Beyond Natural Selection and Intelligent Design:

Sri Aurobindo’s Theory of Evolution

Ulrich Mohrhoff
Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Puducherry, India

An outline of Sri Aurobindo’s theory of spiritual evolution is presented. Ultimate Reality

relates to each world (ours need not be the only one) as the substance that constitutes it,
as a consciousness that contains it, and as an infinite joy that expresses and experiences
itself in it. In our world, Ultimate Reality is “playing Houdini,” enchaining itself as best it
can, challenging itself to escape from self-created darkness and inertia, to rediscover its
true self and powers, to affirm itself in conditions that appear to be its very opposite. Sri
Aurobindo calls the process by which these conditions are created “involution.” Once we
have a sufficient grasp of this process, we are in a position to understand the true nature
of evolution, which is not finished: man is a transitional being, his greatness lies not in
what he is, but in what he makes possible.

1 Evolution
Evolution, according to Sri Aurobindo, “is the one eternal dynamic law and hidden
process of the earth-nature” (EDH1 246):
The keyword of the earth’s riddle is the gradual evolution of a hidden illimitable con-
sciousness and power out of the seemingly inert yet furiously driven force of insensible
Nature. Earth-life is one self-chosen habitation of a great Divinity and his aeonic will is
to change it from a blind prison into his splendid mansion and high heaven-reaching
temple. (EDH 161)
The blind prison is the final outcome of a process Sri Aurobindo calls “involution,” and
the purpose of involution is to set the stage for the drama of evolution: “The involution
of a superconscient Spirit in inconscient Matter is the secret cause of this visible and
apparent world.” (EDH 161)
That evolution happens is obvious. Once “the facts supporting it are marshalled, this
aspect of the terrestrial existence becomes so striking as to appear indisputable” (LD2
868); “we can no longer suppose that God or some Demiurge has manufactured each
                                                            
1
Sri Aurobindo, Essays Human and Divine. Puducherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication
Department, 1997. All quotations are given with the kind permission of the Sri Aurobindo
Ashram Trust.
2
Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine. Puducherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication Department,
2005.
10 ANTIMATTERS 2 (2) 2008

genus and species ready-made in body and in consciousness and left the matter there,
having looked upon his work and seen that it was good” (LD 738). But how evolution
happens is a quite different question. It ought to be superfluous to point this out, but in
certain quarters the ability to distinguish between the fact of evolution and its process
seems to have been lost.
A theory of spiritual evolution is not identical with a scientific theory of form-evolution
and physical life-evolution; it must stand on its own inherent justification: it may accept
the scientific account of physical evolution as a support or an element, but the support is
not indispensable. The scientific theory is concerned only with the outward and visible
machinery and process, with the detail of Nature’s execution, with the physical devel-
opment of things in Matter and the law of development of Life and Mind in Matter; its
account of the process may have to be considerably changed or may be dropped alto-
gether in the light of new discovery, but that will not affect the self-evident fact of a
spiritual evolution, an evolution of Consciousness, a progression of the soul’s manifesta-
tion in material existence. (LD 868)

2 Ultimate reality
Sri Aurobindo’s theory of spiritual evolution makes use of the conceptual framework of
the original Vedantic texts (the Upanishads), for, as he explains,
it is in those ideas that we shall find the best previous foundation of that which we seek
now to rebuild and although, as with all knowledge, old expression has to be replaced to
a certain extent by new expression suited to a later mentality and old light has to merge
itself into new light as dawn succeeds dawn, yet it is with the old treasure as our initial
capital or so much of it as we can recover that we shall most advantageously proceed to
accumulate the largest gains in our new commerce with the ever-changeless and ever-
changing Infinite. (LD 72)
Existence pure, indefinable, infinite, absolute, is the last concept at which Vedantic
analysis arrives in its view of the universe, the fundamental Reality which Vedantic ex-
perience discovers behind all the movement and formation which constitute the appar-
ent reality. (LD 73)
This primary, ultimate and eternal Existence, as seen by the Vedantins, is not merely
bare existence, or a conscious existence whose consciousness is crude force or power; it
is a conscious existence the very term of whose being, the very term of whose con-
sciousness is bliss. . . Just as its force of consciousness is capable of throwing itself into
forms infinitely and with an endless variation, so also its self-delight is capable of
movement, of variation, of revelling in that infinite flux and mutability of itself repre-
sented by numberless teeming universes. To loose forth and enjoy this infinite move-
ment and variation of its self-delight is the object of its extensive or creative play of
Force.
In other words, that which has thrown itself out into forms is a triune Existence-
Consciousness-Bliss, Sachchidananda,3 whose consciousness is in its nature a creative or
rather a self-expressive Force capable of infinite variation in phenomenon and form of
its self-conscious being and endlessly enjoying the delight of that variation. It follows

                                                            
3
The Sanskrit terms are sat (existence, being, or substance), chit (consciousness), and ānanda
(delight or bliss); hence Sachchidananda (sat+chit+ ānanda).
MOHRHOFF : BEYOND NATURAL SELECTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN 11

that all things that exist are what they are as terms of that existence, terms of that con-
scious force, terms of that delight of being. (LD 98–99)
In yet other words, an intrinsically unknowable reality manifests itself and relates to its
manifestation as the substance (sat) that constitutes it, as a consciousness (chit) that
contains it, and as an infinite bliss (ānanda) that expresses and experiences itself in it.

3 Why?
This ancient Vedantic theory of cosmic origin is immediately confronted in the human
mind by two powerful contradictions, the emotional and sensational consciousness of
pain and the ethical problem of evil. (LD 100)
Sri Aurobindo deals with these contradictions at great length. Here I shall mention only
the obvious point that this contradiction cannot be resolved by any account that takes
the Creator/Creatrix to be separate from His/Her creation.
On no theory of an extra-cosmic moral God, can evil and suffering be explained,— the
creation of evil and suffering,— except by an unsatisfactory subterfuge which avoids the
question at issue instead of answering it or a plain or implied Manicheanism which prac-
tically annuls the Godhead in attempting to justify its ways or excuse its works. But such
a God is not the Vedantic Sachchidananda. Sachchidananda of the Vedanta is one exis-
tence without a second; all that is, is He. If then evil and suffering exist, it is He that
bears the evil and suffering in the creature in whom He has embodied Himself. The
problem then changes entirely. The question is no longer how came God to create for
His creatures a suffering and evil of which He is Himself incapable and therefore im-
mune, but how came the sole and infinite Existence-Consciousness-Bliss to admit into it-
self that which is not bliss, that which seems to be its positive negation.
Half of the moral difficulty — that difficulty in its one unanswerable form disap-
pears. It no longer arises, can no longer be put. Cruelty to others, I remaining immune or
even participating in their sufferings by subsequent repentance or belated pity, is one
thing; self-infliction of suffering, I being the sole existence, is quite another. (LD 102)
Two related questions remain: how — through which process or in consequence of
which development — did suffering and evil come into being, and why did Sachchidan-
anda admit these imperfections into itself? As to why —
it is not altogether a mystery if we look at our own nature and can suppose some kin-
dred movement of being in the beginning as [the world’s] cosmic origin. On the con-
trary, a play of self-concealing and self-finding is one of the most strenuous joys that
conscious being can give to itself, a play of extreme attractiveness. There is no greater
pleasure for man himself than a victory which is in its very principle a conquest over dif-
ficulties, a victory in knowledge, a victory in power, a victory in creation over the im-
possibilities of creation, a delight in the conquest over an anguished toil and a hard
ordeal of suffering. At the end of separation is the intense joy of union, the joy of a meet-
ing with a self from which we were divided. There is an attraction in ignorance itself be-
cause it provides us with the joy of discovery, the surprise of new and unforeseen
creation, a great adventure of the soul; there is a joy of the journey and the search and
the finding, a joy of the battle and the crown, the labour and the reward of labour. If de-
light of existence be the secret of creation, this too is one delight of existence; it can be
regarded as the reason or at least one reason of this apparently paradoxical and con-
12 ANTIMATTERS 2 (2) 2008

trary Lila.4 But, apart from this choice of the individual Purusha,5 there is a deeper truth
inherent in the original Existence which finds its expression in the plunge into Incon-
science; its result is a new affirmation of Sachchidananda in its apparent opposite. If the
Infinite’s right of various self-manifestation is granted, this too as a possibility of its
manifestation is intelligible and has its profound significance. (LD 426–427)
Shall we say that Sachchidananda is “playing Houdini”? That it has enchained itself as
best it could, challenging itself to escape from self-imposed darkness and inertia, to re-
discover its true self and powers, to affirm itself in conditions that appear to be its very
opposite? And may not these conditions be the very conditions that lend the greatest
possible stability and concreteness to its progressive self-realization, which may go on
forever?

4 Supermind, space, and the subject-object dichotomy

It is not all that hard to see that imperfection, of which suffering and evil are the most
glaring instances, results from the plunge into inconscience and the consequent limita-
tions in knowledge and capacity of the evolving consciousness. But how is this plunge
effected? To understand evolution, we need to understand the steps by which the stage
for the drama of evolution was set.
To begin with, a distinction has to be made between mind and the original creative
consciousness, supermind, to use Sri Aurobindo’s terminology. To the latter, the unity
of the all-constituting substance (sat), of the all-containing consciousness (chit), of the
infinite delight at the roots of existence (ānanda), and of all these three aspects of
Sachchidananda, is self-evident. To understand the function and characteristics of
mind in the Aurobindonian scheme, we need another distinction, that between two
poises of relation between the supramental self and the world.
In the comprehending poise (the Vedantic vijñāna), the conscious self is coextensive with
the world, and the world is coextensive with the substance that constitutes it. The sub-
ject is wherever its objects are. No distances exist between the seer and the seen. There
is in an extension —otherwise we could not speak of self or substance as being coexten-
sive with the world — but its quality is beyond us. For it has neither the quality of space
nor the quality of time, and these are the only extensive qualities known to us. Sri
Aurobindo rarely shrinks from the challenge of stating “in terms of the intellect” what
he has “observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily”,6 but here he has no
                                                            
4
Divine play.
5
What Sri Aurobindo is telling us here is that the individual spirit, soul, or puruṣa — and this
includes everyone who ever walked this planet — has chosen to participate in the adventure
of evolution: “the assent of the embodied spirit must be there already, for Prakriti [Nature]
cannot act without the assent of the Purusha. There must have been not only the will of the
Divine Purusha to make the cosmic creation possible, but the assent of the individual Pu-
rusha to make the individual manifestation possible.” (LD 426)
6
“Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher — although I
have written philosophy which is another story altogether. I knew precious little about phi-
losophy before I did the Yoga and came to Pondicherry — I was a poet and a politician, not a
MOHRHOFF : BEYOND NATURAL SELECTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN 13

choice:
And to a consciousness higher than Mind which should regard our past, present and fu-
ture in one view, containing and not contained in them, not situated at a particular mo-
ment of Time for its point of prospection, Time might well offer itself as an eternal
present. And to the same consciousness not situated at any particular point of Space, but
containing all points and regions in itself, Space also might well offer itself as a subjec-
tive and indivisible extension,— no less subjective than Time. At certain moments we
become aware of such an indivisible regard upholding by its immutable self-conscious
unity the variations of the universe. But we must not now ask how the contents of Time
and Space would present themselves there in their transcendent truth; for this our mind
cannot conceive. (LD 143)
In the apprehending poise (the Vedantic prajñāna), Sachchidananda distantiates itself
from the content of consciousness and thereby takes on the aspect of a self. Concomi-
tantly, the self adopts a multitude of viewpoints within the content of consciousness,
thereby effectively becoming a multitude of situated selves.
But what then is the origin of mentality and the organisation of this lower consciousness
in the triple terms of Mind, Life and Matter which is our view of the universe? For since
all things that exist must proceed from the action of the all-efficient Supermind, from its
operation in the three original terms of Existence, Conscious-Force and Bliss, there must
be some faculty of the creative Truth-Consciousness which so operates as to cast them
into these new terms, into this inferior trio of mentality, vitality and physical substance.
This faculty we find in a secondary power of the creative knowledge, its power of a pro-
jecting, confronting and apprehending consciousness in which knowledge centralises it-
self and stands back from its works to observe them. And when we speak of
centralisation, we mean, as distinguished from the equable concentration of conscious-
ness of which we have hitherto spoken, an unequal concentration in which there is the
beginning of self-division — or of its phenomenal appearance.
First of all, the Knower holds himself concentrated in knowledge as subject and re-
gards his Force of consciousness as if continually proceeding from him into the form of
himself, continually working in it, continually drawing back into himself, continually is-
suing forth again. From this single act of self-modification proceed all the practical dis-
tinctions upon which the relative view and the relative action of the universe is based. A
practical distinction has been created between the Knower, Knowledge and the Known,
between the Lord, His force and the children and works of the Force, between the En-
joyer, the Enjoyment and the Enjoyed, between the Self, Maya and the becomings of the
Self.
Secondly, this conscious Soul concentrated in knowledge, this Purusha observing
and governing the Force that has gone forth from him, his Shakti or Prakriti, repeats
himself in every form of himself. He accompanies, as it were, his Force of consciousness

                                                                                                                                                                  

philosopher. How I managed to do it and why? First, because X proposed to me to co-

operate in a philosophical review — and as my theory was that a Yogi ought to be able to
turn his hand to anything, I could not very well refuse; and then he had to go to the war and
left me in the lurch with sixty-four pages a month of philosophy all to write by my lonely
self. Secondly, because I had only to write down in the terms of the intellect all that I had
observed and come to know in practising Yoga daily and the philosophy was there auto-
matically. But that is not being a philosopher!” (Sri Aurobindo, On Himself, p. 374. Pondi-
cherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972)
14 ANTIMATTERS 2 (2) 2008

into its works and reproduces there the act of self-division from which this apprehend-
ing consciousness is born. In each form this Soul dwells with his Nature and observes
himself in other forms from that artificial and practical centre of consciousness. In all it
is the same Soul, the same divine Being; the multiplication of centres is only a practical
act of consciousness intended to institute a play of difference, of mutuality, mutual
knowledge, mutual shock of force, mutual enjoyment, a difference based upon essential
unity, a unity realised on a practical basis of difference.
We can speak of this new status of the all-pervading Supermind as a further depar-
ture from the unitarian truth of things and from the indivisible consciousness which
constitutes inalienably the unity essential to the existence of the cosmos. We can see
that pursued a little farther it may become truly Avidya, the great Ignorance which
starts from multiplicity as the fundamental reality and in order to travel back to real
unity has to commence with the false unity of the ego. (LD 149–150)
It is in this apprehending poise, in which the many situated selves present themselves
to each other as objects, that the familiar dimensions of space — viewer-centered depth
and lateral extent — come into being and Sachchidananda effectively differentiates
into consciousness and substance.

5 Ignorance of the Vedantic kind

We all know first-hand a state of exclusive concentration, in which awareness is fo-
cused on a single object or task, while other goings-on are registered, and other tasks
attended to, subconsciously, if at all. As we have seen, it is by a multiple concentration
that the one self assumes the aspect of a multitude of selves, and it is by a multiple ex-
clusive concentration that it loses sight, in each self, of its identity with the other selves
and with the self of all selves. The result is avidya, ignorance in the Vedantic sense, the
veil that hides from the selves their true self and oneness. It altogether changes the
character of the world they perceive.
One salient feature of this world is a differentiation of the force at work in it into one
strand acting directly out of the one self and substance, and many strands each acting
through an effectively separate self. If, moreover, it is the intention of Sachchidananda
to “play Houdini,” then the former strand will appear to act mechanically. The supra-
individual part of Sachchidananda’s creative self-knowledge will appear to be governed
by inflexible laws. And this seemingly mechanical, involuntary, and unconscious ac-
tion, along with the forms it supports, will be perceived as a self-existent, objective re-
ality. Instead of knowingly owing their existence to Sachchidananda (its creative
imagination or its self-effective will), the effectively separate selves will have no choice
but to attribute their existence to an apparently mechanical action governed by appar-
ently inflexible laws. And so they will have a hard time understanding how they can
have something like a free will or how they can even be conscious. Clearly, ignorance in
the Vedantic sense can create a lot of ignorance of the more common kind.

6 Mind
Mind, in Sri Aurobindo’s terminology, is not Sachchidananda’s aspect of consciousness
but what this is reduced to when it multiply situates itself and, in each situated selves,
loses sight of its identity with its other selves. Consciousness becomes “headless and
MOHRHOFF : BEYOND NATURAL SELECTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN 15

footless” (Rig Veda IV. I. 11), and “in the middle there is falsehood” as a result.7 As we
have seen, the creative action of the supermind wells out of an infinite, self-existent
delight. As long as the individual selves are consciously identical with each other and
with the self of all selves, they perfectly express and experience this delight. But once
they are “headless” — once their supra-individual self and its bliss-nature have become
superconscient and thus inaccessible to them — they experience incapacity, discord,
opposition, conflict, frustration, and the like.
The creative action of the supermind is primarily qualitative and infinite and only sec-
ondarily quantitative and finite. Mind can also be characterized as the supermind’s
secondary action, limiting and dividing, for this remains conscious when the veil of
avidya conceals from the individual self the bliss-nature of the supra-individual self.8
Mind in its essence is a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts out forms of things
from the indivisible whole and contains them as if each were a separate integer. Even
with what exists only as obvious parts and fractions, Mind establishes this fiction of its
ordinary commerce that they are things with which it can deal separately and not
merely as aspects of a whole. For, even when it knows that they are not things in them-
selves, it is obliged to deal with them as if they were things in themselves; otherwise it
could not subject them to its own characteristic activity. It is this essential characteristic
of Mind which conditions the workings of all its operative powers, whether conception,
perception, sensation or the dealings of creative thought. It conceives, perceives, senses
things as if rigidly cut out from a background or a mass and employs them as fixed units
of the material given to it for creation or possession. All its action and enjoyment deal
thus with wholes that form part of a greater whole, and these subordinate wholes again
are broken up into parts which are also treated as wholes for the particular purposes
they serve. Mind may divide, multiply, add, subtract, but it cannot get beyond the limits
of this mathematics.
[The Mind’s] office is to translate always infinity into the terms of the finite, to
measure off, limit, depiece. Actually it does this in our consciousness to the exclusion of
all true sense of the Infinite; therefore Mind is the nodus of the great Ignorance. . . (LD
173–174)
It is only when the veil is rent and the divided mind overpowered, silent and passive to a
supramental action that mind itself gets back to the Truth of things. There we find a lu-
minous mentality reflective, obedient and instrumental to the divine Real-Idea.9 There
                                                            
7
“The first and the highest are truth; in the middle there is falsehood, but it is taken between
the truth on both sides of it and it draws its being from the truth.” (Brihadaranyaka Upani-
shad V. 5. 1.) Sri Aurobindo explains: “The truth of the physical reality and the truth of the
spiritual and superconscient reality. Into the intermediate subjective and mental realities
which stand between them, falsehood can enter, but it takes either truth from above or
truth from below as the substance out of which it builds itself and both are pressing upon it
to turn its misconstructions into truth of life and truth of spirit.” (LD 618)
8
To be precise, this remains conscious in front of the veil, for while the veil is opaque to the
surface consciousness (the consciousness in front), it is transparent to the consciousness
behind. The latter encompasses the content of the former. What happens in the world
therefore has two radically different meanings, depending on who is looking, the surface
self or the larger self behind the veil.
9
“The view I am presenting goes farther in idealism; it sees the creative Idea as Real-Idea,
16 ANTIMATTERS 2 (2) 2008

we perceive what the world really is; we know in every way ourselves in others and as
others, others as ourselves and all as the universal and self-multiplied One. We lose the
rigidly separate individual standpoint which is the source of all limitation and error.
Still, we perceive also that all that the ignorance of Mind took for the truth was in fact
truth, but truth deflected, mistaken and falsely conceived. We still perceive the division,
the individualising, the atomic creation, but we know them and ourselves for what they
and we really are. And so we perceive that the Mind was really a subordinate action and
instrumentation of the Truth-consciousness. So long as it is not separated in self-
experience from the enveloping Master consciousness and does not try to set up house
for itself, so long as it serves passively as an instrumentation and does not attempt to
possess for its own benefit, Mind fulfils luminously its function which is in the Truth to
hold forms apart from each other by a phenomenal, a purely formal delimitation of their
activity behind which the governing universality of the being remains conscious and un-
touched. It has to receive the truth of things and distribute it according to the unerring
perception of a supreme and universal Eye and Will. It has to uphold an individualisation
of active consciousness, delight, force, substance which derives all its power, reality and
joy from an inalienable universality behind. It has to turn the multiplicity of the One
into an apparent division by which relations are defined and held off against each other
so as to meet again and join. It has to establish the delight of separation and contact in
the midst of an eternal unity and intermiscence. It has to enable the One to behave as if
He were an individual dealing with other individuals but always in His own unity, and
this is what the world really is. The mind is the final operation of the apprehending
Truth-consciousness which makes all this possible, and what we call the Ignorance does
not create a new thing and absolute falsehood but only misrepresents the Truth. The Ig-
norance is the Mind separated in knowledge from its source of knowledge and giving a
false rigidity and a mistaken appearance of opposition and conflict to the harmonious
play of the supreme Truth in its universal manifestation.
The fundamental error of the Mind is, then, this fall from self-knowledge by which
the individual soul conceives of its individuality as a separate fact instead of as a form of
Oneness and makes itself the centre of its own universe instead of knowing itself as one
concentration of the universal. From that original error all its particular ignorances and
limitations are contingent results. For, viewing the flux of things only as it flows upon
and through itself, it makes a limitation of being from which proceeds a limitation of
consciousness and therefore of knowledge, a limitation of conscious force and will and
therefore of power, a limitation of self-enjoyment and therefore of delight. It is con-
scious of things and knows them only as they present themselves to its individuality and
therefore it falls into an ignorance of the rest and thereby into an erroneous conception
even of that which it seems to know: for since all being is interdependent, the knowl-
edge either of the whole or of the essence is necessary for the right knowledge of the
part. Hence there is an element of error in all human knowledge. Similarly our will, ig-
norant of the rest of the all-will, must fall into error of working and a greater or less de-
gree of incapacity and impotence; the soul’s self-delight and delight of things, ignoring
the all-bliss and by defect of will and knowledge unable to master its world, must fall
into incapacity of possessive delight and therefore into suffering. Self-ignorance is
therefore the root of all the perversity of our existence, and that perversity stands forti-

                                                                                                                                                                  

that is to say, a power of Conscious Force expressive of real being, born out of real being and
partaking of its nature and neither a child of the Void nor a weaver of fictions. It is con-
scious Reality throwing itself into mutable forms of its own imperishable and immutable
substance.” (LD 125)
MOHRHOFF : BEYOND NATURAL SELECTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN 17

fied in the self-limitation, the egoism which is the form taken by that self-ignorance. (LD
181–183)

7 Life
Essentially, objects are subjects seen by other subjects. But to subjects who are ignorant
in the Vedantic sense, objects possess an effectively independent existence. As the sub-
ject splits into an effectively independent object and a conscious self merely associated
with it, so the subject’s creative imagination splits into a seemingly unconscious objec-
tive action and a will merely exerting a limited influence on it. The objective aspect
that conscious force assumes when it acts in or through ignorant individuals, is what
Sri Aurobindo means by “life.” But it is not the only meaning. As there are different
senses for “mind,” depending on the degree of ignorance or involution, so there are
different senses for “life”:
All life depends for its nature on the fundamental poise of its own constituting con-
sciousness; for as the Consciousness is, so will the Force be. Where the Consciousness is
infinite, one, transcendent of its acts and forms even while embracing and informing,
organising and executing them, as is the consciousness of Sachchidananda, so will be the
Force, infinite in its scope, one in its works, transcendent in its power and self knowl-
edge. Where the Consciousness is like that of material Nature, submerged, self-oblivious,
driving along in the drift of its own Force without seeming to know it, even though by
the very nature of the eternal relation between the two terms it really determines the
drift which drives it, so will be the Force: it will be a monstrous movement of the Inert
and Inconscient, unaware of what it contains, seeming mechanically to fulfil itself by a
sort of inexorable accident, an inevitably happy chance, even while all the while it really
obeys faultlessly the law of the Right and Truth fixed for it by the will of the supernal
Conscious- Being concealed within its movement. Where the Consciousness is divided in
itself, as in Mind, limiting itself in various centres, setting each to fulfil itself without
knowledge of what is in other centres and of its relation to others, aware of things and
forces in their apparent division and opposition to each other but not in their real unity,
such will be the Force: it will be a life like that we are and see around us; it will be a clash
and intertwining of individual lives seeking each its own fulfilment without knowing its
relation to others, a conflict and difficult accommodation of divided and opposing or dif-
fering forces and, in the mentality, a mixing, a shock and wrestle and insecure combina-
tion of divided and opposing or divergent ideas which cannot arrive at the knowledge of
their necessity to each other or grasp their place as elements of that Unity behind which
is expressing itself through them and in which their discords must cease. But where the
Consciousness is in possession of both the diversity and the unity and the latter contains
and governs the former, where it is aware at once of the Law, Truth and Right of the All
and the Law, Truth and Right of the individual and the two become consciously harmo-
nised in a mutual unity, where the whole nature of the consciousness is the One know-
ing itself as the Many and the Many knowing themselves as the One, there the Force also
will be of the same nature: it will be a Life that consciously obeys the law of Unity and
yet fulfils each thing in the diversity according to its proper rule and function; it will be
a life in which all the individuals live at once in themselves and in each other as one
conscious Being in many souls, one power of Consciousness in many minds, one joy of
Force working in many lives, one reality of Delight fulfilling itself in many hearts and
bodies. (LD 223–224)
Of the three principles matter, mind, and life, life is the most mysterious, most misun-
18 ANTIMATTERS 2 (2) 2008

derstood, and most neglected. For we are not aware of the force of life at work in us in
the manner in which we are aware of our ourselves as subjects, nor are we aware of it
in the manner in which we are aware of ourselves as objects. We know well enough
that we cannot learn much about our bodies by the method of introspection. We also
know — though there are those who doubt it — that we cannot learn much about our
conscious selves by studying our bodies. What we generally fail to realize is the wide
gap that exists between our minds and our bodies. This gap is the domain of life. Life is
hidden from us (i) because we cannot look behind the surfaces of objects — if we seem
to do so, all we find is more objects and more surfaces — and (ii) because as a rule we
are incapable of probing sufficiently into our subconscient parts.10

8 Setting the stage

The process of creation, conceived as a development of infinite delight into finite ex-
pressive forms, may be divided into three stages. The first concerns the development of
infinite delight into expressive ideas; the second covers the transition from expressive
idea to executive force; the third encompasses the creation, by the executive force, of a
revealing form. Once we have a multitude of ignorant subjects perceiving each other as
separate objects, the first stage takes place subliminally. The surface consciousness is
centered in ideation and largely unaware of the qualitative influx that controls it from
behind the veil.
The multiple exclusive concentration that produces ignorant selves, can deepen to the
point where the second stage — the transition from expressive idea to revealing form —
also takes place unconsciously. The executive force then is the somnambulist vehicle of
expression of a subliminal creative imagination. While we haven’t touched bottom yet
— we are still tracing Sachchidananda’s descent into involution — it will be obvious to
anyone but a hardnosed selectionist that the plant kingdom answers to this descrip-
tion.
On the other hand, if the multiple exclusive concentration is carried to its ultimate ex-
treme, the executive force itself falls dormant. But this is instrumental in the creation
and maintenance of individual forms. “Life is nothing else than the Force that builds
and maintains and destroys forms in the world.” (LD 189) It is “a universal operation of
Conscious-Force. . . that creates, maintains, destroys and re-creates forms or bodies.”
(LD 198) Hence when the executive force falls dormant, the result is a multitude of
formless entities,11 whose behavior is governed by apparently inflexible laws. The stage
for the adventure of evolution is set. Welcome to the physical world!

                                                            
10
This is why we are not only “headless” (unable to access the superconscient part of the
spectrum of consciousness) but also “footless” (unable to access the subconscient part).
11
According to a more widely held opinion, particles that lack internal structure are pointlike
rather than formless. The least that can be said against this view is that it lacks support both
from theory and from experiment. For further reasons to reject it see my “Particles, con-
sciousness, volition: A Vedantic vision,” AntiMatters 1 (1), 2007, pp. 23–53 .
MOHRHOFF : BEYOND NATURAL SELECTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN 19

9 The evolutionary process

Let’s recap. There is an ultimate reality. This relates to the world as the substance that
constitutes it, as a consciousness that contains it, and as an infinite bliss that expresses
and experiences itself in it. By adopting a multitude of viewpoints within the content of
its consciousness, Sachchidananda takes on the aspect of a multitude of situated selves
and thereby engenders both to the world’s spatial aspect and the subject-object dichot-
omy. By an exclusive concentration in each self, consciousness — originally supramental
— becomes mental. By deepening this exclusive concentration, consciousness becomes
implicit in its own executive force. By carrying the exclusive concentration to its fur-
thest extreme, the executive force, which serves to create and maintain objective
forms, becomes implicit in a multitude of entities, which are not only unconscious but
also formless. This, in brief, is the process of involution, which takes us from Sachchi-
dananda to the so-called “ultimate constituents” of matter.12 And it is obviously a psy-
chological process. Therefore the process of evolution, too, is essentially psychological.
[T]he creation of forms of Matter, first of inconscient and inanimate, then of living and
thinking Matter, the appearance of more and more organised bodies adapted to express
a greater power of consciousness, has been studied from the physical side, the side of
form-building, by Science; but very little light has been shed on the inner side, the side
of consciousness, and what little has been observed is rather of its physical basis and in-
strumentation than of the progressive operations of Consciousness in its own nature.
(LD 736)
[L]ife, mind, supermind are present in the atom, are at work there, but invisible, occult,
latent in a subconscious or apparently unconscious action of the Energy; there is an in-
forming Spirit, but the outer force and figure of being, what we might call the formal or
form existence as distinguished from the immanent or secretly governing conscious-
ness, is lost in the physical action, is so absorbed into it as to be fixed in a stereotyped
self-oblivion unaware of what it is and what it is doing. The electron and atom are in this
view eternal somnambulists. . .
In the plant this outer form-consciousness is still in the state of sleep, but a sleep
full of nervous dreams, always on the point of waking, but never waking. Life has ap-
peared; in other words, force of concealed conscious being has been so much intensified,
has raised itself to such a height of power as to develop or become capable of a new
principle of action, that which we see as vitality, life-force. It has become vitally respon-
sive to existence, though not mentally aware, and has put forth a new grade of activities
of a higher and subtler value than any purely physical action. . .
The transition to the mind and sense that appear in the animal being, that which
we call conscious life, is operated in the same manner. The force of being is so much in-
tensified, rises to such a height as to admit or develop a new principle of existence,— ap-
parently new at least in the world of Matter,— mentality. Animal being is mentally
aware of existence, its own and others, puts forth a higher and subtler grade of activi-
ties, receives a wider range of contacts, mental, vital, physical, from forms other than its
own, takes up the physical and vital existence and turns all it can get from them into
sense values and vital-mind values. It senses body, it senses life, but it senses also mind;
for it has not only blind nervous reactions, but conscious sensations, memories, im-
                                                            
12
According to the canon of well-established theories in particle physics, the so-called Stan-
dard Model, these are the quarks and the leptons.
20 ANTIMATTERS 2 (2) 2008

pulses, volitions, emotions, mental associations, the stuff of feeling and thought and will.
It has even a practical intelligence, founded on memory, association, stimulating need,
observation, a power of device; it is capable of cunning, strategy, planning; it can invent,
adapt to some extent its inventions, meet in this or that detail the demand of new cir-
cumstance. All is not in it a half-conscious instinct; the animal prepares human intelli-
gence. (LD 739–741)
[T]he appearance of human mind and body on the earth marks a crucial step, a decisive
change in the course and process of the evolution; it is not merely a continuation of the
old lines. Up till this advent of a developed thinking mind in Matter evolution had been
effected, not by the self-aware aspiration, intention, will or seeking of the living being,
but subconsciously or subliminally by the automatic operation of Nature. This was so be-
cause the evolution began from the Inconscience and the secret Consciousness had not
emerged sufficiently from it to operate through the self-aware participating individual
will of its living creature. But in man the necessary change has been made,— the being
has become awake and aware of himself; there has been made manifest in Mind its will
to develop, to grow in knowledge, to deepen the inner and widen the outer existence, to
increase the capacities of the nature. Man has seen that there can be a higher status of
consciousness than his own; the evolutionary oestrus is there in his parts of mind and
life, the aspiration to exceed himself is delivered and articulate within him: he has be-
come conscious of a soul, discovered the self and spirit. In him, then, the substitution of
a conscious for a subconscious evolution has become conceivable and practicable, and it
may well be concluded that the aspiration, the urge, the persistent endeavour in him is a
sure sign of Nature’s will for a higher way of fulfilment, the emergence of a greater
status.
In the previous stages of the evolution Nature’s first care and effort had to be di-
rected towards a change in the physical organisation, for only so could there be a change
of consciousness; this was a necessity imposed by the insufficiency of the force of con-
sciousness already in formation to effect a change in the body. But in man a reversal is
possible, indeed inevitable; for it is through his consciousness, through its transmuta-
tion and no longer through a new bodily organism as a first instrumentation that the
evolution can and must be effected. In the inner reality of things a change of conscious-
ness was always the major fact, the evolution has always had a spiritual significance and
the physical change was only instrumental; but this relation was concealed by the first
abnormal balance of the two factors, the body of the external Inconscience outweighing
and obscuring in importance the spiritual element, the conscious being. But once the
balance has been righted, it is no longer the change of body that must precede the
change of consciousness; the consciousness itself by its mutation will necessitate and
operate whatever mutation is needed for the body. (LD 875–876)
Evolution is the reverse of involution, but only in this particular sense: “what is an ul-
timate and last derivation in the involution is the first to appear in the evolution; what
was original and primal in the involution is in the evolution the last and supreme
emergence.” (LD 885–886) Particles do not turn back into conscious individuals; they
aggregate, and it is aggregates of particles that form living organism. The inconscient
substrate is not abolished but used. Because of its resistance, its darkness and inertia,
evolution is the difficult and protracted adventure it was meant to be.
This movement of evolution, of a progressive self-manifestation of the Spirit in a mate-
rial universe, has to make its account at every step with the fact of the involution of con-
sciousness and force in the form and activity of material substance. For it proceeds by an
awakening of the involved consciousness and force and its ascent from principle to prin-
MOHRHOFF : BEYOND NATURAL SELECTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN 21

ciple, from grade to grade, from power to power of the secret Spirit, but this is not a free
transference to a higher status. The law of action, the force of action of each grade or
power in its emergence is determined, not by its own free, full and pure law of nature or
vim of energy, but partly by the material organisation provided for it and partly by its
own status, achieved degree, accomplished fact of consciousness which it has been able
to impose upon Matter. Its effectivity is in some sort made up of a balance between the
actual extent of this evolutionary emergence and the countervailing extent to which the
emergent power is still enveloped, penetrated, diminished by the domination and con-
tinuing grip of the Inconscience. (LD 734)
[T]his taking up of the lower parts of life reveals itself as a turning downward of the
master eye of the secret evolving spirit or of the universal Being in the individual from
the height to which he has reached on all that now lies below him, a gazing down with
the double or twin power of the being’s consciousness-force,— the power of will, the
power of knowledge,— so as to understand from this new, different and wider range of
consciousness and perception and nature the lower life and its possibilities and to raise
it up, it also, to a higher level, to give it higher values, to bring out of it higher potentiali-
ties. And this he does because evidently he does not intend to kill or destroy it, but, de-
light of existence being his eternal business and a harmony of various strains, not a
sweet but monotonous melody the method of his music, he wishes to include the lower
notes also and, by surcharging them with a deeper and finer significance, get more de-
light out of them than was possible in the cruder formulation. Still in the end he lays on
them as a condition for his continued acceptance their consent to admit the higher val-
ues and, until they do consent, he can deal harshly enough with them even to trampling
them under foot when he is bent on perfection and they are rebellious. And that indeed
is the true inmost aim and meaning of ethics, discipline and askesis, to lesson and tame,
purify and prepare to be fit instruments the vital and physical and lower mental life so
that they may be transformed into notes of the higher mental and eventually the su-
pramental harmony, but not to mutilate and destroy them. Ascent is the first necessity,
but an integration is an accompanying intention of the spirit in Nature.
This downward eye of knowledge and will with a view to an all-round heightening,
deepening and subtler, finer and richer intensification is the secret Spirit’s way from the
beginning. The plant soul takes, as we may say, a nervous-material view of its whole
physical existence so as to get out of it all the vital-physical intensity possible; for it
seems to have some intense excitations of a mute life-vibration in it,— perhaps, though
that is difficult for us to imagine, more intense relatively to its lower rudimentary scale
than the animal mind and body in its higher and more powerful scale could tolerate. The
animal being takes a mentalised sense-view of its vital and physical existence so as to get
out of it all the sense value possible, much acuter in many respects than man’s as mere
sensation or sense-emotion or satisfaction of vital desire and pleasure. Man, looking
downward from the plane of will and intelligence, abandons these lower intensities, but
in order to get out of mind and life and sense a higher intensity in other values, intellec-
tual, aesthetic, moral, spiritual, mentally dynamic or practical — as he terms it; by these
higher elements he enlarges, subtilises and elevates his use of life-values. He does not
abandon the animal reactions and enjoyments, but more lucidly, finely and sensitively
mentalises them. This he does even on his normal and his lower levels, but, as he devel-
ops, he puts his lower being to a severer test, begins to demand from it on pain of rejec-
tion something like a transformation: that is the mind’s way of preparing for a spiritual
life still beyond it.
But man not only turns his gaze downward and around him, when he has reached
his higher level, but upward towards what is above him and inward towards what is oc-
cult within him. In him not only the downward gaze of the universal Being in the evolu-
22 ANTIMATTERS 2 (2) 2008

tion has become conscious, but its conscious upward and inward gaze also develops. The
animal lives as if satisfied with what Nature has done for it; if there is any upward gaze
of the secret spirit within its animal being, it has nothing consciously to do with it, that
is still Nature’s business: it is man who first makes this upward gaze consciously his own
business. For already by his possession of intelligent will, deformed ray of the gnosis
though it be, he begins to put on the double nature of Sachchidananda; he is no longer,
like the animal, an undeveloped conscious being entirely driven by Prakriti, a slave of
the executive Force, played with by the mechanical energies of Nature, but has begun to
be a developing conscious soul or Purusha interfering with what was her sole affair,
wishing to have a say in it and eventually to be the master. He cannot do it yet, he is too
much in her meshes, too much involved in her established mechanism: but he feels,—
though as yet too vaguely and uncertainly,— that the spirit within him wishes to rise to
yet higher heights, to widen its bounds; something within, something occult, knows that
it is not the intention of the deeper conscious Soul-Nature, the Purusha-Prakriti, to be
satisfied with his present lowness and limitations. To climb to higher altitudes, to get a
greater scope, to transform his lower nature, this is always a natural impulse of man as
soon as he has made his place for himself in the physical and vital world of earth and has
a little leisure to consider his farther possibilities. It must be so not because of any false
and pitiful imaginative illusion in him, but, first, because he is the imperfect, still devel-
oping mental being and must strive for more development, for perfection, and still more
because he is capable, unlike other terrestrial creatures, of becoming aware of what is
deeper than mind, of the soul within him, and of what is above the mind, of supermind,
of spirit, capable of opening to it, admitting it, rising towards it, taking hold of it. It is in
his human nature, in all human nature, to exceed itself by conscious evolution, to climb
beyond what he is. Not individuals only, but in time the race also, in a general rule of be-
ing and living if not in all its members, can have the hope, if it develops a sufficient will,
to rise beyond the imperfections of our present very undivine nature and to ascend at
least to a superior humanity, to rise nearer, even if it cannot absolutely reach, to a divine
manhood or supermanhood. (LD 742–745)

10 The malady of the world

All religion, all occult knowledge, all supernormal (as opposed to abnormal) psychologi-
cal experience, all Yoga, all psychic experience and discipline are sign-posts and direc-
tions pointing us upon that road of progress of the occult self-unfolding spirit. But the
human race is still weighted by a certain gravitation towards the physical, it obeys still
the pull of our yet unconquered earth-matter; it is dominated by the brain-mind, the
physical intelligence: thus held back by many ties, it hesitates before the indication or
falls back before the too tense demand of the spiritual effort. It has, too, still a great ca-
pacity for sceptical folly, an immense indolence, an enormous intellectual and spiritual
timidity and conservatism when called out of the grooves of habit. (LD 751–752)
The malady of the world is that the individual cannot find his real soul, and the root-
cause of this malady is again that he cannot meet in his embrace of things outward the
real soul of the world in which he lives. He seeks to find there the essence of being, the
essence of power, the essence of conscious-existence, the essence of delight, but receives
instead a crowd of contradictory touches and impressions. If he could find that essence,
he would find also the one universal being, power, conscious existence and delight even
in this throng of touches and impressions; the contradictions of what seems would be
reconciled in the unity and harmony of the Truth that reaches out to us in these con-
tacts. At the same time he would find his own true soul and through it his self, because
the true soul is his self’s delegate and his self and the self of the world are one. But this
MOHRHOFF : BEYOND NATURAL SELECTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN 23

he cannot do because of the egoistic ignorance in the mind of thought, the heart of emo-
tion, the sense which responds to the touch of things not by a courageous and whole-
hearted embrace of the world, but by a flux of reachings and shrinkings, cautious
approaches or eager rushes and sullen or discontented or panic or angry recoils accord-
ing as the touch pleases or displeases, comforts or alarms, satisfies or dissatisfies. It is
the desire-soul that by its wrong reception of life becomes the cause of a triple misinter-
pretation of the rasa, the delight in things, so that, instead of figuring the pure essential
joy of being, it comes rendered unequally into the three terms of pleasure, pain and in-
difference. . .
Self-knowledge is impossible unless we go behind our surface existence, which is a
mere result of selective outer experiences, an imperfect sounding-board or a hasty, in-
competent and fragmentary translation of a little out of the much that we are,— unless
we go behind this and send down our plummet into the subconscient and open ourselves
to the superconscient so as to know their relation to our surface being. For between
these three things our existence moves and finds in them its totality. The superconscient
in us is one with the self and soul of the world and is not governed by any phenomenal
diversity; it possesses therefore the truth of things and the delight of things in their
plenitude. The subconscient, so called,13 in that luminous head of itself which we call the
subliminal, is, on the contrary, not a true possessor but an instrument of experience; it is
not practically one with the soul and self of the world, but it is open to it through its
world-experience.
The subliminal soul is conscious inwardly of the rasa of things and has an equal de-
light in all contacts; it is conscious also of the values and standards of the surface desire-
soul and receives on its own surface corresponding touches of pleasure, pain and indif-
ference, but takes an equal delight in all. In other words, our real soul within takes joy of
all its experiences, gathers from them strength, pleasure and knowledge, grows by them
in its store and its plenty. It is this real soul in us which compels the shrinking desire-
mind to bear and even to seek and find a pleasure in what is painful to it, to reject what
is pleasant to it, to modify or even reverse its values, to equalise things in indifference or
to equalise them in joy, the joy of the variety of existence. And this it does because it is
impelled by the universal to develop itself by all kinds of experience so as to grow in Na-
ture. Otherwise, if we lived only by the surface desire-soul, we could no more change or
advance than the plant or stone in whose immobility or in whose routine of existence,
because life is not superficially conscious, the secret soul of things has as yet no instru-
ment by which it can rescue the life out of the fixed and narrow gamut into which it is
born. The desire-soul left to itself would circle in the same grooves for ever.
In the view of old philosophies pleasure and pain are inseparable like intellectual
truth and falsehood and power and incapacity and birth and death; therefore the only
possible escape from them would be a total indifference, a blank response to the excita-
tions of the world-self. But a subtler psychological knowledge shows us that this view
which is based on the surface facts of existence only, does not really exhaust the possi-
bilities of the problem. It is possible by bringing the real soul to the surface to replace
the egoistic standards of pleasure and pain by an equal, an all-embracing personal-
impersonal delight. The lover of Nature does this when he takes joy in all the things of
Nature universally without admitting repulsion or fear or mere liking and disliking, per-

                                                            
13
The real subconscious is a nether diminished consciousness close to the Inconscient; the
subliminal is a consciousness larger than our surface existence. But both belong to the inner
realm of our being of which our surface is unaware, so both are jumbled together in our
common conception and parlance.
24 ANTIMATTERS 2 (2) 2008

ceiving beauty in that which seems to others mean and insignificant, bare and savage,
terrible and repellent. The artist and the poet do it when they seek the rasa of the uni-
versal from the aesthetic emotion or from the physical line or from the mental form of
beauty or from the inner sense and power alike of that from which the ordinary man
turns away and of that to which he is attached by a sense of pleasure. The seeker of
knowledge, the God-lover who finds the object of his love everywhere, the spiritual man,
the intellectual, the sensuous, the aesthetic all do this in their own fashion and must do
it if they would find embracingly the Knowledge, the Beauty, the Joy or the Divinity
which they seek. It is only in the parts where the little ego is usually too strong for us, it
is only in our emotional or physical joy and suffering, our pleasure and pain of life, be-
fore which the desire-soul in us is utterly weak and cowardly, that the application of the
divine principle becomes supremely difficult and seems to many impossible or even
monstrous and repellent. . .
The true soul secret in us — subliminal, we have said, but the word is misleading,
for this presence is not situated below the threshold of waking mind, but rather burns in
the temple of the inmost heart behind the thick screen of an ignorant mind, life and
body, not subliminal but behind the veil,— this veiled psychic entity is the flame of the
Godhead always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness
of any spiritual self within which obscures our outward nature. It is a flame born out of
the Divine and, luminous inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn it
towards the Knowledge. It is the concealed Witness and Control, the hidden Guide, the
Daemon of Socrates, the inner light or inner voice of the mystic. It is that which endures
and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay or corruption,
an indestructible spark of the Divine. . . [It] puts forward a psychic personality which
changes, grows, develops from life to life; for this is the traveller between birth and
death and between death and birth, our nature parts are only its manifold and changing
vesture. . . It is this secret psychic entity which is the true original Conscience in us
deeper than the constructed and conventional conscience of the moralist, for it is this
which points always towards Truth and Right and Beauty, towards Love and Harmony
and all that is a divine possibility in us, and persists till these things become the major
need of our nature. It is the psychic personality in us that flowers as the saint, the sage,
the seer; when it reaches its full strength, it turns the being towards the Knowledge of
Self and the Divine, towards the supreme Truth, the supreme Good, the supreme Beauty,
Love and Bliss, the divine heights and largenesses, and opens us to the touch of spiritual
sympathy, universality, oneness. (LD 235–239)

11 The future of evolution

Man is a transitional being, he is not final. (EDH 157)
Man’s greatness is not in what he is but in what he makes possible. (EDH 160)
Mind is a clumsy interlude between Nature’s vast and precise subconscient action
and the vaster infallible superconscient action of the Godhead. (EDH 225)

A first condition of the soul’s complete emergence is a direct contact in the surface being
with the spiritual Reality. Because it comes from that, the psychic element in us turns
always towards whatever in phenomenal Nature seems to belong to a higher Reality and
can be accepted as its sign and character. At first, it seeks this Reality through the good,
the true, the beautiful, through all that is pure and fine and high and noble: but although
this touch through outer signs and characters can modify and prepare the nature, it
cannot entirely or most inwardly and profoundly change it. For such an inmost change
MOHRHOFF : BEYOND NATURAL SELECTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN 25

the direct contact with the Reality itself is indispensable since nothing else can so deeply
touch the foundations of our being and stir it or cast the nature by its stir into a ferment
of transmutation. Mental representations, emotional and dynamic figures have their use
and value; Truth, Good and Beauty are in themselves primary and potent figures of the
Reality, and even in their forms as seen by the mind, as felt by the heart, as realised in
the life can be lines of an ascent: but it is in a spiritual substance and being of them and
of itself that That which they represent has to come into our experience. (LD 934)
In the animal mind is not quite distinct from its own life-matrix and life-matter; its
movements are so involved in the life movements that it cannot detach itself from them,
cannot stand separate and observe them; but in man mind has become separate, he can
become aware of his mental operations as distinct from his life operations, his thought
and will can disengage themselves from his sensations and impulses, desires and emo-
tional reactions, can become detached from them, observe and control them, sanction or
cancel their functioning: he does not as yet know the secrets of his being well enough to
be aware of himself decisively and with certitude as a mental being in a life and body,
but he has that impression and can take inwardly that position. So too at first soul in
man does not appear as something quite distinct from mind and from mentalised life; its
movements are involved in the mind movements, its operations seem to be mental and
emotional activities; the mental human being is not aware of a soul in him standing back
from the mind and life and body, detaching itself, seeing and controlling and moulding
their action and formation: but, as the inner evolution proceeds, this is precisely what
can, must and does happen,— it is the long-delayed but inevitable next step in our evolu-
tionary destiny. There can be a decisive emergence in which the being separates itself
from thought and sees itself in an inner silence as the spirit in mind, or separates itself
from the life movements, desires, sensations, kinetic impulses and is aware of itself as
the spirit supporting life, or separates itself from the body sense and knows itself as a
spirit ensouling Matter: this is the discovery of ourselves as the Purusha, a mental being
or a life-soul or a subtle self supporting the body. This is taken by many as a sufficient
discovery of the true self and in a certain sense they are right; for it is the self or spirit
that so represents itself in regard to the activities of Nature, and this revelation of its
presence is enough to disengage the spiritual element: but self-discovery can go farther,
it can even put aside all relation to form or action of Nature. For it is seen that these
selves are representations of a divine Entity to which mind, life and body are only forms
and instruments: we are then the Soul looking at Nature, knowing all her dynamisms in
us, not by mental perception and observation, but by an intrinsic consciousness and its
direct sense of things and its intimate exact vision, able therefore by its emergence to
put a close control on our nature and change it. . .
It is only through these decisive movements that the true character of the evolu-
tion becomes evident; for till then there are only preparatory movements, a pressure of
the psychic Entity on the mind, life and body to develop a true soul action, a pressure of
the spirit or self for liberation from the ego, from the surface ignorance, a turning of the
mind and life towards some occult Reality,— preliminary experiences, partial formula-
tions of a spiritualised mind, a spiritualised life, but no complete change, no probability
of an entire unveiling of the soul or self or a radical transformation of the nature. When
there is the decisive emergence, one sign of it is the status or action in us of an inherent,
intrinsic, self-existent consciousness which knows itself by the mere fact of being,
knows all that is in itself in the same way, by identity with it, begins even to see all that
to our mind seems external in the same manner, by a movement of identity or by an in-
trinsic direct consciousness which envelops, penetrates, enters into its object, discovers
itself in the object, is aware in it of something that is not mind or life or body. . .
[A]t first this consciousness may confine itself to a status of being separate from the
26 ANTIMATTERS 2 (2) 2008

action of our ignorant surface nature, observing it, limiting itself to knowledge, to a see-
ing of things with a spiritual sense and vision of existence. For action it may still depend
upon the mental, vital, bodily instruments, or it may allow them to act according to their
own nature and itself remain satisfied with self-experience and self-knowledge, with an
inner liberation, an eventual freedom: but it may also and usually does exercise a certain
authority, governance, influence on thought, life movement, physical action, a purifying
uplifting control compelling them to move in a higher and purer truth of themselves, to
obey or be an instrumentation of an influx of some diviner Power or a luminous direc-
tion which is not mental but spiritual and can be recognised as having a certain divine
character,— the inspiration of a greater Self or the command of the Ruler of all being,
the Ishwara. Or the nature may obey the psychic entity’s intimations, move in an inner
light, follow an inner guidance. This is already a considerable evolution and amounts to
a beginning at least of a psychic and spiritual transformation. But it is possible to go far-
ther; for the spiritual being, once inwardly liberated, can develop in mind the higher
states of being that are its own natural atmosphere and bring down a supramental en-
ergy and action which are proper to the Truth-consciousness; the ordinary mental in-
strumentation, life-instrumentation, physical instrumentation even, could then be
entirely transformed and become parts no longer of an ignorance however much illu-
mined, but of a supramental creation which would be the true action of a spiritual truth-
consciousness and knowledge. (LD 886–888)
As you will recall, the process of creation goes through three phases: the development
of infinite delight into expressive ideas, the transition from expressive idea to execu-
tive force, and the creation, by the executive force, of a revealing form. Evolution may
be likened to building a bridge. The support for one end of the bridge is a multitude of
unconscious, formless entities — the final outcome of Sachchidananda’s plunge into
involution. The support for the other end is the infinite bliss at the heart of existence —
deprived of its creative force. Evolution starts with a multitude of formless particles,
whose spatial relations are potentially capable of constituting revealing forms, but the
executive force needed to created such forms is missing. In addition, there is present
from the beginning this infinite delight, potentially capable of issuing expressive ideas,
but the dynamism needed to form such ideas is missing. This infinite delight thus inca-
pacitated is what Sri Aurobindo calls the psychic principle or psychic entity. The term
“entity” indicates an original multiplicity of the psychic principle — a multiplicity of
souls antedating the plunge into involution and persisting throughout the adventure of
evolution. (Remember note 5.)
Starting from the material end of the bridge, there evolve mental, vital, and bodily in-
struments, which may “act according to their own nature” or else be compelled “to
obey or be an instrumentation of an influx of some diviner Power.” Thus there is what
we may call a “nature dynamism,” by which those instruments act when left to them-
selves, and there is what we may call a “soul dynamism,” by which the psychic entity
influences them or compels them to act differently. Starting from the other end of the
bridge, each psychic entity evolves a psychic being with a psychic personality that de-
velops in proportion to the influence it wields over the outer nature.
[The] evolutionary working of Nature from Matter to Mind and beyond it has a double
process: there is an outward visible process of physical evolution with birth as its ma-
chinery,— for each evolved form of body housing its own evolved power of conscious-
ness is maintained and kept in continuity by heredity; there is, at the same time, an
MOHRHOFF : BEYOND NATURAL SELECTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN 27

invisible process of soul evolution with rebirth into ascending grades of form and con-
sciousness as its machinery. The first by itself would mean only a cosmic evolution; for
the individual would be a quickly perishing instrument, and the race, a more abiding
collective formulation, would be the real step in the progressive manifestation of the
cosmic Inhabitant, the universal Spirit: rebirth is an indispensable condition for any long
duration and evolution of the individual being in the earth-existence. Each grade of
cosmic manifestation, each type of form that can house the indwelling spirit, is turned
by rebirth into a means for the individual soul, the psychic entity, to manifest more and
more of its concealed consciousness; each life becomes a step in a victory over Matter by
a greater progression of consciousness in it which shall make eventually Matter itself a
means for the full manifestation of the Spirit. (LD 858)
There is an evolution of our outward nature, the nature of the mental being in the life
and body, and there is within it, pressing forward for self-revelation because with the
emergence of mind that revelation is becoming possible, a preparation at least, even the
beginning of an evolution of our inner being, our occult subliminal and spiritual na-
ture. . . If the sole intention were the revelation of the essential spiritual Reality and a
cessation of our being into its pure existence, this insistence on the mental evolution
would have no purpose: for at every point of the nature there can be a breaking out of
the spirit and an absorption of our being into it; an intensity of the heart, a total silence
of the mind, a single absorbing passion of the will would be enough to bring about that
culminating movement. If Nature’s final intention were other-worldly, then too the
same law would hold; for everywhere, at any point of the nature, there can be a suffi-
cient power of the other-worldly urge to break through and away from the terrestrial
action and enter into a spiritual elsewhere. But if her intention is a comprehensive
change of the being, this double evolution is intelligible and justifies itself; for it is for
that purpose indispensable.
This, however, imposes a difficult and slow spiritual advance: for, first, the spiritual
emergence has to wait at each step for the instruments to be ready; next, as the spiritual
formation emerges, it is mixed inextricably with the powers, motives, impulses of an
imperfect mind, life and body,— there is a pull on it to accept and serve these powers,
motives and impulses, a downward gravitation and perilous mixture, a constant tempta-
tion to fall or deviation, at least a fettering, a weight, a retardation; there is a necessity
to return upon a step gained in order to bring up something of the nature which hangs
back and prevents a farther step; finally, there is, by the very character of mind in which
it has to work, a limitation of the emerging spiritual light and power and a compulsion
on it to move by segments, to follow one line or another and leave altogether or leave till
later on the achievement of its own totality. This hampering, this obstacle of the mind,
life and body,— the heavy inertia and persistence of the body, the turbid passions of the
life-part, the obscurity and doubting incertitudes, denials, other-formulations of the
mind,— is an impediment so great and intolerable that the spiritual urge becomes impa-
tient and tries rigorously to quell these opponents, to reject the life, to mortify the body,
to silence the mind and achieve its own separate salvation, spirit departing into pure
spirit and rejecting from it altogether an undivine and obscure Nature. Apart from the
supreme call, the natural push of the spiritual part in us to return to its own highest
element and status, this aspect of vital and physical Nature as an impediment to pure
spirituality is a compelling reason for asceticism, for illusionism, for the tendency to
other-worldliness, the urge towards withdrawal from life, the passion for a pure and
unmixed Absolute. A pure spiritual absolutism is a movement of the self towards its own
supreme selfhood, but it is also indispensable for Nature’s own purpose; for without it
the mixture, the downward gravitation would make the spiritual emergence impossible.
The extremist of this absolutism, the solitary, the ascetic, is the standard-bearer of the
28 ANTIMATTERS 2 (2) 2008

spirit, his ochre robe is its flag, the sign of a refusal of all compromise,— as indeed the
struggle of emergence cannot end by a compromise, but only by an entire spiritual vic-
tory and the complete surrender of the lower nature. . .
There is thus a dual tendency in the spiritual emergence, on one side a drive to-
wards the establishment at all cost of the spiritual consciousness in the being, even to
the rejection of Nature, on the other side a push towards the extension of spirituality to
our parts of nature. But until the first is fully achieved, the second can only be imperfect
and halting. It is the foundation of the pure spiritual consciousness that is the first ob-
ject in the evolution of the spiritual man, and it is this and the urge of that consciousness
towards contact with the Reality, the Self or the Divine Being that must be the first and
foremost or even, till it is perfectly accomplished, the sole preoccupation of the spiritual
seeker. (LD 890–892)
As the crust of the outer nature cracks, as the walls of inner separation break down, the
inner light gets through, the inner fire burns in the heart, the substance of the nature
and the stuff of consciousness refine to a greater subtlety and purity, and the deeper
psychic experiences, those which are not solely of an inner mental or inner vital charac-
ter, become possible in this subtler, purer, finer substance; the soul begins to unveil it-
self, the psychic personality reaches its full stature. The soul, the psychic entity, then
manifests itself as the central being which upholds mind and life and body and supports
all the other powers and functions of the Spirit; it takes up its greater function as the
guide and ruler of the nature. A guidance, a governance begins from within which ex-
poses every movement to the light of Truth, repels what is false, obscure, opposed to the
divine realisation: every region of the being, every nook and corner of it, every move-
ment, formation, direction, inclination of thought, will, emotion, sensation, action, reac-
tion, motive, disposition, propensity, desire, habit of the conscious or subconscious
physical, even the most concealed, camouflaged, mute, recondite, is lighted up with the
unerring psychic light, their confusions dissipated, their tangles disentangled, their ob-
scurities, deceptions, self-deceptions precisely indicated and removed; all is purified, set
right, the whole nature harmonised, modulated in the psychic key, put in spiritual order.
This process may be rapid or tardy according to the amount of obscurity and resistance
still left in the nature, but it goes on unfalteringly so long as it is not complete. As a final
result the whole conscious being is made perfectly apt for spiritual experience of every
kind, turned towards spiritual truth of thought, feeling, sense, action, tuned to the right
responses, delivered from the darkness and stubbornness of the tamasic inertia, the tur-
bidities and turbulences and impurities of the rajasic passion and restless unharmonised
kinetism, the enlightened rigidities and sattwic limitations or poised balancements of
constructed equilibrium which are the character of the Ignorance.
This is the first result, but the second is a free inflow of all kinds of spiritual experi-
ence, experience of the Self, experience of the Ishwara and the Divine Shakti, experience
of cosmic consciousness, a direct touch with cosmic forces and with the occult move-
ments of universal Nature, a psychic sympathy and unity and inner communication and
interchanges of all kinds with other beings and with Nature, illuminations of the mind
by knowledge, illuminations of the heart by love and devotion and spiritual joy and ec-
stasy, illuminations of the sense and the body by higher experience, illuminations of dy-
namic action in the truth and largeness of a purified mind and heart and soul, the
certitudes of the divine light and guidance, the joy and power of the divine force work-
ing in the will and the conduct. . .
But all this change and all this experience, though psychic and spiritual in essence
and character, would still be, in its parts of life-effectuation, on the mental, vital and
physical level; its dynamic spiritual outcome would be a flowering of the soul in mind
and life and body, but in act and form it would be circumscribed within the limitations —
MOHRHOFF : BEYOND NATURAL SELECTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN 29

however enlarged, uplifted and rarefied — of an inferior instrumentation. It would be a

reflected and modified manifestation of things whose full reality, intensity, largeness,
oneness and diversity of truth and power and delight are above us, above mind and
therefore above any perfection, within mind’s own formula, of the foundations or super-
structure of our present nature. A highest spiritual transformation must intervene on
the psychic or psycho-spiritual change; the psychic movement inward to the inner be-
ing, the Self or Divinity within us, must be completed by an opening upward to a su-
preme spiritual status or a higher existence. This can be done by our opening into what
is above us, by an ascent of consciousness into the ranges of overmind and supramental
nature in which the sense of self and spirit is ever unveiled and permanent and in which
the self-luminous instrumentation of the self and spirit is not restricted or divided as in
our mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature. This also the psychic change makes possible;
for as it opens us to the cosmic consciousness now hidden from us by many walls of lim-
iting individuality, so also it opens us to what is now superconscient to our normality
because it is hidden from us by the strong, hard and bright lid of mind,— mind constrict-
ing, dividing and separative. The lid thins, is slit, breaks asunder or opens and disappears
under the pressure of the psycho-spiritual change and the natural urge of the new spiri-
tualised consciousness towards that of which it is an expression here. . .
If the rift in the lid of mind is made, what happens is an opening of vision to some-
thing above us or a rising up towards it or a descent of its powers into our being. What
we see by the opening of vision is an Infinity above us, an eternal Presence or an infinite
Existence, an infinity of consciousness, an infinity of bliss,— a boundless Self, a bound-
less Light, a boundless Power, a boundless Ecstasy. . .
[The spiritual transformation] achieves itself and culminates in an upward ascent
often repeated by which in the end the consciousness fixes itself on a higher plane and
from there sees and governs the mind, life and body; it achieves itself also in an increas-
ing descent of the powers of the higher consciousness and knowledge which become
more and more the whole normal consciousness and knowledge. A light and power, a
knowledge and force are felt which first take possession of the mind and remould it, af-
terwards of the life part and remould that, finally of the little physical consciousness and
leave it no longer little but wide and plastic and even infinite. For this new conscious-
ness has itself the nature of infinity: it brings to us the abiding spiritual sense and
awareness of the infinite and eternal with a great largeness of the nature and a breaking
down of its limitations; immortality becomes no longer a belief or an experience but a
normal self-awareness; the close presence of the Divine Being, his rule of the world and
of our self and natural members, his force working in us and everywhere, the peace of
the infinite, the joy of the infinite are now concrete and constant in the being; in all
sights and forms one sees the Eternal, the Reality, in all sounds one hears it, in all
touches feels it; there is nothing else but its forms and personalities and manifestations;
the joy or adoration of the heart, the embrace of all existence, the unity of the spirit are
abiding realities. The consciousness of the mental creature is turning or has been al-
ready turned wholly into the consciousness of the spiritual being. (LD 941–947)
Neither life nor mind succeeds in converting or perfecting the material existence, be-
cause they cannot attain to their own full force in these conditions; they need to call in a
higher power to liberate and fulfil them. But the higher spiritual-mental powers also
undergo the same disability when they descend into life and matter; they can do much
more, achieve much luminous change, but the modification, the limitation, the disparity
between the consciousness that comes in and the force of effectuation that it can men-
talise and materialise, are constantly there and the result is a diminished creation. The
change made is often extraordinary, there is even something which looks like a total
conversion and reversal of the state of consciousness and an uplifting of its movements,
30 ANTIMATTERS 2 (2) 2008

but it is not dynamically absolute.

Only the supermind can thus descend without losing its full power of action; for its
action is always intrinsic and automatic, its will and knowledge identical and the result
commensurate: its nature is a self-achieving Truth-consciousness and, if it limits itself or
its working, it is by choice and intention, not by compulsion; in the limits it chooses its
action and the results of its action are harmonious and inevitable. . . As the psychic
change has to call in the spiritual to complete it, so the first spiritual change has to call
in the supramental transformation to complete it. For all these steps forward are, like
those before them, transitional; the whole radical change in the evolution from a basis of
Ignorance to a basis of Knowledge can only come by the intervention of the supramental
Power and its direct action in earth-existence. (LD 950–951)
If a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our birth into Matter, if it is fun-
damentally an evolution of consciousness that has been taking place in Nature, then
man as he is cannot be the last term of that evolution: he is too imperfect an expression
of the spirit, mind itself a too limited form and instrumentation; mind is only a middle
term of consciousness, the mental being can only be a transitional being. If, then, man is
incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and supermind and superman
must manifest and take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to
what exceeds it, then there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at super-
mind and supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an evolution of
that greater term of the Spirit manifesting in Nature. (LD 879)
The full emergence of supermind may be accomplished by a sovereign manifestation, a
descent into earth-consciousness and a rapid assumption of its powers and disclosing of
its forms and the creation of a supramental race and a supramental life: this must indeed
be the full result of its action in Nature. But this has not been the habit of evolutionary
Nature in the past upon earth and it may well be that this supramental evolution also
will fix its own periods, though it cannot be at all a similar development to that of which
earth has hitherto been the witness. But once it has begun, all must unavoidably and
perfectly manifest and all parts of Nature must tend towards a greatest possible lumi-
nousness and perfection. It is this certainty that authorises us to believe that mind and
humanity also will tend towards a realisation that will be far beyond our present dreams
of perfection. (EPY14 583)

12 Epilogue
The process of involution terminates in a multitude of formless particles, whose spatial
relations appear to be governed by inflexible laws. Being instrumental in setting the
stage for the drama of evolution, these laws — the laws of physics — do not direct the
play. If the infinite delight at the heart of existence is to appear on the stage, it must
begin by evolving the necessary instruments, and this it cannot do without modifying
the initial, physical mode of its creative dynamism. At the same time, given the Hou-
diniesque character of the play, we can predict that the modifications will be so small
and so few that no detectable “violations” of physical laws occur.
This changes when the Purusha begins to exercise a genuine control, or when the psy-

                                                            
14
Sri Aurobindo, Essays in Philosophy and Yoga. Puducherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publication
Department, 1998.
MOHRHOFF : BEYOND NATURAL SELECTION AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN 31

chic being begins to take up the reigns of nature. One can foresee a growing suscepti-
bility of the nature dynamism to soul dynamism or (what comes to the same) a progres-
sive strengthening of the latter at the expense of the former. This development cannot
but continue until it is complete, that is, until the nature dynamism ceases to exist as a
separate dynamism, having been completely integrated into the dynamism of the soul.
The bridge will be complete when an organism that has evolved from matter’s end
merges with a psychic being that has evolved from the immaterial end, our of the infi-
nite delight that is Reality Itself.
The principle of the process of evolution is a foundation, from that foundation an ascent,
in that ascent a reversal of consciousness and, from the greater height and wideness
gained, an action of change and new integration of the whole nature. The first founda-
tion is Matter; the ascent is that of Nature; the integration is an at first unconscious or
half-conscious automatic change of Nature by Nature. But as soon as a more completely
conscious participation of the being has begun in these workings of Nature, a change in
the functioning of the process is inevitable. The physical foundation of Matter remains,
but Matter can no longer be the foundation of the consciousness; consciousness itself
will be no longer in its origin a welling up from the Inconscient or a concealed flow from
an occult inner subliminal force under the pressure of contacts from the universe. The
foundation of the developing existence will be the new spiritual status above or the un-
veiled soul status within us; it is a flow of light and knowledge and will from above and a
reception from within that will determine the reactions of the being to cosmic experi-
ence. The whole concentration of the being will be shifted from below upwards and from
without inwards; our higher and inner being now unknown to us will become ourselves,
and the outer or surface being which we now take for ourselves will be only an open
front or an annexe through which the true being meets the universe. The outer world it-
self will become inward to the spiritual awareness, a part of itself, intimately embraced
in a knowledge and feeling of unity and identity, penetrated by an intuitive regard of the
mind, responded to by the direct contact of consciousness with consciousness, taken
into an achieved integrality. The old inconscient foundation itself will be made con-
scious in us by the inflow of light and awareness from above and its depths annexed to
the heights of the spirit. An integral consciousness will become the basis of an entire
harmonisation of life through the total transformation, unification, integration of the
being and the nature. (LD 753)