Alok da, reading Sri Aurobindo’s poem on the tiger and the deer made me a bit perplexed for a long time. I was checking the predator-prey populations and all the predator animals with grandiose strength like tigers 🐱are shrinking while the prey population like deers 🦒 are in millions,the supposed reasons are apparently cos of High energy demands of predators wrt to their body weight and strength,less reproductive rates and being vulnerable to ecological/climate changes and requiring a larger territory for themselves to survive while the prey population like deers have low energy demands cos they are herbivores, adaptive to ecological changes cos they are mobile, flexible creatures and the ability to change their habitat and can do more with less like birds etc.. Isn’t this an opposite of survival of the fittest? Deers are of-course gentle,beautiful creatures but all the poets and humanity at large was also fascinated by the grandiose of predator animals and they are shrinking.does this mean that it’s the meek that shall actually inherit the earth? Sri Aurobindo writes that Titans fall by their own weight in the human cycle,does this apply here and What are the deeper implications of this phenomenon to Sri Aurobindo’s vision and supramental evolution?

Absolutely so. Survival of the fittest is a surface reading of a deeper process going on behind and through the play of outer forms. It is the growth of consciousness through the different challenges. The process is adaptation and evolution. Even with regard to human evolution from the Apes, the slightly weaker (meeker, humbler) evolved into human kind while the stronger simply stayed on as they were. The Titan having little challenge from outside collapses under his own weight. The human locked in too comfortable zones fails to evolve. Of course nature naturally creates mechanisms and outer means as reasons to engineer the Will within her heart. But the real reason is within.

At the same time nature also aims at creating greater and greater complexity so as to make creation more and more perfect. Here the emphasis shift from numbers to quality. That is why there is inbuilt within us a natural admiration for creatures that express some aspect or the other of the Divine Quality, – the Lion, quiet power; the deer, swiftness; the cobra, evolutionary energy; the horse, force; the elephant, prosperity and so on and so forth. Because before these forms take shape upon earth they are formed in the respective typal worlds. 

This is ofcourse a vast subject on which I have written in some detail elsewhere. But this is true and an interesting observation with important application to the present. The humble will arise and evolve, the arrogant will collapse and devolve. Those with a greater plasticity and wideness will go through, the rigid and narrow will fail to adapt to the evolutionary surge and fall back.