INDIA AND EVOLUTION *

Richard Hartz

In the mid-nineteenth century, Darwin’s theory of evolution shook the world. Evidence to support such a theory had been accumulating for a long time. But with the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species on November 24, 1859, the storm of public debate began. The impact of the theory of evolution through natural selection went far beyond the sphere of pure science. By apparently contradicting the Christian scriptures and leaving no need for a Creator to account for the diverse forms of life, it seemed to compel the Western mind to choose between a religious and a scientific view of existence.

 Religion had already been losing ground in Europe for centuries. The vitality of Western civilisation was due not to its conventional religious beliefs, but to its urge for progress and expansion. The theory of evolution not only called Christian doctrines into question; it also suggested the idea of applying the principle of “the survival of the fittest” (a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer) to social as well as biological evolution. From this standpoint, the laws of nature seemed to justify the ambition of the increasingly materialistic and rationalistic civilisation of Europe to extend its dominion and ideology over the rest of the earth and eliminate or subordinate traditional cultures that could not withstand its onslaught. It could do this with a good conscience in the name of progress, which was only another word for evolution. It was logical to assume that the evolutionary ascent that began some billions of years ago with the protoplasm had reached its climax in Western man. For his scientific mastery over nature gave him an incontestable supremacy in the struggle for survival. If the competition for adaptation to the environment was the mechanism that had driven the process of evolution up to this point, it seemed that this mechanism would practically cease to operate for further evolution with the advent of a creature who could adapt the environment to himself.1

 Meanwhile, as Darwin’s book was being written and published, one ancient civilisation that showed every sign of having lost the struggle for the survival of the fittest was India. A few centuries earlier, India had been more advanced in every way than the semi-barbaric medieval European peoples, who lagged behind Asia by hundreds of years even in technology. But by the nineteenth century, India had passed through a long period when the energies of many of the potential leaders of the society were turned away from practical life to the pursuit of individual spiritual liberation while the collective existence was left to stagnate. Even the Muslim invasion and the slide into chaos that permitted a handful of English merchants to take over the country were regarded with a sublime indifference by enlightened souls whose only aim was to escape from the transient, illusory agitation and misery of this world into the eternal peace and bliss of the Spirit.

In 1857-58, the so-called “Mutiny” was suppressed. This was followed by a consolidation of British power in India that could not be challenged for decades to come. The last spark of resistance appeared to be extinguished and the Indian people crushed into abject submission by this humiliating defeat. Throughout the nineteenth century, the educated class was steadily being indoctrinated to adopt European culture and reject its own. In short, the prospect for the survival of a distinctive Indian civilisation as anything more than a touch of local colour in a province of the British empire looked bleak.

But even as the fate of India seemed to reach its lowest ebb, the tide was already about to turn—and in a way that was thoroughly characteristic of the genius of the country. In the late 1850s, unknown to the world, a twenty-year-old priest in an obscure temple to Kali on the banks of the Ganga near Calcutta was having his first visions of the Divine Mother. Perhaps this was nothing unusual in India. But these were no ordinary visions, this was no ordinary priest, and the Divine Mother evidently had a special mission for him. In the course of time, a number of young Indians, some of them highly Westernised, were attracted to this remarkable saint. One of these proved to have not only a powerful and original mind, but spiritual aptitudes almost as unusual as those of Sri Ramakrishna himself.

In 1893, Swami Vivekananda voyaged to America. There his speeches at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago electrified an audience of thousands and created overnight a widespread recognition that he represented a great spiritual tradition from which the West had something to learn. In his first letter to his own countrymen after his success in Chicago, Vivekananda unveiled a new vision of India’s place among the earth’s peoples. He wrote prophetically of

            that tidal wave of spirituality which is destined at no distant future to break upon India in all its irresistible powers... fulfilling its mission amongst the races of the world—the evolution of spiritual humanity.2

With one bold stroke Swami Vivekananda announced the resurgence of India, at a time when there was almost no visible sign of any such possibility, and overturned the notion of the superiority of Western civilisation by reinterpreting its own idea of evolution and positing a stage beyond scientific rationalism as humanity’s destiny. This higher destiny was one to which India was fittest to lead the world.

We must fully acknowledge the brilliance and importance of the work of Darwin and others who established beyond reasonable dispute that life has evolved on earth and uncovered many details of how this happened. But in making this discovery, Western science stumbled upon a phenomenon which it was incapable of explaining more than superficially due to inherent limitations of its method. Interesting as it may be to study gradual modifications in species of biological organisms due to interaction with their environment, the event that cries out to be understood is the appearance of consciousness in an unconscious world. The physical sciences begin and end with material reality and cannot shed light on this miracle or answer questions about the nature and origin of consciousness as such, as distinct from the organs it uses. Therefore we can legitimately look elsewhere if we want an explanation of where our consciousness has come from and a glimpse of how it might evolve in the future.

Not surprisingly, Indian thinkers and a few Westerners such as the Theosophists who were influenced by Indian thought were among the first to arrive at a deeper understanding of evolution. Whereas the religious-minded in the West were long implacably opposed to the idea of evolution, there was no such difficulty in India. Here, where the first Avatar of Vishnu took the form of a fish and the ideal devotee was depicted in the shape of a monkey, it could easily be accepted that life began in the sea and that man was related to the ape, a scandalous heresy to many Christians in Darwin’s time. In India there was a sense of the continuity of all life and the immanence of consciousness in all things that not only was compatible with the theory of evolution, but made it possible to explain what scientists have failed to explain. This unexplained mystery is the emergence of conscious beings in a world that began, to all appearances, in a state of total unconsciousness. The key to solving the riddle is the concept of involution.
The argument that evolution implies involution was made by Swami Vivekananda with compelling logic:

            No rational man can possibly quarrel with these evolutionists. But we have to learn one thing more. We have to go one step further, and what is that? That every evolution is preceded by an involution.... In the end we find the perfect man, so in the beginning it must have been the same. Therefore, the protoplasm was the involution of the highest intelligence. You may not see it but that involved intelligence is what is uncoiling itself until it becomes manifested in the most perfect man.... If it was not present in the protoplasm, it must have come all of a sudden, something coming out of nothing, which is absurd.3

The hypothesis of involution allows us to avoid the reductionism of the conventional theory of evolution which can explain at most the development of brains, not minds. It enables us to account for human culture, many of whose manifestations have nothing to do with survival or adaptation to the environment and so cannot be explained by the principle of natural selection. Above all, we can now understand the irrepressible vitality of religion and spirituality, which gives a clue to the true secret of the evolutionary process, what it means and where it is going. As Swami Vivekananda said:

            It is all He. He Himself is both the material and the efficient cause of this universe, and He it is that gets involved in the minute cell, and evolves at the other end and becomes God again. He it is that comes down and becomes the lowest atom, and slowly unfolding His nature, rejoins Himself. This is the mystery of the universe.... The whole of this life which slowly manifests itself, evolves itself from the protoplasm to the perfected human being—the Incarnation of God on earth—the whole of this series is but one life, and the whole of this manifestation must have been involved in that very protoplasm. This whole life, this very God on earth, was involved in it and slowly came out, manifesting itself slowly, slowly, slowly.4

The Darwinian theory, which appeared to leave no alternative to a stark materialism, was thus transmuted into a vision of the progressive manifestation of God on earth. This interpretation of evolution was later elaborated by Sri Aurobindo. It has the potential to satisfy both the progressive impulse of the modern mind and the perennial aspiration of the human soul. It does not require any denial of scientifically demonstrable truth with regard to the role of natural selection in bringing about the development of physical organisms. What is disputed is only the right of science itself to deny the reality of consciousness and spirit, which its methods are incapable of investigating.

If evolution is the result of a previous involution, then the appearance of living and thinking creatures in this seemingly lifeless, mindless universe becomes natural and inevitable and no longer an improbable accident. But then there is no reason to assume that the arrival of the human species is the end of the process. If more than mind was involved in matter at the beginning, it is sure to emerge sooner or later. What concerns us here is the place of India in this evolutionary scheme. For this country, whose culture appeared in Darwin’s time to be a relic of a bygone era and doomed to a speedy extinction, may turn out to possess the key to the future. The logic that seemed to prove Western man with his scientific efficiency to be the end-product of an evolution driven by the competition for survival breaks down if what is ultimately behind evolution is the unfolding of an involved consciousness which may have higher degrees than the rational mind.

 In India, the attempt to evolve a faculty beyond mind began long ago and has been going on for centuries as if in a huge laboratory of consciousness research. But this many-sided experimentation in approaching a higher reality from every conceivable angle seems to have lacked a full awareness of its evolutionary significance, since the concept of evolution itself had not been clearly articulated. Without such a concept, positively linking spirituality to the aim of terrestrial existence, the spiritual endeavour came to be seen more and more as a way of escaping from the prison of an irremediably unsatisfactory world. The growth of the otherworldly motive coincided with and reinforced a slow decline in the vitality of the culture as a whole. While the inner life of exceptional individuals was a field of progress and discovery, the outer life of society stagnated in an unchanging groove, becoming vulnerable to disintegration from within and disruption from outside.

 Eventually, India’s spiritual life itself was endangered by the inertia that had overtaken the collective existence. Then, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mighty spirits arose to revive the languishing dharma. But even these could not entirely throw off the tamas that had gripped the country, paralysed as it was by centuries of social immobility. Sri Aurobindo wrote about the effect of Swami Vivekananda’s work:

            Vivekananda was a soul of puissance if ever there was one, a very lion among men, but the definite work he has left behind is quite incommensurate with our impression of his creative might and energy. We perceive his influence still working gigantically, we know not well how, we know not well where, in something that is not yet formed, something leonine, grand, intuitive, upheaving that has entered the soul of India and we say, “Behold, Vivekananda still lives in the soul of his Mother and in the souls of her children.”5

Much the same thing might be said about Sri Aurobindo himself. Whereas the theories of Darwin and Einstein almost immediately revolutionised Western science and strongly affected European thought in general, India has paid hardly more than lip-service to the no less revolutionary work of Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo. Religion and spirituality in India, where the grand Upanishadic synthesis of revealed knowledge became fragmented long ago into a myriad sects and schools, have continued largely in the grooves established during a period of contraction of the collective life.

Today the threat to the survival of India’s distinctive spirit is perhaps more serious than it was even in the time of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda when the power of the British empire looked irresistible. The invasion of an alien culture is subtler, more insidious and pervasive. On the other hand, the violent upsurge of religious conservatism which this invasion has recently provoked is a regressive movement. India’s unique culture can most effectively be preserved intact, not by a hopeless counter-evolutionary attempt to avoid modernisation, but by a creative assimilation of what has to be gained from this age of rationalistic individualism and scientific progress, establishing a solid material and intellectual foundation of the national life as the starting-point for a new phase of spiritual evolution.

In ancient times, India pulsated with life and creativity in every sphere. If an excessive otherworldly tendency has contributed to her weakness in recent centuries, it is only natural that some of the country’s progressive minds have grown averse to the spirituality that seems to have been partly the cause of this downfall. They forget that an unspiritual India would have relatively little to offer the world and that turning away from the national dharma at a moment of crisis could be more fatal than the past mistake of pursuing that dharma too narrowly. Surely it would be far better to encourage a dynamic spirituality free of one-sided, world-shunning tendencies. Sri Aurobindo pointed out the incompleteness of the form of spirituality that is often assumed to be its loftiest type. Proposing an integral, life-affirming alternative, he wrote:

            A spirituality of this intolerant high‑pointed kind, to whatever elevation it may rise, however it may help to purify life or lead to a certain kind of individual salvation, cannot be a complete thing. For its exclusiveness imposes on it a certain impotence to deal effectively with the problems of human existence; it cannot lead it to its integral perfection or combine its highest heights with its broadest broadness. A wider spiritual culture must recognise that the Spirit is not only the highest and inmost thing, but all is manifestation and creation of the Spirit. It must have a wider outlook, a more embracing range of applicability and, even, a more aspiring and ambitious aim of its endeavour. Its aim must be not only to raise to inaccessible heights the few elect, but to draw all men and all life and the whole human being upward, to spiritualise life and in the end to divinise human nature.6

The idea of divinising human nature may sound like an unheard-of contradiction of both materialistic common-sense and the wisdom of the ages, which holds that divinity is not to be found on earth but only in heavens beyond. Yet such an audacious conception is a logical consequence of the synthesis of ancient and modern knowledge that leads us to see evolution as a gradual unfolding of the Spirit involved in matter. In Sri Aurobindo’s view, the total movement of India’s many-sided spiritual culture has always been directed towards this evolutionary goal, even when its highest explicitly formulated aim was a cessation of the troubled cycle of birth and death and a departure into the everlasting Silence. This negative formulation was at one time felt necessary in order to maintain the purity of the spiritual ideal and avoid lowering it by any compromise with material life. But to confront successfully the challenges of modern times, what is needed is a spirituality that neither rejects life nor compromises with it, but accepts it in order to transform it.

If Swami Vivekananda was right and India’s mission among the world’s peoples is to lead the way towards the evolution of a spiritual humanity, a humanity open to a deeper and higher reality and aware of the one Self in all, then an awakening of the country to a consciousness of this mission is long overdue. A first step towards such an awakening might be to get rid of the habit of identifying spirituality with traditions of the past and to start perceiving and practising it as a force of the future.

 The future spirituality cannot be bound by an existing tradition, but must be an adventure into the unknown in much the same way as physical science is in its own field. To fulfil its evolutionary purpose, it cannot be confined to the time-honoured aim of liberating the soul, but must go on from there to attempt the transformation of human nature in all its parts. The difficulty of such an integral transformation is no argument against accepting it as an ideal. The character of Indian civilisation in the past was largely shaped by its ideal of Moksha, spiritual liberation, though the attainment of this goal cannot have been common. Integral transformation is a still more difficult goal, but the attempt to achieve it would be supported by the wonder-working force of evolution that has never tired of doing the apparently impossible. An India inspired by this most uplifting of all ideals would be on the way to the fulfilment of the total meaning of its agelong spiritual quest and, imparting its wisdom to all, would deserve a place at the forefront of the nations in a more enlightened and harmonious world-order.

                                                                                                                                  Richard Hartz

Notes and References

1. On the assumption that evolution is a physical process that has reached more or less the limit of what Nature can do by her old slow methods, it has recently been speculated that further evolution could be brought about by human beings themselves using technology to modify their own bodies and brains. “Transhumanists” foresee the creation, by scientific means, of “posthumans” endowed with “superintelligence”, free from irrational behaviour and immune to disease and death. On the other hand, according to an opposite view of the possible outcomes of technological development, modern man’s power over his environment may be the greatest threat to his very survival. Not being accompanied by wisdom and self-mastery, his recklessly misused technology is rapidly destroying the environment on which he depends and could lead to the extinction of the human race along with much other life on earth.
2. “Reply to the Madras Address” in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (Kolkata: Advaita Ashrama, 2002), Vol. 4, pp. 331-32.
3. Jnana-Yoga in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Vol. 2, pp. 207-9.
4. Ibid., pp. 211, 228.
5. Sri Aurobindo, Bankim-Tilak-Dayananda (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1991), p. 45.
6. Sri Aurobindo, The Renaissance in India and Other Essays on Indian Culture (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 2002), p. 197.

*This paper was presented on March 21, 2004, at a seminar on “Resurgent India” at the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Advanced Research, Pondicherry, India. It has been published in Mother India, March 2005, pp. 249-55.