Who am I? What is Man? Know thyself. These eternal questions and their answers have been written about from time immemorial by the greatest minds, by sages and seers, yogis, adepts and spiritual souls, yet none has written with the knowledge and vision of the Sri Aurobindo, the Avatar, who has brought the truth and the things of the truth down to us from the highest realms. This volume covers every aspect of man in his ascension to a superman, the evolutionary thrust that has propelled him above the plane of limiting mind, though in his darker elements he retains unregenerate qualities that render him even lower than the animal who does not have the mental cognition or the ability to distort truth and beauty for nefarious ends. We hear the voice of man, his philosophies, his many 'isms' that have failed to change him or the world. We see clearly the plight and the promise of a humanity evolving from a brute animal nature to beings of peace, wisdom, power, beauty, vastness, harmony and love. Sri Aurobindo in his epic poem, Savitri, shows every aspect of the human condition, our follies and foibles, our arrogance and lust and self-aggrandizement, and also reveals the possibilities and potentialities leading us to the way of the divine man and shows us clearly the path that we must follow to find ourselves, our true selves and unite our fragmented parts with the divinity that resides in us. Through the divine embodiment of Aswapathy Sri Aurobindo reveals many of the stages of his own tapasya and in a letter to a disciple he writes, "Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes;" and at one point the question is raised as to whether man will survive as a species or disappear from the earth where he was the seeming king of all he surveyed or if he will disappear from the earth like the mastodon and sloth with the advent of the superman. All these questions are answered in Savitri in mantric lines of transcendent beauty vibrating with the Truth-Consciousness. If in the meaningless Void creation rose, If from a bodiless Force Matter was born, If Life could climb in the unconscious tree, Its green delight break into emerald leaves And its laughter of beauty blossom in the flower, If sense could wake in tissue, nerve and cell And Thought seize the grey matter of the brain, And soul peep from its secrecy through the flesh, How shall the nameless Light not leap on men, And unknown powers emerge from Nature's sleep? Even now hints of a luminous Truth like stars Arise in the mind-mooned splendour of Ignorance; Even now the deathless Lover's touch we feel: If the chamber's door is even a little ajar, What then can hinder God from stealing in Or who forbid his kiss on the sleeping soul? Savitri - Book X: The Book of the Double Twilight As a preamble to the quotations from Savitri, here are some of the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on man and humanity, words of promise and light in the seeming darkness of our age. "For what do we mean by Man? An uncreated and indestructible soul that has housed itself in a mind and body made of its own elements." The Supramental Manifestation Sri Aurobindo: "Man is pre-eminently the mental being." Social and Political Thought " For man is precisely that term and symbol of a higher Existence descended into the material world in which it is possible for the lower to transfigure itself and put on the nature of the higher and the higher to reveal itself in the forms of the lower." The Synthesis of Yoga