Patterns of the Present

Introduction

Sri Aurobindo announced, in the very last months of his life, the necessity of a transitional being between man and the supramental being. This announcement was the result of his own yogic realisation in his physical being. The Mother took over this work immediately after his passing, called the transitional being surhomme, “overman”, and realised the overmanhood in 1958. The whole effort was crowned with the establishment of the Consciousness of the overman on 1 January 1969. The development of the process, fully outlined and documented in my book Overman: The Intermediary between the Human and the Supramental Being (Rupa & Co), is clear, and so are the definitions and the reports of the realisations.

The importance and necessity of a transitional being, or a variety of transitional beings, is obvious considering the enormous gap between the human and the supramental being. Besides, the necessity of this intermediary step in evolution seems to agree with the normal evolutionary process in the case of the appearance in the past of every preceding species. The Mother said in 1958: “It can be affirmed with certainty that there will be an intermediate specimen between the mental and the supramental being, a kind of overman who will still have the qualities and in part the nature of man, which means that he will still belong in his most external form to the human being of animal origin, but that he will transform his consciousness sufficiently to belong, in his realisation and activity, to a new race, a race of overmen.”¹

More than a quarter of a century has passed since the Mother left her body and the avataric Yoga came to an end. The foundations of the new species, of the new Order in the world, were laid. Not only had the Supermind descended in the atmosphere of the Earth, the prototype of the overman had been realised and its consciousness had become active wherever there was a receptivity, an aspiration, a turn towards the transformation of the Earth. Moreover, the Mother had realised the archetype of the supramental being.² So, many ask, what has become of all that in the last decades of the century and the millennium? Were there any perceptible signs of the continuation of the process? Any overmen or overwomen? Any events brought about by those new, supposedly very powerful forces? After all, one may assume that the coming of a New World is much more than a new social, scientific or religious paradigm: it means the change from a very troublesome, not to say absurd, human condition to a fully harmonious supramental, i.e. divine world. The life human would become “the life divine”. This would make an enormous difference necessitating a no less enormous change.

The least one can say of the 20th century is that the overall change has been, well yes, enormous. The world at the end of the century was very different from the world at its beginning, so much so that humanity has patently lost its bearings and lives in a kind of dizzying vortex, taking it … where? Pundits made numerous comments on the advent of the new millennium, but they had little more to enunciate than commonplaces about technological inventiveness, electronic miniaturisation, artificial intelligence, interplanetary exploration and putative meetings with extraterrestrials. Change is disorienting and frightening to the human being, and humanity is afraid, now, when it takes the time to reflect on its situation. On the other hand, the effects of the technological revolution and its globalisation are so overwhelming that the planet with its inhabitants seems to be sucked, at an ever-accelerating speed, into something like a black hole.

Then, of course, there is the view of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on the origin and destiny of the Earth and of humanity, and on their present development. But who will take this view as something more than sectarian or utopian?

The Mother foresaw “the supramental catastrophe”, as she once called in jest the great change that is now going on. In The Life Divine Sri Aurobindo had already written: “When the turning point has been reached, the decisive line crossed, the new life in its beginnings would have to pass through a period of ordeal and arduous development.”³ Things cannot change, even for the better, without changing. Evolution has progressed through a clash of forces. Yet “the supramental has a greater – in its fullness a complete mastery of things and power of harmonisation which can overcome resistance by other means than dramatic struggle and violence … As far as I can see”, wrote Sri Aurobindo, “once the supramental is established in Matter, the transformation will be possible under much less troublesome conditions than now are there. These bad conditions are due to the fact that the Ignorance is in possession and the hostile Powers an established authority, as it were, who do not care to give up their hold …”⁴

“The world knows three kinds of revolution. The material has strong results, the moral and intellectual are infinitely large in their scope and richer in their fruits, but the spiritual are the great sowings.”⁵ We are at present fully involved in the greatest, not to say the ultimate spiritual revolution. “The changes we see in the world today [i.e. around 1920] are intellectual, moral, physical in their ideal and intention. The spiritual revolution waits for its hour and throws up meanwhile its waves here and there. Until it comes the sense of the others cannot be understood and till then all interpretation of present happening and forecast of man’s future are vain things. For its nature, power, event are that which will determine the next cycle of our humanity.”⁶ The definitive spiritual revolution is underway, now; it is what is happening all around us, everywhere. Since 1956 it cannot but be underway, for the Supermind, manifested in the earth-consciousness in that year, cannot but be active. Its action, though, has to be prudently dosed not to cause too much damage and therefore takes some time to be apparent.

In 1972 the Mother said that there was “a golden Force” exerting pressure on the Earth, so heavily that catastrophes seemed inevitable. But as this was the supramental Force, harmonious and all-powerful, time and again a solution cropped up in circumstances that seemed miraculous, she added.⁷ This is what, at present, is causing our world to spin so wildly and what, at the same time, is ensuring that apparent chaos may lead towards the right outcome. This is a change so great that the way to bring it about must of necessity be drastic and bewildering to the human mind.

What follows are notes, reflections, quotations, comments and comparisons, all in connection with the continuation of the transformative process caused by the fundamental realisations of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and with the spiritual Forces active at present. To make these notes and reflections more readable, they have been organised around some of the main topics, chosen as themes of the chapters.