Sri Aurobindo

The Hour of God

and other writings

II. Evolution — Psychology — The Supermind

Evolution [6]

Involution of a superconscient Spirit in inconscient Matter is the secret of this visible and apparent world and the evolution of this Superconscient out of inconscient Nature is the keyword of the earth’s riddle. Earth-life is the 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.

The nature of the Divinity in the world is the immutable stability of an eternal existence that puts on superficial mutable forms, the indivisible light of an infinite consciousness that breaks out into multiform detail and groping of knowledge, the illimitable movement of an omnipotent force that works out its marvels in self-imposed limits, the calm and ecstasy of an immeasurable Delight that creates waves and rhythms of the outward-going and inward-drawing intensities of its own all-possessing and self-possessing bliss. This will be the nature of our own fourfold experience when it will work in us in its unveiled nature; and if that manifestation had been from the beginning there would have been no problem of terrestrial existence.

But this Godhead here, whether within us or outside us in things and forces and creatures, started from an involution in inconscient Nature and began by the manifestation of its apparent opposites. In Non-existence, discontinuity and void, the appearance of a blind inconscient Force, in the creations of that Force a principle of difficult labour and suffering and pain: out of these opposites the Spirit in Matter has chosen to evolve its might and light and infinity and beatitude.