The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

The Supermind's Descent and The Mind of Light

"The Mind of Light"

SOME FACTS, INTERPRETATIONS AND

SPECULATIONS

Whoever has studied the full circumstances, both inner and outer, of the momentous event that was the passing of Sri Aurobindo from the material scene knows this event to have been, for all its so-called "clinical picture", no inevitable hour of mortality. It reveals itself as an extreme measure freely adopted, for reasons of his own, in significant yet never dominant mortal detail by one who, after having ascended in consciousness to a new and hitherto unmanifested power of the Divine Reality, sought to effect a descent of it for earth's complete perfection, including a transformation of the very body of man. The spiritual perfectionist found at a critical turn of his battle with entrenched powers of darkness in earth's being that to take his own semi-transformed body through the process of a death at once normal and supernormal was a paradoxical short-cut towards the revolutionary evolution of humanity into divinity that was his aim. Whoever has studied the full circumstances knows too that as a result of this grand and dreadful strategic sacrifice the new power which Sri Aurobindo had variously termed Supermind, Gnosis, Truth-Consciousness came down at last into earth's being and established there a first centre of action. This wonderful descent charged most conspicuously for a while the Master's own body, rendering it strangely luminous to the eyes of many as well as keeping it absolutely incorrupt for over a hundred hours in even the tropical climate. Also, the descended marvel settled permanently in his spiritual co-worker, the Mother, for transformative earth-use and was responsible for the phenomenon that the Aurobindonian work, instead of dwindling after the Master's self-withdrawal, leaped gloriously forward under her leadership.

But what exactly was the centre of action established, by which the Supermind has been ever since in operation no longer from merely high above or deep within but even from the level of the embodied nature, in a gradually increasing degree marking

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manifestation after greater manifestation of the Divine in the stuff of the human? To put the query in other words: what exactly got realised and was set working when the Supermind descended into the body? The answer - at once a definition of the result achieved and a disclosure of the logic of the event - is to be found in a succinct pronouncement made by the Mother to the present writer. She¹ said:

"As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body, what he has called the Mind of Light got realised in me."

"The Supermind had descended long ago - very long ago - into the mind and even into the vital: it was working in the physical also but indirectly through those intermediaries. The question was about the direct action of the Supermind in the physical. Sri Aurobindo said it could be possible only if the physical mind received the supramental light: the physical mind was the instrument for direct action upon the most material. This physical mind receiving the supramental light Sri Aurobindo called the Mind of Light."

Face to face with such a clear-cut statement our sole task is to use as exegesis on its conjunction of physical mind, Supermind and Mind of Light Sri Aurobindo's own treatment of the last. His phrase, "Mind of Light", except for an occurrence in Book IV, Canto I, of Savitri² in connection with Savitri's early development -

A mind of light, a life of rhythmic force,

A body instinct with hidden divinity

Prepared an image of the coming god -

is used with a specific connotation for the first time in the concluding essays in the series originally published in the Mother's Bulletin of Physical Education and later collected in book-form under the title, The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth. The connotation is indeed specific but packed with subtleties, all of which are not expounded in full in the essays before us, and it displays a sort of spectrum-band of more than one shade. Sri Aurobindo intended to write further on the theme and in the existing essays he discusses the Mind of Light with reference less to the initiation of this novel state in the course of his Integral Yoga than to the general life afterwards of a humanity to which

¹. MCW Vol. 13, pp. 64, 63.

². SABCL Vol. 29, p. 357.

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such a state might spread and even become, instead of our present mentality, native. So we must examine the phrase carefully with an eye to both the implicit and the explicit and combine with the clues derived from these last writings those available from his major philosophical work, The Life Divine, to which The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth is, in many senses, a sequel. Then we shall be best able to correlate his declarations with the Mother's pronouncement and by their help fill out the significance it reveals of the supramental descent into the body, which started on December 5, 1950.

I

Preliminary to our exposition of the Mind of Light as treated by Sri Aurobindo we must seize the meaning of the words, "physical mind", employed by the Mother. Elucidation of them will also elucidate those two other terms of hers: "the mind" and "the vital". Evidently these terms denote parts of our nature that are to be distinguished from the physical mind and the physical vital. After the physical mind, the physical vital is what has to receive the supramental light and be its second centre of operation if the most material, the physical proper, is to be supramentalised and a complete divinisation of earth-nature accomplished. It should be obvious that, strictly speaking, the physical vital is the vitality, the life-force, that has assumed the aspect of nervous energy in us, sustaining and activating the material form into which it is intimately infused, and carrying on not only the organic process but the complex play of bodily desire. Similarly, the physical mind, strictly speaking, is mind assuming the aspect of brain-activity in us by which we get the experience of physical things, are engrossed in that experience and respond in various ways of thought, feeling, volition to sense-contacts.

But this matter-obsessed brain-mind does not exhaust our mentality, for the latter is not concerned only with physical things. Even science which is ostensibly thus concerned goes beyond them, for it has its abstract theorist of unvisualisable concepts. Also, there are the pure mathematician, the idealistic dreamer and planner, the artist, the philosopher, the ethico-religious disciplinarian and the spiritual aspirant. And behind

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the multifold mentality that is man's in his normally conscious state are reaches and recesses which he is not ordinarily aware of and among which the most immediately potent and productive are the subliminal. All those parts that are not preoccupied with or mainly governed by physical things are linked with the subliminal and in many respects are, as it were, its projections. Yet, inasmuch as they function within man's conscious state, they form one team with the part which is matter-obsessed. And, like that part, they work in close connection with the brain and are not ordinarily known to be independent of it. A pragmatic continuity they have with the brain-mind, are often hampered by it and in a general manner conditioned by its matter-obsession. In this respect also they stand with the brain-mind over against the subliminal. If we call the subliminal the inner mind and take it to pass beyond the physical formula, the rest is the outer or surface mind and the physical formula covers the whole of it in one way or another. Broadly speaking, what is not subliminal is the physical mind.

Likewise the physical vital, broadly speaking, is all that functioning of the life-force which is not subliminal vitality: the outward-thrown energy of the mighty creators, destroyers, achievers no less than the body-confined organic process and desire-play is then the physical vital. The physical vital and the physical mind are not only life-force and mind which have arisen in the physical proper and, while giving it a rudimentary mechanical sensitiveness and perceptiveness, have themselves taken up the role as of physical functions in the shape of nervous energy and brain-activity: they are also the entire mass of established human workings of vitality and mentality, whatever is not usually independent of the nervous and the cerebral but is pragmatically continuous with them even in its keenest and finest manifestations.

This description equates the mind and the vital mentioned by the Mother with the subliminal or inner mentality and vitality, mind and life-force in their own right apart from matter though thrusting their powers into matter, joining up with and developing the mental and the vital evolving from the "inconscience" of matter in which they lie "involved". The involved vital and mental that have evolved are mind and life-force physical in the strict sense, while in the broad sense the vital and mental

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"evolutes" of earth, in addition to being these, are constituted by their development under the pressure of mind and life-force from above matter and by their juncture with the powers thrust from the subliminal into terrestrial evolution.

Physical mind, in the broad sense, is just what Sri Aurobindo means whenever he speaks of the Mind in us that has to change under the influence of Supermind. Although he often brings out the narrow sense when demarcating the many layers or folds of our mentality, the broad sense is obvious as soon as he talks of the subliminal in contrast to the Mind of our ordinary possession. The latter he generally names the waking or surface consciousness, but he sometimes names it the "corporeal mentality" and even the designation, "physical mind", is not always absent. Thus, while discussing Mind and Supermind in Chapter XVIII of The Life Divine, he³ writes: "To us mind seems to be determined by the body, because it is preoccupied with that and devoted to the physical workings which it uses for its conscious superficial action in this gross material world. Employing constantly that operation of the brain and nerves which it has developed in the course of its own development in the body, it is too absorbed in observing what this physical machinery gives to it to get back from it to its own pure workings; those are to it mostly subconscious.... This corporeal mentality is merely our surface of mind, merely the front which it presents to physical experience." Here, "subconscious" which Sri Aurobindo usually demarcates from "subliminal" is used loosely as a synonym for the latter: in fact, in the same context occurs the phrase, "subconscious or subliminal to us". Clearly, the corporeal mentality is all that we normally know as Mind in ourselves, including "most of the larger, deeper and more forceful dynamic action of our surface mind" as well as "the pure thinker in us", the immediate origin of both of which Sri Aurobindo in this context traces to the subliminal. In Chapter XI of Part II of The Life Divine⁴ he says: "The subliminal self... has the same capacities as our waking being, a subtle sense and perception, a comprehensive extended memory and an intensive selecting intelligence, will, self-consciousness; but even though the same in kind, they are wider, more developed, more sovereign. And it

³. SABCL Vol. 18, p. 168.

⁴. Ibid., pp. 559-60.

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has other capacities which exceed those of our mortal mind because of a power of direct awareness of the being, whether acting in itself or turned upon its object, which arrives more swiftly at knowledge, more swiftly at effectivity of will, more deeply at understanding and satisfaction of impulse. Our surface mind is hardly a true mentality, so involved, bound, hampered, conditioned is it by the body and bodily life and the limitations of the nerve-system and the physical organs. But the subliminal self has a true mentality superior to these limitations; it exceeds the physical mind and physical organs although it is aware of them and their works and is, indeed, in a large degree their cause or creator." The waking human mental in its totality, the whole of embodied Mind whether in its strictly physical or in its subtler and higher yet generally brain-dependent or at least brain- influenced workings is here what Sri Aurobindo terms surface mind or physical mind.

The embodied human mental, to which the epithet "physical" is broadly appropriate, is, in The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth, the Mind spoken of as being converted into the Mind of Light and utilised for supramentalisation of bodily vitality and bodily matter. Take the following passage⁵: "In place of the human mind as it now is, a mind limited, imperfect, open at every moment to all kinds of deviation from the truth or missing of the truth, all kinds of error and openness even to the persuasions of a complete falsehood and perversion of the nature, a mind blinded and pulled down towards inconscience and ignorance, hardly arriving at knowledge, an intellect prone to interpret the higher knowledge in abstractions and indirect figures seizing and holding even the messages of the higher intuition with an uncertain and disputed grasp, there could emerge a true mind⁶ liberated and capable of the tree and utmost perfection of itself and its instruments, a life governed by the free and illumined mind, a body responsive to the light and

⁵. SABCL Vol. 16, p. 48.

⁶. "True mind" mentioned in this passage must not be confused with "true mentality" of the passage in the previous paragraph. One is mind embodied yet no longer ignorant; the other is mind ignorant yet not grossly so like our embodied mentality, it is ignorant mind in its true and not body-falsified extra-impeded form. (K.D.S.)

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able to carry out all that the free mind and will could demand of it."

Again, what else than the physical mind in the broad sense is described when Sri Aurobindo, apropos of the Supermind whose "consciousness lives always in an immediacy of knowledge and acts by a direct immediacy of knowledge", writes⁷: "In Mind as we see it here the action is very different; it starts from an apparent absence of knowledge, a seeming ignorance or nescience, even, in material Nature, from an inconscience in which any kind of knowing does not seem at all to exist. It reaches knowledge or the action of knowledge by steps which are not at all immediate but rather knowledge at first seems utterly impossible and foreign to the very substance of this matter."

Finally, the totality of the human mental, with its higher no less than its lower powers gripped within the evolutionary bodily formula and physicalised into gross ignorance and incompetence, is strikingly summed up thus⁸: "It is a power for creation, but either tentative and uncertain and succeeding by good chance or the favour of circumstance or else, if assured by some force of practical ability or genius, subject to flaw or pent within inescapable limits. Its highest knowledge is often abstract, lacking in a concrete grasp; it has to use expedients and unsure means of arrival, to rely upon reasoning, argumentation and debate, inferences, divinations, set methods of inductive or deductive logic, succeeding only if it is given correct and complete data and even then liable to reach on the same data different results and varying consequences; it has to use means and accept results of a method which is hazardous even when making a claim to certitude and of which there would be no need if it had a direct or a supra-intellectual knowledge. It is not necessary to push the description further; all this is the very nature of our terrestrial ignorance and its shadow hangs on even to the thought and vision of the sage and the seer and can be escaped only if the principle of a truth-conscious supramental knowledge descends and takes up the governance of the earth-nature."

⁷. SABCL Vol. 16, p. 48.

⁸. Ibid., p. 57.

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2

Having fixed the province of the physical mind which the supramental re-creates into the Mind of Light, we should do well as the next step to mark systematically though briefly the main contrast between it and Supermind, basing ourselves on the citations we have already made from Sri Aurobindo as well as on others in The Life Divine. This will pointedly serve to suggest what the re-creation would be like.

Mind in its established human workings is a profound ignorance trying to acquire knowledge and the very knowledge it acquires is of appearances, of nature's surface activity, objective or subjective, rather than of nature's depth and of the under-lying ultimate reality. Further, both in its practical knowledge and in the theoretical constructs it makes to correlate observations it grasps not the substance of things but only an image or eidolon of them: it stands outside what it seeks to know, and knows nothing from the inside by a sense of oneness with it. Again, its mode of operation is analysis and synthesis. It divides, distinguishes, differentiates - it breaks up everything into parts and strains at a whole by merely aggregating them on a basis of similarity or affinity. It never arrives at a final totality or unity or infinity or essentiality, except as an abstract conception to which nothing in its contact with things concretely answers: whatever concrete sense it has through image or eidolon is of sections, fragments, finites, particulars. On its dynamic side also it is circumscribed and indirect: it can will within just a narrow range and to carry out its volition it has to employ instruments, external or internal, instead of being effective by its own strength. Even between its thought and its volition, however close they may seem, there is always a state of strain, as if the thought were not intrinsically effective and the volition not intrinsically conceptive. Though capable of striking originality in some respects, it falls lamentably short of consummately organising the world or fulfilling the self according even to its own restricted sense of the good, the beautiful, the true.

Unavoidably, when our highest power is like this, impulse and emotion tend ever to tear individual as well as collective life with discords and imbalances, and whatever little harmony and happiness is the human lot proves precarious and superficial. If

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bodily mind and bodily life-force are so imperfect, bodily matter is bound to be still more limited, gross and insecure despite the show of strength, beauty and stability put up by it at times. There is no doubt that unless mind - not only in its inner or subliminal recesses where, though ignorant, it is a freer and less dense agent, but also in the physical formula of it which is the principal power in us - can be radically converted, earth-existence is doomed to imperfection; for this power alone can be the first decisive fulcrum to move the rest of our members.

Can the human mental shed its ignorance radically or is ignorance in one degree or another the very grain of its composition? According to Sri Aurobindo, our mind is what it is, not because it is intrinsically a mode of ignorance but because it is cut off from Supermind, the Truth-Consciousness, the divine Gnosis, of which it is an obscured derivate and whose covered-up parenthood is still hinted in our insatiable dreams and aspirations, our pursuit of ideals and values, our ventures after Soul and Spirit. The Supermind is eternally aware of essentiality, infinity, unity, totality, and its knowledge of particulars, finites, fragments, sections proceeds on the basis of that awareness and is indeed a diverse freely demarcated play of it. We may guess that such awareness implies an inside knowledge of everything, a knowledge by oneness with the known. Yes, the Supermind does not know by mere image or eidolon: it knows by identity and all that it knows is truth and every truth known by it is a truth of itself formulated and held within its own substance and consciousness. Idea and reality are not separate for it: they are a single consciousness and a single substance: knowledge here consists of "Real-Idea".

And, we should add, the Supermind's will, unlike the mind's, is automatically self-effectuating: what is seen by the Supermind as a truth to be actualised is instantly made actual because the vision of the thing to be done and the will to do it are not rent asunder and do not have to be brought into a sort of fallible liaison as is the case with mind: they are a single movement of sovereign creativity and indeed it is on account of their being such that all supramental knowledge is not separated into idea and reality, the conceived and the existent.

Further, the supramental will's automatic self-effectuation ensures perfect bliss: frustration and unfulfilment have no place.

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Nor is the will of one being ever against the will of another, for the Supermind's eternal awareness of essentiality, infinity, unity, totality implies that there is no discord or strife. A spontaneous universal happy harmony which nothing can mar and which we with our mind as at present can never reproduce is the constant life on the plane of the Truth-Consciousness. Form, too, is flawless there, an artistry practised by eternal bliss with infinite consciousness in absolute substance.

If our mind were not cut off from Supermind, if it could connect with the supramental power, it would initiate in the most genuine sense a divine existence on earth and not be in its cognition the groper and stumbler or, at best, the totterer that it is. The Truth-Consciousnesss would be at work in mental terms. The mind would be no movement of darkness or of twilight but of Light. Then, even within all limits and measures, withholdings and gradualities, it would be unmixed with falsehood. However restrained in intensity and immensity its Light, it would still proceed from truth to truth - from small to less small truth instead of large to less large error or, at most, to truth mingled with error and thus superficialised and devitalised.

3

Here it is necessary to conceive clearly what Sri Aurobindo means in his last writings by mind's being not cut off from Supermind and becoming by connection with it the Mind of Light. For, being not cut off can be one of two things: either to be actual part of the supramental or to be like the graded ladder of world-being which Sri Aurobindo declares to be intervening between Supermind and mind as it functions in us. The rungs of this ladder he has designated in The Life Divine as those of Spiritual Mind, employing the epithet "spiritual" in a particular sense in distinction from "supramental". Downward from Supermind these gradations he labels as Overmind, Intuition,⁹

⁹. This is to be distinguished from the intuitive mind constituted by the mere intelligence functioning intuitively. The intuition, coated over with intellectual elements, that is sometimes ours is different from the Intuition proper that belongs to a level of Spiritual Mind.

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Illumined Mind,¹⁰ Higher Mind, - a series running from greater to less knowledge until it lapses into the labouriously learning ignorance distinguishing the mental grade on which human beings live at present. Most in Overmind but definitely in even Higher Mind the consciousness is linked with the supramental Gnosis, "devolved from it" and "dependent upon it". That linking secures on each rung of Spiritual Mind's ladder a play of Light.

To regard the Mind of Light as being created by a linking up of the human mental with the Supermind in the manner of Spiritual Mind's ladder is a misconception. But it may arise from certain passages in Sri Aurobindo if they are read in isolation instead of in continuity with all the rest on the subject. And associated with it there can be another misconception even more off the mark, which we should first dispose of. This misconception makes the Mind of Light the last rung of Spiritual Mind's ladder, an already existent plane on its own, in which that ladder continues at the end where Higher Mind is stationed, instead of breaking at this end and leaving the human mental a level of ignorance.

But the Mind of Light does seem a plane that is the lowest part of the luminous ladder above the human mental if we shut ourselves up in the following passage¹¹: "What we have called specifically the Mind of Light is indeed the last of a series of descending planes of consciousness in which the Supermind veils itself by a self-chosen limitation or modification of its self-manifesting activities, but its essential character remains the same... we have not yet crossed over the borders of the truth-conscious into ignorance.... We have passed into Mind but Mind has still not broken its inherent connection with the Supramental principle.... In the order of the evolutionary descent we stand in the Mind of Light on that border and a step downward can carry us beyond it into the beginnings of an ignorance which still bears on its face something of the luminosity that it is leaving behind.

¹⁰. This "Illumined Mind" does not stand for the same thing as "the free and illumined mind" we have mentioned earlier in connection with "true mind". The latter phrase is a synonym for "true mind" and does not connote a specific stage in the hierarchy of Spiritual Mind but is a general description of embodied mentality no longer obscured by Ignorance.

¹¹. SABCL Vol. 16, pp. 71-73.

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On the other hand, in the ascending order of the evolution we reach a transition in which we see the light, are turned towards it, reflect it in our consciousness and one further step carries us into the domain of the Light. The Truth becomes visible and audible to us and we are in immediate communication with its messages and illuminations and can grow into it and be made one with its substance. Thus there is a succession of ranges of consciousness which we can speak of as Mind but which belongs practically to the higher hemisphere although in their ontological station they are within the domain of the lower hemisphere."

What is forgotten, vis-à-vis this passage, is that Sri Aurobindo writes¹², a little later, of the manifestation of life and mind in the earth's history and of the Mind of Light as another development "in the series of the order of existence and as the last word of the lower hemisphere of being, the first word of the higher hemisphere" - that is, something which is not exclusively in either hemisphere already but forms between the two in the course of time a link of transition by which the human passes towards and fuses with the superhuman, a state in which the lower itself finds a culmination in Light and becomes a plane of knowledge like those of the higher hemisphere, a plane which preludes the realisation of the whole higher hemisphere in the human. It is when we look at this link after it has been formed, this state after it has got realised, that it stands as "the last of a series of descending planes of consciousness in which the Supermind veils itself by a self-chosen limitation or modification".¹³ It does not stand already existent but takes shape as a result of the Supermind's action upon the human mental: it is a conversion of ignorance into Light, making, as Sri Aurobindo says¹⁴, "human mentality an adjunct and a minor instrumentation of the supramental knowledge."

Sri Aurobindo also speaks ¹⁵ of "the pressure of the supermind creating from above out of itself the mind of Light" at a certain stage of earth's development and, although he frequently refers to the replacing of the human mental ignorance by the Mind of

12. Ibid.. p. 74.

13. SABCL Vol. 16, p. 71.,

14. Ibid., pp. 53-54.

15. Ibid., p. 67.

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Light, he nowhere alludes to the Mind of Light descending, as he does to Spiritual Mind descending or Supermind descending - an omission impossible if the Mind of Light were a pre-existent plane above the human mental instead of the "physical mind receiving the supramental light". Besides, if this Mind were a plane belonging to Spiritual Mind's ladder, Sri Aurobindo would certainly mention it in The Life Divine where he gives a detailed description of the various rungs. Of course, there are many things not mentioned in that book, but what is not mentioned is what was too high or too complex to be touched upon at the time the book was published. Surely, if Sri Aurobindo could mention high and complex things like Overmind and even Supermind, what sense could there be in refraining from mention of a plane which, according to the interpreters whom we are correcting, is below even Higher Mind?

However, we must admit that two definite suggestions could be received from the quoted passage. The first is: the Mind of Light, when it does take shape, is a creation of Supermind on the same principle as are the grades of Spiritual Mind, so that it seems to be not Supermind itself in the physical mentality but a newly arrived member of the family of Spiritual Mind. The second is: the Mind of Light gets its membership in this family pretty low in the scale, for it appears to be a state inferior to Higher Mind though still a state of knowledge and not of ignorance. At the moment we are concerned directly with the first and general suggestion. By tackling it correctly we shall also know how to catch hold of the second and particular suggestion by the right end. It may be said to get confirmed when Sri Aurobindo uses analogous language about the family in question and about the Mind of Light. About the family he writes ¹⁶: "We may say that there is a higher hemisphere of our being in which Mind luminous and aware of its workings still lives in the Light and can be seen as a subordinate power of the Supermind; it is still an agent of the Truth-Consciousness, a gnostic power that has not descended into the mental ignorance; it is capable of a mental gnosis that preserves its connection with the superior light and acts by its power. This is the character of Overmind in its own plane and of all the powers that are dependent on the

16. Ibid., p. 72.

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Overmind: the Supermind works there but at one remove as if in something that it has put forth from itself but which is no longer entirely itself but is still a delegate of the Truth and invested with its authority." The Mind of Light is similarly spoken of¹⁷ as "a subordinate action of Supermind, dependent upon it even when not apparently springing direct from it.... This too proceeds from the Supermind and depends upon it even though it is limited and subordinate."

Hence, even if the Mind of Light is not a pre-existent plane but stands as a luminous kingdom by a conversion of the physical mentality, it still gives the impression of being "spiritual" and not "supramental". The distinction is highly significant, for it is as between two typal orders, each with its own principle of world-organisation and is not meant to point only to different degrees of the Light of Gnosis. The very top of Spiritual Mind's ladder, Overmind, directly neighbours Supermind and receives the latter's action immediately and not distantly as do Intuition, Illumined Mind, Higher Mind and yet it is not merely a self-chosen limitation or modification of Supermind in the sense of restrained deployment of the Truth-Consciousness: it is a limitation or modification in the sense that, though there is no lapsing of the Truth-Consciousness, there is a change of characteristic poise in the deployment of knowledge. That is what is implied in Sri Aurobindo's saying at the same time that it is invested with Supermind's authority and that Supermind works in it at one remove as if in something not entirely itself. We shall soon see what is the change of characteristic poise. Here it is enough to note that it is there. So, the question whether the Mind of Light stands with Spiritual Mind or with Supermind is important and to dispel the misconception that Sri Aurobindo anywhere intends it to be classed with the former is as necessary as to dispel the misconception that it is a pre-existent plane.

The clue to right understanding lies in remembering just this latter misconception and realising that even the fitting on, as it were, of the Mind of Light to the ladder of Spiritual Mind is by conversion of the stuff of ignorance: the Mind of Light is not a level of knowledge naturally existing as a diminution of Higher

17. Ibid., pp. 70-71.

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Mind; it is a manifestation from above in the human mentality, a manifestation in which, to quote Sri Aurobindo's words¹⁸, "in-conscience, ignorance and error can claim no place". Can a state of this kind where a radical conversion has occurred be one of Spiritual Mind? Of course, Spiritual Mind can be a state of knowledge from the beginning, but here is a case of ignorance radically ceasing for the first time - an entirely different case. And what we have to decide is whether Spiritual Mind at even its highest can bring about such a state. For, if it can, it can itself be a state in which a condition of ignorance has radically ceased by its action.

In The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo has made it abundantly plain that the Overmind itself, the highest spiritual mental, cannot effect a radical ceasing of ignorance in the human mental. The reason for the Overmind's insufficiency is the peculiar posture of relation in it between the One and the Many. All the levels of world-being are a play of the Many and the One: the nature of each level is defined by the terms characteristic to it of this play. In the Supermind the One and the Many are balanced and integrated and, while the One does not annul or engulf the Many, the Many always cast back to the One and there is no such stress on them as might bring about the possibility of their running away from it and causing a genuine fissure between it and them as well as among themselves - the fissure which is the ignorance, the lack of Light, on our human mental plane. On the other hand, in the Overmind, though there is no ignorance yet and Light prevails, the ominous stress occurs: the Many are allowed to run to the utmost distance, so to speak, from the One without breaking their connection: the connection never fails but it is subdued, thrown into the background, functions only as an overall and general instead of immediate and prominent principle. No discord and still an infinity of divergences and counter-actions: extreme opposites and yet a holding of them together as finally fitting complementaries. The Self of selves is not abrogated, but a dangerous game of innumerably multiplied mutual exclusion is carried on. It is this that, as the Light grows less intense and immense in the downward gradation of Spiritual Mind, culminates in the fall from Higher Mind into the sharp

18. Ibid., p. 71.

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division felt between self and self, object and object, individual and universe, on the plane of our mentality. Given the Overmind, there is an inevitability of ignorance happening at some point in the series of worlds issuing from it below.

The presence of this inevitability proves that the Overmind has not the sovereign Truth which can transform all human parts and activities completely into divine ones: the Overmind does not hold the impeccable and all-harmonising Archetype of the evolutionary mind, life-force and matter that are our cosmos. The Supermind is the supreme Creator, and everything, including our cosmos of ignorance, is actualised by it freely, through Overmind and other planes, for the purpose of gradual self-discovery by the Divine under conditions commencing with the very opposite of all that is deific - blind brute matter in which neither life-force nor mind seems to exist, much less what is beyond mind, but which yet holds them involved for evolutionary emergence by their own nisus from below and by a pressure from above of planes where their principles stand in typal manifestation, uninvolved. Yes, Supermind is the supreme Creator, and in its own plane it keeps the divine original of everything: ignorance does not come out of it anywhere in the world-series as an inevitability but as a mode of its infinite freedom founded in the perfection its plane manifests through the balance and integration of the One and the Many: its plane alone is free enough and perfect enough to fulfill evolutionary mind, life-force and matter by converting the progressive Lightward straining of darkness and dusk into a process of ever-unfolding Light.

Hence only the Supermind can create the radical change marked by the Mind of Light in the stuff of ignorance resulting from a breaking of the luminous ladder. No grade of Spiritual Mind can repair that break. So, the Mind of Light, however restrained its movement from truth to truth, no matter if seeming to be connected at many removes with Supermind, is really an expression of the supramental power operating in persona propria and not, as in Spiritual Mind, with a change of characteristic poise in the deployment of knowledge. It is itself Supermind creative in the field of terrestrial evolution and operating in human mind-terms.

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4

All this we must keep in focus if we are to arrive at a proper comparison between the Mind of Light and the grades of Spiritual Mind, unembodied or in embodiment. Without it we shall stop short with regarding the Mind of Light as just an added last rung to the luminous ladder and as inferior even to Higher Mind. The paradox would persist: how can a creation by Supermind of itself in the embodied mentality be inferior to a plane which, for all its lack of ignorance, is still pretty far from Supermind? Now we are led to see that the Mind of Light, holding as it does a principle superior to all Spiritual Mind, may have - nay, must have - several forms in the field of terrestrial evolution where it manifests. If at any stage it looks inferior to Higher Mind, it is something that can develop beyond it. Within its very initial form it contains, hidden like a miniature sun, the whole Supermind which escapes all Spiritual Mind and which the vastness of Overmind itself cannot comprise. What appears inferior in Light to even Higher Mind is the first peep of an effulgence before which the Overmind lustres pale.

By this fact it differs also from and in a certain sense surpasses all states of the human mental into which Spiritual Mind has descended. Evidently when the grades of Spiritual Mind descend into the human mental they introduce qualities which in themselves exceed the actual quality the Mind of Light manifests in its initial form. But while these grades in their undescended poise are free from ignorance they do not completely keep their freedom when under their own power they get embodied in the human mental. If they cannot create in the human mental a continuation downward of the luminous ladder, much less can they thoroughly assimilate it so as to acquire entire embodiment of their typical glories. It is because not even Overmind can affect radically the stuff of ignorance that no continuation can be brought about by it; and if Overmind is impotent in the task of continuation how can it be potent in a much greater task - namely, entire assimilation of this stuff? An entire assimilation would imply the absence of ignorance in the human mental as on the plane of Overmind, an absence far intenser and immenser than when the human mental might be rendered a diminished continuation of Higher Mind! The inevitability of

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ance concretising at some point in the series of planes issuing downward from Overmind incapacitates the latter for not only repairing the break in the luminous ladder but also, a fortiori, totally assimilating the human mental and converting it into a mode of its own intensity and immensity. The change effected can be very extraordinary but it is never dynamically absolute: the stuff of ignorance hampers and dilutes to a larger or smaller degree the descended Light of even the top of Spiritual Mind.

In contrast, the initial form of the Mind of Light, for all its apparent inferiority to Higher Mind, has still not an iota of ignorance. The Light is less intense and immense in actual outburst, but it is perfectly clear. The mass-ideation of Higher Mind, the far-ranging colourful vision-glow of Illumined Mind, the piercing intimate ubiquitous lightning-seizures of Intuition, the resplendent multitudinous catholicity and globality of Overmind may import into the human mental on their descent into it a certain richness as well as swiftness which the initially realised Mind of Light does not exhibit; yet, while the richness and swiftness will not always work in utter purity everywhere since they are still working on an unabolished though subdued ground of ignorance, the Mind of Light from the very start is utterly pure in whatever restrained quality of knowledge it exhibits.

But here the query which must have occurred to the reader at several points in our discussion arises inevitably: How is it that Supermind which is the acme of richness and swiftness of Light creates, on its descent, a state which has in any respect a quality of knowledge more restrained than that of embodied Spiritual Mind? We should expect this state to be not only devoid of ignorance in a radical way: we should expect it also to be superior in every respect to what Spiritual Mind could do by embodiment. Why, then, inferiority on any score at all? Inferiority on any score can come only if somehow, previous to the creation of the Mind of Light, Spiritual Mind has not descended into the human mental and got established there to the extent possible to it under its own power. But can such an "anomaly" ever happen? Unless Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind have been realised in descent and have functioned on the level of the physical mentality, can the Mind of Light which is a result of Supermind's descent be created in the body?

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The answer is at once Yes and No. For, we have to draw a line between the Mind of Light forming at a highly advanced stage in the course of the Aurobindonian Yoga and the same essential power manifesting afterwards in humanity in general as an effect of this formation or in those who have not gone far in that Yoga. The one presupposes in the individual a whole history of spiritual realisations and it climaxes a long series of descents and it preludes the descent of the Supermind into bodily life-force and bodily matter. The other is a condition of various sorts. Broadly, it is that produced in people not yet ready for embodying the supramental Gnosis but sufficiently responsive to change radically from mere mind under the sovereign pressure of a Supermind descended on a large scale through the Aurobindonian Yoga into the occult atmosphere, so to speak, of earth's being. In the long run it could be in mankind a condition even from birth as mere mind is today and that would be most in line with what is generally meant by evolutionary achievement. In many cases the condition will be of those who, though responsive to the supramental Gnosis, have not had any substantial commerce with Spiritual Mind's gradation and into whom therefore there cannot have been a previous descent of Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition or Overmind. But this condition will be precisely what facilitates substantial commerce by rendering it natural. And, through that commerce, one who lives in this Mind of Light will be by right effort able to climb towards and into Supermind as well as call it down. But neither the substantial commerce with Spiritual Mind nor the dealings with the supramental Gnosis will everywhere be present. While in a number of human beings they will both be present, in others Spiritual Mind alone will be more or less freely contacted and in still others no free contact with even Spiritual Mind and so none with Supermind either will be there. From the first group recruits will be drawn for the expansion of the gnostic race whose nucleus we may expect to take shape out of those who are living in the Aurobindonian Yoga. The remaining two groups will be stages between this race and whatever of the human species with mind, as we ordinarily observe it, may persist for a shorter or longer time.

The Mind of Light, realised through Sri Aurobindo's sacrifice and set operating for gradual formation of the nucleus of the

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gnostic race, is the real subject of our essay. But mostly we have discussed what will manifest in the future in the world outside this nucleus or else in those who have not progressed much in the Aurobindonian Yoga - a wonderful gift to humanity from Sri Aurobindo by means of the realisation his sacrifice won for earth. And we must continue the discussion if we are to turn his writings to account in understanding that realisation.

5

We have already studied the initial form of the Mind of Light and the difference between it and the fullest creations possible of Spiritual Mind before Supermind has descended. The difference provides the clue to the forms the Mind of Light assumes in its farther development. We are here talking of forms developed by supramental descent. But we can also speak of the progression of the Mind of Light by ascent, what we have already mentioned as its climbing towards and into Supermind. Once shaped, the Mind of Light can first reflect accurately in its purified and exalted condition something of the overhead planes and then rise to the plateaus and peaks of Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind, Supermind. However, this rising will not be the same experience as that of the ordinary mentality making an ascent. For now they will be attained by something that is itself Supermind in mental terms and the experience of them will all be a progressive movement from the lowest to the highest note of Supermind's own gamut, as it were, rather than a conversion from the ordinary mental to the spiritual mental by a change of characteristic poise and again, by another such change, to the supramental. This new kind of ascent will be an accompaniment and a help to the greater descent, a descent not only into the physical mind but also into the physical vitality and the physical proper. As Sri Aurobindo puts it, "there would be a new mental being", "a liberated mind... aware of its affiliation to Supermind, a natural agent of Supermind and capable of bringing down the supramental influence into the lower reaches of being,... aspiring to release the secret divinity into self-finding and self-fulfilment and self-poise, aspiring towards the ascension to the divine consciousness, able to receive and bear the descent of the divine light and power,

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fitting itself to be a vessel of the divine Life."

It is the descent with which we are concerned in this essay and the further forms of the Mind of Light resulting from the descent have to be envisaged. Its initial form which seems a continuation, below Higher Mind, of the luminous ladder is the precursor of one in which the human mental acts as if it has been completely assimilated, step after step, by the Light of descended Spiritual Mind. The word "completely" is of capital importance. For, as we have noted, when Spiritual Mind descends under its own power assimilation does occur but is never complete. The presence of the Mind of Light in one indicates that the stuff of ignorance, in which no change can be dynamically absolute before Supermind has come on the scene, is not resistant in one any longer: the Supermind has come and ignorance has radically ceased. But now not only has a continuation of the luminous ladder been brought about; a possibility has also been introduced of the total assimilation by Spiritual Mind of the human mental. The thorough descent and embodiment, therefore, of all the grades of Spiritual Mind can happen now after Supermind has started taking a direct hand instead of playing on the human mental indirectly through those grades. Once the Mind of Light begins its reign Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind can found themselves securely and authentically on its supramental basis and reach their own perfection as embodied powers. When they do this, the Mind of Light assumes its second form. Repeating the name Sri Aurobindo gives to Spiritual Mind in its own undescended hierarchy as well as to the Mind of Light ascended there, we should call the Mind of Light in its second form in the body mental Gnosis as distinguished from the Gnosis proper which is Supermind.

Beyond mental Gnosis the Mind of Light manifests, in complete assimilation of the human mental, the Gnosis proper and assumes its third and sovereign form. But what the two kinds of Gnosis are in the hierarchy above the human mental is not what they are here. There they are separate though connected levels, each a cosmos with its own type and function: here the one is merely the other partially unfolded. For, the Mind of Light is not anywhere anything else than the Supermind in progressive manifestation in embodied nature. As we have observed, its very inception signalises that the Supermind is acting directly and is

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in immediate presence on the level of the physical mentality. But in its initial and middle forms the directness and the immediacy are, in different measures, restrained: the third form employs them freely. The supreme divinity which releases a little of its magnificence under the form of an apparent continuation at the lower end of Spiritual Mind's gradation and then "an ampler ether, a diviner air" in the form of wholly descended mental Gnosis, is utterly laid open - a towering apocalypse in the terms of the human mental - by the third form the Mind of Light takes.

"In the terms of the human mental" - the phrase is important for grasping what, in Sri Aurobindo's eyes, the Mind of Light ultimately manifests. The Mind of Light is not only Supermind descended into and divinising the physical mentality: it is also the manifestation of that which is the counterpart in Supermind of this mentality's terms. The counterpart, whose apocalypse is the third form of the Mind of Light, must be a power which is not all "supra" but is in some sense "mental": otherwise no mind, whether of Light or of twilight, can result and Spiritual Mind also will lack foundation in the Supreme. We shall understand what that power is if we remember that, according to The Life Divine, the Supermind has a triple status or a three-stranded unity. The first strand is closest to the unitarian Consciousness in which the One contains the Many indiscernibly in an unmanifest potentiality beyond space and time. The Supermind brings the Many forth into manifestation, sets them in an archetypal space and time which are extensions of Consciousness. But in its first strand it is a multitudinous yet equable self-distribution, a vast Identity infinitely repeated. Though the multiple is indeed present the single stands out: here All are not lost in the One, but All are indefeasibly the One. This is a Consciousness constituting, pervading and comprehending everything. The second strand is a Consciousness that apprehends no less than comprehends. In its own vast unity of multiplicity it creates distinguishable centres and from these centres views everything else, yet everything is known by each centre to be essentially itself: the multiple stands out as an infinite repetition of Identity. All are not indefeasibly the One, they are distinct, but still they are in the One. The third strand is a further development of the apprehending Consciousness. Each centre knows itself as other

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than the rest, and on the basis of an innumerable otherness the Many weave themselves into the One: difference has been added to distinction, and the multiple stands out not as an infinite repetition but as an infinite variation or diversity of the One. All are not in the One so much as the One is in All, concentrating itself in each and following the movement of that particular in pragmatic separation from, and independence of, the remaining particulars and from the totality containing that particular and these. However, the knowledge is never overclouded that what is concentrated in each separately and independently for pragmatic purposes is the Identical and through that knowledge there is an act of union simultaneously with the fact of division and difference.

Clearly, in the apprehending Consciousness of the Supermind we have, remotely, the beginning of a movement like that of the human mental. And in the further development of it that is the third strand this movement is in full form and could be the high-uplifted parent of our fallen mentality with a recognisable family-likeness, except for the saving grace of a simultaneous reverse side to it which balances the characteristic mind-turn of standing back in divided different centres and apprehending from them. The further development kins the apprehending movement more closely to Spiritual Mind where there is also a species of reverse side. On all the planes of Spiritual Mind the One is not lost in the Many and there is thus no play of darkness as in the human mental: in that respect no less than in respect of increase in the projecting and confronting Consciousness, the dissimilarity between Supermind and Spiritual Mind is of no more than degree. Overmind exhibits this dissimilarity attenuated to the utmost and is thereby entitled to be regarded in general as a delegated Supermind and in particular as the delegate of the Supermind's third strand.

But we have already seen how the Overmind's stress on the Many renders ignorance ultimately inevitable and the radical conversion of ignorance to Light a feat beyond this delegated Supermind. In view of that stress we have to consider the dissimilarity between the supramental and its delegate as of kind in a certain undeniable sense, and not just of degree. It obliges us to pass beyond merely terming the Supermind's third strand a sort of Spiritual Mind which overtops the hitherto-mentioned top of the luminous ladder.

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The right name for it, as much "supra" as "mental"', and hitting off precisely the nature of what in the Supermind creates the Mind of Light and is fully active in this Mind's third form, is found in The Life Divine. There Sri Aurobindo writes that the last of the three strands of Supermind may be called "Divine Mind". For, this Mind carries in itself a perfect corrective to the extreme developed in it of the apprehending Consciousness and is by virtue of that corrective saved from becoming not only like the human mental but also like the spiritual mental whose gradation prepares in luminousness our obscurity. Here are absent both the twilight of our mind of ignorance fumbling towards knowledge and the Light of Spiritual Mind lessening gradually towards ignorance. Here is Mind with a secure and undiminishable radiance. Mind not simply unsundered from the supramental or a subordinate action of it but itself an inherent mode of it by which measuring and delimiting are freely done and relations freely fixed - operations necessary for creating any cosmos - without the least ignorant obscuration or even the smallest possibility of being the parent of ignorance. Here is the original face of the Truth reproduced on earth by the Mind of Light at its highest and in its full orb.

Thus the designation coined by Sri Aurobindo is seen to cover several phases of one and the same supramental reality in process of embodiment. We may sum up in words culled from his own last writings. When "untransformed mind or human mind burdened with its hampering disabilities" recovers, as a result of Supermind's "descent into the human world", its true character which is that of "a principle of Light and a power of Light or a force for Knowledge specialised in its action for a subordinate purpose", namely "the work of differentiation... in the Supermind itself" and "in all its creation" - when mind is made to outgrow its defects and discover that some of the "characteristics which we conceive to be the very signs of its nature... belong to Supermind also and the difference is in the way and scope of their action, not in the stuff or in their principle", then it will manifest, roughly, a threefold progression. "At its highest it might pass out of its limitations into the supramental truth and become part and function of the supramental knowledge or at the least serve for a minor work of differentiation in the consensus of that knowledge: in the lower

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degree below Supermind it might be a mental gnosis, a spiritual or spiritualised perception, feeling, activity, sense which could do the works of knowledge and not of ignorance. Even at a still lower level it could be an increasingly luminous passage leading from light to light, from truth to truth and no longer a circling in the mazes of half-truth and half-nescience."¹⁹

We may figure in greater detail the phases of the Mind of Light in terms of moon-phases. But these terms must be differentiated from those that would characterise a vision by us of the partial levels of Spiritual Mind rising into the roundness of the Divine Mind. In such a vision we might say there would be growth of Light from silver to more ample silver until we passed the Overmind, an argent disc almost whole and striking one as actually whole unless one has a sharp sense of the plenary. The full moon itself would be Divine Mind, but it would be a mass of perfection white only at first sight when the dissimilarity of merely degree and not of kind between the spiritual mental and the supramental is glimpsed. As soon as the latter is discerned, the silver is felt to become gold, the full moon shows itself as a sun white-seeming in its immediate front before the aureate depths are found shining out.

The phases of the Mind of Light would be of a moon golden from the very start or, rather, of a sun behaving like a moon because Divine Mind is viewed not in its original inherence in Supermind as the third strand of the latter's triple status but in its manifestation in an evolving scheme on earth, in which there is a stage-by-stage expression of the supramental epiphany. The phases of this sun-moon stand for successive states of Supermind's embodiment. Nowhere is any dissimilarity of kind, everywhere is dissimilarity of nothing more than degree. Even when the grades of Spiritual Mind are symbolised, it is neither in their own statuses above mind nor in their descents into mind under their own power which never radically alters the ignorance of the human mental. They are symbolised in their descended condition as brought about by a direct action of Supermind. And when the Supermind acts directly, the preliminary to their descended condition as brought about by it is the Mind of Light in its initial form. Thus, in terms of phases of a

19. SABCL Vol. 16, p. 55.

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sun-moon, the human mind re-created as a somewhat diminished continuation of Higher Mind will be the crescent, a thin bright curve with upward-pointing arms within which the rest of the sun-moon's rondure is faintly visible, a rim of Light which is not really severed from the solar-lunar globe but only put forth for a certain purpose and play as the apparent edge of a secret splendour. Higher Mind - as the entire establishment, on the physical mentality's level, of further reaches of this splendour - will be a brighter disclosure en route to a semi-circular revelation, the half sun-moon which will be Illumined Mind in a state in which the human mental has been utterly assimilated by it. Beyond this, where the gibbous or three-quarter stage is reached, will be the phase of Intuition wholly established in incarnate mind. Much past the gibbous and close to the complete circle, leaving just a crescent-thread unencompassed by its glow, will be Overmind similarly established. The sun-moon in its rounded plenitude will be Divine Mind descended in full into the physical mentality.

Looking at these phases we have now to ask: What phase was realised when Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body? It cannot be any except the last. The first phase of the sun-moon development we have figured can apply only to a case in which none of the grades of Spiritual Mind have come down and yet an initial supramental state has been created in consequence sooner or later of Sri Aurobindo's holocaust to kindle heaven upon earth. All the other phases, short of the last, apply to various cases in which one or more of the grades have already come down and the grace of the holocaust catches them to convert what was a considerable enlightenment of ignorance into limited disclosures of Supermind in which, though ignorance could never be, knowledge does not integrally out-flower. But when all the grades have already come down and, though in the absence of Supermind's descent no Mind of Light as such has been created, the human mental has been packed with more and more Light until the utmost that Overmind descended under its own power can do has been effulgently consummated, then the next step which is the coming down of Supermind can only be the precipitation of the integral knowledge in the shape of Supermind's third strand into that utmost: in other words, Divine Mind makes its appearance, secures embodiment, perfects

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the descent of Overmind, acts for a time partly through an Overmind which is no longer its delegate at a remove but rather its own direct though apparently modified projection and partly through an open dynamic of itself, and then the whole action becomes openly supramental. Logically, too, nothing less than Supermind's third strand would manifest when Supermind for the first time got embodied and established a centre in the human mental; for, nothing supramental can come down for the first time unless Overmind has effected a descent and after Overmind's descent what else save Divine Mind can manifest? Anything lower in supramental quality would lack the element of richness and swiftness that Overmind's descent, no matter if incomplete, imports on a huge scale into the human mental: something richer and swifter could be the sole sequel to that importation.

Yes, the Mind of Light at its supreme and in its absolute orb, is what was realised in descent into earth's being in December, 1950. This does not mean that merely the third strand of the Supermind descended into the physical mentality. Supermind is one whole, taking three simultaneous poises, and the descent which gave birth to the Mind of Light in its full orb brought the progressively unfolding action of the whole. What that Mind did was just to throw into frontal relief the third strand while not excluding either the second of which the third is an extreme extension or the first whose modification is the second. This frontal relief is natural in all supramental embodiment - not only bodily mind but also bodily life and bodily matter must show it, the latter pair even more since they represent further stages of the differentiation, the fragmentation beginning with mind. Supermind's third strand we have called the divine counterpart or archetype of our mentality, but really it archetypes vitality and matter as well. We give prominence to the mind-aspect because the work of conscious demarcation and differentiation to which we refer is most like the activity in us of mind. Actually, the process of delimitation within the gnostic Vast is, in Sri Aurobindo's words,²⁰ "a process by which the ever dividing and reuniting consciousness of Mind, the ever divergent and convergent action of Life and the infinitely divided and

20. SABCL Vol. 18, p. 164.

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self-aggregating substance of Matter come, all by one principle and original act, into phenomenal being." According to him, when Supermind cosmicises its own Truth and fixes many centres or standpoints by deploying the measuring and defining power that archetypes mind, then archetypal life and matter immediately follow; for life is simply the determination of force and action, of relation and interaction of energy from many fixed centres of consciousness, while matter is nothing else than the substance that provides for the determination of form at each centre, form without which the cosmic interaction would not be possible.

Yes, the third strand would be in frontal relief everywhere - yet, as we have said, with the two others precluded in no way. In fact, we may surmise that their dynamism would be more and more drawn upon as the descent passes from bodily mind to bodily vitality and bodily matter, for it will meet with increasing atomisation and separative concentration. The third strand, in which the One is in All, may be considered sufficient in general to transform mind which is the least obscure of the lower trinity and therefore needs the least divine puissance for its fulfilment. Life-force, with its larger obscurity, requires a more effective Truth-energy to divinise it: the second strand of the Supermind, in which All are in the One, is perhaps its principal transformer. Where obscurity has touched the nadir, the zenith must be called for: against the infinitesimally fragmented and unconscious nature of matter the first strand, in which All are the One and a vast Identity equably constitutes and pervades and comprehends everything and no multiplicity stands out at all, is likely to be the main Godhead that delivers.

On the other hand, since mind is the least obscure member of the lower trinity and has a quicker and larger turn towards essentiality, infinity, unity, totality than its associates, the second and first strands of the Supermind will always be more easily and perceptibly expressed in it. Though the third strand will be in frontal relief, the second and the first will constantly keep projecting their colour, so to speak, and we shall have the most vivid evidence possible of the fact that Supermind is one whole and, whatever the manner in which it acts, it acts with all of itself.

Thus the realisation in December, 1950, was an invasion of a part of the physical being by Supermind in its entirety - and,

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through that part's organic relation with the rest, the spearhead of an invasion of the entire physical being. It started the bodily nucleus of the supramental race and also laid the foundation of all that future play of the Mind of Light in a race not yet supramental, whose broad picture Sri Aurobindo's last writings provide. The marvellous kingdom on earth of the Gnosis proper has begun. The integral epiphany prophesied in Savitri ²¹ Book XI Canto 1 is on way to fulfilment:

The mind of earth shall be a home of light,

The life of earth a tree growing towards heaven,

The body of earth a tabernacle of God.

6

With the direct action initiated in our midst of embodied Supermind, we may well inquire by what extraordinary signs its operative presence is accompanied. Among those that can be objectively gauged we may mention at least four. First, the most general, a many-sidedness of spiritual action: one single outflow of Yogic energy produces a far-flung network of vibrant victorious consequences. An inter-connectedness, subtle yet keenly living, is to a considerable extent rendered evident between persons or fields or events very much remote and detached even though within more or less the same province. Often it becomes necessary to lay a creative stress on just one spot, so to speak, in order to touch through it various other spots not only in the individual but also in the group and put them all in a unison of progress. Something of the essential integrality of the Supermind's manifold comprehensiveness is seen in this achievement of maximum diverse result with a minimum expense of force, at times no more than a casual word, gesture or look. It is as though some intrinsic automatism or spontaneity of Truth-development in disparate centres were appreciably awakened.

A second supramental sign is an almost incredibly swift, a well-nigh irresistible influence on not only mental movements and vital turns but certain bodily processes. Many things accounted impossible by medical science get accomplished. And these "miracles" differ from the results of occult-spiritual practice such

21. SABCL Vol. 29, p. 699.

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as many Yogis are capable of. In that practice a force from beyond the physical plane is brought to bear upon bodily ailments like, to a considerable extent, a foreign agency subduing defects and lapses felt to be natural to the body. The occult-spiritual "miracles" are, in the last resort, superimposed. The astonishing effects of the supramental Will are at the same time from above the stuff of body and from entirely within it. The irreducible minimum of imperfection, which even the Overmind admits in matter, as to a less degree also in life-force and mind, because the Overmind is not the ultimate Creator and Archetype, is not there for this Will: hence the miraculous operation has no foreignness about it. Everything corporeal may not be miraculously reached by the Supermind radically converting the physical mentality, but the genuine Omnipotence is at last at work here from even the earth-level, however self-restrained in several ways this Omnipotence may be in order to conform to its own laws of a manifestation that blends the evolutionary with the revolutionary. And inasmuch as this Omnipotence, being of the ultimate archetypal creativity, is one substance with matter so that matter may be looked upon as itself omnipotent in its hidden nature and destined to reveal its consubstantiality with Supermind, the supramental Will's miracles in the body are as if with roots there and seem to grow out of matter itself on contact between the supramental and the material. There is no superimposition anywhere, no forcible subduing of the body's so-called natural defects and lapses: rather, whatever defects and lapses are common to the body are here like temporary provisional states in the history of an unfolding intrinsic perfection: a concealed perfection and not any irreducible minimum of the imperfect is active as the body's natural quality, and so a response is felt in the body like the secret co-operation, from one end, of the same Will that is openly exercising its omnipotence from the other. This kind of work in the body, from beyond and yet from completely inside, is exclusive to Supermind, for Supermind alone can solve radically the riddle of obscurity set by the Sphinx of matter.

A third sign of Supermind's working from a physical centre is a unifying sweep through which persons touched by or attracted towards spirituality and Yoga are rapidly and triumphantly caught up into them. Obstructions of long standing in the outer

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self, obstructions that were adamantine as if they had been part and parcel of our embodied make-up, get broken at a stroke. Though some momentum from the past may keep a ghost of the old unregenerate nature going for a while, nothing appears to have the strength to stand against the invasion of the finite and the divided by the Infinite and the divinely One. The vast inalienable unity-in-multiplicity of the Truth-Consciousness seems to send forth a fiat which is automatically self-fulfilling. And, not seldom, on the individual who is gathered into the divine harmony this fiat works as if some supreme decree or decision were flamingly fixed in a Spirit-space above the brain: a Will not his own though mysteriously reflected in his volition is almost palpably master of his destiny and gives him peace and illumination and happy certainty of spiritual realisation, even in spite of himself! The imperious Grace from "overhead" is typically the Supermind's largesse. The converse of this integrating of sincere yet in some respects hopelessly weak souls into the scheme of the new Truth-world in the making is, of course, the throwing out with a vehement definitiveness of those who, though carrying on some sort of Yoga, lack central sincerity. The hour of final choice strikes with a two-way effect, for the Truth-Consciousness entering earth's being and setting each one's human self into connection with the Truth-counterpart of it beyond does not as a rule tarry or compromise long in its dealings with practitioners of Yoga.

A fourth sign of the supramental descent into the physical mind is the repeated flow of mercy and power in extremities. People in their last gasp of inner struggle and on the black verge of total failure, people in a practically irredeemable situation of soul and about to sink into helpless despair, people overwhelmed by even material misfortunes that look mountainous are suddenly aided, uplifted and carried over to safety and at times to the very opposite of their state. The only condition laid down for this salvation is that a modicum somewhere of tenacity and faith should aspire, however blindly, to the Divine. This salvation is illustrative of the Supermind's power to deliver the Light or Truth from the deepest darkness or falsehood, its capacity to turn the very Inconscient on which our universe is to all appearances based into a mould for the Superconscient which is the real secret support of the universal evolution, its omnipotent

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ability to manifest "one entire and perfect chrysolite" out of a maximum wreck of glittering dreams. Perhaps such power is, from a general point of view, the most important sign of the supramental Presence: a civilisation in crisis needs it acutely. And in recognition indeed of its importance now and in the future and as also a reminder that the apparently extreme tragedy of Sri Aurobindo's passing from the material scene is in fact the most glorious triumph of his life-mission to bring the Supermind here bodily amongst us, the Mother gave on the first of January this year her message to the world which is as much Sri Aurobindo's message: "Lord, Thou hast told us: Do not give way, hold tight. It is when everything seems lost that all is saved."²²

1953

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