The Gita reveals that the purpose of the divine Incarnation or coming as an Avatar is to do the divine work, diyam karma. This is not only to destroy evil and establish the righteous Law, but is actually to take the progressive evolutionary march to the next higher stage. Sri Aurobindo came to do that, to bring the Spermind in the terrestrial play and make the divine manifestation here upon earth a possibility. We have to see from whatever has been revealed to us if this is present in his life and in his work. Representation of that work should be the genuine concern for any study of his, including biographical. If this is missed the that study is a waste of effort and one need not really attach any importance to it. Unfortunately that is precisely what is happening in the case of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. However, in this article we shall briefly try to look into some of the aspects of the yogic work carried out by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the work having progressed in formulating a link between Man the Mental Being and the Supramental Race, the Intermediate Race. We shall discuss this in the context of the visit of the heavenly sage Narad to Aswapati as we have in the Book of Fate of Savitri. It provides the necessary framework to appreciate the issues that are deeply involved in the process.
[The Gita reveals that the purpose of the divine Incarnation or coming as an Avatar is to do the divine work, diyam karma. This is not only to destroy evil and establish the righteous Law, but is actually to take the progressive evolutionary march to the next higher stage. Sri Aurobindo came to do that, to bring the Spermind in the terrestrial play and make the divine manifestation here upon earth a possibility. We have to see from whatever has been revealed to us if this is present in his life and in his work. Representation of that work should be the genuine concern for any study of his, including biographical. If this is missed the that study is a waste of effort and one need not really attach any importance to it. Unfortunately that is precisely what is happening in the case of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. However, in this article we shall briefly try to look into some of the aspects of the yogic work carried out by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the work having progressed in formulating a link between Man the Mental Being and the Supramental Race, the Intermediate Race. We shall discuss this in the context of the visit of the heavenly sage Narad to Aswapati as we have in the Book of Fate of Savitri. It provides the necessary framework to appreciate the issues that are deeply involved in the process.]
The heavenly sage Narad sets himself out from Paradise to visit Aswapati and on his way to the palace sings the song of evolution. Its theme is the unfolding reality of this creation and its mood is an offering of joy to its enjoyer, to the Bhokta himself. In the sweetness of his name the song arrives at the transfiguration and the ecstasy about to be born on earth and Narad is in raptures to see it soon happen. Indeed, the chant itself is a prophetic rush
Of life that slumbers in the stone and sun
And mind subliminal in mindless life,
And the consciousness that wakes in beasts and men…
Of Godhead throwing off at last its veil,
Of bodies made divine and life made bliss,
Immortal sweetness clasping immortal might,
Heart sensing heart, thought looking straight at thought,
And the delight when every barrier falls,
And the transfiguration and the ecstasy.
The long course of evolution might have been full of travail and uncertainties; but then it is evolution with a definite purpose also, felicitous purpose, of divine birth in the material creation. In its essentiality it is the evolution of consciousness in the ascending grades of the spirit itself and it has to move on. It has presently advanced to the mental level, but there are higher and vaster ranges of consciousness stretching beyond it and these must enter into the evolutionary scheme. Conscious participation of man in it is now possible, and indeed man does make an effort also to exceed himself. But his soul is burdened by the weight of the inconscient past and a thousand forces are there to thwart his faltering attempts. In the presence of such difficulties he might easily succumb and fail to carry the evolution forward. There is even opposition built into the character of man: he is not only suspect of spiritual possibilities; there is in him a deep-seated irreverence for it, even a fierce antagonism. Oftentimes cross is the payment for the crown offered to him.
Hard is the world-redeemer’s heavy task;
The world itself becomes his adversary,
His enemies are the beings he came to save.
Those he would save are his antagonists.
This is what Narad tells to Savitri’s mother who questions God for the kind of world he has created. In 1616 Galileo maintained that Faith and Reason, Fides et Ratio, can never contradict each other; for holding such a view he had to suffer and pay a heavy price. Marx loudly proclaimed that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed class”, and a whole section of the society fell prey to its logic. True, creedal religion is a monstrosity and “excessive legalism of the Roman Catholic Church” is anti-spiritual; same is the story with other forms of orthodoxy and fundamentalism, classical or modern, even with scientific and materialistic philosophies with all their stubbornness and arrogance, their irrational denials. With the least hesitation all such retrograde impositions must be removed, dismissed at once. Jean-Paul Sartre’s is a godless universe and he tells us that in such a universe the only meaning or purpose of life is to set the goals for oneself and achieve them. But then these existential notions or ideas make the universe a stopped-up system, closing on itself, without the occurrence of further openings or prospects. But there are also noble and elevating thoughts and feelings and deeds in various branches of human activity, with its conquests and triumphs which must be duly acknowledged. There is the religio-mystical experience of seeing God in the world and the world in God. There is the fine perception that “Logos is the blueprint and exemplar of the created universe.” Indeed, Jalalu’d-din Rumi, the thirteenth century Persian Sufi poet, has the intuition of a unique dawn breaking in our skies, of the happy naissance to new-shape our life:
… to-night this world is heavy and in travail,
Striving to give birth to an eternal world.
In the possibility of such a birth here is the wonderful perception of a genuine mystic. Yet the question is: will that eternal world’s birth occur at all? And how will it happen? Or is it just a small vulnerable imagination, feeble, flickering, a longing and an anticipation of a dreamy poet to escape sorrow and suffering that to-night characterise heaviness and anguish of this transient world? And then will this to-night’s struggling world by itself, by its own effort, its own propulsion, bring about a world of undecaying and deathless happiness? Even granting for a moment that in its deepest secrecy there is something remarkable, something truly magnificent, yet a misgiving remains whether this to-night’s world with its own endeavour, by its own labour and struggle can give rise to the eternal world. Is it in a position to assert itself against all opposition? Can man play any pivotal role in this respect and, if he can, will he? Is he capable to do this at all?
“If a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our birth into Matter, if it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that has been taking place in Nature,” writes Sri Aurobindo, “then man as he is cannot be the last term of that evolution: he is too imperfect an expression of the Spirit, Mind itself a too limited form and instrumentation; Mind is only a middle term of consciousness, the mental being can only be a transitional being. If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and Supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to what exceeds it, then there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at Supermind and supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an evolution of that greater term of the Spirit manifesting in Nature.” Behind this luminous metaphysics is knowledge of the yogi-seer founded on his realisations. We have here the revelation of what is held for the evolution.
Sri Aurobindo in his independence-day message, of 15 August 1947, speaks of “a step in evolution which would raise man to a higher and larger consciousness and begin the solution of the problems which have perplexed and vexed him since he first began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society.” Undoubtedly, there are difficulties on the way but difficulties are made to be overcome and if the supreme will is there, tells Sri Aurobindo, they will be overcome.
One way out of the difficulties could be Nirvana; but its immutable peace is at the cost of making nonsense of life, this samsāra; no doubt this life is despicable, yet in its intrinsic contents it has a meaning and a purpose also. In Nirvana there is neither the growing individual perfection nor a society making more progress; they have to be here in the world-dynamism based on its truth. According to the Jewish myth Adam was created immortal but death entered the world through sin. The saviour came and bore the cross of pain, yet fundamentally no transformative change took place. But there is something positive also in man. The flame in him may be flickering. But why does a flame flicker, leap? The core of the flame, the hottest part in it, becomes lighter due to the gaseous combustion and the lighter gases at the core of the flame move upward and the denser air from beneath the flame fills the void at the core. The lamp continues to burn in leaps. Hence we have leaping tongues. There is something in the heart of man which keeps on burning and its leaping is a sign of its growth, progress. Rumi has a vision of exceeding what man presently is, exceeding even the greatness of the angels of heaven. Here is his song of evolution:
I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And from vegetablensss I died and became animal.
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearance through death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth the wings and feathers like angels;
After that, soaring higher than angels—
What you cannot imagine,
I shall be that.
In spite of his diffidence and refusal and opposition, in spite of his dumbness, man’s hope and longing and aspiration lead him on to nobler heights, to bluer and brighter skies, to the gold-hued empyrean. The psychic flame within him continues to burn, and leap. His spirit climbs the ascending slopes of heaven. He crosses the Upanishadic gates of the sun to live in immortality of the Self. He certainly has an inkling that this creation’s bliss is in truth, as much as its truth is in bliss. There is even the revelation that God’s glory shines throughout the universe. “Dante informs us that he has been to paradise, and has seen things so extraordinary that he cannot possibly hope to tell about them. Nevertheless, he determines to make this final song his crowning achievement as a poet, and he calls on the Muses for inspiration as he focuses on his journey heavenward. At noon on the spring equinox, Dante, still in the Earthly Paradise, sees Beatrice gazing into the sun, and he imitates her gaze. In so doing, he becomes aware of an extraordinary brightness, as though God had placed in the heavens a second sun, and feels himself being ‘transhumanised’ in preparation for his experience of Paradise. He then finds himself soaring heavenward through God’s grace, although he is uncertain whether it is his soul or his corporeal self that rises. As Dante and Beatrice pass out of the earth’s atmosphere into a sphere of fire that lies above it, Dante hears the music of the spheres. This music fills him with wonderment and perplexity, but before he can question Beatrice about it, she explains to him the teleological order of the universe, and how it is only natural that, having been purified, he should now rise heavenward.”
Yet, if at all, only awhile can stay such a state—because our restless nether members get tired of it. On the “heart’s altar the sacred fire is dim, and an old pull of subconscious cords renews, and the unwilling spirit is drawn back from the heights.” Here is in fact a fundamental issue staring at the soul of man, and it has to meet the challenge. The Mother explains: “This is the great difficulty in the physical life. It is the strength of the old habit that pulls down the body to its old way. Then comes the struggle, and if the faith is sufficient, if the ardour for progress is there, then out of this fall we can rise to a higher receptivity and a better achievement. In fact, there is nothing in this experimental life that is not meant to push the whole creation towards the luminous, marvellous Divine End that is promised to our effort and to our faith… . If we can enlarge our consciousness sufficiently, we see that even the apparent defeats are marvellous steps towards the final Victory.” The pull-and-push is real in this world, the ancient tussle between the forces of light and darkness, between evil and good, between ignorance and knowledge, between life and death, between Matter and Spirit.
But the solution lies in our enlarging the consciousness sufficiently. Man should be in a position to keep aside his mind and open to the superior states waiting to descend in him. That is the true evolutionary answer to the thousand problems that afflict him. The knowledge of intuition and the knowledge of rationality are quite different things and it may not be even possible for them to come together. From the infra-rational stage to the rational was a great leap; a greater leap from the rational to the supra-rational will make man’s manhood progressive, complete. He must understand it—because he is equipped to understand it; the evolutionary foundation has already got it established in its design. In the course of time his faculties must become sharper, keener, subtler, more intense; it is only then will he exceed the typal limits under which he presently works.
It is true that with progress in awareness the consciousness of time, for instance, marks a definite step forward, that it can differentiate time from changes and events “taking place” in it. Yet the fact that time itself is a dynamic power effecting changes and events is difficult for rational mind to recognise. We speak of zeitgeist but do not acknowledge it as an entity per se. The being of time is an occult reality and we are oblivious of it. Only when our psychic faculties open out, when the flame within us burns in a steady manner, “motionless like the light of a lamp in a windless place” as the Gita says, when the Godward will is unfaltering and intense, can we then get a glimpse of it. Will man keep aside his mentality and live in his soul? We are presently living in the hour of God and we are not aware of it. When the hour comes “even a little effort produces great results and changes destiny.” In it can be achieved all that the soul aspires for; in it can be the true fulfilment also of the human race. In it is the glad celebration of the work of time. An “aeon”, meaning not only “eternity” but also universe, is itself a power emanating from the supreme Being, playing various roles in the operation. It is personification of an age and new aeons are equinoxes of God. The two aeons of Christianity are Jesus and Sophia. When Sophia emanates without her partner aeon, the result is the Demiurge. In many gnostic systems the various emanations of God are called aeons. They constitute the pleroma, the “region of light”. The lowest regions of the pleroma are closest to the darkness; that is, the physical world. Here is time in its several manifestations.
In this physical world appearance of a being greater than man is the “divine promise” to be realised in the majesty of the steps of this dynamic and participative time. Time-Spirit as the Devourer was abroad on the battlefield of the epochal Kurukshetra; in our own fierce and forceful times it thundered through nations and trampled over them during the Second World War. Kāla-Bhairava dances wild to destroy all that stands across the path of the divine Event. He opens out a new era in evolutionary march of the soul of the earth. “Man is a transitional being” and in time there has to arrive the superman.
Speaking of the vaster light and profounder bliss Sri Aurobindo writes as follows: “Mind indeed can never be a perfect instrument of the Spirit; a supreme self-expression is not possible in its movements because to separate, divide, limit is its very character. Even if mind could be free from all positive falsehood and error, even if it could be all intuitive and infallibly intuitive, it could still present and organise only half-truths or separate truths and these too not in their own body but in luminous representative figures put together to make an accumulated total or a massed structure. Therefore the self-perfecting mental being here must either depart into pure spirit by the shedding of its lower existence or return upon the physical life to develop in it a capacity not yet found in our mental and psychic nature… . The mental being exceeding his sphere does not… bring down its greater spiritual nature into this lower triplicity; for here the mental being is the highest expression of the Self. Here the triple mental, vital and physical body provides almost the whole range of our capacity and cannot suffice for that greater consciousness; the vessel has not been built to contain a greater godhead or to house the splendours of this supramental force and knowledge.”
The problem is therefore to build a vessel to hold the greater godhead in life here. The Vedic Rishis called the human body an unbaked vessel, atapta tanu, in which practically no tapas has been done, no spiritual consciousness has been established to receive Light, Knowledge, Power, Immortality, transcendental Ananda. But there is a possibility of human mind standing perfected in the Light and a new humanity taking its place as part of the new order. There could be a liberated mind escaping from ignorance into light, aware of its affiliation to supermind. In that eventuality there would be a new mental being, an intermediate race able to climb consciously towards and into living vastness of superconscience. If this could happen then the physical body too would prepare itself for the divine transformation. “The full emergence of supermind may be accomplished by a sovereign manifestation, a descent into earth-consciousness and a rapid assumption of its powers and disclosing of its forms and the creation of a supramental race and a supramental life.” But ever the question remains: how is this going to be achieved? It might be a possibility, a possibility already built into the scheme, but its realisation is a process to be worked out.
But who is going to work out this possibility? To shape humanity as the harbinger of this new supramental life is a yogic task to be done by a Yogi only. The power or principle or agent who could organise this new humanity, the intermediate race, Sri Aurobindo called the Mind of Light, the mind of the very physical that has opened itself to the supramental. Mind of Light is the presiding deity or adhişţātā of the new race. In the dynamism of this operation the presence of the Mind of Light, the physical receiving the supramental light, is the decisive stage in the final arrival of the superman proper. From this nature of the Mind of Light as the leader and governor of the intermediate race, the race of the true Overman, we might get an idea why Sri Aurobindo took the practical step of establishing it first as an imperative towards further evolutionary growth: he saw the necessity of the intermediate race governed by this Mind. It is the precursor, even a prerequisite, for the appearance of the supramental race, collective supermanhood. Yogically, Sri Aurobindo first created it in the transcendental and then established it in himself; his body’s cells became receptive to the supramental light and force. He gave the Mind of Light to the Mother as a yogic gift when he withdrew on 5 December 1950, thus making it dynamic here; not too long after this, in fact in less than six years, occurred the great event of the supramental descent and manifestation in the earth’s subtle physical.
Apropos of the role of the Mind of Light in the evolution of the future race of superior gnostic beings, K D Sethna writes: “The Mind of Light in its plenary form, leading to the fullness of what we may call the Life-force of Light and the Body of Light, would constitute the Intermediate Race between the Human and the Supramental Races. The Supramental Race would be a directly manifested line of Divine Beings who have never gone through the process of earthly evolution: they would be the Supermind humanised, as differentiated from Humanity supramentalised. Humanity would be supramentalised by a natural means of spiritualisation; the Supermind would be humanised by an occult means of materialisation developed by Humanity when it has supramentalised itself. The two achievements would be complimentary aspects of the complete manifestation of the Divine upon earth—the crowning vision of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and the all-consummating goal of his Yoga.” It would perhaps be necessary to pause and consider whether a “natural” means of spiritualisation can really supramentalise humanity. It was indeed the yogic endeavour of the Master-Yogi that had opened out the prospects.
Sethna explains the nature of this achievement through the spiritual realisations or siddhis of Aswapati, as we have in Savitri: “... there took place in his very physical substance an extraordinary growth of consciousness, a supernormal intensification of perception and puissance, due to the unfoldment of the real being in him, the essential animating self of him, and resulting in a wide-awake sustained ascent to a visionary and intuitive plane... Aswapati caught ... a sense akin to or instinct with the drive of the Primal Truths of the Transcendent that have to become the Final Realities of the Individual in the life-terms of the physical universe.” Even in the early stages of Aswapati’s Yoga there is the aspect of the body seeking its meaning and its fulfilment in the aggregate scheme of this vast and purposeful creation. Body’s cells acquire an extra-dense luminosity to promote prospects of undimming substantiality in the Spirit’s ever-growing immensities. The archetypal Harmony becomes definite and concrete, not only in terms of ideas alone but also in terms of established possibilities, in terms of multiply-realised relationships even in the material expression. The Cosmic and the Transcendental join the rich Individual, now ready to support and to articulate them variedly. When this begins to happen, then is ushered in a new age. This can be so only because someone has made himself available for the complex play of the countless universal forces. Soul’s release from the ignorant Nature is a first step without which this radical change cannot occur. With this soul’s release Aswapati, tells Sethna, “faces the objective and subjective Nature that constitutes our common habitual experience, our life of Ignorance, the physical and psychological fields of our works.”
Such may be taken as a statement of the Yoga of Evolution, Yoga as a creative-operative process in the dimensions of the vast Reality that initiates it and supports it. Such is the work which an Avatar alone can do. Indeed, his coming here is the sine quo non for the spiritual advance to take place; it is he who carries the evolution forward. Sri Aurobindo had gathered the supramental Light and Force and fixed the Supermind in his physical body. In yogic-spiritual terms, he attempted all and achieved all. Whatever was to be done was done, not for himself, nor for the sake of humanity; all that he did, he did for the sake of the Divine. One definite result of this was that the Mind of Light got fixed in the Mother. This happened in that midnight’s “tremendous hour”, at the time of his passing away. A decisive step towards supermanhood was taken.
The Yogi Purusha did his job, of creating the body of the Vijnanmaya Purusha. Now the Bhagavati Shakti must attend to her task right away. The foundational Nature has to receive this new Light and this new Power. That is her difficult task. That was the assignment given to the Mother by Sri Aurobindo. And she did carry it out. What was promised got fulfilled: “A new Light breaks upon the earth, a new world is born,”—she declared on 24 April 1956. The event had taken place much earlier, on 29 February 1956, when during collective meditation in the evening the golden Supermind leaped down on the golden Wednesday. Since then things remained no more the same. Supramental manifestation took place in the earth’s subtle-physical. What had exactly happened on 29 February 1956? The Mother says: “This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine. As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that the time has come, and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces. Then the Supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow.” She also declared: “A new world is born, born, born.” It was not the old world transformed, but it was a new world that had taken birth. Her missioned work was completed in 1956. But then in the wake of supramental descent and manifestation she got preoccupied with readying humanity’s soul to receive this exceptional Light and Power. Once the Mother asked Sri Aurobindo: “After the descent of the Supermind, how long do you think the process of transformation will take?” He looked up and told her: “Perhaps 300 years.” Later the Mother added: “He said 300 years, but you know there is something like Grace—anything can take place.”
Some of the ancient traditions speak of the glorious body, but the divine body, divya deha, housing the gnostic being as revealed by Sri Aurobindo is something radically different from all that. He writes in August 1949: “This destiny of the body has rarely in the past been envisaged or else not for the body here upon earth; such forms would rather be imagined or visioned as the privilege of celestial beings and not possible as the physical residence of a soul still bound to terrestrial nature. The Vaishnavas have spoken of a spiritualised conscious body, cinmaya deha; there has been the conception of a radiant or luminous body, which might be the Vedic jyotirmaya deha. A light has been seen by some radiating from the bodies of highly developed spiritual persons, even extending to the emission of an enveloping aura and there has been recorded an initial phenomenon of this kind in the life of so great a spiritual personality as Ramakrishna. But these things have been either conceptual only or rare and occasional and for the most part the body has not been regarded as possessed of spiritual possibility or capable of transformation. It has been spoken of as the means of effectuation of the dharma and dharma here includes all high purposes, achievements and ideals of life not excluding the spiritual change: but it is an instrument that must be dropped when its work is done and though there may be and must be spiritual realisation while yet in the body, it can only come to its full fruition after the abandonment of the physical frame. More ordinarily in the spiritual tradition the body has been regarded as an obstacle, incapable of spiritualisation or transmutation and a heavy weight holding the soul to earthly nature and preventing its ascent either to spiritual fulfilment in the Supreme or to the dissolution of its individual being in the Supreme. But this… is insufficient for a… divine life upon earth… . The body is an offspring and creation of the Inconscient, itself inconscient or only half-conscious… but the fact that it has developed a soul and is capable of serving it as a means may indicate that it is capable of further development and may become a shrine and expression of the spirit, reveal a secret spirituality of Matter, become entirely and not only half-conscious, reach a certain oneness with the spirit.”
If there is going to be a divine Destiny for earth, it must be so because of a free choice of the soul of the earth itself. Not pressure or impulsion from above, nor just solicitude, but a glad spontaneous urge from within has to be there to get ready to receive that Destiny. The fundamental issue is of manifestation in the physical. The Mother was busy with it. Her occult work got focused to make the mind of the earth’s physical ready for that. The divine will has to be awakened even in the cellular physical; the divine flame has to be kindled in that house for the divine to dwell in a divine way. It looks rather paradoxical that, as if only during the last few years of her presence here upon earth, she should have said that “the more we advance on the way, the more the need of the Divine Presence becomes imperative and indispensable.” It is not that on 21 February 1973 she realised this imperative; it is the very physical that realised it on this day. It means, the physical was making a direct response for the Divine Presence in it. How marvellous!
“The supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness,” wrote Sri Aurobindo in 1928. The supramental change was decreed by him and he and the Mother had set themselves to work out its inevitability. But to realise it in us there is needed the call and we have to be ready to receive what they are constantly showering on us. Tapahprabhava and Devaprasada together can, as the ancient Upanishadic scripture says, bring fulfilment to our longings, to our soul’s aspiration. To be engaged in that spiritual growth, to live and work and enjoy divinely in the Divine is the aspiring soul’s glad path of the future.
Apropos of the gnostic being a pertinent question that could be raised here is: will he be any different than the Avatar or Incarnation of the Divine himself? are the Superman and the Avatar the same? But the function of the Avatar is to establish a new principle of consciousness and enable evolution to move closer towards the secret divinity that is pressing to manifest itself with an increasing play of higher possibilities. Establishment of the Dharma, dharmasamsthāpanam, of the Law of the manifesting Truth, has been proclaimed to be the function of Avatarhood. In the case of the supramental Avatar it will be the supramental Dharma that will be founded; he will open out the way towards supermanhood. Can such an Avatar be called a superman? No, he cannot be; he belongs to a totally different category. While the Avatar accepts the conditions of world-ignorance to work out the divine Purpose and Will in it, superman belonging to the race of the gnostic beings does not accept any basis of ignorance for its existence; it cannot, by its very quality and integrity. Which means a supramental race, though evolutionary, will always live and grow in the widening Truth-Consciousness. That should also imply no need of any further Avatar of the Supreme.
Long ago the Mother had obtained the consent for collaboration from the material Nature. That was a great advance in the evolutionary process. Nature saw the distinct possibility and gained confidence in the work, as if she knew that this time she will not be duped. She discarded her earlier frustrating reservations. The Mother experienced the Divine alone acting in the body. In fact the Divine had become the body, with the power of omniscience and omnipotence operating in it. She was busy with the formation of the new body. A golden light, transparent and benevolent, very strong, very powerful filled the body’s cells. It is said in the Veda that the body of Agni is made of gold, it is hiraņya tanu. The Mother did it as a part of the evolutionary process. She was trying to fuse this material body with that supramental body. She would then simply walk into that body— without dying. This happened on 17 November 1973. She walked into the New Body.
If we have to mark a few important stages in the process of physical transformation, these could be quickly enumerated as follows: Sri Aurobindo’s descent into death, 1950; supramental manifestation in the earth’s subtle physical, 1956; realisation of the surhomme consciousness, 1958; consent for collaboration from the material Nature, 1958; the descent of the surhomme consciousness in 1969; the psychic being itself getting materialised, 1970; supramental body, 1972. It is the psychic being which will materialise itself and become the supramental being, the Mother told on 1 July 1970. It is precisely the psychic being which survives death. So, if it itself materialises, it means the abolition of the death of, and in, the physical. That is the central importance of the psychic being. Whatever is not in accordance with the Truth thus just disappears. Materialisation of the psychic being gives continuity to evolution. In the material world immortality means the materialisation of the psychic being. The New Body makes it possible. Perhaps that is the process. Now it is the New Body which will do whatever is to be done. It is not an inert lump of matter, but is charged with the luminous dynamism of the Divine. It is going to exert pressure upon the material in the evolutionary process. The supramental Presence is a sufficient, a wonderful necessary and sufficient basis for that to happen. Such is surely the greater gain than perhaps the transformation itself.
On 14 March 1970 the Mother spoke of the work Sri Aurobindo had given to her. He himself had, after 1950, willed and worked so much for the physical life to be governed by the higher consciousness that it became now possible for it to change into an authentic life. But it had to be translated into the process of time. The Aeon has to open out to receive it. The Mother was here to accomplish it. The emphasis was on the higher Power working in the physical, of manifesting in it. In 1967 she had the early certitude of it being done. There was even a conscious prayer from the cells of the body to the Supreme: “O Supreme Lord of the universe, we implore Thee, give us the strength and the beauty, the harmonious perfection needed to be Thy divine instruments upon earth.” Now the age-old illusion that the physical is incapable of opening to the higher Consciousness was altogether removed. The body started responding to it, joyously, submitting to it with an attitude of “It is as Thou Willest, Lord, as Thou Willest.” The body was no more as it was, said the Mother. The progress was such that it started breathing divinity, started living in divinity.
When the Mother’s sadhana entered the stage of awakening consciousness of the body’s cells, she found that they started chanting constantly the name of the Lord. They were all the while imploring the Lord for the strength and the beauty, for the harmonious perfection needed to be the divine instruments upon earth. Om Namo Bhagavate, Om Namo Bhagavate became the specific Word of Realisation. The Mother even spoke of the path that was never trod by anyone. Sri Aurobindo had done it in principle, she said on 26 November 1960; but she also added that the details had to be worked out. To make the body’s cells awake to the divine reality was an unprecedented task and the Mother had to discover the means for accomplishing it. It is here that she found the power of the Mantra coming to a definite aid in fixing the higher subtle-luminous in the dark and crude gross. Only Japa or repetition of the Mantra has direct action on the body. While she was engaged in this intense Japa-Yoga, she was actually invoking the “Lord of Tomorrow”.
Indeed, a very mysterious process accepting the circumstances of life, life as is, nourishes our urge towards immortality; this urge in turn is nourished by an equally enigmatic as well as stiff ordaining agent of creation: life only would be a blind attempt to grow but life and death together are presently the promoters of evolution. But if the transcendental immortality has to be housed here in Man the Mortal, here upon mrityuloka, then he has to exceed himself. He has to become Superman. Vijnanamaya Purusha or the Being of Knowledge has to arrive here. The well fashioned and beautifully made Upanishadic Man cannot be the ultimate crown of this great endeavour. The problem is the physical and it is in the physical that the new tapas-yoga has got to be done. We have to acquire the golden body, hiraņya tanu, of the Divine Agni. This needs another kind of Yoga, the Yoga of the Future. If by Tapas Brahma creates the world, then by Yoga the world in its totality has to see and breathe and live Brahmanhood in every respect.
This well fashioned Man is presently endowed in his subtle physical only with seven Chakras or centres of occult energy. What is below him and what is above him have not yet entered into its swift functioning. The rush of the Kundalini Force, of the occult Pranic or Vital Energy in these seven Chakras is a great beginning but in the veritable Yoga of Transformation what is necessary is that the two Chakras below the body and the three above have to materialise and become operative. This is what the Mother was told long ago by her occultist teacher Théon, and it was her experience also. For these Chakras to come into operation it is necessary to do another type of occult-spiritual yoga-tapasya. It is only then that the physical can respond to the working of the higher consciousness-force. A new body is necessary for this, a body that must emerge out of the Yajna of the Shakti. In it must be kindled the golden flame invoking the rush of the divine existence-substance as the basis of life in truth-conscient delight of the manifesting Spirit. But how exactly the new body will be made, that cannot be said or disclosed in the beginning. This however became the main thrust of the Mother’s yoga-tapasya during the last fifteen years or so of her work. The Mantra-japa she discovered was one possible method to achieve this. That was an unexplored technique.
The Mother was concerned with the almighty powers that are shut in the body’s cells. She awoke them. Not only that. The cells started joyously vibrating and opening out more and more in the aspiration for the Divine. This was something new. She said: “I have been sent upon earth to do the work of supramental transformation and the bringing about of the new creation, and I have been trying to do this... .” Sri Aurobindo had indicated that the new golden body is to be first formed out of the inner mental, inner vital and inner physical renewed and reshaped. The difficulty that notably comes in the modus operandi is that of the inner physical with its stubborn mind. While this mind, mind within matter, was gainfully formed under compulsion of the difficulties present in the unevolved obscure stuff, it also inherited those very stiff and harsh difficulties. If this mind—the Mind of Night standing across the path of the divine Event as we might see in Savitri—is transformed, then the transformation of the body can follow “quite naturally”. The Mother found Mantra-japa to be a definite way towards this. She was repeating everyday 1400 times the Mantra Om Namo Bhagavate. While the Mother was doing the Japayoga of the cells with the Mantra, with absolute faith she entrusted the entire work and the result to the Will of the Lord.
In October 1959 the Mother spoke something significant about the new world: “… it is not as if this new world of Truth had to be created from nothing: it is fully ready, it is there.” It is fully ready. Yes, it was made ready in the House of the Spirit. Sri Aurobindo had brought it into existence there fully. When in one of their occult-spiritual meetings she asked Sri Aurobindo as to when this other world, the real one that is there, so near, would come to take the place of this world of falsehood, he replied: “Not ready.” The Mother was given the charge of this “not ready”-earth; she took its burden upon herself.
At this most crucial stage her method was to leave everything to the Will of the Lord; yet in that Will she had also something to will. Four great times she was given the choice,— and she made the choice in it. She had the freedom to exercise her own will. It means that the whole being lived “only to know and serve the Divine”. To know the Divine, to will and to serve the Divine that his Will be done—this is what is to be practised.
Not what we think and see for ourselves, but what is thought and seen for us is all that matters. When there is no difference between our will and the Will of the Divine Shakti, then it is she who takes full charge of our life. Then we acquire our genuine freewill. In it can then be the truest expression of Krishna-Kali in us. When this is achieved then the Being of Delight, Anandamaya Purusha, with his Consciousness-Force or Shakti working for his joy, comes down wearing a crown of peacock plumes to play on his flute the Song of New Creation. This song of new creation is born in the fierce “death” of Death, in his transformation into the being of the Truth, he becoming the unveiled Sat-Purusha. Then begins the real re-creation of the Lord and his Shakti, of Krishna and Kali. “When the Unity has been well founded,” wrote long ago Sri Aurobindo, in 1916, “the static half of our work is done, but the active half remains. It is then that in the One we must see the Master and His Power,—Krishna and Kali.”
During the period 1912-20 we see the Krishna-Kali aspect occurring repeatedly as the most decisive and fundamental experience of Sri Aurobindo in the context of the Spirit’s dynamism in life. In his noting dated 1 January 1915 he writes: “Kali is now everywhere revealed in the bhāva of the madhur dāsī dominated by Krishna and administering to his bhoga.” Then, again, in February 1920: the Krishna-Kali relation founded on madhura dāsya is the foundation of tapas siddhi; it has the power to change the world. In fact Krishna’s delight and Kali’s action in his pleasure, Divine Action and Divine Enjoyment,—these two form the entire basis of this divine dynamism in the creation. If this world also has to be creatively progressive in this sense, then Krishna and Kali must step into it; that is the Avataric yoga-tapasya which has to be carried out. Belonging to the same period 1912-20 of Sri Aurobindo’s writings, we also have an early draft of Savitri in which the coming down of Krishna and Kali figures as the finest thing that can happen to this creation. It is with this most excellent boon that Savitri returns to earth with the soul of Satyavan:
Pursuing her in her fall implacably sweet
A face was over her which seemed a youth’s
Crowned as with peacock plumes of gorgeous hue
Framing a sapphire, whose heart-disturbing smile
Insatiably attracted to delight.
Often it changed, though rapturously the same,
And seemed a woman’s dark and beautiful,
Turbulent in will and terrible in love,
A shadowy glory and a stormy depth,
Like a mooned night with drifting star-gemmed clouds.
This Tapas-siddhi of bringing down Krishna and Kali is the entire purport of the yogic Savitri. Whatever stood in its way had to be removed and the path cleared to usher in the divine Event. In it is won the higher Amrita that was postponed earlier. In it is a Siddhi that does not remain static, but which by the work of Kali in the will of Krishna keeps on adding to itself realisable possibilities of the vast yet widening Truth-conscient Delight.
While this is the grand finale of the evolutionary scheme on its way to supermanhood, the actual modus operandi to effect it as a reality on earth, to look into details in the context of the existential parameters, is the pressing imperative. Here we must go to the last set of Sri Aurobindo’s prose writings, published during February 1949 and November 1950. In them he has asserted the fundamental role of the Mind of Light and the possibility of the Intermediate Race on the verge of realisation. As an evolving principle, he says, the Mind of Light marks a stage in the human ascent; it evolves a new type of human being. In this birth of the Mind of Light there are two stages: in the first, it gathers itself out of the Ignorance, assembles its constituent elements, builds up its shapes and types; in the second stage it develops itself in greater light taking its higher shapes and forms till it joins the supermind. Thus is built up the possibility of human ascent towards a divine living; then will there be an illumined divine life. During the entire process of evolution there has been the covert operation of supermind, out of Matter the emergence of Life and out of Life that of Mind; now Mind of Light as the last word of the lower hemisphere of being and the first word of the higher hemisphere provides the operating connection to supermind.
The arrival of the earth-evolution at the Mind of Light, at the threshold of supermanhood itself thus means the birth of a new aeon, of a new being of transcendental Time. In the rush and dynamism of the golden Kali it is the naissance of the golden Spirit, of the evolutionary Kala in a body of delight. Indeed, a new aeon is formed in it, created in it, established in it. Narad’s jubilant recital of the song of the transfiguration and the ecstasy is a cursor indicating the prospects that lie in the working of this new aeon, the Aeon of Krishna-Kali. In it all the barriers of the inconscient time crumble and fall, dissolve; in it the demons weep with joy and, having completed their dreadful task, prepare themselves to return to the One from whom they had come. Narad sees these prospects being realised in the work of Savitri and therefore, in that sweetness and harmony, in that felicity, he sings glory of the manifesting name. The work itself is done by Kali and is offered by her as a yajna to Krishna, but it is the divine Aeon who actually sees the sacrifice done; he is the yajamāna whose presence is necessary to every movement of the sacrifice. He is the Purusha of the Intermediate Race.
RY Deshpande
[The present article is actually a chapter in the author’s book entitled Narad’s Arrival at Madra published by Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry]
[The Gita reveals that the purpose of the divine Incarnation or coming as an Avatar is to do the divine work, diyam karma. This is not only to destroy evil and establish the righteous Law, but is actually to take the progressive evolutionary march to the next higher stage. Sri Aurobindo came to do that, to bring the Spermind in the terrestrial play and make the divine manifestation here upon earth a possibility. We have to see from whatever has been revealed to us if this is present in his life and in his work. Representation of that work should be the genuine concern for any study of his, including biographical. If this is missed the that study is a waste of effort and one need not really attach any importance to it. Unfortunately that is precisely what is happening in the case of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo. However, in this article we shall briefly try to look into some of the aspects of the yogic work carried out by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the work having progressed in formulating a link between Man the Mental Being and the Supramental Race, the Intermediate Race. We shall discuss this in the context of the visit of the heavenly sage Narad to Aswapati as we have in the Book of Fate of Savitri. It provides the necessary framework to appreciate the issues that are deeply involved in the process.]
The heavenly sage Narad sets himself out from Paradise to visit Aswapati and on his way to the palace sings the song of evolution. Its theme is the unfolding reality of this creation and its mood is an offering of joy to its enjoyer, to the Bhokta himself. In the sweetness of his name the song arrives at the transfiguration and the ecstasy about to be born on earth and Narad is in raptures to see it soon happen. Indeed, the chant itself is a prophetic rush
Of life that slumbers in the stone and sun
And mind subliminal in mindless life,
And the consciousness that wakes in beasts and men…
Of Godhead throwing off at last its veil,
Of bodies made divine and life made bliss,
Immortal sweetness clasping immortal might,
Heart sensing heart, thought looking straight at thought,
And the delight when every barrier falls,
And the transfiguration and the ecstasy.
The long course of evolution might have been full of travail and uncertainties; but then it is evolution with a definite purpose also, felicitous purpose, of divine birth in the material creation. In its essentiality it is the evolution of consciousness in the ascending grades of the spirit itself and it has to move on. It has presently advanced to the mental level, but there are higher and vaster ranges of consciousness stretching beyond it and these must enter into the evolutionary scheme. Conscious participation of man in it is now possible, and indeed man does make an effort also to exceed himself. But his soul is burdened by the weight of the inconscient past and a thousand forces are there to thwart his faltering attempts. In the presence of such difficulties he might easily succumb and fail to carry the evolution forward. There is even opposition built into the character of man: he is not only suspect of spiritual possibilities; there is in him a deep-seated irreverence for it, even a fierce antagonism. Oftentimes cross is the payment for the crown offered to him.
Hard is the world-redeemer’s heavy task;
The world itself becomes his adversary,
His enemies are the beings he came to save.
Those he would save are his antagonists.
This is what Narad tells to Savitri’s mother who questions God for the kind of world he has created. In 1616 Galileo maintained that Faith and Reason, Fides et Ratio, can never contradict each other; for holding such a view he had to suffer and pay a heavy price. Marx loudly proclaimed that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed class”, and a whole section of the society fell prey to its logic. True, creedal religion is a monstrosity and “excessive legalism of the Roman Catholic Church” is anti-spiritual; same is the story with other forms of orthodoxy and fundamentalism, classical or modern, even with scientific and materialistic philosophies with all their stubbornness and arrogance, their irrational denials. With the least hesitation all such retrograde impositions must be removed, dismissed at once. Jean-Paul Sartre’s is a godless universe and he tells us that in such a universe the only meaning or purpose of life is to set the goals for oneself and achieve them. But then these existential notions or ideas make the universe a stopped-up system, closing on itself, without the occurrence of further openings or prospects. But there are also noble and elevating thoughts and feelings and deeds in various branches of human activity, with its conquests and triumphs which must be duly acknowledged. There is the religio-mystical experience of seeing God in the world and the world in God. There is the fine perception that “Logos is the blueprint and exemplar of the created universe.” Indeed, Jalalu’d-din Rumi, the thirteenth century Persian Sufi poet, has the intuition of a unique dawn breaking in our skies, of the happy naissance to new-shape our life:
… to-night this world is heavy and in travail,
Striving to give birth to an eternal world.
In the possibility of such a birth here is the wonderful perception of a genuine mystic. Yet the question is: will that eternal world’s birth occur at all? And how will it happen? Or is it just a small vulnerable imagination, feeble, flickering, a longing and an anticipation of a dreamy poet to escape sorrow and suffering that to-night characterise heaviness and anguish of this transient world? And then will this to-night’s struggling world by itself, by its own effort, its own propulsion, bring about a world of undecaying and deathless happiness? Even granting for a moment that in its deepest secrecy there is something remarkable, something truly magnificent, yet a misgiving remains whether this to-night’s world with its own endeavour, by its own labour and struggle can give rise to the eternal world. Is it in a position to assert itself against all opposition? Can man play any pivotal role in this respect and, if he can, will he? Is he capable to do this at all?
“If a spiritual unfolding on earth is the hidden truth of our birth into Matter, if it is fundamentally an evolution of consciousness that has been taking place in Nature,” writes Sri Aurobindo, “then man as he is cannot be the last term of that evolution: he is too imperfect an expression of the Spirit, Mind itself a too limited form and instrumentation; Mind is only a middle term of consciousness, the mental being can only be a transitional being. If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and Supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the creation. But if his mind is capable of opening to what exceeds it, then there is no reason why man himself should not arrive at Supermind and supermanhood or at least lend his mentality, life and body to an evolution of that greater term of the Spirit manifesting in Nature.” Behind this luminous metaphysics is knowledge of the yogi-seer founded on his realisations. We have here the revelation of what is held for the evolution.
Sri Aurobindo in his independence-day message, of 15 August 1947, speaks of “a step in evolution which would raise man to a higher and larger consciousness and begin the solution of the problems which have perplexed and vexed him since he first began to think and to dream of individual perfection and a perfect society.” Undoubtedly, there are difficulties on the way but difficulties are made to be overcome and if the supreme will is there, tells Sri Aurobindo, they will be overcome.
One way out of the difficulties could be Nirvana; but its immutable peace is at the cost of making nonsense of life, this samsāra; no doubt this life is despicable, yet in its intrinsic contents it has a meaning and a purpose also. In Nirvana there is neither the growing individual perfection nor a society making more progress; they have to be here in the world-dynamism based on its truth. According to the Jewish myth Adam was created immortal but death entered the world through sin. The saviour came and bore the cross of pain, yet fundamentally no transformative change took place. But there is something positive also in man. The flame in him may be flickering. But why does a flame flicker, leap? The core of the flame, the hottest part in it, becomes lighter due to the gaseous combustion and the lighter gases at the core of the flame move upward and the denser air from beneath the flame fills the void at the core. The lamp continues to burn in leaps. Hence we have leaping tongues. There is something in the heart of man which keeps on burning and its leaping is a sign of its growth, progress. Rumi has a vision of exceeding what man presently is, exceeding even the greatness of the angels of heaven. Here is his song of evolution:
I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And from vegetablensss I died and became animal.
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearance through death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth the wings and feathers like angels;
After that, soaring higher than angels—
What you cannot imagine,
I shall be that.
In spite of his diffidence and refusal and opposition, in spite of his dumbness, man’s hope and longing and aspiration lead him on to nobler heights, to bluer and brighter skies, to the gold-hued empyrean. The psychic flame within him continues to burn, and leap. His spirit climbs the ascending slopes of heaven. He crosses the Upanishadic gates of the sun to live in immortality of the Self. He certainly has an inkling that this creation’s bliss is in truth, as much as its truth is in bliss. There is even the revelation that God’s glory shines throughout the universe. “Dante informs us that he has been to paradise, and has seen things so extraordinary that he cannot possibly hope to tell about them. Nevertheless, he determines to make this final song his crowning achievement as a poet, and he calls on the Muses for inspiration as he focuses on his journey heavenward. At noon on the spring equinox, Dante, still in the Earthly Paradise, sees Beatrice gazing into the sun, and he imitates her gaze. In so doing, he becomes aware of an extraordinary brightness, as though God had placed in the heavens a second sun, and feels himself being ‘transhumanised’ in preparation for his experience of Paradise. He then finds himself soaring heavenward through God’s grace, although he is uncertain whether it is his soul or his corporeal self that rises. As Dante and Beatrice pass out of the earth’s atmosphere into a sphere of fire that lies above it, Dante hears the music of the spheres. This music fills him with wonderment and perplexity, but before he can question Beatrice about it, she explains to him the teleological order of the universe, and how it is only natural that, having been purified, he should now rise heavenward.”
Yet, if at all, only awhile can stay such a state—because our restless nether members get tired of it. On the “heart’s altar the sacred fire is dim, and an old pull of subconscious cords renews, and the unwilling spirit is drawn back from the heights.” Here is in fact a fundamental issue staring at the soul of man, and it has to meet the challenge. The Mother explains: “This is the great difficulty in the physical life. It is the strength of the old habit that pulls down the body to its old way. Then comes the struggle, and if the faith is sufficient, if the ardour for progress is there, then out of this fall we can rise to a higher receptivity and a better achievement. In fact, there is nothing in this experimental life that is not meant to push the whole creation towards the luminous, marvellous Divine End that is promised to our effort and to our faith… . If we can enlarge our consciousness sufficiently, we see that even the apparent defeats are marvellous steps towards the final Victory.” The pull-and-push is real in this world, the ancient tussle between the forces of light and darkness, between evil and good, between ignorance and knowledge, between life and death, between Matter and Spirit.
But the solution lies in our enlarging the consciousness sufficiently. Man should be in a position to keep aside his mind and open to the superior states waiting to descend in him. That is the true evolutionary answer to the thousand problems that afflict him. The knowledge of intuition and the knowledge of rationality are quite different things and it may not be even possible for them to come together. From the infra-rational stage to the rational was a great leap; a greater leap from the rational to the supra-rational will make man’s manhood progressive, complete. He must understand it—because he is equipped to understand it; the evolutionary foundation has already got it established in its design. In the course of time his faculties must become sharper, keener, subtler, more intense; it is only then will he exceed the typal limits under which he presently works.
It is true that with progress in awareness the consciousness of time, for instance, marks a definite step forward, that it can differentiate time from changes and events “taking place” in it. Yet the fact that time itself is a dynamic power effecting changes and events is difficult for rational mind to recognise. We speak of zeitgeist but do not acknowledge it as an entity per se. The being of time is an occult reality and we are oblivious of it. Only when our psychic faculties open out, when the flame within us burns in a steady manner, “motionless like the light of a lamp in a windless place” as the Gita says, when the Godward will is unfaltering and intense, can we then get a glimpse of it. Will man keep aside his mentality and live in his soul? We are presently living in the hour of God and we are not aware of it. When the hour comes “even a little effort produces great results and changes destiny.” In it can be achieved all that the soul aspires for; in it can be the true fulfilment also of the human race. In it is the glad celebration of the work of time. An “aeon”, meaning not only “eternity” but also universe, is itself a power emanating from the supreme Being, playing various roles in the operation. It is personification of an age and new aeons are equinoxes of God. The two aeons of Christianity are Jesus and Sophia. When Sophia emanates without her partner aeon, the result is the Demiurge. In many gnostic systems the various emanations of God are called aeons. They constitute the pleroma, the “region of light”. The lowest regions of the pleroma are closest to the darkness; that is, the physical world. Here is time in its several manifestations.
In this physical world appearance of a being greater than man is the “divine promise” to be realised in the majesty of the steps of this dynamic and participative time. Time-Spirit as the Devourer was abroad on the battlefield of the epochal Kurukshetra; in our own fierce and forceful times it thundered through nations and trampled over them during the Second World War. Kāla-Bhairava dances wild to destroy all that stands across the path of the divine Event. He opens out a new era in evolutionary march of the soul of the earth. “Man is a transitional being” and in time there has to arrive the superman.
Speaking of the vaster light and profounder bliss Sri Aurobindo writes as follows: “Mind indeed can never be a perfect instrument of the Spirit; a supreme self-expression is not possible in its movements because to separate, divide, limit is its very character. Even if mind could be free from all positive falsehood and error, even if it could be all intuitive and infallibly intuitive, it could still present and organise only half-truths or separate truths and these too not in their own body but in luminous representative figures put together to make an accumulated total or a massed structure. Therefore the self-perfecting mental being here must either depart into pure spirit by the shedding of its lower existence or return upon the physical life to develop in it a capacity not yet found in our mental and psychic nature… . The mental being exceeding his sphere does not… bring down its greater spiritual nature into this lower triplicity; for here the mental being is the highest expression of the Self. Here the triple mental, vital and physical body provides almost the whole range of our capacity and cannot suffice for that greater consciousness; the vessel has not been built to contain a greater godhead or to house the splendours of this supramental force and knowledge.”
The problem is therefore to build a vessel to hold the greater godhead in life here. The Vedic Rishis called the human body an unbaked vessel, atapta tanu, in which practically no tapas has been done, no spiritual consciousness has been established to receive Light, Knowledge, Power, Immortality, transcendental Ananda. But there is a possibility of human mind standing perfected in the Light and a new humanity taking its place as part of the new order. There could be a liberated mind escaping from ignorance into light, aware of its affiliation to supermind. In that eventuality there would be a new mental being, an intermediate race able to climb consciously towards and into living vastness of superconscience. If this could happen then the physical body too would prepare itself for the divine transformation. “The full emergence of supermind may be accomplished by a sovereign manifestation, a descent into earth-consciousness and a rapid assumption of its powers and disclosing of its forms and the creation of a supramental race and a supramental life.” But ever the question remains: how is this going to be achieved? It might be a possibility, a possibility already built into the scheme, but its realisation is a process to be worked out.
But who is going to work out this possibility? To shape humanity as the harbinger of this new supramental life is a yogic task to be done by a Yogi only. The power or principle or agent who could organise this new humanity, the intermediate race, Sri Aurobindo called the Mind of Light, the mind of the very physical that has opened itself to the supramental. Mind of Light is the presiding deity or adhişţātā of the new race. In the dynamism of this operation the presence of the Mind of Light, the physical receiving the supramental light, is the decisive stage in the final arrival of the superman proper. From this nature of the Mind of Light as the leader and governor of the intermediate race, the race of the true Overman, we might get an idea why Sri Aurobindo took the practical step of establishing it first as an imperative towards further evolutionary growth: he saw the necessity of the intermediate race governed by this Mind. It is the precursor, even a prerequisite, for the appearance of the supramental race, collective supermanhood. Yogically, Sri Aurobindo first created it in the transcendental and then established it in himself; his body’s cells became receptive to the supramental light and force. He gave the Mind of Light to the Mother as a yogic gift when he withdrew on 5 December 1950, thus making it dynamic here; not too long after this, in fact in less than six years, occurred the great event of the supramental descent and manifestation in the earth’s subtle physical.
Apropos of the role of the Mind of Light in the evolution of the future race of superior gnostic beings, K D Sethna writes: “The Mind of Light in its plenary form, leading to the fullness of what we may call the Life-force of Light and the Body of Light, would constitute the Intermediate Race between the Human and the Supramental Races. The Supramental Race would be a directly manifested line of Divine Beings who have never gone through the process of earthly evolution: they would be the Supermind humanised, as differentiated from Humanity supramentalised. Humanity would be supramentalised by a natural means of spiritualisation; the Supermind would be humanised by an occult means of materialisation developed by Humanity when it has supramentalised itself. The two achievements would be complimentary aspects of the complete manifestation of the Divine upon earth—the crowning vision of Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy and the all-consummating goal of his Yoga.” It would perhaps be necessary to pause and consider whether a “natural” means of spiritualisation can really supramentalise humanity. It was indeed the yogic endeavour of the Master-Yogi that had opened out the prospects.
Sethna explains the nature of this achievement through the spiritual realisations or siddhis of Aswapati, as we have in Savitri: “... there took place in his very physical substance an extraordinary growth of consciousness, a supernormal intensification of perception and puissance, due to the unfoldment of the real being in him, the essential animating self of him, and resulting in a wide-awake sustained ascent to a visionary and intuitive plane... Aswapati caught ... a sense akin to or instinct with the drive of the Primal Truths of the Transcendent that have to become the Final Realities of the Individual in the life-terms of the physical universe.” Even in the early stages of Aswapati’s Yoga there is the aspect of the body seeking its meaning and its fulfilment in the aggregate scheme of this vast and purposeful creation. Body’s cells acquire an extra-dense luminosity to promote prospects of undimming substantiality in the Spirit’s ever-growing immensities. The archetypal Harmony becomes definite and concrete, not only in terms of ideas alone but also in terms of established possibilities, in terms of multiply-realised relationships even in the material expression. The Cosmic and the Transcendental join the rich Individual, now ready to support and to articulate them variedly. When this begins to happen, then is ushered in a new age. This can be so only because someone has made himself available for the complex play of the countless universal forces. Soul’s release from the ignorant Nature is a first step without which this radical change cannot occur. With this soul’s release Aswapati, tells Sethna, “faces the objective and subjective Nature that constitutes our common habitual experience, our life of Ignorance, the physical and psychological fields of our works.”
Such may be taken as a statement of the Yoga of Evolution, Yoga as a creative-operative process in the dimensions of the vast Reality that initiates it and supports it. Such is the work which an Avatar alone can do. Indeed, his coming here is the sine quo non for the spiritual advance to take place; it is he who carries the evolution forward. Sri Aurobindo had gathered the supramental Light and Force and fixed the Supermind in his physical body. In yogic-spiritual terms, he attempted all and achieved all. Whatever was to be done was done, not for himself, nor for the sake of humanity; all that he did, he did for the sake of the Divine. One definite result of this was that the Mind of Light got fixed in the Mother. This happened in that midnight’s “tremendous hour”, at the time of his passing away. A decisive step towards supermanhood was taken.
The Yogi Purusha did his job, of creating the body of the Vijnanmaya Purusha. Now the Bhagavati Shakti must attend to her task right away. The foundational Nature has to receive this new Light and this new Power. That is her difficult task. That was the assignment given to the Mother by Sri Aurobindo. And she did carry it out. What was promised got fulfilled: “A new Light breaks upon the earth, a new world is born,”—she declared on 24 April 1956. The event had taken place much earlier, on 29 February 1956, when during collective meditation in the evening the golden Supermind leaped down on the golden Wednesday. Since then things remained no more the same. Supramental manifestation took place in the earth’s subtle-physical. What had exactly happened on 29 February 1956? The Mother says: “This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine. As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that the time has come, and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces. Then the Supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow.” She also declared: “A new world is born, born, born.” It was not the old world transformed, but it was a new world that had taken birth. Her missioned work was completed in 1956. But then in the wake of supramental descent and manifestation she got preoccupied with readying humanity’s soul to receive this exceptional Light and Power. Once the Mother asked Sri Aurobindo: “After the descent of the Supermind, how long do you think the process of transformation will take?” He looked up and told her: “Perhaps 300 years.” Later the Mother added: “He said 300 years, but you know there is something like Grace—anything can take place.”
Some of the ancient traditions speak of the glorious body, but the divine body, divya deha, housing the gnostic being as revealed by Sri Aurobindo is something radically different from all that. He writes in August 1949: “This destiny of the body has rarely in the past been envisaged or else not for the body here upon earth; such forms would rather be imagined or visioned as the privilege of celestial beings and not possible as the physical residence of a soul still bound to terrestrial nature. The Vaishnavas have spoken of a spiritualised conscious body, cinmaya deha; there has been the conception of a radiant or luminous body, which might be the Vedic jyotirmaya deha. A light has been seen by some radiating from the bodies of highly developed spiritual persons, even extending to the emission of an enveloping aura and there has been recorded an initial phenomenon of this kind in the life of so great a spiritual personality as Ramakrishna. But these things have been either conceptual only or rare and occasional and for the most part the body has not been regarded as possessed of spiritual possibility or capable of transformation. It has been spoken of as the means of effectuation of the dharma and dharma here includes all high purposes, achievements and ideals of life not excluding the spiritual change: but it is an instrument that must be dropped when its work is done and though there may be and must be spiritual realisation while yet in the body, it can only come to its full fruition after the abandonment of the physical frame. More ordinarily in the spiritual tradition the body has been regarded as an obstacle, incapable of spiritualisation or transmutation and a heavy weight holding the soul to earthly nature and preventing its ascent either to spiritual fulfilment in the Supreme or to the dissolution of its individual being in the Supreme. But this… is insufficient for a… divine life upon earth… . The body is an offspring and creation of the Inconscient, itself inconscient or only half-conscious… but the fact that it has developed a soul and is capable of serving it as a means may indicate that it is capable of further development and may become a shrine and expression of the spirit, reveal a secret spirituality of Matter, become entirely and not only half-conscious, reach a certain oneness with the spirit.”
If there is going to be a divine Destiny for earth, it must be so because of a free choice of the soul of the earth itself. Not pressure or impulsion from above, nor just solicitude, but a glad spontaneous urge from within has to be there to get ready to receive that Destiny. The fundamental issue is of manifestation in the physical. The Mother was busy with it. Her occult work got focused to make the mind of the earth’s physical ready for that. The divine will has to be awakened even in the cellular physical; the divine flame has to be kindled in that house for the divine to dwell in a divine way. It looks rather paradoxical that, as if only during the last few years of her presence here upon earth, she should have said that “the more we advance on the way, the more the need of the Divine Presence becomes imperative and indispensable.” It is not that on 21 February 1973 she realised this imperative; it is the very physical that realised it on this day. It means, the physical was making a direct response for the Divine Presence in it. How marvellous!
“The supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earth-consciousness,” wrote Sri Aurobindo in 1928. The supramental change was decreed by him and he and the Mother had set themselves to work out its inevitability. But to realise it in us there is needed the call and we have to be ready to receive what they are constantly showering on us. Tapahprabhava and Devaprasada together can, as the ancient Upanishadic scripture says, bring fulfilment to our longings, to our soul’s aspiration. To be engaged in that spiritual growth, to live and work and enjoy divinely in the Divine is the aspiring soul’s glad path of the future.
Apropos of the gnostic being a pertinent question that could be raised here is: will he be any different than the Avatar or Incarnation of the Divine himself? are the Superman and the Avatar the same? But the function of the Avatar is to establish a new principle of consciousness and enable evolution to move closer towards the secret divinity that is pressing to manifest itself with an increasing play of higher possibilities. Establishment of the Dharma, dharmasamsthāpanam, of the Law of the manifesting Truth, has been proclaimed to be the function of Avatarhood. In the case of the supramental Avatar it will be the supramental Dharma that will be founded; he will open out the way towards supermanhood. Can such an Avatar be called a superman? No, he cannot be; he belongs to a totally different category. While the Avatar accepts the conditions of world-ignorance to work out the divine Purpose and Will in it, superman belonging to the race of the gnostic beings does not accept any basis of ignorance for its existence; it cannot, by its very quality and integrity. Which means a supramental race, though evolutionary, will always live and grow in the widening Truth-Consciousness. That should also imply no need of any further Avatar of the Supreme.
Long ago the Mother had obtained the consent for collaboration from the material Nature. That was a great advance in the evolutionary process. Nature saw the distinct possibility and gained confidence in the work, as if she knew that this time she will not be duped. She discarded her earlier frustrating reservations. The Mother experienced the Divine alone acting in the body. In fact the Divine had become the body, with the power of omniscience and omnipotence operating in it. She was busy with the formation of the new body. A golden light, transparent and benevolent, very strong, very powerful filled the body’s cells. It is said in the Veda that the body of Agni is made of gold, it is hiraņya tanu. The Mother did it as a part of the evolutionary process. She was trying to fuse this material body with that supramental body. She would then simply walk into that body— without dying. This happened on 17 November 1973. She walked into the New Body.
If we have to mark a few important stages in the process of physical transformation, these could be quickly enumerated as follows: Sri Aurobindo’s descent into death, 1950; supramental manifestation in the earth’s subtle physical, 1956; realisation of the surhomme consciousness, 1958; consent for collaboration from the material Nature, 1958; the descent of the surhomme consciousness in 1969; the psychic being itself getting materialised, 1970; supramental body, 1972. It is the psychic being which will materialise itself and become the supramental being, the Mother told on 1 July 1970. It is precisely the psychic being which survives death. So, if it itself materialises, it means the abolition of the death of, and in, the physical. That is the central importance of the psychic being. Whatever is not in accordance with the Truth thus just disappears. Materialisation of the psychic being gives continuity to evolution. In the material world immortality means the materialisation of the psychic being. The New Body makes it possible. Perhaps that is the process. Now it is the New Body which will do whatever is to be done. It is not an inert lump of matter, but is charged with the luminous dynamism of the Divine. It is going to exert pressure upon the material in the evolutionary process. The supramental Presence is a sufficient, a wonderful necessary and sufficient basis for that to happen. Such is surely the greater gain than perhaps the transformation itself.
On 14 March 1970 the Mother spoke of the work Sri Aurobindo had given to her. He himself had, after 1950, willed and worked so much for the physical life to be governed by the higher consciousness that it became now possible for it to change into an authentic life. But it had to be translated into the process of time. The Aeon has to open out to receive it. The Mother was here to accomplish it. The emphasis was on the higher Power working in the physical, of manifesting in it. In 1967 she had the early certitude of it being done. There was even a conscious prayer from the cells of the body to the Supreme: “O Supreme Lord of the universe, we implore Thee, give us the strength and the beauty, the harmonious perfection needed to be Thy divine instruments upon earth.” Now the age-old illusion that the physical is incapable of opening to the higher Consciousness was altogether removed. The body started responding to it, joyously, submitting to it with an attitude of “It is as Thou Willest, Lord, as Thou Willest.” The body was no more as it was, said the Mother. The progress was such that it started breathing divinity, started living in divinity.
When the Mother’s sadhana entered the stage of awakening consciousness of the body’s cells, she found that they started chanting constantly the name of the Lord. They were all the while imploring the Lord for the strength and the beauty, for the harmonious perfection needed to be the divine instruments upon earth. Om Namo Bhagavate, Om Namo Bhagavate became the specific Word of Realisation. The Mother even spoke of the path that was never trod by anyone. Sri Aurobindo had done it in principle, she said on 26 November 1960; but she also added that the details had to be worked out. To make the body’s cells awake to the divine reality was an unprecedented task and the Mother had to discover the means for accomplishing it. It is here that she found the power of the Mantra coming to a definite aid in fixing the higher subtle-luminous in the dark and crude gross. Only Japa or repetition of the Mantra has direct action on the body. While she was engaged in this intense Japa-Yoga, she was actually invoking the “Lord of Tomorrow”.
Indeed, a very mysterious process accepting the circumstances of life, life as is, nourishes our urge towards immortality; this urge in turn is nourished by an equally enigmatic as well as stiff ordaining agent of creation: life only would be a blind attempt to grow but life and death together are presently the promoters of evolution. But if the transcendental immortality has to be housed here in Man the Mortal, here upon mrityuloka, then he has to exceed himself. He has to become Superman. Vijnanamaya Purusha or the Being of Knowledge has to arrive here. The well fashioned and beautifully made Upanishadic Man cannot be the ultimate crown of this great endeavour. The problem is the physical and it is in the physical that the new tapas-yoga has got to be done. We have to acquire the golden body, hiraņya tanu, of the Divine Agni. This needs another kind of Yoga, the Yoga of the Future. If by Tapas Brahma creates the world, then by Yoga the world in its totality has to see and breathe and live Brahmanhood in every respect.
This well fashioned Man is presently endowed in his subtle physical only with seven Chakras or centres of occult energy. What is below him and what is above him have not yet entered into its swift functioning. The rush of the Kundalini Force, of the occult Pranic or Vital Energy in these seven Chakras is a great beginning but in the veritable Yoga of Transformation what is necessary is that the two Chakras below the body and the three above have to materialise and become operative. This is what the Mother was told long ago by her occultist teacher Théon, and it was her experience also. For these Chakras to come into operation it is necessary to do another type of occult-spiritual yoga-tapasya. It is only then that the physical can respond to the working of the higher consciousness-force. A new body is necessary for this, a body that must emerge out of the Yajna of the Shakti. In it must be kindled the golden flame invoking the rush of the divine existence-substance as the basis of life in truth-conscient delight of the manifesting Spirit. But how exactly the new body will be made, that cannot be said or disclosed in the beginning. This however became the main thrust of the Mother’s yoga-tapasya during the last fifteen years or so of her work. The Mantra-japa she discovered was one possible method to achieve this. That was an unexplored technique.
The Mother was concerned with the almighty powers that are shut in the body’s cells. She awoke them. Not only that. The cells started joyously vibrating and opening out more and more in the aspiration for the Divine. This was something new. She said: “I have been sent upon earth to do the work of supramental transformation and the bringing about of the new creation, and I have been trying to do this... .” Sri Aurobindo had indicated that the new golden body is to be first formed out of the inner mental, inner vital and inner physical renewed and reshaped. The difficulty that notably comes in the modus operandi is that of the inner physical with its stubborn mind. While this mind, mind within matter, was gainfully formed under compulsion of the difficulties present in the unevolved obscure stuff, it also inherited those very stiff and harsh difficulties. If this mind—the Mind of Night standing across the path of the divine Event as we might see in Savitri—is transformed, then the transformation of the body can follow “quite naturally”. The Mother found Mantra-japa to be a definite way towards this. She was repeating everyday 1400 times the Mantra Om Namo Bhagavate. While the Mother was doing the Japayoga of the cells with the Mantra, with absolute faith she entrusted the entire work and the result to the Will of the Lord.
In October 1959 the Mother spoke something significant about the new world: “… it is not as if this new world of Truth had to be created from nothing: it is fully ready, it is there.” It is fully ready. Yes, it was made ready in the House of the Spirit. Sri Aurobindo had brought it into existence there fully. When in one of their occult-spiritual meetings she asked Sri Aurobindo as to when this other world, the real one that is there, so near, would come to take the place of this world of falsehood, he replied: “Not ready.” The Mother was given the charge of this “not ready”-earth; she took its burden upon herself.
At this most crucial stage her method was to leave everything to the Will of the Lord; yet in that Will she had also something to will. Four great times she was given the choice,— and she made the choice in it. She had the freedom to exercise her own will. It means that the whole being lived “only to know and serve the Divine”. To know the Divine, to will and to serve the Divine that his Will be done—this is what is to be practised.
Not what we think and see for ourselves, but what is thought and seen for us is all that matters. When there is no difference between our will and the Will of the Divine Shakti, then it is she who takes full charge of our life. Then we acquire our genuine freewill. In it can then be the truest expression of Krishna-Kali in us. When this is achieved then the Being of Delight, Anandamaya Purusha, with his Consciousness-Force or Shakti working for his joy, comes down wearing a crown of peacock plumes to play on his flute the Song of New Creation. This song of new creation is born in the fierce “death” of Death, in his transformation into the being of the Truth, he becoming the unveiled Sat-Purusha. Then begins the real re-creation of the Lord and his Shakti, of Krishna and Kali. “When the Unity has been well founded,” wrote long ago Sri Aurobindo, in 1916, “the static half of our work is done, but the active half remains. It is then that in the One we must see the Master and His Power,—Krishna and Kali.”
During the period 1912-20 we see the Krishna-Kali aspect occurring repeatedly as the most decisive and fundamental experience of Sri Aurobindo in the context of the Spirit’s dynamism in life. In his noting dated 1 January 1915 he writes: “Kali is now everywhere revealed in the bhāva of the madhur dāsī dominated by Krishna and administering to his bhoga.” Then, again, in February 1920: the Krishna-Kali relation founded on madhura dāsya is the foundation of tapas siddhi; it has the power to change the world. In fact Krishna’s delight and Kali’s action in his pleasure, Divine Action and Divine Enjoyment,—these two form the entire basis of this divine dynamism in the creation. If this world also has to be creatively progressive in this sense, then Krishna and Kali must step into it; that is the Avataric yoga-tapasya which has to be carried out. Belonging to the same period 1912-20 of Sri Aurobindo’s writings, we also have an early draft of Savitri in which the coming down of Krishna and Kali figures as the finest thing that can happen to this creation. It is with this most excellent boon that Savitri returns to earth with the soul of Satyavan:
Pursuing her in her fall implacably sweet
A face was over her which seemed a youth’s
Crowned as with peacock plumes of gorgeous hue
Framing a sapphire, whose heart-disturbing smile
Insatiably attracted to delight.
Often it changed, though rapturously the same,
And seemed a woman’s dark and beautiful,
Turbulent in will and terrible in love,
A shadowy glory and a stormy depth,
Like a mooned night with drifting star-gemmed clouds.
This Tapas-siddhi of bringing down Krishna and Kali is the entire purport of the yogic Savitri. Whatever stood in its way had to be removed and the path cleared to usher in the divine Event. In it is won the higher Amrita that was postponed earlier. In it is a Siddhi that does not remain static, but which by the work of Kali in the will of Krishna keeps on adding to itself realisable possibilities of the vast yet widening Truth-conscient Delight.
While this is the grand finale of the evolutionary scheme on its way to supermanhood, the actual modus operandi to effect it as a reality on earth, to look into details in the context of the existential parameters, is the pressing imperative. Here we must go to the last set of Sri Aurobindo’s prose writings, published during February 1949 and November 1950. In them he has asserted the fundamental role of the Mind of Light and the possibility of the Intermediate Race on the verge of realisation. As an evolving principle, he says, the Mind of Light marks a stage in the human ascent; it evolves a new type of human being. In this birth of the Mind of Light there are two stages: in the first, it gathers itself out of the Ignorance, assembles its constituent elements, builds up its shapes and types; in the second stage it develops itself in greater light taking its higher shapes and forms till it joins the supermind. Thus is built up the possibility of human ascent towards a divine living; then will there be an illumined divine life. During the entire process of evolution there has been the covert operation of supermind, out of Matter the emergence of Life and out of Life that of Mind; now Mind of Light as the last word of the lower hemisphere of being and the first word of the higher hemisphere provides the operating connection to supermind.
The arrival of the earth-evolution at the Mind of Light, at the threshold of supermanhood itself thus means the birth of a new aeon, of a new being of transcendental Time. In the rush and dynamism of the golden Kali it is the naissance of the golden Spirit, of the evolutionary Kala in a body of delight. Indeed, a new aeon is formed in it, created in it, established in it. Narad’s jubilant recital of the song of the transfiguration and the ecstasy is a cursor indicating the prospects that lie in the working of this new aeon, the Aeon of Krishna-Kali. In it all the barriers of the inconscient time crumble and fall, dissolve; in it the demons weep with joy and, having completed their dreadful task, prepare themselves to return to the One from whom they had come. Narad sees these prospects being realised in the work of Savitri and therefore, in that sweetness and harmony, in that felicity, he sings glory of the manifesting name. The work itself is done by Kali and is offered by her as a yajna to Krishna, but it is the divine Aeon who actually sees the sacrifice done; he is the yajamāna whose presence is necessary to every movement of the sacrifice. He is the Purusha of the Intermediate Race.
RY Deshpande
[The present article is actually a chapter in the author’s book entitled Narad’s Arrival at Madra published by Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, Pondicherry]
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