Sri Aurobindo’s Theory of Spiritual Evolution

Abstract

Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy of spiritual evolution was based on ideas found in Indian spiritual texts but also incorporated Western ideas. Born in India, he was educated in England between 1879 and 1892, when the question of evolution dominated British scholarly and popular discourse. Although his theory as a whole was original, it is possible to break it down into its constituent elements. It incorporates the central idea of nineteenth-century Western evolutionary philosophy as he understood it: the development of complex forms through physical evolution. It also incorporates two key elements of Vedanta (the philosophy based on the Upanishads) as he understood it: the One Being or brahman and the perfection of the soul through rebirth. To this Vedantic basis he added two ideas that he found implicit in the Upanishads and the Vedas—the development of higher levels of consciousness and the emergence of a “supramental” and spiritual consciousness—as well as two ideas he seems to have encountered in esoteric and religious sources: the “involution” of consciousness prior to its evolution and the possibility of the divinization of the human being. Viewed historically, Aurobindo’s theory was one of many attempts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers to harmonize science and spirituality. It also may be viewed as an attempt to show that life is not the product of chance but has a long-term purpose. In this essay I give a synchronic as well as diachronic presentation of Aurobindo’s theory, attempting to trace intellectual influences but taking seriously the idea that individual minds may arrive at independent formulations of ideas that recur across historical periods.