And in two minutes I was staring at photographs of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who I had never heard of before in my life

When the breakdown I described in the last post in this series took place, though, something interesting happened. For the first time since I had become atheistic, I started questioning some sort of higher power — I wasn’t even sure what I was calling on. The question was the most childlike of all questions: Why? Why this existence? What was the point? What was the meaning of it all?

So much inequality, injustice, pain, suffering, abuse — for what purpose? And this started off the worst anxiety attack I have ever had in my life, as I faced up to the fact that I could not understanding the meaning of my own pain. This attack lasted about two days...

For two nights I skipped the medication. During these two nights, I experienced a storm of intuitions. It was as if something was dying to get out from deep inside me. I wrote an essay called The Revolution Begins Inside Me. It had a lot of genuine insights in it, but because of the racing and noisy mind, there was also a lack of clarity and coherence, naturally. When the mind misunderstands these experiences, the result is superstition. However, it was really the first time I was taking the existence of God seriously again after my turn to secularism. The intuitions were about God and the universe being one and the same, about the evolution of the universe being the self-discovery of God, and about how all mental dualities had to be overcome, and all labels abandoned. I truly felt at the time that I was the recipient of some sort of revelation. I thought I was onto something huge. Those around me considered me mad.

Eventually, though, I realized that a lot of what I had written did not make sense. It was the first semblance of any kind of “awakening”, I was still obviously very much identified with the ego, and the usual mental pretensions were still there. I experienced what is commonly called “ego inflation” — during your first experiences, you think you are a “prophet” or something, because the outer personality is too weak to handle the inflow of inner intuitions. I was seeking affirmation or at least encouragement of some sort; I got none, only pitying looks. My friends did not understand what I was saying. I was embarrassed of what I had written...

Initially I resisted the notion that something “spiritual” was happening, although that intuition was there right from the start. I tried to fight it off, and be rational. I tried to silence my mind. It would not work. Most of the same thoughts recurred again. God and the universe were one and the same. The evolution of the cosmos was the self-discovery of God. Dualities were an illusion, a figment of the mind’s imagination, and had to be overcome. Many thoughts were about love and humility. I became convinced that true love was unconditional, and that, theoretically, one should be able to love anyone, even an abuser. Of course loving an abuser would mean a confrontation of their issues, but it should be possible to not fear them. In fact that was the main insight that emerged – love was just the absence of fear. If you loved someone, you would not fear them. Conversely if you overcame your fears about someone or something, you would love them. Another realization that occurred to me was that the ego-mind, the individual identity, was the source of all of humankind’s suffering, and transcending the ego-mind was the only solution. And pure rationalism and the intellect could not help us here.

I found myself sharing these thoughts with a friend, asking her, “Did you ever think I would be back at this exact same place again?” She shook her head, as bewildered as I was.
As before, but to a greater extent, it felt like my mind had ascended into some storehouse of knowledge, and the thoughts that kept occurring to me were not mine, but from some other plane of mind entirely. I thought about something mystic-philosophers call gnosis a lot. I became convinced that everyone was a genius, but was not aware of their gnosis. I also became convinced that extending one’s egoic boundaries would lead to gnosis.
It was clear to me that this was some kind of “heightened” state of consciousness. It did not feel like a psychosis. But it was difficult to control. I felt like I was being pulled toward something, but I was not sure what.
The flow of thoughts just got faster and faster. Eventually my powers of concentration more or less went to hell. They just disappeared completely. Nights were sleepless. I would get that fast flow of thoughts – most of them repetitive – accompanied by endorphin rushes. It got to a point where I would literally knock myself out in exhaustion. My rational mind would kick in and try to resist the process. No, I would tell myself, this is irrational, it has to stop. It would be like this: get thoughts, try to resist, be unable to resist, get knocked out. I would fall asleep after having gotten too tired, and then when I woke up, the thoughts would start again. I wasn’t going to classes, wasn’t doing my readings, and was barely eating.
For all practical purposes, though, this altered state of consciousness had incapacitated me to the point that normal day-to-day functioning had become impossible.

I was constantly asking questions. Why was nature so cruel? If God was perfect, and God and universe were one and the same, why was the universe so imperfect? Might it be that everything is perfect, though we do not know it yet? Eventually one thought gripped me, and would just refuse to leave me: that humankind was headed for the next evolutionary leap, evolving to godhood. I found myself telling friends, “In the next stage of evolution, humankind is going to become God.” The phrase “next evolutionary leap” began to repeat itself in my head, over and over again, like a mantra. I was, in that altered state, absolutely convinced that “the Kingdom of God” or “Day of Judgment” or “Second Coming” or whatever was the next evolutionary leap. I also seemed to be envisioning this new species as asexual and unisex.
It was crazy. I wondered if I was going crazy. I tried to ignore the intuitions. But I couldn’t. I went home from college for a weekend. The minute I got inside the house, my kid sister called me up to her room, wanting to play a song for me. It was Androgynous by The Replacements: “Same hair, revolution / same sex, evolution / Tomorrow, who’s gonna fuss?” I was taken aback by the coincidence.

When I got back to college, I don’t know exactly what I did, but I just ran a Google search for “next evolutionary leap” or “unisex species” or something like that. And in two minutes I was staring at photographs of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who I had never heard of before in my life. And their quotes just leapt out at me:

Man is a transitional being. Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges. – Sri Aurobindo

Humanity is not the last rung of the terrestrial creation. Evolution continues and man will be surpassed. It is for each individual to know whether he wants to participate in the advent of this new species.

There is a genius within everyone of us — we don’t know it. We must find the way to make it come out — but it is there sleeping, it asks for nothing better than to manifest; we must open the door to it. – The Mother

My jaw dropped. I think in about 30 seconds my entire world was turned upside down.

Of course I believed in Darwinian evolution and natural selection and all the rest of it. But that a new species might emerge out of humanity some day before our very eyes — this I had never even dared to imagine. And yet it struck me how anthropocentric it was for the human race to assume that it was not going to evolve further, that it was somehow “different” or “special” compared to other species.
Evolution had become aware of itself through the species of homo sapiens. Evolution could now reflect upon the millions of years that it had taken to get there, and direct the future course of the universe.
I am nowhere near as eloquent as Satprem (an important devotee of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, who passed away recently at the age of 84), so I can do no better than to quote him from his book The Revolt of the Earth:

It created a kind of revolution in my head, my heart, my life. Indeed, I could have ignored altogether that the earth was round and revolved around the sun, not to mention Newton’s apple and the entire scientific, “enlightened” lot, and nothing would have been essentially different in my life; I would only have sailed more beautiful sailboats, on seas that were not more safe. But that man was a “transitional” being was astounding news.
One can sail with portolanos and an astrolabe, or even by the stars, but can one sail with death in one’s heart? Man’s heart is filled with death. And he sows it everywhere.
Of course, I had read Lamarck (or at least what is said about him in philosophy class), and it had fascinated me, but I would never have imagined that this triumphant species of ours was nothing more than a link, a kind of “higher” baboon, and that we were on our way to something else.
My heart was crying to find that “something else” — not in heaven, not in a Bible of one kind or another, but in my body! This wounded, cheated body, burdened with false knowledge, with religious and scientific injunctions and all the rest of it — all that to end in a human Horror.
Suddenly, everything was as clear as daylight! My astrolabe pointed straight to that star.
Suddenly, all these human carnivores — pardon me — seemed, well, just a phase, a painful fecund interlude. Fantastically fecund, since it finally led somewhere! That being I had seen, Sri Aurobindo — so dense, so poignant, as if bursting with power, like the columns of Luxor, with a boundless gaze — that being could not speak philosophical twaddle; he knew. He knew the way. There was a way.
It was a fantastic piece of news, as if the first news of my entire life.

There was a way out of all this insanity, this imperfection, these finite limitations, this seemingly pointless pain? My mind reeled. But how? Posted by ned on April 14, 2007. Filed under Personal Journey.