Preparing for the Miraculous

eing human and the copernican principle 141What is a human being?Scientific materialism reduced the human being to acomplex chance agglomeration of material elements, emergingas forms in a coincidental evolution. The image it foundpleasure in destroying in the Western mind was that of anoriginal human being given form by a Creator in his ownimage from the dust of the Earth. This is one of the numerousmythical stories about the origin of man. In this case theimage after which he was made must have been that of ananthropomorphic God, in other words a God himself madein the image of man!Still there is a truth behind this myth. 29 When writingabout the four varnas – brahmins, kshatriyas, vaishyas,and shudras – Sri Aurobindo mentioned the Purushasuktaof the Vedas “where the four orders are described as havingsprung from the body of the creative Deity, from hishead, arms, thighs and feet.” To us, he comments, this ismerely a poetical image, but to the seers among the ancientforefathers it was “a revelative symbol of the unrevealed ...To them this symbol of the Creator’s body was more thanan image, it expressed a divine reality. Human society wasfor them an attempt to express in life the cosmic Purusha ...Man and the cosmos are both of them symbols and expressionof the same hidden reality.” 30What Sri Aurobindo calls here “the cosmic Purusha”was also known in various ancient occult traditions. Gnosticismknew an Anthropos, Protanthropos, Adam or Adamas.The Kabbalah knew Adam Kadmon, the Primal orPrimordial Man, sometimes also called the High Man orthe Heavenly Man. Whatever the names given, all couldbe considered to be the same divine archetype from whose29 See talk 1: “Adam Kadmon and the Evolution”.30 Sri Aurobindo: The Human Cycle, pp. 9-10.