Overman

6: The Consciousness of the Overman

The transition from man to supramental being is accomplished through the overman. There may be a few overmen – there are – who will actually make that transition.¹

– The Mother

The transitional beings are always in an unstable equilibrium.²

– The Mother

We have now returned to the point where we started in the previous chapter: May 1958, when the Mother reminisced about the moment Sri Aurobindo left his body and transferred to her all the supramental power gathered in it. This was when she said to her already badly battered body (for the Integral Yoga “is not a joke”): “ ‘Now you shall set right everything that is out of order and gradually realise this intermediate overmanhood between man and the supramental being – in other words: what I call the overman.’ And this is what I have been doing for the last eight years, and even much more during the past two years, since 1956. Now it is the work of each day, each minute.”

Towards the end of November 1959 and at the beginning of December, the Mother had to go through a severe, life-threatening ordeal, the first of many in the coming years. On 26 November she gave her last Entretien at the Playground; on 7 December she played her last game of tennis (at the age of 81); on 9 December she stopped leaving the Ashram compound, except on special occasions. What was happening? Now that the overman was realised, the Mother took up the supramentalisation of the body; she started building the first supramental body, the archetype of the future supramental species, within her gross material body.

The Mother had realised the possibility for overman, the transitional being, to exist physically on the earth: she had, as it were, created by the partial transformation of her own adhara the mould for the overman to appear as an intermediary degree in the evolution of the human and the supramental being. Remember what she said in 1958: “One may conclude from this that the moment one body [i.e. her own], of course formed according to the old animal method, is capable of living this consciousness naturally and spontaneously, without any effort, without going out of itself, it proves that it is not an exceptional, unique case, but that it simply is the forerunner of a realisation which, even if it is not general, can at least be shared by a certain number of individuals.”

This having been accomplished, the Mother began another great phase in her yoga: the realisation, through the transformation of her own physicality, of the archetype of the supramental being. These two realisations, far beyond the horizon of our imagination, were the reason why she stayed on in 1956. They were the reason why Sri Aurobindo decided to descend into death as, according to his own words, the Mother’s body was better suited than his to undergo this transformation. The Mother even said that, knowing the severity of what was awaiting her in her new incarnation, she had chosen both her parents especially with this factor in view: the robustness of their bodies. The double Avatar had come to establish the Supermind in the consciousness of the earth. It may be guessed that, through their love for humanity, they have shortened the appearance of the supramental being by hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

The Mysteries of the Body

The Mother withdrew, but only in certain ways. She remained bodily in her small apartment on the second floor of the central Ashram building in the Rue de la Marine, and the work increased gradually to the extent that she hardly had any time for herself. For she went on running the Ashram down to the smallest detail, and she received people who wanted to see her for all possible reasons, on an average forty to fifty a day, but at times up to two hundred. And there was also the inner Work of the Yoga, and there was the inner, invisible crowd that came to her with good intentions as well as bad. “I lead a much more busy life than the life I lead downstairs.”³

The phase of the Yoga which involved the transformation of the body was not something totally new. It was the continuation of the transformation we have been following in the previous chapter, but much more radical. From now onwards it was literally the body cells in ever greater numbers – there are fifty trillion of them – that were doing the Yoga. For a number of those cells were now transformed. Can one imagine what this means: cells of the body, tiny living organisms, that have acquired a spiritual consciousness? The Mother must have read the incomprehension in the mind of the persons she was talking to, for she said so often something like: “It is the experience of the body, you understand, physically, materially: the experience of the body!”⁴ The aspiration, the equanimity, the sincerity – all basics of the Integral Yoga – were now to become qualities of the cells, practised by the cells, acquired by the cells. But above all there was the surrender, “the Alpha and Omega of the Integral Yoga” (Sri Aurobindo). Surrender was the main occupation of the Mother, day and night. Every cell, every part of the cell had to open to the Light in order to become accessible to it. They had to overcome all the subconscious and inconscient obscurity and darkness we carry in us, which in fact is the substance we are made of. And there is the memory of the ages, of the previous stages of evolution, that is still present in the cells, for they were there from the beginning.

Inflicting still its habit on the cells

The phantom of a dark and evil start

Ghostlike pursues all that we dream and do.⁵

All that had to be pervaded by the transforming Light, according to the Will of the Supreme. “Ce que Tu veux”, said the Mother, the palms of both her hands turned upwards in a gesture of complete submission: “What You will”. “It is day and night, without interruption: ‘What You will, Lord, what You will …’ ” – “The only solution, at every moment and in all cases, is (gesture of self-giving). ‘What you will’, that is to say, the abolition of preference and desire, even the preference of not suffering.” – “What I told you is the truth, it is the only remedy: to exist only for the Divine; to exist only through the Divine; to exist only in the service of the Divine; to exist only by becoming the Divine.”⁶ To create the possibility of a higher species taking a body on earth, not only gross Matter had to be refined, but the functioning of the body also had to be refined. Actually, the latter would be a consequence of the former. The functioning of the cells had to be refined, as well as the functioning of the organs. This too Sri Aurobindo foresaw in The Supramental Manifestation: “There would have to be a change in the operative processes of the material organs themselves and, it may well be, in their very constitution and their importance; they could not be allowed to impose their limitations imperatively on the new physical life. To begin with, they might become more clearly outer ends of the channels of communication and action, more serviceable for the psychological purposes of the inhabitant, less blindly material in their responses, more conscious of the act and aim of the inner movements and powers which use them and which they are wrongly supposed by the material man in us to generate and to use. The brain would be a channel of communication of the form of the thoughts and a battery of their insistence on the body and the outside world where they could then become effective directly … The heart would equally be a direct communicant and medium of interchange for the feelings and emotions … The will might control the organs that deal with food, safeguard automatically the health, eliminate greed and desire, substitute subtler processes or draw in strength and substance from the universal life-force …

“It might well be that the evolutionary urge would proceed to a change of the organs themselves in their material working and use and diminish greatly the need of their instrumentation and even of their existence. The centres in the material body … of which one would become conscious and aware of all goings on in it, would pour their energies into material nerve and plexus and tissue and radiate them through the whole material body; all the physical life and its necessary activities in this new existence could be maintained and operated by these higher agencies in a freer and ampler way and by a less burdensome and restricting method. This might go so far that these organs might cease to be indispensable and even be felt as too obstructive: the central force might use them less and less and finally throw aside their use altogether. If that happened they might waste by atrophy, be reduced to an insignificant minimum or even disappear. The central force might substitute for them subtle organs of a very different character or, if anything material was needed, instruments that would be forms of dynamism or plastic transmitters rather than what we know as organs.”⁷

The language is dense and abstract, but the implications are enormous. A complete change of the body and its organs far beyond our imagination is of course necessary to constitute a supramental, divine being. “If a total transformation of the being is our aim, a transformation of the body must be an indispensable part of it; without that no full divine life on earth is possible.”⁸ Otherwise how would one be able “to be here and there at the same time”? How would one be able “to communicate with many people at the same time”? In other words, how would one be able to be godlike in a physical body? Already in the very beginning of The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo, taking the example of “wireless telegraphy”, predicted that “the physical means for the intermediate transmission of the physical force” must eventually disappear. “For when the laws and forces of the supraphysical are studied with the right starting-point, the means will infallibly be found for Mind directly to seize on the physical energy and speed it accurately upon its errand. There, once we bring ourselves to recognise it, lie the gates that open upon the enormous vistas of the future.”⁹

Here now the Mother was studying the laws and forces of the supraphysical with the right starting-point in what she called “microscopic studies”. What was going on in her, however, was enormous, fantastic, flabbergasting. The creation of a new, refined form of Matter in Matter?¹⁰ The change of the material organs into their supramaterial essence while alive? How can a heart be changed while it has to go on beating? And yet, this kind of thing was happening in her!

“All habits are undone”, she said. “And it is like that with all the functions [of the body]: with the blood circulation, with the digestion, with the respiration – with all the functions. And at the moment of change [from the normal way of functioning into the new one], it is not so that the one suddenly replaces the other: there is a fluid state in between, and that is difficult. It is only this great Faith, wholly immobile, luminous, constant, immutable – the faith in the real existence of the supreme Lord, in the sole real existence of the Supreme – that enables everything to continue being apparently the same.”¹¹ If ever there was a great adventure, then this metamorphosis was surely it. It was “a battle against a habit that is thousands of years old”, a “catastrophic habit”. Her entire body was “emptied of its habits and its forces, and then slowly, slowly the cells woke up to their new receptivity and opened to the Divine Influence directly.”¹² “The necessities” were bit by bit losing their authority. “All the laws, those laws that were the laws of Nature, have lost what one could call their despotism: it is no longer as it was”,¹³ the Mother said in 1967. Yet, she was still far from the complete realisation.

Every part of her body was undergoing or had to undergo “a change of master”, as she put it: a change “from the ordinary automatic functioning to a conscious functioning under the direct guidance and the direct influence of the Supreme.”¹⁴ The whole material body had to be permeated by the Divine. This was, of course, the supreme siddhi, and if it is true that every siddhi has an influence, a repercussion on the physical body, then the supreme siddhi must have a supreme, absolute influence. The Mother’s day-to-day experiences were baffling and could not have been possible without her avataric Yoga and, yes, the solidity of her physical constitution.

In our experience our body feels like the centre or axis of the material universe, and this feeling is firmly grounded in our ego-sense. Mentally and vitally the Mother had not had an ego for a very long time. But the body, in order to function normally, had naturally continued having its ego-sense. This ego-sense was now being dissolved and replaced by the presence of “the Supreme”. How does it feel being in a body when this body is no longer the centre of the material universe? “In the last few days, yesterday and the day before, there was this experience: a kind of consciousness completely decentralised – I am always speaking of the physical consciousness, not at all of the higher levels of consciousness – a decentralised consciousness that was here, there, in this body and in that other one. In what people call ‘this person’ and ‘that person’, but the notion [of a ‘person’] does not exist very much any more.”¹⁵ This line of her Yoga, like all others, will develop further and her body will become the body of the earth.

We have seen (cf. ‘The Ship from the Supramental World’) that the supramental world was there, ready to permeate the gross material world and take its place. The more the Mother’s cells became supramentalised, the more she belonged physically to the supramental world too, which means that for years she belonged physically to two worlds, the gross material and the supramental! How does one do that? How does one live in two worlds at the same time, physically – two worlds that are … worlds apart? This was a serious problem which, at first, she was not able to solve. The transitions from the one world to the other occurred unpredictably and abruptly, with the result that the Mother would faint at the most unexpected moments and in the most inconvenient places. This line too will gradually develop and she will acquire mastery over these kind of transitions.

However, to those surrounding her the faintings and the other tokens of the ongoing transformation looked like symptoms of illnesses. The disciples had no idea what was going on. The first reports, culled from personal conversations, would be published in the Bulletin only from October 1964 onwards, and even then the information provided was so sparse and so totally out of the ordinary that nobody gained any better insight into what was happening, not even the most “advanced” disciples. (And who has understood it even now? For a real understanding, a real knowledge is only possible when one is able to repeat the experience. This is at least as important to yoga, a matter of Truth, as it is to Science.)

As a consequence the Mother, from the time of her withdrawal in 1959, was thought to be almost continuously ill. It certainly looked like it. “You are surrounded by people who treat you as an ill person, and you know that you are not ill.”¹⁶ She stressed vigorously, and in part to counteract the suggestions projected upon her from all sides, that she was never ill: “These are not illnesses, these are functional disorders”,¹⁷ she said, caused by the process of transformation. And: “I have nothing to do with an illness from which one gets cured. I cannot get cured! This is the work of transformation!”¹⁸

All the same, the Mother was constantly in a state of “unstable equilibrium”, with one organ after the other, and sometimes several at the same time, being transformed, which meant a temporary suspension of its function and afterwards a completely new, unknown way of functioning … Who could stand that? And all these changes, suspensions and transformations of course caused a considerable upheaval in the physical body – an upheaval making itself felt by pain. On the one hand there was the glory of the transformation, on the other the terror of it – heaven and hell alternating, sometimes in one and the same moment. “Three minutes of splendour for twelve hours of misery.” – “Some seconds of paradise for hours of hell.” – “The marvellous moment lasts for a few minutes and is followed by hours of agony.” All these are her words.

She went through these ordeals while carrying out her daily routine, from the age of eighty to ninety-five – a routine that would prove too much for most young and healthy people. At that time the Ashram had some thirteen hundred inmates and six hundred students, living and working in numerous buildings. The secretaries and heads of the Ashram departments came for her advice, decisions, signatures and answers to the daily correspondence. The Ashramites met her at least once a year, on their birthday, which was considered by the Mother to be a special day; but many sought to meet her more often when they were in inner or outer difficulty. The children came on their birthday too, and the school was a kind of abiding challenge because the teachers struggled to find ways of applying the Yoga in the education. In addition there were the visitors of every standing and class, presidents, prime ministers, cabinet ministers of the Indian Union and of the States, kings, princes, gurus, religious leaders, professors, ambassadors, foreigners from all over the world, film actors and other celebrities. And this was only the human crowd.

What Was to be Done, is Done

At the beginning of April 1962, the situation became so critical that some thought the Mother had passed away. As in 1958 and during the following grave ordeals, she was attacked by black magic. Who were the attackers? Powerful beings from the invisible worlds who used human instruments. One of those hostile beings was a “titan” who had been a threat to her life since her birth and who, according to her own report, had actually been born at the same time. Another was the Lord of Falsehood who calls himself the Lord of the Nations; he had assured her that he would cause all possible havoc until she had destroyed him. The “Lord of the Nations” has been the origin of the great wars and all evil in the past century; he was the being by whom Hitler was possessed.¹⁹

Who were the human instruments? We do not know and it is risky to guess. It is much easier to become the medium of the forces of evil than it is to put oneself at the disposition of the Force of Good. “There are a group of people … who want to create a kind of religion based on the revelation of Sri Aurobindo. But they have taken only the side of power and force, a certain kind of knowledge and all that could be utilised by Asuric forces. There is a big Asuric being that has succeeded in taking the appearance of Sri Aurobindo … This appearance of Sri Aurobindo has declared that I have been a traitor to him and to his work, and has refused to have anything to do with me.”²⁰ It is not difficult to imagine the religion the Mother here talks about: one has only to think of the superman as conceived by Friedrich Nietzsche.

“I am no longer in my body. I have left it for the Lord to take care of it, to decide if it is to have the Supramental or not. I know and I have said also that now is the last fight. If the purpose for which this body is alive is to be fulfilled, that is to say, the first steps taken towards the Supramental transformation, then it will continue today. That is the Lord’s decision. I am not even asking what he has decided. If the body is incapable of bearing the fight, if it has to be dissolved, then humanity will pass through a critical time. What the Asuric Force that has succeeded in taking the appearance of Sri Aurobindo will create is a new religion or thought, perhaps cruel and merciless, in the name of the Supramental Realisation.” When the transcript of this talk was read to the Mother on one of the following days, she commented: “The fight is within the body. This can’t go on. They must be defeated or this body is defeated. All depends on what the Lord will decide. It [her body] is the battlefield …”

“Several weeks of grave illness threatened the Mother’s life”,²¹ read the introductory words to the following bulletin: “Suddenly in the night I woke with the full awareness of what we could call the Yoga of the World. The Supreme Love was manifesting through big pulsations, and each pulsation was bringing the world further in its manifestation. It was the formidable pulsations of the eternal stupendous Love, only Love …

“And there was the certitude that what was to be one is done²² and that the Supramental Manifestation is realised.

“Everything was personal, nothing was individual.²³

“This was going on, and on, and on, and on.

“The certitude that what was to be done is done …”²⁴

The Sixties

The Sixties were happening. The Twentieth Century, the most surprising, eventful and bloody century in human history, was taking a turn towards the unknown. The Mother said: “According to what I am being told – I mean by people who listen to the radio and read newspapers, all things I never do – the whole world seems to be undergoing an action which for the moment is disconcerting … In America, for instance, the entire youth seems to be in the grip of a sort of curious vertigo, disconcerting to reasonable people but certainly an indication that an unusual force is at work. It implies the breaking of all habits and all rules. It is good. It may be somewhat strange for the time being, but it is necessary …

“The best one can do is not to have any prejudices, not to have preconceived ideas or principles – you know: the moral principles, the preconceptions concerning the rules of conduct, what one must do and what one must not do, and the preconceived ideas concerning morality, concerning progress, and all the social and mental conventions. There is no worse obstacle …

“To stick to something one believes one knows, to stick to the way one feels, to stick to what one loves, to stick to one’s habits, to stick to one’s supposed needs, to stick to the world as it is: that is what ties you down. You must undo all that, one thing after the other. All the ties must be undone. We have said this thousands of times and the people continue all the same. Even those who are most eloquent and preach this to others, how they remain stuck: they stick to their way of seeing, their way of feeling, their habit of progress, which seems to them the only one. No more ties – free! free! Always ready to change, except one thing: to aspire, to thirst.

“I understand it well, there are people who do not like the idea of a ‘Godhead’ because it gets immediately mixed up with all kinds of European or Occidental conceptions which are terrible, and this complicates their life to some extent. But one does not need that! What one needs is the Light, what one needs is the Love, what one needs is the Truth, what one needs is the supreme Perfection, and nothing else! Formulas … the fewer formulas there are, the better. But this: a need which That alone can satisfy. Nothing else, no half-measures: That alone. And then: godspeed! Whatever your way, it does not matter. It does not matter! Even the extravagances of the modern American youth may be a way. It does not matter.”²⁵ The radical spirit of the beginning had, if possible, grown still more radical. The Mother founded Auroville on 28 February 1968. The principles of this Utopian “City of Dawn” were those of the Integral Yoga, and so was its goal. Then how did it differ from the Sri Aurobindo Ashram? It might be put as follows: the tender shoot of the Integral Yoga planted in the well-protected greenhouse of the Ashram had flourished into a strong young tree. Now the time had come to plant a first shoot of this tree in the open territory of the world. In the ‘Charter of Auroville’, a universal township-to-be which started from nothing in the middle of nowhere, the Mother wrote that the new city “belongs to nobody in particular”, but “to humanity as a whole”; that it would be “the place of unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages”; that it “wants to be the bridge between the past and the future”; and that it “will be a site of spiritual and material researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity”.

However, the key to the whole charter and therefore to Auroville was contained in its first paragraph: “To live in Auroville one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness”. The Mother was, of course, very much aware that this was the touchstone of the whole enterprise. No wonder then that from the very beginning, even before Auroville’s inauguration, the squabbling started precisely over this point. Which Divine? Which Divine Consciousness? Were the vision and the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to be accepted in order to be an Aurovillian? Were Sri Aurobindo and the Mother to be accepted as the Divine? How can one formulate things like that without making a religion out of it? And so on.

No doubt, the Mother foresaw it all: the material difficulties to be conquered in a very tough terrain; the spiritual ignorance and confusion; the egos of the individuals and the different groups – national, racial, cultural, and others – dancing their dances; the cultural and financial problems. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother herself had already pointed out on several occasions that the chief condition for the overman and the superman to come into being was an invincible occult protection against all the visible and occult influences which would try to make their presence impossible. Auroville was to be “the cradle of the superman”, wrote the Mother; this implied that, for the time being, it was also to be the cradle of the overman. The fact that after thirty-two years it is not only still there but even growing and expanding is proof that a Force is very concretely protecting it, for otherwise the whole project would have come to nothing because of its internal and external tribulations.

Perhaps the power poured into the atmosphere of the earth to establish Auroville caused a chain reaction elsewhere. Nanterre University, in the suburbs of Paris, was occupied by the students on 22 March 1968. And after March followed “May ’68”, with the barricades: in Paris and repercussions all over the globe. And there was the Prague Spring, when a few intellectuals stood up against a communist totalitarianism. A spirit of freedom, novelty, daring, improvisation and hankering for something better because more authentic, more honest, more sincere, wandered over the planet and inspired hundreds and thousands who never fully realised what was driving them. One cannot but recall the Mother’s prophetic insight when she said some four years earlier: “In America, for instance, the entire youth seems to be in the grip of a sort of curious vertigo, disconcerting to reasonable people but certainly an indication that an unusual force is at work …”

She followed the events with keen interest. She said that it was “the highest Power” that forced the people to do what they had to do, and: “This has not at all the character of a strike, it has the character of a revolution … It is clearly the future that is awakening and that wants to chase away the past.”²⁶ These words sounded almost pitifully inflated when after a few days the student’s movement in Paris fizzled out, when the wild waves abated everywhere, and still more when in the following years most grandiloquent leaders of the events fell in step with the establishment. At that time “May ’68” was “cruelly vilified” (Bernard-Henri Lévy) by the media.

But not any longer. For its importance has gradually grown evident and now even academic historians (like Eric Hobsbawn) concede that it was in the Sixties that the century took an unexpected turn into a future which nobody is yet able to interpret.

But: what has all this to do with overman? Everything. For there is no doubt that the external global events were the physical expression of the ongoing spiritual transformation. Sri Aurobindo once wrote that the French Revolution of 1789 was made possible because of the siddhi of Freedom, Equality and Brotherhood realised by some unknown yogi in the Himalayas. (“If the French Revolution took place, it was because a soul on the Indian snows dreamed of God as freedom, brotherhood and equality.”²⁷) An Avatar has more power than a yogi; he does not come to write great literature or say impressive things and build castles in the air, but to change an era. Speaking of overman, a surprise was in store.

“There are Some …”

Discussing the constitution of the supramental being, the Mother said on 30 September 1966: “This would be a transformation that is infinitely greater than that from the animal into man: this would be a change from man into a being no longer built in the same way, no longer functioning in the same way, being as it were a condensation or concretisation of something … Up to the present, this corresponds to nothing we have yet seen physically, unless the scientists have found something I do not know of … It is the leap, you see, that seems so enormous to me. I conceive without difficulty of a being that could, by spiritual power, the power of its inner being, absorb the necessary forces, renew itself and remain always young. One conceives this without any difficulty, even that some suppleness can be given to change the form if need be. But the total disappearance of this system of construction [of the body] all at once – all at once, from one [being] to the other? … It seems to require stages.”²⁸

She continued to reflect on this. “How long would it take to do away with the necessity – let us consider this problem only – of the skeleton? This seems to me still very far away in the future.” The physical substance required for the functioning of the supramental body would have to be of a kind “that I do not know. It is not the substance as we know it now, and it is surely not the [bodily] construction that we know now … It seems to me that between what exists at present, the way we are, and that other form of life, many intermediary stages will be needed … It is something I feel more and more: the necessity of intermediary periods. It is quite obvious that something is happening, but it is not the ‘something’ that was seen and foreseen, and that will be the final accomplishment [i.e. the supramental being]: It is one of the [intermediary] stages that is going to happen, it is not the final accomplishment.”²⁹

Then, on the first day of the year 1969 something “new” happened. “During the night it was coming slowly, and on waking up in the morning there was as it were a golden dawn, and the atmosphere was very light. The³⁰ body felt: ‘Hey, this is really, really new.’ A golden light, imponderous and benevolent – benevolent in the sense of a certitude, a harmonious certitude. It was new. Voilà. And when I say ‘bonne année’ to the people, it is that that I pass on to them. And this morning I have spent my time like this, spontaneously, saying: ‘Bonne année, bonne année …’ ”

The Mother never mentally dissected her experiences immediately after they had happened. She let them develop and take their complete shape so that she could be sure of their meaning, of their portent. We will follow the process in this case. On 4 January, she said: “On the 1st something really strange happened. And I was not the only one to feel it, several other persons felt it too. It was just after midnight [i.e. the beginning of the new year], but I felt it at two o’clock and others felt it at four o’clock in the morning. Last time I spoke to you about it in passing, but what is surprising is that it had absolutely nothing to do with anything I was expecting – I was expecting nothing – or with other things which I had felt [coming] …

“My impression was that of an immense personality. Immense! By this I mean that, compared to it, the earth was small, small like this (gesture as if holding a small ball in the palm of her hand), like a ball. An immense personality, very, very benevolent, that came in order to – (Mother does as if she gently lifts up a small ball in the palm of her hand). The impression was of a personal godhead … who comes to help. And so strong, so strong and at the same time so gentle, so comprehending …

“It was luminous, smiling, and so benevolent because of its power. By this I mean that, generally speaking, benevolence in the human being is something rather weak, in the sense that it does not like combat, it does not like fighting. This is nothing of the sort! [It is] a benevolence that imposes itself (Mother brings her fists down upon the armrests of her chair) … What is it? … Since its coming, the feeling of the body is of a kind of certitude, a certitude as if now it no longer has the anxiety or uncertainty of needing to know: ‘How will it be like? What will the Supramental be like – physically, what will it be like physically?’ That was what the body asked itself. Now it does not think of that any more, it is satisfied …

“I have the feeling that it is the formation that is going to enter, that is going to express itself – to enter and express itself – in what will be the bodies of the Supramental. Or perhaps … the overman [le surhomme]³¹ don’t know. The intermediary between the two [between man and superman]: Perhaps the overman. It was very human, but human with divine proportions, you see. Human without weaknesses and without shadows: it was all light, all light and smiling, and sweetness at the same time. Yes, perhaps the overman.”³²

Finally, on 8 January, she identified the new Consciousness: “It is the descent of the consciousness of the overman [le surhomme]: I had the assurance afterwards. It was 1 January, after midnight. I woke up at two in the morning, surrounded by a consciousness, so concrete and so new, by which I mean that I had never felt that before. And it lasted, absolutely concrete, there, for two or three hours. And afterwards it spread out and went in search of all the people who were able to receive it. And I knew that it was the consciousness of the overman, that is to say: the intermediary between man and the supramental being. This has given to the body a kind of assurance, of confidence. It is as if this experience stabilised it [the body], and, if it keeps the right attitude, as if every support is there to help it.”³³

Ten days later, on 18 January, the Mother had become quite familiar with the new Consciousness: “Well, it is very consciously active. It is like a projection of power. And it has now become habitual. There is a consciousness in it – something very precious – that gives lessons to the body, teaching it what it must do, that is to say which attitude it must take, which reaction it must have. I had told you many times that it is very difficult to find the process of transformation when there is nobody to give you any indications. Well, it is as if this were the reply. It comes and tells the body: ‘Take this attitude, do this, do that in that way.’ And so the body is content, it is completely reassured, it can no longer be mistaken. It is very interesting. It came as a mentor – practical, completely practical … In one of the former Entretiens, when I spoke there at the Playground, I said: ‘No doubt, the overman will be in the first place a being of power, so that he may defend himself.’ Well, this is it, it is that experience. It came back as an experience. And it is because it came back as an experience that I remember having said it.”³⁴

We may draw some conclusions from these words with their far-reaching implications. Overman is the intermediary being between man and superman, and his job is to make the supramental being possible, to find the means of producing the supramental body that will be the crown of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s Yoga – and of the Yoga of all those who work towards the same aim, who are “looking in the same direction” as the Mother put it. This, however, does not mean that the Consciousness of the overman is less than the supramental Consciousness. The latter having been established in the atmosphere of the earth in 1956, it would make no sense for a lesser consciousness to become active in the ongoing process of supramentalisation. The Consciousness of the overman is an aspect of the supramental Consciousness: it is the supramental Consciousness that emanates itself in a certain way in order to accomplish a certain task, namely the formation of the overman.

Two facts make this very clear. Firstly, the consciousness of the intermediary being that is overman is a supramental consciousness, called by Sri Aurobindo “the Mind of Light”. The fact that he defined it as the lowest degree of the Supermind does not diminish its importance. Any degree of the Supermind is supramental; anything supramental is divine; anything divine is worlds above our human status. Secondly, in 1969 the Mother was already far advanced in the realisation of the supramental body within her gross material body. Therefore the fact that she was so plainly content with the presence and guidance of the Consciousness of the overman, acting as her mentor, is a sure indication of its supramental status.

The presence of the Consciousness of the overman in the atmosphere of the earth is a permanent fact, whether it is known or not. It means that overmen and overwomen are coming into existence and are already there, now, unnoticed, in the common mass of humanity. The Mother herself has pointed this out when she said in April 1972: “The change from the human into the supramental being is being achieved … through the overman. It may be that there will be some overmen – there are some – who will make the transition possible.”³⁵

Another relevant reference in this connection is found in one of the very last Entretiens which is dated fourteen years earlier: “All those who make an effort to overcome their ordinary nature, all those who try to realise materially the profound experience that has brought them into contact with the divine Truth, all those who, instead of turning to the Hereafter or the On-high, try to realise physically, externally, the change of consciousness they have realised within themselves – all those are apprentice-overmen [des apprentis-surhommes]. Among them, there are countless variations according to the success of their efforts. Each time we try not to be an ordinary man, not to live the ordinary life, to express in our movements, our actions and reactions the divine Truth, when we are governed by that Truth instead of being governed by the general ignorance, we are apprentice-overmen, and according to the success of our efforts we are, well, more or less good apprentices, more or less advanced on the way.”³⁶

The Mother would continue her sometimes ecstatic, often gruesome, but always glorious Yoga of the body till the end on 17 November 1973, at the time of writing twenty-seven years ago. Gradually the prototype of the supramental body took shape in her in a series of extraordinary experiences. She saw her new body in May 1970, and ce n’était pas surhumain, it was not a body of the overman but of the superman. In March 1972 the formation of the supramental body was complete: she was like that, she said, she “had a totally new body”. But this is outside the compass of this essay and has been narrated elsewhere.

The twentieth century has seen such a storm of upheaval that the learned have run out of explanations. Our world, our planet is going through an unprecedented crisis; all are agreed that something singular is happening, but nobody has any notion what that something might be. This is not unusual: mankind has never known the deeper rationale of the throes it was subject to, except post factum, and the exceptional beings who did know have never been believed. Why should it be otherwise this time? “Most people are blind”, said the Mother, “they will go till the end without seeing anything. But those who have their eyes open will see.”³⁷ In order to see, however, there is a condition: that we change from a blind species into a species which has its inner sight activated – that the darkness of our mind changes into a Mind of Light. All remains literature and fantasy stuff unless we become apprentice-overmen and apprentice-overwomen. “There are some …”

Auroville, 28 March 2001