THE METAPHYSICAL CONTEXT

The philosophy of Aurobindo is so eminently an integrated one that the general pattern of cosmic and human history cannot be discussed apart from his metaphysical system described at length in The Life Divine. In this system the Sevenfold Chord of Being is the central concept and provides the framework for the meaning and pattern of history. There are three higher and three lower hemispheres of Being in the Sevenfold Chord, and mediating between the two is the Supermind. The three that belong to the higher hemisphere are aspects of the Eternal Reality or Absolute; they are the Sat, the Cit, and the Ananda of Upanishadic thought. As Aurobindo interprets them, Sat is the Pure Existent, Cit is Consciousness-Force and

Ananda Delight-in-Existence. Although this is Brahman in its eternal, changeless, infinite aspect—the impersonal Nirguna Brahman—Brahman is pregnant with all creation. Creation is manifested in the three evolutes of the lower hemisphere—Matter, Life, and Mind.

Supermind mediates between the two hemispheres. Its major function is creative activity; it is the manifestation of the Saguna Brahman aspect of the Divine and thus the primal cause of the progressive evolutionary development that is cosmic and human history. The Absolute is infinite, perfect and eternal; why does it choose to manifest itself in creative activity? This activity belongs to the very nature of the Divine; it is the līlā (spontaneous play) of Brahman, a familiar view in Indian philosophy. The Saguna Brahman or Supermind, the force behind history, creates in an evolutionary pattern. There is first the involution of the Divine, the descent into Matter, then the ascent to the Life (or Vital) evolute, then to the stage of Mind. The next and final stage to be evolved, the goal towards which all creation aspires, is that of the Supermind (Supramental or Gnostic), a new species of being.

This general pattern of cosmic and human history was inspired not only by modern Western evolutionary theories, but also by Indian traditional thought. We find evolutionary ideas in ancient Indian philosophy in the Taittirfya Upanishad of about 800 B.C. In this Upanishad the stages of evolution are related to the sheaths of the Atman-Brahman, the sheaths of Matter, Life, Mind. These correspond with Aurobindo's evolutionary stages of cosmic history.

These sheaths of the Atman-Brahman were interpreted by later philosophers of the Advaita Veddnta, the dominant school of Indian thought, as mdyd, i.e., phenomenal appearance and not reality. Man's goal, therefore, was to transcend the temporal space-time universe in an intuitive experience of identity with the eternal Brahman and thereby escape the round of rebirths in this world. In Aurobindo's philosophy the world of nature and history, the space-time universe, is not mdyd, not a world of appearances, but real, and man's goal is a divine life in this world. Matter is really Matter, the Inconscient level of being; Life the Subconscient, and Mind the Conscious (self-conscious) aspect of the universe. Even when the final stage of evolution is attained, the Supramental, the individual is not one with Brahman in one identity, but remains an individual although he does experience unity, oneness with the higher hemisphere of being, Sacchiddnanda, as well as unity also with the lower hemisphere. He sees all interfused with the one Divine; yet the individual concrete things, organisms, men are real. Though this integral Supramental consciousness has not yet been reached, human beings, now generally at the Mental level, have individual freedom, though gently inspired by the Divine toward upward progress until all mankind realizes the Supermind.

Aurobindo's view of the pattern of human history directed towards this goal is not a mechanical one, because of the freedom of human individuals. Because of this participation by human beings, Aurobindo thinks that the most adequate approach to an understanding and patterning of human history is a psychological one. He therefore rejects the materialist (both mechanistic and dialectical) and vitalistic (e.g. Bergson's elan vital) theories and builds his own philosophy of history around a psychological approach to the development of human civilizations. He finds [Karl] Lamprecht's patterning of this psychological development in a series of five stages a true and useful framework for describing "the human cycle," the pattern of the evolutionary progress of a civilization from its beginnings. Human history is the story of man's civilizations, the group creations that educate mankind for ever higher goals, eventually the goal of Supermind. The five stages (borrowed from Lamprecht) in the development of a civilization [as outlined by Aurobindo in The Human Cycle] are the Symbolic, the Typal, the Conventional, the Individualist, and the Subjective. Aurobindo sees these stages manifested in Indian history and elsewhere.

STAGES OF CIVILIZATION

The Symbolic Stage

This is a subjective stage like the fifth, but differs in the kind of subjectivism. The Symbolic stage is a subjectivism at the infrarational level, the Subjective (fifth) state at the suprarational. In a Symbolic age man vaguely intuits the Divine that he feels is everywhere, and expresses his feeling in myth, poetry, and art. In Indian history this epoch is the Vedic Age, a time, Aurobindo comments, when the sacrifice was central and interpreted in mystical symbols. Social institutions also were given a mystical meaning. For example, the Rig Vedic marriage hymn in the Vedic Age was a glorification of the divine marriages of Sfarya, daughter of the Sun—the human was "an inferior figure and image of the divine." Also "the Indian ideal of the relation between man and woman has always been governed by the symbolism of the relation between the Purusha and Prakriti …, the male and female divine Principles in the universe." Another key social institution, the organization of society into the four Varnas is given a divine origin in the Vedas in the Purusa Sakta.

This intuitive, poetic, symbolic age is apparent in the formative stage of all other civilizations, Aurobindo affirms. This is the view, also, of some prominent Western philosophers of history. Among these theorists, Oswald Spengler posits such a symbolic age in the childhood period of a civilization. Pitirim A. Sorokin, the noted sociologist philosopher of history finds religious symbolism dominant in the beginning epoch of a great culture, the "ideational" epoch. In this era the culture is integrated around the Divine as the true reality and value. Religious symbolism has, in fact, played a large part in the early phases of civilizations.

The Typal Stage

This is "predominantly psychological and ethical." Aurobindo again refers to the development of Indian civilization to illustrate the nature of this era. The varna system originating in the Symbolic Age develops the notion of psychological human types each with its particular ideal.

In the Symbolic Age the varnas were oriented around the idea of the Divine as knowledge in man (the Brahman varna); the Divine as power in man (Ksatriya varna); the Divine as production in man (Vaisya varna); and the Divine as obedience, service and work (Szudra varna). This orientation of the varnas around the Divine changes, in the Typal stage, to one oriented around the human. The focus is now upon the human psychological types and the ethical ideal for each. Religion in this era is mainly the sanction for Dharma (ethical ideals) except for a few who develop a more and more other-worldly religion. The finest flower of this stage is the social ideal set for each psychological type, each varna. These ideals remain as standards of social honor even in the Conventional Stage that succeeds the Typal.

The Conventional Stage

The Typal stage ends and the Conventional begins when the outward trappings of each varna become more important than the inner ethical ideal. A Brahman, for example, is no longer one through observance of the ethical ideal proper to his psychological type, but merely one by birth and honored for similar external circumstances. Religion in the Conventional stage becomes stereotyped, thought subjected to infallible authorities, and education bound to unchangeable forms. The medieval age in Europe illustrates this stage, and in India what orthodox idealists fondly call the Golden Age. Aurobindo thinks that much of the East (including India) is still in a Conventional stage and needs to be awakened to an age of individualism before the fifth, the Subjective Stage, can be possible.

Aurobindo comments on the lack of sincere, profound spirituality in a Conventional epoch:

Thus at one time the modern litterateur, artist or thinker looked back often with admiration and with something like longing to the medieval age of Europe; he forgot in its distant appearance of poetry, nobility, spirituality the much folly, ignorance, iniquity, cruelty and oppression of those harsh ages, the suffering and revolt that simmered below these fine surfaces, the misery and squalor that was hidden behind that splendid facade. So too the Hindu orthodox idealist looks back to a perfectly regulated society devoutly obedient to the wise yoke of the Shastra, and that is his golden age,—a nobler one than the European in which the apparent gold was mostly hard burnished copper with a thin gold-leaf covering it, but still of an alloyed metal, not the true Satya Yuga.

Aurobindo admits that there is "much indeed that is really fine and sound and helpful to human progress" in such an age, but "always the form prevails and the spirit recedes and diminishes." This becomes most apparent in religion despite the efforts of a few saints and reformers. Ultimately the contradiction between convention and truth becomes so intolerable to men of perceptive intellects that they burst through the walls of convention and begin to use their own individual minds independently in the search for truth in the worlds of religion and nature. This development ushers in the Individualist stage of a civilization.

The Individualist Stage

Aurobindo describes this era as one of Reason, Revolt, Progress, and Freedom. Reason is essential in freeing man from the sterility of the Conventional epoch. Reason is the stage of self-conscious mind, the human level of existence. In many ways atrophied in the Conventional era, it flourishes forth with its objectivity, its fearless search for truth in the Individualist Stage, and this—the search for truth—is its highest power. (It has, of course, been operative from the first stage, for it is the source of human creativity in the arts and sciences.)

In the Individualist stage, when Reason is dominant, the natural form of social organization is democracy; it stands for the freedom and equality of each member of society to use his individual reason in arranging his life. In practice, however, Aurobindo thinks that it has resulted in party strife, in social classes of rich and poor, and in a kind of competition, often ruthless, in which the most successful and not the best survive. Values deteriorate from the mental level and are mainly those related to man's infrarational nature, his material and vital needs. To satisfy these for the masses of men, socialism comes into being, and to make actual the equality of each member of society in the satisfaction of such material and vital needs, the individual is subjugated more and more to the State. Totalitarianism, either Fascist or Communist is born, the natural outcome of socialism. Only the Scandinavian socialist states, Aurobindo comments, have avoided this thus far and may continue to be successful in maintaining freedom, unless mankind collectively accepts some form of totalitarianism as the form of social organization. If this occurs, there will be an eclipse of Reason and Individualism until, in the human cycle, times grow more favorable for its return. Then the "spiral of human social evolution" may again progress towards its goal, the Age of Spirit, the Subjective Age.

It is important to note here that Aurobindo posits a spiral pattern of progress in history, neither the traditional cyclical one of Indian thought, nor the one-cycle, linear form of the Western tradition. In recent Indian thought, however, Mahadevan argues for a spiral-progress pattern, and in the Western world Toynbee and Sorokin take the same view.

When another and final Individualist stage recurs and Reason again is dominant, there is the obsession characteristic of Reason that all truth can be discovered by objective means, by looking at things from the outside, the "dream that perfection can be determined by machinery," by the computer. Then comes the realization that the deepest, most fundamental, and central truth whence all else springs can be realized only subjectively, through the discovery and recovery of the deeper self. This intuitive knowledge brings in the Subjective Stage of the human cycle of history, the Age of Spirit or Supermind.

The Subjective Stage: The Age of Supermind

The Symbolic stage, the first in the cycle of a civilization, is also a subjective stage, but at the infrarational level; the Supermind era is a subjective one at the suprarational level. At the stage of Supermind man feels strongly the pull of the Divine that inspired him to transcend Intellect itself. He now sees Intellect as mediator between the infrarational and suprarational (Supermind) aspects of his being as a microcosm; in the macrocosm Intellect has the same function. In his intuitive unity with the macrocosmic Supermind, he experiences its blissful knowledge as mediator and knower of both the Higher Hemisphere of Being (Sacchiddnanda) and the Lower (Matter, Life, and Mind). When all men collectively, or at least a majority, attain this kind of subjective, intuitive knowledge-by-identity of the Divine, the everlasting epoch of Supermind, the Age of Spirit, will have arrived. This is the goal of history.

What are the conditions for the advent of this Divine age? Aurobindo names two that must be fulfilled simultaneously. The first is the appearance of individuals "who are able to see, to develop, to re-create themselves in the image of the Spirit and to communicate both their idea and its power to the mass." Such sage-saints, e.g. recently Gandhi, have already appeared. The second condition is the "readiness of the common mind of man" to receive the image. It is the latter condition that is so difficult to bring into being. Mankind at present is preoccupied with the lower self, the Inconscient (Matter) and the Subconscient (Vital) aspects of his being. "If mankind is to be spiritualised," Aurobindo says, "it must first in the mass cease to be the material or the vital man and become the psychic and the true mental being." If this kind of progress is impossible, "then the spiritualisation of mankind as a whole is a chimera." The common man may find an attraction in the spiritual teachings of those rare souls who have attained a supramental consciousness, but because he has not yet become the "psychic and true mental being" he remains unready to receive the Divine image.

To prepare mankind as a whole to receive the Divine image, an age of mental subjectivism is the first condition. There must be a "growth of the subjective idea of life—the idea of the soul, the inner being, its powers, its possibilities, its growth, its expression and the creation of a true, beautiful and helpful environment for it is the one thing of first and last importance." The subjectivism of the mental self of man, a "psychic subjectivism," sees man as a soul developing an "ever-expanding mental existence" that eventually can master all of nature—physical, vital and the mental itself. In art and beauty awesome achievements would be made, and in human relations greater harmony would prevail. Such a full exploration of the mental being to its highest reaches is necessary before mankind is ready for the Age of Spirit. Aurobindo maintains that past efforts to spiritualize mankind were unsuccessful because of the failure to realize that all the intervening levels (the material, the vital, and the mental) must first be completely mastered before the spiritual can find root.

In the age of mental subjectivism the climactic idea must develop that mind is only a secondary power of the Spirit which is the original, eternal, sole reality, ayam dtmd brahma (this self is Brahman). When this development occurs, the Era of Supermind comes into being.

The Age of Spirit (or Supermind, or the Supramental Being or the Gnostic Being) would begin with and aim to realize three essential truths of existence: God, freedom, and unity. These three must be realized together; unless God is realized neither can the other two. Possession of God is possession of one's highest self and the self of all, the foundation for freedom and unity.

Real freedom can only be founded upon freedom from egoism, and possession of God as one with the self and the self of all others means freedom from one's ego. The Divine within each man discovered in seif-knowledge is the inner source of freedom in a spiritual age; all external "laws" within societies and among nations will be based upon it. Without man's self-knowledge—without his identification with God and with the self of all—"he cannot escape from the law of external compulsion and all his efforts to do so must be vain." As long as a man is the slave of his own ego, of his lower nature, he will remain the slave of others—his family, caste, church, society, and nation.

The age of the spiritualized society is the age of the Life Divine, the era of finding God within ourselves. As in the Vedic age all knowledge and practice—art, philosophy, science, and the social structure—would be God-centered. The aim of ethics as a branch of philosophy would be the development of the divine nature in all men; the aim of art, to see the Divine symbolized in art-creations; of economics, to work for all according to one's own nature and attain the leisure to develop inwardly in a "simply rich and beautiful life"; of politics, the appreciation of each nation as a group-soul with the freedom to develop its own nature and thereby aid all mankind in the "common work of humanity." The noble work of humanity in this Age of Spirit "would be to find the divine Self in the individual and the collectivity and to realise spiritually, mentally, vitally, materially its greatest, largest, richest and deepest possibilities in the inner life of all and their outer action and nature."

In this era of Spirit the individual will not be swallowed up into a collectivity, but a spiritual anarchy will prevail. There will be no coercive institutions. Each individual will be free to develop his own unique talents and personality. Each will be "the law, the Divine law, because he will be a soul living in the Divine and not an ego living mainly if not entirely for its own interest and purpose. His life will be guided by the law of his own divine nature liberated from the ego," and this is real, complete and ultimate freedom.

But there will be no isolated individuals because the era of the Life Divine is characterized also by Unity. The individual knows that the Divine in himself is equally in all others, the same Spirit in all. "The sign and condition of the perfect life" is when the growing inner unity with others becomes perfect unity. Then one seeks the perfection and liberation of all others. Yet this unity with all others does not mean a featureless oneness of all. "The spiritual life is the flower not of a featureless but a conscious and diversified oneness. Each man has to grow into the Divine within himself through his own individual being." Each is a soul free to develop his unique talents, and because he sees God in all he serves men with love; he seeks their freedom and perfection along with his own, and spontaneously because his central allegiance is not to himself, or to the State and society, or to the individual ego or to the collective ego, but to God, the Divine in himself and in the universe.

The new age, then, dawns when the common mind of man begins to be moved by the three: God, Freedom, and Unity. Human history will then cease its "incomplete repetitions" and progress directly upwards towards the perfection of the divine life upon earth. Aurobindo tersely summarizes the "human cycle" thus:

For having set out, according to our supposition with a symbolic age, an age in which man felt a great Reality behind all life which he sought through symbols, it will reach an age in which it will begin to live in that Reality, not through the symbol, not by the power of the type or of the convention or of the individual reason and intellectual will, but in our own highest nature which will be the nature of that Reality fulfilled in the conditions—not necessarily the same as now—of terrestrial existence.

This will be the actualization of the Kingdom of God on earth which the great religions have for the most part but dimly intuited.

Once the new age begins what will be the nature of this upward progress? Men will not have an other-wordly asceticism as the ideal, but will be integral beings; the material, the vital, and the mental aspects of the self will be integrated with the spiritual or Gnostic self. The Spirit will, however, guide the lower levels of being and divinize them. The desires of the body, e.g., lust for food and for satisfaction of sexual desire, will be sublimated. In an essay published as a book, written at the end of his life with the title The Mind of Light, Aurobindo suggests some of the possibilities for divinizing the grosser physicobiological desires. With the growing omniscience to be realized by Gnostic beings, such problems could easily be solved. Aurobindo in his book [On Yoga] observes that the occult powers such as clairvoyance that already belong to some yogis will become perfect omniscience in supramental beings, so the kind of knowledge necessary for divinizing the grosser desires of man should pose no problem. The spiritual life in this world in the final age of human history, the Age of Spirit, will fulfill the noblest dreams of the greatest sage-saints for a Kingdom of God on earth.

COMMENTS AND EVALUATION

Aurobindo's argument that cosmic and human history will ultimately achieve the goal of an Age of Spirit, a Kingdom of God on earth, seems pure fantasy, no doubt, to many in the intellectual world both in India and the West. In India where intuitive experience of the Divine is acceptable evidence, perhaps more thinkers are sympathetic with such a philosophy of history than in the scientifically-minded Western intellectual world. Yet there are areas in twentieth century Western thought where we find much that parallels the more significant aspects of Aurobindo's philosophy of history. We shall select examples from Western psychology, from philosophical theology, from scientific thought, and from philosophy of history that support Aurobindo's views or aspects of his system.

In Western psychology there is much resemblance to Aurobindo's thought in Carl Jung's view that man's goal is "individuation," a reintegration of the personality around its two poles, the "shadow" (the material and vital aspects of Aurobindo's philosophy) and the "central archetype meaning" (the spiritual pole, the Supermind of Aurobindo's thought). Jung's concept of the individuation process is similar to Aurobindo's description [in The Problem of Rebirth] of the yogic experience on the microcosmic scale of the involution-evolution process which takes place on the grand macrocosmic scale in the vastnesses of time and space that is cosmic and human history. The microcosmic experience of this process is portrayed most graphically in the practice of the Tantric yoga. Involution is represented by the Divine force, Kundalini, asleep in the earth-center, the lowest level of being, the level that corresponds with Matter, the Inconscient. Then Evolution begins. Kundalinī is "struck by the freely coursing breath, by the current of Life," the subconscient and "rises flaming up the ladder of the spinal cord and forces open centre after centre of the involved dynamic secrets of consciousness (the conscious and mental) till at the summit she finds, joins and becomes one with the spirit," the ultimate goal. In this experience the yogin has a foretaste and confirmation of the macrocosmic pattern of history. The yogin's reintegration with the Divine resembles, as we said, Jung's individuation process. The essential elements in this process are first the conscious recognition by the individual of his "shadow," his materio-biological self or inconscient and subconscient aspects. Then it is essential that he intuit the spiritual pole of being, "the central archetype meaning," the spiritual experience that transforms him and annihilates his egocentrism. He is now able to control his lower nature, for he sees himself in true perspective in relation to this lower pole of being and the spiritual pole, the ultimate divine meaning which pervades and integrates all selves and the cosmos. This is reintegration, the goal of the individuation process in Jung's psychology. Jung thought that Eastern yogic experience exemplified it. We have seen above in Aurobindo's interpretation of yogic experience that it is a reintegration process on the microcosmic scale that manifests the pattern of cosmic and human history in the macrocosm.

In Western philosophical religion the goal of man in Paul Tillich's theology, the New Being, is similar to man's goal in Aurobindo's thought, the Gnostic Being [see Tillich's The New Being]. Tillich's New Being manifests a unity between self and God, between self and humanity and the world, and between self and Self. All elements of egoism, of alienation from man and God are extinguished and replaced with altruistic love. In unity with God the New Being is in unity with the creative ground of being (this corresponds with Aurobindo's Supermind) characterized by Love, Truth, and Beauty, and Love is primary. In participation in the Divine, the New Being is a resurrected soul with the power to create a new life and a new world for himself and all mankind. But Tillich differs from Aurobindo on the question of the perfection of mankind. He does not think that the human individual or human society can ever reach a divine perfection. He maintains that "the Creation and the Fall are one"; therefore "there will never be a state of existence without tragedy" [quoted in Walter Leibrecht, "The Life and Mind of Paul Tillich," in Religion and Culture: Essays in Honor of Paul Tillich, edited by Walter Leibrecht]. Although the New Being may be united with the Unconditioned, the Infinite God, he is not one with the Divine. He remains a finite cocreator of a new divinized world that can never attain perfection. This hiatus between God and man, the Infinite and the finite, has been characteristic of the Western tradition in theology from early times. On the other hand, the perfection, the full divinization of man has been a dominant view in Indian thought from the days of the early Upanishads. If Westerners could experience the divine in yogic meditation as practised in the East by Hindus and Buddhists they would be more prone to believe in the probability or even certainty of man's perfection in godlikeness, the view of Aurobindo.

Not only in Western psychology and religion do we find philosophies of history like that of Aurobindo. We find a striking resemblance to Aurobindo's evolutionary description of man's past and future history in the work of a scientist, a paleontologist, Pere Teilhard de Chardin [see in particular Teilhard's The Phenomenon of Man]. Pere Teilhard sees the history of this planet as a cosmogenesis, a progressive evolutionary process from inorganic matter to the biological (the Biosphere) and then to the mental (the Noosphere). These stages obviously parallel Aurobindo's Matter, Life, and Mind spheres. Resembling Aurobindo's thesis of the Supermind pervading all, even Matter, is Teilhard's Within that pervades all things. All entities, even the atom has both a Within and a Without aspect. The Within is the psychic energy aspect; the Without is the physical energy or material aspect. In the evolutionary process as entities become more and more complex at the biological level the Within aspect slowly becomes dominant over the Without until at the human level the psychic energy can control much of the physical. The next and culminating step will be the maximum control of the physical by the psychic energy. This is the Omega point.

Again we notice the likeness to Aurobindo's interpretation of the evolutionary process and its goal. Like Aurobindo's Gnostic Beings, Teilhard's "super-man" will have transcended the present human species of man. In these new ultra-hominized beings there will be complete control over the physical and biological spheres and thus the realization of Divinity and immortality. These new beings will be immortal individual personalities although parts of a hyperpersonal psycho-social spiritual totality, Omega; and each being will be in a completely integrated and harmonious relationship with all his fellow beings. Consciousness will be co-extensive with the universe and space and time will have been transcended for this omniscient ultra-hominised species. This divinization of man into a new species creating a new divinized world is precisely Aurobindo's evolutionary goal. Also, Teilhard agrees that egoless, universal love is a prior condition in reaching point Omega. The evolutionary philosophy of history of Teilhard and of Aurobindo are so much alike that Teilhard may possibly have been influenced by the ideas of his great Indian contemporary. Teilhard has devoted more of his time and writing to the scientific data that, he thinks, strongly support his theories. Aurobindo would have been happy for this kind of evidence that points to the divinizing of man and his world.

In the area of Western philosophies of history two of the most prominent thinkers, Arnold J. Toynbee and Pitirim A. Sorokin, follow Aurobindo's thesis that man's goal and ultimate salvation is the realization in this world of a global society in which egoless love will be the bond among men, or at least a world that would accept the leadership of such saints in the creation of a new society. Toynbee sees the rise and fall of civilizations as the spiral progress of "the chariot of religion" [Civilization on Trial], towards the goal of a community of saints on earth—men who will pattern their lives after men like St. Francis of Assisi or the bodhisattva ideal of Buddhism [A Study of History]. Sorokin, too, sees history as a spiral progress towards this goal. He mentions particularly [in The Ways and Power of Love] the intuitive suprarational experience of the great mystics of East and West as evidence that man is capable of attaining the highest kind of spiritual life. When a sufficient number of men can have this kind of experience of intuitive identity with the Divine a new world of altruistic love among men will come into being.

Opposing these glorious views of man's destiny are those historians and philosophers who think that a realistic, scientific, and objective approach to human history inhibits belief in a future age dominated by spiritual values. Besides, say these men, fairly precise predictions about the pattern of future events can be made only in the more exact sciences, those in which experiments can be performed with repeatable phenomena. In the social sciences, and particularly in the area of history, experiments like those common in the physical and biological sciences cannot be performed to verify whether or not a hypothetical pattern is a reality. The best the objective, scientific historian can do is examine segments of past history by collecting documentary evidence; also he must remember that in many studies he has to be selective; he cannot know all the myriad past events that might be related to the area he has chosen for study. Other more subjective factors also enter into his selection. For example, in attempting to ascertain the cause or causes of a significant past event such as the fall of Rome, he can scarcely avoid being influenced in his selection of the most relevant factors by his own personal cultural background and by the general "climate of opinion" of his time.

Granting that a thinker's philosophy, around which he builds his theory of the meaning of history, may have this kind of relativity, there remains as a perennial truth the direct experience of the great Eastern and Western mystics as evidence of humanity's contact with an eternal spiritual reality—a contact which has resulted in a new kind of divine egoless living in this world. Aurobindo, the mystic philosopher of cosmic and human history, Tillich, the renowned theologian, Teilhard de Chardin, the scientist-philosopher, and Toynbee and Sorokin, attempting encyclopaedic empirical philosophies of history—all are convinced that the great mystic saints are forerunners of a new age in history similar to that described by Aurobindo. The very failure of past and present civilizations will, as Toynbee declares, drive humanity forward to the only kind of society that can satisfy his deepest needs and aspirations.

It is true that our world is in a transition stage of global history. The transition may be to a Communist world founded upon a materialist philosophy; or to a spiritual society in which egoless love will be the highest value and a new rich creative integral life for all mankind will flourish. If Communism prevails, perhaps an easier alternative for collective humanity at present, the spiral of history, as Aurobindo thinks, may nevertheless lead eventually to the final epoch, the Age of Spirit. This is the intuitive knowledge of those who have already been infused with the Light Divine, the forerunners of the new species of Gnostic Beings.