sustains us, our birthplace, our home, teeming

with both life and death, growth and decay, ever active, neversleeping, always changing, hurtling through space at a terrific speed.Then, suddenly Mitchell had what he has since called an epiphany. Hebecame one with the universe. His identity, he said, fused with allthat was around him. He saw that he, too, was an active part of thevery process he was viewing. Just as he was a living intelligent

being, so, too, was the universe. Instantly, everything around him hesaw as alive and infused with intelligence. Consciousness appeared tobe everywhere, not just confined to human beings. And it seemed likea wider and deeper consciousness than merely rational human beings can

know. It was a euphoric experience” (Taylor, 283).-describing an account from Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell

Ātmabandhu: Relational Self-Identity and Nature in the Thoughtof Sri Aurobindo

Nicholas Collins, 12/4/12

Introduction and Context:

The relationship between human culture, nature, and religion, experienced and conceptualized in different forms throughout the existence of human culture, always exists embedded in particular contextual circumstances, representing in part the larger environment of interrelated processes surrounding and determining, to an extent, the way this relationship is expressed. With the emergence of human culture, it became possible to reflect on this relationship, to conceive of it in symbolic conceptual terms, specifically those of language. The fundamental role played by language in the establishmentof human culture has been stressed by a number of thinkers, among themRoy Rappaport, Robert Bellah, and Max Oelschlaeger, who share a view of language as interrelated with human conceptual thought, and its consequent manifestation in culture. Language allows for the conceptual understanding of the world in terms of symbolic forms, which derive their meanings from their human creation via linguistic thought. In allowing for increased conceptual flexibility and capacitythrough symbolic representation as well as interpersonal communication, language enables individuals to learn from each other

and establish public knowledge, which is maintained as cultural tradition. (Rappaport, 4) The precise temporal origins of conceptual thought in humanity can only be inferred from archeological records prior, as the linguistic structures representing early conceptual thought were made public, cultural knowledge in the form of orality, as the media technology of writing had not yet been developed. Such public knowledge could be shared in speech, but its preservation required systems of repetitive oral recitation to facilitate memorization and transmission of cultural knowledge to subsequent generations. Such a tradition of systematic recitation and transmission existed in pre-historical Vedic Indian culture, preserving the cultural knowledge of these peoples for thousands of years prior to the advent of writing. Such orally transmitted knowledge thus became the first to be recordedfollowing the emergence and adoption of written language. This transitional period was not only a simple progression to a new media technology, however, and was also marked by enormous tension and the threat of cultural breakdown, in connection with changing ways of living, thinking and organizing human communities. Among these changes, the establishment of settled centers of human civilization, accompanied by the practice of agriculture, was a significant factor in restructuring the cultural complex of relationships, most fundamentally the relationship between culture and nature. The root cause of this “axial” transition has been long debated, with some thinkers, such as Paul Shepard and Max Oeschlaeger ascribing the shiftto agriculture, and others like Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan maintaining that literacy, the adoption of the written word, is the fundamental factor. The latter position is aptly summed up by McLuhan’s well-known aphorism, “the medium is the message.” What then is the message of literacy? McLuhan offers an account, “From that magical resonating world of simultaneous relations that is the oral space there is only one route to the freedom and independence…that route is via the phonetic alphabet, which lands men at once in varying degrees of dualistic schizophrenia.” (McLuhan, 22) Literacy, in McLuhan's view, restructures human perceptions of reality, fundamentally with regard to the experienced relationships to the content of that reality. The individual embedded in a world of relationships, characteristic of oral cultures, is abstracted from those relationships conceptually by print, yet physically they are unchanged. Literacy confers freedom and independence, but it is a schizophrenic freedom, continually at odds with the terms of the earlier, acoustic worldview. Whether literacy is the fundamental causeof such a change in human consciousness and culture is uncertain, but

it is certainly one factor among many concomitant changes which, together, characterize the axial age, in which contemporary humanity predominantly dwells.

Religion, conceived as the experienced relationship between humanindividuals and what they consider to be the ultimate nature of reality, in personal, social, and essential terms, thus represents a critically important area of culture for the understanding of its relationship to the natural world. Religious understanding, like mediatechnology, is never separate from the wider contextual environment, even if often highly influential on that environment. Neither is it ever divorced from the temporal aspect of such contextual and culturalprocesses and relationships. Their continual modification, and interaction through time, their evolution, preserving the knowledge of the past in the manifestation of the present, encompasses not only human history (whether or not recorded as history), but also the genetic history of biological evolution, that which had produced a consciousness capable of culture.

Evolution’s impact on the religious understanding of culture represents a transitional period in religious and cultural evolution, one characterized by unresolved tensions between humanity’s religious past, the history of our ways of being, and the paradigm shift to a modern conception grounded on scientific understanding informed by theidea of evolution. This tension has been present from the genesis of evolutionary theory, and continues to undergird contemporary culture, which has since been engaged in attempting to reconcile prehistoric (tribal), civilizational (archaic and axial), and scientific or evolutionary “religious” understandings (if scientific and evolutionary narratives can be considered to explore the relationship of humanity and existence- describing the processes underlying human being-ness). Such a reconciliatory attempt is clearly evident in the thought of 20th century philosopher and spiritual leader Aurobindo Ackroyd Ghose, or as he became known by his followers after his death,Sri Aurobindo. In was his lifelong work to develop a synthesis of these various perspectives, recognizing a fundamental continuity between biological and cultural-religious evolution, such that this dual process was in essence a single developmental movement of spirit.Regarding religion, he recognized it as having significance in both anindividual sense and in terms of its being a function of Nature as such, a phenomenon meant to “serve her as a means for pointing humanity’s effort and ideal in the direction of spiritual evolution...the holding up of this growing light of guidance on our way through the mind’s ignorance.” (Aurobindo, LD, 908) He was acutely aware that contemporary civilization was in danger of self-destruction and that

to overcome this threat a spiritual solution was necessary. At its base, the cause was evolutionary, in that the current state of human consciousness was maladapted to our capability in manipulating nature.As Aurbindo states, “The evolution of mind working upon Life has developed an organization of the activity of Mind and use of Matter which can no longer be supported by human capacity without an inner change. An accommodation…to a system of living which demands unity, perfect mutuality, and harmony is imperative.” He perceived a worldwide trend toward adopting such a spiritual solution, which wouldonly intensify and “become more imperative under the urgency of critical circumstance.” (Aurobindo, LD, 1099) He advocated a spiritualevolution in humanity, emphasizing the need for harmonious relationships of intuitive intimacy with the natural world and with the spiritual reality that pervaded and was manifest in that world, never separate from its activity even though unbound and transcendent.His metaphysical worldview can be understood as pantheistic, where spirit-as-nature is always implicit in any vision or description of spirit, even when experienced as a formless transcendent principle. Charles Hartshorne describes pantheism as “an appropriate term for theview that deity is the all of relative or interdependent items, with nothing wholly independent or in any clear sense nonrelative,” while in the panentheist view, the “deity is in some real aspect distinguishable from and independent of any and all relative items, and yet, taken as an actual whole, includes all relative items.” On its face it seems as though a transcendent spiritual principle contradicts a pantheistic status, yet the transcendent never exists independent of its relationships with the world and the individual beings therein. It is in actuality these relationships, these connections (bandhu-s) linking the terms of individual, cosmic, and transcendent spirit, which are the true self of all three. In positinga universality of spirit his system could also be seen as a form of what is called in Dark Green Religion, “Gaian Spirituality,” in which thereis a perception of the cosmos as having consciousness, “understood as an expression or part of God.” (Taylor, 14) For Aurobindo, the sacrality of nature lies somewhere in between these terms of expression and aspect, “a knowledge near and one, Seized on all thingsby a moved identity.” (Aurobindo, S, 292)

In keeping with the idea of contextual relevance in understanding the intellectual or religious forms that emerge within culture, an account of the immediate historical and cultural context in which his thinking arose is warranted. Aurobindo is considered one of the principal figures in the intellectual and aesthetic renaissancethat took place in India around the beginning of the 20th century. He

was also one of the central actors in the Indian independence movementthat was associated with the enormous transformations in thought that took place at this time. Aurobindo’s home state of Bengal was the epicenter of both movements. Aurobindo’s father, a thoroughly Anglicized physician raised his son to disregard Hindu thinking and believe in the Enlightenment faiths of reason, science, and especiallyDarwinian evolution. At the age of seven he sent Aurobindo to school in England, where he lived until earning his degree at Cambridge in 1893. Upon his return to India, Aurobindo plunged into the independence struggle, and founded a newspaper to promote Indian independence values. He was compelled to extend his ideas out of the purely scholarly philosophical realm into the social sphere. Thrown into prison on charges of plotting to set off a bomb, Aurobindo practiced intense meditation and yoga based on teachings he had received earlier from Vishu Bhaskar Lele, a traditional Hindu yogi (McDermott, 33). For the rest of his life Aurobindo would elaborate the insights he obtained in mystical experiences at this time. Reveredas a guru and indeed a world teacher by millions, Aurobindo continues to be a major presence in contemporary Indian thinking, and also exerted a major influence in the West, especially during the 1960s andthe subsequent counterculture. His followers, led after his death by Mira Richard, who had by then become known simply as “The Mother,” have continued the work of developing a model community capable of fostering practices aimed at achieving ecological harmony with the processes of evolution, fundamentally at the level of consciousness, but also with regard to environmental and socio-cultural interrelations. This community, called “Auroville,” is located in Pondicherry, in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, continues as an ongoing experiment in sustainable communal living and realization of ahigher, more holistic state of consciousness in humanity.

Sri Aurobindo’s Thought:

Aurobindo’s thinking is influenced principally by two streams of thought: that of evolutionary theory, whose popularity and visibility in European nations and colonial India at the time defined the intellectual milieu, and also the intuitive insights which Aurobindo found in the Vedic tradition of India, originally the product of a tribal culture, likely combined with influences from Aryan nomadic traditions, whose truths were confirmed for him through states of mystical consciousness brought about by determined meditative practice. Educated in England, where he attended Cambridge in 1890, Aurobindo was exposed to a variety of evolutionary perspectives.

Prior to Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace’s publication of The Origin of Species in 1858, thinkers such as French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and English philosopher Herbert Spencer and had posited evolutionary ideas. Spencer’s First Principles of a New System of Philosophy, published in 1862, attempted to encompass the multiform processes of evolution in human culture and thought in addition to the biological realm. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace were the first to publish a detailed complete theory of biological evolution in their On the Origin of Species, positing the emergence of complex and diverse forms of life from simplicity through the means of natural selection for beneficial traits aiding the organism in successful adaptation to its environment. Darwinian theory, of which Aurobindo’s father was an ardent supporter, was extremely popular in the latter part of the 19th century, and the attempt to integrate evolutionary thinking into the realm of human culture was a principle concern for thinkers of the age. Some of these theories resulted in simplified, Euro-centric assertions of cultural superiority, where European civilization represented the “fittest” society defined in a broad cultural sense involving science, art, and religion. Such views, often associated with E.B. Tylor, perceive the members of indigenous, non-western cultures as primitive savages trailing far behind European nations in the grand evolutionary project of civilization. Having come of age in the cultural environment of England at the end of the 19th century, at the time a principle intellectual center of Europe at the height of the evolutionary movement, Aurobindo was immersed in these evolution-inspired views. Yet he was also aware of the contrasting view, held bythinkers such as Rousseau, that primitive human cultures existed in harmony with Nature, and explicitly states such a harmonious state of relations among humanity and nature may approximate his vision of an ideal future: “Our progress may be a devious round leading from the easy and spontaneous uniformity and harmony which reflects Nature to the self-possessed unity which reflects the Divine (Aurobindo, HU, 202)

These were not the only western influences Aurobindo encountered,however, and while at Cambridge, he read widely in the western literature and philosophy, and expressed considerable affinity with early nineteenth-century Romantic poets, most notably William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and W.B. Yeats, all of whom shared a love of the natural world and sought to integrate the beauty of nature into their intellectual and aesthetic works. The work of French philosopherHenri Bergson was particularly influential on Aurobindo’s thought, representing a western philosophical view with correlational ties to the other major stream of influence on Aurobindo, the Indian

traditions rooted in the Vedas. Bergson, in his An Introduction to Metaphysics, distinguished between absolute and relative knowledge, and the methods particular to each form of understanding. Conceptual formulation, or “analysis,” attempts to construct an image of the object of which understanding is sought, however, it necessarily generalizes about the object, missing the intricacies and uniqueness that characterize its relational context, its place among a nexus of active relationships, being effected and itself affecting the other participant members in this process, which Bergson calls the “Duration(Duree).” Analysis thus is an act of division, separating the object of analysis from the whole of which its existence is a part, and disregarding the relational connections informing this existence. Ascribing its being to internally generated factors lying within the object and not in its relationships, analysis arrests the motion of relational being by symbolic representation of such qualities “possessed” by the object in an act of further separation. The quintessential human technology of symbolic representation, that of language, is employed to reconstruct a “spectre” of the object in linguistic form, itself a sort of snap-shot taken at a particular timeand state of relational being of the object. This simultaneous temporal and spatial separation purports to provide complete and objective truth, not realizing it is only a partial symbolic representation representing in inaccurate terms a specific and incomplete perspective. Aurobindo’s description of the regular operations of human mental cognition directly invokes Bergson; “Mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge. Its function is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown thing in itself and call this measurement or delimitation of it the Whole, and again to analyze the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects.” (Aurobindo, LD, 137) In regardingits concepts as separate mental objects, mental analysis abstracts them from their place within a nexus of natural relations, for the webof Nature is infinitely complex and limitless in form, far beyond the level of complexity and integration that mind is capable of grasping. Extracting a finite form from that web and representing it in conceptual symbolic thought is the attempt by mind to achieve a sense of knowledge, to say to itself, “This now I know,” when in fact its knowledge is not of its objects but rather of its own analysis. (Aurobindo, LD, 137)

In contrast to analysis, Bergson posited a mode of understanding capable of relational comprehensiveness, seeking as much as possible asympathetic closeness or unity of experience with the being of the object, with the way it actually exists, as an active relational

member of an ecosystem-like web of relations constituting its immediate environment. This sympathetic mode of understanding, which Bergson terms “intuition,” grasps the inner being of objects, and in doing so, grasps the external relationships informing that internal constitution, not in obscure symbolization but as authentic empatheticexperience. Such intuitive empathy is reminiscent of Henry David Thoreau’s desire for “sympathy with Intelligence” rather than the search for absolute descriptive knowledge, which, like Bergson, Thoreau considered to be unobtainable. Thoreau’s statement, “The desire to bath my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant” expresses the ultimate longing for experiential truth beyond the ordinary mode of analytical description-through-division characterizing normal mental operations. (Oelschlaeger, 166) Such ultimate longing for empathetic awareness Thoreau shares both with Bergson and Sri Aurobindo, evident in the latter’s poetic description of the “world- soul:”

“A sympathy of self with other selves, The touch of consciousness on consciousness, And being's look on being with inmost gaze And heart laid bare to heart without walls of speech”

(Aurobindo, S, 292)Again paralleling Thoreau, Aurobindo sought a linguistic

aesthetic capable of expressing or evoking such sympathy, which he detailed in The Future Poetry and endeavored to create with his poetic reinterpretation of Vedic mythology, Savitri, in which the creation and evolution of the world from spirit is told as a cosmic love story.

Correlational intimacy or intuitive understanding has relevance for Aurobindo which is intimately related to its affinity with similarmodes of understanding long idealized in Indian religious traditions, most fundamentally in the Vedas, which are the ideational and culturalwellspring from which the diverse forms of Hinduism, as well as Buddhism and Jainism, emerged and developed. The idea of understandingrelationships that determine the constitution and experiential qualityof reality is ubiquitous in the Vedas, and may be a general feature ofpre-modern representations of reality. (Witzel, Farmer, Henderson, 49) These relationships, or correlational structures, link the structural terms of one order of reality with those of another, such as in the identification of Vedic gods, devas, with the powers of nature and with ritual objects, or in linking the social and natural world orders. In the view of indologist Louis Renou, “the aim of the whole of Vedic thought may be expressed as the formation of upanisads (connections).” It is interesting that the word for connection, which is generally “bandhu” (cognate with “bond”), is here “upanisad,” as it

is precisely the texts known as Upanisads in which a truly novel idea of connection or correlational identity emerges. This experience of intuitive identity with the other, with the object of knowledge, is most clearly evident in its expression during what has been called by Bellah and others India’s “axial transition.” (Bellah, 509) Implicit in this view is an evolutionary understanding of cultural development,where the structures of human culture undergo modification and alteration according to the necessity of adaptation to changes in the surrounding environmental contexts. With respect to axiality, such alterations involve primarily the emergence of an idea of “transcendence,” defined by Benjamin Schwartz as “a kind of standing back and looking beyond- a kind of critical, reflective questioning ofthe actual and a new vision of what lies beyond.” (Bellah, 475)

In the Indian context, this transcendent principle takes the formof the concept of Brahman as it first expressed in the Upanisads, the philosophically oriented texts which are seen as elucidating the true hidden meaning implicit in the Vedas, or the “end of the Vedas” (vedānta). In the Brhad-aranyaka Upanisad (“great or vast-forest”), the concept of Brahman is described as the ground of Being, the fundamental self of all things and beings: “This (self) was indeed Brahman in the beginning. It knew only itself as, ‘I am Brahman.’ Therefore it became all.” (Madhavananda, 100) Through awareness of itsself-identity (Atman), Brahman becomes the Whole, that is the reality of self for all individual beings- it “became bodies here (on earth), every single one.” (Br.U, 1.7.3, “ekaikena bhavati atmeti atra”) The implication of this passage is that, in the state of proper and unobstructed intuitive experience of self, this self is not defined interms of a multiplicity of ecological relationships, the exchanging ofinformation that influences or impacts mutually interrelated participants such that they must adapt in response to it, in this sense being formed through their interaction. Rather, the self referred to in the Upanisad is beyond all relationality and activity, its true being not capable of expression in the limited terms of phenomenal experience. One must therefore step back away from this nexus of relationality which defines the character of an inaccurate orincomplete self-experience, one that is obscured by such associations.Standing apart from that false self, one experiences the Atman, the self defined by a relationality of a fundamentally different order, that of intuitive identity with transcendent Brahman. The danger inherent in such a transcendent experience is that it can be taken as a negation of phenomenal reality, which on its face seems irreconcilable with such a featureless, relationless Absolute. Aurobindo recognizes that this has in fact been the case with much of

post-Vedic Hinduism, a view which he calls, “the refusal of the ascetic,” in which “the Sannyasin (renouncer), enamored of that Beyond, insists on pure Spirit as the reality, and the relative as a dream.” (Aurobindo, LD, 23) This refusal is identified as having beenculpable in significantly disrupting the balance of Indian religious understanding, such that “all have lived in the shadow of the great Refusal, and the final end of life for all is the garb of the ascetic.” (Aurobindo, LD, 28) The ascetic garb which all will wear at the end of life is a reference to the Dharma-sastra text, The Laws of Manu, in which life of the individual is said to be properly divided into four stages, culminating in renunciation and wandering asceticism. Although he identifies early Buddhism as being culpable inpromoting this view, seeking the Nirvana of the world’s non-being, itsprevalence in classical Hinduism was no less visible, particularly in the philosophical school known as Advaita Vedanta (“non-dual truth of the Vedas”). The 9th century philosopher Shankara, probably the most well-known figure in the Avaita Vedanta tradition, commenting on this verse, states, “As ‘I am Brahman,’ the Self… described as ‘Not this, not this’…which is untouched by the attributes of the phenomenal universe, discarding the differences superimposed.” (Madhavananda, 111) The phrase used here, “Not this, not this,” (na iti, na iti), refers to the assertion that Brahman is decidedly not anything that can be pointed to, referred to, or conceived of. It is beyond the superimposed qualities of a world only existent to the perception of the ignorant view.

If Brahman-as-Atman is interpreted to be the sole reality of the plurality of selves and relationships comprising phenomenal existence,then that plurality as it appears to normal human perception (and to the empirical observations of science and ecology) is relegated to a less than real status. Such devaluation of the phenomenal world, that of interrelational experience, represents a devaluation of nature, fornature, as it has come to be understood by the science of ecology, is precisely that nexus of relationships engaged in the unending continual processes of exchange. From an ecological perspective, nature is a global or even universal ecosystem, described by Paul Shepard as “a creative, harmonious being where the relationships between things are as real as the things... whose members are engaged in a kind of choreography of materials and energy and information, thecreation of order and organization.” Shepard provides the analogy of apond, a microcosmic correlative structure of the larger world and universe, whose “ecology includes all events: the conversion of sunlight to food and the food-chains within and around it… fishing, plowing the slopes of the watershed, drawing a picture of it, and

formulating theories about the world based on what one sees in the pond. He and all the other organisms at and in the pond act upon one another, engage the earth and atmosphere, and are linked to other ponds by a network of connections like the threads of protoplasm connecting cells in living tissues.” (Shepard, 6) In Shepard’s analogy, the ecology of nature involves all natural forms and phenomena, from the sun’s rays traveling through the atmosphere to thesoul to the processes expressed by and engaged in by plants and animals, as well as all human action, perception, and experience. The pond provides a microcosmic example of a universal ecological view, yet even here it is not possible to separate the pond ecosystem from the wider relationships constitutive of and intimately connected to it, for it is itself entirely dependent on these, a fact represented by the uniquely important relationship with the sun. The sun provides the currency of this economy of nature, its rays delivering energy that feeds into the soil, into the plants that grow in soil, into animals that eat those plants, into humans who eat plants and animals,where it is again transformed into human thought and experience, as electrical activity connecting neurons in the brain. Indeed, the humanindividual represents another microcosmic correlational level, where the ecological relationships, represented as “threads of protoplasm connecting living tissue,” give rise to the individual as an ecosystemic whole. To negate such an understanding of ourselves and reality in favor of a transcendent self beyond relationality is precisely the view that has been identified as being complicit in fostering anthropocentric attitudes toward nature, where humanity is privileged and exceptional, whose right and true home is in the heavenly realm proper to its god-like status.

This thesis, first positing explicitly by Lynn White in 1967, hasbeen embraced by many more ecologically minded thinkers across a spectrum of disciplines. It is supported by the work of Clarence Glacken, who examines the (recorded) history of western culture with regard to attitudes and conceptions of nature in his Traces on the Rhodian Shore. Glacken traces this devaluation of nature to ancient ideas of Nature as purposely ordered, “planned abode” fashioned by an otherworldly creator deity, such as Plato’s artisan, or by other representational forms of a teleological first cause, a Logos. (Glacken, 44) Secularizing tendencies of the enlightenment era and achievements of scientific understanding served to sever completely the connection between sacrality and nature, justifying unlimited human manipulation of nature for its own ends. Aurobindo also seems to recognize such a removal of sacred from the world and consequent intellectualization of religion in western culture, where “the

syncretic tendency of consciousness was replaced by the analytic and separative, the spiritual urge and the intellectual reason parted company almost at the outset…the connection between spirit and its dynamism was cut.” (Aurobindo, LD, 914) He recognizes positive aspect of western religion, such as the Neo-Pagans attempting an integration of eastern and western thought, and also affirms the virtue of primitive religious forms, although he was likely also partially influenced by the prejudicial opinions about such groups prevalent among his contemporary cultural evolutionists. Speaking to the contemporary view, he says, “It has been contended that religion in its beginnings was nothing but a mass of animism, magic, superstition…at best a form of Nature-worship, yet behind such beliefs and practices there may have been a truth of a very effective kind that wehave lost.” (Aurobindo, LD, 903)

Lynn White’s thesis, while admonishing the western religious traditions, also posited the idea that the religious understanding exemplified in indigenous cultures and also those of Asia, unlike their western counterparts, perceived nature as inherently sacred. E.B. Tylor’s term “animism,” often applied to indigenous or “primitive” religions (highlighting the evolutionary basis for prejudicial European views of Tylor and others), refers to this understanding of nature-as-imbued-with-spirit. Classical Hinduism, if understood to be characterized by the total dissolution of the relational self of nature into the transcendent concept of Brahman, asit is in the ascetic’s refusal, clearly would not represent such an animistic tradition. Rather in this view it would rightly be classed together with Judeo-Christian and other “world religions,” which idealize divine transcendence, those which Eliade had called “Sky-God”religions. However, Hinduism, as understood by Aurobindo, does in factimply an affirmation of spiritual presence in the forms and relationships of nature. On the other hand, he also maintains the validity of transcendent experience of the kind exemplified in self-unity with Brahman. In his view the experiences of a spiritually infused cosmos and of spiritual transcendent identity are not mutuallyexclusive, and each depends on the perspective of individuality maintaining semi-permeable autonomy, in which all three selves are held in interrelated complementary harmony. An understanding of this seemingly contradictory nexus of relationships in the individual’s experience is intimately related to the evolutionary process as it is interpreted in Aurobindo’s cosmological system.

Evolutionary Cosmology:

Aurobindo’s cosmology is structured around the dual-processes of involution and evolution of spirit, where the former refers to spirit descending from its transcendent state of pure Being to become createdreality. As creation, spirit progresses via evolutionary development back towards its original state of complete self-knowledge. Spirit, the Brahman of the Upanisads, is understood by Aurobindo to be describable by the term, “Sat-Chit-Ananda,” a compound of Sat (being),Chit (pure consciousness), and Ananda (bliss). All three of these specifications of Brahman are, in their essence, unified and infinite.This is to say that Brahman’s existence is consciousness and force, and the experience of delighting in this existence is one and the sameas the existence itself. Thus in order for the creation of a world ofmyriad forms to take place there is a need for a power capable of limitation and division. This power emerges in the principle of the “supermind,” which has the special character of being able to know thefull unity and truth of Sat-Chit-Ananda, yet it is also able to conceive their separateness and individuality. (Aurobindo, LD, 173) Inits essence, supermind is Brahman as Sat-Chit-Anada; it is the unity of the infinite oneness of the transcendent mode and also the multiplicity of forms in universal existence as Nature, born of division and limitation of Brahman, and in either poise it never losesthe sense of the underlying unity of its complete being.

The essence of the supramental principle is its ability to act asa bridge connecting the One; the transcendent Brahman, and the Many; the Universe and every being within it. It performs this function in the involution, as it extends from Brahman (as Sat-Chit-Ananda) to create or manifest the universe and its individual inhabitants. Aurobindo describes the activity of supermind in the involutionary process, distinguishing between two powers or capabilities of supramental consciousness particular to its functions of unity and division. In its comprehending power, the supermind conceives of the whole of infinitely varied forms of the temporal universe, but as conceptual potentialities, not yet as objectified actualities. To enable objectification and actuality in space and time, a more complete separation is needed in which the infinite forms of Brahman conceptualized by comprehending Supermind may assert their distinctness in objective reality. For this supermind has the power of apprehension, by which it apprehends individually all these objectiveforms of reality in the extension of space and progression of time. This apprehending power is actually the process of mind, which is a subordinate faculty of supermind when it sees via divided consciousness, apprehending objective separative existence in temporalsuccession. Mind, therefore, is the principle that enables the

formation of objects which are in their essence Brahman, but can be individually expressed as particular beings separate from Brahman without losing their distinctive character in the underlying cosmic identity and unity from which they sprang. Mind exercises this dividing power on the force of consciousness (Chit, Consciousness-Force), splitting it into knowledge and will. Consciousness and Forceare dual aspects of the power of Existence (Sat), and knowledge and will are the forms which that power takes during this stage of supramental creation or Involution. (Aurobindo, LD, 134). Mind is able to completely separate knowledge and will, and further to effect the absorption of knowledge by will, producing the plane of Life as anocean of still energy. When this energy of will begins to move, it coagulates into the form of original inconscient matter. These movements from Brahman to matter comprise the involutionary process, whereby the qualities of the transcendent perspective of spirit becomereflections of themselves in the natural world. There is thus an inversion of the transcendent terms; of Existence (Sat) to matter, Consciousness-Force (Chit) to Life, Supermind to Mind, and Delight (Ananda) to the true individual self- the Psychic Being (Aurobindo, LD, 242).

The fundamental importance of the relationship between the individual and the natural universe, and between each of these and thetranscendent Brahman, is at the heart of Aurobindo’s metaphysical system. It should be emphasized that although “individuals” here doesinclude human individuals, it also includes innumerable other forms ofindividuality, all of which (at present) are constituted, in varying degrees, by the natural terms of matter, life, and mind, yet their individuality is defined fundamentally by their acting as centers of consciousness for involved spirit, not by the degree to which individuality or spirit are consciously present in one’s experience. There is no aspect of phenomenal reality that is not, in this sense, an individual, though the condition of stable, persistent individuality requires at least some degree of mental emergence to maintain itself against the tendency toward constant dissolution, intermixture and fusion with other beings in nature’s “flux and motionof Energy.” (Aurobindo, LD, 216) The universe and the individual are the essential events in the descent of Brahman. The universe is “a diffusion of the divine All in infinite Space and Time,” and the individual is “the concentration of the divine All within the limits of Space and Time” (Aurobindo, LD, 45). The universe, in infinite space and time, is unable to realize the divine totality which is itself because it can only realize a “pluralistic sum” which is alwaysrecurring without beginning or end. The individual emerges in the

universe as a self-conscious concentration of Brahman through which the universe can ascend toward comprehensive (supramental) self-knowledge. The descent of Brahman into both appearances (Natural worldand individual) is described as a “self-concealing which involves successive levels of concealment” (Aurobindo, LD, 43). Thus, while the transcendent, the universal, and the individual are three terms for one existence, each of which always contains the other, the individual, functioning as a center for universal consciousness, may be ignorant of his nature as the transcendent spirit and cosmic Naturein totality. This is the situation in which humanity currently finds itself, and although it represents the highest realization of the individual aspect of spirit at this point in the evolutionary process,it remains in an ignorant, limited view.

Evolution in Aurobindo’s system refers to the progressive ascent from original inconscient matter back to life, mind, and finally supermind, in which the full unity of Sat-Chit-Ananda is experienced. The physical, biological, and mental evolution of matter producing life and then mind is an external manifestation of spiritual evolution, which is the self-creation of spirit. Matter is described as a state of sleep or unconsciousness; alternatively, it can be seen as consciousness self-obscured. As knowledge (consciousness) is absorbed by will (force) in involution, matter is driven by a power ofwhich it is not aware. Eventually the energy of the vital, life principle that is involved in matter produces individual forms of itself, which more overtly display this principle in vital consciousness while in matter it was veiled and inconscient. This vital consciousness is made even more overt to the point of self-awareness in the emergence of the principle of mind which further liberates knowledge from the mechanical will or the force of nature from which it emerges in evolution, but which was previously the product of supermind in the involution. Mind emerging from original inconscient, or nescient, matter must struggle to evolve back to its former complete knowledge in its true nature as apprehending power of supermind.

For Aurobindo life is really a veiled or limited form of mind, just as matter is a limited form of life, where the terms of each successive evolutionary stage express more fully the consciousness latent within phenomenal reality. Life, emerging from matter by virtueof its latent presence in matter, has a kind of consciousness, even ifonly expressed as a drive for survival and reproduction, the activity of the vital will. Such a drive impelling life towards its ends is in essence the force or power inherent in all of nature, united with the cosmic consciousness or Chit of Brahman, though not fully manifesting

that consciousness to the extent that there self-awareness. In mind, this consciousness gains a sort of vision of itself; the first apprehension of mind, that of a separate, individual self-conscious being in the cosmos. There are of course, gradations in the ascent tomind, as it progressively develops to become the dominant principle inan individual being. In submental life without a surface consciousness, such as one-celled prokaryotes or blades of grass, the vital principle is still dominant, and mind is not yet overtly manifest to a degree capable of enabling the action of consciousness beyond vital instincts for growth and self-preservation. In forms of life where this consciousness has risen to a higher level and the mental principle has just begun to emerge, it does so in as a sort of imprisoned awareness or veiled sight. In this stage, mind’s actions are primarily directed toward fulfilling the instincts of vital nature, but with a greater capacity and level of complexity than of simply vitality alone. Such forms of life are moved by vital instinct, but are not dominated by them; rather, as mind becomes the seat of individuality, conscious mental sight is developed from vital nature to more fully express it. This is so because evolution takes place by the preceding principle of being becoming developed to such adegree of intensity or fullness that a new principle is needed to convey it. The vital instincts of the life principle become too intense to be expressed in the submental reactions of beings dominatedby it, and thus, mind emerges to effectively express the complete meaning of that which submental reactions were only partially capable of bringing forth. A similar idea is put forth by Merlin Donald with regard to the evolution of linguistic consciousness in man, suggestinga “drive toward conceptual clarification… a need for a more coherent representation of the world… the primary human adaptation was not to language qua language, but rather integrative, initially mythical, thought. Modern humans developed language in response to pressure to improve their conceptual apparatus, not vice versa.” (Bellah, 133) Mythical thought in Donald’s view represents the pressure of a higher or more complex state of consciousness, one capable of holding in its conceptual vision a larger and more complete understanding of reality.Similarly, Aurobindo recognizes the overarching tendency toward integration and synthesis by the spiritual principle involved in phenomenal reality, with mind as a conspicuous manifestation of such conceptual aims, still struggling toward to move beyond its present state of limited vision, and mistaking its perception of the extractedobjects of its analysis for complete knowledge.

Mind, having become progressively more capable of higher meaning, has evolved to the present state of a complete surface

consciousness in humanity, of which less self-consciously aware animals have only limited and partial experience. Mind emerges from life because vital nature is the cosmos’ method of asserting a necessary separateness and individuality within itself as a focus or center of its total universal consciousness. As Carl Sagan famously stated in the film, Cosmos, “We are a way for the cosmos, to know itself.” Aurobindo might add spirit to that cosmic self-knowledge, yetthis is already implied for his understanding of the cosmos as an essential perspective or appearance of spirit. This individual center thus evolves a self-consciousness that understands itself as autonomous, in a certain sense independent of the universe of which itis a part. Through the processes of mental and cultural evolution mind develops from primarily a nature of division to one of unifying construction of divided formations of thought. Mind, however, is itself a limited evolutionary term for expressing the fullness of being, and as such, it will always be grasping at a unity or totality of conceptual clarity, an encompassment of universal Nature in mental representation, of which it is incapable of achieving. Aurobindo describes Mind as “an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not ofessential knowledge… which analyzes the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects.” (Aurobindo, LD, 137)

Neither is mind capable of apprehending the transcendent divine, for its analytical thought is a wholly different mode of understanding, dependent on symbolic representation, rather than intuitive unity. Aurobindo distinguishes four types of knowledge graded according to their level of separation or intimacy with the object of knowledge. Mind, for example, apprehending by the dual analytical processes of human reason, “rational action and pure reason,” is capable of only indirect contact and separative direct contact (Aurobindo, LD, 58). When reason takes for its objects the sensible experiences of the external world its activity is termed “rational action,” whose method of analysis is thus limited to the forms sensibly conveyed. The action of “pure reason,” on the other hand, may begin from sensible experience, but is able to move beyond it and work towards general, theoretical concepts underlying a thing’sappearance. This distinction seems almost parallel to Donald’s account of mythic thinking or mytho-speculation and theory, where the former terms refer to human thought which proceeds in the symbolic terms of mythic language. When the symbolism of myths is reflected upon, as in the speculative language of certain vedic hymns, yet done so in the terms of the medium of myth, where reason is subordinate to those terms, termed “mytho-speculation” by Voeglin, this seems similarto Aurobindo’s account of rational action. (Bellah, 651) Theory, as

“second-order thinking,” or “thinking about thinking,” approximates the action of pure reason, moving beyond limitation to the terms of sensible or mythic representation. (Bellah, 275) Both forms of human reason, however, proceed from a fundamental subject-object separation,unbridgeable so long as the boundaries of individuality remain rigidlymaintained in autonomous self-identity. This unwillingness to expand the sense of self beyond individual autonomy, to make permeable the boundaries between self and universal nature and perceive the reality of the relationships connecting them, is due to the divisive actions of mind, presently driven in large part by the vital impulse for autonomy. It is only in the immediate realm of psychological experience where intuition and identity with the object of knowledge is possible. Intuitive identity, however, is limited at the present stage of evolution to the individual’s consciousness of self-identity,and as such, the autonomously maintained impermeable individual will only have knowledge by identity when he himself is the object of knowledge, as an autonomous ego. (Aurobindo, 478)

What is needed is an expansion of intuitive identity to encompassthe aspect of its connection with nature. Such an identity Aurobindo understands to be the true essence of autonomous individuality, a latent force of spirit, individualized in its involution in vital-mental egoism, yet not bound itself to individual autonomy. He terms this principle the “psychic being,” which refers to its status in the evolutionary process, correlating on the involutionary scale to Ananda, or joy, which is the character of its experience. (Aurobindo, LD, 207). The psychic being is open in its relationships to universal nature, including the plurality of relations comprising it, as well asto transcendent perspective of Brahman-consciousness. Intuitive awareness of self as psychic being represents the initial step in the individual’s cultivation of connections and making permeable the boundaries of individuality, with the eventual aim, “to become and to live as a universal being… to widen to the superconscient unity in which each embraces all… to know itself as no separate entity but as one with and sustaining in itself the whole flow of the indivisible force that is all things.” (Aurobindo, LD, 121) This flow of indivisible force describes Aurobindo’s ideal supramental identity, emphasizing the movement between all things as the common connection uniting them. Living as the universal being is the understanding of self as the totality of relationships existing in universal nature. Implicit in this is the concomitant relational identity to spirit, which includes the self-forgetting of cosmic involutionary descent, the evolutionary emergence of individuality, and the joyous self-discovery of spirit. Thus, “his whole nature has to reproduce in the

individual the unity, the harmony, the oneness-in-all of the supreme Existence-Consciousness-Bliss (Sat-Chit-Ananda)” (Aurobindo, LD, 121)

Supermind is the triple-chord uniting the perspectival self-identities of formless transcendence, the universal totality of natural forms, and the individual existing as a particular natural form. Its lack of widespread manifestation in the present is not to beseen as a limitation, but rather only a transitional step in the evolutionary process leading to the fully comprehensive and unified consciousness of itself from the perspective of universal Nature and the plurality of individual forms therein, as well as their transcendent ground. In truth, each of these three poises contains the other two, either secretly or overtly. Brahman, even as the transcendent principle removed from existence, is never itself actually divorced from the creative processes of nature. With the emergence of supramental consciousness as an evolute in the individualperspective, one’s concept of self is “extended horizontally” to encompass the whole of universal Nature, and also vertically to the transcendent beyond which is the true essence of both (Aurobindo, LD, 40). Supramental consciousness attained by the individual in the evolution is no different than in the involution. It is knowledge by identity, or intuitive knowledge, both of the unity and oneness of Sat-Chit-Ananda and also of each of the infinite individual aspects and distinct possibilities of its cosmic being. Holding together thesecontradictory relationships, the supramental individual is a nexus of connectivity, a bandhu in the sense meant by the Vedic rsis, which bothintegrates and preserves. “That integral emergence is the goal of evolving Nature.” (Aurobindo, LD, 713)

The Vedas Revisited:

The ancient Vedic texts in which both the religious traditions ofIndia and Aurobindo have found their inspiration have often been described as incredibly cryptic, paradoxical, and nuanced, while others, such as Max Mueller, speaking of the Brahmanas, expository texts interpreting Vedic ritual, regarded them as “the twaddle of idiots.” (Bellah, 700) Muller, like many others, also posited that theVedas represented a primitive animistic religion, referring to the correlational identities of the gods and the features and powers of nature. Similarly, In The Secret of the Veda, Aurobindo says of such natural imagery, “Their formulas and ceremonies are, overtly, the details of an outward ritual devised for the Pantheistic Nature-Worship which was then the common religion.” (Aurobindo, SV, 8) It is not difficult to find scenes filled with natural imagery, metaphors of

harmonious relationships, and reverence for natural forms, and indeed there is a great deal of literature detailing such “ecological” content in the Vedas. Laurie Patton even identifies a trend in the general perception of Indian culture and the Vedas that regards them as being “in touch with nature and the earth,” which she calls the “romanticization of India.” (Patton, 40) Patton raises doubts about the validity of this romantic status attributed to Vedic texts, but inany case, for Aurobindo, a romantic reverence for nature is most definitely a critical feature of Vedic insight, “the experiences to which they are the key… are necessary to an integral knowledge and realization of Brahman in the universe.” (Aurobindo, SV, 547) As the Vedas are considered to have been maintained and incorporated into thelater traditions of classical Hinduism by virtue of a cultural emphasis on preservation and oral transmission of religious knowledge,it follows that, understood as such, these Indian traditions, althoughaxial in cultural character, should be differentiated from those of the western world by virtue of their origins preceding the emergence of axial consciousness as well as their continuously maintained sacredstatus as sruti (“heard”). The Rg Veda, oldest of the four Vedas, was composed long before the advent of writing, as far back as 5000 BCE insome estimates, and around 1900 BCE in the view of Vedic scholars Michael Witzel and Stephanie Jameson. (Jameson and Witzel, 6) In any case, the Rg Veda is the product of tribal culture rather than larger,more complex and centralized civilizations that provided the settings for axial breakthroughs in western cultures such as ancient Greece andIsrael.

The fundamental insight of the Vedic Rsis, “poets or seers,” for Aurobindo, was that they were able to maintain a self-identifying intuitive experience of a pre-axial, ecological self, existing in simultaneously and harmoniously with the Atman-as-Brahman self more clearly evident in the then imminent axial transformation. By ecological self is meant one characterized by awareness of a cosmic web of relationships and beings necessarily arranged in such a way as to achieve a harmonious order, “rta,” and also of the proper positioning of human individuals and culture within this this web, a positioning integral to maintaining cosmic rta, and constituting the truth of self-existence. This positioning is an activity within the continually shifting and creative order of Nature, and thus, rta is an“active, creative truth,” or the individual’s action of realizing the truth of harmonious relationality from within the flux of natural interrelationships. (Bellah, 508) Aurobindo asserts the presence of such a multiple, relational self-identity in the supramental understanding of the Vedic rsis, whose poetic expression of this

knowledge represented “an early teaching at once psychological and naturalistic… this teaching, though prehistoric, was anything but primitive.” (Aurobindo, SV, 92) An interpretation of the Nasadiya-sukta (Rg. Veda 10.29) may serve to illustrate such a convergence between Aurobindo’s thought and that of the rsis:

“In the beginning love arose in that (one) which was the first seed of thought.

Seeking in their heart with (that very) thought, the poets found the ray-connection/ family-tie (bandhu) of what is in not-being.” Their (the poets') ray was extended across (horizontally). What was below? What above? Seed-placers were (above), innate powers were (below). Self-power was below, impulse beyond.”

(Rg. Veda 10.129)

When the poets find the common underlying essence of both Being (existence) and Non-Being (transcendence), this implies that they are speaking from a place of supramental consciousness. Thus, supermind is the unity of the manifest universe (including the individuals within in) and transcendent reality, i.e., the triple poise of Brahman’s consciousness. When the ray of supramental consciousness isextended horizontally it acts as the line dividing the universal and transcendent poises of Brahman. Thus supermind here the link between the universe and transcendent Sat-Chit-Ananda, and also simultaneouslya dividing mechanism separating them so that the delight above may ascend to fruition from below.

It is also understood by Aurobindo to be the case that the wisdomof the Vedic rsis became degraded, that those that followed them couldnot successfully maintain the truths of poetic insight in the face of the all-consuming view of transcendence, of the self as Atman merging into non-dual unity with Brahman, motionless and silent, residing in isolation (kaivalya) apart from the cosmic world of becoming. The issue of how the insights of the Vedas became in large part lost to classical Hinduism, described by J.C. Heesterman in The Broken World of Sacrifice, revolves around the issue of humanity’s willingness to be a participant member in the relational web of exchange that constitutes the reality of Nature. The metaphor of Nature as a system of economic exchange, an idea present in Donald Worster’s Nature’s Economy, is particularly apt here, for the relationships of nature’s economy require that one not only receive nature’s energies as sustenance, which then become quite literally the substance of one’s self through consumptive action, but also that one willingly accept their identity

as debtor, that they are themselves also destined to become food and sustenance for other economic participants, that one is in this sense,a sacrifice. In this acceptance is an implicit overcoming of self-division from the web of natural relationships, a sense of permeability between an identity characterized by individuality and one characterized by relationality, that is to say between an individual and universal self-identity. Heesterman states, “In this world of floating forms there are no hard and fast lines: conceptuallydifferent entities and notions interchange with bewildering ease… all are connected with each other.” (Heesterman, RC, 6) To accept one’s role as universal sustenance is to participate in the sacrificial game, the “play of sacrifice,” in which one must deal with “the riddleof life and death, which are intimately linked and at the same time each other’s absolute denial... At issue is the repartition of life and death among its participants.” (Heesterman, 2) This contradictory self-identity as both sacrificer (the one who kills and consumes the sacrifice, along with the guests) and sacrifice (the one consumed) creates in the individual a continual tension between Being and Non-Being, opposites existing in a complementary harmony where one becomesthe other, where life becomes death and death becomes life. The Vedic sacrifice represents for Aurobindo the psychological state of self-conscious awareness and willingness on the part of the cosmos and the human individual to participate harmoniously in the evolutionary narrative of spiritual emergence in the world. Because the self of spirit and those of the participants are not distinct (at the supramental level, existing as a bandhu, nexus of connections) the sacrificial narrative is a process of “self-fulfillment by self-immolation, to grow by giving.” (Aurobindo, SV, 278)

The extremely high level synthetic correlative capability of Aurobindo’s metaphysical system, its ability to integrate a multiplicity of perspectives, might be its most endearing quality, enabling it to remain culturally relevant long after it was conceived.Aurobindo maintains that the Vedic rsis were aware of the same insights which characterize his metaphysical system, despite the divergence of historical contexts. The model presented by Witzel, Farmer, and Henderson of correlative-thought takes an “evolutionary” view of the development of these systems in the sense that in the course of human history, correlative structures became exponentially more integrative, developing multi-layered cosmologies and systems of correspondence. Along with some other 19thcentury proponents of an evolutionary view of religion, such as Tylor and Herbert Spencer, thismodel asserts that the development from comparatively simple correlational structures, such as those of primitive animistic

thought, toward increasingly complex, “high-correlative” systems occurred through a process of textual exegesis, utilizing the technology of writing as an external memory device in the process of reflecting on, contemplating, and “working up” earlier correlational models toward complexity and abstraction. Witzel, Farmer, and Henderson cite neurological and cross-cultural bases for their model. Among the latter, Ancient China, Vedic India, and Mesoamerica represent examples of such development from textual exegesis, althoughcomplicated by the Indian case due to the lack of textual evidence. They hypothesize that the extensive and intricate systems of oral memorization and recitation in India, exemplified by the grammarians such as Panini in the 4th century, allowed “textual” interpretation without the technology of writing, simultaneously committing to memorylarge bodies of texts while speculating on their content. The characteristic feature of such exegetical processes was the attempt toharmonize contradictory traditions, resulting in varying levels of correlational complexity according to the complexity of the traditionsbeing synthesized. They recognize the often employed method of affirming the simultaneous truths of contradictory ideas on different levels of reality, citing the understanding of deities and concepts asreflections of a “higher, abstract entity,” and posit that the resulting systems developed out of this method often exhibited a “bifurcation of reality.” (Witzel, Farmer, Henderson, 65) This idea ofreflecting higher abstract entities is plainly evident in the case of late-Vedic India, where already in the tenth book of the Rg Veda, in the Hiranyagarbha (“golden womb”) and Pursusa (“comic man”)suktas (hymns). In the former hymn, creation of the cosmos, along with the Vedic devas, proceeds from a golden-womb identified with Prajapati, a figure who is later identified as the progenitor of all beings. He is addressed in the hymn as, “he who was the one god among all the gods… Prajapati, lord of progeny, no one but you embraces all these creatures,” and the poets express confusion at the nature of such a being, “who is the god whom we should worship with the oblation?” (Doniger, 28) The same character, appearing in the Indian Epic, the Mahabharata, is described as being born from that “one large Egg,” which is identified with “the everlasting Brahman.” (Van Buitenen, 21)A process of emanation of creator deities ensues, beginning with Prajapati, “the Sole Lord who is known as Brahma, as the Preceptor of the gods, as Sthau, Manu, Ka, and Paramesthin.” (Van Buitenen, 21) This multi-level identity, elaborated significantly in the Mahabharata, represent even in the Vedic hymn a correlational identification with an abstract principle of creation. The Purusa-sukta expresses a similar theme of creation from an abstract

principle, a “cosmic man,” dismembered in ritual sacrifice, from whom are born animals “who live in the air, in the forest, and in villages,” the four human social classes, or varnas, as well as Viraj,who is understood as representing the active female principle of creation and who later becomes known in Samkhya philosophy as Prakrti,the similarly feminine principle of cosmic phenomenal reality. (Doniger, 31) This underscores the fact that these Vedic hymns are comparatively quite late, and as such, they are a “snap shot” of a culture in transition, where the increasing level of correlational complexity, reaching its zenith in the Mahabharata, led to a convergence or collapse of the Vedic ritual system into the supreme transcendent principle of Brahman. Aurobindo describes this process thusly in the introduction to The Secret of the Vedas:

“Our actual Sanhita (Vedic hymns) represents the close of a period… for the material aspects of Vedic worship had grown like a thick crustover the inner knowledge and were stifling what they had once served to protect. The Veda was already amass of ritual. The power had begun to disappear out of the symbolic ceremony; the light had departed fromthe mystic parable and left only a surface of apparent grotesqueness and naïve culture. First, it tended to subordinate more and more completely the outward ritual, the material utility of the mantra and the sacrifice to a more purely spiritual aim and intention. The balance, the synthesis preserved by the old Mystics between the external and the internal, the material and the spiritual life was displaced and disorganized. A new balance, a new synthesis was established, leaning finally towards asceticism and renunciation.” (Aurobindo, SV, 12)

From this account, it is apparent that Aurobindo, like Heesterman, understands the cultural “snap shot” of Vedic India to represent a culture in decline, and further, this decline was fundamentally one of religious knowledge. While Aurobindo’s evolutionary narrative proceeds on multiple interrelated levels including human culture, it is not the case that it is a completely linear progress, and he acknowledge this was the case culturally in Vedic India. The distinction made by Heesterman between sacrifice and ritual represents that of earlier, holistic religious understanding ofthe Vedic rsis, and the subsequent cultural-religious degeneration of middle-late and post-Vedic culture. Sacrifice is game where the participants “play out the riddle of life and death in ever-recurring rounds,” a dangerous, violent, and unstable “broken world,” which is “forever balanced on the brink of collapse.” (Heesterman, 44) There is

always the threat of disorder, of anrta, and destruction, yet in the willing participation in this public contest, on the “battleground” ofagonistic sacrifice, one may be victorious, successfully distributing the goods won among the community of guests also present. The social aspect of redistribution engages the tensions inherent in a life rooted in Nature, with the necessity of death, and provides an “organic” place and time to resolve these tensions, to work out the “tangled relationships” brought into view in sacrifice.” (Heesterman, 34) In ritual, by contrast, the guests are barred from participation, replaced by a number of priestly ritual specialists; for proper action, adhvaryu, for recitation, hotr, for ritual chanting, udgatr, and the supervising Brahmin. Rather than the duality and instability of engaging death in the sacrificial slaughter, ritual is characterized by well-choreographed liturgical operations, a “closed system,” where there was no uncertainty, where the isolated sacrificersecured his own goods by mechanical priestly actions. The individual is no longer rooted in the complex web of reality, of Nature, because he has secured his freedom through the “equivalences” known by the priests, whose ritual actions were efficacious by their symbolically identical equivalence to forces transcending the natural order and with it, Death. (Heesterman, 58) The killing of the sacrificial animalbecomes excised or worked around in various ritual substitutions, whether symbolic or actual, as with a vegetable offering in place of the animal. With the internalization of the sacrificial fire, Agni, ritually placed in the heart, the fire was transformed into the immortal self of the Atman, freed from the threat death by ritual mastery. The concept of brahman had been, in sacrifice, a paradoxical cosmic power- the “secret of sacrifice”- unresolved yet contained by the sacrificer’s intuitive experience of this “connective energy… the link between life and death.” (Heesterman, 156) For the priests of theśrauta ritual, Brahman became the knowledge of ritual equivalences, efficacious of realizing the immortal Atman, and explicitly detailed, to be proclaimed by “he who knows thus.” Combined with the knowledge of equivalent identity, yat tvam eva (“you are only that”), Atman and Brahman, where previously held together in the heart in a mystical unexpressed relationship, became separated and transformed by ritual distinctions, and were subsequently “fused together,” in a monistic identity transcending the world. (Heesterman, 220) Thus, the contradictions and paradoxes made explicit and complex in ritual disturbed the balance held together, albeit tenuously, by sacrifice. The insight of the rsis, the inexpressible bandhu rooting one in the interconnected relationships of nature and spirit, became simplistic correlational equivalence, the knowledge of which allowed one to

transcend the dichotomy, dissolving into the beyond. “Now the brahman was once and for all set apart from the sacrificial contest where, hidden in its antithetical relations, it had held together the contenders.” (Heesterman, 221)

Revisiting the neurological basis for an evolutionary model of development in correlational thought-structures, Witzel, Farmer, and Henderson present the concept of “topographic maps,” referring to “structures of spatially related groups of neural assemblies, or basicunits of cortical processing.” (Witzel, Farmer, Henderson, 60) These structures are projected to all areas of the brain, including basic perceptual experience as well as higher order thinking, refashioning the quality of experience in terms of these cognitive structures. Such neural structures remain relatively plastic, liable to reformulation and alternation in response to natural and cultural environmental factors, and further, they manifest these changes globally in all regions of the brain. In light of this evidence, it ishypothesized that the spread of literate technology and exposure to contradictory texts from multiple cultural sources greatly acceleratedthe growth of complex, high-correlational systems involving multiple levels of meaning leading ultimately to the emergence of “extreme syncretic systems” attempting to resolve these various contradictory systems. As these new systems emerge, they spread quickly to other groups through the same processes of textual transmission. Witzel, Farmer, and Henderson compare this to the evolutionary theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” where intensified pressures, in this case the significant increase in exposure to contradictory systems effectedby textual transmission, lead to rapid changes which become stabilizedas the terms that will be conserved and expressed in future generations. (Witzel, Farmer, Henderson, 67) The concept of Brahman-Atman identity and transcendence represents such a syncretic system, which, rather than attempting to harmonize the extreme complexity of Vedic ritual, transcended its dualities through ascribing fundamental reality only to a single correlational relationship, that of the self to Brahman, ultimate truth.

One final type of extreme correlation system is discussed, the “fractal cosmology,” in whose fractal structure every member of the system, on every level, reflects the entire system as well as all other members. (Witzel, Farmer, Henderson, 72) The Huayen Chan Buddhist concept of “Indra’s Net,” is given as an example of such a system, where the “net” belonging to the Vedic deity Indra, is coveredin jewels with such universally comprehensive and apprehensive powers of reflection, each jewel mirroring the rest, individually and collectively. Such a system seems to preserve rather than negate or

transcend the complex interrelationships of correlational structures. In Aurobindo’s concept of supermind, such a fractal cosmological structure is exhibited. In its apprehending power, it holds all individual beings in harmonious relationship to itself, while simultaneously mirroring Brahman, whose transcendence is has now become merely apparent. Taken as a whole, the supermind is neither theindividual, a jewel in Indra’s net, nor the universe, the net itself, nor is the transcendent, inexpressible Brahman. There is no metaphorical representative of transcendence in the fractal cosmology,it has been restored to the status of enigma, as the integrative reality of a bandhu.

With regard to the insights of Vedic rsis, it is impossible to determine conclusively whether they were in experiential possession ofsuch a supramental, bandhu consciousness. According to the model of evolutionary development in correlative thinking proposed by Witzel, Farmer, and Henderson, such insight only emerged with the spread of the technology of literacy. They hypothesize that literacy brought about widespread intercultural textual exchange, and with it the presence of multiple contradictory correlative cosmological systems and concepts which had to be reconciled by the cultures who were exposed to them. Combined with the written word as an external memory device with which they could engage in contemplative reflection on what were previously orally-transmitted mythic narratives, such attempts to create an overarching integrative system resulted in the emergence of axial consciousness as an attempt to rise above the cross-cultural fray. Aurobindo’s affirmation of supramental knowledge being present in the Vedas would seem to invalidate this model of development, as acknowledged by its authors, who state, “The model could be falsified by the discovery of ‘primitive monotheism’ or abstract cosmological principles that did not emerge from integrationsof primitive animistic traditions.” (Witzel, Farmer, Henderson, 77) However, supermind is definitively not a monotheistic concept in the usual sense, as it involves manifestations of the supramental spirit in three distinct perspectives of consciousness, yet at the same time being itself the connections uniting them into a whole. Aurobindo addresses this explicitly, stating; “The monotheism of the Veda includes in itself also the monistic, pantheistic and even polytheistic views of the cosmos and is by no means the trenchant and simple creed of modern Theism.” (Aurobindo, SV, 32) Additionally, its explicit, yet partial, expression in the axial-age concept of Brahman was precisely the factor cited by Heesterman as being responsible for the schism between the mythic past and concomitant negation of the natural world in favor of transcendence. (Heesterman, 219) Neither is

the supermind necessarily an abstraction, rather, Aurobindo’s metaphysical system utilizes abstract thought to represent the elements of supramental consciousness, among these being the abstract notion of a transcendent poise of Brahman, that axial Brahman which first emerged in the Upanisads. The issue is further complicated by the conspicuous lack of evidence for presence of literacy in Vedic India, and by the tradition of oral transmission among Vedic rsis and later Brahmins. If, in fact, literacy was not present, and if this model is taken to be accurate, this would necessitate an oral technology which functioned as literacy, fostering contemplation and interpretation in the service of harmonizing contradictory mythic narratives. Whether the model is accurate is irrelevant in the terms of Aurobindo’s cosmological account, as it assumes the involution of supramental spirit into the terms of nature, and consequently in humanity, whether illiterate, Neanderthal, ape-like or any other evolutionary form. While the process of spirit’s evolution in creation, from the individual’s perspective, is a temporal progressionthrough successive stages, it does not deny that higher-order evolutes(such as higher levels of mental capability) may become expressed in lower terms. As with Indra’s Net, supramental consciousness maintains the full unity-in-diversity characteristic of its syncretic function within every being and every moment, and even limited human mental nature is of a more plastic character in evolutionary terms, able to adapt to more integral cognitive awareness with relative rapidity. Indeed it is exactly such an expression of spirit which Aurobindo believes is required in humanity, whose familiar mental awareness, while limited and maladaptive, represents a sufficiently conscious power of will capable of directing humanity toward a wider, more harmonious and interrelated understanding of self, one rooted in the sacrality of ecological relationships, and itself a willing participant in the sacrificial game as it was understood by the Vedic rsis. In The Ideal of Human Unity, he describes such a self; “The swallowingup, not of one by the other, but of each by the other, so that both shall live entirely in the other and as the other, is our highest ideal of oneness.” (Aurobindo, IHU, 291)

One possible explanation for the coexistence of the sacrificial or ecological self and the transcendent Atman-Brahman self in Vedic India, at least for a period, might be found in Oelschaeger’s concept of “primitive survival,” which posits that at every stage in the evolutionary process of cultural development is contained the entire history preceding that stage, where the present exists in a relationship with its own past and is able to recall and possibly reestablish its former self. Bellah posits a similar view of culture

in Religion and Human Evolution, derived from Kirschner and Gerhart’s notionof “facilitated variation,” which understands novel evolutionary developments as being accepted or rejected according to their relationto certain previously established structures, called “core processes,”which are never to be abandoned at any subsequent stage in the evolutionary process of the organism. (Bellah, 61) He also mentions Eric Voeglin’s idea of “archaic mortgage,” referring to the lingering presence of preceding cultural forms and ideas following major cultural transitions, or “paradigm shifts.” Bellah, following Merlin Donald, recognizes three such shifts; from episodic to mimetic or tribal culture, from tribal to mythic or archaic culture, and from archaic to theoretic, or axial culture. (Bellah, 65) At each stage ofdevelopment, a culture will therefore be constituted by a mixture of elements characteristic of previous paradigmatic states as well as those of the present cultural paradigm. Those surviving elements represent instances of conserved core processes, which are understood to be necessarily present in order for successive variation beyond their structural terms to take place. Thus, Bellah states, “Every post-axial society has been a combination of axial and non-axial elements… so India must be seen as an extreme case.” (Bellah, 523) Thesacrificial self in this context can then be viewed as a conserved core process or a primitive survival present following the axial breakthrough and emergence of the transcendent self. Similarly, such notions of transcendence are firmly established in contemporary cultural consciousness, in various manifestations, and must be reconciled in any new form of religion seeking to establish deep meaningful relationships in the hearts and minds of its followers. Particularly germane among these is religious or mystical experience, whose widespread and continuous presence in human history has been documented by William James, describing its essential qualities as being; ineffability, referring to its supra-intellectual experiential quality, and noesis, that is has an authoritative power as knowledge forthe individual. (James, 371) While the classical context of mystical experience has changed over time, its survival in contemporary cultureis evinced by examples such as the psychedelic culture first emerging in the 1960’s as well as the popularity of meditative and yogic practice. The primitive survival of a sacrificial-self in contemporarysociety could be indicated by its partial reemergence as signified by the rise of ecology, environmentalism, and various cultural movements constituting “Dark Green Religion.” I would add Sri Aurobindo’s integral vision to this list, as a comparatively early example, along with Thoreau and others, of a reaffirmation of the concept of an ecological or sacrificial understanding of self, where one is situated

or “emplaced,” to use Heidegger’s term, within a wide web of relations, as their nexus or point of connection, a bandhu of Nature. Additionally, his metaphysical system, as a high-correlational syncretic structure, integrates primitive or animistic, monotheistic or monistic, and evolutionary perspectives of religious understanding,whether or not experienced in mystical terms. As such, it informs a more complete view of one’s relationship to reality and way of human being-ness, while also enjoining humanity to cultivate a more holistic, syncretic mentality, one with a wider more encompassing power of comprehension, in order to heal the schism between action (the vital and physical) and thought (mental) that has characterized most of human culture following its axial break-through.

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