The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and The Mother's Contribution to it

even when they are focused on the Life-Force's Rajas, its energy lost in self-assertive turbulence/we are already far advanced on the way which culminates in certainty. From the time the sadhana ca Aurobindo struck with accumulating confidence upon the momentous truth that here was not any genuine prelude of the supreme all-transformative power which in his own ascent overhead he had visioned and experienced.

The proof of our contention lies in our knowledge that around the end of 1926 the Overmind's cleavage from the Supermind had already been realised: that is, several months before Sri Aurobindo and the Mother brought the sadhana down into the physical and started working from the physical consciousness under most oppressive conditions.

If we could find out - to match our information about the time the sadhana was precipitated into the physical - the time it began on the vital plane, we should have some basis for ascertaining when exactly the Overmind as a separate entity from the Supermind sprang into Sri Aurobindo's perception. Was the beginning marked by the event of 24 November? There is no statement anywhere that it was; we are only told that it was going on in the days subsequent to it. The question is: how long before did it commence?

In the talk of 6 November 1926, recorded by Purani, Sri Aurobindo tells a disciple: "...when you are doing the Sadhana in the mind, then outer activities like the Arya and writing, etc., can go on. But when I came down to the vital I stopped all that."¹ We may also cite Chidanandam's corroboration. The Master tells a disciple about the process of supramental descent: "It is a silent work. Publicity attracts hostile forces. You can do outside work only when it is in you to do so. When you are doing sadhana in the mind, you can do it. I wrote the Arya at the time of such sadhana. When I came to the vital plane, I had to stop all that."² We may

¹. Evening Talks, Second Series, p. 295.

². Mother India, July 1970, p. 333.

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be tempted to attribute the stopping of the Arya to one sole cause: the coming down of the sadhana to the vital plane. This would give us January 1921 as approximately our date. But we would be indulging in too cut-and-dried a procedure. There may have been more than one reason why Sri Aurobindo discontinued his periodical. We cannot be certain, either, that the vital sadhana did not begin earlier. The Arya may have gone on for a while after its beginning. A broad clue to the general situation may be gleaned from the Mother's talk of 25 August 1954. There she says:

"...when I began with Sri Aurobindo to descend, for the yoga,...from the mind into the vital...I was forty at that time. I didn't look old, I looked younger than forty, but still I was forty - and after a month's yoga I looked exactly eighteen. And someone who had seen me before, who had lived with me in Japan and came here, found it difficult to recognise me. He asked me, 'But, really, is it you?' I said, 'Obviously!' Only when we descended from the vital into the physical, then it was gone, for in the physical the work is much harder. It was because there were many more things to change..."

If we took the Mother's chronology literally, we should have 1918 as the date for the shift of Yoga to the vital plane, for in that year the Mother, who was born in 1878, would have been forty. But in 1918 she was still in Japan. Only on 24 April 1920 she returned to Pondicherry after a little more than five years' absence. The joint Yoga shift is most likely to have taken place subsequent to this date. The Mother was often rather vague in chronological matters. In the very talk from which we have quoted, she admitted as much when she said that she could not tell precisely in what year had arrived on earth temporarily the power and personality of Ananda which, unlike her four great powers and personalities - Maheshwari, Mahakali, Mahalakshmi, Mahasaraswati - had never appeared in the manifestation so far: she could only declare that it had arrived before Sri Aurobindo left his body (5 December 1950). When a disciple mentioned 1946 she felt he was right, and answered: "Yes." What we can affirm with

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certainty m the present case is in reference to "someone" whom she had known well in Japan and who later visited her in Pondicherry. The person concerned was W. W. Pearson who had been with Tagore in Japan in 1916 when the Mother too had been in that country. He visited Pondicherry on 17 April 1923.¹His surprise at finding the Mother looking like an eighteen-year-old although in fact she was forty-five proves the shift with Sri Aurobindo to the vital to have been made earlier. Thus we have positively the terminus ad quem, the lower limit. The upper limit, the terminus a quo, seems in all probability on the evidence available to lie between 24 April 1920 and the month of the Arya's last issue.

But surely we do not have here "the difficulty" which Sri Aurobindo speaks of in dealing with the vital. Up to 1923 no particular difficulty seems present. Again, immediately following the Overmind's descent there was no difficulty as such: the descent brought a tremendous spurt of glory on the vital plane. Between 1923 and 1926 the obstacles leading to awareness of the Overmind's insufficiency for transformation must have reared their heads.

So, in that interval of three years, the real nature of the Overmind as being no part of the supreme Truth-Consciousness was gradually disclosed, the specific name for it approached and the final definition of Supermind developed.

Some aspects of the process are hinted at in the reports kept by Purani and Chidanandam. But we can draw no complete picture of it from them. Several of their elements leave us in a blur. We might have been helped if there had been private records of Sri Aurobindo himself, such as those which yielded to us the mention of the Overmind Gnosis. Unfortunately no diary-notes of the Master from 1920 to 1926 exist. All we are left with is the sense of the time-span within which the process must have taken place.

¹. Purani, The Life of Sri Aurobindo, p. 185.

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(e)

The new knowledge changed for Sri Aurobindo the boundaries he had set to the Lower Hemisphere (aparardha) of Reality and the Higher Hemisphere (parardha). The general formulation in the An/a-days was as follows: "The Divine descends from pure existence through the play of Consciousness-Force and Bliss and the creative medium of Supermind into cosmic being; we ascend from Matter through a developing life, soul and mind and the illuminating medium of Supermind towards the divine being. The knot of the two, the higher and the lower hemisphere, is where mind and Supermind meet with a veil between them."¹ The exact significance of this formulation, before the First Part of The Life Divine where it figures was revised, emerges from another statement of Sri Aurobindo's in a series that has not received revision. There we obtain a more particular focus on the "veil". In the commentary on the Isha Upanishad's verse on Surya, the Sun of Truth, Sri Aurobindo writes: "The face of this Truth is covered as with a brilliant shield, as with a golden lid; covered, that is to say, from the view of our human consciousness. For we are mental beings and our highest ordinary mental sight is composed of the concepts and percepts of the mind, which are indeed a means of knowledge, rays of the Truth, but not in their nature truth of existence, only truth of form.... We can only arrive at the true Truth, if Surya works in us to remove this brilliant formation of concepts and percepts and replaces them by the self-vision and all-vision."² The "veil" between the Lower Hemisphere and the Higher is the mental consciousness unenlightened by what is above it.

This view of Reality's dichotomy changes after the Over- mind is sorted out from the Supermind. Now we are told: "A line is therefore drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness, parardha, and the lower half, aparardha. The

¹ . The Life Divine (American Edition, 1949), p. 243.

². The Isha Upanishad (Arya Publishing House, Calcutta, 1924), pp. 95-96

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higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental) - the lower half of mind, life. Matter. This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light..."¹ About the Overmind we learn: "It is a power, though the highest power, of the lower hemisphere; although its basis is a cosmic unity, its action is an action of division and inter- action, an action taking its stand on the play of the multiplicity. Its play is, like that of all Mind, a play of possibilities; although it acts not in the Ignorance but with the knowledge of the truth of these possibilities, yet it works them out through their own independent evolution of their powers. It acts in each cosmic formula according to the fundamental meaning of that formula and is not a power for a dynamic transcendence." ² Sri Aurobindo, expressing his new vision, tells us: "...we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, - not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality."³

The face of the Isha Upanishad's Surya is now seen as veiled not by our perceptual and conceptual mental consciousness but by the creative superconscient Overmind. The Upper Hemisphere now commences beyond the Overmind plane. That plane is now to be placed at the farther end (the "violet" end, we may say) of a broad spectrum which can be designated as Mental in a general sense differing from the

¹. On Yoga II, Tame One, p. 264.

². The Life Divine, p. 846.

³. Ibid., p. 255.

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restricted sense of the Arya-days and even of a later period - a spectrum which bears at its nearer end (the "red" one, so to speak) "Mind as we know it". The Overmind plane marks the summit of the Cosmic Being as distinguished from the Transcendence. The Transcendence begins at the Supermind and completes an ultimate quaternary by holding Bliss (ananda), Consciousness-Force (chit-tapas) and Existence (sat) at the back of the Supramental plane (vijnana).

Once the World of the Gods was seen - some years before 24 November 1926 - not as a subordinate province of the Supermind but only as a preparatory stage for the Supermind's descent, the Parardha ceased to start immediately above the mind with a rising supramental gradation: the Supermind was pitched far beyond with a ladder of ascending non-supramental Knowledge in between.

Not that Sri Aurobindo completely denied a veil between the mind and what is above it. A phrase in Savitri written long after he had distinguished Overmind from Supermind repeats in a certain context the vision of the Arya-days:

All the grey inhibitions were torn off

And broken the intellect's hard and lustrous lid...¹

But the. great divide actually comes, according to Sri Aurobindo's full realisation, at the top of the Overmind. As Savitri itself puts it:

Then stretches the boundless finite's last expanse,

The cosmic empire of the Overmind,

Time's buffer state bordering Eternity...²

Again, we read:

There is the Godhead's universal gaze

And there the boundaries of immortal Mind:

¹. Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherrv, 1971) p. 25.

² . Ibid., p. 660.

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The line that parts and joins the hemispheres

Closes in on the labour of the Gods

Fencing Eternity from the toil of Time.¹

The critical newness of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga, rendering defunct all the old spirituality which in various forms hailed from the Overmind and which, because of the Overmind's dazzling splendours, could not look beyond it - the critical newness is hit off very strikingly in the verses:

As if a torch held by a power of God,

The radiant world of the everlasting Truth

Glimmered like a faint star bordering the night

Above the golden Overmind's shimmering ridge. ²

These lines are unique in Sri Aurobindo's writings - and more than anything else from his hand they can serve as the packed nucleus of a whole revolution in spiritual philosophy, an astonishing reversal in the final vision of reality. For, they posit a "night" between the Overmind and the Supramental Truth-World, and so vast, so deep is it that the latter appears beyond the former as no more than a tiny scintillation at the remotest end of the darkness. The only parallel to this view is to be found in a talk by the Mother in 1931 to some of us who used to gather in the "Prosperity"-room before the evening's Soup-distribution. Let me quote a recollection I put into a talk I myself gave to the students of the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education on 20 October 1971:³

"When we usually talk of Supermind and Overmind, we do draw a marked distinction between them, but we do not go beyond saying that the latter is only the delegate of the former and therefore an inferior power by comparison and not capable of achieving the ultimate victory of the Divine.

¹. Ibid., pp. 660-61.

². Ibid., p. 41.

³. Light and Laughter: Some Talks at Pondicherry by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran (Second Revised Edition, All India Press, Pondicherry, 1974), p. 77.

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All the same, compared to mind, it is a mighty splendour and we couple it with the Supermind while we mental creatures stand dwarfed below. The Mother shook us up by saying that the gap we feel between our mind and Overmind is less than the gap existing between Overmind and Supermind. Her words put things quite topsyturvy. But if we think clearly they should strike us as quite natural. After all, the Overmind is only the divine aspect of the mind. The Supermind is the Divine self-experienced in His creative movement directly, immediately. The Overmind is the Divine projecting Himself into the highest mental formulation of His nature. The Divine there is self-aware at one remove. Because of this the Overmind is, according to Sri Aurobindo, the top of the Lower Hemisphere: the Higher Hemisphere starts beyond it. Yet we are always impressed by its proximity to the Supermind and forget the radical, the colossal difference between the two. The Mother threw this difference into remarkable relief."

However, the difference, though never to be forgotten, must not be counted as the single last word. Another word has to pair with it; or else the Overmind would hardly be what Sri Aurobindo makes it out: a passage to the supreme Truth- Consciousness by its delegated power no less than an obstruction to that Ultimate by its own immensity and grandeur. The definitive formula for it must be the paradox of "a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity", as Sri Aurobindo ¹ puts it, a Siddhi and Victory which is indispensable as an aid and anticipation in order to be itself renounced and surpassed, where

In the realms of the immortal Supermind

Truth who hides here her head in mystery,

Her riddle deemed by reason impossible

In the stark structure of material form,

Unenigmaed lives, unmasked her face and there

Is Nature and the common law of things.²

¹ . The Life Divine, p. 255.

². Savitri, pp. 661-62.

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the Supermind, as man represents the mind" (13.8.1933).¹

The power called supramental by Sri Aurobindo is the all- creative as well as the all-transformative divinity to which he attaches several names besides Supermind - "Truth-Consciousness", "Gnosis", "Gnostic Being", "Vijnana", "Mahas" - and which he considers to have never before been directly manifested. It is by the descent of this power into the figure of humanity with the co-operation of the aspiring soul that man's entire complex of mind, life-force and body will be altogether divinised to bring about evolution's fulfilment: the Superman. For, as Sri Aurobindo says repeatedly, "supermind is superman." ²

The nucleus, with which the supramentalisation or divinisation or transformation will begin what ultimately will be a racial step forward, is designated by Sri Aurobindo as the Gnostic Community, a small group organised harmoniously according to a perfect inner light, love and liberty.

Sri Aurobindo also conceived the appearance of a semi- supramentalised group, "a new humanity", possessing what he called the Mind of Light. In this context he labelled that humanity as "the new race", and told us: "Its mentality...at its highest...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",³ a community entirely Gnostic, totally transformed. Sri Aurobindo adds: "Even, the highest manifestations of a mind of Light would be an instrumentality of the supermind, a part of it or a projection from it, a stepping beyond humanity into the superhumanity of the supramental principle."⁴ The word "recruited" indicates that "the race of supramental beings" would grow by enlisting and including members of the "new humanity" ready to rise higher and

¹. Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (1953), p. 434.

². The Life Divine (American Edition, 1949), p. 44. Also, SABCL, Vol. 17, pp. 7, 76.

³. The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16, p. 67.

⁴. Olid.

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perfect themselves. Both the batches have the common base of the terrestrially human, even though Sri Aurobindo distinguishes the former as "superhumanity".

That "the race of supramental beings" consists of the human turned into a divine quality all-round is precisely stated by him when he ponders what "the descent of Super- mind into our earthly existence" would have as its "consequence".¹He writes; "It would certainly open to man the access to the supramental consciousness and the...supramental beings would be created, even as the human race itself has arisen by a less radical but still a considerable uplifting and enlargement of consciousness and conversion of the body's instrumentation and its indwelling and evolving mental and spiritual capacities and powers out of a first animal state."²

In the original plan Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were to be the initial representatives of a "superhumanity" resulting from an accelerated evolution. As Avatars of the Supermind, they were to form the double centre of "the race of supramental beings", men grown Supermen by practising the Integral Yoga with their help. This plan is obvious from a pronouncement like: "What is being done is meant to prepare the manifestation of the Supermind in the earth-consciousness down to Matter itself, so it can't be for the physical of myself or the Mother alone. If it comes down into our physical it would mean that it has come down into Matter and so there is no reason why it should not manifest in the sadhaks" (15.9.35). ³ For occult reasons Sri Aurobindo chose to pass through the process of physical death, thereby removing as if

with a strategic self-sacrifice some block in the way which would have taken very much longer to demolish otherwise. The moment he left his body the Mind of Light was realised in the Mother. Six years later (1956) the manifestation of the supramental light, consciousness and force on a universal

¹ . Ibid., p. 50.

². Ibid.

³. Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (1953), p. 358.

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scale was brought about in the subtle-physical layer of the earth. (This layer, which the earth possesses just as it possesses a vital and mental layer, must be demarcated from the subtle-physical plane as such, although the two have a connection. That plane, being typal, exactly like the independent vital and mental ones, has no need of any other light, consciousness and force than its own.)

Generalising from her realisation of the Mind of Light and applying to the Ashram's Yogic life Sri Aurobindo's view of "a new humanity" moving forward to become a "superhumanity", the Mother refers on 29 December 1954 to "what Sri Aurobindo has written in his last article which appeared in the Bulletin”, and tells us: "He says that if you want to prepare for the descent of the Supermind, first of all your mind of ignorance and incapacity must be replaced by a mind of light which sees and knows. And this is the first step! Before this step is crossed, one cannot go forward."¹

Then the Mother proceeds to a dimension of future achievement which is nowhere quite explicit in the Master's books. With Sri Aurobindo not on the material scene, the Mother, under the inspiration of his inner message to her, after his passing in the supramental way, saw the fulfilment of their work under two aspects. Taking a cue from his latest writings and developing it along novel lines with a nomenclature not actually used by Sri Aurobindo but attributable to him from the drift of his utterance, she declares: "Sri Aurobindo said that there would be an intermediate race (a race or perhaps a few individuals, one does not know), a kind of intermediate stage which might serve as a passage or might be perpetuated, following the needs and necessities of creation. But if one starts with a body formed as human bodies are now formed, the result will never be the same as in the case of a being formed wholly according to the supramental method and process. It may be farther on the superhuman side, in the sense that all animal expression might disappear, but it

¹. CWM, Vol. 6, p. 451,

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cannot have the absolute perfection of a body purely supramental in its formation."

The opposed aspects projected here in general she defines more particularly though still in a broad manner thus: "There are two possibilities, the possibility of a purely supramental creation and the possibility of a progressive transformation of a physical body into a supramental body or rather that of a human body into a superhuman body; this progressive trans- formation might take a number of years, probably a very considerable number of years and produce a being who would not be a man in the animal sense of the word, and yet would not be the being properly called supramental, formed wholly outside animality; necessarily it would have an animal origin."¹ In short, on the one hand there would be the human supramentalised and on the other the supramental humanised - in the sense of assuming a man-like shape. The former would mark the evolutionary consummation, with the Mother being, as the leader of the earth's "Yoga of supramental descent and transformation", its prime exemplar. The latter would be a non-evolutionary epiphany, an embodiment of the Supermind from its own level without the ordinary birth- process and without an earthly past of human as well as pre- human history: Sri Aurobindo returning to our world would be the prime exemplar of the direct divine self-expression.

In one of his final essays, Sri Aurobindo discussed the possibility of a materialisation of this sort in a time yet to come. He wrote: "A soul wishing to enter into a body or form for itself a body and take part in a divine life upon earth might be assisted to do so or even provided with such a form by this method of direct transmutation without passing through birth by the sex process or undergoing any degradation or any of the heavy limitations in the growth and development of its mind and material body inevitable to our present way of existence. It might then assume at once the structure and greater powers and functionings of the truly

¹. Bulletin, February 1963, p. 43.

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divine material body which must one day emerge in a progressive evolution to a totally transformed existence both of the life and form in a divinised earth-nature."¹ As Sri Aurobindo was still in his body, the vision he had delineated had no relation to himself. The Mother related it to him as well as made it depend on the event of the human supramentalised. The human supramentalised would develop and exercise the ability to effect a materialisation of beings from a higher plane, which would bypass the common phenomenon of birth by sexual means.

In view of Sri Aurobindo's occult affirmation to the Mother after leaving his body that he would return to earth in a non-evolutionary supramental manner at some future date, we may adjudge the Mother's vision as having in general his private seal upon it.

In several talks she named the evolutionary aspect of supramentalisation the Intermediate Race or the Race of Superman. To quote her own words on the nature and function of the ultimate product of Yogic evolution: "This species may be considered as a species of transition, because it will discover, as it is to be foreseen, the means of creating new beings without passing through the old animal method, and it is these beings, having truly a spiritual birth, that will form the elements of the new race, the supramental race. One might thus name supermen those who still belong by their origin to the older method of generation, but who, by their achievement, are in conscious and active relation with the new world of supramental realisation."²

What the Mother calls "the new world of supramental realisation" is something unique in evolutionary history. Perhaps it is not correct to speak of evolution at all in this connection. When the life-world manifested, even when the more subtle and potent mind-world found its expression and that special superior race was once formed, there never were sheer beings of these planes precipitated directly upon earth

¹. The Supramental Manifestation, SABCL, Vol. 16, p. 33.

². Bulletin, August 1958, p. 85.

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their own characteristic spirit and substance. For, the ability to bring about a lasting direct materialisation from any plane will arise only with the evolution of the Intermediate Race - and what is brought about will be an involution, in the Mother's sense, of an utterly unprecedented nature.

Thus the Intermediate Race, even if transitional, has a crucial role. In one place the Mother has doubted its transitional fate: she has envisaged a continued side-by-side play of the Supreme-body and the pure embodiment of the Supermind, as each would possess a beauty of its own and have its reason d'etre.¹ To keep a sign of animal origin must not be understood as a radical imperfection. We must remember that "the truly divine body", of which Sri Aurobindo has spoken in his Bulletin-article, is said by him precisely to be the one emerging "in a progressive evolution" - the body of the Mother's Intermediate Race. The Mother herself, in 1931, enumerated the attributes of this body, which she then called "supramental" rather than "superhuman" since the two aspects of the fulfilment of her work and Sri Aurobindo's were not yet visualised. She said: "The supramental body which has to be brought into being here has four main attributes: lightness, adaptability, plasticity and luminosity. When the physical body is thoroughly divinised, it will feel as if it were always walking on air, there will be no heaviness or tamas or unconsciousness in it. There will also be no end to its power of adaptability: in whatever conditions it is placed it will immediately be equal to the demands made upon it because its full consciousness will drive out all that inertia and incapacity which usually make Matter a drag on the Spirit. Supramental plasticity will enable it to stand the attack of every hostile force which strives to pierce it: it will present no dull resistance to the attack but will be, on the contrary, so pliant as to nullify the force by giving way to it to pass off. Thus it will suffer no harmful consequences and the most deadly attacks will leave it unscathed. Lastly, it will be turned

¹. Ibid., April 1963, p. 49.

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into the stuff of light, each cell will radiate the supramental glory. Not only those who are developed enough to have '•> their subtle sight open but the ordinary man too will be able to perceive this luminosity. It will be an evident fact to each and all, a permanent proof of the transformation which will convince even the most sceptical."¹

Only in comparison with "the supramental body built in the supramental way" is the Intermediate Race's physical' vehicle open to criticism. In itself it will be as if - in Shakespearean phrase -

Heaven had made another world

Of one entire and perfect chrysolite.

At the beginning of 1969 - that is, about thirteen years after the subtle-physical manifestation of the Supermind - the Mother announced that the force to realise the Intermediate Race had come in its own right to the earth - evidently from the subtle-physical. She distinguished the occasion as the advent of the Superman Consciousness and mentioned some of its outstanding qualities. About the non-evolutionary aspect of her work - the supramental humanised from its own level, the New Race, as she named it - she has not said much. But it is this race that, according to her, would really merit to be regarded as composed of Gnostic Beings and making the Gnostic Community.

Evidently her New Race and her Superman do not coincide as mostly did Sri Aurobindo's. Nor are her Gnostic Being and Gnostic Community the same as his. Doubtless, the description "New Race" is at a few places employed by her for the human supramentalised, as when she says: "We must not confuse a supramental transformation with the appearance of a new race." Earlier, when she opened the All- India Convention held in Pondicherry on 24 April 1951, about four and a half months after Sri Aurobindo's departure, she

¹. CWM, Vol. 3, pp. 175-76

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grave a message which reflected in its closing words his vision of the great time ahead: "...preparing the future humanity to receive the supramental light that will transform the elite of today into a new race manifesting upon earth the new light and force and life." By and large, however, the Mother distinctly reserves the "New Race" title for the other phenomenon.

Thus, owing to altered circumstances, the Mother's terminology extended that of Sri Aurobindo in several respects, and the vision of the Supermind's revealed presence in the world changed in its final details - although both the extension and the change were along lines which could be recognised as having Sri Aurobindo's silent support.

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There has been a little perplexity among the Mother's readers owing to a broad use of the term "physical mind" in two talks of hers and to a vague reference in them to some writing or letter of Sri Aurobindo's in the past. She says on 18 December 1971:

"I heard something written by Sri Aurobindo saying that for the Supramental to manifest upon earth the physical mind must receive it and manifest it - and it is just the physical mind, that is to say, the body mind, that is the only thing that remains in me now. And then, the reason why only this part has remained became quite clear to me. It is on the way to being converted in a very rapid and interesting manner. This physical mind is being developed under the Supramental Influence. And it is just what Sri Aurobindo has written, that this is indispensable so that the Supramental can manifest itself permanently upon earth.

" So it is going on well...but it is not easy....

"I could say truly that I have become another person. There is only this (Mother touches the outer form of her body) which remains as it was.... To what extent would it be able to change? Sri Aurobindo has said that if the physical mind were transformed, the transformation of the body would follow quite naturally. We shall see."

On 22 December 1971 she says:

"A letter of Sri Aurobindo was read to me in which he said that for the Supramental to be fixed here (he had seen that the Supramental came into him and then it withdrew, and then it came back again and again withdrew - it was not stable); for it to become stable it must enter and settle itself in the physical mind. It is this work which is being done in me for months now. The mind has been withdrawn and the physical mind..., the mind that is in the body, became wide, it had a global view of things, and its entire way of its seeing was absolutely

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different. I have seen, it is this: the Supramental is at work there. I am passing through extraordinary hours."

In the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, February 1972, where both the talks appear in the series "Notes on the Way" on pp. 83-84 and 91 respectively, a footnote has been put in connection with the second talk, reading:

"We do not know exactly the text to which Mother refers here, but it must be some writing similar to the following:

'There is too an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles. Haeckel, the German materialist, spoke somewhere of the will in the atom, and recent science, dealing with the incalculable variations in the activities of the electrons, comes near to perceiving that this is not a figure but the shadow thrown by a secret reality. This body-mind is a very tangible truth; owing to its obscurity and mechanical clinging to past movements and docile oblivion and rejection of the new, we find in it one of the chief obstacles to permeation by the Supermind Force and the transformation of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilisation of the Supramental Light and Force in material Nature' "¹

Taken along with other talks of the same period, what the Mother is speaking of is obviously the work going on in her of the illumination of the body's cells by the Supermind. However, it is very improbable that some writing of Sri Aurobindo like the letter quoted in the editorial footnote should be the one to which she refers. No doubt, like her two talks, the letter points to "an obscure mind of the body" or "body mind" at work in the cells (as well as in the molecules, the corpuscles) and it also mentions the task of converting this mind and the important role its conversion will play in stabilising - that is, in manifesting permanently - the Super- mind in earth-Nature. But there is here no focusing on this

¹. Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 22, p. 340.

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task of conversion as the one master-key to the physical transformation, the supramentalisation of the body. And - what is equally if not more significant - the omitted sentence, which immediately precedes in this letter the words quoted in the footnote, actually differentiates the "physical mind" from the "mind of the body" or "body mind" belonging to "the very cells", for we read: "The physical mind is technically placed below the vital and yet it is a prolongation of the mind proper and one that can act in its own sphere by direct touch with the higher mental intelligence. And there is too an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells..." Here the "body mind", to which the Mother alludes, is specially regarded as additional to and not overlapping with the physical mind.

Finally, where in the letter is any hint about Sri Aurobindo's having seen the Supramental coming into him and then withdrawing and again coming and once more withdrawing? Such an experience as a background is not evident in any letter of his. Besides, all the letters at our disposal touching on the themes concerned in the two talks of the Mother - in fact, all the letters on any subject - go without a single assertion that the Supermind has not only been at work in Sri Aurobindo's inner parts but also descended into his body-substance for however short a time. Therefore, the letter in question as well as every other on allied topics is ruled out: nothing in his correspondence has a straight bearing on the Mother's themes. An oblique bearing, from the Mother's memory of Sri Aurobindo's correspondence, is possible, but to get to the definite point of her reference we must look elsewhere.

We do not need to search long. Two published statements of her own are at hand - statements which must have been read to her - and the second one quotes Sri Aurobindo's words as she remembers them.

The first dates back to 1954. It appears in an article by my then Associate Editor, Soli Albless. He read out the article to the Mother before its publication in Mother India. It contained a report which I reproduced afterwards in two places:

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(1) verbatim in a pamphlet I published with the Mother's approval on 29 February 1960, where all that had been written by Sri Aurobindo and her up to that year about the Supermind's advent was collected, and (2) in a paraphrase in an essay I wrote in Mother India in February 1970. The Mother's report runs: "Even in 1938 I used to see the Supermind descending into Sri Aurobindo. What he could not do at that time was to fix it down." Here we have the exact gist of her bracketed phrase in the talk of 22 December 1971: "(he had seen that the Supramental came into him and then it withdrew, and then it came back again and again withdrew - it was not stable)." Nowhere, except in Albless's article and my collection and my own essay, is this fact given expression. Nor could it have been expressed in any of the letters we can pick out as relevant in one way or another, for they all precede 1938. The Supermind's descent, no matter how intermittently, into Sri Aurobindo's physical substance took place only in that year in which the Mother had told me, when I left Pondicherry at February's end for a visit to Bombay, that something great and definite was expected to occur in the course of the year and that she would inform me of it as soon as it happened, so that I might hurry back.

No call came for me for months and then I wrote to Sri Aurobindo asking why I had not received the Mother's summons. He replied on 1 August 1938: "A general descent of the kind you speak of is not in view at the moment..."¹ Yes, a manifestation on a universal scale such as was attested, by the Mother for 29 February 1956 was somehow delayed - for 18 years as it proved to be - but a breakthrough was achieved on the individual scale and this is what the Mother's statement first cited by Albless implied.

From my later essay the statement was pressed into service in a brochure on Auroville which the architect Roger Anger was preparing in 1970. It was then read out to the

¹. Life-Literature-Yoga: Some Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Revised and Enlarged Second Edition, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1967), p. 43.

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Mother again after nearly 16 years. She criticised it saying it seemed to assert that Sri Aurobindo did not have the Supermind in his body until 1938. Such an assertion she dubbed "utter nonsense". And when I had an interview with her on my birthday on 25 November 1970 she scolded me for letting this suggestion spread. After I had apologised and she had characteristically responded, "Oh, it doesn't matter," she put before me the correct position of things: "Clearly, Sri Aurobindo did not have the supramental body, and neither do I have it. But that does not mean that the Supermind was not in his body. The two things are quite different. One can have the Supermind in the body without the body being supramentalised. It is not true that the Supermind descended into Sri Aurobindo's body only in 1938 or that it was not fixed there but merely coming and going."¹

In view of what the Mother said in her talk of 22 December 1971, a little more than a year after my interview, the full situation appears to be, as follows. Sri Aurobindo did have the Supermind in his body before 1938 but it had not penetrated his body-substance anywhere: it was a presence in the body inasmuch as it had settled within his embodied mental and vital and even subtle-physical being. His letters testify to individual "perfection" or "transformation" having been sufficiently achieved up to the subtle-physical level,² but they repeatedly admit that the Supermind had not entered Matter.³ In one letter he says that it was on the point of doing so.⁴ Thus we may infer that the entry into the body-substance happened only in 1938 and that even then it was fluctuant and not established once for all.

The Mother evidently accepted towards the end of 1971 her own statement in the sense I have just tried to elucidate. She even repeated from it the word "fixed"; and the words of

¹. Light and Laughter: Some Talks at Pondicherry by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran, p. 84.

². Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (1953), p. 100.

³. Ibid., p. 380.

⁴. Ibid., p. 215.

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Sri Aurobindo, which along with it she interprets to the effect that for the Supermind to be fixed and stable on earth it must enter and settle itself in the physical mind, hail from a note which Nolini sent to me from her on 29 June 1953 when I was writing my article on "the Mind of Light". The note ran: "The Supermind had descended long ago - very long ago - in the mind and even in the vital: it was working in the physical also but indirectly through these intermediaries. The question now 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 receiving the supramental light Sri Aurobindo called the Mind of Light."¹

While answering very closely to the phraseology of the second talk, this statement anticipates almost word-for-word the first talk's turn of speech. The first talk refers at the start to "Sri Aurobindo saying that for the Supramental to manifest upon earth the physical mind must receive it and manifest it" - and at the close the talk refers to his having "written that this is indispensable so that the Supramental may manifest itself permanently upon earth".

No question, I hold, can any more be raised as to what exactly was the text upon which the Mother drew. However, her usage of the term "physical mind" requires discussion. But, before we discuss it, we may say a few words on a point which must have puzzled many students of the Aurobindonian sadhana.

In the thirties the Master wrote semi-humorously of glimpsing the Supermind above his head and of trying to catch its tail and pull it down into himself. Evidently this tantalising situation, which was pictured to Nirodbaran in a letter of 1935 and a talk of 1938,² persisted until Sri

¹. The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo by K. D. Sethna (Mother India, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1968), p. 100.

². Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1954), pp. 92,104. See also Talks with Sri Aurobindo (Sri Aurobindo Pathmandir, Calcutta, 1966), p. 52.

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Aurobindo's passing away, since even in 1947 he was still preoccupied with progressively supramentalising the Over-mind at the brain-level and using on the world the Overmind force from there and not the sheer supramental.¹ But if, as the Mother declares and the Master also implies, the supramental realisation was complete in him except that the Supermind had not yet permeated his body-substance - if the Truth- Consciousness had already descended into his inner mind, inner vital being and even subtle-physical nature - why could it not emerge into the gross-physical from within instead of being glimpsed up to the end above his head with its tail dangling just beyond?

The query is hardly illegitimate, but it overlooks an occult fact. There is a necessity for each part of the being to receive a separate independent descent. Not by an efflux from the Supermind already descended into the parts other than the gross-physical but by a direct pull from the latter upon the Supramental Consciousness, the Divine Gnosis, existing above in its own plane; would that Highest Reality be natural, authentic and inalienable to this part. Just as every component of us - the mental, the vital, the physical - must make its spontaneous individual surrender to the Supreme under the influence of the inmost psyche, in order to make integral our self-surrendering, so too the supramental descent must be accomplished essentially by a straight and unmediated relationship of each component to the Gnostic Truth. Even when the inner nature has been inhabited by that Truth, the consciousness in the outer substance has to act towards that higher Reality almost as if nothing of this Truth were achieved elsewhere in the being. No doubt, the consciousness of the outer substance would be influenced by the many- sided victory in the inner dimension and find its task helped to a certain degree; yet this victory could still leave room for a defeat in the outer region. The outer region has to pay its own crucial price for the laurel and the crown of supramentalisation

¹. Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (1953), p. 245.

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to rest on its head. Thus alone would the Supermind "involved" in matter meet its free "overhead" counterpart and hold supramentalisation as if it were its innate dharma, its intrinsic self-law.

Not to understand this paradox of transformative perfection may lead us to a confused misreading of what Sri Aurobindo did or left undone until his mighty self-sacrifice on 5 December 1950.

A further misreading can there be if we confine the Integral Yoga to the phenomenon of descent. In understanding Sri Aurobindo's spirituality we must not forget that, while the Supermind's descent into all the components of earthly existence is the ultimate aim, knowledge of the Supermind is not born only of this descent. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga strives also for ascent - the consciousness rising from its embodied state to "overhead" planes. All the planes above the mind were known to Sri Aurobindo before he undertook the responsibility of the monthly Arya in 1914, although detailed acquaintance with their specific powers obviously came later, as we saw in the preceding chapter. In 1947, at the very time that he declared what his preoccupation and capacity were, he unmistakably implied that he had the freedom of the topmost height itself of the "overhead" Spirit. This height was the far extreme of his multi-realised being. What he did at the moment was his own choice inspired by the Avataric mission he had accepted: transformation of embodied life in its totality, down to divinisation of the body, by the one. sole agency that could consummate it: the Supramental Light and Force and Bliss. He begins the 1947 letter: "If I had been standing on the Supermind level and acting on the world by the instrumentation of Supermind, that world would have changed or would be changing much more rapidly and in a different fashion from what is happening now. My present effort is not to stand up on a high and distant Supermind level and change the world from there, but to bring some- thing of it down here and to stand on that and act by that..."¹

¹. Ibid., pp. 244-45.

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(b)

Now we may turn to ponder the Mother's usage of the term "physical mind". She equates it to "the body mind" or "the mind that is in the body" and the letter editorially excerpted from Sri Aurobindo as relevant, with its mention of "this body mind" to signify "an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles", leaves us in no uncertainty about the Mother's meaning. She means by "the physical mind" the dim mental consciousness which is working in the cells of the body. And such a meaning is even explicitly mentioned by her in April 1967: "there is the consciousness of the physical mind (what I call cellular mind)..."¹ But "the physical mind" figuring in the note sent from her by Nolini to me in 1953 is surely a different proposition. What it was may be perceived from her declaration to me on an earlier occasion: "As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body, what he had called the Mind of Light got realised in me."²-The word "realised" is most important here: it stands for the Higher Power's permanent stabilisation, an achieved conversion of the instrument, an entry and settlement of the new consciousness for good.

There is no question of a continuing process. The Mother's "physical mind receiving the supramental light" is not like the physical mind of the two talks which is said to be "on the way to being converted" and in which "the work" for the Supramental's entry and settlement was "being done...for months" in order to stabilise it. The precise realisation is flash-lit by her comment on the two opening lines of a poem I wrote in the early fifties on the Mind of Light. The lines were:

The core of a deathless Sun is now the brain

And each grey cell bursts to omniscient gold.

¹. Bulletin, August 1967, p. 63.

² . The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo, p. 100. To mask the personal element a little, the closing words in the book run: "...got realised here."

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The Mother said that the expression here was revelatory, an absolutely inspired and accurate transcription of what had happened, whereas the rest of the poem was an imaginative reconstruction by me of the phenomenon envisaged. Thus the physical mind concerned was only the mind in its brain- functioning, the cells concerned were solely the brain-cells and not those of the whole body though these must have been partially affected. We are face to face with an understanding of "the physical mind" dissimilar to the one prompted by "the body mind". Not to appreciate the dissimilarity would confuse the sense of "the Mind of Light" and the place of this Mind's realisation in the progressive stages of the Integral Yoga, the Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation.

How is "the physical mind" of those two talks to be interpreted in the light of Sri Aurobindo's employment of the term in his various letters? We may outline his usage with the help of his Letters on Yoga, from which the extract in the Bulletin's footnote was made.

In Sri Aurobindo the term covers two aspects. First, "the externalising mind" (p. 326) which is "a prolongation of the mind proper" (p. 340) - that is of "the thinking mind" which "does not belong to the physical" but "is a separate power" (p. 327) - into the physical formula. This prolongation he labels as "the physical mental" (p. 373) as distinguished from "the mental physical" or "mind in the physical" (p. 326). The latter is the second aspect of "physical mind" (ibid.) insofar as a certain functioning which is not too distant from the former is concerned. In this functioning, the physical mind "is limited by the physical view and experience of things, it mentalises the experiences brought by the contacts of out- ward life and things, and does not go beyond that (though it can do that much very cleverly), unlike the externalising mind which deals with them from the reason and its higher intelligence" (pp. 326-27). We may consider the "physical mental", which Sri Aurobindo designates "the true physical mind" (p. 328), as the high part of the physical mind, and the "mental physical" at its best operation as the low one.

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Another "part of the physical mind" (p.329), a "much' lower action of the mental physical" (p.327), is "the mechanical mind...which, left to itself, would only repeat customary ideas and record the natural reflexes of the physical consciousness to the contacts of outward life and things" {ibid.). The mechanical mind is also called "body-mind" (p.328). A turn of phrase similar to "body-mind" occurs when Sri Aurobindo says: "Everything has a physical part - even the mind has a physical part; there is a mental physical, a mind of the body and the material..." (p.351). It is evidently the "mind of the body and the material" that he speaks of in writing of "the gross material part" thus: "it must be remembered that this too has a consciousness of its own, the obscure consciousness proper to the limbs, cells, tissues, glands, organs" (p.348).

The description "body-mind" is not applied by Sri Aurobindo to anything above "the mechanical mind whose nature is to go on\ turning round in a circle the thoughts that come into it" (p.329). At its lowest the description applies to "an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles" which has a "mechanical clinging to past movements and docile oblivion and rejection of the new" (p.340). Hence "the physical mind" of the two talks by the Mother may be taken, from the Aurobindonian viewpoint, to cover in general all that works mechanically in the mental physical and in particular the element of mental mechanicality in the cellular stuff of the body. We may broadly name it "body- mind" in distinction from "brain-mind".

Broadly, because the mechanical mind has still to do with "thoughts" and hence with the brain and so cannot quite be on a par with "the obscure consciousness" of the sheer bodily components. Strictly speaking, it is this consciousness that the Mother mentions by her specially narrowed employment of the words "physical mind" and it is also from this consciousness that, strictly speaking, the "brain-mind" is to be demarcated. In the latter the externalising mind and the mental in the physical, though unlike each other in several

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respects, are "in practice...mixed together" (p.327). Further, through the externalising mind still greater mental activities than its own come into play in the mind of the brain. For, as we have noted, the externalising mind prolongs into the physical the mind proper and consequently what is characteristic of the mind proper is drawn to some extent into this aspect of the physical mind.

" The mind proper," says Sri Aurobindo, "is divided into three parts - the thinking Mind, dynamic Mind, externalising Mind - the former concerned with ideas and knowledge in their own right, the second with the putting out of mental forms for realisation of the idea, the third with the expression of them in life (not only by speech, but by any form it can give)" (p.326). How the greater mental activities enter in may be yet more vividly seized from Sri Aurobindo's elaboration of his phrase "the true physical mind". He says: "The true physical mind is the receiving and externalising intelligence which has two functions - first, to work upon external things and give them a mental order with a way of practically dealing with them and, secondly, to be the channel of materialising and putting into effect whatever the thinking and dynamic mind sends down to it for the purpose" (p.328).

Thus the mixture of the physical mental and the mental physical has a halo as it were of higher things than its actual constituents. And this subtly rich mixture, which is the full sense of the "brain-mind", is what, on receiving the supramental light, gets converted into the Mind of Light. The conversion of the "body-mind" by means of the supramental light cannot be quite the same phenomenon. Inasmuch as mentality is still present we should adopt the same nomenclature but a new shade of it has to be clearly set forth, a corporeal shade standing off from the cerebral.

In a talk almost seven years earlier than the two we have discussed, the Mother does actually imply a distinction between the brain-mind and the body-mind, giving the term "physical mind" a higher connotation than in these two talks. She draws even finer lines of difference while pinpointing her

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subject - the part of the being with which she is busy - thus: "It is not the physical mind...it is the mind of Matter. It is the mental substance which belongs to Matter itself, to the cells. That is what was once called 'the spirit of the form' when it was said that the mummies kept their body intact so long as the spirit of the form persisted. It is that mind, this wholly material mind."¹ In the same talk she says about herself: "It is long since the physical mind has changed" - and explains: "The physical mind is the mind of the physical personality formed by the body but it is not the mind of Matter: it is the mind of the physical being." In differentiating what she has been working upon at the moment she goes so far as to state: "You cannot even call it the bodily mind - it is the mind of the cells...." Then we learn from her: "...the physical mind, as soon as you take up an integral yoga, must be dealt with, but this material mind, the cellular one, I assure you, is altogether new...." Finally, we get an autobiographical disclosure: "Sri Aurobindo had said that it was unorganisable and it had only to be thrown out of existence. And I too had the same impression. But when the action for transformation upon the cells is constant, this material mind begins to be organised. It is this that is wonderful...."

A year later (1966) the Mother has another pronouncement on the same lines and of autobiographical interest: "When we were working in the physical cells, Sri Aurobindo realised the difficulty of transforming the mind of the physical cells. I am not speaking of the physical mind or physical consciousness. He thought of leaving the mind of the physical cells alone. Then I saw that their refusal to change was not due to any bad will but to ignorance. The cells have a great aspiration and the progress is steady, there is no vacillation as in the mind of the vital. So Sri Aurobindo, before he left his body, entrusted to me this work and said that I alone could do it, but it takes long and I can't give sufficient time to it. I work upon it only in the first part of the

¹. Bulletin, November 1965, p. 87.

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night. In the second part I go about [in the subtle body] visiting people and things. Otherwise they go wrong. When the work in the cells will have been finished, there won't be any further difficulty".¹

The Mind of Light in an increased aspect which has to do with the mental substance belonging to Matter itself - an aspect involving an extension of the Supermind's establishment in the cerebral mentality which the Mother had realised in the immediate wake of Sri Aurobindo's departure - is the goal she posited for herself in the period of the two talks when she wanted her "physical mind" to be "developed under the Supramental Influence".

Already at the time of talking, a remarkable development was in evidence, since, in her own words, "this physical mind, the mind that is in the body had become wide, had a global view of things and the entire way of its seeing was absolutely different." As hers had been the first incalculable experiment in supramentalising the most obscure part of bodily existence, the process had been fraught with a great deal of suffering, but she was well on the way to acquiring a radical lever for the transformation which would pass from the mental physical to the vital physical and then to the material physical, which is the physical proper. Suddenly on 17 November 1973 she chose to give up her embodied state, put in abeyance her terrestrial progress and join Sri Aurobindo to work from behind a veil - for reasons which must essentially be the same as inspired his strategic self-sacrifice: the future good of humanity's spiritual career.

Before she took the momentous step, she had contributed appreciably to Sri Aurobindo's spiritual system not only in the realm of visioning but also in the field of living.

¹. The Mother - Sweetness and Light by Nirodbaran (Auropress, Auroville, 1978), p. 149.

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