classes ::: George_Van_Vrekhem, Integral_Yoga, chapter,
children :::
branches :::
see also :::

Instances, Classes, See Also, Object in Names
Definitions, . Quotes . - . Chapters .


object:1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous
book classPreparing for the Miraculous
author class:George Van Vrekhem
subject class:Integral Yoga
class:chapter

E
volution, according to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother,
is a long and difficult climb of Nature, in the organisms
it creates, to regain its original divinity. Therefore human-
ity, given its imperfection, cannot be the ultimate step or
crown of the evolution. Beyond the human gradation are
the higher worlds and beings humans have always intuited
or dreamed of, and still further beyond are the infinitudes
of the Divine. The animal is a living laboratory in which
Nature has, it is said, worked out Man. Man himself may
well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with
whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the su-
perman, the god. 1 (Sri Aurobindo)

The next step in the evolution, announced by Sri Auro
bindo and the Mother, is the superman or supramental
being. The human is the mental being; therefore, what is
more than human must be called supra-mental. As the
mental consciousness has been incorporated into life on
Earth from its pre-existent involutionary level in the cos-
mic manifestation, so the supramental consciousness will
incorporate from the supramental level or Supermind,
which is the creative divine Consciousness.

As Sri Aurobindo and the Mother said, the difference
between the human and the superhuman is much great-
er than between the animal and the human. Considering
the intricacies it has taken for Homo sapiens to form on a
physical basis prepared by his evolutionary predecessors,
if the appearance of the supramental being on Earth is
a still greater wonder, its realization will be vastly more
complex. For what the incorporation of a supramental, i.e.
divine consciousness in a material body demands, is that
matter be divinized. Only then will the future species be-
yond the human become a possibility.

What such a transformed supramental body on our ma-
terial planet will be, we cannot even try to imagine, for our
mind is too limited. That matter, or the material living cell,
can be refined is shown by the human body in its develop-
ment from the body of the primate. Materialistic science,
accepting to examine only the surface processes of things, is
not a competent guide in this, and creates constantly more
problems than it solves.

1 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 6.

How did the human come to walk upright? Why is his
body naked? How did he manage to reason and talk? Many
questions with many more constantly changing scientific
answers, some of them requiring minor miracles which sci-
ence promises to explain later. How will the body and the
mind of still half animal Homo sapiens be changed into the
features of the gods? The only way seems to be a series of
major miracles. But are the realizations of the soul and of
the spirit, preconditions of the transformation, not already
in themselves miracles?

When examining in The Human Cycle the communal life
of the future supramental beings, a spiritualized society
... the kingdom of God upon earth, Sri Aurobindo wrote:
Certainly, this will not come about easily, or, as men have
always vainly hoped ... by a sudden and at once entirely
satisfying change and magical transformation. The ad-
vance, however it comes about, will be indeed of the nature
of a miracle, as are all such profound changes and immense
developments, for they have the appearance of a kind of
realized impossibility. But God works all his miracles by an
evolution of secret possibilities which have been long pre-
pared ... at least in their elements, and in the end by a rapid
bringing of all to a head, a throwing together of the ele-
ments so that in their fusion they produce a new form and
name of things and reveal a new spirit. Often the decisive
turn is preceded by an apparent emphasizing and raising
to their extreme of things which seem the very denial, the
most uncompromising opposite of the new principle and
the new creation. 2

2 Sri Aurobindo: The Human Cycle, p. 183.

The biological sciences are actively propagating their
positivist teaching that evolution is nothing but the work
of chance in an accidental universe, and that it is not pro-
gressive. Consequently the appearance of the human being
is purely a matter of luck. Stephen Jay Gould, for instance,
was adamantly opposed to progress, speaking of it as a
noxious, culturally embedded, untestable, nonoperational,
untractable idea that must be replaced if we wish to under-
stand the patterns of history. It is a delusion engendered
by our refusal to accept our insignificance when faced with
the immensity of time. (Michael Ruse) The religious and
spiritual view, on the contrary, has held of old that the hu-
man being is the masterpiece of the creation, and even that
it was made in the image of God.

For Sri Aurobindo, in whose cosmic scheme evolution
is the backbone, Homo sapiens, possessing a psychic being,
is provisionally the highest step of evolution, although on
the whole ladder back to the Divine he stands only some-
where halfway. Sri Aurobindo has explained that, if a new,
supramental species is to be worked out, the process will
resemble the emergence of the previous evolutionary stag-
es. There will be the ascendant urge in the highest existing
species (which in humanity translates as aspiration); an
answer will come from the corresponding next higher level
in the pre-existing general manifestation (which Sri Aurob-
indo calls the involution); and this response will create in
the aspiring species a number of intermediary subspecies,
leading up to the formation of the new main species.

As the gap between the human and the superhuman or
divine is enormous, the variety of intermediary beings may
be wide-ranging. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had come
to lay the foundations of this transformation. From 1956
onwards the Mother confirmed repeatedly that the appear-
ance of the supramental being on Earth was certain.

The moment of humanitys transformation, she said,
was now by which she meant a now on an evolution-
ary timescale. In fact, the unification of humanity which
causes the present unprecedented upheavals on our globe,
resulting in an almost total disorientation among humans,pr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
47
was predicted by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother as one of
the inevitable phenomena of the Great Transition.

The path which Sri Aurobindo and the Mother called
the Integral Yoga is therefore not a fixed system with a
defined goal to be realized within the lifetime of the practi
tioner (as are other paths of yoga). What they have initiated
is continuing now in ways humans cannot foresee, but to
the general trend of which they can collaborate if they feel
called to. The great evolutionary adventure of the past will
be continued in unimaginable ways. Already a century ago,
after the self-assuredness of the bourgeois era and before
the explosions of the twentieth-century wars, Sri Aurob-
indo announced the time of the unexpected.

The present insecurity, posited by the post-modern in-
tellectuals as an innate modality of the human mind, is gen-
eral, except in the vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
which clearly and in detail defines the rationale behind
ours and the coming times. If all is That the fundamen-
tal premise of the Upanishads then the present vortices in
humanity are also That, and the most secure foothold must
be the inner Presence, the Divine in us. On this basis one
can be prepared for the unexpected for the miraculous,
which is the assured future definitively to come.


Of laws and miracles

Science tells us that the universe functions according
to laws which the human mind can find out and formulate.
The scientific culture that arose in Western Europe, of
which we are the inheritors, was dominated by adherence
to the absolute invariance of laws of Nature, which thereby
underwrote the meaningfulness of the scientific enterprise
and assured its success. (John Barrow)48

In recent times, however, the laws of physics, once re-
garded as cast in tablets of stone, began to look less defini-
tive. What was once the domain of a few eccentric scien-
tists like David Bohm, Rupert Sheldrake or Ilya Prigogine,
is now more and more accepted by scientific orthodoxy
and may soon be integrated into the standard paradigm.
As soon as the laws are confined to some abstract realm
of ideal mathematical forms, there is no problem, writes
Paul Davies, but if the laws are considered to inhabit, not
a transcendent Platonic realm, but the real universe, then
its a very different story. And a French scientist states
squarely: The fundamental laws [of physics] are now
about possibilities and no longer about certitudes.

Sri Aurobindo did not only rely on his yogic insight,
he followed the evolution of science, including physics,
from nearby, and in his writings one finds numerous refer-
ences to Einsteins relativity theories and the puzzling con-
clusions of quantum mechanics. It was part of the funda-
mental attitude of this mystic never to lose contact with
reality and the world. This should be kept in mind when
reading the following passages by him. Quite aware of the
confirmations of science, he explains here that the reality
of what science tries to grasp, describe and understand is
much more complex than science even accepts. The simple
but crucial reason is that physical science has in Galileo,
Descartes and Newton reduced reality to the realm of mat-
ter, declaring the other principles of what constitutes real-
ity life, mind, spirit to be reducible to matter, or other-
wise to be outside the sphere of interest of serious science.

If we look carefully at these workings of Nature, Sri
Aurobindo writes in The Life Divine, once we put aside the
veil of familiarity and our unthinking acquiescence in the
process of things as natural because so they always hap-
pen, we discover that all she does in whole or in parts is apr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
49
miracle, an act of some incomprehensible magic. 3 And in
a letter he writes: Science, like most mental and external
knowledge, gives you only truth of process. I would add
that it cannot give you the whole truth of process; for you
seize some of the ponderables, but miss the all-important
imponderables ... After all the triumphs and marvels of Sci-
ence the explaining principle, the rationale, the significance
of the whole is left as dark, as mysterious and even more
mysterious than ever. 4

There is no fundamental significance in things if you
miss the Divine Reality; for you remain embedded in a
huge surface crust of manageable and utilizable appear-
ance. It is the magic of the Magician [the Divine as Creator]
you are trying to analyze, but only when you enter into
the consciousness of the Magician himself can you begin to
experience the true origination, significance and circles of
the Lila. I say begin because the Divine Reality is not so
simple that at the first touch you can know all of it or put it
into a single formula; it is the infinite and opens before you
an infinite knowledge to which all Science put together is
a bagatelle. 5

If reality consists of the hierarchical gradations which
from old have been called the Chain of Being, modern sci-
ence, with physics as its norm, has voluntarily blocked its
own access to reality, for it has chosen as its fundamental
premise that all existence is material and nothing else. In a
future world of Truth, however, the whole of reality must
be taken into account. As Sri Aurobindo writes: If science
is to turn her face towards the Divine, it must be a new sci-
ence not yet developed which deals directly with the forces
3 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 341.
4 Sri Aurobindo: Letters on Yoga, p. 197.
5 Ibid.50
of the life-world and of Mind [cf. the Chain of Being] and
so arrives at what is beyond Mind; but present-day science
cannot do that. 6

The self-assuredness, at times arrogance, of academic
science and most of its practitioners has become part of the
modern mentality. The foregoing reflections are therefore
relevant to support an open attitude towards the present
conditions in a rapidly changing world and the dramatic
happenings all over the globe which are brought to our
knowledge day by day. The events of history have never
been predictable to the human mind. Still less is it capable
of discerning the trends of our contemporary history and
their possible consequences, now that we are constantly
informed about the goings-on in the four corners of the
world. If in the present crisis atmosphere we want to find
some solid ground, we must not turn to science but inwards
and find there what is the core of our existence, while on the
outside we must have confidence in the magic of the Magi-
cian, inevitably working for a new and better world. From
this standpoint all history, like all existence and manifesta-
tion, is one continuous miracle. This knowledge can help
us to prepare for the future miracles capable of solving our
global problems, miracles which, according to Sri Auro
bindo and the Mother, will reveal the meaning of it all and
are certain to happen.


The preparatory work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

What do we, Aurobindians, stand for? Is the vision of
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother just another of those well-
intentioned New Age fancies, or does it have a basis in fact
which can be spelled out?
6
Id., p. 205.pr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
51

In the first place there are their abundant writings and
transcribed sayings covering a period of nearly a century;
this literature is considered by knowledgeable persons
the richest in the history of modern spirituality. (Sri Au-
robindo was nominated for the Nobel Prize of Literature
in 1950, the year of his demise.) Then there is also the in-
ner coherence of the facts of their spiritual adventure into
the unknown, supported by a mass of direct and indirect
evidence. It must be remembered that spiritual matters are
not subject to scientific proof; they can only be confirmed
through faith and direct experience. What Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother are, what they have done, and what con-
tinues to happen as the continuation of the Work done dur-
ing their lifetime, must ultimately be a matter of personal
acceptance based on an open attitude in the mind, the gift
of faith in the heart, and an inner empathy resulting from
the long history of ones soul.

Until recently, that is until about 1970, little was known
about the facts of their lives. Most of their letters and notes,
conversations, Sri Aurobindos Record of Yoga and Mothers
Agenda were published after that date, which was also the
time when serious research in archives and other documen-
tary sources began to be made. This means, among other
things, that the writings of most of the first commentators
or exegetes remained limited mainly to Sri Aurobindos
works in the Arya, the Mothers Prayers and Meditations,
and personal correspondence.

No doubt, this literature contained the foundations on
which Sri Aurobindos and the Mothers avataric mission
could be understood. Books like The Life Divine, The Syn-
thesis of Yoga and Essays on the Gita contained all essentials
of the Aurobindian Revolution. But the Yoga of Sri Auro
bindo and the Mother was an adventure into the unknown 7
7 See talk 2: The Development of Sri Aurobindos Thought.52
which went through countless yogic crises, struggles and
reversals many years after the Arya and the Prayers and
Meditations had been written. For instance, Sri Aurobindos
battle in the 1930s to bring the Supermind down on Earth
remained known only to a small circle of disciples around
Dilip Kumar Roy and Nirodbaran Talukdar, to whom Sri
Aurobindo gave some glimpses of his gigantic yogic ef-
fort in his correspondence with them. The important se-
ries of articles written for the Bulletin and later named
The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth remains largely
unappreciated even today. And one reads seldom about
the intimations by the Mother about her work of physical
transformation, which was, after all, her avataric Yoga in
the last years of her life, the crucial step which would make
the appearance of the overman and the supramental being
possible.

It is a matter of importance that the creation of the su-
pramental being, the next step in the terrestrial evolution,
is not to happen according to a once-and-for-all fixed ideo-
logical scheme, but that it is an open, unknown process of
transformation that has been started by Sri Aurobindo and
the Mother during their lifetime, that is continuing now,
and that will continue for a long time to come. It is a pil-
grims progress into the miraculous.


Overman

Sri Aurobindo, continuously occupied with completing
Savitri and with the urgency of his avataric task, did not
write essayistic prose any more in the last years of his life.
The reason may have been that for this kind of literary work
his consciousness had to descend again to the human level.
Besides, his eyesight had deteriorated and he had to dictate
everything to an amanuensis, poetry as well as prose. All
the same, he could not refuse a request from the Mother forpr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
53
a contribution to the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International
Centre of Education which she had newly founded. There-
fore he dictated eight articles between 30 December 1948
and the time he left his body, on 5 December 1950.

What started as an encouragement of the students ide-
als, and therefore a reminder to them of his and the Moth-
ers Work, suddenly took another turn: for the first time Sri
Aurobindo spoke about the necessity of intermediary be-
ings between the existing species of Homo sapiens and the
coming species of supermen, Homo supramentalis. This tran-
sitional being he gave no name, but called it a new human-
ity. It would not be the total transformation, the fullness
of a divine life in a divine body. There would be a body still
human and indeed animal in its origin and fundamental
character, and this would impose its own inevitable limita-
tions on the higher parts of the embodied being.

All the same, its mentality would be an instrument of
the Light and no longer of the Ignorance. At its highest it
would be capable of passing into the supermind and from
the new race would be recruited the race of supramental
beings, who would appear as the leaders of the evolution in
earth nature. Even, the highest manifestations of a mind of
Light would be an instrumentality of the supermind, a part
of or a projection from it, a stepping beyond humanity into
the superhumanity of the supramental principle. Above all,
its possession would enable the human being to rise beyond
into those highest powers of the mind in its self-exceedings
which intervene between our mentality and supermind,
and can be regarded as steps leading towards the greater
and more luminous principle [i.e. Supermind]. 8

In April 1958 the Mother said: It can be confirmed
with certainty that there will be an intermediate specimen
8 Sri Aurobindo: Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, pp. 537 and 585.54
between the mental and the supramental being, a kind of
overman who will still have the qualities and in part the
nature of man, that is, who will still belong in his most ex-
ternal form to the human species with its animal origin, but
who will transform his consciousness sufficiently to belong
in his realization and activity to a new race, a race of over-
men [surhommes]. This species may be considered a transi-
tional species, for one can foresee that it will discover the
means of producing new beings without going through the
old animal method ... So we could call overmen [surhommes]
those who, in their origin, still belong to the old method of
generation, but in their achievement are in conscious and
active contact with the new world of supramental realiza-
tion. 9


Two remarks are in order here.

Firstly, the above quotations of Sri Aurobindo clearly
show the need of a series of miraculous transformations
between our species of animal man, as Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother called it, and the supramental being. In the
course of the evolution of life on Earth the formation of a
species with a higher consciousness, succeeding Homo sa-
piens, is inevitable. Between the primates and Homo sapiens
in its various appearances the gap was enormous; between
Homo sapiens and the supramental being the gap is unim-
aginable.

Secondly, where in the aforementioned quotation from
the Mother there is written overmen, the English transla-
tors have used each and every time the term supermen,
unaware of significance of the Mothers words and of the
contents of The Supramental Manifestation. The Mother
gave her Entretiens in French, for those talks were actually
French classes for the students of the Ashram School. What
9
The Mother: Questions and Answers, 16 April 1958.pr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
55
Sri Aurobindo had called a new humanity, the Mother
called surhomme which literally means overman, not
superman, and which is the being corresponding to the
surmental, the overmind. This error is unfortunately the
source of an enormous confusion, for other translators fol-
low by example and commit systematically the same error,
e.g. throughout the English translation of the Agenda.

One result is that lots of texts are written on the fu-
ture glories of the Supermind and supermanhood, but
hardly anything about the transitional processes required
to fashion the supramental being, that is: about our own
participation in the Work. The effort of the practitioner of
the Integral Yoga at present is to become, through his aspi-
ration and surrender, one of the transitional beings which
will make the appearance of the supramental being possi-
ble. As the Mother said: This was certainly what Sri Auro
bindo expected of us: what he conceived of as the overman,
who must be the intermediate being between humanity as
it is and the supramental being created in the supramental
way in other words, in no way part of the animal life
any longer and freed from all animal needs ... It is quite
obvious that intermediary beings are necessary, and that it
is these intermediary beings who must find the means to
create beings of the Supermind. And there is no doubt that,
when Sri Aurobindo wrote this, he was convinced that this
is what we have to do. 10


The manifestation of the Supermind

The avataric task of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother
consisted in bringing down a new, higher consciousness
into the Earth atmosphere: the consciousness of the Super-
mind. Life on Earth is still predominantly the fiefdom of
the hostile powers, which are the direct descendants of
10 Ibid.56
the Inconscient from which the evolution started. As these
are powers of the Ego, it is in their nature to counter any-
thing that would weaken the egoistic self-affirmation of
Life, in other words they resist unconditionally any spir-
itual endeavour.

As Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have stated explicitly,
the rather weak personality of Adolf Hitler got its strength
and inspiration from an asuric power, the Lord of Falsehood
who calls himself Lord of the Nations. It was at the inspira-
tion of this occult personality that the Second World War
took place, to counteract the avataric Work that would lead
to the appearance of a divinized species on Earth. Even those
who were aware of the interventions of Sri Aurobindo and
the Mother in the war thought that, once the war was over,
the crucial problem it posed for the ascendance of humanity
was solved. On the contrary, the asuric powers still intensi-
fied their action, so much so that Sri Aurobindo wrote to a
correspondent: Other blacknesses threaten to overshadow
or even engulf mankind... and that he had to take the dras-
tic decision to descend into death in order to change things
in the occult depths at the roots of existence. 11

What this yogic, or rather avataric, master-act actually
meant, we cannot even guess. But its result was that only
six years later the Supramental Manfestation took place,
and the evolutionary progress was guaranteed forever. Af-
ter a lifetime of unprecedented spiritual effort for human-
ity, Sri Aurobindo had seen that the result of his and the
Mothers Work was not assured. Not intending to give his
sanction to a new edition of the old fiasco, he had to do
what none had done before: remove whatever blocked the
development of the evolution and kept the Earth bound to
its origin in the Ignorance. The success of his act was con-
firmed on 29 February 1956.
11 See talk 2: The Development of Sri Aurobindos Thought.pr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
57

On that day the Mother noted down: 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 con-
sciousness, that the time has come, and lifting with both
hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one sin-
gle 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. 12

Before this universal event all was possibility; after it
all had become certainty.

This event should not be seen only in the context of the
lives of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, or of the twentieth
century. Its significance was much, much more encompass-
ing. To be possible the past of humanity, and in humanity
of the Earth, had to be sufficiently prepared; the potential
of all the cycles of the evolution and of human history in its
various known or lost civilizations had to be worked out.
In this event the Work of all Avatars, and of Sri Aurobindo
and the Mother in their previous lives, was finally justified.
(Once, when asked what he had done in his previous lives,
Sri Aurobindo answered simply: Carrying on the evolu-
tion.) Events in the material and the occult worlds always
take place against a background where time and space are
quite different from the dimensions we move in. The supra-
mental manifestation, or the beginning of the new age, in
1956, should be seen in this kind of perspective. One could
interpret the preceding centuries as leading up to it, and in
the succeeding decennia things have undoubtedly acceler-
ated under its influence. But 29 February 1956, at that point
in our space and time, was the moment.
12 The Mother: Words of the Mother III, p. 102.58


The ship from the new world

On 3 February 1958, the Mother had an experience
which she deemed sufficiently important to dictate it imme-
diately afterwards. The supramental world exists perma-
nently and I am there permanently in a supramental body.
I had proof of it this very day, when my earth-conscious-
ness went there and remained there consciously between
two and three oclock in the afternoon. Now I know that
what was lacking for the two worlds to join in a constant
and conscious relation is an intermediate zone between the
physical world as it is and the supramental world as it is.
This zone is to be built both in the individual conscious-
ness and in the objective world, and it is being built ...

I was on a huge ship which was a symbolic represen-
tation of the place where this work is going on. This ship,
as large as a city, is fully organized, and it had already been
functioning for some time, for its organization was perfect.
It is the place where the people are being trained who are
destined for the supramental life. These people, or at least
part of their being, had already undergone a supramental
transformation, for the ship itself and everything on board
was neither material, subtle-physical, vital or mental: eve-
rything consisted of a supramental substance ...

The light was a mixture of gold and red, forming a uni-
form substance of a luminous orange. Everything was like
that. The light was like that, the people were like that eve-
rything had that colour, although in various shades, which
made it possible to distinguish things from each other. The
general impression was of a world without shadows. The
atmosphere was full of joy, calm, order. Everything went in
an orderly way and in silence ...

This immense ship had just reached the shore of the
supramental world and a first group of people, who werepr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
59
destined to become the future inhabitants of the supramen
tal world, were to go ashore. Everything had been arranged
for this first disembarkation. ... I was in charge of the whole
enterprise from the beginning and throughout the proceed
ings. I had prepared all the groups myself. I stood on the
ship at the head of the gangway, calling the groups one
by one and sending them ashore. ... Things continued in
this way until suddenly the clock here [in her room at the
Ashram] struck three, and this brought me back violently.
There was a sensation of suddenly falling into my body. I
came back with a shock but with the full memory...

When I was called back [into her material body] ... I
had a brief glimpse of myself of my form in the supramen
tal world, that is. ... My upper part, particularly the head,
was not much more than a silhouette of which the contents
were white with an orange fringe. The more down towards
the feet the more the colour looked like that of the people
on the ship, that is to say orange; the more upwards the
more it was translucent and white, with less red [red is the
colour of Matter]. The head was only a contour with a bril-
liant sun in it. Rays of light radiated from it, which were
actions of the will.

As for the people I saw on board the ship, I recognized
them all. Some were from here, from the Ashram, others
were from elsewhere, but I know them too. ... Most of the
people who went ashore were middle-aged, except a few ...

When I came back I knew, simultaneously with the
recollection of the experience, that the supramental world is
permanent, that my presence there is permanent, and that
only a missing link was needed for enabling the connection
in the consciousness and in the substance, and it is this link
which is now being established. There I had the impression
of an extreme relativity no, more exactly the impression
that the relation of this world with the other one completely60
changed the standpoint from which things must be evaluat-
ed or appraised. The standpoint was not at all mental, and
it gave the strange inner feeling that lots of things we con-
sider good or bad are not really so ... What was obvious is
that our opinion of what is divine or not divine is not right
... In the people too I saw that what helps them become su-
pramental, or prevents them from it, is very different from
what we, with our habitual moral notions, imagine. I felt
how ridiculous we are. 13


The big pulsations

At the end of 1958 the time of withdrawal into her room
had come for the Mother too. She was now 80, and would
say later on that the outward signs of her Yoga of transfor-
mation were by most people understood as symptoms of
her advanced age. Of the heroic, superhuman battle with
the old world to create the new, and with the old body to
create the new, we have the conversations published under
the misleading title Mothers Agenda. For under the lemma
agenda the Concise Oxford Dictionary has a list of items
of business to be discussed at a meeting ... a list of matters
to be addressed. Even the Nouveau Petit Robert has under
the same lemma carnet sur lequel on inscrit jour par jour
ce quon doit faire, ses rendez-vous, ses dpenses, etc. which
means small notebook in which one enters day by day
what one has to do, ones appointments, ones expenses,
etc. What Mothers Agenda actually does report is what
had been done by her, her experiences, struggles, battles,
encounters, and much more. It was actually the diary of
her conversations with Satprem, a French disciple.

One of the most important events in the Mothers
Yoga of those years took place on 3 April 1962, after sev-
eral weeks of grave illness. Again she dictated a report of
13 Id., pp. 103-104.pr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
61
the event immediately afterwards, and it was published in
Words of the Mother III, pp. 408 ff. In this report, seldom if
ever commented upon, the Mother tells about a group of
people who want to create a religion based on the revela-
tion of Sri Aurobindo. But they have taken only the side of
power and force, a certain kind of knowledge and all that
could be utilized by asuric forces. 14 In this group there was
a big asuric being that has succeeded in taking the appear-
ance of Sri Aurobindo. ... This appearance of Sri Aurobindo
has declared to me that the work I am doing is not his [i.e.
Sri Aurobindos]. It has declared that I have been a traitor
to him and to his work, and has refused to have anything
to do with me.

And the report goes on: I woke up at 2 oclock [in the
night] and noticed that the heart had been affected by the
attack of this group that wants to take the life away from
this body ... They would have liked me dead years ago. It
is they who are responsible for these attacks on my life. Up
till now I am alive because the Lord wanted me to be alive,
otherwise I would have gone long ago.

I am no more in my body. I have left it to the Lord to
take care of it, to decide if it is to have the Supramental or
not. I know and I have said also that now is the last fight.
... This is the Lords decision. I am not even asking what he
has decided. If the body is incapable of bearing the fight,
if it has to be dissolved, then humanity will pass through
a critical time. What the asuric Force that has succeeded in
14 In The Mother - The Story of Her Life, Georges Van Vrekhem has the
following footnote on p. 466: It would indeed be easy to concoct a sec-
tarian or totalitarian creed or cult from the teaching of Sri Aurobindo and
the Mother. One has only to put the accent on the new race of supermen
in the making, to leave out the individuality of the way and the primary
necessity of the realization of the soul, and to extract a mythos from their
writings, Savitri containing all necessary material to this end.62
taking the appearance of Sri Aurobindo will create is a new
religion or thought, perhaps cruel and merciless, in the
name of the supramental Realization. But everybody must
know that it is not true, it is not Sri Aurobindos teaching,
not the truth of his teaching. ...

The fight is within the body. ...

This dramatic fight must have gone on for several days
till the Mother, on 13 April, dictated the following victory
bulletin in French, probably to Pavitra, another French dis-
ciple: Suddenly in the night I woke with the full awareness
of what we could call the Yoga of the World. The Supreme
Love was manifesting through big pulsations, and each
pulsation was bringing the world further in its manifesta-
tion. They were the formidable pulsations of the eternal
stupendous Love, only Love. Each pulsation of the Love
was carrying the universe further in the manifestation.
And there was the certitude that what had to be done
is done, and that the Supramental Manifestation is real-
ized. ...

This was going on and on and on.

The certitude that what had to be done is done. ...

Then the Mother switched to her native French: And
we set out again on the way, sure of the Victory.

The skies are full of hymns of Victory.

The Truth alone exists, it alone shall be manifested.
Forward! Forward!

Gloire Toi, Seigneur, Triomphateur suprme ! ... Glory
to Thee, o Lord, supreme Triumpher! (This was one of the
Mothers mantric formulas which we find already in her
Prayers and Meditations.)pr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
63

The evocation of this episode, of the extended Yogic
battle on the verge of life and death of which so much de-
pended for humanity, including ourselves, may lead to re-
flections of the following kind. Firstly, the surroundings of
the Mother, visible and invisible, were rather different from
what most people who were present at the time knew or
prefer to remember. She, who took everything into herself,
had apparently to swallow more poison than nectar. Each
time her life was in danger, she would point out an attack of
black magic as the cause. The Asura, using human persons,
was at his tricks maybe more than ever, as the avataric Yoga
approached the stage where the first supramental body
was in the process of formation. Secondly, this phase of the
Yoga, being the attempt at transformation for which Sri Au-
robindo had ordered the Mother to remain in her body, is
hardly ever remembered or commented upon, as if it were
of little or no importance. Thirdly, all great spiritual innova-
tions have been diminished, disfigured, reduced to a lower
level and torn to sectarian shreds by human lack of un-
derstanding and blind or ambitious ego. Fourthly, the end
of the Mothers transformational Yoga, if at that time her
heart had failed, would not have meant the failure of the
supramental transformation, assured since 1956; it would
however have meant a cancellation of possibilities which
could only be worked out by the Mother, and consequently
a postponement of the transformative process for an in-
determinate time. Lastly, rare are the souls able to discern
the Asuric forces at work, for they are more subtle that the
ignorant humans, have powers which humans deem to be
divine, and do deeds the consequences of which humans
cannot estimate.


The Overman Consciousness

In the first hours of the very first day of 1969, the Mother
had another special experience. In the night it came slowly,64
and on waking up this morning there was as it were a gold-
en dawn, and the atmosphere was very light. The body felt:
Well, this is truly, truly new. A golden light, imponderous
and benevolent. Benevolent in the sense of a certainty, a har-
monious certainty. It was new. Voil. And when I say Bonne
anne, to the people, it is this that I pass on to them ...

On the 1st something truly strange happened, and I
wasnt the only one to feel it, some others felt it too. It was
just after midnight ... What is surprising is that it didnt
correspond at all with anything I was expecting I was
expecting nothing [or] to other things I had felt. It was
something very material, by which I mean that it was very
external very external and it was luminous, with a gold-
en light. It was very strong, very powerful. But even so its
character was a smiling benevolence, a peaceful joy and
a kind of unfolding into joy and light. And it was like a
bonne anne, like a wish. ... I dont know what it is, but its a
kind of benevolence, therefore it was something very close
to the human. And it was so concrete, so concrete! ... It has
not gone away. One does not feel it to be something that
has come to go away again ...

My own impression was that of an immense person-
ality immense! That is to say that for [that personality]
the Earth was small, small like this [gesture as if holding a
small ball in the hollow of her hand], like a ball. ... It gave
the impression of a personal divinity who comes to help.
And so strong, so strong, and at the same time so gentle, so
all-embracing ... I have the impression that it is the forma-
tion which is going to enter, which is going to express itself
... which is going to enter and express itself in the bodies
which will be the bodies of the Supramental. Or perhaps
perhaps the overman [le surhomme], I dont know, the
intermediary between the two [between the human and
the supramental being]. Perhaps the overman. It was verypr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
65
human, but human in divine proportions, you see, human
without weaknesses and without shadows. ... Yes, perhaps
the overman. 15

The Mother has always warned that, if one has a spirit
ual experience, one should let it work itself out, without
limiting and thereby fixing it through a mental formulation
or interpretation. This is one of many examples how she
proceeded herself, evoking the experience without defin-
ing it, by carefully letting it continue to have its effect till it
might become comprehensible by the mind.

The confirmation came eight days after the fact: Yes,
thats what it is: it is the descent of the consciousness of the
overman. I had the assurance later on. On the 1st of Janu-
ary it lasted, absolutely concrete, there, for two or three
hours, and afterwards it spread out and went in search of
people who could receive it. And I knew that it was the con-
sciousness of the overman, thats to say, the intermediary
between man and the supramental being. And ten days
later she said: Yes, its very consciously active. Its as it
were a projection of power. And it has now become some-
thing habitual ... In one of the old entretiens, I said when I
was speaking there at the Playground: There is no doubt
that the overman will in the first place be a being of power,
so that he may be able to defend himself. Its that. Its that
experience. It came back as an experience. And its because
it came back as an experience that I remembered having
said it.

This statement about the spreading activity of the Over-
man Consciousness could not be clearer and more complete
and important in the development of the Integral Yoga.
15 This and the following quotations in this section: The Mother: Notes
on the Way, pp. 148 ff.66
Nonetheless one has yet to read reflections or comments on
it in the Aurobindian literature, where the existence of the
Overman Consciousness and the existence of the overman
him- and herself is barely acknowledged.

We should be aware that behind our existence and our
tiniest effort there are: 1. the presence of Sri Aurobindo, for
the Avatar never deserts his Work; 2. the presence of the
Mother, who exists in the archetype of an immortal, omni-
present supramental body; 3. the Supermind, active in the
Earth-atmosphere since 1956; 4. since 1 January 1969 the
presence of the Overman Consciousness in search of peo-
ple who can receive it. The people called to participate in
the realization of the new world should be aware of these
extraordinary Forces. The miraculous is present now as it
was during the lifetime of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother,
but to perceive it one has to be prepared for it.


Five confirmations

Is there any confirmation that Sri Aurobindos and the
Mothers vision is not another mystic chimera? This is a
common and valid question from the few, among the mass
of humanity, who have heard of them. In answer one could
point to Auroville, the utopia of all utopias continuing to
exist and growing against all odds, and to the Matrimandir,
that place out of this world at the centre of Auroville. But
bizarre or impressive buildings have been built in many
places on the globe, by groups or movements counted as
no more than eccentric sects.

In 1947, on the occasion of Indias independence, Sri
Aurobindo was invited to address the nation in a radio
broadcast, which he read from his room. On that occasion
he talked about his five dreams, these dreams being five
prominent tasks he had set himself to be accomplishedpr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
67
through his avataric work. The five dreams were: the free-
dom of India; the awakening of Asia; the formation of con-
glomerates of nations leading up to a worldwide commu-
nity; world unity; and Indias spiritual treasure to be shared
by all humanity, the precondition to enable the appearance
of a supramental species.

Now, in 2010, the status of the realization of those five
avataric tasks may be evaluated as follows.
It was on the occasion of Indias freedom that Sri Au-
robindo made his broadcast. (It might here be recalled that
he was the very first to publicly demand unconditional in-
dependence for his motherland.) However, his categorical
condition of Indias full and effective participation in the
one world of tomorrow the complete unity of her physi-
cal body has not yet been fulfilled, for Bharat Mata re-
mains divided into India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

What seemed just after the Second World War an ideal
ists fancy, has now become a daily item on the worlds news
bulletins: Asia has awoken with such rapidity that experts
think it should slow down. India and China, in 1947 part
of the third world, are now rivals of the rich nations in the
international market and have to be taken into account po-
litically.

Conglomerates of nations are now in place, mostly
constituted along geographical lines. The European Un-
ion, where at the time of writing 27 nations are learning
to live together and cooperate, stands out as an example.
Other conglomerates have been formed in South Asia, in
Africa and in the Americas. The necessity of consultation
and cooperation is now acute in a world where everything
depends on everything else, and the well-being of all seems
to hang by a thread.68

Humanity has to re-awake to the essential values which
are spiritual, and which of old have been treasured in the
East, more specifically in India, the heart of Asia. As Sri
Aurobindo has stressed time and again, a better world can-
not come about without a change in the beings who con-
stitute that world. This is not a question of philosophy or
morals; it is a question of the way the human being exists,
not by chance or as a material organism, but as an incarnat-
ed soul. The new way in which the humans have to learn
to see themselves, and which is the knowledge or gnosis
India has to offer, is not a new dogmatic or ritualistic reli-
gion; it is the way of self-exploration leading to self-know
ledge leading in its turn to knowledge and realization of
the All. For this is how the macrocosm and the microcosm
(the human being) exist: as a reality much larger and com-
plex than strict rationalism and materialism can grasp.

The world is growing receptive of these verities. Their
synthesis is the integral vision of Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother, the perennial philosophy worded for the present
times. The knowledge of this revelation should not result
in another systematization or be calcified in the dogmas
of a new religion; it should provide the guidance for the
adventure of consciousness into which humanity is engag-
ing the adventure into the miraculous.

Thus will the masked Transcendent mount his throne.
When darkness deepens strangling the earths breast
And mans corporeal mind is the only lamp,
As a thiefs in the night shall be the covert tread
Of one who steps unseen into his house.
A Voice ill-heard shall speak, the soul obey,
A Power into minds inner chamber steal,
A charm and sweetness open lifes closed doors
And beauty conquer the resisting world,
The Truth-Light capture Nature by surprise,pr e par ing fo r the mi raculous
A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss
And earth grow unexpectedly divine.
In Matter shall be lit the spirits glow,
In body and body kindled the sacred birth ...
A few shall see what none yet understands;
God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep;
For man shall not know the coming till its hour
And belief shall be not till the work is done. 16




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