Evolution and the Earthly Destiny by Nolini Kanta Gupta

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny

This selection of essays, drawn from the manifold writings of Nolini Kanta Gupta, is dedicated to the youth of India, to those among her children who cherish in some part of their being an aspiration, a living flame of light that yearns towards an ever-growing perfection, a truth of being and becoming as yet vaguely surmised or only partially revealed.

Throughout the many and varied domains of the human adventure, seen here in the light of Sri Aurobindo’s vision of the future, there emerges the one eternal question and dominant theme of our seeking: man past and present, man individual and collective, but always and above all, the ultimate flowering of his life upon earth.

The essays cover five broad topics: Man and the evolution, India and her Swadharma, Education, Science and Philosophy, and Poetry and Mysticism.

Book Details

Author: Nolini Kanta Gupta
Print Length: 354 pages
Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Submitted by: Avinash Tiwari
Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle
Language: English

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Contents

MAN AND THE EVOLUTION

  • Sri Aurobindo
  • Nature’s Own Yoga
  • The Divine Man
  • Lines of the Descent of Consciousness
  • Evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness
  • Consciousness as Energy
  • The Intuition of the Age
  • The Creative Soul
  • Human Progress
  • Human Destiny
  • The March of Civilisation
  • The New Humanity

INDIA AND HER SWADHARMA

  • The Spiritual Genius of India
  • Vivekananda
  • The Basis of Unify
  • Towards a New Ideology
  • A Stainless Steel Frame
  • The Basis of Social Reconstruction
  • The Moral and the Spiritual
  • The World is One
  • Humanism and Humanism
  • The Eternal East and West

EDUCATION

  • The Immortal Person
  • The Nature of Perfection
  • The Relative Best
  • Mind and the Mental World
  • Education is Organisation
  • The Spirit of Tapasya
  • Brahmacharya
  • Education as the Growth of Consciousness
  • Consciousness as Freedom
  • A True Professor

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

  • In Quest of Reality
  • The Observer and the Observed
  • The Mystery of the Five Senses
  • Physics or Philosophy
  • Cosmonautics
  • Darshana and Philosophy
  • The Philosopher as an Artist and Philosophy as an Art

POETRY AND MYSTICISM

  • Savitri
  • Prayers and Meditations of the Mother
  • The Approach to Mysticism
  • Mystic Poetry
  • The Poetry in the Making
  • Hymn to Darkness
  • A Vedic Story
  • A Vedic Conception of the Poet
  • The Beautiful in the Upanishads
  • Upanishadic Symbolism
  • Rabindranath Tagore: A Great Poet, A Great Man
  • Rabindranath And Sri Aurobindo

Book Sample

Evolution and the Earthly Destiny by Nolini Kanta Gupta

The Eternal East and West

The East and the West are two recognised wings of humanity. Only the relation between them is somewhat in dispute. According to one view the two are quite separate and irreconcilable entities, because they .embody two outlooks that are contradictory to each other. The other view is that they are not contradictory, however distinct they may be; they are complementary or supplementary to each other.

The interaction between the two across the centuries recorded in history has been admitted and studied; it considerably influenced the growth and development of each in its line. Only the influence exerted some view with favour, others with disfavour. For some consider the mixture of influence, like that of blood, as a necessary condition of progress and creativity: others again are keen on maintaining the purity of stock, the particular type of culture to which each is attached and any intrusion of a foreign vein they consider as a lowering, a degeneration of the type.

We all know the great difference between the East and the West that has been pointed out and accepted generally as true is that of the spiritual East and the worldly or materialist West. Crudely and categorically formulated the truth remains no longer true. There is a very large amount of worldliness in the East, on the one hand, and on the other, mystics and spiritual seekers or leaders are not a rare phenomenon in the West. However, it can be said and admitted as a fact that there is in the East an atmosphere that is predominantly spiritual and one can more easily come in contact with it; whereas in the West it is the mental and material culture that predominates and the approach to it is nearer and closer to man. The science of the Spirit has received greater attention in the East; it has been studied, experimented, organised, almost consummated there in a supreme manner. Even as the science of Matter has reached its apotheosis in the West.

Recognising the difference, the momentous question confronting us is what should be our next move: must we accept the one and reject the other for the sake of human progress and fulfilment, or that a harmony and synthesis is possible and is demanded ? For it is not unoften asserted that the so-called spiritual outlook of the East is only a mediaeval outlook. All people in the world, including even the West, were once upon a time predominantly religious and spiritual; that was a certain stage in man’s evolution. Europe has passed that stage of myth and imagination, has brought upon the earth and is living the higher illumination that Science reveals. The East did not or could not march with Time and continues the old world with its backward glance; it stands arrested in its growth.

The New Humanity

The world is in the throes of a new creation and the pangs of that new birth have made mother Earth restless. It is no longer a far-off ideal that our imagination struggles to visualise, nor a prophecy that yet remains to be fulfilled. It is Here and Now.

Although we may not know it, the New Man—the divine race of humanity is already among us. It may be in our next neighbour, in our nearest brother, even in myself. Only a thin veil covers it. It marches just behind the line. It waits for an occasion to throw off the veil and place itself in the forefront. We are living in strenuous times in which age-long institutions are going down and new forces rearing their heads, old habits are being cast off and new impulsions acquired. In every sphere of life, we see the urgent demand for a recasting, a fresh valuation of things. From the base to the summit, from the economic and political life to the artistic and spiritual, humanity is being shaken to bring out a new expression and articulation. There is the hidden surge of a Power, the secret stress of a Spirit that can no longer suffer to remain in the shade and behind the mask, but wills to come out in the broad daylight and be recognised in its plenary virtues.

That Power, that Spirit has been growing and gathering its strength during all the millenniums that humanity has lived through. On the momentous day when man appeared on earth, the Higher Man also took his birth. Since the hour the Spirit refused to be imprisoned in its animal sheath and came out as man, it approached by that very uplift a greater freedom and a vaster movement. It was the crest of that underground wave which peered over the surface from age to age,  from age to age through the experiences of poets and prophets and sages— the Head of the Sacrificial Horse galloping towards the Dawn.

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