Overmental

0.08 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
vital, mental, Overmental, demands assiduous effort and a great
Series Eight - To a Young Captain

0 1961-08-02, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Except for Krishna. In 1926, I had begun a sort of Overmental creation, that is, I had brought the Overmind down into matter, here on earth (miracles and all kinds of things were beginning to happen). I asked all these gods to incarnate, to identify themselves with a body (some of them absolutely refused). Well, with my very own eyes I saw Krishna, who had always been in rapport with Sri Aurobindo, consent to come down into his body. It was on November 24th, and it was the beginning of Mother.8
Yes, in fact I wanted to ask you what this realization of 1926 was.
--
After a while, I too began having meditations with people. I had begun a sort of Overmental creation, to make each god descend into a beingthere was an extraordinary upward curve! Well, I was in contact with these beings and I told Krishna (because I was always seeing him around Sri Aurobindo), This is all very fine, but what I want now is a creation on earthyou must incarnate. He said Yes. Then I saw him I saw him with my own eyes (inner eyes, of course), join himself to Sri Aurobindo.
Then I went into Sri Aurobindos room and told him, Heres what I have seen. Yes, I know! he replied (Mother laughs) Thats fine; I have decided to retire to my room, and you will take charge of the people. You take charge. (There were about thirty people at the time.) Then he called everyone together for one last meeting. He sat down, had me sit next to him, and said, I called you here to tell you that, as of today, I am withdrawing for purposes of sadhana, and Mother will now take charge of everyone; you should address yourselves to her; she will represent me and she will do all the work. (He hadnt mentioned this to me!Mother bursts into laughter)

0 1962-09-26, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
This region just overlooks the earth and the mind (including the very highest mind). But evolution I mean TERRESTRIAL evolution, with its particular rhythm which is more condensed, more concentrated and, you could say, more focused than universal evolution as a wholethis terrestrial evolution has, with the human species, created a kind of higher intellectuality capable of passing through the Overmental region, the region of the gods, and reaching a higher Principle directly.
But this Overmental region, this region of the gods with the power to govern the universe and, PARTIALLY, the earth, does have its own reality. You can come into contact with it and use it; the Vedic forefa thers used it, occultists use it, even Tantrics use it. But theres another path which, distrusting the gods, bypasses them through a kind of intellectual asceticism, as it were, wary of forms, of images, and differing expressions, which rises straight as an arrow, proud and pure, towards the supramental Light. That is a living experience.
Sri Aurobindo preached the integral yoga which includes everything, so one can have all the experiences. Indeed, the universe was clearly created as a field of experience. Some people prefer the short, straight and narrow paths thats their business. Others like to dawdle along the wayand thats their business! And some are drawn to have all the experiences, and thus they often wander for a long time through the Overmental world. And of course, the vast majority of those who have RELIGIOUS aspirations are thus put in touch with various deities, where they stopits enough for them.
But everything Ive just said is only one tiny part of the whole story.
--
This is just what I am observing these days. To me, the Overmental consciousness is a magnified consciousness: far lovelier, far loftier, far more powerful, far happier, far with lots of far mores to it. But. I can tell you one thing: the gods dont have the sense of Oneness. For instance, in their own way they quarrel among themselves, which shows they have no sense of Oneness, no sense of all being one, of all being various expressions of the Divine the unique Divine. So they are still on this side, but with magnified forms, and powers beyond our comprehension: the power to change form at will, for example, or to be in many places at the same timeall sorts of things that poor human beings can only dream of having. The gods have it all. They live a divine life! But its not supramental.
The Supermind is knowledgePure Knowledge. Yes, it is knowingknowing what is to be known.
--
Its supramental, not Overmental?
No, no.
Its like the message of the Gita as Sri Aurobindo explained it: not Overmental, but supramental. It is Oneness, the experience of Oneness.
The experience of the gods has never been more than a distraction for mean amusement, a pleasant diversion; none of it seems essential or indispensable. You can treat yourself to the luxury of all these experiences, and they increase your knowledge and your power, your this and your that, but its not particularly important. THE thing is altogether different.

0 1962-10-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
One thing struck me: you say that the Gita as Sri Aurobindo explained it is not Overmental but supramental.
Sri Aurobindo said that what he came to bring was already indicated in the Gita.
--
Take the gods raiment, for example. Their raiment, which they change at will in the same way they change their forms, is made not of physical but of Overmental substance, and that substance contains its own light. Its like that with everything, its all. Theres no sun casting light and shadows: the substance is self-luminous.
And beyond, in the Supramental?

0 1962-11-10, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Some people found it interesting, mon petit! First of all, Sri Aurobindo was there it was like a large hall: a very large room with scarcely any walls, just enough so it didnt seem wide open to everything. And then there was a kind of musical instrument, like a grand piano, but much bigger and higher, playing its own music: nobody was playing it. And its own music was the music of what you have written. It was taking the form of something like luminous, colored sheets of paper, tinged with gold, with pink, which were scattering in the air and then very slowly falling onto a floor that was scarcely a floor, with an almost birdlike movement. They were falling, fallingalmost square sheets of paper falling one upon another like feathersnothing heavy about it. And then from the left a being like a god from the overmind entered the room; he was both like a Hindu deity with a tiara, and a kind of angel in a long robe (a combination of the two), and he moved so lightly, without touching the groundhe was all lightness. And with a very lovely and harmonious movement (everything was so harmonious!), he gathered up all the sheets: he took them in his arms and they stayed therethey were weightless, you see. He gathered them up, smiling all the while, with a young and very, very luminous and happy face something very lovely. Then, when he had gathered them all up, he turned towards me (I was here; you were over there, the music was there and Sri Aurobindo was there), and said as he was leaving, I am taking all this to give to them, as if he were returning to the Overmental world where they were greatly interested in it! (Mother laughs.)
But it was all so lovely, so very lovely! There was a rhythm; it was all unfolding rhythmically, a rhythm of the falling sheets of paper; and a rhythm moving along very slowly, not in a straight line, and undulating.

0 1962-12-22, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
(Satprem reads a passage from his manuscript dealing with the Ashrams bright period in 1926, when Mother had made an Overmental creation and the gods were beginning to manifest.)
In the end, Sri Aurobindo told me it was an Overmental creation, not the Truth. These were his very words: Yes, its an Overmental creation, but thats not the truth were seeking; its not the truth, the highest truth, he said.
I made no reply, not a word: in half an hour I had undone everything I undid it all, really everything, cut the connection between the gods and the people here, demolished absolutely everything. Because you see, I knew it was so attractive for people (they were constantly seeing the most astonishing things) that the obvious temptation was to hang on to it and say, Well improve on itwhich was impossible. So I sat down quietly for half an hour, and I undid it all.

0 1963-02-19, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I do it exclusively for the joy of being in a world a world of Overmental expression (I dont say supramental, I say Overmental), a luminous, marvelous expression through which you can catch the Truth.
And it teaches me English without books! Now, whenever I have to write a letter, all the words come by themselves: the CONTENT of the word (just as I told you for moment and instant), now it works the same way with all words! Yesterday I wrote something in English for a doctor here (Mother looks for a paper): The world progresses so rapidly that we must be ready at any moment to over pass what we knew in order to know better. And you know, I never think: it just comes, either the sound or the written word (it depends on the case: now Ill see the written words, now Ill hear the sound). For instance, the word advance came first, and with it came quick, quickly, repeatedly [the world advances so quickly]. Then came progress, and quickly was out of the picture; and suddenly rapidly came forward. So I understood how it worked, how it works for all words! I understood: progress (the idea or inner meaning of progress) calls for rapidly; and advance calls for quickly. Putting it like this sounds like splitting hairs, but when I saw it, it was positively irrefutable! The word was alive, its content was alive, and along with it was its friend, the word that went with it; and the word that wasnt its friend was not to be seen, it wasnt in the mood! Oh, it was so funny! For that alone it is worth the trouble.

0 1963-03-09, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It was the same thing when I made that Overmental formation (we were heading for miracles!). One day Sri Aurobindo told me I had brought down into Amrita6 a force of the creative Brahma (its the creative Word, the Word that realizes itself automatically). And I dont know what happened something, I cant recall what, that showed me it was working very well. Then a sort of idea occurred to me: Why, we could try this power on mosquitoes: let mosquitoes cease to exist! What would happen? (We were pestered by mosquitoes at the time.) Before doing it (the meditation was over, it would have been for the next time), I said to Sri Aurobindo, Well, what if we tried with that force which responds; if we said, Let mosquitoes cease to exist, we could at least get rid of them within a certain field of action, a certain field of influence, couldnt we? So he looked at me (with a smile), kept silent, and, after a moment, turned to me and said, You are in full Overmind. That is not the Truth we want to manifest. I told you the story. It was on that occasion.
We could have done things of that sort.

0 1964-07-22, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
And the physical world is made to express Beauty; if it became harmonious instead of being the ignoble thing it is, if it became harmonious, it would have an exceptional vibratory quality! Its rather curious: the vital world is magnificent, the mental world has its splendors, the Overmental world with all its gods (who are existing beings, I know them well) is truly very beautiful; but I tell you, since I had that Contact, I have found all that hollowhollow and lacking the essential.
And that essential thing, in its principle, is here, on earth.

0 1964-10-14, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is a rather obscure labor thats going on at the moment. I remember the day when Sri Aurobindo told me (we were still in the other house), he told me, Yes, you are doing an Overmental work, a creation of the Overmind, you will work heaps of miracles and the whole world will admire you! But that is not the Truth we want. I told you the story. Well, this memory very often comes to my aid. I said, Thats right, we dont care for the fanfare of popular victory!
Its without glory. But it doesnt need any glory at all! I said to him, I dont need glory and I dont care a whit for public admiration! (Laughing) That has no place in my consciousness.

0 1965-01-12, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
To me, its very simple. Narada was a demigod, as we know, and he belonged to the Overmental world and was able to materializethose beings dont have a psychic being. The gods dont have in themselves the divine spark which is the heart of the psychic being, since only ON THE EARTH (I am not even referring to the material universe), only on the earth was there the Descent of divine Love that was the origin of the divine Presence in the heart of Matter. And naturally, as they dont have a psychic being, they dont know, they have no knowledge of the psychic being. Some of those beings even decided to take on a physical body in order to experience the psychic beingnot many.
They generally did it only partially, through an emanation, not through a complete descent. It is said, for instance, that Vivekananda was an incarnation (a vibhuti) of Shivas; but Shiva himself I have had a very close relationship with him and he clearly expressed the will to come down on earth only with the supramental world. When the earth is ready for supramental life, he will come. And almost all those beings will manifest they are waiting for that moment, they do not want the present struggle and darkness.

0 1966-07-09, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But not just a brain, precisely. That Power can express itself, as in the past, in a mental or Overmental way; it can express itself vitally through force; it can express itself through muscles; but how can it express itself physically (because you often speak of a material power), purely, directly? Whats the difference between the Action up above and true Action here?
Every time I have been conscious of the Power, the experience has been similar. The Will from above is expressed by a vibration, which certainly gets clothed in vital power but acts in a subtle physical. There is a perception of a certain quality of vibration, which is difficult to describe but gives a sense of something coagulated (not broken up), something that feels denser than air, extremely homogeneous, with a golden luminosity, an AWESOME power of propulsion, and which expresses a certain willit doesnt have the nature of human will but more the nature of vision than that of thought: its like a vision imposing itself in order to be realized, in a domain very close to material Matter, but invisible except to the inner vision. And That, that Vibration, exerts a pressure on people, on things, on circumstances, in order to fashion them according to its vision. And its irresistible. Even people who think the opposite, who want the opposite, do what is willed without wanting it; even things that are opposed in their very nature are turned around.

0 1967-11-29, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It may be two things. It may be that the original consciousness split into two in a past existence (it has happened several times) and manifested in two different bodies at the same time; and so naturally, there was an intimacy and probably a familiarity in lifeit may be something physical. But it may also be someone who exists permanently, a permanent form somewhere, with whom we are in constant contact in that world (the Overmental or supramental world, or elsewhere), and the feeling Oh, I know this springs from within. It may be either of those two things I dont know which as yet.
(After a silence) Its more an expression, a type of vibration, an atmosphere more than exact features. So it might rather be this: someone who exists permanently somewhere with whom we are in contact.

0 1969-08-30, #Agenda Vol 10, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
Mother actually said "the Overmental being." This confusion will often take place, probably because Mother found this vocabulary quite cumbersome. But this next being clearly has nothing to do with the overmind or the world of the gods.
In May 1968, the student uprising in France.

0 1972-04-15, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
I mean that for contacting or reaching this SUPRA-mental consciousness or being, it is not necessary to pass through the Overmental being.
What do you call Overmental being?
What Sri Aurobindo calls overmind.

02.03 - An Aspect of Emergent Evolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The whole urge of evolutionary Nature today is to bring out first the Overmental principle and then through it the Supramental which will establish and fix upon earth the principle of Deity and the Supreme Divine.
***

02.06 - The Integral Yoga and Other Yogas, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Power, Purity, Peace, Ananda of which we become aware above and which descends into the being and progressively replaces the ordinary consciousness by its own movements - that is the second transformation. We realise also the consciousness itself as moving upward, ascending through many planes physical, vital, mental, Overmental to the supramental and Ananda planes.
This is nothing new; it is stated in the Taittiriya Upanishad that there are five Purushas, the physical, the vital, the mental, the

03.01 - The Evolution of Consciousness, #The Integral Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
- supramental or Overmental and submental ranges.

03.05 - Some Conceptions and Misconceptions, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The unrolling or Involution is the path traced by consciousness in its changing modes of concentration. The principle of concentration is inherent in consciousness. Sri Aurobindo speaks of four modes or degrees of this concentration: (I) the essential, (2) the integral, (3) the total or global and (4) the separative. The first is a sole in-dwelling or an entire absorption in the essence of its own being it is the superconscient Silence, at one end, and the Inconscience, at the other. The second is the total Sachchidananda, the supramental concentration; the third, multiple or totalising Overmental awareness; the fourth is the concentration of Ignorance. All the four, however, form the integral play of one indivisible consciousness.
Here we come to the very heart of the mystery. As we have put it thus far, the process of Involution would appear as a series of stages in a descending order, a movement along a vertical line, as it were, one stage following another, more or less separate from each other, the lower being ever more ignorant, more separative, more exclusive. But this is not the whole picture. At each lower stage the higher is not merely high above, but also comes down and stands behind or becomes immanent in the lower. Along with the vertical movement there is also a horizontal movement. In other words, even when we are sunk in the lowest stratum of Ignorancein the domain of Matterwe have also there all the other strands behind, even the very highest, not merely as passive or neutral entities, but as dynamic agents exerting their living pressure to the full. Indeed the Ignorance is not mere Ignorance, but Knowledge itself, the very highest Knowledge, but in a particular mode of activity. What appears ignorant is full of a secret Knowledgeit is just the outer surface, the facet that appears as its opposite because of a particular manner of concentration, a total self-abandonment in the object of Knowledge. That Knowledge stands revealed if the mask is put away, that is to say, if we get behind, If we release the exclusiveness of the concentration. This release or getting behind does not mean necessarily the dissolution of the status itself for it is the pressure from behind, the concentration of the hidden consciousness that creates the status and its truth-forms; with the exclusiveness goes away only the twist, the aberration produced by it. When the consciousness withdraws from its mode and field of exclusive concentration, it need not concentrate again on the withdrawal only, it can be an inclusive concentration also embracing both the status the frontal and the behind. Both can be held together in one single movement of consciousness possessing the double function of projection and comprehensionprajna and vijna.

05.02 - Gods Labour, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The Divine incarnates, as an individual in the concrete material actuality, this double aspect of the utter truth and reality. There are, what may be called, intermediary incarnations, some representing powersaspects of the Divinein the higher mental or Overmental levels of consciousness, others those of the inner heart, yet others again those of the dynamic vital consciousness. But the integral Divine, he who unites and reconciles in his body the highest height and the lowest depth, who has effectuated in him something like the "marriage of Heaven and Hell" is an event of the futureeven perhaps of the immediate future. The descent into hell is an image that has been made very familiar to man, but all its implications have not been sounded. For what we were made familiar with was more or less an image of hell, not hell itself, a region or experience in the vital (may be even in the mental): real hell is not the mass of desires or weaknesses of the flesh, not "living flesh", but dead Matter whose other name is Inconscience. In the older disciplines the central or key truth, the heart of reality where the higher and the lowerBrahman and Maya, the Absolute and the Contingency, the One and the Many, God and the Worldmet and united in harmony was bypassed: one shot from below right into the supreme Absolute; the matrix of truth-creation was ignored. Even so, at the other end, the reality of brute matter was not given sufficient weight, the spiritual light disdained to reach it (vijigupsate).
The integral Divine not merely suffers (as in the Christian tradition) a body material, He accepts it in his supernal delight, for it is his own being and substance: it is He in essence and it will become He in actuality. When he comes into the world, it is not as though it were a foreign country; he comes to his own,only he seeks to rebuild it on another scale, the scale of unity and infinity, instead of the present scale of separativism and finiteness. He comes among men not simply because he is' moved by human miseries; he is no extra-terrestrial person, a bigger human being, but is himself this earth, this world, all these miseries; he is woven into the fabric of the universe, he is the warp and woof that constitute creation. It is not a mere movement of sympathy or benevolence that actuates him, it is a total and absolute identification that is the ground and motive of his activity. When he assumes the frame of mortality, it is not that something outside and totally incongruous is entering into him, it is part and parcel of himself, it is himself in one of his functions and phases. Consequently, his work in and upon the material world and life may be viewed as that of self-purification and self-illumination, self-discipline and selfrealisation. Also, the horrors of material existence, being part of the cosmic play and portion of his infinity, naturally find shelter in the individual divine incarnation, are encompassed in his human embodiment. It is the energy of his own consciousness that brought out or developed even this erring earth from within it: that same energy is now available, stored up in the individual formation, for the recreation of that earth. The advent and acceptance of material existence meant, as a kind of necessity in a given scheme of divine manifestation, the appearance and play of Evil, the negation of the very divinity. Absolute Consciousness brought forth absolute unconsciousness the inconscientbecause of its own self-pressure, a play of an increasingly exclusive concentration and rigid objectivisation. That same consciousness repeats its story in the individual incarnation: it plunges into the material life and matter and identifies itself with Evil. But it is then like a pressed or tightened spring; it works at its highest potential. In other words, the Divine in the body now works to divinise the body itself, to make of the negation a concrete affirmation. The inconscient will be embodied consciousness.

05.03 - Bypaths of Souls Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Let us repeat here what we have often said elsewhere. The creation and development of souls is a twofold process. First, there is the process of growth from below, and secondly there is the process of manifestation or expression from above, the movements of ascent and descent, as spoken of by Sri Aurobindo. The souls start on their evolutionary journey on the material plane as infinitesimal specks of consciousness imbedded in the vast expanse of the Inconscient; but they are parts and parcels of a homogeneous mass: in fact they are not distinguishable from each other at that level. There is as it were a secret vibration of consciousness with which the material infinity all around is shot through. With evolution, that is to say, with the growth and coming forward of the consciousness, there arise sparks, glowing centres here and there, forms shape and isolate themselves in the bosom of the original formless mass; they rise and they subside, others rise, coalesce, separatesome grow, others disappear. These sparks or centres, as they develop or evolve, slowly assume definiteness,of form and function,attain an individuality and finally a personality. Looked at from below there is no counting of these sparks or rudimentary souls; they are innumerable and infinitely variable. It is something like the nebula out of which the galaxies are supposed to be formed. The line of descent, however, presents a different aspect. Looked from above, at the summit there is the infinite supreme Being and Consciousness and Bliss (Sachchidananda) and in it too there cannot be a limit to the number of Jivatmas that are its formulations, like the waves in the bosom of the sea, according to the familiar figure. This is the counterpart of the infinity at the other end, where also the rudimentary souls or potential individualities are infinite. Moving down along the line of descent at a certain stage, under a certain modality of the creative process, certain types or fundamental formations are put forward that give the ground-plan, embody the matrix of the subsequent creation or manifestation. The Four Great Personalities (Chaturvyuha), the Seven Seers, the Fourteen Manus or Human Ancestors point to the truth of a fixed number of archetypes that are the source and origin of emanations forming in the end the texture of earthly lives and existences. The number and scheme depends upon a given purpose in view and is not an eternal constant. The types and archetypes with which we, human beings, are concerned in the present cycle of evolution belong to the supramental and Overmental planes of consciousness; they are the beings known familiarly as gods and presiding deities. They too have emanations, each one of them, and these emanations multiply as they come down the scale of manifestation to lower and lower levels, the mental, the vital and the physical, for example. And they enter into human embodiments, the souls evolving and ascending from the lower end; they may even take upon themselves human character and shape.
There are thus chains linking the typal beings in the world above with their human embodiments in the physical world; an archetype in the series of emanations branches out, as it were, into its commensurables and cognates in human bodies. Hence it is quite natural that many persons, human embodiments, may have so to say one common ancestor in the typal being (that gives their spiritual gotra); they all belong to the same geneological tree. Souls aspiring and ascending to the higher and fuller consciousness, because of their affinity, because together they have to fulfil a special role, serve a particular purpose in the cosmic plan, because of their spiritual consanguinity, call on the same godhead as their Master-soul or Over-soul, the Soul of their souls. Their growth and development are along similar or parallel lines, they are moulded and shaped in the pattern set by the original being. This must not be understood to mean that a soul is bound exclusively to its own family and cannot step out of its geneological system. As I have said in the beginning, souls are not material particles hard and rigid and shut out from each other, they are not obliged to obey the law of impenetrability that two bodies cannot occupy the same place at the same time. They meet, touch, interchange, interpenetrate, even coalesce, although they may not belong to the same family but follow different lines of, evolution. Apart from the fact that in the ultimate reality each is in all and all is in each, not only so, each is all and all is eachthus beings on no account can be kept in water-tight compartmentsapart from this spiritual truth, there is also a more normal and apparent give and take between souls. The phenomenon known as "possession", for example, is a case in point. "Possession", however, need not be always a ghostly possession in the modern sense of the possession by evil spirits, it may be also in a good sense, the sense that the word carried among mediaeval mystics, viz.,spiritual.

07.01 - Realisation, Past and Future, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
You may pertinently ask, however, why we have not started with Overmental beings; we should have had here, say, Vivekanandas only and not ordinary frail human creatures.
You think the work would have been easier? Such beings, on the contrary, would have been less manageable and malleable. For what is most difficult is to convince someone who has had already a realisation. He believes he has reached the goal and no further progress is necessary for him. It generally happens especially to men who have made effort and realised the object of the effort that, they stop with that, because they feel they have reached their final goal. They get settled and fixed there. It was their personal goal and they have got it. Their brain gets crystallised and their consciousness fossilised. They will live there all their life and will never know how to move. So I say, those who have had an experience or a realisation in themselves are not: necessarily the most advanced. Such a person lacks an element of simplicity, modesty, plasticity that spontaneously come to one who feels that he has not grown fully and has to develop further.

07.36 - The Body and the Psychic, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
The matter is not so simple. I have told you often that the psychic being is the result of an evolution, that is to say, it is the expression of the divine consciousness that has entered and spread itself into Matter and slowly raises Matter and develops it so that it may return to the Divine. The psychic being is formed progressively by the divine centre through many lives or incarnations. There comes a time when it attains a kind of perfection, the perfection of its growth and formation. It has then often an aspiration towards greater realisation, a further progress to manifest better or further the Divine. As the result of this pull, it generally draws towards itself a being of a higher order, from a higher plane, from the Overmind, as Sri Aurobindo calls it, a being of involution who incarnates in the psychic being. These Overmental entities are termed gods and divinities by men. Now when the fusion takes place, of a god into a psychic being, the latter naturally increases in stature and partakes of the nature of the god and acquires also the capacity to produce emanations; that is to say it throws out of itself a part which possesses an independent existence and can incarnate in others. In this way there may be not only two but several emanations or projections of the same original being. In other words, there may be a single psycho-divine origin but many personalities coming out of it. That is how it happens sometimes that different people feel a sort of affinity and even identity, and with reason, because they carry within them the same deity, out of which they, that is, their psychic being came. It is not the same thing as the doubling of the personality where in throwing oneself out of oneself one loses a portion, as when you cut a body into two: there are only two halves. Here the projection is a whole and independent personality. If you emanate a being out of you, you remain whole and entire without losing anything of yourself and the emanation too is a being whole and entire living its independent life.
II

07.43 - Music Its Origin and Nature, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Source or origin means the thing without which an object would not exist. Nothing can manifest upon earth physically unless it has its source in a higher truth. Thus material existence has its source and inspiration in the vital, the vital in its turn has behind it the mental, the mental has the Overmental and so on. If the universe were a flat object, having its origin in itself, it would quickly cease to exist. (That is perhaps what Science means when it postulates the impossibility of perpetual motion). It is because there is a higher source which inspires it, a secret energy that drives it towards manifestation that Life continues: otherwise it would exhaust itself very soon.
There is a graded scale in the source of music. A whole category of music is there that comes from the higher vital, for example: it is very catching, perhaps even a little vulgar, something that twines round your nerves, as it were, and twists them. It catches you somewhere about your loinsnavel centre and charms you in its way. As there is a vital music there is also what can be called psychic music coming from quite a different source; there is further a music which has spiritual origin. In its own region this higher music is very magnificent; it seizes you deeply and carries you away somewhere else. But if you were to express it perfectlyexecute ityou would have to pass this music too through the vital. Your music coming from high may nevertheless fall absolutely flat in the execution, if you do not have that intensity of vital vibration which alone can give it its power and splendour. I knew people who had very high inspiration, but their music turned to be quite commonplace, because their vital did not move. Their spiritual practice put their vital almost completely to sleep; yes, it was literally asleep and did not work at all. Their music thus came straight into the physical. If you could get behind and catch the source, you would see that there was really something marvellous even there, although externally it was not forceful or effective. What came out was a poor little melody, very thin, having nothing of the power of harmony which is there when one can bring into play the vital energy. If one could put all this power of vibration that belongs to that vital into the music of higher origin we would have the music of a genius. Indeed, for music and for all artistic creation, in fact, for literature, for poetry, for painting, etc. an intermediary is needed. Whatever one does in these domains depends doubtless for its intrinsic value upon the source of the inspiration, upon the plane or the height where one stands. But the value of the execution depends upon the strength of the vital that expresses the inspiration. For a complete genius both are necessary. The combination is rare, generally it is the one or the other, more often it is the vital that predominates and overshadows.

08.15 - Divine Living, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
I am perfectly sure that if we went back into the past a few thousands of years, we would find that when one spoke of the Divine it was of a being somewhat like one of the " Overmental" gods. But now, the way of living proper to these Overmental divinities who governed the earth and created many things upon earth for a very long time, seems to us very inferior to what we conceive as the Supramental. This Supramental again which we now call the Divine and which we seek to bring down upon earth will have the same effect upon us a few thousand years hence as the Overmental has upon us now.
In other words, in the manifestation, in his Self-expression the Divine is progressive. Outside and beyond manifestation, He is something we cannot conceive of. But when He manifests Himself in this status of constant becoming, He manifests more and more of Himself, as if He had reserved for the final end the most beautiful things of His being.

1.02 - The Development of Sri Aurobindos Thought, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
sort of Overmental creation [the overmind is the world of
the gods], that is, I had brought the overmind down into
--
The Mother continued her Overmental creation for some
months after 24 November. Put in the simplest of terms,

1.05 - Consciousness, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Such is our own particular bias; we place ourselves at the center of the world and bestow the gift of consciousness upon all those who share our way of being and perceiving things. Not so long ago, we marveled that one could be Persian. However, if we want to understand and discover what consciousness truly is, and utilize it, we must indeed go beyond this narrow perspective. After having attained a certain degree of mental silence, Sri Aurobindo was able to make the following observations: Mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of color or human hearing all the gradations of sound for there is much above or below that is to man invisible and inaudible. So there are ranges of consciousness above and below the human range, with which the normal human has no contact and they seem to it unconscious, supramental or Overmental and submental ranges.42 . . . What we call unconsciousness is simply other-consciousness. . . . We are really no more unconscious when we are asleep or stunned or drugged or "dead" or in any other state, than when we are plunged in inner thought oblivious of our physical selves and our surroundings. For anyone who has advanced even a little way in Yoga, this is a most elementary proposition. And Sri Aurobindo adds: As we progress and awaken to the soul in us and things, we shall realize that there is a consciousness also in the plant,
42

1.07 - Savitri, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
I desist from giving my own impression of the incomparable epic. I have no such competence and though I have been made a poet by the Master I leave it to more efficient authorities. One fact alone makes me dumb with a reverent awe and exalted admiration: the colossal labour Sri Aurobindo put forth to build this unique structure. It reminds me of one of those majestic ancient temples like Konarak or of a Gothic cathedral like Notre Dame before which you stand and stare in speechless ecstasy, your soul takes a flight beyond time and space. Before I knew much about Sri Aurobindo, I asked him in my foolish way, why, himself being the master of inspiration and having all higher planes at his command, sending inspiration to others, should he still have to work so hard? With his consciousness entirely silent, he had only to hitch to the right source and words, images, ideas would tumble down in a Brahmaputra of inspiration! To which he answered in his habitual indulgent tone, perhaps a bit piqued by my facile observation: "The highest planes are not so accommodating as all that. If they were so, why should it be so difficult to bring down and organise the supermind in the physical consciousness? What happy-go-lucky fancy-web-spinning ignoramuses you all are. You speak of silence, consciousness, Overmental, supramental, etc. as if they were so many electric buttons you have only to press and there you are. It may be one day, but meanwhile I have to discover everything about the working of all possible modes of electricity, all the laws, possibilities, perils, etc., construct roads of connection and communication, make the whole far-wiring system, try to find out how it can be made foolproof and all that in the course of a single lifetime. And I have to do it while my blessed disciples are firing off their gay or gloomy a priori reasonings at me from a position of entire irresponsibility and expecting me to divulge everything to them not in hints but at length. Lord God in omnibus!"
Then, with regard to hard labour on Savitri, he wrote: "That is very simple. I used Savitri as a means of ascension. I began with it on a certain mental level, each time I could reach a higher level I rewrote from that level. Moreover I was particular if part seemed to me to come from any lower levels I was not satisfied to leave it because it was good poetry. All had to be as far as possible of the same mint. In fact, Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished; but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one's own Yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative. I did not rewrite Rose of God or the sonnets except for two or three verbal alterations made at the moment."

1.1.02 - Sachchidananda, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
- supramental or Overmental and submental ranges.
When Yajnavalkya says there is no consciousness in the

1.11 - The Master of the Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
A Transcendent who is beyond all world and all Nature and yet possesses the world and its nature, who has descended with something of himself into it and is shaping it into that which as yet it is not, is the Source of our being, the Source of our works and their Master. But the seat of the Transcendent Consciousness is above in an absoluteness of divine Existence -- and there too is the absolute Power, Truth, Bliss of the Eternal -- of which our mentality can form no conception and of which even our greatest spiritual experience is only a diminished reflection in the spiritualised mind and heart, a faint shadow, a thin derivate. Yet proceeding from it there is a sort of golden corona of Light, Power, Bliss and Truth -- a divine Truth-Consciousness as the ancient mystics called it, a supermind, a Gnosis, with which this world of a lesser consciousness proceeding by Ignorance is in secret relation and which alone maintains it and prevents it from falling into a disintegrated chaos. The powers we are now satisfied to call gnosis, intuition or illumination are only fainter lights of which that is the full and flaming source, and between the highest human intelligence and it there lie many levels of ascending consciousness, highest mental or Overmental, which we would have to conquer before we arrived there or could bring down its greatness and glory here. Yet, however difficult, that ascent, that victory is the destiny of the human spirit and that luminous descent or bringing down of the divine Truth is the inevitable term of the troubled evolution of the earth-nature; that intended consummation is its raison d'etre, our culminating state and the explanation of our terrestrial existence. For though the Transcendental Divine is already here as the Purushottama in the secret heart of our mystery, he is veiled by many coats and disguises of his magic world-wide Yoga-Maya; it is only by the ascent and victory of the Soul here in the body that the disguises can fall away and the dynamis of the supreme Truth replace this tangled weft of half-truth that becomes creative error, this emergent Knowledge that is converted by its plunge into the inconscience of Matter and its slow partial return towards itself into an effective Ignorance.
For here in the world, though the gnosis is there secretly behind existence, what acts is not the gnosis but a magic of Knowledge-Ignorance, an incalculable yet apparently mechanical overmind Maya. The Divine appears to us here in one view as an equal, inactive and impersonal Witness Spirit, an immobile consenting Purusha not bound by quality or Space or Time, whose support or sanction is given impartially to the play of all action and energies which the transcendent Will has once permitted and authorised to fulfil themselves in the cosmos. This Witness Spirit, this immobile Self in things, seems to will nothing and determine nothing; yet we become aware that his very passivity, his silent presence compels all things to travel even in their ignorance towards a divine goal and attracts through division towards a yet unrealised oneness. Yet no supreme infallible Divine Will seems to be there, only a widely deployed Cosmic Energy of a mechanical executive Process, prakriti. This is one side of the cosmic Self; the other presents itself as a universal Divine, one in being, multiple in personality and power, who conveys to us, when we enter into the consciousness of his universal forces, a sense of infinite quality and will and act and a world-wide knowledge and a one yet innumerable delight; for through him we become one with all existences not only in their essence but in their play of action, see ourself in all and all in ourself, perceive all knowledge and thought and feeling as motions of the one Mind and Heart, all energy and action as kinetics of the one Will m power, all Matter and form as particles of the one Body, all personalities as projections of the one Person, all egos as deformations of the one and sole real "I" in existence. In him we no longer stand separate, but lose our active ego in the universal movement, even as by the Witness who is without qualities and for ever unattached and unentangled, we lose our static ego in the universal peace.

1.1.1 - The Mind and Other Levels of Being, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Yes, the active mind in people with a very intellectual turn can be an obstacle to the deeper more silent spiritual movement. Afterwards when it is turned into the higher thought (intuitive or Overmental) it becomes on the contrary a great force.
***

1.12 - The Superconscient, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
It is a cosmic consciousness, but with no loss of the individual. Instead of rejecting everything to soar to celestial heights, the seeker has patiently ascended each step of his being, so that the bottom remains linked to the top without any break. The overmind is the world of the gods, the source of inspiration of the great founders of religions. This is where all the religions we know were born; they all derive from an Overmental experience in one of its countless aspects. For a religion or revelation, a spiritual experience, belongs to a certain plane; it does not come from God's thunders or from nowhere; those who incarnate the particular revelation have not conceived it from nothing: the overmind is their source. It is also the source of the higher artistic creations. But we must remember that, although it is the summit, it is still a mental plane.
When consciousness rises to that plane, it no longer sees "point by point," but calmly in great masses.198 There is no longer the diffused light of the illumined mind or the isolated flashes of the intuitive mind, but, to quote the wonderful Vedic phrase, "an ocean of stable lightnings." The consciousness is no longer limited to the brief present moment or the narrow range of its visual field; it is unsealed, seeing in a single glance large extensions of space and time.199 The essential difference with other planes lies in the evenness, the almost complete uniformity of the light. In a particularly receptive illumined mind one would see, for example, a bluish background with sudden jets of light, intuitive flashes, or moving luminous eruptions, sometimes even great Overmental downpours, but it would be a fluctuating play of light, nothing stable. This is the usual condition of the greatest poets we know; they attain a certain level of rhythm, a particular poetic luminousness, and from time to time they touch upon higher regions and return with those rare dazzling lines (or musical phrases) that are repeated generation after generation like an open sesame. The illumined mind is generally the base (an already very high base), and the overmind a divine kingdom one gains access to in moments of grace.
But for a full and permanent Overmental consciousness, such as was realized by the Vedic rishis, for instance, there are no more fluctuations. The consciousness is a mass of stable light. There results an unbroken universal vision; one knows universal joy, universal beauty, universal love; for all the contradictions of the lower planes came from a deficiency of light, or narrowness of light, which lit up only a limited field; while in this even light the contradictions, which are like small shadowy intervals between two flashes or dark frontiers at the end of our light, melt into a unified visual mass. And since there is light everywhere, there are also, necessarily, joy and harmony and beauty everywhere, because opposites are no longer felt as negations or shadowy gaps between two sparks of consciousness but as elements of varying intensity within a continuous cosmic Harmony. Not that the Overmental consciousness fails to see what we call ugliness and evil and suffering, but everything is connected within a comprehensive universal play in which each thing has its place and purpose. This is a unifying consciousness, not a dividing one. The degree of unity gives an exact measure of the Overmental perfection. Moreover, with the vision of this unity, which is necessarily divine (the Divine is no longer something hypothetical or theoretical, but seen and touched, something that we have become naturally, just as our consciousness has become materially luminous), the Overmental being perceives the same light everywhere, in all things and in all beings, just as he perceives it within his own self. There are no more separate gaps, no more lapses of strangeness; everything is bathed continuously in a single substance. The seeker feels universal love, universal understanding, universal compassion for all those other "selves" who are likewise moving toward their own divinity or, rather, gradually becoming the light that they are.
Therefore, we can attain the Overmental consciousness in many different ways: through religious passion, through poetic, intellectual, artistic, or heroic zeal, or through anything that helps man to exceed himself. Sri Aurobindo assigned a special place to art, which he considered one of the major means of spiritual progress.
Unfortunately, artists and creators too often have a considerable ego standing in the way, which is their main difficulty. The religious man, who has worked to dissolve his ego, finds it easier, but he rarely attains universality through his own individual efforts, leaping instead beyond the individual without bothering to develop all the intermediate rungs of the personal consciousness, and when he reaches the "top" he no longer has a ladder to come down, or he does not want to come down, or there is no individual self left to express what he sees, or else his old individual self tries its best to express his new consciousness, provided he feels the need to express anything at all. The Vedic rishis, who have given us perhaps the only instance of a systematic and continuous spiritual progression from plane to plane, may be among the greatest poets the earth has ever known, as Sri Aurobindo has shown in his Secret of the Veda. The Sanskrit word kavi had the double meaning of "seer of the Truth" and "poet." One was a poet because one was a seer. This is an obvious and quite forgotten reality. It may be worthwhile, then, to say a few words about art as a means of ascent of the consciousness, and, in particular, about poetry at the Overmental level.
198 - On Yoga II, Tome 2, 263
--
This line by Virgil, which Sri Aurobindo has cited as foremost among inspirations of an Overmental origin, owes its Overmental quality not to the meaning of the words but to the rhythm that precedes the words and follows them, as if they were inscribed on a backdrop of eternity or, rather, by Eternity itself. So, too, this line by Leopardi does not owe its greatness to the meaning but to that something so subtly more than the meaning, which quivers behind it:
Insano indegno mistero delle cose.

1.13 - Under the Auspices of the Gods, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
but the world's. He had attained that Overmental consciousness from which one sees, in a single glance, "great extensions of space and time," and he wondered about man's future. What could man do?
He had reached the limits of human consciousness. Higher up,
--
then, is our earthly future if there is really nothing else but this Overmental consciousness?
We all hope the development of consciousness and science combined will bring about a better human world, a more harmonious
--
First of all, it embodies a principle of division. Yet, we had said earlier that the Overmental consciousness is a mass of stable light, that it possessed the vision of a cosmic harmony and a cosmic unity, since it sees light everywhere as in itself. As such, it is not a principle of division within unity. The overmind sees that all is one, but by the very structure of its consciousness it cannot, in practice, help dividing 213
The Life Divine, 19:722
--
as a prism divides light. Whether mental or Overmental, the consciousness can experience only one truth at a time. This is what all the past and present mythologies express: each god is the incarnation of a single cosmic power love, wisdom, destruction, preservation,
etc. Buddha expresses the transcendent that sees only Nought; Christ expresses loving Charity and sees only Charity, and so on; but no matter how high each of these truths may be, it is still only one truth.
The farther the Overmental truth (which is already fragmented)
descends from plane to plane in order to express itself in life, the more fragmented it becomes; beginning in division, it inevitably ends in a superdivision. From the Buddha to the "vehicles," and from Christ to all the Christian sects, the process is visible. This applies not only to the spiritual or religious spheres but to all spheres of life, since the very function of the overmind is to bring into play one possibility and one only: It gives to each [possibility] its full separate development and satisfaction. . . . sheer unsparing logicality. It can give to beauty its most splendid passion of luminous form and the consciousness that 214
--
because it will still be a mental synthesis, a potpourri, not unity, as Mother says. It will be the prism pretending that all the colors do come from a single Light, but meanwhile, in practice, all the colors are divided in the world, and all the forces emanating from the Overmental plane result from its own original division. Again, let us emphasize that this is not a matter of intellectual speculation, a philosophical dilemma to be resolved, but a cosmic fact, an organic reality like the needles on the porcupine's back. For division to cease,
the prism has to go. The world is divided and will remain so inevitably as long as the mental principle of consciousness, whether high or low,
--
It is nevertheless conceivable, in a nearer or rather evolutionary future, that one perfect Overmental consciousness, or even several simultaneously, could incarnate on the earth. The less evolved human fraction rallying around these luminous centers would then be able to know a harmonious life and, to that extent, life would be changed;
there would be a sort of unity. But it would be unity within a single luminous beam. Some would bask in the beam of pure Beauty, say,

1.14 - The Secret, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
At Chandernagore, Sri Aurobindo had reached the last levels of the physical subconscient. He was before a wall: No, it is not with the Empyrean that I am busy, I wish it were. It is rather with the opposite end of things.243 Knowing the kind of resistance and violent reactions one meets when barely touching the mental and vital subconscient, the snakepit, one can image the difficulty of that descent. The farther one descends, the higher the consciousness required, the stronger the light, since one can only descend as low as one has ascended. And if one understands that consciousness is a force, as tangible as an electric current, one can imagine the traumas and ordeals the Overmental power and light can cause as they pour like a cataract into the quagmire of the physical subconscient an assault of ether and of fire.21 There are tremendous difficulties, and even dangers, in this to which we will return when discussing the transformation. As long as we are merely involved with mental or vital resistances, our moral lies, we need only to cultivate willpower and patience, but when we descend lower we must face the lies of the body, as the Mother says, namely, diseases and death. This is why Sri Aurobindo and Mother insisted upon a sound physical base for their disciples: Work from both ends; do not neglect one for the other.
As he reached the extreme Overmental frontiers, where "great colored waves" fade into white confines, Sri Aurobindo simultaneously touched the black rock at the bottom:
I have been digging deep and long

1.15 - The Supramental Consciousness, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
Global vision, undivided vision, and also eternal vision. Time is conquered. While the Overmental consciousness saw "large extensions of space and time," the supramental consciousness completely embraces all three tenses: [it] links past, present and future in their indivisible connections, in a single continuous map of knowledge, side by side.267 268
All time is one body, Space a single book.269
--
and the higher we ascend, the greater the power, but also the farther away we are from the earth. Thus if we wish to apply our Overmental power, say, to the affairs of this world, it must be brought down from one level to another and overcome the determinisms of all the intermediary levels before it can reach the depths, Matter. Finally,
there remains only a dulled and weakened Overmental reflection,
which must then fight against more and more heavy and rebellious determinisms. This is why the spiritualists have never been able to transform life. The Supramental is the supreme Consciousness-Force in the very heart of Matter, without any intermediary. It is the "sun in the darkness" of the Veda, the meeting place of the highest Heights and the deepest Depths. Therefore it can change everything. As the Mother has said, "The true change of consciousness is one that will change the physical conditions in the world and make it into a entirely 275

1.17 - The Transformation, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
The few disciples there were about fifteen of them all remember that very special, highly concentrated atmosphere prevailing during this first phase. They had dazzling experiences almost at will; divine manifestations were common, and the natural laws seemed to begin to yield. The veil between the physical world and the other planes of consciousness was growing thinner, and the beings we call gods, or the forces of the overmind, were able to manifest, bend the laws, and produce so-called miracles. Had this trend continued, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother would have been well on their way to founding a new religion, and Pondicherry to becoming one of the "holy places" where spiritual fragrances mask the more common odors. But one day, as the Mother was describing one of the latest extraordinary occurrences to Sri Aurobindo, he remarked humorously: Yes, it is very interesting, you will work miracles that will make us famous the world over; you will be able to turn earthly events topsy-turvy; indeed (Sri Aurobindo smiled), it will be a grand success. Then he added: But this is an Overmental creation, not the highest truth. It is not the success we want; we want to establish the 360
361
--
dwelleth the Truth"), because without the new heaven or, rather, the new supramental level of consciousness, the emergence of a new earth would not be possible. The new earth will result from the "new heaven" of the supramental consciousness, just as the present earth resulted from the old mental or Overmental "heaven" of the gods and religions. So it is for all the evolutionary stages: high and low go together. But the emergence of the new "high" or new level of consciousness, at any stage of evolution, is not a magical phenomenon, which abruptly alters all the preceding levels. Between the appearance of the first amoeba in the world of Life and that of the mammal, we know that it took many millions of years to overcome Matter's inertia and to "vitalize" it. Similarly, from the Neanderthal man to Plato, thousands of years were needed to overcome the resistance of the two previous levels and to "mentalize" Life, to become the complete mental man. Even today, how many human lives are truly governed by the mind rather than by vital passions? The whole task of the pioneers of evolution, at any level, is precisely to join the new height with the former depth; when high meets low, an evolutionary cycle is completed. Likewise, when the pioneer of mental evolution suddenly emerges in the Supramental, his discovery is not a feat of magic that upsets all the former laws. He does not leap to the complete supramental being any more than the Neanderthal man leapt to Plato; he must first "supramentalize" all the previous levels.
Certainly, his consciousness is the meeting point of the supreme High and the supreme Low, Spirit and Matter, Positive and Negative, and his own powers are, of course, considerably increased, but they are increased only in proportion to the new resistance he has to encounter.
--
The higher the seeker reaches, the wider his access to the regions below the Past he can come into contact with is exactly in proportion to the Future he has discovered and the greater his capacity for collective transformation. Until now, the only power brought down was a mental power, or Overmental at best, which was incapable of touching the bottommost layers, but now that a 387
388

12.05 - The World Tragedy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
It is to be noted that death does not mean literally or exclusively the physical event, disintegration and disappearance of the body: it is rather the symbol of the corrosive consciousness of the ordinary ignorant life. There is the ignorant consciousness making up the lower half circle of the integral life and there is the luminous consciousness making up the higher half circle. In between there is, as I have said, a border range which partakes of the nature of both. In psychological terms, the lower is the predominantly vital and physical ranges with a modicum of the mental shading into the higher mental. Up till here it is more or less the region of ignorance. Then comes the higher mind with its aspiring will: this is the purificatory agent the purgatory the crucible where forces are generated to stir and change and renovate the inferior sphere of our life. Indeed it is the region of the j-cakra in Tantric terminology: in modern terms you may call it the control-room, or in most modern lunar vocabulary, the command-module. It is from here that the first changes towards a higher and purer functioning are initiated in our lower limbs, the body, the vital and even the lower mental. Beyond is the overhead and Overmental and still higher ranges. The luminous consciousness, the touch of immortality begins with the overhead and the Overmental. As we enter the overhead, we shake off the shadow of death upon us and our mortal nature. The Upanishad speaks of two kinds of knowledge that have to be known, two forms of consciousness that have to be acquired in order to become the full integral Divine being. First you have to know, to become aware of the existence of ignorance, the primal or primitive nature and through that awareness or knowledge probe into its character and movement and destiny. Ignorance, pure ignorance leads towards disintegration and death, but to be aware of the ignorance is already a step towards enlightening the ignorance and redeeming it into knowledge. By this knowledge of the ignorance you release it from the grip of death; when you have the full consciousness of the ignorance you transcend the region of death, and free from death, free from ignorance you have the knowledge of knowledge and with the knowledge of knowledge, that is to say, with the full revelation of it you are one with Truth that is Immortality. The delight of immortality is love; love's own status and home is Paradise.
The Paradise, the svargyam lokam of the Upanishads is not necessarily utterly afar and aloof, sundered from this world. The kingdom of heaven instead of being wholly within and absolutely beyond can be and has to be brought out and down upon and into earth, established here below in the fullness of its own glory. That is the material epiphany, the transformation of the physical nature, the ultimate and inevitable destiny of earth and mankind.

1.28 - Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
11:In this simultaneous development of multitudinous independent or combined Powers or Potentials there is yet - or there is as yet - no chaos, no conflict, no fall from Truth or Knowledge. The Overmind is a creator of truths, not of illusions or falsehoods: what is worked out in any given Overmental energism or movement is the truth of the Aspect, Power, Idea, Force, Delight which is liberated into independent action, the truth of the consequences of its reality in that independence. There is no exclusiveness asserting each as the sole truth of being or the others as inferior truths: each God knows all the Gods and their place in existence; each Idea admits all other ideas and their right to be; each Force concedes a place to all other forces and their truth and consequences; no delight of separate fulfilled existence or separate experience denies or condemns the delight of other existence or other experience. The Overmind is a principle of cosmic Truth and a vast and endless catholicity is its very spirit; its energy is an all-dynamism as well as a principle of separate dynamisms: it is a sort of inferior Supermind, - although it is concerned predominantly not with absolutes, but with what might be called the dynamic potentials or pragmatic truths of Reality, or with absolutes mainly for their power of generating pragmatic or creative values, although, too, its comprehension of things is more global than integral, since its totality is built up of global wholes or constituted by separate independent realities uniting or coalescing together, and although the essential unity is grasped by it and felt to be basic of things and pervasive in their manifestation, but no longer as in the Supermind their intimate and ever-present secret, their dominating continent, the overt constant builder of the harmonic whole of their activity and nature.
12:If we would understand the difference of this global Overmind Consciousness from our separative and only imperfectly synthetic mental consciousness, we may come near to it if we compare the strictly mental with what would be an Overmental view of activities in our material universe. To the Overmind, for example, all religions would be true as developments of the one eternal religion, all philosophies would be valid each in its own field as a statement of its own universe-view from its own angle, all political theories with their practice would be the legitimate working out of an Idea Force with its right to application and practical development in the play of the energies of Nature. In our separative consciousness, imperfectly visited by glimpses of catholicity and universality, these things exist as opposites; each claims to be the truth and taxes the others with error and falsehood, each feels impelled to refute or destroy the others in order that itself alone may be the Truth and live: at best, each must claim to be superior, admit all others only as inferior truth-expressions. An Overmental Intelligence would refuse to entertain this conception or this drift to exclusiveness for a moment; it would allow all to live as necessary to the whole or put each in its place in the whole or assign to each its field of realisation or of endeavour. This is because in us consciousness has come down completely into the divisions of the Ignorance; Truth is no longer either an Infinite or a cosmic whole with many possible formulations, but a rigid affirmation holding any other affirmation to be false because different from itself and entrenched in other limits. Our mental consciousness can indeed arrive in its cognition at a considerable approach towards a total comprehensiveness and catholicity, but to organise that in action and life seems to be beyond its power. Evolutionary Mind, manifest in individuals or collectivities, throws up a multiplicity of divergent view-points, divergent lines of action and lets them work themselves out side by side or in collision or in a certain intermixture; it can make selective harmonies, but it cannot arrive at the harmonic control of a true totality. Cosmic Mind must have even in the evolutionary Ignorance, like all totalities, such a harmony, if only of arranged accords and discords; there is too in it an underlying dynamism of oneness: but it carries the completeness of these things in its depths, perhaps in a supermind-overmind substratum, but does not impart it to individual Mind in the evolution, does not bring it or has not yet brought it from the depths to the surface. An Overmind world would be a world of harmony; the world of Ignorance in which we live is a world of disharmony and struggle.
13:And still we can recognise at once in the Overmind the original cosmic Maya, not a Maya of Ignorance but a Maya of Knowledge, yet a Power which has made the Ignorance possible, even inevitable. For if each principle loosed into action must follow its independent line and carry out its complete consequences, the principle of separation must also be allowed its complete course and arrive at its absolute consequence; this is the inevitable descent, facilis descensus, which Consciousness, once it admits the separative principle, follows till it enters by obscuring infinitesimal fragmentation, tucchyena,5 into the material Inconscience, - the Inconscient Ocean of the Rig Veda, - and if the One is born from that by its own greatness, it is still at first concealed by a fragmentary separative existence and consciousness which is ours and in which we have to piece things together to arrive at a whole. In that slow and difficult emergence a certain semblance of truth is given to the dictum of Heraclitus that War is the father of all things; for each idea, force, separate consciousness, living being by the very necessity of its ignorance enters into collision with others and tries to live and grow and fulfil itself by independent self-assertion, not by harmony with the rest of existence. Yet there is still the unknown underlying Oneness which compels us to strive slowly towards some form of harmony, of interdependence, of concording of discords, of a difficult unity. But it is only by the evolution in us of the concealed superconscient powers of cosmic Truth and of the Reality in which they are one that the harmony and unity we strive for can be dynamically realised in the very fibre of our being and all its self-expression and not merely in imperfect attempts, incomplete constructions, ever-changing approximations. The higher ranges of spiritual Mind have to open upon our being and consciousness and also that which is beyond even spiritual Mind must appear in us if we are to fulfil the divine possibility of our birth into cosmic existence.
14:Overmind in its descent reaches a line which divides the cosmic Truth from the cosmic Ignorance; it is the line at which it becomes possible for Consciousness-Force, emphasising the separateness of each independent movement created by Overmind and hiding or darkening their unity, to divide Mind by an exclusive concentration from the Overmental source. There has already been a similar separation of Overmind from its supramental source, but with a transparency in the veil which allows a conscious transmission and maintains a certain luminous kinship; but here the veil is opaque and the transmission of the Overmind motives to the Mind is occult and obscure. Mind separated acts as if it were an independent principle, and each mental being, each basic mental idea, power, force stands similarly on its separate self; if it communicates or combines with or contacts others, it is not with the catholic universality of the Overmind movement, on a basis of underlying oneness, but as independent units joining to form a separate constructed whole. It is by this movement that we pass from the cosmic Truth into the cosmic Ignorance. The cosmic Mind on this level, no doubt, comprehends its own unity, but it is not aware of its own source and foundation in the Spirit or can only comprehend it by the intelligence, not in any enduring experience; it acts in itself as if by its own right and works out what it receives as material without direct communication with the source from which it receives it. Its units also act in ignorance of each other and of the cosmic whole except for the knowledge that they can get by contact and communication, - the basic sense of identity and the mutual penetration and understanding that comes from it are no longer there. All the actions of this Mind Energy proceed on the opposite basis of the Ignorance and its divisions and, although they are the results of a certain conscious knowledge, it is a partial knowledge, not a true and integral self-knowledge, nor a true and integral world-knowledge. This character persists in Life and in subtle Matter and reappears in the gross material universe which arises from the final lapse into the Inconscience.
15:Yet, as in our subliminal or inner Mind, so in this Mind also a larger power of communication and mutuality still remains, a freer play of mentality and sense than human mind possesses, and the Ignorance is not complete; a conscious harmony, an interdependent organisation of right relations is more possible: mind is not yet perturbed by blind Life forces or obscured by irresponsive Matter. It is a plane of Ignorance, but not yet of falsehood or error, - or at least the lapse into falsehood and error is not yet inevitable; this Ignorance is limitative, but not necessarily falsificative. There is limitation of knowledge, an organisation of partial truths, but not a denial or opposite of truth or knowledge. This character of an organisation of partial truths on a basis of separative knowledge persists in Life and subtle Matter, for the exclusive concentration of Consciousness-Force which puts them into separative action does not entirely sever or veil Mind from Life or Mind and Life from Matter. The complete separation can take place only when the stage of Inconscience has been reached and our world of manifold Ignorance arises out of that tenebrous matrix. These other still conscient stages of the involution are indeed organisations of Conscious Force in which each lives from his own centre, follows out his own possibilities, and the predominant principle itself, whether Mind, Life or Matter, works out things on its own independent basis; but what is worked out are truths of itself, not illusions or a tangle of truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance. But when by an exclusive concentration on Force and Form Consciousness-Force seems phenomenally to separate Consciousness from Force, or when it absorbs Consciousness in a blind sleep lost in Form and Force, then Consciousness has to struggle back to itself by a fragmentary evolution which necessitates error and makes falsehood inevitable. Nevertheless, these things too are not illusions that have sprung out of an original Non-Existence; they are, we might say, the unavoidable truths of a world born out of Inconscience. For the Ignorance is still in reality a knowledge seeking for itself behind the original mask of Inconscience; it misses and finds; its results, natural and even inevitable on their own line, are the true consequence of the lapse, - in a way, even, the right working of the recovery from the lapse. Existence plunging into an apparent Non-Existence, Consciousness into an apparent Inconscience, Delight of existence into a vast cosmic insensibility are the first result of the fall and, in the return from it by a struggling fragmentary experience, the rendering of Consciousness into the dual terms of truth and falsehood, knowledge and error, of Existence into the dual terms of life and death, of Delight of existence into the dual terms of pain and pleasure are the necessary process of the labour of self-discovery. A pure experience of Truth, Knowledge, Delight, imperishable existence would here be itself a contradiction of the truth of things. It could only be otherwise if all beings in the evolution were quiescently responsive to the psychic element within them and to the Supermind underlying Nature's operations; but here there comes in the Overmind law of each Force working out its own possibilities. The natural possibilities of a world in which an original Inconscience and a division of consciousness are the main principles, would be the emergence of Forces of Darkness impelled to maintain the Ignorance by which they live, an ignorant struggle to know originative of falsehood and error, an ignorant struggle to live engendering wrong and evil, an egoistic struggle to enjoy, parent of fragmentary joys and pains and sufferings; these are therefore the inevitable first-imprinted characters, though not the sole possibilities of our evolutionary existence. Still, because the Non-Existence is a concealed Existence, the Inconscience a concealed Consciousness, the insensibility a masked and dormant Ananda, these secret realities must emerge; the hidden Overmind and Supermind too must in the end fulfil themselves in this apparently opposite organisation from a dark Infinite.
16:Two things render that culmination more facile than it would otherwise be. Overmind in the descent towards material creation has originated modifications of itself, - Intuition especially with its penetrative lightning flashes of truth lighting up local points and stretches of country in our consciousness, - which can bring the concealed truth of things nearer to our comprehension, and, by opening ourselves more widely first in the inner being and then as a result in the outer surface self also to the messages of these higher ranges of consciousness, by growing into them, we can become ourselves also intuitive and Overmental beings, not limited by the intellect and sense, but capable of a more universal comprehension and a direct touch of truth in its very self and body. In fact flashes of enlightenment from these higher ranges already come to us, but this intervention is mostly fragmentary, casual or partial; we have still to begin to enlarge ourselves into their likeness and organise in us the greater Truth activities of which we are potentially capable. But, secondly, Overmind, Intuition, even Supermind not only must be, as we have seen, principles inherent and involved in the Inconscience from which we arise in the evolution and inevitably destined to evolve, but are secretly present, occult actively with flashes of intuitive emergence in the cosmic activity of Mind, Life and Matter. It is true that their action is concealed and, even when they emerge, it is modified by the medium, material, vital, mental in which they work and not easily recognisable. Supermind cannot manifest itself as the Creator Power in the universe from the beginning, for if it did, the Ignorance and Inconscience would be impossible or else the slow evolution necessary would change into a rapid transformation scene. Yet at every step of the material energy we can see the stamp of inevitability given by a supramental creator, in all the development of life and mind the play of the lines of possibility and their combination which is the stamp of Overmind intervention. As Life and Mind have been released in Matter, so too must in their time these greater powers of the concealed Godhead emerge from the involution and their supreme Light descend into us from above.
17:A divine Life in the manifestation is then not only possible as the high result and ransom of our present life in the Ignorance but, if these things are as we have seen them, it is the inevitable outcome and consummation of Nature's evolutionary endeavour.

13.03 - A Programme for the Second Century of the Divine Manifestation, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
First each element in the individual, each level of his being must find its centre, its soul or psychic base and then only a co-ordination of all would be possible. Next through the psychic level the general level of the being and consciousness, that is to say, its expression and its field of action should be lifted and raised to a higher potency of poise the higher the bettertowards the higher mind, towards the Overmental and beyond.
The Divine Presence in the heart the central psychicshould not only be felt constantly there in the heart but in all other parts or levels of the being: it must create or awake its figure or norm everywhere so that it can inspire and control directly all activities and movements in a global and total gesture. It has to be an integral dynamic Presence, that is the way of uplifting the poise of the adhara, its global existence. The process is first to deepen the Presence, that is from the surface to dive into the inner realm and then float up again into a wider and higher expanse, deeper and deeper means truer and truer truthnearer the pure fundamental reality the Eternal and Infinite, the supreme Spirit, the bedrock of existence. Higher and higher means formulations of the Reality in a gradually evolving expansion up the ladders of the physical, the vital, the mental consciousness and towards the higher mental and Overmental, indeed towards the Supramental.
II
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Such a consummation, so complex in composition, so global in scope would be possible only when the above-mental or the Overmental world-consciousness descends into the mental and lower hemisphere and takes possession of it and becomes active and dynamic there. The movement upward, the evolutionary force in nature inclusive of the human aspiration is the spearhead to break through the solid frontier wall of ignorance and inferior consciousness; the luminous point that breaks through is, as I have said, the soul-power, the psychic. That creates the rift in the dense covering through which can pour down the rains and streams of the universal consciousness with its purificatory ablution of the lower nature and consciousness. But this again becomes not only possible but inevitable when this new consciousness contacts openly and directly its master and overlord, the supreme Supramental Consciousness, which is the true reality pressing down always upon the lower creation, rejecting whatever has to be thrown out, sifting and screening the mixture, sublimating, subsuming all that has to be retained within itself.
The problem, the fundamental problem is not merely to extract the Truth out of its covering of falsehood-in the image of the Upanishads, to pull the inner stem out of its sheath. It is not sufficient to liberate the spirit from the obscuring matter but to instal the spirit in the body of matter and transfigure it into the substance of the Spirit, build it in its own image. It is not sufficient to arrive at the One without the second, the Unitary Unit, but to realise the Unit in its most concrete multiplicity.

1951-03-17 - The universe- eternally new, same - Pralaya Traditions - Light and thought - new consciousness, forces - The expanding universe - inexpressible experiences - Ashram surcharged with Light - new force - vibrating atmospheres, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
For example, it is said that for a certain period the terrestrial world was ruled by Overmental forces and that this rule is going to be transcended, that the world will be governed by supramental forces; well, each time new forces descend upon earth, a change is produced and a change of consciousness must have a corresponding change of movement. You say that the movement of expansion becomes more and more swift; this means that the world is filled with a consciousness which makes the movements of the world more and more rapid. This would be altogether the material transcription of the spiritual phenomenon. The earth is being charged more and more with forces coming from ever higher regions (for our consciousness), which means that they come faster and faster, giving more and more the sense of the instantaneous. What has been discovered is a kind of physical symbolism of this phenomenon which would tend to prove scientifically that the universe is in progress.
The other possibility is that it is a matter of a vibratory movement of inhaling and exhalingthis is quite possible; but the phenomenon of concentration would not necessarily mean a retrogression; it is simply a passage from one movement to another.

1953-09-30, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
There are beings of the vital, if they appeared to men, or to say things more exactly, whenever they have appeared to men, men have taken them for the supreme Godthese vital entities! If you like, we shall call that a disguise but it is a very successful disguise, because those who saw it were thoroughly convinced that they had seen the supreme Godhead. And yet, they were but beings of the vital. And these entities of the Overmind, these Overmental gods are mighty entities in comparison with our humanity. When human beings come in relation with them, they become truly bewildered.
There is however a kind of Grace which makes it possible for us to profit by the experience of others. It is something similar to the way of teaching the sciences. If each scientist had to do all over again all the experiments of the past in order to arrive at a new discovery, go over all that the others had found, he would have to spend his whole life doing that and there would be no time left to make his new discovery! Now one doesnt need to do all that: one opens a book and sees the results and starting from there can proceed further. Well, Sri Aurobindo wanted to do the same thing. He tells you where you can find the results of what others before him have found the experiments they made and their resultsand where you stand: historically where you stand in the spiritual history of the world. And then he takes you from there, and after the basis has been firmly laid for you, he makes you climb higher up the mountain.
So, in the Ashram, there should be only those who have reached the Overmental level? Instead of that
I dont want to speak of those who were there at the beginning, what they knew or did not know and their experience. But you all, my children, at what age did you come here? That was not an age to have realised the Overmind?!

1960 01 20, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
It is the same for all the subtle worldsvital, mental, Overmental, supramental and for all the intermediate worlds and planes of the being. In this way one can have visions that are vital, mental, Overmental, supramental, etc.
On the other hand, Sri Aurobindo tells us that what is termed a hallucination is the reflection in the mind or the physical senses of that which is beyond our mind and our ordinary senses; it is therefore not a direct vision, but a reflected image which is usually not understood or explained. This character of uncertainty produces an impression of unreality and gives rise to all kinds of superstition. This is also why serious people, or people who think themselves serious, do not accord any value to these phenomena and call them hallucinations. And yet, in those who are interested in occult phenomena, this type of perception often precedes the emergence of the capacity of vision which may be in course of formation. But you must guard against mistaking this for true vision. For, I repeat, these phenomena occur most often in a state of almost complete ignorance and are too frequently accompanied by much error and wrong interpretation; not to mention the cases of unscrupulous people, who introduce into the account they give of their experiences many details and particulars not actually there, thus justifying the discredit with which these phenomena are received by rational and thoughtful people.

1966 07 06, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
But, exactly, not only a brain. This Power can express itself, as in the past, in a mental or Overmental way; it can express itself vitally through force; it can express itself through the muscles; but how can it express itself physically, purely, directlysince you often speak of material power? What is the difference between the Action above and the true Action here?
Each time I have been conscious of the Power, the experience has been similar. The Will from above is translated into a vibration which certainly takes on some vital force but which acts in a subtle physical domain. One perceives a certain quality of vibration which is difficult to describe, but which gives the impression of something coagulated, not fragmented, something which seems to be denser than air, but which is extremely homogeneous, with a golden luminosity, with a tremendous driving power, and which expresses a certain willwhich is not of the same nature as human will, which has the nature of vision rather than of thought; it is like a vision that imposes itself in order to be realisedin a domain that is very close to material Matter, but invisible, except to the inner sight. And that vibration exerts a pressure on people, things, circumstances, to mould them according to its vision. And it is irresistible. Even people who think the opposite, who want the opposite, do what is wanted without wanting to; even the things that by their very nature are opposed to it are turned around.

2.01 - Indeterminates, Cosmic Determinations and the Indeterminable, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Overmind seems to add to the perplexity, for the Overmental view of things allows each possibility to formulate itself in its own independent right and realise its own existence in cognition, in dynamic self-presentation, in substantiating experience.
In Overmind, in all the higher ranges of the mind, we find recurring the dichotomy of a pure silent self without feature or qualities or relations, self-existent, self-poised, self-sufficient, and the mighty dynamis of a determinative knowledge-power, of a creative consciousness and force which precipitates itself into the forms of the universe. This opposition which is yet a collocation, as if these two were correlatives or complementaries, although apparent contradictions of each other, sublimates itself into the coexistence of an impersonal Brahman without qualities, a fundamental divine Reality free from all relations or determinates, and a Brahman with infinite qualities, a fundamental divine Reality who is the source and container and master of all relations and determinations - Nirguna, Saguna. If we pursue the Nirguna into a farthest possible selfexperience, we arrive at a supreme Absolute void of all relations and determinations, the ineffable first and last word of existence.
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Our fundamental cognition of the Absolute, our substantial spiritual experience of it is the intuition or the direct experience of an infinite and eternal Existence, an infinite and eternal Consciousness, an infinite and eternal Delight of Existence. In Overmental and mental cognition it is possible to make discrete and even to separate this original unity into three self-existent aspects: for we can experience a pure causeless eternal Bliss so intense that we are that alone; existence, consciousness seem to be swallowed up in it, no longer ostensibly in presence; a similar experience of pure and absolute consciousness and a similar exclusive identity with it is possible, and there can be too a like identifying experience of pure and absolute existence. But to a supermind cognition these three are always an inseparable Trinity, even though one can stand in front of the others and manifest its own spiritual determinates; for each has its primal aspects or its inherent self-formations, but all of these together are original to the triune Absolute. Love, Joy and Beauty are the fundamental determinates of the Divine Delight of Existence, and we can see at once that these are of the very stuff and nature of that Delight: they are not alien impositions on the being of the Absolute or creations supported by it but outside it; they are truths of its being, native to its consciousness, powers of its force of existence. So too is it with the fundamental determinates of the absolute consciousness, - knowledge and will; they are truths and powers of the original Consciousness-Force and are inherent in its very nature. This au thenticity becomes still more evident when we regard the fundamental spiritual determinates of the absolute Existence; they are its triune powers, necessary first postulates for all its self-creation or manifestation, - Self, the Divine, the Conscious Being; Atman, Ishwara, Purusha.
If we pursue the process of self-manifestation farther, we shall see that each of these aspects or powers reposes in its first action on a triad or trinity; for Knowledge inevitably takes its stand in a trinity of the Knower, the Known and Knowledge; Love finds itself in a trinity of the Lover, the Beloved and Love; Will is self-fulfilled in a trinity of the Lord of the Will, the object of the Will and the executive Force; Joy has its original and utter gladness in a trinity of the Enjoyer, the Enjoyed and the Delight that unites them; Self as inevitably appears and founds its manifestation in a trinity of Self as subject, Self as object and self-awareness holding together Self as subject-object.

2.06 - Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
as a kind of dream or sleep - that the surface mental consciousness normally passes out of the perception of objective things into the inner subliminal and the superior supramental or Overmental status. In that inner condition it sees the supraphysical realities in transcribing figures of dream or vision or, in the superior status, it loses itself in a massed consciousness of which it can receive no thought or image. It is through this subliminal and this superconscient condition that we can pass into the supreme superconscience of the highest state of selfbeing. If we make the transition, not through dream trance or sleep trance, but through a spiritual awakening into these higher states, we become aware in all of them of the one omnipresent
Reality; there need be no perception of an illusionary Maya, there is only an experience of the passage from Mind to what is beyond it so that our mental structure of the universe ceases to be valid and another reality of it is substituted for the ignorant mental knowledge. In this transition it is possible to be awake to all the states of being together in a harmonised and unified experience and to see the Reality everywhere. But if we plunge by a trance of exclusive concentration into a mystic sleep state or pass abruptly in waking Mind into a state belonging to the

21.03 - The Double Ladder, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
Now this process of devolution has gone on; from the supreme Consciousness, it has entered into the Supramental, then into the Overmental and then into the mental regions, and peopled all of them with gods and divinities. In the lower regions - lower, that is to say, denser, obscurer, and more ignorant forms of consciousness - they have become smaller gods, dwarf gods. Perhaps to these also the Vedic Rishis offered their namasand stoma,their obeisance as blakhilyagods. The gods have come down farther still and proliferated liberally in the earth's atmosphere. The gods and goddesses of the woodland, of rivers and springs, of mounts and hills, form a whole world of mythology - they are not mere creations of fancy or abstract imagination. The totems of the primitive people continue the same story of proliferation into still darker and denser regions of being and consciousness that may rather be called non-being and unconsciousness. And even, I may say if I am allowed to, the world of rocks and stones is not excluded: they too in their solid material dead body enshrine something of the god in devolution.
There is no question here of any human intervention - of the infusion of man's will and thought-formation. That is another subject altogether. Here I am speaking of the inherent intrinsic spiritual status or even divinity of a material body - Its dravya-guna- that which a lingam or a Kaaba possesses.

2.13 - Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness-Force and the Ignorance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Inconscience; the second, the integral, is the total consciousness of Sachchidananda, the supramental concentration; the third, the multiple, is the method of the totalising or global Overmental awareness; the fourth, the separative, is the characteristic nature of the Ignorance. The supreme integrality of the Absolute holds all these states or powers of its consciousness together as a single indivisible being looking at all itself in manifestation with a simultaneous self-vision.
Concentration in this sense of self-held dwelling in itself or on itself as object may be said then to belong to the very nature of conscious being. For, although there is an infinite extension of consciousness and a diffusion of consciousness, it is a self-held self-contained extension or a self-held self-contained diffusion.

2.15 - On the Gods and Asuras, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
[2] In those days the Mother was trying to manifest four Overmental Godheads: Aspiration, Adoration, Faith and Purity. Tirupati was to embody Faith.
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2.17 - December 1938, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Integral Yoga
I consider the Supramental the culmination of the spiritual man. When the Supramental becomes established I expect that one will not be required to flee from life. It is something dynamic that changes life and nature. It will open the vital, mental and even the physical to the intuitive and Overmental planes.
You want comfort and happiness: in that case, Truth and Knowledge are of no value.

2.2.01 - The Problem of Consciousness, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
Science has discovered Evolution; Religion and Philosophy have discovered something of that which is involved and evolves in this cosmic Existence. But the two discoveries have refused to shed light upon each other; each has shut itself up in its own formulas. This is because each is a creation and activity of Mind, Science of the concretising experimental mind, Philosophy of the abstracting intellectual mind, Religion of the dynamic spiritual mind. But Mind is bound always by its partial formulations of the Truth; Mind grasps formulas or images but is itself grasped by its own creations, it cannot get free from them or go beyond them. But the mind's concepts and formulas are only fragmentary representations of Truth or pointers or abstract schemas and images, not her very self and reality. Either a deeper inner soul-vision or a higher Overmental or supramental consciousness is needed to discover Truth in her very face and body.
The Problem of Consciousness

2.22 - Rebirth and Other Worlds; Karma, the Soul and Immortality, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
But there are also the true vital worlds, - original constructions, organised developments, native habitats of the universal life-principle, the cosmic vital Anima, acting in its own field and in its own nature. On his internatal journey he may be held there for a period by force of the predominantly vital character of the influences which have shaped his earthly existence, - for these influences are native to the vital world and their hold on him would detain him for a while in their proper province: he may be kept in the grasp of that which held him in its grasp even in the physical being. Any residence of the soul in annexes or in its own constructions could be only a transitional stage of the consciousness in its passage from the physical to the supraphysical state; it must pass from these structures into the true worlds of supraphysical Nature. It may enter at once into the worlds of other-life, or it may remain first, as a transitional stage, in some region of subtle-physical experience whose surroundings may seem to it a prolongation of the circumstances of physical life, but in freer conditions proper to a subtler medium and in some kind of happy perfection of mind or life or a finer bodily existence. Beyond these subtle-physical planes of experience and the life-worlds there are also mental or spiritual-mental planes to which the soul seems to have an internatal access and into which it may pursue its internatal journey; but it is not likely to live consciously there if there has not been a sufficient mental or soul development in this life. For these levels must normally be the highest the evolving being can internatally inhabit, since one who has not gone beyond the mental rung in the ladder of being would not be able to ascend to any supramental or Overmental state; or if he had so developed as to overleap the mental level and could attain so far, it might not be possible for him to return so long as the physical evolution has not developed here an organisation of an Overmental or supramental life in Matter.
But, even so, the mental worlds are not likely to be the last normal stage of the after-death passage; for man is not entirely mental: it is the soul, the psychic being, and not the mind, that is the traveller between death and birth, and the mental being is only a predominant element in the figure of its self-expression.

2.25 - The Triple Transformation, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
This is the third motion, the descent which is essential for bringing the permanent ascension, an increasing inflow from above, an experience of reception and retention of the descending spirit or its powers and elements of consciousness. This experience of descent can take place as a result of the other two movements or automatically before either has happened, through a sudden rift in the lid or a percolation, a downpour or an influx. A light descends and touches or envelops or penetrates the lower being, the mind, the life or the body; or a presence or a power or a stream of knowledge pours in waves or currents, or there is a flood of bliss or a sudden ecstasy; the contact with the superconscient has been established. For such experiences repeat themselves till they become normal, familiar and wellunderstood, revelatory of their contents and their significance which may have at first been involved and wrapped into secrecy by the figure of the covering experience. For a knowledge from above begins to descend, frequently, constantly, then uninterruptedly, and to manifest in the mind's quietude or silence; intuitions and inspirations, revelations born of a greater sight, a higher truth and wisdom, enter into the being, a luminous intuitive discrimination works which dispels all darkness of understanding or dazzling confusions, puts all in order; a new consciousness begins to form, the mind of a high wide selfexistent thinking knowledge or an illumined or an intuitive or an Overmental consciousness with new forces of thought or sight and a greater power of direct spiritual realisation which is more than thought or sight, a greater becoming in the spiritual substance of our present being; the heart and the sense become subtle, intense, large to embrace all existence, to see God, to feel and hear and touch the Eternal, to make a deeper and closer unity of self and the world in a transcendent realisation. Other decisive experiences, other changes of consciousness determine themselves which are corollaries and consequences of this fundamental change. No limit can be fixed to this revolution; for it is in its nature an invasion by the Infinite.
This, effected little by little or in a succession of great and swift definitive experiences, is the process of the spiritual transformation. It achieves itself and culminates in an upward ascent often repeated by which in the end the consciousness fixes itself on a higher plane and from there sees and governs the mind, life and body; it achieves itself also in an increasing descent of the powers of the higher consciousness and knowledge which become more and more the whole normal consciousness and knowledge. A light and power, a knowledge and force are felt which first take possession of the mind and remould it, afterwards of the life part and remould that, finally of the little physical consciousness and leave it no longer little but wide and plastic and even infinite. For this new consciousness has itself the nature of infinity: it brings to us the abiding spiritual sense and awareness of the infinite and eternal with a great largeness of the nature and a breaking down of its limitations; immortality becomes no longer a belief or an experience but a normal selfawareness; the close presence of the Divine Being, his rule of the world and of our self and natural members, his force working in us and everywhere, the peace of the infinite, the joy of the infinite are now concrete and constant in the being; in all sights and forms one sees the Eternal, the Reality, in all sounds one hears it, in all touches feels it; there is nothing else but its forms and personalities and manifestations; the joy or adoration of the heart, the embrace of all existence, the unity of the spirit are abiding realities. The consciousness of the mental creature is turning or has been already turned wholly into the consciousness of the spiritual being. This is the second of the three transformations; uniting the manifested existence with what is above it, it is the middle step of the three, the decisive transition of the spiritually evolving nature.

2.26 - The Ascent towards Supermind, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
It is conceivable indeed that, without the descent, by a secret pressure from above, by a long evolution, our terrestrial Nature might succeed in entering into a close contact with the higher now superconscient planes and a formation of subliminal Overmind might take place behind the veil; as a result a slow emergence of the consciousness proper to these higher planes might awake on our surface. It is conceivable that in this way there might appear a race of mental beings thinking and acting not by the intellect or reasoning and reflecting intelligence, or not mainly by it, but by an intuitive mentality which would be the first step of an ascending change; this might be followed by an Overmentalisation which would carry us to the borders beyond which lies the Supermind or divine Gnosis. But this process would inevitably be a long and toilsome endeavour of Nature.
There is a possibility too that what would be achieved might only be an imperfect superior mentalisation; the new higher elements might strongly dominate the consciousness, but they would be still subjected to a modification of their action by the principle of an inferior mentality: there would be a greater expanded and illuminating knowledge, a cognition of a higher order; but it would still undergo a mixture subjecting it to the law of the Ignorance, as Mind undergoes limitation by the law of Life and Matter. For a real transformation there must be a direct and unveiled intervention from above; there would be necessary too a total submission and surrender of the lower consciousness, a cessation of its insistence, a will in it for its separate law of action to be completely annulled by transformation and lose all rights over our being. If these two conditions can be achieved even now by a conscious call and will in the spirit and a participation of our whole manifested and inner being in its change and elevation, the evolution, the transformation can take place by a comparatively swift conscious change; the supramental Consciousness-Force from above and the evolving Consciousness-Force from behind the veil acting on the awakened awareness and will of the mental human being would accomplish by their united power the momentous transition. There would be no farther need of a slow evolution counting many millenniums for each step, the halting and difficult evolution operated by Nature in the past in the unconscious creatures of the Ignorance.
--
For the action of a new power of being in a higher range of consciousness might, even in its control on outer Nature, be extraordinarily effective, but only because of its light of vision and a consequent harmony or identification with the cosmic and transcendent Will; for it is when it becomes an instrumentation of a higher instead of a lower Power that the will of the being becomes free from a mechanical determinism by action and process of cosmic Mind-Energy, Life-Energy, Matter-Energy and an ignorant subjection to the drive of this inferior Nature. A power of initiation, even of an individual overseeing of world-forces could be there; but it would be an instrumental initiation, a delegated overseeing: the choice of the individual would receive the sanction of the Infinite because it was itself an expression of some truth of the Infinite. Thus the individuality would become more and more powerful and effective in proportion as it realised itself as a centre and formation of the universal and transcendent Being and Nature. For as the progression of the change proceeded, the energy of the liberated individual would be no longer the limited energy of mind, life and body, with which it started; the being would emerge into and put on - even as there would emerge in him and descend into him, assuming him into it - a greater light of Consciousness and a greater action of Force: his natural existence would be the instrumentation of a superior Power, an Overmental and supramental Consciousness-Force, the power of the original Divine Shakti. All the processes of the evolution would be felt as the action of a supreme and universal Consciousness, a supreme and universal Force working in whatever way it chose, on whatever level, within whatever self-determined limits, a conscious working of the transcendent and cosmic Being, the action of the omnipotent and omniscient World-Mother raising the being into herself, into her supernature. In place of the Nature of Ignorance with the individual as its closed field and unconscious or half-conscious instrument, there would be a Super-Nature of the divine Gnosis and the individual soul would be its conscious, open and free field and instrument, a participant in its action, aware of its purpose and process, aware too of its own greater Self, the universal, the transcendent Reality, and of its own Person as illimitably one with that and yet an individual being of Its being, an instrument and a spiritual centre.
A first opening towards this participation in an action of Supernature is a condition of the turn towards the last, the supramental transformation: for this transformation is the completion of a passage from the obscure harmony of a blind automatism with which Nature sets out to the luminous au thentic spontaneity, the infallible motion of the self-existent truth of the Spirit.

3.2.01 - The Newness of the Integral Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
By divine realisation is meant the spiritual realisation the realisation of Self, Bhagavan or Brahman on the mental-spiritual plane or else the Overmental plane. That is a thing (at any rate the mental-spiritual) which thousands have done. So it is obviously easier to do than the supramental. Also nobody can have the supramental realisation who has not had the spiritual.
It is true that neither can be got in any effective way unless the whole being is turned towards itunless there is a real and very serious spirit and dynamic reality of sadhana.
--
You are mistaken in two respects. First, the endeavour towards this achievement [the transformation of mind, life and body] is not new and some Yogis have achieved it, I believe but not in the way I want it. They achieved it as a personal siddhi maintained by Yoga-siddhinot a dharma of the nature. Secondly, the supramental transformation is not the same as the spiritual-mental. It is a change of mind, life and body which the mental or Overmental-spiritual cannot achieve. All whom you mention were spirituals, but in different ways. Krishnas mind, for instance, was Overmentalised, Ramakrishnas intuitive, Chaitanyas spiritual-psychic, Buddhas illumined higher mental. I dont know about B. G. [Bijoy Goswami]he seems to have been brilliant but rather chaotic. All that is different from the supramental. Then take the vital of the Paramhansas. It is said their vital behaves either like a child (Ramakrishna) or like a madman or like a demon or like something inert (cf. Jadabharata). Well, there is nothing supramental in all that. So?
One can be a fit instrument for the Divine in any of the transformations. The question is, an instrument for what?

32.06 - The Novel Alchemy, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
What is this world that is to be the fruit of the new spiritual realisation? Where will it be? It would appear to be a supraphysical and transcendent realisation. Chardin has clearly suggested that the new earth will not be anything like a planet renovated into a "sidereal" body illumined by its own light and not that of another. It will not be a thing of the gross material world at all. It would rather come into being as if by rending through the old earth and destroying it, almost as a result of a universal catastrophe, pralaya.Would it then be something non-material? If it were to be made up of pure consciousness, then it might be termed the realisation of Brahman,the Brahmic status. Is then evolution of the manifested universe moving towards this final destruction or dissolution? Or else is the new world to be conceived as something belonging to the supra-physical? But the supra-physical world too has its planes, and this new world may be the field of a spiritual realisation somewhere among these planes beyond life, mind and the above-mind. The Vedantins speak of the world of Brahman, they aim at realising the grand status of Brahman, brahma-loke mahiyate.But theirs is. something outside the created universe, beyond manifestation. The Vaishnavas have spoken of a highest spiritual world, go-taka,which is within the manifestation. The Christians too speak of their Heaven. We also hear of the world of Shiva, the world of Vishnu; these too are not entirely outside the manifestation or created universe. Does then Chardin aim at something Overmental, utterly beyond and above the mind?
In the vision of Sri Aurobindo, the process of creation is not merely an ascent and upward movement, it has a movement of descent too. There is not merely a crossing of levels upon levels, not merely a progressive purification, enlargement, deepening, intensification and sharpening of the consciousness and status; the aim is to transfigure all in the image of the divine being. This process involves a going upward and a, descent with a view to reshape the lower reaches anew in the mould of the heights, not a final extinction, nirvana,in the world of Brahmanby a rejection of all individuality and collectivity. No level of the created universe has to be bypassed or abolished, not even the lowest material plane. On the contrary, the aim is to take one's stand on this material plane itself and transmute it into a new matter, even as the secret aim of the old alchemists had been to transmute the base metal into gold.

3.2.09 - The Teachings of Some Modern Indian Yogis, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
The methods described in the account [of Ramana Maharshis technique of self-realisation] are the well-established methods of Jnanayoga(1) one-pointed concentration followed by thought-suspension, (2) the method of distinguishing or finding out the true self by separating it from mind, life, body (this I have seen described by him [Brunton] more at length in another book) and coming to the pure I behind; this also can disappear into the Impersonal Self. The usual result is a merging in the Atman or Brahmanwhich is what one would suppose is meant by the Overself, for it is that which is the real Overself. This Brahman or Atman is everywhere, all is in it, it is in all, but it is in all not as an individual being in each but is the same in allas the Ether is in all. When the merging into the Overself is complete, there is no ego, no distinguishable I, or any formed separative person or personality. All is ekkraan indivisible and undistinguishable Oneness either free from all formations or carrying all formations in it without being affected for one can realise it in either way. There is a realisation in which all beings are moving in the one Self and this Self is there stable in all beings; there is another more complete and thoroughgoing in which not only is it so but all are vividly realised as the Self, the Brahman, the Divine. In the former, it is possible to dismiss all beings as creations of Maya, leaving the one Self alone as truein the other it is easier to regard them as real manifestations of the Self, not as illusions. But one can also regard all beings as souls, independent realities in an eternal Nature dependent upon the One Divine. These are the characteristic realisations of the Overself familiar to the Vedanta. But on the other hand you say that this Overself is realised by the Maharshi as lodged in the heart-centre, and it is described by Brunton as something concealed which when it manifests appears as the real Thinker, source of all action, but now guiding thought and action in the Truth. Now the first description applies to the Purusha in the heart, described by the Gita as the Ishwara situated in the heart and by the Upanishads as the Purusha Antaratma; the second could apply also to the mental Purusha, manomaya praarra net of the Upanishads, the mental Being or Purusha who leads the life and the body. So your question is one which on the data I cannot easily answer. His Overself may be a combination of all these experiences, without any distinction being made or thought necessary between the various aspects. There are a thousand ways of approaching and realising the Divine and each way has its own experiences which have their own truth and stand really on a basis, one in essence but complex in aspects, common to all, but not expressed in the same way by all. There is not much use in discussing these variations; the important thing is to follow ones own way well and thoroughly. In this Yoga, one can realise the psychic being as a portion of the Divine seated in the heart with the Divine supporting it therethis psychic being takes charge of the sadhana and turns the whole being to the Truth and the Divine, with results in the mind, the vital, the physical consciousness which I need not go into here,that is a first transformation. We realise it next as the one Self, Brahman, Divine, first above the body, life, mind and not only within the heart supporting themabove and free and unattached as the static Self but also extended in wideness through the world as the silent Self in all and dynamic too as the active Divine Being and Power, Ishwara-Shakti, containing the world and pervading it as well as transcending it, manifesting all cosmic aspects. But, what is most important for us, is that it manifests as a transcending Light, Knowledge, Power, Purity, Peace, Ananda of which we become aware above and which descends into the being and progressively replaces the ordinary consciousness by its own movements that is the second transformation. We realise also the consciousness itself as moving upward, ascending through many planes physical, vital, mental, Overmental to the supramental and Ananda planes. This is nothing new; it is stated in the Taittiriya Upanishad that there are five Purushas, the physical, the vital, the mental, the Truth Purusha (supramental) and the Bliss Purusha; it says that one has to draw the physical self up into the vital, the vital into the mental, the mental into the Truth Self, the Truth Self into the Bliss Self and so attain perfection. But in this Yoga we become aware not only of this taking up but of a pouring down of the powers of the higher Self, so that there comes in the possibility of a descent of the Supramental Self and nature to dominate and change our present nature and turn it from nature of Ignorance into nature of Truth-Knowledge (and through the supramental into nature of Ananda)this is the third or supramental transformation. It does not always go in this order, for with many the spiritual descent begins first in an imperfect way before the psychic is in front and in charge, but the psychic development has to be attained before a perfect and unhampered spiritual descent can take place, and the last or supramental change is impossible so long as the two first have not become full and complete. Thats the whole matter, put as briefly as possible.
***

4.3.2.04 - Degrees in the Higher Consciousness, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
realisation is very different from an Overmental or supramental
although the Truth realised may be the same. So also to know

4.3.2.09 - Overmind Experiences and the Supermind, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
it were quite easy to enter into them and mistake inferior movements for the Overmental or supramental, thereby confusing the
Truth and delaying the progress of the sadhana.

4.4.3.05 - The Effect of Descent into the Lower Planes, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
less Overmental, more easily modified into something that is part
truth, part error. When this diminished indirect Force descends

7 - Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
I spoke of the Overmental and the vital plane. There
is also the mental plane between them. There are mental
--
mental has the Overmental and so on. If the universe
were a flat object, having its origin in itself, it would

Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Anonymous, #Various
the physical to the intuitive and Overmental planes.
You want comfort and happiness. In that case Truth and Knowledge are

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