Aurobindo Ghose

Evil, which is rooted in the insentience of matter and the limitations it imposes on life (the converse of valuable possibilities it secures), is fated to diminish and even disappear as evolution proceeds - possibly past the human species. The future evolution that Aurobindo envisages is the working out of a divine intention in which human effort, however, has a crucial role. Humans have developed a sufficient measure of freedom and self-determination to further the evolutionary progression, as divine delegates as it were. In a second, revised and expanded, edition of The Life Divine (1943-4), Aurobindo elaborates his theory of individual progress, amplifying a mystical psychology and enlarging on a theory of rebirth. Brahman's self-manifestation includes other 'worlds', or 'planes of being', said to be accessible to us in a mystic trance and which the developing divine individual ('psychic being' or 'soul') is said to enter upon the death of the body. The material universe does not exhaust the manifestation of Brahman, but it is, Aurobindo claims, the only evolutionary world. The others are 'typal', with no evolutionary emergence. In this world, the soul, profiting from all its experience, develops an increasingly refined and finely etched personality in terms of body, life and mind. The value of this development discounts, Aurobindo reasons, the evil made possible and even necessary by the insentience of matter inasmuch as matter makes possible such an evolutionary world.