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Vol. XXII, No. 2
87
i.e., his true subjective self. Such an action or work turns out to be more expressive rather than instrumental in approach and becomes the Nishkama Karma-yoga of the Bhagwat Gita. Thus such an action serves as a means to emancipate man from his subhuman vitalism.
It is laudable to consider alternative models of development but these endeavours do not provide an adequate base to meet the damage that has already been done by mechanomorphic and ultrautilitarian doctrines and their blind execution, for these humanistic approaches do not offer an appropriate concept of the "integral man" in terms of his open-ended growth as a value-seeking-being. What is needed, in fact is, to use Ivan Illich's18 phrase, the "celebration of awareness," i.e , a revolutionary change in our perception of social reality which would make our approach more man-central than institution biased.
With the industrial civilization of the West fast becoming obso. lescent, traditional Indian wisdom has much in the store to offer to the world. The contributions of Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo are remarkable in this direction, Gandhi as a moral praxiologist and Sri Aurobindo the contemplative philosopher who have worked out concrete solutions and a detailed cognitive frame-work to compre. hend contemporary reality. Perhaps it is only the myopic xenophilia of Indian sociologists that makes them shy of accepting these visiopary perceptions and irsights. We would like to mention in brief some of the conceptual relevancies of these two great pillars of modern Indian social thought and bring out the implications relevant for our purpose.
Sri Aurobindo has tried to give a new meaning to the theory and process of evolution unlike the Darwinian thesis, he does not conceive of human evolution in the mechanical frame-work, i.e., as a process set into motion mechanically without any initiator. Sri Aurobindo extends this process of organic mutation from the plane of mere physical extence to the self-aware existence of man. To him man is a middle link between nature and spirit, continuously evol. ving to realize his real spiritual identity. He writes :
Man at his highest is a half god who has risen up out of the animal nature and is splendidly abnormal in it, but the thing which he has started out to be, the whole god, is something so much greater than what he is that it seems to him as abnormal to himself as he is to animal. 16
To him, thus, man is always a "future" or a potentiality which should not be judged merely in terms of his "real" or present a hcievements.
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