''Life & mind are sometimes believed to descend,—or the hypothesis is advanced—into this world from another where they are more at home.
If by world is meant not another star or system in this material universe, but some other systematisation of universal consciousness, the Vedantin who follows the Vedas & Upanishads, will not disagree.
Life & mind in another star or system of this visible universe might, it is conceivable, be more free and, therefore, at home; but they would still be acting in a world whose basis & true substance was matter. There would therefore be no essential alteration in the circumstances of their action nor would the problem of their origin here be at all better solved.
But it is reasonable to suppose that just as here Force organises itself in matter as its fundamental continent & movement, so there should be—the knowledge & experience of the ancient thinkers showed them that there are—other systems of consciousness where Force organises itself in life and in mind as its fundamental continent & movement.—It is not necessary to consider here what would be the relations in Time & Space of such worlds with ours.
Life & mind might descend, ready organised, from such worlds and attach themselves to forms of matter here; but not in the sense of occupying physically these material forms & immediately using them, but in the sense of rousing by the shock of their contact & awakening to activity the latent life & mind in matter.
That life & mind in matter would then proceed, under the superior help & impulse, to organise a nervous system for the use of life and a system of life-movements in the nerves for the use of mind fit to express in matter the superior organisations who have descended here.
It was indeed the belief of the ancients that—apart from the government of each living form by a single organised personality—such help from the worlds of life & mind was necessary to maintain & support all functionings of life & mind here below because of the difficulty otherwise of expressing & perfecting them in a world which did not properly belong to them but to quite other movements.
This was the basis of the idea of Devas, Daityas, Asuras, Rakshasas, Pisachas, Gandharvas etc, with which the Veda, Upanishad & Itihasa have familiarised our minds.
There is no reason to suppose that all worlds of this material system are the home of living things—on the contrary the very reverse is likely to be the truth. It is, probably, with difficulty & in select places that life & mind in matter are evolved.''
extract from Sri Aurobindo - Kena Upanishad - An incomplete commentary
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