Overman

4: A First Sketch of Supermanhood

… From the new race would be recruited the race of supramental beings who would appear as the leaders of the evolution in earth-nature.¹

– Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s whole effort was focused on the descent of the Supermind into the earth-consciousness, the crucial and basic event that would found the future and that they wanted to effect as soon as possible. To that end Sri Aurobindo withdrew into his apartment after the “Siddhi Day” of 1926, never to leave it again. To that end the Mother, now in charge of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, worked tirelessly among the steadily growing number of disciples, in order to prepare humanity and the Earth they represented. In 1935 Sri Aurobindo announced, in his delightful correspondence with Nirodbaran, that he had good hope to bring “the supramental Whale” down soon.²

But the Hostiles were vigilant. When in 1938 Sri Aurobindo and the Mother seemed convinced that the Great Event would take place before the end of the year, Sri Aurobindo was the object of a direct attack and broke his thigh; the work towards the chief aim had to be interrupted. Then the Second World War erupted and needed all Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s attention and even their occult interventions to ensure that the descent would remain possible, that the anti-evolutionary forces would not carry the day and postpone the advent of the New World for centuries if not for millennia.

According to Sri Aurobindo the global situation remained critical after the war, even more dangerous than during the worldwide conflagration. Commenting on the war in Korea, Sri Aurobindo judged “the situation as grave as it can be”. He seems, moreover, to have been confronted with a central obstacle in the Inconscient. He wrote in 1947 that the Yoga had “come down against the bedrock of Inconscience.”³ From the same year are the following words: “At the present stage the progressive supramentalisation of the Overmind is the first immediate preoccupation and a second is the lightening of the heavy resistance of the Inconscient and the support it gives to human ignorance which is always the main obstacle in any attempt to change the world or even to change oneself.”⁴ One may remember the extracts in the preceding chapter of the account of his efforts contained in “A God’s Labour”. To those we add a few lines from Savitri:

Into the abysmal secrecy he came

Where darkness peers from her mattress, grey and nude,

And stood on the last locked subconscients floor

Where Being slept unconscious of its thoughts

And built the world not knowing what it built.

There waiting its hour the future lay unknown,

There is the record of the vanished stars.

There in the slumber of the cosmic Will

He saw the secret key of Nature’s change.⁵

Nobody knows what that secret key was, but taking possession of it was certainly a deed only the Avatar himself could accomplish by means of a unique yogic master-act: a conscious descent into that “abysmal secrecy” – into death itself. The Mother knew about the problem, of course, and proposed to deal with it herself. But Sri Aurobindo forbade her, saying that her body was better suited than his to bear the ordeal of transformation, of supramentalisation. Their Yoga being an adventure into the unknown, they could not foresee everything; but they had reached a point where the main lines of development had become perceptible to them.

Such was the situation in the last months of Sri Aurobindo’s life, when the Mother asked him to write a message for the Bulletin of Physical Education. She had founded a school during the war years, for many relatives of Ashramites, especially Bengalis, had descended on the Ashram in Pondicherry to seek shelter from the threatening Japanese. The children of those families had to be kept occupied – the serious inmates of the Ashram, concentrated on their tapasya, were far from happy with the children’s presence! But the Sri Aurobindo Ashram was after all to be “a world in miniature”, the fitting field for the work of transformation that was the aim of the Integral Yoga.

Sri Aurobindo, intensely occupied with completing Savitri (and with carrying out his avataric task on levels and in places of which we do not even have an inkling) did not write essayistic prose anymore, perhaps because for this kind of literary work his consciousness had to descend again to the ordinary human level. Besides, his eyesight had deteriorated and he had to dictate everything, poetry as well as prose, to Nirodbaran Talukdar, his amanuensis. But he could not refuse a request from the Mother. He dictated eight articles for the Bulletin between 30 December 1948 and the time he left his body, on 5 December 1950. The first article is the actual required message. Did he then write the other seven articles because he saw an opportunity or the necessity to make known a new development in the Integral Yoga? An editor of his Collected Works writes that “the series [of articles] was left unfinished”. It certainly gives that impression. Yet, the contents of the articles are of immense importance, especially at the present time. This is what we will try to demonstrate.

“A New Humanity”

“I take the opportunity of the publication of this issue of the ‘Bulletin d’Education Physique’ of the Ashram”, Sri Aurobindo began his message, “to give my blessings to the Journal and the Association – J.S.A.S.A. (Jeunesse Sportive de l’Ashram de Sri Aurobindo). In doing so I would like to dwell for a while on the deeper raison d’être of such Associations and especially the need and utility for the nation [i.e. the then newly independent India] of a widespread organisation of them and such sports or physical exercises as are practised here.”⁶ The Ashram not only represented, in miniature, the world, it also irradiated its attainments back into the world. This is an important fact without which the Mother’s work cannot be fully appreciated.

Sri Aurobindo continues: “In our own time these sports, games and athletics have assumed a place and command a general interest such as was seen only in earlier times in countries like Greece,⁷ where all sides of human activity were equally developed and the gymnasium, chariot-racing and other sports and athletics had the same importance on the physical side as on the mental side the Arts and poetry and the drama, and were especially stimulated and attended to by the civic authorities of the city state. It was Greece that made an institution of the Olympiad, and the recent re-establishment of the Olympiad as an international institution is a significant sign of the revival of the ancient spirit.”⁸

In his Twelve Years with Sri Aurobindo, Nirodbaran reminisces: “When the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education was launched, the Mother wanted to initiate it with an article from Sri Aurobindo. Some days passed. She asked him if he had started writing it. He answered with a smile, ‘No.’ After a few days, she reminded him of the urgency. Then he began dictating on the value of sports and physical gymnastics … As he was dictating, I marvelled at so much knowledge of Ancient Greece and Ancient India stored up somewhere in his superconscious memory and now pouring down at his command in a smooth flow. No notes were consulted, no books were needed, yet after a lapse of so many decades everything was fresh, spontaneous and recalled in vivid detail!”⁹

The second article is entitled Perfection of the Body. “A total perfection is the ultimate aim which we set before us, for our ideal is the Divine Life which we wish to create here, the life of the Spirit fulfilled on earth, life accomplishing its own spiritual transformation even here on earth in the conditions of the material universe. That cannot be unless the body too undergoes a transformation, unless its action and functioning attain to a supreme capacity and the perfection which is possible to it or which can be made possible … The transformation is not a change into something purely subtle and spiritual to which Matter is in its nature repugnant and by which it is felt as an obstacle or as a shackle binding the Spirit; it takes up Matter as a form of the Spirit though now a form which conceals and turns it into a revealing instrument, it does not cast away the energies of Matter, its capacities, its methods; it brings out their hidden possibilities, uplifts, sublimates, discloses their intimate divinity. The divine life will reject nothing that is capable of divinisation; all is to be seized, exalted, made utterly perfect.”¹⁰

In this second article, Sri Aurobindo again writes about the physical perfection that was the classical ideal, but then he suddenly takes a turn towards a perfection far beyond the physical: the supramental transformation of the body. “In the past the body has been regarded by spiritual seekers rather as an obstacle, as something to be overcome and discarded than as an instrument of spiritual perfection and a field of spiritual change … Even in its fullest strength and force and greatest glory of beauty, it is still a flower of the material inconscience; the Inconscient is the soil from which it has grown and at every point opposes a narrow boundary to the extension of its powers and to any effort of radical self-exceeding. But if a divine life is possible on earth, then this self-exceeding must also be possible.”¹¹

The body is after all “the material basis … the instrument we have to use”, it is “the means of fulfilment of dharma”,¹² even when dharma is changing into higher gear, into a totally new mode, when evolution itself begins to evolve. “If we could draw this power [of the Supermind] into the material world, our age-long dreams of human perfectibility, individual perfection, the perfectibility of the race, of society, inner mastery over self and a complete mastery, governance and utilisation of the forces of Nature could see at long last a prospect of total achievement.”¹³ In other words, the age-long dream of a truly Golden Age the Mother spoke of would become reality. (Gold is the colour of the Supermind.)

In the third article, Sri Aurobindo briefly summarises what we have tried to explain in Chapter 2: “It is indeed as a result of our evolution that we arrive at the possibility of this transformation. As Nature has evolved beyond Matter and manifested Life, beyond Life and manifested Mind, so she must evolve beyond Mind and manifest a consciousness and power of our existence free from the imperfection and limitation of our mental existence, a supramental or truth-consciousness, and able to develop the power and perfection of the spirit.”¹⁴

And then comes the new development, not only in this series of articles but in the totality of the huge body of literature Sri Aurobindo had produced so far¹⁵: “It might be that the psychological change, a mastery of the nature by the soul, a transformation of the mind into a principle of light, of the life-force into power and purity would be the first approach, the first attempt to solve the problem, to escape beyond the merely human formula and establish something that could be called a divine life upon earth, a first sketch of supermanhood, of a supramental living in the circumstances of the earth-nature.” This is not what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother until then had consistently called “superman”: “… It would not be the total transformation, the fullness of a divine life in a divine body. There would be a body still human and indeed animal in its origin and fundamental character and this would impose its own inevitable limitations on the higher parts of the embodied being.”¹⁶

Sri Aurobindo then expands on this possibility: “It might be also that the transformation might take place by stages, there are powers of the nature still belonging to the mental region which are yet potentialities of a growing gnosis lifted beyond our human mentality and partaking of the light and power of the Divine and an ascent through these planes, a descent of them into the mental being might seem to be the natural evolutionary course”. (What those “powers of the nature still belonging to the mental region” are we will see in the next section.) Sri Aurobindo stresses once again that by this he does not mean “superman”. “Still these levels might become stages of the ascent …”¹⁷

The gap, the quantum jump between the human and the supramental being is enormous. In the following pages will be quoted several passages from The Life Divine pointing in the direction of the necessity of a transitional being or several kinds of transitional beings. The fact that Sri Aurobindo here presents a new development in the Yoga of Transformation, when probably he had already taken the decision to descend voluntarily into death, is most remarkable and significant. As it will turn out, what he puts forward as a possibility was already partially realised in his own body.

In the fifth article of the series, he returns to this theme. “But Supermind alone has the truth-consciousness in full and, if this comes down and intervenes, mind, life and body too can attain to the full power of the truth in them and their full possibility of perfection. This, no doubt, would not take place at once, but an evolutionary progress towards it could begin and grow with increasing rapidity towards its fullness. All men might not reach that fullness till a later time, but still the human mind could come to stand perfected in the Light and a new humanity take its place as part of the new order.

“This is the possibility we have to examine. If it is destined to fulfil itself, if man is not doomed to remain always as a vassal of the Ignorance, the disabilities of the human mind on which we have dwelt are not such as must remain irredeemably in possession and binding for ever. It could develop higher means and instrumentalities, pass over the last borders of the Ignorance into a higher knowledge, grow too strong to be held by the animal nature. There would be a liberated mind escaping from ignorance into light, 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, a creator in the light, a discoverer in the depths, an illuminant in the darkness, helping perhaps to penetrate even the Inconscient with the rays of Superconscience. There would be a new mental being not only capable of standing enlightened in the radiance of Supermind but able to climb consciously towards it and into it, training life and body to reflect and hold something of the supramental light, power and bliss, 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, fitting itself to be a vessel of the divine Life.”¹⁸

The last sentence clearly describes the transitional being, “able to receive and bear the descent of the divine light and power”, as a necessary stage between the human and the supramental being in order to make the advent of the latter possible.

“A new humanity would then be a race of mental beings on the earth and in the earthly body”, reads the beginning of the sixth article, “but delivered from its present conditions in the reign of the cosmic Ignorance so far as to be possessed of a perfected mind, a mind of light, which could even be a subordinate action of the Supermind or Truth-consciousness, and in any case capable of the full possibilities of mind acting as a recipient of that truth and at least a secondary action of it in thought and life. It could even be a part of what could be described as a divine life upon earth and at least the beginnings of an evolution in the Knowledge and no longer predominantly in the Ignorance.”¹⁹ Thus begins the sixth article.

In the seventh article, entitled The Mind of Light, Sri Aurobindo takes up again the central theme of the series: “A new humanity means for us the appearance, the development of a type or race of mental beings whose principle of mentality would be no longer a mind in the Ignorance seeking for knowledge but, even in its knowledge bound to the Ignorance, a seeker after Light but not an inhabitant of the Light, not yet a perfected instrument, truth-conscious and delivered out of the Ignorance. Instead, it would be possessed already of what could be called a mind of Light, a mind capable of living in the truth, capable of being truth-conscious and manifesting in its life a direct in place of an indirect knowledge.

“Its mentality would be an instrument of the Light and no longer of the Ignorance. At its highest it would be capable of passing into the Supermind and from the new race would be recruited the race of supramental beings who would appear as the leaders of the evolution in earth-nature. Even, the highest manifestations of a mind of Light would be an instrumentality of the Supermind, a part of or a projection from it, a stepping beyond humanity into the superhumanity of the supramental principle. Above all, its possession would enable the human being to rise beyond into those highest powers of the mind in its self-exceedings which intervene between our mentality and Supermind and can be regarded as steps leading towards the greater and more luminous principle [i.e. Supermind]:”²⁰

The highest “powers of the mind” in the last sentence are the same as the aforementioned “powers of the nature still belonging to the mental region which are yet potentialities of a growing gnosis lifted beyond our human mentality”. “In this inevitable ascent the mind of Light is a gradation, an inevitable stage”, writes Sri Aurobindo. “As an evolving principle it will mark a stage in the human ascent and evolve a new type of human being; this development must carry in it an ascending gradation of its own powers and types of an ascending humanity which will embody more and more the turn towards spirituality, capacity for Light, a climb towards a divinised manhood and the divine life.”²¹ It should be noted that Sri Aurobindo no longer uses the conditional mode in his presentation of “a new type of human being”, but that he repeats the word “inevitable”, one of his key words when discoursing on the continuation of the earthly evolution and the appearance of a supramental being on the Earth. In the course of this series of articles the language has gradually become more affirmative.

He goes on to say that the embodiment of the Mind of Light will proceed in two stages. “In each of these stages it will define its own grades and manifest the order of its beings who will embody it and give to it a realised life. Thus there will be built up, first, even in the Ignorance itself, the possibility of a human ascent towards a divine living; then there will be, by the illumination of this mind of Light in the greater realisation of what may be called a gnostic mentality, in a transformation of the human being, even before the Supermind is reached, even in the earth-consciousness and in a humanity transformed, an illumined divine life.”²² “Supermind and Mind of Light” is the title of the last article; it was published in the Bulletin of November 1950 and must have been written one or two months earlier. Here we get the full definition of the Mind of Light. “The Mind of Light is a subordinate action of Supermind, dependent upon it even when not apparently springing directly from it … In the Mind of Light when it becomes full-orbed this character of the Truth reveals itself, though in a garb that is transparent even when it seems to cover: for this too is a truth-consciousness and a self-power of knowledge. This too proceeds from the Supermind and depends upon it even though it is limited and subordinate.

“What we have called specifically the Mind of Light is indeed the last in 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 an action of light, of truth, of knowledge in which inconscience, ignorance and error claim no place. It proceeds from knowledge to knowledge; we have not yet crossed over the borders of the truth-consciousness into ignorance.”²³

On 5 December Sri Aurobindo left his body as the outer consequence of a strange uraemic coma from which, visibly by an act of highest yogic mastery, he time and again rose up regaining full waking consciousness. He was entering death consciously because the Law the Creator had imposed upon Himself demanded this unprecedented “strategic” sacrifice. The yogic master-act was possible because the Avatar, complete this time, double-poled, had incarnated in two bodies. The Mother remained, so it had been decided. What her acceptance of staying in the body meant can be (partly) comprehended from the conversations that constitute Mother’s Agenda.

There she stood, the Mother, when the doctors had declared that Sri Aurobindo was “dead”. “She stood there, near the feet of Sri Aurobindo: her hair had been undressed and was flowing about her shoulders”, Dr Prabhat Sanyal remembered. “With a piercing gaze she stood there”,²⁴ for a long, long time. This was when the Mother received the Mind of Light from Sri Aurobindo into the cells of her body. “As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body, what he has called the Mind of Light got realised in me”, the Mother afterwards told K.D. Sethna. “The Supermind had descended long ago – very long ago – into the mind and even into the vital [of Sri Aurobindo and herself]; 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.”²⁵

These words of the Mother need some explanation that will be given further on. They are quoted here because they serve to highlight the significance of that moment – and because they confirm, as mooted above, that in his last series of articles Sri Aurobindo made known something that he had first experienced and realised himself. The import of the series of dictated articles, later on published under the title The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, cannot be overestimated. But in the Aurobindonian literature it has hardly been taken note of.

The Levels Above the Rational Mind (1)

“There are powers of the nature still belonging to the mental region which are yet potentialities of a growing gnosis lifted beyond our human mentality and partaking of the light and power of the Divine[^,] and an ascent through these planes [and] a descent of them into the mental being might seem to be the natural evolutionary course.” When these words of Sri Aurobindo were quoted in the beginning of the present chapter, we promised to clarify them to some extent. For they refer to an important range of gradations of being that is little known because it has barely been explored before. Now that the descent of Supermind and the realisation of one or more kinds of intermediary beings between the human and the supramental being was being attempted, this range of gradations became the focus of the Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.

Both of them had become thoroughly knowledgeable about those higher, spiritual realms during their yogic explorations and experiments. All related data indicate that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother realised the supramentalisation of the Mind around 1920 and that of the Vital soon afterwards. (This was the time that, according to witnesses, their physical aspects changed so much.) Sri Aurobindo more than once underlines that all gradations are closely connected; therefore, if they personally had realised the Supermind on those levels, they must have realised the intermediate gradations too.

The apparent gap between the human and the supramental being, between the human mind and the Supermind, is enormous. This apparent gap is the cause of “the error to make an unbridgeable gulf between God and man, Brahman and the world”.²⁶ This error resulted in the various conceptions of a supracosmic God, separated from His manifestation or creation. The gap seems to be there because normally to the human being, and therefore to the earthly evolution until now, rational mind is the highest attainment. But the gradations of being run all the way from the Pure Absolute down to the Inconscient. “For the whole of being is a connected totality and there is in it no abrupt passage from the principle of Truth and Light into their opposite … The depths are linked to the heights and the Law of the one Truth creates and works everywhere.”²⁷ This is the same as saying that there is no gap, hiatus, discontinuity or lacuna anywhere, and that the supposed gap between mind and Supermind is nothing but the consequence of a lack of human spiritual experience.

Let us recall, for clarity’s sake, the main rungs of the ladder of being, covering the whole of existence. In the “upper hemisphere” there is Existence, Consciousness-Force, Bliss, and Supermind; in the “lower hemisphere” there is Mind, Life and Matter. Supermind is the manifesting aspect of the Absolute. It is a Truth-Consciousness, a Unity-Consciousness, it is the Brahman with attributes that are usually ascribed to God. We should never forget that every consciousness is also a being. Supermind contains and manifests the Absolute in its plenitude. And everything manifested, in the upper as well as in the lower hemisphere, is the Absolute and could not exist if it were not directly, in its essence, supported by Supermind which is omnipotent and therefore also possesses the power of self-limitation.

The upper and the lower hemisphere are separated by “a golden lid”, in some traditions called “the Gate of the Sun”, through which no ordinary mortal can pass with the hope of returning. It is on this dividing line or rather in this dividing zone above Mind and below Supermind, that we find the four “spiritual” levels which play such an important part in the subject that concerns us. They are, in descending order and as named by Sri Aurobindo: Overmind, Intuition, Illumined Mind and Higher Mind. Together they make up a region which contains the possible gradations of consciousness of the transitional beings whom Sri Aurobindo called “the new humanity”.

Overmind (which is the level of the worlds of the gods), Intuition, Illumined Mind and Higher Mind still exist in the Light of the Supermind, they are, in that order, so to say its increasingly diluted extensions. “… There is an increasing self-limitation [of Supermind] which begins even with Overmind: Overmind is separated by only a luminous border from the full light and power of the supramental Truth and it still commands direct access to all that Supermind can give it.” Every overmental Being, or God, represents the Supreme and therefore all the other gods. “There is further limitation or change of characteristic action at each step downwards from Overmind to Intuition, from Intuition to Illumined Mind, from Illumined Mind to what I have called the Higher Mind”, writes Sri Aurobindo.²⁸

The Absolute is Light, the Inconscient is darkness. Light and darkness in this case are much more than poetic epithets, they are realities. The substances of the Absolute, and therefore of the upper hemisphere, are Light in all its modulations, variations, and powers. The substances of the Inconscient, and therefore of the lower hemisphere, are darkness.

Overmind, Intuition, Illumined Mind and Higher Mind are modulations of the Light of the upper hemisphere, while actually belonging to the lower hemisphere. “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.”²⁹ A metaphor may make clear what many a reader may find confusing. If the Supermind is symbolised by a Sun and the lower hemisphere by an ocean, then the rays of the sun penetrate the surface of the ocean and illumine its highest layers till the water gradually becomes darker and finally completely dark. According to Sri Aurobindo the highest levels of the lower hemisphere, the layers above the mind, still receive the light of the supramental Sun although they actually belong to the ocean of fragmentation and darkness that is the lower hemisphere.

The following quotation from Sri Aurobindo gives a hint of the importance of these transitional levels: “In the transformation by the Higher Mind the spiritual sage and thinker would find his total and dynamic fulfilment; in the transformation by the Illumined Mind there would be a similar fulfilment for the seer, the illumined mystic, those in whom the soul lives in vision and in a direct sense and experience: for it is from these higher sources that they receive their light and to rise into that light and live there would be their ascension to their native empire.”³⁰ In other words, the lowest two of these four ranges represent the highest ranges of consciousness humanity had access to until now. (“Intuition” in this context means something very different from the mostly untrustworthy, because deformed, intuitive flashes that sometimes visit us: it is a direct though not complete revelation of the Supermind.)

Mind

To gain a clearer insight into the role and significance of the spiritual levels,³¹ we will take a brief look at Mind itself, as described by Sri Aurobindo. It is no exaggeration to assert that Mind is the main instrument as well as the object of philosophical thought in the West. A real understanding of Mind should be part of a real understanding of the human being as a whole, but one does not have to delve very deeply into Western philosophy to find out that confusion on this topic is rife. The greatest authorities contradict each other with the greatest authority. The point is that as long as the West keeps exploring the surfaces of existence, it cannot find out the fundamentals of things. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s understanding represents the findings of old, in-depth and patiently researched traditions, perfected by their own experience which went beyond all former experience.

Their writings and sayings on the subject of Mind are extensive. The following quotes from The Life Divine give a first notion.

• “Mind is not a faculty of knowledge nor an instrument of omniscience; it is a faculty for the seeking of knowledge, for expressing as much as it can gain of it in certain forms of a relative thought and for using it towards certain capacities of action. Even when it finds, it does not possess; it only keeps a certain fund of current coin of Truth – not Truth itself – in the bank of Memory to draw upon according to its needs. For Mind is that which does not know, which tries to know and which never knows except as in a glass darkly. It is the power which interprets truth of universal existence for the practical uses of a certain order of things; it is not the power which knows and guides that existence and therefore it cannot be the power which created or manifested it.”³²

• “Its function [of Mind] is to cut something vaguely from the unknown Thing in itself and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to analyse the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects. It is only the parts and accidents that the Mind can see definitely and, after its own fashion, know. Of the whole its only definite idea is an assemblage of parts or a totality of properties and accidents. The whole not seen as a part of something else or in its own parts, properties and accidents is to the mind no more than a vague perception; only when it is analysed and put by itself as separate constituted object, a totality in a larger totality, can Mind say to itself, ‘This now I know.’ And really it does not know. It knows only its own analysis of the object and the idea it has formed of it by a synthesis of the separate parts and properties that it has seen. There its characteristic power, its sure function ceases, and if we would have a greater, a profounder and a real knowledge, – a knowledge and not an intense but formless sentiment such as comes sometimes to certain deep but inarticulate parts of our mentality, – Mind has to make room for another consciousness which will fulfil Mind by transcending it or reverse and so rectify its operations after leaping beyond it: the summit of mental knowledge is only a vaulting-board from which the leap can be taken. The utmost mission of Mind is to train our obscure consciousness which has emerged out of the dark prison of Matter, to enlighten its blind instincts, random intuitions, vague perceptions till it shall become capable of this greater light and this higher ascension. Mind is a passage, not a culmination.”³³

• “Mind can conceive with precision divisions as real; it can conceive a synthetic totality or the finite extending itself indefinitely; it can grasp aggregates of divided things and the samenesses underlying them; but the ultimate unity and absolute infinity are to its conscience of things abstract notions and unseizable quantities, not something that is real to its grasp, much less something that is alone real. Here is therefore the very opposite term to the Unitarian consciousness …”³⁴

• “But if we suppose an infinite Mind which would be free from our limitations, that at least might well be the creator of the universe? But such a Mind would be something quite different from the definition of mind as we know it: it would be something beyond mentality; it would be the supramental Truth. An infinite Mind constituted in the terms of mentality as we know it could only create an infinite chaos, a vast clash of chance, accident, vicissitude wandering towards an indeterminate end after which it would be always tentatively groping and aspiring. An infinite, omniscient, omnipotent Mind would not be mind at all, but supramental knowledge.”³⁵

In the series of articles Sri Aurobindo wrote for the Bulletin, he also characterises Mind. “… Mind is not a power of whole knowledge and only when it begins to pass beyond itself a power of direct knowledge: it receives rays from the truth but does not live in the sun; it sees as through glasses and its knowledge is coloured by its instruments, it cannot see with the naked eye or look straight at the sun … 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 …”³⁶

Mind “is used by the Supermind principally for the work of differentiation which is necessary if there is to be a creation and a universe” – if there are to be separate, (apparently) independently existing beings and things. “In the Supermind itself, in all its creation there is this differentiating power, the manifestation of the One in the Many and the Many in the One; but the One is never forgotten or lost in its multiplicity which always consciously depends upon and never takes precedence over the eternal oneness. In the mind, on the contrary, the differentiation, the multiplicity does take precedence and the conscious sense of the universal oneness is lost and the separated unit seems to exist for itself and by itself as a sufficient self-conscious integer or in inanimate objects as the inconscient integer.”³⁷

This means that Mind has been made into the instrument of a practical (apparent) division of the One and its Oneness. In the descending order this lowest gradation of the Light had to plunge into the darkness of the Inconscient, and rise out of it in the ascending order for its characteristic embodiment in our species of human beings. Mind is a darkened substance of Light, necessary in the scheme of things to make the existence of “the inconscient or self-conscious integers” possible. It always vaguely remembers the fundamental Unity at its base; therefore it cannot but persistently try to recover that Unity, which is the clouded Sun behind all human strivings. It is that Sun, that Unity, the Supermind which upholds all existing things, even when they apparently seem to be separated or self-existent. For all exists in That, all is Brahman.

The Levels Above the Rational Mind (2)

As we are now a bit better acquainted with Mind, the pride of our species, we may return to the spiritual levels for a closer look, for until now they have been defined only in a general, abstract way. Sri Aurobindo has described these four levels – Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, and Overmind – for the very first time in the history of human thought and spirituality extensively in The Life Divine.³⁸ His description covers many pages and we will have again to content ourselves with a few key passages. It is important to remember that these are not philosophical abstractions, but condensed and highly expressive wordings of spiritual experiences.

In “the natural configuration of the stair of ascent” there are “many steps, for it is an incessant gradation and there is no gap anywhere”, writes Sri Aurobindo, “but from the point of view of the ascent of consciousness from our mind upwards, through a rising series of dynamic powers by which it can sublimate itself, the gradation can be resolved into a stairway of four main ascents, each with its high level of fulfilment. These gradations may be summarily described as a series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it … All these degrees are gnostic [i.e. supramental] in their principle and power …

“In themselves these grades are grades of energy-substance of the Spirit: for it must not be supposed, because we distinguish them according to their leading character, means and potency of knowledge, that they are merely a method or way of knowing or a faculty or power of cognition; they are domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the spiritual being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal Consciousness-Force constituting and organising itself into a higher status. When the powers of any grade descend completely into us, it is not only our thought and knowledge that are affected, – the substance and very grain of our being and consciousness, all its states and activities are touched and penetrated and can be remoulded and wholly transmuted. Each stage of this ascent is therefore a general, if not a total, conversion of the being into a new light and power of a greater existence.”³⁹

Higher Mind: “Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit. Its basic substance is a Unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable of the formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming, of all of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge. It is therefore a power that has proceeded from the Overmind, – but with the Supermind as its ulterior origin, – as all these greater powers have proceeded: but its special character, its activity of consciousness are dominated by Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of Spirit-born conceptual knowledge.

“An all-awareness emerging from the original identity, carrying the truths the identity held in itself, conceiving swiftly, victoriously, multitudinously, formulating and by self-power of the Idea effectually realising its conceptions, is the character of this greater mind of knowledge. This kind of cognition is the last that emerges [in the descending order] from the original spiritual identity before the initiation of a separative knowledge, base of the Ignorance; it is therefore the first [in the ascending order] that meets us when we rise from conceptive and ratiocinative mind, our best organised knowledge-power of the Ignorance, into the realms of the Spirit; it is, indeed, the spiritual parent of our conceptive mental ideation …”⁴⁰

Illumined Mind: Illumined Mind is “a Mind no longer of higher Thought, but of spiritual light. Here the clarity of the spiritual intelligence, its tranquil daylight, gives place or subordinates itself to an intense lustre, a splendour and illumination of the Spirit: a play of lightnings of spiritual truth and power breaks from above into the consciousness and adds to the calm and wide enlightenment and the vast descent of peace which characterise or accompany the action of the larger conceptual-spiritual principle, a fiery ardour of realisation and a rapturous ecstasy of knowledge.

“A downpour of inwardly visible Light very usually envelops this action; for it must be noted that, contrary to our ordinary conceptions, light is not primarily a material creation and the sense of vision of light accompanying the inner illumination is not merely a subjective visual image or a symbolic phenomenon: light is primarily a spiritual manifestation of the Divine Reality illuminative and creative; material light is a subsequent representation or conversion of it into Matter for the purposes of the material Energy. There is also in this descent [of the Illumined Mind] the arrival of a greater dynamic, a golden drive, a luminous ‘enthousiasmos’ of inner force and power which replaces the comparatively slow and deliberate process of the Higher Mind by a swift, sometimes a vehement, almost a violent impetus of rapid transformation.

“The Illumined Mind does not work primarily by thought but by vision; thought is here only a subordinate movement expressive of sight …”⁴¹

Intuition: “Intuition is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge of identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed identity. It is when the consciousness of the subject meets with the consciousness in the object, penetrates it and sees, feels or vibrates with the truth of what it contacts, that the intuition leaps out like a spark or lightning-flash from the shock of the meeting; or when the consciousness, even without any such meeting, looks into itself and feels directly and intimately the truth or the truths that are there or so contacts the hidden forces behind appearances, then also there is the outbreak of an intuitive light; or, again, when the consciousness meets the Supreme Reality or the spiritual reality of things and beings and has a contactual union with it, then the spark, the flash or the blaze of intimate truth-perception is lit in its depths. This close perception is more than sight, more than conception: it is the result of a penetrating and revealing touch which carries in it sight and conception as part of itself or as its natural consequence. A concealed or slumbering identity, not yet recovering itself, still remembers or conveys by the intuition its own contents and the intimacy of its self-feeling and self-vision of things, its light of truth, its overwhelming and automatic certitude …

“Intuition is always an edge or ray or outleap of a superior light; it is in us a projecting blade, edge or point of a far-off Supermind light entering into and modified by some intermediate truth-mind substance above us and, so modified, again entering into and very much blinded by our ordinary or ignorant mind-substance; but on that higher level to which it is native its light is unmixed and therefore entirely and purely veridical, and its rays are not separated but connected or massed together in a play of waves of what might almost be called in the Sanskrit poetic figure a sea or mass of ‘stable lightnings’.”⁴²

Overmind: “The next step of the ascent brings us to the Overmind; the intuitional change can only be an introduction to this higher spiritual overture. But we have seen that the Overmind, even when it is selective and not total in its action, is still a power of cosmic consciousness, a principle of global knowledge which carries in it a delegated light from the supramental Gnosis. It is, therefore, only by an opening into the cosmic consciousness that the overmind ascent and descent can be made wholly possible: a high and intense individual opening upwards is not sufficient, – to that vertical ascent towards summit Light there must be added a vast horizontal expansion of the consciousness into some totality of the Spirit. At the least, the inner being must already have replaced by its deeper and wider awareness the surface mind and its limited outlook and learned to live in a large universality; for otherwise the overmind view of things and the overmind dynamism will have no room to move in and effectuate its dynamic operations.

“When the Overmind descends, the predominance of the centralising ego-sense is entirely subordinated, lost in largeness of being and finally abolished; a wide cosmic perception and feeling of a boundless universal self and movement replaces it: many motions that were formerly egocentric may still continue, but they occur as currents or ripples in the cosmic wideness.

Thought, for the most part, no longer seems to originate individually in the body or the person but manifests from above or comes in upon the cosmic mind-waves: all inner individual sight or intelligence of things is now a revelation or illumination of what is seen or comprehended, but the source of the revelation is not in one’s separate self but in the universal knowledge; the feelings, emotions, sensations are similarly felt as waves from the same cosmic immensity breaking upon the subtle and the gross body and responded to in kind by the individual centre of the universality; for the body is only a small support or even less, a point of relation, for the action of a vast cosmic instrumentation.

“In this boundless largeness, not only the separate ego but all sense of individuality, even of a subordinated or instrumental individuality, may entirely disappear; the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, the cosmic delight, the play of cosmic forces are alone left: if the delight or the centre of Force is felt in what was the personal mind, life or body, it is not with a sense of personality but as a field of manifestation, and this sense of the delight or of the action of Force is not confined to the person or the body but can be felt at all points in an unlimited consciousness of unity which pervades everywhere.”⁴³

To the above should be added by way of completion and comment the following points.

The Soul: What we have not yet read about is the essence, cause and support of our incarnation: the soul. It is, once again, no exaggeration to state that the confusion about the soul in the religious and spiritual literature is dumbfounding, and not only in Christianity. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s view on this topic, as on all others, is on the contrary clear, complete, and a reliable basis for spiritual practice.

“The soul, representative of the central being, is a spark of the Divine supporting all individual existence in Nature; the psychic being is a conscious form of that soul growing in the evolution – in the persistent process that develops first life in Matter, mind in life, until finally mind can develop into overmind and overmind into the supramental Truth. The soul supports the nature in its evolution through these grades, but is itself not any of these things …”⁴⁴

“The soul or psyche is immutable only in the sense that it contains all the possibilities of the Divine within it, but it has to evolve them and in its evolution assumes the form of a developing psychic individual [the psychic being] evolving in the manifestation the individual Prakriti [Nature] and taking part in the evolution. It is the spark of the Divine Fire that grows behind the mind, vital and physical by means of the psychic being until it is able to transform the Prakriti of Ignorance into a Prakriti of Knowledge. This evolving psychic being is not therefore at any time all that the soul or essential psychic existence bears within it; it temporalises and individualises what is eternal in potentiality, transcendent in essence, in this projection of the spirit.

“The central being [jivatman] is the being which presides over the different births one after the other, but is itself unborn, for it does not descend into the being but is above it – it holds together the mental, vital and physical being and all the various parts of the personality and it controls the life either through the mental being and the mental thought and will or through the psychic [antaratman], whichever may happen to be the most in front or most powerful in nature …

“The psychic is not above but behind – its seat is behind the heart, its power is not knowledge but an essential or spiritual feeling – it has the clearest sense of the Truth and a sort of inherent perception of it which is of the nature of soul-perception and soul-feeling. It is our inmost being and supports all the others, mental, vital, physical, but it is also much veiled by them as an influence rather than by its sovereign right of direct action; its direct action becomes normal and preponderant only at a high stage of development or by yoga …”⁴⁵

Let us add the following clarifications. “The Jivatma, spark-soul [Antaratma] and psychic being are three different forms of the same reality and they must not be mixed together, as that confuses the clearness of the inner experience.” Secondly: “The soul is a spark of the Divine in the heart of the living creatures of Nature … This spark of Divinity is there in all terrestrial living beings from the earth’s highest to its lowest creatures.” But it is only in humans that it becomes individualised and is given shape, as it were, by a psychic being. Thirdly: “The psychic being is a spiritual personality put forward by the soul in its evolution; its growth marks the stage which the spiritual evolution of the individual has reached and its immediate possibilities for the future. It stands behind the mental, the vital, the physical nature, grows by their experiences, carries the consciousness from life to life.”⁴⁶

The realisation of the psychic being, i.e. the state of becoming concretely aware of it and living in it, is the first important aim and siddhi of the Integral Yoga. The second is the realisation of the spiritual levels which are the main focus of our attention in this chapter, and the third the realisation of the Supermind and the transformation of the body.

Reality of the Spirit: As was pointed out before, it is a common misconception that matter is concrete and dense, while the Spirit gradually becomes less substantial, more ethereal on every higher level. On the contrary, Sri Aurobindo puts it like this: “Consciousness, as we descend the scale, becomes more and more diminished and diluted, – dense indeed by its coarser crudity, but while that crudity of consistence compacts the stuff of Ignorance, it admits less and less the substance of light; it becomes thin in pure substance of consciousness and reduced in power of consciousness, thin in light, thin and weak in capacity of delight; it has to resort to a grosser thickness of its diminished stuff and to a strenuous output of its obscurer force to arrive at anything, but this strenuousness of effort and labour is a sign not of strength but of weakness.

“As we ascend, on the contrary, a finer but far stronger and more truly and spiritually concrete substance emerges, a greater luminosity and potent stuff of consciousness, a subtler, sweeter, purer and more powerfully ecstatic energy of delight.”⁴⁷ Again, Sri Aurobindo is clearly relying on his personal spiritual experience. The philosophic masterpiece that is The Life Divine is in fact from beginning to end an account of his own experiences.

Interpenetrability. We have enumerated the four spiritual levels, just as we have discerned the other tiers of the Great Chain of Being. To do so is indispensable, but this may also, in part or on the whole, distort our view of the reality. We should never forget that all is One, undivided, and that division is the typical way in which the Mind functions, because otherwise it can have no hold on reality, it cannot comprehend. But “the whole of being is a connected totality and there is in it no abrupt passage from the principle of Truth and Light into their opposite.”⁴⁸

“In themselves these grades [i.e. the four spiritual levels] are grades of energy-substance of the Spirit: for it must not be supposed, because we distinguish them according to their leading character, means and potency of knowledge, that they are merely a method or way of knowing or a faculty or power of cognition; they are domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the spiritual being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal Consciousness-Force constituting and organising itself into a higher status. When the powers of any grade descend completely into us, it is not only our thought and knowledge that are affected, – the substance and very grain of our being and consciousness, all its states and activities are touched and penetrated and can be remoulded and wholly transmuted. Each stage of this ascent is therefore a general, if not a total, conversion of the being into a new light and power of a greater existence.”⁴⁹

These words are of immense importance for people who do not have the experience and who are interested in this kind of adventure. For, firstly, they tell us that a realisation of one of the spiritual levels has a direct repercussion on the physical body, on the adhara. We will have to come back to this when we learn about the work the Mother did for “the new humanity”. For the Mind of Light, which is the consciousness of that new humanity, is part of the spiritual levels, as we shall presently see.

Secondly, these words explain the complex, seemingly chaotic movements of the Integral Yoga. In the previous chapter we quoted Sri Aurobindo’s comparison of the Yoga to “an army advancing in columns which annexes new ground” and has to adapt to the situation. On the same occasion he writes: “But evolutionary Nature is not a logical series of separate segments; it is a totality of ascending powers of being which interpenetrate and dovetail and exercise in their action on each other a power of mutual modification. When the higher descends into the lower consciousness, it alters the lower but is also modified and diminished by it; when the lower ascends, it is sublimated but at the same time qualifies the sublimating substance and power. This interaction creates an abundant number of different intermediate and interlocked degrees of the force and consciousness of being, but it also makes it difficult to bring about a complete integration of all the powers under the full control of any one power.

“For this reason there is not actually a series of simple clear-cut and successive stages in the individual’s evolution; there is instead a complexity and a partly determinate, partly confused comprehensiveness of the movement. The soul may still be described as a traveller and climber who presses towards his high goal step by step, each of which he has to build up as an integer but must frequently redescend in order to rebuild and make sure of the supporting stair so that it may not crumble beneath him: but the evolution of the whole consciousness has rather the movement of an ascending ocean of Nature; it can be compared to a tide or a mounting flux, the leading fringe of which touches the higher degrees of a cliff or hill while the rest is still below. At each stage the higher parts of the nature may be provisionally but incompletely organised in the new consciousness while the lower are in a state of flux or formation, partly moving in the old way though influenced and beginning to change, partly belonging to the new kind but still imperfectly achieved and not yet firm in the change.”⁵⁰

The Necessity of Transitional Beings

The announcement in The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth of the creation of “a new humanity”, of beings or kinds of beings in between the human and the supramental species, was a new development in the supramental Yoga, in the enormously concentrated effort of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to give a totally new turn to evolution within the span of a single lifetime. But was such a development completely unforeseen? The gap between Mind and Supermind being so large, how could it reasonably be supposed that it could be bridged without something in between? “For the gulf between Mind and Supermind has to be bridged, the closed passages opened and roads of ascent and descent created where there is now a void and a silence”,⁵¹ wrote Sri Aurobindo in the Arya, some thirty years before his articles were composed for the Bulletin. To put the progress of the Yoga from the Arya articles onward into perspective, we shall simply quote some relevant paragraphs from his early writings.

• “If a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our birth into Matter, if it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that has been taking place in Nature, then man as he is cannot be the last term of that evolution: he is too imperfect an expression of the Spirit, Mind itself a too limited form and instrumentation; Mind is only a middle term of consciousness, the mental being can only be a transitional being. If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and Supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to what exceeds it, then there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at Supermind and supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an evolution of that greater term of the spirit manifesting in Nature.”⁵²

• “When the gnosis is gained, it can then be turned on the whole nature to divinise the human being. It is impossible to rise into it at once; if that could be done, it would mean a sudden and violent overshooting, a breaking or slipping through the gates of the Sun, suryasya dvara, without near possibility of return. We have to form as a link or a bridge an intuitive or illuminated mind, which is not the direct gnosis, but in which a first derivative body of the gnosis can form. This illumined mind will first be a mixed power which we shall have to purify of all its mental dependence and mental forms so as to convert all willing and thinking into thought-sight and truth-seeing will by an illumined discrimination, intuition, inspiration, revelation. That will be the final purification of the intelligence and the preparation for the Siddhi of the gnosis.”⁵³

• **“Even before the gnostic change there can be a beginning of this fundamental ecstasy of being translated into a manifold beauty and delight. In the mind, it translates into a calm of intense delight of spiritual perception and vision and knowledge, in the heart into a wide or deep or passionate delight of universal union and love and sympathy and the joy of beings and the joy of things. In the will and vital parts it is felt as the energy of delight of a divine life-power in action or a beatitude of the sense perceiving and meeting the One everywhere, perceiving as their normal aesthesis of things a universal beauty and a secret harmony of creation of which our mind can catch only imperfect glimpses or a rare supernormal sense. In the body it reveals itself as an ecstasy pouring into it from the heights of the Spirit and the peace and bliss of a pure and spiritualised physical existence.”⁵⁴

• “In the untransformed part of humanity itself there might well arise a new and greater order of mental human beings; for the directly intuitive or partly intuitivised but not yet gnostic mental being, the directly or partly illumined mental being, the mental being in direct or part communion with the higher-thought plane would emerge: these would become more and more numerous, more and more evolved and secure in their type, and might even exist as a formed race of higher humanity leading upwards the less evolved in a true fraternity born of the sense of the manifestation of the One Divine in all beings.”⁵⁵ These words may also be applicable to the levels of humanity, overhumanity and superhumanity that are likely to exist simultaneously in the future.

• “Therefore the individuals who will most help the future of humanity in the new age will be those who will recognise a spiritual evolution as the destiny and therefore the great need of the human being. Even as the animal man has been largely converted into a mentalised and at the top a highly mentalised humanity, so too now or in the future an evolution or conversion – it does not greatly matter which figure we use or what theory we adopt to support it – of the present type of humanity into a spiritualised humanity is the need of the race and surely the intention of Nature; that evolution or conversion will be their ideal and endeavour. They will be comparatively indifferent to particular belief and form and leave men to resort to the beliefs and forms to which they are naturally drawn. They will only hold as essential the faith in this spiritual conversion, the attempt to live it out and whatever knowledge – the form of opinion into which it is thrown does not so much matter – can be converted into this living. They will especially not make the mistake of thinking that this change can be effected by machinery and outward institutions; they will know and never forget that it has to be lived out by each man inwardly or it can never be made a reality for the kind. They will adopt in its heart of meaning the inward view of the East which bids man seek the secret of his destiny and salvation within; but also they will accept, though with a different turn given to it, the importance which the West rightly attaches to life and to the making the best we know and can attain the general rule of all life.”⁵⁶

This selection of quotations is far from exhaustive. Yet it shows convincingly the enormous will of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to change humanity into something better and higher. The spiritual was never left out of their view and the material was always used as their stepping stone. There is no greater epic than the story of their lives; but its episodes were for the most part unseen, not “in front of the curtain”; and they remain for the most part unknown.

The Mind of Light

Our ordinary human mind is a mind of confusion and darkness; a look into this morning’s newspaper will confirm this right away. In the last months of his life Sri Aurobindo announced the coming of a kind of being that would possess a mind of clarity and light.

Let us then at this point of our exposition recall how he defined that Mind of Light in the last of his articles for the Bulletin.⁵⁷ (All emphases are added.)

• “The Mind of Light is a subordinate action of Supermind, dependent upon it even when not apparently springing directly from it …” (Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, p. 588)
• “In the Mind of Light when it becomes full-orbed this character of the Truth reveals itself, though in a garb that is transparent even when it seems to cover: for this too is a truth-consciousness and a self-power of knowledge. This too proceeds from the Supermind and depends upon it even though it is limited and subordinate. What we have called 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: there is in it an action of light, of truth, of knowledge in which inconscience, ignorance and error claim no place. It proceeds from knowledge to knowledge; we have not yet crossed over the borders of the truth-consciousness into ignorance.” (p. 589) It should be noted that Sri Aurobindo locates the Mind of Light in the descending order of the spiritual levels as “the last of a series of descending planes of consciousness” where the border of the truth-consciousness into the ignorance is not yet crossed. In the inverse order the Mind of Light will be (or is already) the first acquisition by some advanced human beings of the Truth-Consciousness or Supermind in its most “diluted” aspect.
• “There is a further limitation or change of characteristic action [of the supramental consciousness] at each step downwards from Overmind to Intuition, from Intuition to Illumined Mind, from Illumined Mind to what I have called the Higher Mind: the Mind of Light is a transitional passage by which we can pass from Supermind and superhumanity to an illumined humanity. For the new humanity will be capable of at least a partly divinised way of seeing and living because it will live in the light and in knowledge and not in the obscuration of the ignorance.” (p. 590) Again Sri Aurobindo is locating “the new humanity” in the descending order. From this passage one might conclude that the character, intensity or degree of the Mind of Light may vary to some degree and that it belongs, generally speaking, to the levels of either Higher or Illumined Mind. We already know that these two levels are the highest attained by mankind until the present in its thinkers, poets,⁵⁸ sages, mystics, seers and saints. Now the acquisition of the Mind of Light (1) would no longer be a personal feat but an evolutionary step forward of humankind in many individuals, preparing the advent of the supramental species; (2) it would cause and even require bodily changes necessary to allow for “a partly divinised way of seeing and living”.

A Normal Evolutionary Process

Sri Aurobindo wrote as early as in The Life Divine: “In a future transformation the character of the evolution, the principle of evolutionary process, although modified, will not fundamentally change but, on a vaster scale and in a liberated movement, royally continue.”⁵⁹ Palaeontology tells us that there have been intermediary, transitional beings between the primates and homo sapiens. The appearance of a “new humanity” of transitional beings would therefore be the normal and necessary preamble to the realisation of the supramental being on the Earth. “The advance [i.e. the coming of a new, higher species beyond humanity], however it comes about, will indeed be of the nature of a miracle, as are all such profound changes and immense developments, for they have the appearance of a kind of realised impossibility. But God works all his miracles by an evolution of secret possibilities which have been long prepared, at least in their elements, and in the end by a rapid bringing of all to a head, a throwing together of the elements so that in their fusion they produce a new form and name of things and reveal a new spirit. Often the decisive turn is preceded by an apparent emphasising and raising to their extreme of things which seem the very denial, the most uncompromising opposite of the new principle and the new creation.”⁶⁰

“All the facts show that a type can vary within its own specification of nature”, wrote Sri Aurobindo, “but there is nothing to show that it can go beyond it. It has not yet been really established that ape-kind developed into man; for it would rather seem that a type resembling the ape, but always characteristic of itself and not of apehood, developed within its own tendencies of nature and became what we know as man, the present human being.” This, written around 1920 in the Arya, seems to be in agreement with the latest conclusions of evolutionary biology. “It is not even established that inferior races of man developed out of themselves the superior races; those of an inferior organisation and capacity perished, but it has not been shown that they left behind the human races of today as their descendants: but still a development within the type is imaginable.”⁶¹

In the same chapter, Sri Aurobindo returned to the subject: “If the appearance in animal being of a type similar in some respects to the ape-kind but already from the beginning endowed with the elements of humanity was the method of the human evolution, the appearance in the human being of a spiritual type resembling mental-animal humanity but already with the stamp of the spiritual aspiration on it would be the obvious method of Nature for the evolutionary production of the spiritual and supramental being.”⁶² Towards the end of his life he discovered or communicated the knowledge for the first time: that “a spiritual type resembling mental-animal humanity” was to become an evolutionary fact, but in place of a “spiritual aspiration” it would be endowed with the first lights of the Supermind.

One of the main problems of the avataric effort was that the foundations of the future had to be secured within the span of a human lifetime. This meant that a new evolutionary turn and acceleration, which normally takes thousands and more often millions of years, had to be initiated within less than a century.

“My difficulty is”, wrote Sri Aurobindo to a disciple in 1933, “that you all seem to expect a kind of miraculous fairy-tale change and do not realise that it is a rapid and concentrated evolution which is the aim of my Sadhana [and the Mother’s] and that there must be a process for it, a working of the higher in the lower and a dealing with all the necessary intervals – not a sudden feat of creation by which everything is done on a given date. It is a supramental but not an irrational process. What is to be done will happen – perhaps with a rush even – but in a workmanlike way and not according to Faerie.”⁶³ And he wrote to another disciple: “But in its nature the Descent [of the Supermind] is not something arbitrary and miraculous but a rapid evolutionary process compressed into a few years. That cannot be done in the whole world at a time, but it is done like all such processes, first through selected Adharas and then on a wider scale. We have to do it through ourselves [Sri Aurobindo meant himself and the Mother] first and through the circle of Sadhaks gathered around us in the terrestrial consciousness as typified there. If a few open, that is sufficient for the process to be possible.”⁶⁴ At the time this last passage was written, the expectation was still of a direct descent of the Supermind, to be concretised by an appearance on earth of the supramental being. But now, at this point in our story, it became obvious that a transitional kind of being in the evolutionary scale was required.