The Superman

He energized the conscious force and came to knowledge that matter is the Brahman. Far from Matter all existences are born: born by Matter they increase and enter into Matter in their passing hence. Then he went to Varuna, his father, and said, “Lord, teach me of the Brahman.” But his father said to him, “Energize the Conscious Energy in thee; for the Energy is Brahman."

Taittiriya Upanishad.

From the day I started my search, I have been trying to understand the totality of the above verse and I have not been able to understand. I sometimes hate the word totality as its use always deprives me of the partial and fragmentary comprehension I am capable of. I understand or I don’t understand. That’s the truth. Totality and Partiality are tricks to satiate my ego. But my search continued and time and again found shelter in various forms manifested by the teachings of the greatest prophets of the recent past. One such shelter is the following excerpt from Life Divine of Sri Aurobindo.

It enlightened me of the higher possibilities of humanity being manifested naturally as a process of evolution, as manifestation is progressive in nature and hence, humanity is the potent divinity.

The persistent ideals of the race are at once the contradiction of its normal experience and the affirmation of higher and deeper experiences which are abnormal to humanity and only to be attained, in their organized entirety, by a revolutionary individual or an evolutiuonary progression. To know, possesses and be the divine being in an animal and egoistic consciousness, to convert our twilit or obscure physical pain and physical mentality into the plenary supramental illumination, to build peace and a self existent bliss where there is only a stress of transitory satisfaction besieged by physical pain and emotional suffering, to establish an infinite freedom in the world which presents itself as a group of mechanical necessaities, to discover and realize the immortal life in a body subjected to death and constant mutation – this is offered to us as the manifestation of God in Matter and the goal of Nature in her terrestrial evolution. To the ordinary material intellect which takes its present organization for the limit of its possibilities, the direct contradictions of the unrealized ideals with the realized fact is a final argument against their validity. But if we take a more deliberate view of the world’s workings, that direct opposition appears rather as part of nature’s profoundest method and the seal of her complete sanction.


We speak of of the evolution of life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness. And then there seems to be little objection to the farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man toward God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind, and appeard to be as natural, true and just as the impulse toward Life. As the impulse toward Mind ranges from more sensitive reactions of Life in the things like metal and plants up to its full organization in man, so in man himself there is the same ascending series, the preparation, if nothing more, of a higher and divine life. The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has worked out man. Man himself may well be a living and thinking laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation Nature wills to work out the Superman, the God. For it is likely that such is the next higher state of consciousness of which Mind is only a form and veil, and through the splendours of that light may lie the path of our progressive self-enlargement into whatever highest state is humanity’s ultimate resting-place.