=1 "Contact with Higher Lifeforms"
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Contact with Higher Lifeforms
Now that amino acids – the building blocks of life – have been discovered even in far away galaxies, the following deductions are inescapable:
Life is not merely a chance phenomenon on a single or even a few planets; there must be trillions of planets carrying life.
Wherever there is life there must be evolution, and since many solar systems with planets are older than ours, life must have been evolving there for billions of years longer than on earth. If that is the case, then here and there in the universe (and considering the size of the universe that means billions of places) there must be civilizations older and therefore wiser than man's.
Technology is not mere mechanical innovation, the invention of new gadgets, new machines, new ways of combining chemicals, etc. Technology is always, of necessity, accompanied by a greater awareness. Telescopes and microscopes bring not only new sights but also new insights. The telephone, radio, and jet plane spread not only commerce by also cultural and spiritual progress. Therefore technological evolution always brings more awareness, more understanding, more knowledge, more consciousness, even if, at the beginning of a new age, such inventions as the stone ax or fire or the atomic bomb may seem to be excessively destructive. In its larger outlines evolution is never merely biological or technological; it is always psychologically motivated. The eyes developed by the trilobites in the Cambrian seas were not merely a new organ; they started a new way of looking into the universe.
And today evolution is leading us not simply towards being a superdriver or superpilot or even a super-Edison or super-Einstein but towards a superway of being man. Tomorrow's man will be as different psychologically from us as we are from man a million years ago. Not only would we be unable to understand anything he says, but we would be entirely unable to recognize him as man.
Now scientists ask the unavoidable question: How can it be, if there are superior civilizations in the universe, that we don't get any messages, by some supercommunication system, some celestial radio? They ask this question with the utmost apprehension and even fear. What would happen, for example, if we got such a message as: “Stop the war in Indochina!” or “Stop building oil pipelines!” or “Heal cancer with dymetryl amino benzedrine”? Well, it would be the end of our way of life as it was the end of the Marquesan, the Hawaiian and the Eskimo way of life when the European messages reached them. Thus the super-Margaret Meads or Levi Strausses of faraway civilizations observing with super-wisdom what is happening on our underdeveloped planet, would understandably be very reluctant to interfere to obviously or abruptly with earthlife.
How then could they approach us? Suppose they wanted to be helpful but not discouraging or imposing. Well, they might send their messages in such a discreet way that they would not be felt as alien intrusion. And that is exactly what happens around us every day, has happened ever since the beginnings of time – no massive interference but precious little gifts like flowering plants, bees, fruit trees, wine, olives, cheese, maize, wheat, tomatoes.
Certainly these things would have evolved on earth; no space traveller was needed to bring them. But how did they evolve so neatly, so quickly, at just the right place and time? What source guided the mutation of their DNA molecules?
A bare hundred years ago our science discovered the process of evolution. This process is not one-sided as one might assume; it is helped and guided by a continuous involution. The coming down into higher forms of life into lower ones is involution, and it is a process as natural and continuous and efficient as evolution. The aspirations of life are answered by inspirations.
What our scientists and farmers do to plants and domestic animals by selection and hybridization and guided mutation has been occurring on earth for billions of years.
Man's progress, the advance of mind, life and consciousness, is guided by beings higher than man, and human endeavor likewise guides the creation evolving on other planets in the universe. Our painful struggles and breakthroughs aid the universal ascent towards perfection; our victories are not isolated, lonely or one-time occurrences. We give help and receive help in a universe which is one.
On the human level, involution is mainly psychic or psychological, nonobservable by the gross material eye of modern science which calls it ‘chance’, thus acknowledging its own limits. So-called primitive people – or should we say child-like people – on earth have long felt this subtle influence in their daily business of evolving. They speak of gods, devas, spirits, angels coming to them, into their dreams, and telling them what to do in difficult situations. Indeed there has never been a dearth of communication with extraterrestrial civilizations, but rather an astonishing and continuous amount of it.
How ironical that it is just our scientists, the most guided spearheads of evolution on this planet, who are unaware of this involution of forces and beings, of ideas and inventions, of inspiration and interference that is constantly taking place in the most gentle and helpful way imaginable for the progress of our human species and its civilizations!
If our theory of involution is correct what conclusions may we draw from it? Well, one might ask, what can I do to make involution work better and more efficiently in myself personally? How can I help my children to be better prepared to receive more and more consciously and continuously from this marvellous source of inspiration?
Don't we all receive messages which we call inspirations or intuitions? When our ancestors discovered fire, or how to shape metals, did they not feel inspired to do so? Our Nobel Prize winners – what would they do without aspiration and inspiration?
…Wait a minute, look at that petri dish. See, what a strange discoloration! What has happened? Just pause a moment. The answer will come...
“The experiment of human life on an earth is not now for the first time enacted. It has been conducted a million times before and the long drama will again a million times be repeated. In all that we do now, our dreams, our discoveries, our swift or difficult attainments we profit subconsciously by the experience of innumerable precursors and our labour will be fecund in planets unknown to us and in worlds yet uncreated.”
Sri Aurobindo
Essays Divine and Human, p.141, “The Beginning and the End”