Jaspal Singh
Head, Department of English,
G.G.D.S.D. College, Hariana,
Distt. Hoshiarpur, Punjab, (India) Pin-144208
Introduction:
The beginning of the Twentieth Century was a period of intense disturbance and
turmoil as a wind of change was sweeping the entire human civilization. The old order was giving way to the new. Mankind had never seen such drastic changes in its recorded history as a total reversal of the long cherished principles was taking place. People were apprehensive regarding the decline and decomposition of the entire system of values that had upheld mankind for so long. It was as if the theory of the reversal of ‘gyres’ put forward by Yeats was coming true. The oldest institution of ‘religion’ was on the verge of dismissal. Man’s faith in God was waning and the authenticity of the religious books was being challenged. Commenting on the disillusionment, faithlessness and hopelessness that had crept into the society during that phase of history, Yeats, the ‘greatest’ poet of the period, in his poem, The Second Coming, says:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world (Yeats, 294)
With the untying of the religious knot of man with God, there was a confusion in the entire state of affairs. The moral, ethical and religious principles were fading and the human life was seen as meaningless, purposeless and senseless. There were many factors responsible for this collapse of values but the major cause was the rapid advancement that science made within a short span of time. Scientific advancements led to industrialization and urbanization on one hand and scientific reasoning and rationality resulted in the denial of religious and spiritual values damaging the established faith on the other hand. This dent in the established religion was not made overnight: it was slow and the realization came when most of the damage was done. John Tyndall, an eminent physicist, said in an address at Belfast in 1874 that in the 18th century men had an “unwavering trust” in the “chronology of the Old Testament”, but in Victorian times, men have had to become accustomed to “the idea that not for six thousand, nor for sixty thousand, nor for six thousand thousand, but for aeons embracing untold millions of years this earth has been the theatre of life and death.” (Abrams 2: 882) The evidences put forward by the scientists had proved the fact that the planet earth was millions and millions of years old, thereby refuting the Bible which described the creation as only a few thousand years old.
Man fell from the position of dignity and pride: from son of God to the descendent of an ape. This made John Fowles note that man was feeling “infinitely isolated”. (Abrams 2: 882) As a result of such feelings against religion, the human race was getting detached from its roots. Humanity was facing a total eclipse of spirituality. Berdyaev says: “Man stands amid a frightening emptiness. He no longer knows where the keystone of his life may be found; beneath his feet he feels no depth of solidity.” (Berdyaev, 189)
The great superstructures of philosophies, religions and social stratifications were already beginning to look dangerously corroded. There was a demolition of the values that society had cherished for so long. The pillars of human connection with the cosmic meaning and significance were bulldozed by his own findings. What was left was the human life
devoid of any real larger function or purpose. Without purpose, life becomes meaningless on this earth. It becomes illogical and irrational. The rationalist arguments lead to loss of importance of life and it became what Shakespeare termed it in Macbeth as ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’(Shakespeare, 5.5. 160)
Aurobindo’s Criticism:
The approach of science declared man as a chance evolution that will ultimately result
into chance extinction through death: Universe that came into being not with the ‘word’ of God but with the ‘Big Bang’, will end up in the ‘Big Crunch’. Science could see nothing before birth and nothing beyond death. All the happenings during life were chance accidents of blind forces that were not moving towards any predetermined events or outcomes. Science reduced man to a speck in the vast universe. He became a death bound entity that was to spend time in insignificance and will have to struggle with his own ignorance. Aurobindo, in his poem Man The Thinking Animal underlines the viewpoint of godless science regarding the evolution and purpose of man on this earth:
A trifling unit in a boundless plan Amidst the enormous insignificance
Of the unpeopled cosmos’ fire-whirl dance, Earth, as by accident, engendered man,
A creature of his own grey ignorance,
A mind half shadow and half gleam, a breath That wrestles, captive in a world of death, To live some lame brief years. (CP 163)
This subtraction of God from the universe, religion from society and purpose from life was agonizing. The removal of the soul from man left behind a body that was a permutation and combination of elements that perchance combined in such a manner that life evolved out of it in a few million years. Man became a complex arrangement of tissues, cells and atoms. This reduced man to nothing more than a product of evolution with no scope of any afterlife. Aurobindo in his poem The Vision of Science illustrates the limited understanding of science regarding life:
Nothing am I but earth,
Tissue and nerve and from the seed a birth, A mould, a plasm, a gas, a little that is much. In these grey cells that quiver to each touch
The secret lies of man; they are the thing called I. (CP 43)
Life can have meaning only in the context of something that surpasses life. The meaning always comes from the context; without God, man stands without a context. The meaning comes only when one can look upwards to something bigger than himself, something greater than his own being. Science failed to see the larger truth, the wider context and was unsuccessful in comprehending the cosmic design. And because of its failure, it declared man’s birth on the earth as a matter of chance and not the celestial plan. Reliance was on the visible and the invisible was ignored. But Aurobindo in his poem Science and the Unknowable rejects the limited scientific viewpoint of looking at reality. It works on the physical level and is unable to look at the things that are beyond the physical plane. Everything is not within the scientific domain as it has its own restricted scope. The supernatural realities cannot be understood by mental awareness but by spiritual consciousness:
Man’s science builds abstractions cold and bare And carves to formulas the living whole;
It is a brain and hand without a soul,
A piercing eye behind our outward stare. The objects that we see are not their form, A mass of forces is the apparent shape; Pursued and seized, their inner lines escape
In a vast consciousness beyond our norm. (CP 598)
Sri Aurobindo points out that intellectual reason and rational understanding is not man’s only means of knowledge. Sri Aurobindo as a critique of reason says,
“…it is felt that reason is too analytic, too arbitrary that it falsifies life by its distinctions and set classifications and the fixed rules based upon them and that there is some profounder and larger power of knowledge, intuition or another, which is more deeply in the secrets of existence.” (Aurobindo 1997: 105)
Human reason is unable to decode this secret of existence. It rationalized everything on the touchstone of logic. It was not able to look ahead of the elements and therefore was ignorant of the spirit. But as God and His creation are beyond the rational explanation, therefore rational mind cannot comprehend the truth of the beyond. Aurobindo in Savitri expresses his views on scientific working as a struggle in darkness as it has no light of religion. Human mind is imperfect and not fully developed understand the Divine realities, therefore the discipline evolved by him in the form of science also cannot comprehend the higher realities. Aurobindo says:
For not by Reason was creation made And not by Reason can the Truth be seen
Which through the veils of thought, the screens of sense Hardly the spirit’s vision can descry
Dimmed by the imperfection of its means: The little Mind is tied to little things:
Its sense is but the spirit’s outward touch, Half-waked in a world of dark Inconscience; It feels out for its beings and its forms
Like one left fumbling in the ignorant Night. (Aurobindo 1993: 256-57)
Aurobindo condemns the knowledge that is gained to explain the surface phenomena, the physical and the visible world. The invisible and the spiritual dimension should not be left unobserved. Knowledge of this world has snapped our connection with the other world. The humanity is not progressing and gaining knowledge but it is moving towards ignorance in absence of religion. It is the ignorance of God that has led to man’s unawareness towards his own importance.
It is because man is unable to comprehend the meaning of his life on earth that he relates it to meaninglessness. Actually science has information of the body but religion has the awareness of the soul. Science explains the happenings from birth to death, but religion and spiritualism goes beyond birth and death. Science only deals with the realm and limits of time but religion connects time to timelessness. But the advancement of man has negated his faith in God. It is religion alone that can explain to man the larger purpose as it deals with larger and higher cosmic realities. Aurobindo in his poem Discoveries of Science I remarks:
The surface finds, the screen-phenomenon, Are Nature’s offered ransom, while behind Her occult mysteries lie safe, unknown,
From the crude handling of the empiric Mind. (CP 166)
Quest for Meaning:
Aurobindo has tried to propagate that the world is a cosmos not a chaos. Human
beings are composed not simply of a materialistic or corporeal frame of existence; rather they have a higher level of consciousness and spirituality which is meant to manifest some higher form of life. The purpose is to unfold the order, the plan which leads to the realization that the universe has an idea which is already in God’s mind. But the human reason is based on his finite operation of the physical nature and therefore his observation and understanding is not complete. To have the complete observation and experience, the realization of higher level of consciousness is needed. Man has to develop the faculties for the apprehension of the extra dimensional realities. The consciousness of the Supernatural, the Invisible is central to the poetry of Aurobindo. In his poem Vision Of Science he calls upon humanity to identify its true potential:
“Know thyself infinite,
Who shalt do mightier miracles than these, Infinite, moving mid infinites.” (CP 44)
Doubt and disbelief created a disturbance and disequilibrium in man and society. With the higher connection and meaning gone, man was just a wanderer on the face of the earth. But for man who had been finding consolation and hope in religion and faith, it was difficult to live without religion in meaninglessness. Aurobindo through his poetry tries to end the spiritual homelessness of man through poetry. He tries to work back to a unified sensibility and development of consciousness of God in human mind as an antidote to the fragmentation rampant in human psyche. He wanted us to look at the world not from the material and worldly angle but from the spiritual and religious point of view. He in his poem Discoveries of Science III sets out to explore the human destiny as a part of larger cosmic order:
The visible has its roots in the unseen And each invisible hides what it can mean In a yet deeper invisible, unshown.
The objects that you probe are not their form. Each is a mass of force thrown in shape.
The forces caught, their inner lines escape
In a fathomless consciousness beyond mind’s norm. Probe it and you shall meet a Being still
Infinite, nameless, mute, and unknowable. (CP 168)
Aurobindo differs from his times as he tries to work out a larger meaning of human life on earth. What he tries to propagate through his poetry is that man is not a mere speck in the universe that has come here by chance. He is a part of a cosmic plan. His existence on this earth has a larger meaning. The universe is not guided by chance events and blind forces. Behind formless is form and behind chance is design which human mind fails to comprehend. There is a crisis in the consciousness of man that prevents him see and understand the real meaning of his life. He teaches a higher meaning and purpose of life to the humanity. For this the horizon of man’s understanding has to be pushed forward.
Man has to suspend his blind belief in rationality to comprehend the larger purpose of life. It is the evolution of the soul to the right consciousness that he talks of in his poetry. For this, faith is the pre-condition, to be accompanied by extinction of personality, self sacrifice
and surrender. It is this faith in the Supernatural, the Consciousness of the Invisible, the metaphysical and the spiritual domain around man that promises redemption and Divine mercy. Aurobindo with his ideas proposed a path of redemption for the whole of humanity by restoring man to religion. For the believers, the way to redemption was through faith and for the non believers the faithlessness ultimately precipitated into the absurdity and hopelessness.
Conclusion:
Aurobindo believed that human beings have a higher level of consciousness and
spirituality which is meant to manifest some higher form of life. The purpose is to unfold the order, the plan which leads to the realization that the universe has an idea which is already in God’s mind. Aurobindo wants us to have a second look at the state of affairs, to have a comprehensive, a larger view of life. Man cannot have the complete understanding of the cosmic mysteries through mental awareness but through the spiritual consciousness. It is the development of spiritual consciousness in man that Aurobindo talks of in his entire poetry.
Works Cited:
Abrams, M.H., et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 3rd ed. 2 vols. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc. 1974. Print.
Aurobindo, Sri.(1971). Collected Poems. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. Print. Aurobindo, Sri. (1993). Savitri. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. Print. Aurobindo, Sri. (1997). The Human Cycle. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. Print. Berdyaev, Nikolai. (1933). The End of Our Time, London: Sheed & Ward. Print. Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Edt. Muir, Kenneth. London: Methuen and Co. Ltd. 1963. Print.
Yeats, W. B. Yeats’s Poems. Edt. Jeffares, A. Norman. London: Macmillan London Limited. 1989. Print.