Within the field of philosophical posthumanism, understanding the human as a being in transition, progressing toward an evolutionary leap in ontology, does not take much convincing. Where debate does arise is in the choice of destination, and the stops required for getting there. What does a posthuman future look like? Toward what destination(s) is the transitional being heading? Can our collective envisioning actually dictate what that future will be, or is the transmutation more autopoietic?And if our posthuman train has already left the station, how do we recognize plural formations of posthuman flourishing that reciprocally impact our shared ecosystems? If where we’re going is in part determined by where we’ve been, perhaps past seekers looking to the future, like the philosopher and sage Sri Aurobindo, have already brought down—into phenomenal consciousness—one such pathway, and destination, to consider.
Proceeding on the premise that Sri Aurobindo was onto something in his formulation of integral yoga as a psychospiritual technology for “divinizing” our own “nature” as well as our planet, for ultimately transforming the posthuman into the gnostic being—a being whose “existence would be fused into oneness with the transcendent and universal Self and Spirit;” whose “action would originate from and obey the supreme Self and Spirit’s divine governance of Nature”[1]—it is not hard to see why these assertions of a perfected ontological “race” align so well with those of posthumanism. By drawing heavily on South Asian formulations of Puruṣa (Self/Spirit) and Prakṛti (Nature—including body, matter, and the phenomenal universe), in his philosophical writings Aurobindo made the case that a transmutation of the human would not occur in a box, but in symbiotic harmony with our shared ecosystems, helping all facets of life—e.g., biological, ontological, sociological—perfect their self-expression. This planetary change would also affect the seemingly unpredictable nature of climate patterns and the anthropocentric causes that unnaturally compound them—without relying on new technologies developed from the same consumption-oriented systems of industrial economy to solve them.
While reversing the climate breakdowns currently besieging our planet was not Sri Aurobindo’s end goal, actualizing a profound transformation of consciousness in the human, which would eventually result in a complete transformation of planetary Nature, was his highest aspiration. This is because the transformation of the human and of Nature are inextricably linked. We humans are Nature ourselves, after all, and part of these landscapes seething. Thus for Earth to begin realizing this possibility, Sri Aurobindo recognized that we humans must first reimagine ourselves. “Man” is no longer the measure of all things, and his reliance on shallow ecology to address climate change only perpetuates the catastrophes rocking our geological foundations; for shallow ecology “does not inspire a change in the way people perceive the world around them—it only seeks to guide human action.”[2] Put differently, our current neoliberal environmental policies and corporate climate propaganda address issues that are surface deep. To get at the core of Earth’s issues, we must forgo our hierarchic understanding of planetary life, with human-centric capital at its apex, and realign the components of our biosphere so that all life is interconnected and relational. This work has already begun thanks in part to deep ecology, an environmental philosophy and social movement calling for biocentric equality and the self-realization of all planetary life. While the posthuman visions of Sri Aurobindo and the deep ecologists ultimately differ, their shared pursuit of deconstructing the human down to its own interests in the interest of the other, not siloed into separate ontological structures by the biopowers and psychopowers that aim to ensure, sustain, and order all life under all-consuming jurisdiction, is noteworthy.
Thus to begin our human reimagining, we must revisit the phenomenal building block of all life: matter. Embracing the possibility that there’s more to life than measurable material substances, behaviors, and patterns is key if we are to ever collectively progress toward a revisioning of our evolutionary future. The increasing application of empiricism to philosophical examinations of existence not only grossly limits alternate forms of thought experimentation, but negates immeasurable sources of knowledge production that have developed outside the realm of the microscope and evidence-based data. To assist in Sri Aurobindo’s vision for the posthuman arrival at the gnostic being—and to address the current environmental crises of modernity befalling us—we must understand our planet on his terms—as a material and immaterial field, a field of both evolution and involution, one that is infused with Puruṣa and activated by Prakṛti, with the human serving as intermediary agent. Here too, the deep ecologists share in this perspective, acknowledging that “an environmental crisis of this complexity and scope is not only the result of certain economic, political, and social factors. It is also a moral and spiritual crisis which, in order to be addressed, will require broader philosophical and religious understanding of ourselves as creatures of nature, embedded in life cycles and dependent on ecosystems.”[3] And for Sri Aurobindo, this “broadening” of ourselves is the crux of his yoga, one that ultimately requires an independent being with higher mentality and consciousness for symbiotic individuations to ripple across our planet, not an egalitarian material arrangement for codependent symbiotic individuations based on Nature’s current ontology. Integral yoga (pūrṇayoga, with pūrṇa meaning filled, full, fulfilled—integral), the yogic path developed to accomplish this, implies a shifting human subjectivity with preindividual or postindividual (symbiotic) subjecthood that ultimately transforms Nature.
In order to open human thought to these new visions of our planetary future, and to ecological actualization of this envisioning, higher planes of mind beyond our current mental consciousness are necessary. Moreover, especially in posthumanist work, proceeding from a vantage point that includes emanations of consciousness outside the measurable and material cannot be discounted. By inquiring after the immeasurable and immaterial, we present ourselves with a new data set of futuristic possibilities that no longer limits our queries, but helps us overcome our mental limitations. Here too, Sri Aurobindo has already completed much of the legwork for us, arguably establishing higher planes of mind (higher mind, illumined mind, intuitive mind, overmind, supermind) that allow us to more concretely know—and work toward—what our future holds. For Aurobindo, the past, present, and future of Nature evolves by the creative power of Saccidānanda (being-consciousness-bliss), which presents the possibility of transformation—from the lowest material (inconscient) to the highest spiritual (superconscient) level of existence. In this sense, Nature is both the original form and force (śakti)—the former carrying out the evolution of humanity, the latter supplying the creative energy and active movement to realize it.
Again, given the evolutionary crises of consciousness currently rupturing our modern lives, the symbiotic nature of our psycho-ecosystems must be accepted and upheld in order to break the cycles of mass-scale, life-threatening events that continue to plague us. To address this, engaging with earth consciousness (Prakṛti) through psychospiritual technologies of becoming (yogas) like integral yoga should be prioritized. It is this admittedly complex yogic progress guided by the one Self in all beings (Puruṣa; psychic being) that over time amounts to prakṛtic changes in the human. These changes include fragmentation, individuation, reintegration, and new physical, vital, mental, psychic, and spiritual capacities. Through this initial process of transmutation, avenues of communication with other forms of sentient and even insentient life may also materialize thanks to the shifting consciousness now seeded in the human. Even the immeasurable and unknowable begin to present themselves to this forming posthuman.
By drawing on the darśana of India’s wisdom traditions as well as the integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo, the coexisting plurality of deep ecological and integral perspectives poised toward the posthuman becomes easier to fathom. While sociocultural worlds still exist between the paths of the deep ecologists and the yogic paths destined for planetary change/liberation, through a comparative lens concrete steps for birthing a new world and a new creation begin to present themselves, helping our mentality develop to the point of being legitimately able to consider climate change reversals, potentialities of planetary existence, and synergetic biospheres for posthuman flourishing. Consequently I argue that as we continue on our transitional journey, a comprehensive ecological reworking of our sociocultural systems and structural actions must be our next stop, with the express goal that this deconditioning and “rewilding” spring from the foundation of continuous interconnectivity. By deconstructing our existence and all the trappings of “being” human, we could create a playing field for equalizing what has been out of balance, across our shared planetary home, for so long. And as the aforementioned higher planes of mind become realized in us, “human beings should interfere as little as possible with the self-realization of these other [ecological] entities, because everything should be able to self-realize itself.”[4] By the path of integral yoga the human in transition creates capacities for these “natural” self-realizations.
As an example grounded in the darśana, consider a re-envisioned triguṇa in Sāṅkhya—śama-tapas-prakāśa—as Sri Aurobindo has done. Unlike the guṇas of the lower nature, śama, tapas, and prakāśa “do not exclude each other, are not at war, are not even merely in equilibrium, but each an aspect of the two others and in their fullness all are inseparable and one.”[5] Therefore by the replacement of tamas, rajas, and sattva in the triguṇa, a perfected liberation of Nature occurs and we humans are able to cease identifying solely with the mental or egoic and instead experience ourselves as whole and as an inseparable part of greater and greater wholes (pūrṇa). By expanding our relational field of awareness and expression in Nature, we are also able to transform our awareness and expression of ourselves, and can honestly take stock of our natural imperfections so as to exceed them. D. P. Chattopadhyaya, founder of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research in New Delhi, affirms as much in Sri Aurobindo: “Sri Aurobindo is naturalist in a special sense. He affirms the reality of matter and at the same time highlights its imperfection. He affirms the reality of life-world and points out its imperfection and even distortion. He analyses the rich complexity of the human mind and also shows its inadequacy to grasp the integrality of reality as a whole.”[6] Thus a posthuman vision for grasping the “integral” Nature of reality as a whole is one such pathway for beginning to seek ecological coherence disabused from anthropocentric exceptionalism.
To continue this line of thinking, for Sri Aurobindo the triloka of matter, life, and mind as well as supermind (vijñāna) are involved in the earth-consciousness, and are what constitute this transformation. And because our planetary systems are not simply an ongoing arrangement of material substances void of involution, but contain the principle of all the other planes and possibilities of existence, accordingly Sri Aurobindo sees us humans as the ones tasked with changing our way of being in the world and “expanding” our subjectivity by successively elevating our mental planes to intuit higher forms of consciousness. This is done through the practice of integral yoga, ultimately resulting in the evolutionary destination of the gnostic being from the intermediate stage of the posthuman. Thus for Sri Aurobindo, it is the gnostic being, and even the posthuman—not our planet in itself—that is tasked with transforming Nature so it exceeds and self-perfects its ecological station:
“The supramental gnostic being, on the contrary, would not only found all his living on an intimate sense and effective realisation of harmonic unity in his own inner and outer life or group-life, but would create a harmonic unity also with the still surviving mental world, even if that world remained altogether a world of Ignorance. For the gnostic consciousness in him would perceive and bring out the evolving truth and principle of harmony hidden in the formations of the Ignorance; it would be natural to his sense of integrality and it would be within his power to link them in a true order with his own gnostic principle and the evolved truth and harmony of his own greater life-creation. That might be impossible without a considerable change in the life of the world, but such a change would be a natural consequence of the appearance of a new Power in Nature and its universal influence. In the emergence of the gnostic being would be the hope of a more harmonious evolutionary order in terrestrial Nature.”[7]
By ultimately arriving at the posthuman destination of Sri Aurobindo’s gnostic being, a more integral and deeply ecological prakṛtic makeup is possible, one with evolutionary powers (siddhis) for self-perfected change that counter the anthropocentric powers of destruction, for, on the word of the deep ecologists, “all beings strive in their own ways for self-realization” and “all are endowed with intrinsic value, irrespective of any economic or other utilitarian value they might have for human ends.”[8] According to Sri Aurobindo, the gnostic consciousness necessary for such transmutations of being is already involved in the phenomenal world and accessible to those whose personhoods—physical, vital, mental, psychic, spiritual—have integrated to the point that higher realms of consciousness are able to bear down, so as to pressurize the mind toward loftier iterations of its own expression: higher, illumed, intuitive, overmental, supramental.
There are so many ways of knowing and being in this world. Even more have yet to be imagined. By releasing ourselves from the anthropocentric estimation of them, by reacquainting ourselves with Nature as the active consciousness (cit) or force (śakti) that structures both the universe and ourselves, we begin to close the artificial gap between matter (Prakṛti) and spirit (Puruṣa), planet and people, and access the totality of knowledge by identity (vijñāna) beyond the limitations of our consciousnesses in its current stage of development. In this way the potential to realize the gnostic consciousness already present on this planet, which Sri Aurobindo brought into the world, remains. To pursue higher planes of mentality, to strive toward the transitional being’s ultimate self-expression, to deconstruct the human through integral yoga so as to integrate holistically with the symbiotic ecosystems of our planet—all the while perfecting one’s own subjectivity—is the work of the human-posthuman who aspires to one day arrive at the destination of a gnostic being and the divinity of all life on Earth.
References
[1] Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Pondicherry: 2005. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, p. 1007.
[2] Guilherme, A. (2011). Metaphyics as a Basis for Deep Ecology: An Equiry into Spinoza’s System. The Trumpeter, 27 (3).
http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/viewFile/1224/1594 p. 61.
[3] Tucker, M. E., & Grim, J. (2000). Series Forward. In: Chapple, Christopher Key. XVI.
[4] Guilherme (2011). Metaphyics as a Basis for Deep Ecology: An Equiry into Spinoza’s System. The Trumpeter, 27 (3).
http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/viewFile/1224/1594 p. 68.
[5] Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita. Pondicherry: 1997. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, p. 467.
[6] Chattopadhyaya D. P., Seminar: Sri Aurobindo and the World and Education for Tomorrow in the Light of Sri Aurobindo. New Delhi: 1998. Nov 21, 22, Sri Aurobindo, India and the World.
[7] Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Pondicherry: 2005. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, p. 1006.
[8] Harding, S. (2002). What is Deep Ecology. https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/learningresources/what-is-deep-ecology/