An Aspect of Emergent Evolution

 

THE theory of Emergent Evolution should be considered no longer as a theory, but as a statement of fact. The fact, at its barest, stripped of all assumptions and even generalisations, is the fact observed and implicit in all evolution, which can be denied only by the perverse and purblind. It is this, that at each crucial step Nature undergoes a sudden and total change, brings forth a new element which was not there before and which could not be foreseen or foretold by any process of deduction from the actual factors in play.

At the very outset of the evolutionary march, when material Nature meant only a mass or masses of incandescent gaseous elements, the first miracle that happened was the formation, the advent of water. There was Hydrogen and there was Oxygen existing and moving side by side, for millions of years perhaps, but only at a given moment did an electric current happen to pass through a certain mixture of the two elements somewhere, and behold, a liquid drop was the product, an absolutely new, unforeseen, unpredictable and wonderful object! Examples can be multiplied.

The fact is admitted, on the whole, unless one is a Fundamentalist and prefers still to live in the consciousness of a bygone century. Difference comes in when the question of explanations and of viewpoints regarding them is raised. A materialist like Professor Broad would consider Mind and Life as fundamentally formations of Matter, however different they might seem from each other and from the latter. Water, the so-called miracle product of Oxygen and Hydrogen, according to him, is as material as these two; even so Life and Mind, however miraculously produced, being born of Matter, are nothing but the same single reality, only in different

forms. Others, who are more or less idealists, Alexander and Lloyd Morgan, for example (some of them call themselves neo-realists, however), would not view the phenomenon in the same way. Alexander says that Matter and Life and Mind are very different from each other; they are truly emergents, that is to say, novelties; but how the thing has been possible, one need not inquire; one should accept the fact with "natural piety."

Morgan proffers an explanation. He says that whatever there is, exists in God who is the all-continent. In fact, everything that is or was or shall be is in Him. And the evolutionary gradation expresses or puts in front, one by one, all the principles or types of existence that God holds in Himself. The explanation hardly explains. It simply posits the existence of Matter and Life and Mind and whatever is to come hereafter in the infinity of God, but the passage from one to another, the connecting link between two succeeding terms, and the necessity of the link, are left as obscure as before. Life is tagged on to Matter and Mind is tagged on to Life in the name of the Lord God.

            Bertrand Russell made a move in the right direction with a happy suggestion which unhappily he had not the courage to follow up. Mind (and Life), he says, are certainly emergents out of Matter; that is because the reality is neither, it is a neutral stuff out of which all emergents issue. The conclusion is logical and sensible. But as he was initially bound to his position of scientific scepticism, he could not further question or probe the "neutral" and stopped on the fence.

The problem in reality, however, is simple enough, if we allow the facts to speak for themselves and do not hesitate to accept the conclusions to which they inevitably lead. After Matter came Life; that is to say, out of Matter came Life, and that can only be because Life was involved in Matter. And if such a conclusion makes of Matter a potentially living thing, we shall have to accept the position. In the same way, Mind that followed Life came out of Life, because Mind was involved in Life; and if that means endowing Life with a secret mentality, well, there is no help for it. And if, as a natural consequence of the two premises we have to admit the existence of some kind of mind or consciousness secreted in Matter 

­- a minimal psychic life, according to McDougall – that would be but what the Upanishads always declared: Creation -is a vibration of consciousness, and all things and all kinds of .existence are only forms and modalities of consciousness.

However, we thus arrive at Mind in following the evolutionary process. Now after Mind there emerges another principle which has been termed Deity. By Deity the emergent evolutionists mean the embodiment of the religious feeling – piety, charity, worship, love of God or of God's creatures. Indeed, saints and prophets are visible deities, embodiments of the Deity in the making. These represent another element in the evolutionary process – a new evolute.

Does this point to the emergence of a new type of superhuman beings forming a class or a species by themselves? The possibility has been envisaged by some of the protagonists of emergent evolution, but has not been sufficiently examined - or considered. . Philosophers seem to walk in this region with caution and incertitude, as if on quicksand and quagmire. :But in this connection we are faced with a problem which Morgan had the happy intuition to seize and to bring forward. It is our purpose to draw attention to this matter.

Professor Alexander spoke of the emergence of deities who would embody emergent properties other than those manifest in the Mind of man. Morgan asks whether there is not also a Deity – or the Deity – in the making. He establishes the 1ogical necessity of such a consummation in this way: the evolutionary urge (or nisus, as it has been called) in its upward drive creates and throws up on all sides, at each stage, forms of the new property or principle of existence that has come into evidence. These multiple forms may appear anywhere and everywhere; they are strewn about on the entire surface of Nature. These are, however, the branchings of the evolutionary nisus which has a central line of advance running through the .entire gradation of emergents; it is, as it were, the central pillar round which is erected a many-storeyed edifice. The interesting point is this, that at the present stage of emergence, what the central line touches and arrives at is the Deity. Or, again, the thing can be viewed in another way. At the bottom the evolutionary movement is broad-based on Matter but as it proceeds upward its extent is gradually narrowed down; 

Life is less extensive than Matter and Mind is still less extensive than Life. Thus the scheme of the movement can be figured as a pyramid-the base of the pyramid represents Matter, but the apex where the narrowing sides converge is what is called the Deity.

            What is the implication of such a conclusion? It comes. perilously near the Indian conception of Avatarhood! The central line of evolutionary nisus is the line of Avatarhood. At each point of the line, on the level of the newly emerged principle, there is a divine embodiment of that principle. The esoteric significance of the graded scale of Avatarhood, as illustrated in Vishnu's ten Forms, has long ago been pointed out, by some thinkers, in this light.

The principle of Avatarhood stands justified in this scheme as a necessary and inevitable element in the terrestrial evolutionary movement. An Avatar embodies a new emergent property: he incarnates a new principle of being and consciousness, he manifests-unfolds from below or brings down from above upon earth--a higher and deeper principle of organisation. He is the nucleus round which the new organisation crystallises. A Rama comes and human society attains a new status: against a mainly vitalistic and egoistic organisation whose defender and protagonist is Ravana, is set up an ideal of sattwic humanity. A Krishna appears and human consciousness is lifted, potentially at least, to a still higher level of spiritual possibility. The Avatar following, rather tracing,. in his upward movement the central line of the evolutionary nisus, cuts a path, as it were, in the virgin forest of a realm of consciousness still unknown and foreign to human steps. As the Avatar presses and passes on, the way is cleared for other, ordinary human beings to come up and naturalise themselves in a new country promising a higher destiny which He discovers and conquers-for them.

Now at this point we reach the crux of the problem, the supreme secret – rahasyam uttamam – as the Gita would say. For the apex of the pyramid, the crown of evolution, the consummation of the central line of emergence would then be nothing less than the manifestation, the terrestrial incarnation of the Supreme Divine. The Deity thus fully emerged would embody the truth and play of creation in its widest scope and 

highest elevation; it would mean the utter fulfilment of human destiny and terrestrial Purpose.

In Indian terminology, it would be the advent of the Purna Bhagavan in the human body – manusim tanuasritam. All previous Avatars are only a preparation for the coming of this Supreme Divine. It is said also that the present epoch marks a crucial turn and transition. We await the Kalki Avatar who will wipe off the past, the Iron Age, and bring in the Golden Age, Satya Youga.

A question inevitably arises here – what next? Once the evolutionary movement has reached the apex, does it stop there? After the apex, the Void? I t need not be so. The completion of the pyramid would mean simply the end of a particular order of creation, the creation in Ignorance. This is, indeed, what Sri Aurobindo envisages in his conception of the creation in supramental Gnosis. The evolutionary nisus, on its arrival at the apex, according to him crosses a borderland, leaps into another order of the world, of infinite Truth-Consciousness. Thereafter another new creation starts the building perhaps of another pyramid (if we want to continue the metaphor). The progression "Of the evolutionary course is naturally expected to be an unending series. The pyramids rise tier upon tier ad infinitum. Only it is to be noted that in the basic pyramid the evolution starts from inconscience and moves from more ignorance to less ignorance through a gradually lessening density of darkness until the apex is reached where all shade of darkness is eliminated for ever. Beyond there is no mixture, however thin and diluted: it is a movement from light to light, from one expression of it to another, perhaps richer, but of the same quality.

This, however, is an aspect of the problem with which we are not immediately concerned. There is one question with which we have omitted to deal but which is nearer to us and touches present actualities. We spoke of the emergence of the Deity -   and of the Supreme Deity – after Mind. The question is, how long after? I do not refer to the duration of time needed, but to the steps or the stages that have to be passed. For between Mind and Deity, certainly between Mind and the Supreme Deity (Purushottama, as we would say), there may presumably still lie a course of graded emergence. In fact, Sri Aurobindo

speaks of the Overmind and the Supermind, as farther steps of the evolutionary progress coming after Mind. He says that Mind closes the interior hemisphere of man's nature and consciousness; with Overmind man enters into the higher sphere of the Spirit. In this view, the religious feeling or perception or conduct would be but an intermediary stage between Mind and Overmind. They are not really emergent properties, but reflections, faint echoes and promises of what is to come, mixed up with attributes of the present mentality. The Overmind brings in a true emergence.

            Still Overmind – whose characteristic is a cosmic consciousness and a transcendence of all ego-sense – is not the firm basis on which a new terrestrial organisation can stand and endure. It is still a basis of unstable equilibrium. For it is not the supernal light and, although it transcends all ignorance, yet does not possess that absolute synthetic unity, that transcendent power of consciousness which is at once the cosmic and the individual. That is the domain of the Supermind.

The whole urge of evolutionary Nature today is to bring out first the Overmental principle and then through it the Supramental which will establish and fix upon earth the principle of Deity and the Supreme Divine.