Beyond Man

Chapter Nineteen: Twelve Quiet Days

I do not believe in the limit that cannot be exceeded.¹

— The Mother

Since the beginning of the earth, wherever and whenever there was the possibility of manifesting a ray of the Consciousness, I was there.²

— The Mother

Sri Aurobindo’s sudden corporeal absence meant an enormous blow to the Mother, ‘a sledgehammer blow,’ as she said afterwards, ‘an annihilation’. ‘The very idea that Sri Aurobindo might leave his body, that that particular way of being might no longer exist for the body, was absolutely unthinkable. They had to put him in a box and put the box in the Samadhi⁹¹ for the body to be convinced that it had really happened … Nothing, nothing, no words can describe what a collapse it was for the body when Sri Aurobindo left.’³ By ‘the body’ she meant her body: that the blow had been so crushing for her body — for in the higher parts of her being such a reaction was impossible. So intimate was the presence of the One Consciousness in the two bodies that the departure of the one had almost made the other follow automatically; this gives us a deep insight in their true relation of divine Unity and Love.

‘You see, he had decided to go. But he didn’t want me to know that he was doing it deliberately; he knew that if for a single moment I knew he was doing it deliberately, I would have reacted with such violence that he would not have been able to leave! And he did this … he bore it all as if it were some unconsciousness, an ordinary illness, simply to keep me from knowing — and he left at the very moment he had to leave … And I couldn’t even imagine he was gone once he had gone, just there, in front of me — it seemed so far away … And then afterwards, when he came out of his body and entered into mine, I understood it all … It’s fantastic. Fantastic. It’s … it’s absolutely superhuman. There’s not one human being capable of doing such a thing. And what … what a mastery of his body — absolute, absolute!’⁴ As long as she stayed in the room, he could not leave his body ‘and that was very painful to him.’ She then had left the room saying to Sanyal: ‘Call me when it is time.’

‘I had already had all my experiences, but with Sri Aurobindo, during the thirty years I lived with him (a little more than thirty years), I lived in an absoluteness, an absoluteness of security — a sense of total security, even physical, even the most material security. A sense of absolute security because Sri Aurobindo was there … Not for one minute in those thirty years did that leave me. That was why I could do my work with a Base, really, a Base of absoluteness — of eternity and absoluteness. I realized it when he left: that suddenly collapsed … The whole time Sri Aurobindo was here … individual progress was automatic: all the progress Sri Aurobindo made, I made. But I was in a state of eternity, of absoluteness, with a feeling of such security in every circumstance. Nothing, nothing unfortunate could happen, for he was there. So when he left, all at once … a fall into an abyss.’⁵

She then had applied her occult powers and closed an inner door, the door of her psychic being which was the seat of the Love that otherwise would have pulled her away. ‘When he went out of his body and entered into mine (the most material part of him, the part involved with external things) and I understood that I had the entire responsibility for all the work and for the sadhana — well, then I locked a part of me away, a deep psychic part that was living, beyond all responsibility, in the ecstasy of the realisation: the Supreme. I took it and locked it away, I sealed it off and said: “You’re not moving until all the rest is ready” … That in itself was a miracle. If I hadn’t done it I would have followed him — and there would have been no one to do the Work. I would have followed him automatically, without even thinking about it. But when he entered into me, he said: “You will do the work. One of us has to go and I am going, but you will do the work.”’⁶ She opened that door only ten years later, and even then with great caution.

All activities in the Ashram were stopped for a period of twelve days. What went on inside the Mother in the first days of that period is not documented anywhere. She will probably have been in a continuous state of inner concentration and consultation, for the question was whether the Work should be continued by her alone and whether the Ashram as an institution should remain in existence. ‘After Sri Aurobindo’s passing, it was feared in some quarters that the Ashram would collapse, at least decline,’⁷ writes Nirodbaran. The Mother, ‘in some quarters’, apparently was still a French lady whose relation with the Divine and the Supramental never could be as authentic as that of an Indian … But be that as it may, one can only scrutinize oneself and ask how one would have reacted in such unforeseen and dramatic circumstances.

Although the Mother let the period of twelve days run its full course, for herself everything was decided and determined in the first three days. Sri Aurobindo had physically entered into her with all the supramental force he had accumulated in his cells. She now was MOTHERSRIAUROBINDO⁹² and in the coming years she would often tell bow intimately both their personalities had melted into each other and how concretely Sri Aurobindo was present in her. She had undoubtedly seen the full scope of Sri Aurobindo’s masterly spiritual manoeuvre, as well as of the task which rested now completely on her shoulders in so far as the physical sadhana on Earth was concerned. She must also have seen that his voluntary confrontation with death, however unexpected in the development of the Work, had been the right action to accelerate that Work in order to make it achievable within the time of the bodily terrestrial presence of the Avatar. And it must have been clear to her that her body, already prepared for its superhuman task in her mother’s womb, was better suited than Sri Aurobindo’s to endure the first and critical phases of the supramental transformation.

All developments and experiences in Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana preceding the Arya can be regarded as a preparation for the great Work, without in the least disparaging their importance. The same goes for the sadhana of the Mother which, as confirmed by Sri Aurobindo himself, had followed of necessity an identical line and goal as his, as both were one and the same Avatar of the Supermind. From the Arya onwards their Work, which received its definitive seal at the time of their second meeting in 1920, was like a mighty river in the landscape of Matter — a river that would branch out into a broadening delta of increasing supramental Force in the earth-atmosphere, and that finally would flow into the ocean of the supramental Presence in the living mother-body of our symbolical planet. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, being the double-poled supramental Avatar, have ‘seen’ this river and its destination from the beginning of their integral yoga; they have all along had a profound knowledge of it, but its bed had to be scoured, delved and hewn in the stony terrain of Matter (this was their sadhana) — an effort doomed to failure according to all who had thought of it or even tried it in former times.

Their elaboration of this effort was at the same time an arduous and heroic journey of discovery. We, who have now been observing this journey for quite some time, have been able to ascertain how right Sri Aurobindo’s foresight has been on most points of importance, even in his first major writings. But we also have met with new discoveries on the way, with some surprises and difficulties which put everything that went before in a new light.

Several learned commentators have concocted a fixed system from Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and yoga, and such systems have been expounded in a number of books. It is seldom admitted that Sri Aurobindo has nowhere proposed a yogic system or a fixed framework of his philosophy. The Arya was not intended to divulge a system but to explicate mentally his spiritual discoveries — discoveries which Sri Aurobindo considered important, fertile and even revolutionary enough to share with humanity. Sri Aurobindo’s first works contain errors, one of them being that, at that stage in his evolution, he still mistook the Overmind for the Supermind — one of the causes of some misconceptions about the significance of the Siddhi-day of 24 November 1926. They inevitably contain lacunae too, simply because his sadhana had not achieved in 1914 what it would in 1938 or 1950. Another noteworthy difference between the Arya and his later writings is that in the Arya he usually recommended to follow the yogic techniques of the Sankhya school, while later on Sri Aurobindo directs his disciples to anchor their yoga unconditionally in the presence, the force and the help of the Mother. (Question: ‘Is thinking of the Mother yoga?’ Sri Aurobindo: ‘Yes’.)

One might argue that, all the same, it should be possible to systematize Sri Aurobindo’s latest, most advanced realizations, but where are these to be found? About his yoga in the last years he has written only one text, which moreover he left incomplete, namely the chapter ‘The Supramental and the Yoga of Works,’ appended to The Synthesis of Yoga. The editor of this book writes the following in a biographical note: ‘The Synthesis of Yoga as a whole was never completed. Not only was the “Yoga of Self-Perfection” left unfinished, a proposed additional section was not begun. It also should be remembered that only the first part, “The Yoga of Divine Works,” was issued during Sri Aurobindo’s lifetime in a thoroughly revised form. The second and more especially the third and fourth parts must be considered as belonging to an earlier period.’

We have already drawn attention to the fact that among the most important documents in connection with Sri Aurobindo’s own yoga are his poems and Savitri, the epic in which he has said the most according to the ‘Mother. But how does one systematize that? Stronger still, has not Sri Aurobindo explicitly said that his disciples did not or could not understand what he was doing — just like the Mother would repeat time and again in later years? Those who want to take up the supramental yoga, he said, must first have reached its threshold, situated beyond the complete psychic and spiritual realizations, beyond the highest realizations of the traditional yogas. Once the aspirant has reached that far — and that is very far indeed — the process of the Supramental Yoga would as it were unfold itself automatically to the predestined soul under the direct guidance of the always present but now no longer veiled Most-Highest or Most-Intimate.

Suffice it to say that the sadhana of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother has been something completely different from the neatly outlined, watered-down system one finds in the treatises. Sri Aurobindo has, on rare occasions, spoken in a most reticent way about his avataric effort, but the Mother has left us more frequent and intimate glimpses of hers, especially in her conversations with Satprem, now published in the thirteen volumes (more than six thousand pages) of L’Agenda de Mère. Her experiences also provided essential information about the ‘virgin forest’ of the unknown in which Sri Aurobindo had ventured and put his scarce statements about himself against a background with some more relief and shades of colour. Let us also not forget that, though the course of the great river of their development had been mapped out from the beginning, the evolution of the sadhana of the double Avatar has to be seen as a genuine journey of discovery, maybe the riskiest and most adventurous of all time, full of the unexpected, the grandiose and the quasi-insignificant, of the dangerous, venomous and stubbornly malicious, of the agonizingly torturous and the unutterably ecstatic. One of their discoveries was ‘the Mind of Light.’

In his book The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo, K.D. Sethna has included an early essay of his on the Mind of Light in which he quotes the following words the Mother spoke to him: ‘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.’⁸ This needs some elucidation.

The Supermind is the divine Unity-Consciousness or Truth-Consciousness. (‘Supermind’ and ‘supramental’ are technical terms denoting a reality far surpassing our consciousness. Sri Aurobindo has often defined them in his writings.) In the view of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Earth is an evolutionary field in which the mental being we call human must be succeeded by a supramental being, just as man has been preceded by a whole series of inframental beings. Man is a transitional creature. For every material, terrestrial embodiment of a new evolutionary gradation, a direct intervention of the Divine in his creation is required. Such an embodiment — this time a complete, double-poled Avatar — were the Mother and Sri Aurobindo. To bring about the new evolutionary gradation, they had to go down all previous spiritual paths to the end and then advance Into the unknown. This was their Yoga, their sadhana: building the bridge between the present and the future.

In order to bring the supramental Unity-Consciousness upon Earth, in matter, they first had to realize it in their inner selves and afterwards gradually bring down what they had realized into the degrees of existence between the Supermind and Matter. We have seen that Sri Aurobindo had brought down the Supramental into his mental consciousness by 1920 (it might be a useful yogic exercise to try and imagine what these words mean) and how he stopped the publication of the Arya in January 1921 because the Supramental was descending in his vital being. The Mother, inwardly one with him, participated in his progress: ‘All progress Sri Aurobindo made, I made too.’ When the world of the cosmic forces in the person of the God Shri Krishna gave its assent for the new creation by agreeing to descend into terrestrial matter (the matter of Sri Aurobindo’s body), Sri Aurobindo withdrew into his apartment. His only aim from then onwards was to bring the Supramental into the lowest gradation of existence, into terrestrial matter that is, and to establish it permanently on the Earth. The result of such an establishment would be a new world-order, the Kingdom of God on Earth.

We have got some idea of the ‘Herculean labour’ (Sri Aurobindo’s term) which this demanded. To make the decisive step forward he literally had to go through the whole evolution, also in the Subconscient and Inconscient. For in the inseparable Unity of things every gradation and every unit of existence contains all other gradations and all other units in itself. The atom contains all other gradations of existence, which otherwise could not have evolved from it, while in its turn it is an already advanced evolutionary form emerged from the somber depths of the Subconscient and Inconscient.

The most obstinate resistance to the descent of the Supramental was shown by the mental gradation of matter, called the ‘mental physical’ in Sri Aurobindo’s terminology. How far the transformation of the mental-physical in his own body had progressed was demonstrated by the transmission of the supramental force it contained into the Mother’s body each time she came into the presence of Sri Aurobindo’s body after his ‘death’, and also by the ‘miraculous’ conservation of his body in a climate conducive to disintegration.

The supramental transformation of the mind of the body cells, of the matter of which the body consists, was called ‘the Mind of Light’ by Sri Aurobindo — of the supramental Light that is the supramental Vibration. About this completely new phenomenon on Earth he has first written in a series of articles requested by the Mother for the Bulletin of Physical Education, the quarterly of the section of physical education in the school she had started. These articles, Sri Aurobindo’s last prose writings, appeared in the quarterly during 1949 and 1950, and were later published as a book with the title The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth.

‘What we have called specifically the Mind of Light’, Sri Aurobindo writes there, ‘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: there is in it [in the Mind of Light] an action of light, of truth, of knowledge in which inconscience, ignorance and error claim no place.’⁹ The Mind of Light is the undiminished, authentic, golden Unity-Consciousness, secretly present in the lower levels of the body: those of the mental consciousness of matter.⁹³ Sri Aurobindo had actualized the transformation of his body that far. But his was still an individual realization, clearly shown by the fact that it had to be transmitted to the Mother in order that she might carry on with the Work from the point reached by him.

K.D. Sethna rightly calls The Supramental Manifestation a sequel to The Life Divine. Though this series of articles leaves many questions unanswered, it is not only important for its presentation and definition of the Mind of Light, but also because there the transitory beings between man and superman are for the first time identified and discussed. For, as we know, at the end of the grand perspective Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had seen ‘superman’ standing, the being with the supramental Unity-Consciousness, the divine Man, the new species on the Earth. It was to make the transition from man to ‘superman’ possible that they had come. But in the course of their exploration they found that here too an unspecified number of transitory beings would materially give shape to the transition, just as happened in the previous transitions of evolution. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have always stressed that the new evolution was not a divine caprice but a development based on and in the line of already established processes, although this time on a much wider and more elevated scale.

The Mother therefore said in 1958: ‘It can with certainty be affirmed that there will be an intermediary being [she used the word specimen] between the mental and the supramental being, a kind of overman who still has the qualities and partially the nature of man, which means that he will still belong to the human species of animal origin by his most external form, but that he will transform his consciousness in a sufficient manner to belong, in his realization and in his activity, to a new race, a race of overmen. One may consider this species as transitory because it may be foreseen that it will discover the way in which to produce new beings without using the old animal method. And it will be these beings — who will be born in a really spiritual way — who will constitute the elements of the new race,⁹⁴ the overmental race.’¹⁰ This means that henceforth we will have to use the word ‘overman’ for the being which is procreated and born in the normal human way but which has acquired a supramental consciousness; the ‘supramental being’ is then the future, truly new species which has as yet no name and of which the procreation will no longer happen in the animal-human way. ‘From the new race [of intermediary beings] would be recruited the race of supramental beings who would appear as the leaders of the evolution in earth-nature.’¹¹ (Sri Aurobindo)

All of which means that on this Earth we may expect the presence of the following species simultaneously:

1. the animal-human, which will prolong the species to which we all belong: the half rational mental being possessing an individualized soul; although the term may sound pejorative, the animal-human is not the ‘naked ape’ of the scientific positivists: he is a forward, inward and upward looking transitory being;

2. the human-human, who will embody one or more spiritual gradations between the mental and the supramental consciousness; the human-human is a future being that will originate from the animal-human through the influence of the presence of the Supermind on Earth and that will be fully satisfied with its higher, complete humanness;

3. the overman, who will still be born from the sexual union of his progenitors, but who will be in possession of the Mind of Light which is a supramental consciousness, even when for the most part veiled; the overman is an intermediary being and will probably appear in many variants;

4. the supramental being, who will embody in the refined form of matter a being from the supramental worlds, materialized in a hitherto unknown way according to an occult procedure.

We may conclude that the word ‘superman’, as used in all texts of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother previous to The Supramental Manifestation, has from the time of the writing of this series of articles obtained a new meaning because of the developments in their Yoga. It is of course important to keep this in mind if one wants to understand correctly what the Mother has said, written and realized after 1950. In October 1956, for instance, she said: ‘One should not confound supramental transformation with the appearance of a new race,’¹² and two years later: ‘There will surely be an innumerable quantity of partial realizations,’¹³ just like in homo ergaster, habilis, erectus and all along in the australopitheci has been worked out homo sapiens.

The task taken on in 1950 by the Mother, then seventy-two years of age, with her enormous occult and spiritual capacities and now with the Mind of Light in her corporeal substance, was not the realization of material supramentality but of corporeal overmanhood as identified in this chapter. This is evident from statements like the one spoken by her on 10 May 1958, when she had accomplished that task. ‘I have told my body [in December 1950]: “You are going to realize that overmanhood intermediary between man and the supramental being,” this means what I call “overman” (le surhomme). And this is what I have been doing for the last eight years’¹⁴ — from the moment she had decided after Sri Aurobindo’s passing that she would continue the Work to keep her promise to him.