classes ::: Integral Yoga, plane, parts of the being, Place, world, attribute, parts of the being, thing, the Supermind, the Illumined Mind,
children :::
branches ::: Overmind

bookmarks: Instances - Definitions - Quotes - Chapters - Wordnet - Webgen


object:Overmind
subject class:Integral Yoga

--- THE GODS
  There are gods of the Overmind who are the great creators of the earth - until now. There are the gods of the Vedas who are mentioned in everything that has come down from the Rishis. And there are the gods of the Supermind, those who are going to manifest on earth, although of course they exist from all eternity on their own plane. - The Mother Questions And Answers 1957-1958

the fashioners ::: There is an entire world which is the world of the fashioners, where all conceptions are made. And this world is very high, much higher than all the worlds of the mind; and from there these formations, these creations, these types which have been conceived by the fashioners come down and are expressed in physical realisations. And there is always a great distance between the perfection of the idea and what is materialised. Very often the materialised things are like caricatures in comparison with the primal idea. This is what he calls the archetype. This takes place in worlds... not always the same ones, it depends on the things; but for many things in the physical, the primal ideas, these archetypes, were in what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind.

--- DEF
  Overmind is the highest source of the cosmic consciousness available to the embodied being in the Ignorance. It is part of the cosmic consciousness-but the human individual when he opens into the cosmic usually remains in the cosmic Mind-Life- Matter receiving only inspirations and influences from the higher planes of Intuition and Overmind. He receives through the spiritualised higher and illumined mind the fundamental experiences on which spiritual knowledge is based; he can become even full of intuitive mind movements, illuminations, various kinds of powers and illumined light, liberation, Ananda. But to rise fully into the Intuition is rare, to reach the Overmind still rarer- although influences and experiences can come down from there. - LOY1, Page: 152

  It is (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly) by the power of the Overmind releasing the mind from its close partitions that the cosmic consciousness opens in the seeker and he becomes aware of the cosmic spirit and the play of the cosmic forces. - LOY1, Page: 152

  It is from the Overmind that all these different arrangements of the creative Truth of things originate. Out of the Overmind they come down to the Intuition and are transmitted from it to the Illumined and higher Mind to be arranged there for our intelligence. But they lose more and more of their power and certitude in the transmission as they come down to the lower levels. What energy of directly perceived Truth they have is lost in the human mind; for to the human intellect they present themselves only as speculative ideas, not as realised Truth, not as direct sight, a dynamic vision coupled with a concrete undeniable experience. - LOY1, Page: 155

  The Overmind has to be reached and brought down before the Supermind descent is at all possible-for the Overmind is the passage through which one passes from mind to Supermind. - LOY1 Page: 155

"If the Divine that is all love is the source of the creation, whence have come all the evils abounding upon earth?"


   "All is from the Divine; but the One Consciousness, the Supreme has not created the world directly out of itself; a Power has gone out of it and has descended through many gradations of its workings and passed through many agents. There are many creators or rather 'formateurs', form-makers, who have presided over the creation of the world. They are intermediary agents and I prefer to call them 'Formateurs' and not 'Creators'; for what they have done is to give the form and turn and nature to matter. There have been many, and some have formed things harmonious and benignant and some have shaped things mischievous and evil. And some too have been distorters rather than builders, for they have interfered and spoiled what was begun well by others." - Questions and Answers 1929 - 1931 (30 June 1929)


You say, "Many creators or rather 'formateurs', formmakers, have presided over the creation of the world." Who are these 'formateurs'?


   That depends. They have been given many names. All has been done by gradations and through individual beings of all kinds. Each state of being is inhabited by entities, individualities and personalities and each one has created a world around him or has contri buted to the formation of certain beings upon earth. The last creators are those of the vital world, but there are beings of the Overmind (Sri Aurobindo calls this plane the Overmind), who have created, given forms, sent out emanations, and these emanations again had their emanations and so on. What I meant is that it is not the Divine Will that acted directly on Matter to give to the world the required form, it is by passing through layers, so to say, planes of the world, as for example, the mental plane - there are so many beings on the mental plane who are form-makers, who have taken part in the formation of some beings who have incarnated upon earth. On the vital plane also the same thing happens.


   For example, there is a tradition which says that the whole world of insects is the outcome of the form-makers of the vital world, and that this is why they take such absolutely diabolical shapes when they are magnified under the microscope. You saw the other day, when you were shown the microbes in water? Naturally the pictures were made to amuse, to strike the imagination, but they are based on real forms, so magnified, however, that they look like monsters. Almost the whole world of insects is a world of microscopic monsters which, had they been larger in size, would have been quite terrifying. So it is said these are entities of the vital world, beings of the vital who created that for fun and amused themselves forming all these impossible beasts which make human life altoge ther unpleasant.


Did these intermediaries also come out of the Divine Power?

Through intermediaries, yes, not directly. These beings are not in direct contact with the Divine (there are exceptions, I mean as a general rule), they are beings who are in relation with other beings, who are again in relation with others, and these with still others, and so on, in a hierarchy, up to the Supreme.(to be continued....) ~ The Mother Question and Answers



--- FOOTER
class:plane
class:parts of the being
class:Place
class:world
class:attribute
class:parts of the being
class:thing
order:3rd
parent class:the Supermind
child class:the Illumined Mind
see also ::: Heaven, world of the Gods,



Instances - Definitions - Wordnet - Quotes - Chapters - Webgen






see also ::: Heaven, world_of_the_Gods

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now begins generated list of local instances, definitions, quotes, instances in chapters, wordnet info if available and instances among weblinks


OBJECT INSTANCES [0] - TOPICS - AUTHORS - BOOKS - CHAPTERS - CLASSES - SEE ALSO - SIMILAR TITLES

TOPICS
SEE ALSO

Heaven
world_of_the_Gods

AUTH

BOOKS
Blazing_the_Trail_from_Infancy_to_Enlightenment
Essential_Integral
Letters_On_Yoga
Letters_On_Yoga_I
Letters_On_Yoga_III
My_Burning_Heart
old_bookshelf
Questions_And_Answers_1929-1931
Questions_And_Answers_1953
Questions_And_Answers_1955
Questions_And_Answers_1957-1958
Sri_Aurobindo_or_the_Adventure_of_Consciousness
The_Integral_Yoga
The_Life_Divine

IN CHAPTERS TITLE
1.28_-_Supermind,_Mind_and_the_Overmind_Maya
1955-04-13_-_Psychoanalysts_-_The_underground_super-ego,_dreams,_sleep,_control_-_Archetypes,_Overmind_and_higher_-_Dream_of_someone_dying_-_Integral_repose,_entering_Sachchidananda_-_Organising_ones_life,_concentration,_repose
1956-01-25_-_The_divine_way_of_life_-_Divine,_Overmind,_Supermind_-_Material_body__for_discovery_of_the_Divine_-_Five_psychological_perfections
1957-07-10_-_A_new_world_is_born_-_Overmind_creation_dissolved
2.23_-_Supermind_and_Overmind
2.3.03_-_The_Overmind
4.3.2.08_-_Overmind_Experiences
4.3.2.09_-_Overmind_Experiences_and_the_Supermind

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT
00.03_-_Upanishadic_Symbolism
0.08_-_Letters_to_a_Young_Captain
01.02_-_Natures_Own_Yoga
01.03_-_The_Yoga_of_the_King_-_The_Yoga_of_the_Souls_Release
0_1958-08-09
0_1958-11-04_-_Myths_are_True_and_Gods_exist_-_mental_formation_and_occult_faculties_-_exteriorization_-_work_in_dreams
0_1961-07-28
0_1961-08-02
0_1962-03-11
0_1962-07-11
0_1962-07-25
0_1962-09-15
0_1962-09-26
0_1962-10-06
0_1962-10-30
0_1962-11-10
0_1963-03-09
0_1963-05-11
0_1963-05-18
0_1964-10-14
0_1964-10-24a
0_1964-10-30
0_1965-05-29
0_1966-02-26
0_1966-05-18
0_1967-03-04
0_1967-04-15
0_1967-08-02
0_1967-08-30
0_1968-07-27
0_1969-08-30
0_1970-05-27
0_1971-04-17
0_1972-04-15
0_1972-04-26
02.01_-_Our_Ideal
02.02_-_Lines_of_the_Descent_of_Consciousness
02.03_-_An_Aspect_of_Emergent_Evolution
02.15_-_The_Kingdoms_of_the_Greater_Knowledge
04.04_-_Evolution_of_the_Spiritual_Consciousness
04.06_-_Evolution_of_the_Spiritual_Consciousness
05.01_-_Man_and_the_Gods
05.12_-_The_Soul_and_its_Journey
07.01_-_Realisation,_Past_and_Future
07.04_-_The_World_Serpent
07.11_-_The_Problem_of_Evil
07.36_-_The_Body_and_the_Psychic
08.27_-_Value_of_Religious_Exercises
09.03_-_The_Psychic_Being
10.04_-_The_Dream_Twilight_of_the_Earthly_Real
1.02_-_The_Development_of_Sri_Aurobindos_Thought
1.03_-_Preparing_for_the_Miraculous
1.03_-_The_Gods,_Superior_Beings_and_Adverse_Forces
1.04_-_Religion_and_Occultism
1.05_-_Consciousness
1.05_-_The_Ascent_of_the_Sacrifice_-_The_Psychic_Being
1.07_-_Savitri
1.09_-_Sleep_and_Death
1.1.02_-_The_Aim_of_the_Integral_Yoga
1.1.03_-_Brahman
1.1.04_-_The_Self_or_Atman
1.1.1.01_-_Three_Elements_of_Poetic_Creation
1.1.1.03_-_Creative_Power_and_the_Human_Instrument
11.15_-_Sri_Aurobindo
1.11_-_The_Kalki_Avatar
1.11_-_The_Master_of_the_Work
1.12_-_The_Superconscient
1.13_-_The_Divine_Maya
1.13_-_The_Supermind_and_the_Yoga_of_Works
1.13_-_Under_the_Auspices_of_the_Gods
1.14_-_The_Secret
1.15_-_The_Supramental_Consciousness
1.16_-_Man,_A_Transitional_Being
1.17_-_The_Transformation
1.2.01_-_The_Upanishadic_and_Purancic_Systems
1.2.12_-_Vigilance
1.24_-_The_Advent_and_Progress_of_the_Spiritual_Age
1.28_-_Supermind,_Mind_and_the_Overmind_Maya
13.03_-_A_Programme_for_the_Second_Century_of_the_Divine_Manifestation
1.3.05_-_Silence
1.4.02_-_The_Divine_Force
14.07_-_A_Review_of_Our_Ashram_Life
1929-04-21_-_Visions,_seeing_and_interpretation_-_Dreams_and_dreaml_and_-_Dreamless_sleep_-_Visions_and_formulation_-_Surrender,_passive_and_of_the_will_-_Meditation_and_progress_-_Entering_the_spiritual_life,_a_plunge_into_the_Divine
1951-03-01_-_Universe_and_the_Divine_-_Freedom_and_determinism_-_Grace_-_Time_and_Creation-_in_the_Supermind_-_Work_and_its_results_-_The_psychic_being_-_beauty_and_love_-_Flowers-_beauty_and_significance_-_Choice_of_reincarnating_psychic_being
1951-05-11_-_Mahakali_and_Kali_-_Avatar_and_Vibhuti_-_Sachchidananda_behind_all_states_of_being_-_The_power_of_will_-_receiving_the_Divine_Will
1953-09-16
1953-09-30
1953-10-14
1953-10-21
1954-06-30_-_Occultism_-_Religion_and_vital_beings_-_Mothers_knowledge_of_what_happens_in_the_Ashram_-_Asking_questions_to_Mother_-_Drawing_on_Mother
1954-12-08_-_Cosmic_consciousness_-_Clutching_-_The_central_will_of_the_being_-_Knowledge_by_identity
1955-04-13_-_Psychoanalysts_-_The_underground_super-ego,_dreams,_sleep,_control_-_Archetypes,_Overmind_and_higher_-_Dream_of_someone_dying_-_Integral_repose,_entering_Sachchidananda_-_Organising_ones_life,_concentration,_repose
1955-05-18_-_The_Problem_of_Woman_-_Men_and_women_-_The_Supreme_Mother,_the_new_creation_-_Gods_and_goddesses_-_A_story_of_Creation,_earth_-_Psychic_being_only_on_earth,_beings_everywhere_-_Going_to_other_worlds_by_occult_means
1955-06-15_-_Dynamic_realisation,_transformation_-_The_negative_and_positive_side_of_experience_-_The_image_of_the_dry_coconut_fruit_-_Purusha,_Prakriti,_the_Divine_Mother_-_The_Truth-Creation_-_Pralaya_-_We_are_in_a_transitional_period
1955-07-20_-_The_Impersonal_Divine_-_Surrender_to_the_Divine_brings_perfect_freedom_-_The_Divine_gives_Himself_-_The_principle_of_the_inner_dimensions_-_The_paths_of_aspiration_and_surrender_-_Linear_and_spherical_paths_and_realisations
1956-01-25_-_The_divine_way_of_life_-_Divine,_Overmind,_Supermind_-_Material_body__for_discovery_of_the_Divine_-_Five_psychological_perfections
1956-06-13_-_Effects_of_the_Supramental_action_-_Education_and_the_Supermind_-_Right_to_remain_ignorant_-_Concentration_of_mind_-_Reason,_not_supreme_capacity_-_Physical_education_and_studies_-_inner_discipline_-_True_usefulness_of_teachers
1956-07-11_-_Beauty_restored_to_its_priesthood_-_Occult_worlds,_occult_beings_-_Difficulties_and_the_supramental_force
1956-11-21_-_Knowings_and_Knowledge_-_Reason,_summit_of_mans_mental_activities_-_Willings_and_the_true_will_-_Personal_effort_-_First_step_to_have_knowledge_-_Relativity_of_medical_knowledge_-_Mental_gymnastics_make_the_mind_supple
1957-05-15_-_Differentiation_of_the_sexes_-_Transformation_from_above_downwards
1957-07-10_-_A_new_world_is_born_-_Overmind_creation_dissolved
1958-08-15_-_Our_relation_with_the_Gods
1958_09_19
1965_01_12
2.01_-_Indeterminates,_Cosmic_Determinations_and_the_Indeterminable
2.01_-_On_Books
2.03_-_Renunciation
2.06_-_Reality_and_the_Cosmic_Illusion
2.1.02_-_Classification_of_the_Parts_of_the_Being
2.1.02_-_Nature_The_World-Manifestation
21.03_-_The_Double_Ladder
2.13_-_Exclusive_Concentration_of_Consciousness-Force_and_the_Ignorance
2.16_-_The_Integral_Knowledge_and_the_Aim_of_Life;_Four_Theories_of_Existence
2.1.7.05_-_On_the_Inspiration_and_Writing_of_the_Poem
2.1.7.07_-_On_the_Verse_and_Structure_of_the_Poem
2.1.7.08_-_Comments_on_Specific_Lines_and_Passages_of_the_Poem
2.17_-_December_1938
2.18_-_January_1939
2.18_-_The_Evolutionary_Process_-_Ascent_and_Integration
2.19_-_Knowledge_of_the_Scientist_and_the_Yogi
2.2.02_-_Becoming_Conscious_in_Work
2.20_-_Nov-Dec_1939
2.21_-_The_Order_of_the_Worlds
2.22_-_Vijnana_or_Gnosis
2.23_-_Supermind_and_Overmind
2.23_-_The_Conditions_of_Attainment_to_the_Gnosis
2.24_-_The_Evolution_of_the_Spiritual_Man
2.25_-_List_of_Topics_in_Each_Talk
2.25_-_The_Triple_Transformation
2.26_-_The_Ascent_towards_Supermind
2.27_-_The_Gnostic_Being
2.2.9.02_-_Plato
2.2.9.04_-_Plotinus
2.3.02_-_The_Supermind_or_Supramental
2.3.03_-_The_Overmind
2.3.04_-_The_Higher_Planes_of_Mind
2.3.06_-_The_Mind
2.3.07_-_The_Mother_in_Visions,_Dreams_and_Experiences
2.3.07_-_The_Vital_Being_and_Vital_Consciousness
2.3.1_-_Ego_and_Its_Forms
2.3.2_-_Desire
2.4.01_-_Divine_Love,_Psychic_Love_and_Human_Love
24.03_-_Notes_on_Savitri_II
28.01_-_Observations
3.08_-_The_Thousands
3.1.02_-_Spiritual_Evolution_and_the_Supramental
3.1.04_-_Transformation_in_the_Integral_Yoga
3.1.3_-_Difficulties_of_the_Physical_Being
3.2.01_-_The_Newness_of_the_Integral_Yoga
3.2.02_-_The_Veda_and_the_Upanishads
32.05_-_The_Culture_of_the_Body
3.2.06_-_The_Adwaita_of_Shankaracharya
3.2.1_-_Food
3.3.1_-_Illness_and_Health
4.1.2.02_-_The_Three_Transformations
4.1.2.03_-_Preparation_for_the_Supramental_Change
4.1.4_-_Resistances,_Sufferings_and_Falls
4.2.5.05_-_The_Psychic_and_the_Supermind
4.3.1.05_-_The_Self_and_the_Cosmic_Consciousness
4.3.1.07_-_The_Self_Experienced_on_Various_Planes
4.3.2.04_-_Degrees_in_the_Higher_Consciousness
4.3.2.05_-_The_Higher_Planes_and_the_Supermind
4.3.2.08_-_Overmind_Experiences
4.3.2.09_-_Overmind_Experiences_and_the_Supermind
4.3.2.10_-_Reflected_Experience_of_the_Higher_Planes
4.3.2_-_Attacks_by_the_Hostile_Forces
4.4.3.05_-_The_Effect_of_Descent_into_the_Lower_Planes
4.4.4.08_-_The_Descent_of_Knowledge
5.05_-_Supermind_and_Humanity
5.08_-_Supermind_and_Mind_of_Light
5.1.01_-_Terminology
5.1.02_-_The_Gods
5.1.03_-_The_Hostile_Forces_and_Hostile_Beings
5.4.01_-_Occult_Knowledge
7_-_Yoga_of_Sri_Aurobindo
Blazing_P2_-_Map_the_Stages_of_Conventional_Consciousness
Blazing_P3_-_Explore_the_Stages_of_Postconventional_Consciousness
r1927_10_29
r1927_10_30
r1927_10_31
Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_1
Talks_With_Sri_Aurobindo_2
The_Riddle_of_this_World

PRIMARY CLASS

attribute
parts_of_the_being
Place
plane
thing
world
SIMILAR TITLES
Overmind

DEFINITIONS


TERMS STARTING WITH

Overmind ::: Above the mind there are several levels of conscious of the Truth. But in between is what he has distinguished as the Overmind, the world of the cosmic Gods. Now it is this Overmind that has up to the present governed our world: it is the highest that man has been able to attain in illumined consciousness. It has been taken for the Supreme Divine and all those who have reached it have never for a moment doubted that they have touched the true Spirit. For, its splendours are so great to the ordinary human consciousness that it is absolutely dazzled into believing that here at last is the crowning reality. And yet the fact is that the Overmind is far below the true Divine. It is not the authentic home of the Truth. It is only the domain of the formateurs , all those creative powers and deities to whom men have bowed down since the beginning of history. And the reason why the true Divine has not manifested and transformed the earth-nature is precisely that the Overmind has been mistaken for the Supermind.being, among which the really divine world is what Sri Aurobindo has called the Supermind, the world. The cosmic Gods do not wholly live in the Truth-Consciousness: they are only in touch with it and represent, each of them, an aspect of its glories.

Overmind ::: Overmind is the highest source of the cosmic consciousness available to the embodied being in the Ignorance. It is part of the cosmic consciousness—but the human individual when he opens into the cosmic usually remains in the cosmic Mind-Life- Matter receiving only inspirations and influences from the higher planes of Intuition and Overmind. He receives through the spiritualised higher and illumined mind the fundamental experiences on which spiritual knowledge is based; he can become even full of intuitive mind movements, illuminations, various kinds of powers and illumined light, liberation, Ananda. But to rise fully into the Intuition is rare, to reach the Overmind still rarer— although influences and experiences can come down from there.
   Ref: CWSA Vol.28, Letters on Yoga-I, Page: 152


Overmind, for in any of these the Self can be realised. It brings about a subjective transformation ; the instrumental nature is only so far transformed that it beaimes an instrument for the

Overmind ::: full of lights and powers, the Overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally , it creates and acts in the same way. The Overmind is a delegate of the Supramental Consciousness, its delegate to the cosmic Ignorance. The Supramental is the total Truth-Consciousness; the Overmind draws down the truths separately and gives them a separate identity.

Overmind is a sort of delegation from the Supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary uni- verse in which we live here in Matter. Though luminous in itself, it keeps from us the full indivisible Supramental Tight, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness such as we reach in Mind to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictor^ to it. But this does not create a disharmony, because the Over- mind has the sense of the Infinite and in the true (not spatial)

Overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally ; it creates and acts in the same way — it is the world of the great Gods, the divine Creators. Only each creates in his own way ; he sees all but sees all from his own tnewpoint. There is not the abso- lute supramental harmony and quietude.

Overmind

Overmind ::: “The overmind is a sort of delegation from the supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary universe in which we live here in Matter. If supermind were to start here from the beginning as the direct creative Power, a world of the kind we see now would be impossible; it would have been full of the divine Light from the beginning, there would be no involution in the inconscience of Matter, consequently no gradual striving evolution of consciousness in Matter. A line is therefore drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness, parardha , and the lower half, aparardha. The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental)—the lower half of mind, life, Matter. This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness, such as we reach in Mind, to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictory to it.” Letters on Yoga

overmind ::: (from 29 October 1927 onwards) the highest plane or system of planes of consciousness below supermind or divine gnosis; especially the principal plane in the overmind system, apparently corresponding to what earlier in 1927 was referred to as supreme supermind. Possessing "an illimitable capacity of separation and combination of the powers and aspects of the integral and indivisible all-comprehending Unity", the overmind "takes up all that is in the three steps below it and raises their characteristic workings to their highest and largest power, adding to them a universal wideness of consciousness and force"

overmind gnosis ::: (c. 1931, in the diagram on page 1360) the highest plane of overmind, defined as "supermind subdued to the overmind play" (see supermind); it may also be regarded as a series of planes.

overmind logos ::: (c. 1931, in the diagram on page 1360) the logos or universal reason in its highest form on the plane of overmind below formative maya (see overmind system), described as "determinative of relations" in the worlds derived from it.

OVERMIND. ::: Plane of consciousness beyond individual mind, beyond even universal mind in ignorance ; it carries in

overmind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The overmind is a sort of delegation from the supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary universe in which we live here in Matter. If supermind were to start here from the beginning as the direct creative Power, a world of the kind we see now would be impossible; it would have been full of the divine Light from the beginning, there would be no involution in the inconscience of Matter, consequently no gradual striving evolution of consciousness in Matter. A line is therefore drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness, parardha , and the lower half, aparardha. The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental) — the lower half of mind, life, Matter. This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness, such as we reach in Mind, to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictory to it.” *Letters on Yoga

   "The overmind is the highest of the planes below the supramental.” *Letters on Yoga

"In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light.” The Life Divine

"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.” The Life Divine

   "The overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally; it creates and acts in the same way — it is the world of the great Gods, the divine Creators.” *Letters on Yoga

"The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons, it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. It is besides concerned with things other than beauty or aesthetics. It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we call knowledge; its truth goes beyond truth of fact and truth of thought, even the higher thought which is the first spiritual range of the thinker. It has the truth of spiritual thought, spiritual feeling, spiritual sense and at its highest the truth that comes by the most intimate spiritual touch or by identity. Ultimately, truth and beauty come together and coincide, but in between there is a difference. Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error; it brings out the truth of the Inconscient and the truth of the Superconscient and all that lies in between. When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose.” *Letters on Savitri

"In the overmind the Truth of supermind which is whole and harmonious enters into a separation into parts, many truths fronting each other and moved each to fulfil itself, to make a world of its own or else to prevail or take its share in worlds made of a combination of various separated Truths and Truth-forces.” Letters on Yoga

*Overmind"s.


overmind system ::: a term used on 29 October 1927 (when the word "overmind" first occurs) for what earlier in that year had consisted of a series of planes, divisible into four groups, rising from supramentality to gnostic supermind. In 1933, Sri Aurobindo wrote that the overmind "can for convenience be divided into four planes", which he called mental overmind, intuitive overmind or overmind intuition, true overmind, and supramental overmind or overmind gnosis, "but there are many layers in each and each of these can be regarded as a plane in itself". In the diagram of overmind gradations on page 1360 (c. 1931), mental overmind seems to be missing, but overmind logos is listed between intuitive overmind and formative maya, the latter evidently designating the principal plane of true overmind. Overmind logos may represent mental overmind; its position in the diagram could be explained if its highest level is assumed to be a form of mental overmind taken up into true overmind and constituting a plane of overmind proper, like the supramentalised mind in overmind of 1927-28.P


TERMS ANYWHERE

ABOVE-HEAD CENTRE. ::: Above the head extends the higher consciousness centre, sahasradala padma, the thousandpetalled lotus, commanding the higher thinking mind and the illumined mind and opening upwards to the intuition and overmind. The sahasradala centralises spiritual mind, higher mind, intuitive mind and acts as a receiving station for the intuition proper and overmind.
It is the seventh and highest centre. Usually those who take the centres in the body only count six centres, the sahasrāra being excluded. It is sometimes or by some identified with the brain, but that is an error; the brain is only a channel of communication situated between the thousand-petalled and the forehead centre. The former is sometimes called the void centre, śūnya, either because it is not in the body, but in the apparent void above or because rising above the head one enters first into the silence of the self or spiritual being.
Wide Crown centre.


Almost all the occult systems and disciplines aim at the development and mastery of the overmind.

Amal: “I believe this phrase—like ‘The sun-eyed Guardians and the Golden Sphinx’—refers to the denizens of the Supermind just as do the lines mentioning ‘the belt of the unchanging Truth’ and ‘the presence of the Ineffable’. The earlier words—‘The gold ridge of the world-dream’—point to the overmind. In the same context the words ‘Between the slayer and the saviour fires’ remind us of the closing lines of the sonnet ‘Nirvana’ which ends with lines:

Amal: “There are several levels between the mind and the Supermind. One of them is that of the Ideal. A common classification by Sri Aurobindo is: the Higher Mind, the Illumined Mind, the Intuition, the Overmind Intuition, the Overmind, the supramentalised Overmind. In an early chapter of The Life Divine, there is a triple scheme: the Phenomenal, the Ideal, the Real. The Ideal here would cover all the planes between mind and Supermind.”

Ananda in the consciousness, their workings there, the realisation of the divine or spiritual love, the perception of on€’s own psy- chic being, the discovery of one’s own true mental being, true wtal being, true physical being, the realisation of the overmind or the Supramental consciousness, the clear perception of the relation of all these things to our present inferior nature and their action on it to change that lower nature. These things also are often called experiences when they only come in flashes, snatches or rare visitations ; they are spoken of as full realisa- tions only when they become very positive or frequent or con- tinuous or normal.

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 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 with or combines 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. …

“Avatarhood would have little meaning if it were not connected with the evolution. The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is itself, as it were, a parable of evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibious animal between land and water, then the land animal, then the Man-Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal, then man as dwarf, small and undeveloped and physical but containing in himself the godhead and taking possession of existence, then the rajasic, sattwic, nirguna Avatars, leading the human development from the vital rajasic to the sattwic mental man and again the overmental superman. Krishna, Buddha and Kalki depict the last three stages, the stages of the spiritual development—Krishna opens the possibility of overmind, Buddha tries to shoot beyond to the supreme liberation but that liberation is still negative, not returning upon earth to complete positively the evolution; Kalki is to correct this by bringing the Kingdom of the Divine upon earth, destroying the opposing Asura forces. The progression is striking and unmistakable.” Letters on Yoga

aya ::: (c. 1931, in the diagram on page 1360) overmind in its fundamental power of measuring and limiting consciousness (maya), regarded as the essential form of overmind proper (see overmind system); "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".

Overmind ::: Above the mind there are several levels of conscious of the Truth. But in between is what he has distinguished as the Overmind, the world of the cosmic Gods. Now it is this Overmind that has up to the present governed our world: it is the highest that man has been able to attain in illumined consciousness. It has been taken for the Supreme Divine and all those who have reached it have never for a moment doubted that they have touched the true Spirit. For, its splendours are so great to the ordinary human consciousness that it is absolutely dazzled into believing that here at last is the crowning reality. And yet the fact is that the Overmind is far below the true Divine. It is not the authentic home of the Truth. It is only the domain of the formateurs , all those creative powers and deities to whom men have bowed down since the beginning of history. And the reason why the true Divine has not manifested and transformed the earth-nature is precisely that the Overmind has been mistaken for the Supermind.being, among which the really divine world is what Sri Aurobindo has called the Supermind, the world. The cosmic Gods do not wholly live in the Truth-Consciousness: they are only in touch with it and represent, each of them, an aspect of its glories.

Overmind ::: Overmind is the highest source of the cosmic consciousness available to the embodied being in the Ignorance. It is part of the cosmic consciousness—but the human individual when he opens into the cosmic usually remains in the cosmic Mind-Life- Matter receiving only inspirations and influences from the higher planes of Intuition and Overmind. He receives through the spiritualised higher and illumined mind the fundamental experiences on which spiritual knowledge is based; he can become even full of intuitive mind movements, illuminations, various kinds of powers and illumined light, liberation, Ananda. But to rise fully into the Intuition is rare, to reach the Overmind still rarer— although influences and experiences can come down from there.
   Ref: CWSA Vol.28, Letters on Yoga-I, Page: 152


Overmind, for in any of these the Self can be realised. It brings about a subjective transformation ; the instrumental nature is only so far transformed that it beaimes an instrument for the

Overmind ::: full of lights and powers, the Overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally , it creates and acts in the same way. The Overmind is a delegate of the Supramental Consciousness, its delegate to the cosmic Ignorance. The Supramental is the total Truth-Consciousness; the Overmind draws down the truths separately and gives them a separate identity.

Overmind is a sort of delegation from the Supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary uni- verse in which we live here in Matter. Though luminous in itself, it keeps from us the full indivisible Supramental Tight, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness such as we reach in Mind to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictor^ to it. But this does not create a disharmony, because the Over- mind has the sense of the Infinite and in the true (not spatial)

Overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally ; it creates and acts in the same way — it is the world of the great Gods, the divine Creators. Only each creates in his own way ; he sees all but sees all from his own tnewpoint. There is not the abso- lute supramental harmony and quietude.

Overmind

Overmind ::: “The overmind is a sort of delegation from the supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary universe in which we live here in Matter. If supermind were to start here from the beginning as the direct creative Power, a world of the kind we see now would be impossible; it would have been full of the divine Light from the beginning, there would be no involution in the inconscience of Matter, consequently no gradual striving evolution of consciousness in Matter. A line is therefore drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness, parardha , and the lower half, aparardha. The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental)—the lower half of mind, life, Matter. This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness, such as we reach in Mind, to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictory to it.” Letters on Yoga

But how then do you expect a supramental inspiration to come down here when the Overmind itself is so rarely in human reach? That is always the error of the impatient aspirant, to think he can get the Supermind without going through the intervening stages or to imagine that he has got it when in fact he has only got something from the illumined or intuitive or at the highest some kind of mixed overmind consciousness.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 27, Page: 27


cosmic mind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Nevertheless, the fact of this intervention from above, the fact that behind all our original thinking or authentic perception of things there is a veiled, a half-veiled or a swift unveiled intuitive element is enough to establish a connection between mind and what is above it; it opens a passage of communication and of entry into the superior spirit-ranges. There is also the reaching out of mind to exceed the personal ego limitation, to see things in a certain impersonality and universality. Impersonality is the first character of cosmic self; universality, non-limitation by the single or limiting point of view, is the character of cosmic perception and knowledge: this tendency is therefore a widening, however rudimentary, of these restricted mind areas towards cosmicity, towards a quality which is the very character of the higher mental planes, — towards that superconscient cosmic Mind which, we have suggested, must in the nature of things be the original mind-action of which ours is only a derivative and inferior process.” *The Life Divine

"If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, . . . we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; . . . At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, — not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality.” The Life Divine

"There is one cosmic Mind, one cosmic Life, one cosmic Body. All the attempt of man to arrive at universal sympathy, universal love and the understanding and knowledge of the inner soul of other existences is an attempt to beat thin, breach and eventually break down by the power of the enlarging mind and heart the walls of the ego and arrive nearer to a cosmic oneness.” *The Synthesis of Yoga

"[The results of the opening to the cosmic Mind:] One is aware of the cosmic Mind and the mental forces that move there and how they work on one"s mind and that of others and one is able to deal with one"s own mind with a greater knowledge and effective power. There are many other results, but this is the fundamental one.” Letters on Yoga

"The cosmic consciousness has many levels — the cosmic physical, the cosmic vital, the cosmic Mind, and above the higher planes of cosmic Mind there is the Intuition and above that the overmind and still above that the supermind where the Transcendental begins. In order to live in the Intuition plane (not merely to receive intuitions), one has to live in the cosmic consciousness because there the cosmic and individual run into each other as it were, and the mental separation between them is already broken down, so nobody can reach there who is still in the separative ego.” Letters on Yoga*


cosmic Spirit ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Cosmic Spirit or Self contains everything in the cosmos — it upholds cosmic Mind, universal Life, universal Matter as well as the overmind. The Self is more than all these things which are its formulations in Nature.” *Letters on Yoga

"[The Divine in one of its three aspects] . . . is the Cosmic Self and Spirit that is in and behind all things and beings, from which and in which all is manifested in the universe - although it is now a manifestation in the Ignorance.” Letters on Yoga

   ". . . the cosmic spirit, the one self inhabiting the universe, . . . .” *The Life Divine

"For the cosmic Spirit inhabits each and all, but is more than all; . . . .”The Life Divine


Diamond blue is Krishna’s light in the overmind. Lavender blue is Krishna’s light in the intuitive mind.

DOUBLE SYSTEM IN THE BEING. ::: There are two sys- tems simultaneously active in the organisation of the being and its pans ::: one is concentric, a series of tings or sheaths with the psychic at the centre ; another is vertical, an ascension and descent, like a flight of steps, a series of superimposed planes with the Supermind-Overmind as the crucial nodus of the transi- tion beyond the human into the Divine.

:::   Footnote: "E.g. the Russellian fear of emptiness which is the form the active mind gives to Silence. Yet it was on what you call emptiness, on the Silence, that my whole yoga was founded and it was through it that there came afterwards all the inexhaustible riches of a greater Knowledge, Will and Joy — all the experiences of greater mental, psychic and vital realms, all the ranges up to overmind and beyond. The cup has often to be emptied before it can be new-filled; the yogin, the sadhak ought not to be afraid of emptiness or silence.” Letters on Yoga

Footnote: “E.g. the Russellian fear of emptiness which is the form the active mind gives to Silence. Yet it was on what you call emptiness, on the Silence, that my whole yoga was founded and it was through it that there came afterwards all the inexhaustible riches of a greater Knowledge, Will and Joy—all the experiences of greater mental, psychic and vital realms, all the ranges up to overmind and beyond. The cup has often to be emptied before it can be new-filled; the yogin, the sadhak ought not to be afraid of emptiness or silence.” Letters on Yoga

gnosis ::: "a power above mind working in its own law, out of the direct identity of the supreme Self", a faculty superior to buddhi or intellect, possessing not only the "concentrated consciousness of the infinite Essence", but "also and at the same time an infinite knowledge of the myriad play of the Infinite"; (in 1919-20) the supra-intellectual consciousness (also called ideality or vijñana) with its three planes of logistic, hermetic and seer gnosis, each successive level being more "intense and large in light, imperative, instantaneous, the scope of the active knowledge larger, the way nearer to the knowledge by identity, the thought more packed with the luminous substance of self-awareness and all-vision"; (in most of 1927 before 29 October) a plane of consciousness usually referred to as above the supreme ...64 supermind and descending into it to form supreme supermind gnosis, also rising to the "invincible Gnosis of the Divine"; (in April 1927) a term encompassing three degrees of supramental gnosis (corresponding to planes later redefined as parts of the overmind system) and a fourth degree of divine gnosis; (from 29 October 1927 onwards) equivalent to "divine gnosis", a grade of consciousness above overmind (but sometimes distinguished from supermind, which occupies a similar position) and descending into it to form gnostic overmind or gnosis in overmind.

gnosis in overmind ::: (in late 1927 or 1928) the highest plane in the series of planes at the summit of the overmind system later called overmind gnosis, where overmind borders on supermind or divine gnosis.

gnostic intuition ::: (in 1919) same as ideal intuition; (in April 1927) intuition as the first degree of supramental gnosis, probably corresponding to the later intuitive overmind.

gnosticised supreme supermind ::: same as supreme supermind gnosis or the later supramentalised overmind.

gnostic overmind ::: (in late 1927 or 1928) the highest series of planes in the overmind system, where overmind is filled with divine gnosis; one of the higher planes in this series.

gnostic supermind ::: (in April 1927) the highest degree of supramental gnosis; it corresponds apparently to gnosis (above the supreme supermind) in the terminology of January 1927 and gnostic overmind (in the sense of the later overmind gnosis) in the terminology adopted by the end of 1927.

Golden light is a light from the Supermind but naturally it is modified in the plane in which h works. It becomes the light of Truth in the OvermInd, light of Truth in the intuition.

Higher consciousness ::: abosr the ordinary mind and different from it in Its workings ; it ranges from higher mine! through illumined mind, intuition and overmind upto the border line of the Supramental.

Higher Mind ::: I mean by the Higher Mind a first plane of spiritual [consciousness] where one becomes constantly and closely aware of the Self, the One everywhere and knows and sees things habitually with that awareness; but it is still very much on the mindlevel although highly spiritual in its essential substance; and its instrumentation is through an elevated thought-power and comprehensive mental sight—not illumined by any of the intenser upper lights but as if in a large strong and clear daylight. It acts as an intermediate state between the Truth-Light above and the human mind; communicating the higher knowledge in a form that the Mind intensified, broadened, made spiritually supple, can receive without being blinded or dazzled by a Truth beyond it.Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the spirit. Its basic substance is a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable of the formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming, of all of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge. It is th
   refore a power that has proceeded from the Overmind,—but with the Supermind as its ulterior origin,—as all these greater powers have proceeded: but its special character, its activity of consciousness are dominated by Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of spirit-born conceptual knowledge.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 27, 21-22 Page: 20, 974


Higher mind/mental ::: Overtopping the ordinary mind, hidden in our own superconscient parts, there are higher ranges of Mind, gradations of spiritualised mind leading to the Supermind. In ascending order they are: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, Intuition and Overmind. See spiritualised mind.

Higher Planes ::: From the point of view of the ascent of consciousness from our mind upwards through a rising series of dynamic powers by which it can sublimate itself, the gradation can be resolved into a stairway of four main ascents, each with its high level of fulfilment. These gradations may be summarily described as a series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, IlluminedMind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 972


highest mind ::: (c. 1931, in the diagram on page 1360) the plane of intuitive consciousness below overmind, possibly corresponding to seer ideality in entries of 1919.

“If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, . . . we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; . . . At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies,—not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality.” The Life Divine

If we regard the Powers of the Reality as so many Godheads, we can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, communication and interplay with the others. There are in the Veda different formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Existence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods together or contains them in his being; and yet again each is a separate Deity acting sometimes in unison with companion deities, sometimes separately, sometimes even in apparent opposition to other Godheads of the same Existence. In the Supermind all this would be held together as a harmonised play of the one Existence; in the Overmind each of these three conditions could be a separate action or basis of action and have its own principle of development and consequences and yet each keep the power to combine with the others in a more composite harmony. As with the One Existence, so with its Consciousness and Force. The One Consciousness is separated into many independent forms of consciousness and knowledge; each follows out its own line of truth which it has to realise. The one total and many-sided Real-Idea is split up into its many sides; each becomes an independent Idea-Force with the power to realise itself. The one Consciousness-Force is liberated into its million forces, and each of these forces has the right to fulfil itself or to assume, if needed, a hegemony and take up for its own utility the other forces. So too the Delight of Existence is loosed out into all manner of delights and each can carry in itself its independent fullness or sovereign extreme. Overmind thus gives to the One Existence-Consciousness-Bliss the character of a teeming of infinite possibilities which can be developed into a multitude of worlds or thrown together into one world in which the endlessly variable…

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 viewpoints, 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. …

imperative ::: (in 1920) being of the nature of a "revealingly imperative power of the spirit"s knowledge by identity", the element in the logos vijñana or highest representative ideality (see full revelatory ideality) that deals with "the imperatives of the infinite", connected with revelation in much the same way as representative with intuition and interpretative with inspiration, and evidently entering into the logistic ideality from a higher plane of imperative vijñana; (in early 1927) a plane related to, but higher than, the imperative vijñana of 1920, apparently occupying a position between the supreme supramental and the supreme supermind, for one of its forms "acts as an intermediary force, lifting the former into the latter". The forms of "the imperative" in 1927 are perhaps the "intuitive forms" which by January of that year had been arranged "in the gnosis", making them part of what at the end of October is called the overmind system. imperative vij ñana

In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light. Even, it is by the projection of this luminous Overmind corona that the diffusion of a diminished light in the Ignorance and the throwing of that contrary shadow which swallows up in itself all light, the Inconscience, became at all possible. For Supermind transmits to Overmind all its realities, but leaves it to formulate them in a movement and according to an awareness of things which is still a vision of Truth and yet at the same time a first parent of the Ignorance. A line divides Supermind and Overmind which permits a free transmission, allows the lower Power to derive from the higher Power all it holds or sees, but automatically compels a transitional change in the passage. The integrality of the Supermind keeps always the essential truth of things, the total truth and the truth of its individual self-determinations clearly knit together; it maintains in them an inseparable unity and between them a close interpenetration and a free and full consciousness of each other: but in Overmind this integrality is no longer there. And yet the Overmind is well aware of the essential Truth of things; it embraces the totality; it uses the individual self-determinations without being limited by them: but although it knows their oneness, can realise it in a spiritual cognition, yet its dynamic movement, even while relying on that for its security, is not directly determined by it. Overmind Energy proceeds through an illimitable capacity of separation and combination of the powers and aspects of the integral and indivisible all-comprehending Unity. It takes each Aspect or Power and gives to it an independent action in which it acquires a full separate importance and is able to work out, we might say, its own world of creation. Purusha and Prakriti, Conscious Soul and executive Force of Nature, are in the supramental harmony a two-aspected single truth, being and dynamis of the Reality; there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of one over the other. In Overmind we have the origin of the cleavage, the trenchant distinction made by the philosophy of the Sankhyas in which they appear as two independent entities, Prakriti able to dominate Purusha and cloud its freedom and power, reducing it to a witness and recipient of her forms and actions, Purusha able to return to its separate existence and abide in a free self-sovereignty by rejection of her original overclouding material principle. So with the other aspects or powers of the Divine Reality, One and Many, Divine Personality and Divine Impersonality, and the rest; each is still an aspect and power of the one Reality, but each is empowered to act as an independent entity in the whole, arrive at the fullness of the possibilities of its separate expression and develop the dynamic consequences of that separateness. At the same time in Overmind this separateness is still founded on the basis of an implicit underlying unity; all possibilities of combination and relation between the separated Powers and Aspects, all interchanges and mutualities of their energies are freely organised and their actuality always possible.

“In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light.” The Life Divine

intermediate zone ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The intermediate zone means simply a confused condition or passage in which one is getting out of the personal consciousness and opening into the cosmic (cosmic Mind, cosmic vital, cosmic physical, something perhaps of the cosmic higher Mind) without having yet transcended the human mind levels. One is not in possession of or direct contact with the divine Truth on its own levels , but one can receive something from them, even from the overmind, indirectly. Only, as one is still immersed in the cosmic Ignorance, all that comes from above can be mixed, perverted, taken hold of for their purposes by lower, even by hostile Powers. ::: It is not necessary for everyone to struggle through the intermediate zone. If one has purified oneself, if there is no abnormal vanity, egoism, ambition or other strong misleading element, or if one is vigilant and on one"s guard, or if the psychic is in front, one can either pass rapidly and directly or with a minimum of trouble into the higher zones of consciousness where one is in direct contact with the Divine Truth.

Intermediate Zone ::: The intermediate zone means simply a confused condition or passage in which one is getting out of the personal consciousness and opening into the cosmic (cosmic Mind, cosmic vital, cosmic physical, something perhaps of the cosmic higherMind) without having yet transcended the human mind levels. One is not in possession of or direct contact with the divine Truth on its own levels, but one can receive something from them, even from the Overmind, indirectly. Only, as one is still immersed in the cosmic Ignorance, all that comes from above can be mixed, perverted, taken hold of for their purposes by lower, even by hostile Powers.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 35, Page: 118


interpretative imperative ::: (c. 1920) a form of logos vijñana formed by a combination of its interpretative and imperative elements; (in early 1927) an intermediate form of "the imperative", evidently interpretative ideality taken up into imperative vijñana and that again elevated to one of the lower planes of what by the end of 1927 was called overmind. interpretative logistical vijñana

In the individual evolution, one must develop in oneself a zone corresponding to the overmind and an overmind consciousness, before one can rise above it, to the Supermind, or open oneself to it.

“In the overmind the Truth of supermind which is whole and harmonious enters into a separation into parts, many truths fronting each other and moved each to fulfil itself, to make a world of its own or else to prevail or take its share in worlds made of a combination of various separated Truths and Truth-forces.” Letters on Yoga

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….

intuitive consciousness ::: (c. 1931, in the diagram on page 1360) the plane of highest mind below overmind; evidently equivalent to "Intuition" in the sense in which Sri Aurobindo used this word in his later writings, where it is "a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate [than Higher Mind or Illumined Mind] to the original knowledge by identity", differing from Overmind in that it "sees in flashes" and combines them, while Overmind "sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally".

intuitive overmind ::: (c. 1931, in the diagram on page 1360) intuitive consciousness taken up into overmind, where its "movement is more comprehensive, global, many-faceted, more wide and potent in its truth-force".

It is a creator of truth, not of illusions or falsehood. It is a principle of cosmic truth and a vast and endless catholicity is its very spmt. Overmind takes each aspect of Power and gives to it an independent action.

*It is from the Overmind that all these different arrangements of the creative Truth of things originate. Out of the Overmind they come down to the Intuition and are transmitted from it to the Illumined and higher Mind to be arranged there for our intelligence. But they lose more and more of their power and certitude in the transmission as they come down to the lower levels. What energy of directly perceived Truth they have is lost in the human mind; for to the human intellect they present themselves only as speculative ideas, not as realised Truth, not as direct sight, a dynamic vision coupled with a concrete undeniable experience.
   Ref: CWSA Vol.28, Letters on Yoga-I, Page: 155


It is (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly) by the power of the Overmind releasing the mind from its close partitions that the cosmic consciousness opens in the seeker and he becomes aware of the cosmic spirit and the play of the cosmic forces.
   Ref: CWSA Vol.28, Letters on Yoga-I, Page: 152


"Krishna is the Anandamaya; he supports the evolution through the overmind leading it towards the Ananda.” Letters on Yoga

“Krishna is the Anandamaya; he supports the evolution through the overmind leading it towards the Ananda.” Letters on Yoga

Kr.s.n.a (Krishna) ::: the eighth avatara of Vis.n.u in the Hindu tradition, regarded by Sri Aurobindo as an embodiment of "the complete divine manhood" and as the avatara who opened the possibility of overmind in the evolution of consciousness on earth; a name of the universal Deity (deva) and supreme Being (purus.ottama) who is the fourfold isvara and also "the Destroyer, Preserver, Creator in one" (Rudra2,Vis.n.u, Brahma), manifesting "through the Vishnu aspect as his frontal appearance"; "the Ishwara taking delight in the world" (anandamaya isvara or lilamaya purus.a), realisation of oneness with whom is the first part of the karma catus.t.aya, seen in all things and beings in the several intensities and degrees of Kr.s.n.adarsana.

Location: E Library—Works Of Sri Aurobindo—English—SABCL—The Life Divine Volume 18—Supermind, Mind And The Overmind Maya …

Location: E Library—Works Of The Mother—English—Cwmce—Questions And Answers Volume 03—Supermind And Overmind

Madhav: “Aswapathy participates in the luminous manifestation of Inspiration, Revelation and Intuition on his way to the heights of the Overmind.” The Book of the Divine Mother

mantra ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.” *The Future Poetry

mantra ::: Sri Aurobindo: “The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.” The Future Poetry

mantra ::: : “The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.” The Future Poetry

mental overmind ::: the plane of the overmind system that is "directly creative of all the formations that manifest below in the mental world". mental sama

Mental transformation ::: All the works of the mind and intellect must first be heightened and widened, then illumined, lifted into the domains of a higher Intelligence, afterwards translated into workings of a greater non-mental Intuition, then again trans- formed into the dynamic outpourings of the Overmind radiance, and these transfigured into the full light and sovereignty of the supramental Gnosis.

Mind-centres ::: For the mind there are many centres. One in the throat (the outward-going or externalising mind) ; one between the eyes or rather in the middle of the forehead (the centre for inner thought, will and vision) ; one above, com- municating with the brain, which is called the sahasradala, thousand-petalled lotus and where are centralised the highest thought and intelligence, communicating with the greater mind planes (illumined mind, intuition, overmind) above.

No doubt, the Supermind has also acted in the history of the world but always through the Overmind. It is the direct descent of the Supramental Consciousness and Power that alone can utterly re-create life in terms of the Spirit. For, in the Overmind there is already the play of possibilities which marks the beginning of this lower triple world of Mind, Life and Matter in which we have our existence. And whenever there is this play and not the spontaneous and infallible working of the innate Truth of the Spirit, there is the seed of distortion and ignorance. Not that the Overmind is a field of ignorance; but it is the border-line between the Higher and the Lower, for, the play of possibilities, of separate even if not yet divided choice, is likely to lead to deviation from the Truth of things.

Nolini: “The image is that of the comoposition of an army or that of a mathematical series (e.g., arithmetical or geometrical progression). It is composed of regularised uits of different values (group of sums), but all measured and definite and precise—e.g.., in the case of an army—company, brigade, battalion, army—an ascending scale, the whole also forming one big unit, taken in at a single glance—that is the nature of overmind vision.

On the other hand the passage through the higher zones — higher Mind, illumined Mind, Intuition, overmind is obligatory — they are the true Intermediaries between the present consciousness and the supermind.” Letters on Yoga

On the other hand the passage through the higher zones—higher Mind, illumined Mind, Intuition, overmind is obligatory—they are the true Intermediaries between the present consciousness and the supermind.” Letters on Yoga

“Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit. Its basic substance is a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable of the formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming, of all of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge. It is therefore a power that has proceeded from the Overmind,—but with the Supermind as its ulterior origin,—as all these greater powers have proceeded: but its special character, its activity of consciousness are dominated by Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of Spirit-born conceptual knowledge. An all-awareness emerging from the original identity, carrying the truths the identity held in itself, conceiving swiftly, victoriously, multitudinously, formulating and by self-power of the Idea effectually realising its conceptions, is the character of this greater mind of knowledge.” The Life Divine

overmind ::: (from 29 October 1927 onwards) the highest plane or system of planes of consciousness below supermind or divine gnosis; especially the principal plane in the overmind system, apparently corresponding to what earlier in 1927 was referred to as supreme supermind. Possessing "an illimitable capacity of separation and combination of the powers and aspects of the integral and indivisible all-comprehending Unity", the overmind "takes up all that is in the three steps below it and raises their characteristic workings to their highest and largest power, adding to them a universal wideness of consciousness and force"

overmind gnosis ::: (c. 1931, in the diagram on page 1360) the highest plane of overmind, defined as "supermind subdued to the overmind play" (see supermind); it may also be regarded as a series of planes.

overmind logos ::: (c. 1931, in the diagram on page 1360) the logos or universal reason in its highest form on the plane of overmind below formative maya (see overmind system), described as "determinative of relations" in the worlds derived from it.

OVERMIND. ::: Plane of consciousness beyond individual mind, beyond even universal mind in ignorance ; it carries in

overmind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The overmind is a sort of delegation from the supermind (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary universe in which we live here in Matter. If supermind were to start here from the beginning as the direct creative Power, a world of the kind we see now would be impossible; it would have been full of the divine Light from the beginning, there would be no involution in the inconscience of Matter, consequently no gradual striving evolution of consciousness in Matter. A line is therefore drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness, parardha , and the lower half, aparardha. The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental) — the lower half of mind, life, Matter. This line is the intermediary overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness, such as we reach in Mind, to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictory to it.” *Letters on Yoga

   "The overmind is the highest of the planes below the supramental.” *Letters on Yoga

"In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light.” The Life Divine

"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.” The Life Divine

   "The overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally; it creates and acts in the same way — it is the world of the great Gods, the divine Creators.” *Letters on Yoga

"The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons, it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. It is besides concerned with things other than beauty or aesthetics. It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we call knowledge; its truth goes beyond truth of fact and truth of thought, even the higher thought which is the first spiritual range of the thinker. It has the truth of spiritual thought, spiritual feeling, spiritual sense and at its highest the truth that comes by the most intimate spiritual touch or by identity. Ultimately, truth and beauty come together and coincide, but in between there is a difference. Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error; it brings out the truth of the Inconscient and the truth of the Superconscient and all that lies in between. When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose.” *Letters on Savitri

"In the overmind the Truth of supermind which is whole and harmonious enters into a separation into parts, many truths fronting each other and moved each to fulfil itself, to make a world of its own or else to prevail or take its share in worlds made of a combination of various separated Truths and Truth-forces.” Letters on Yoga

*Overmind"s.


overmind system ::: a term used on 29 October 1927 (when the word "overmind" first occurs) for what earlier in that year had consisted of a series of planes, divisible into four groups, rising from supramentality to gnostic supermind. In 1933, Sri Aurobindo wrote that the overmind "can for convenience be divided into four planes", which he called mental overmind, intuitive overmind or overmind intuition, true overmind, and supramental overmind or overmind gnosis, "but there are many layers in each and each of these can be regarded as a plane in itself". In the diagram of overmind gradations on page 1360 (c. 1931), mental overmind seems to be missing, but overmind logos is listed between intuitive overmind and formative maya, the latter evidently designating the principal plane of true overmind. Overmind logos may represent mental overmind; its position in the diagram could be explained if its highest level is assumed to be a form of mental overmind taken up into true overmind and constituting a plane of overmind proper, like the supramentalised mind in overmind of 1927-28.P

Planes, Higher ::: …from the point of view of the ascent of consciousness from our mind upwards through a rising series of dynamic powers by which it can sublimate itself, the gradation can be resolved into a stairway of four main ascents, each with its high level of fulfilment. These gradations may be summarily described as a series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, IlluminedMind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 21-22, Page: 972


Realisation ::: Realisations are the reception in the consciousness and the establishment there of the fundamental truths of the Divine, of the Higher or Divine Nature, of the world-consciousness and the play of its forces, of one's own self and real nature and the inner nature of things, the power of these things growing in one till they are a part of one's inner life and existence, as for instance, the realisation of the Divine Presence, the descent and settling of the higher Peace, Light, Force, Ananda in the consciousness, their workings there, the realisation of the divine or spiritual love, the perception of one's own psychic being, the discovery of one's own true mental being, true vital being, true physical being, the realisation of the overmind or the supramental consciousness, the clear perception of the relation of all these things to our present inferior nature and their action on it to change that lower nature. The list, of course, might be infinitely longer. These things also are often called experiences when they only come in flashes, snatches or rare visitations; they are spoken of as full realisations only when they become very positive or frequent or continuous or normal.
   Ref: SABCL Vol. 22-23-24, Page: 884-85 Settled experience.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 23-24, Page: 120


representative imperative ::: (c. 1920) a form of logos vijñana formed by a combination of its representative and imperative elements; (in early 1927) the lowest form of "the imperative", evidently representative vijñana taken up into imperative vijñana and that again elevated to one of the lower planes of what by the end of 1927 was called overmind.

Since the Consciousness-Force of the eternal Existence is the universal creatrix, the nature of a given world will depend on whatever self-formulation of that Consciousness expresses itself in that world. Equally, for each individual being, his seeing or representation to himself of the world he lives in will depend on the poise or make which that Consciousness has assumed in him. Our human mental consciousness sees the world in sections cut by the reason and sense and put together in a formation which is also sectional; the house it builds is planned to accommodate one or another generalised formulation of Truth, but excludes the rest or admits some only as guests or dependents in the house. Overmind Consciousness is global in its cognition and can hold any number of seemingly fundamental differences together in a reconciling vision. Thus the mental reason sees Person and the Impersonal as opposites: it conceives an impersonal Existence in which person and personality are fictions of the Ignorance or temporary constructions; or, on the contrary, it can see Person as the primary reality and the impersonal as a mental abstraction or only stuff or means of manifestation. To the Overmind intelligence these are separable Powers of the one Existence which can pursue their independent self-affirmation and can also unite together their different modes of action, creating both in their independence and in their union different states of consciousness and being which can be all of them valid and all capable of coexistence. A purely impersonal existence and consciousness is true and possible, but also an entirely personal consciousness and existence; the Impersonal Divine, Nirguna Brahman, and the Personal Divine, Saguna Brahman, are here equal and coexistent aspects of the Eternal. Impersonality can manifest with person subordinated to it as a mode of expression; but, equally, Person can be the reality with impersonality as a mode of its nature: both aspects of manifestation face each other in the infinite variety of conscious Existence. What to the mental reason are irreconcilable differences present themselves to the Overmind intelligence as coexistent correlatives; what to the mental reason are contraries are to the Overmind intelligence complementaries. Our mind sees that all things are born from Matter or material Energy, exist by it, go back into it; it concludes that Matter is the eternal factor, the primary and ultimate reality, Brahman. Or it sees all as born of Life-Force or Mind, existing by Life or by Mind, going back into the universal Life or Mind, and it concludes that this world is a creation of the cosmic Life-Force or of a cosmic Mind or Logos. Or again it sees the world and all things as born of, existing by and going back to the Real-Idea or Knowledge-Will of the Spirit or to the Spirit itself and it concludes on an idealistic or spiritual view of the universe. It can fix on any of these ways of seeing, but to its normal separative vision each way excludes the others. Overmind consciousness perceives that each view is true of the action of the principle it erects; it can see that there is a material world-formula, a vital world-formula, a mental world-formula, a spiritual world-formula, and each can predominate in a world of its own and at the same time all can combine in one world as its constituent powers. The self-formulation of Conscious Force on which our world is based as an apparent Inconscience that conceals in itself a supreme Conscious-Existence and holds all the powers of Being together in its inconscient secrecy, a world of universal Matter realising in itself Life, Mind, Overmind, Supermind, Spirit, each of them in its turn taking up the others as means of its self-expression, Matter proving in the spiritual vision to have been always itself a manifestation of the Spirit, is to the Overmind view a normal and easily realisable creation. In its power of origination and in the process of its executive dynamis Overmind is an organiser of many potentialities of Existence, each affirming its separate reality but all capable of linking themselves together in many different but simultaneous ways, a magician craftsman empowered to weave the multicoloured warp and woof of manifestation of a single entity in a complex universe. …

Sri Aurobindo: "Avatarhood would have little meaning if it were not connected with the evolution. The Hindu procession of the ten Avatars is itself, as it were, a parable of evolution. First the Fish Avatar, then the amphibious animal between land and water, then the land animal, then the Man-Lion Avatar, bridging man and animal, then man as dwarf, small and undeveloped and physical but containing in himself the godhead and taking possession of existence, then the rajasic, sattwic, nirguna Avatars, leading the human development from the vital rajasic to the sattwic mental man and again the overmental superman. Krishna, Buddha and Kalki depict the last three stages, the stages of the spiritual development — Krishna opens the possibility of overmind, Buddha tries to shoot beyond to the supreme liberation but that liberation is still negative, not returning upon earth to complete positively the evolution; Kalki is to correct this by bringing the Kingdom of the Divine upon earth, destroying the opposing Asura forces. The progression is striking and unmistakable.” *Letters on Yoga

Still there is an increasing self-limitation which begins even with Overmind: Overmind is separated by only a luminous border from the full light and power of the supramental Truth and it still commands direct access to all that Supermind can give it. There is a further limitation or change of characteristic action at each step downwards from Overmind to Intuition, from Intuition to Illumined Mind, from Illumined Mind to what I have called the Higher Mind: the Mind of Light is a transitional passage by which we can pass from supermind and superhumanity to an illumined humanity.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 13, Page: 589-90


supermind ::: "a principle superior to mentality", which "has the knowledge of the One, but is able to draw out of the One its hidden multitudes" and "manifests the Many, but does not lose itself in their differentiations", forming a link between "the unitarian or indivisible consciousness of pure Sachchidananda in which there are no separating distinctions" and "the analytic or dividing consciousness of Mind which can only know by separation and distinction" and making it "possible for us to realise the one Existence, Consciousness,Delight in the mould of the mind, life and body"; (up to 1920) a general term for the supra-intellectual faculty or plane (vijñana); (c.December 1926) the "Truth-Mind" or plane of "luminous DivineMind-Existence" below the "Divine Truth and Vastness" of mahad . brahma; (in 1927 before 29 October) same as supreme supermind, one of a series of planes above ideality which seem to correspond to those later included in the overmind system, a series that also included other planes sometimes designated as forms of "supermind", such as supreme supramental supermind and gnostic supermind; (from 29October 1927 onwards) equivalent to divine gnosis, the plane of "selfdetermining infinite consciousness" above overmind, from which it differs in that "the overmind knows the One as the support, essence, fundamental power of all things, but in the dynamic play proper to it it lays emphasis on its divisional power of multiplicity", while in the supermind all is "held together as a harmonised play of the one Existence" even in its "working out of the diversity of the Infinite".

Supermind consciousness. Overmind has not the integrality of the supramental truth but it is n'ell aware of the essential truth of things. Thus overmind gives to the Sacchidananda Brahman the character of a teeming infinite of possibilities which can be developed into worlds or one world.

supermind in overmind ::: (in late 1927 or 1928) supermind manifesting in the higher ranges of the overmind system, a plane of what is later called overmind gnosis.

Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya …

supermind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "The Supermind is the total Truth-Consciousness; the Overmind draws down the truths separately and gives them a separate activity — e.g. in the Supermind the Divine Peace and Power, Knowledge and Will are one. In the Overmind each of these becomes a separate aspect which can exist or act on its own lines apart from the others.

supermind ::: “The Supermind is the total Truth-Consciousness; the Overmind draws down the truths separately and gives them a separate activity—e.g. in the Supermind the Divine Peace and Power, Knowledge and Will are one. In the Overmind each of these becomes a separate aspect which can exist or act on its own lines apart from the others.

supramental ::: (before 1920) same as vijñanamaya or ideal (sometimes restricted to the lower levels of vijñana); (in 1926-27 before 29October 1927) having the nature of supermind and related planes as defined before the introduction of the term overmind and the elevation of "supermind" above "overmind", sometimes applied especially to the planes below supreme supermind; ("the supramental" in some entries of January 1927) the next plane of consciousness above supramentality; (after 29 October 1927) expressing the working of supermind (in the latest sense) on its own plane or in the overmind, where "supramental" movements are sometimes regarded as higher than supramentalised and lower than gnostic.

Supramental Creation ::: Characteristically the old world, the creation of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, was an age of the gods, and consequently the age of religions. As I said, the flower of human effort towards what is above it gave rise to innumerable religious forms, to a religious relationship between the noble souls and the invisible world.And now, all these old things seem so old, so out-of-date, so arbitrary — such a travesty of the real truth. In the supramental creation there will no longer be any religions.The whole life will be the expression, the flowering into forms of the divine Unity manifesting in the world.
   Ref: CWM Vol.09, Page: 151


supramental gnosis ::: (in April 1927) a term comprising the planes called (gnostic) intuition, supermind and gnostic supermind as defined before the introduction of the term overmind and the redefinition of these planes as parts of the overmind system.

supramentalised mind ::: (in late 1927 or 1928) a supramentalised form of mind, one of the lower gradations of the overmind system, mentioned along with supramentality and perhaps corresponding to the supramental or supreme supramental referred to in the earlier terminology of January 1927.

supramentalised mind in overmind ::: (in late 1927 or 1928) an inferior form of the third plane of the overmind system, evidently the result of supramentalised mind being lifted into the true overmind; perhaps a later term for what in January 1927 was referred to as supreme supramental mind in the supreme supermind.

supramentalised overmind ::: (in late 1927 or 1928) a plane or planes of overmind connected with supermind and having a partly supramental character; when distinguished from supramental overmind, the term seems to refer to the higher ranges of true overmind below the line where overmind gnosis begins.

supramentality ::: (in 1927-28) the first plane above the highest ideality, evidently the beginning of what came to be called the overmind system; its levels are referred to as "the supramentalities".

supramental overmind ::: (in late 1927 or 1928) a form of overmind in which the element of supermind is prominent; when distinguished from supramentalised overmind, which seems to be a lower plane, and from the higher plane of gnostic overmind, supramental overmind may be regarded as the beginning of the highest series of overmind planes.Later it is equivalent to overmind gnosis.

supramental reason ::: a term used in April 1927 for some parts of what later in the year came to be called the overmind system; it seems to include grades up to supreme supermind other than gnostic intuition and is possibly related to overmind logos in the diagram on page 1(c. 1931). supreme d dasya

Supramental Transformation ::: The supramental transformation can only come when the lid between the lower and higher hemispheres or halves of existence is removed and the supermind instead of the overmind becomes the governing power of the existence; but of that nothing can be spoken now.
   Ref: SABCL Vol. 22-23-24, Page: 1093


supreme supermind gnosis ::: (in January 1927) gnosis manifesting in the supreme supermind and forming its highest plane, later called supramentalised overmind.

supreme supermind ::: (in 1927 before 29 October) the highest plane below gnosis in the series of planes above ideality, corresponding to true overmind in the later terminology of the overmind system.

supreme supramental mind in the supreme supermind ::: (in January 1927) a grade of consciousness apparently experienced as a result of the supreme supramental being lifted into the supreme supermind by a form of the imperative acting "as an intermediary force", a process also described as "the supreme supermind taking up the supreme supramental supermind"; perhaps equivalent to supramentalised mind in overmind in the terminology adopted for the overmind system later in the same year.

T2 ::: a union of two of the three elements of T3; (in 1914) abbreviation of telepathy-trikaladr.s.t.i, a combination of the knowledge faculties of T3; (usually, from 1917 onwards) abbreviation of trikaladr.s.t.itapassiddhi, representing a united action of the higher faculties of knowledge and will, with telepathy included in or replaced by trikaladr.s.t.i; in the last entries of 1927, this is associated with a "passive-active attitude . . . in which the Ishwara determines and the Powers [of the Overmind] may for a time resist and even modify temporarily what he has determined, but must now or in the end help to carry out his will".

T3 ::: abbreviation of telepathy-trikaladr.s.t.i-tapassiddhi, these three elements "acting separately and not taken up into the union in duality" of T2; in the last entries of 1927, associated with a "passive attitude . . . in which the nature is the plaything of the powers of the Overmind".

The Overmind has to be reached and brought down before the Supermind descent is at all possible—for the Overmind is the passage through which one passes from mind to Supermind.
   Ref: CWSA Vol.28, Letters on Yoga-I, Page: 155


“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.” The Life Divine

“The Overmind is essentially a spiritual power. Mind in it surpasses its ordinary self and rises and takes its stand on a spiritual foundation. It embraces beauty and sublimates it; it has an essential aesthesis which is not limited by rules and canons, it sees a universal and an eternal beauty while it takes up and transforms all that is limited and particular. It is besides concerned with things other than beauty or aesthetics. It is concerned especially with truth and knowledge or rather with a wisdom that exceeds what we call knowledge; its truth goes beyond truth of fact and truth of thought, even the higher thought which is the first spiritual range of the thinker. It has the truth of spiritual thought, spiritual feeling, spiritual sense and at its highest the truth that comes by the most intimate spiritual touch or by identity. Ultimately, truth and beauty come together and coincide, but in between there is a difference. Overmind in all its dealings puts truth first; it brings out the essential truth (and truths) in things and also its infinite possibilities; it brings out even the truth that lies behind falsehood and error; it brings out the truth of the Inconscient and the truth of the Superconscient and all that lies in between. When it speaks through poetry, this remains its first essential quality; a limited aesthetical artistic aim is not its purpose.” Letters on Savitri

The Overmind, therefore, does not and cannot possess the power to transform humanity into divine nature. For that, the Supramental is the sole effective agent. And what exactly differentiates our Yoga from attempts in the past to spiritualise life is that we know that the splendours of the Overmind are not the highest reality but only an intermediate step between the mind and the true Divine.

"The colours of the lotuses and the numbers of petals are respectively, from bottom to top: — (1) the Muladhara or physical consciousness centre, four petals, red; (2) the abdominal centre, six petals, deep purple red; (3) the navel centre, ten petals, violet; (4) the heart centre, twelve petals, golden pink; (5) the throat centre, sixteen petals, grey; (6) the forehead centre between the eye-brows, two petals, white; (7) the thousand-petalled lotus above the head, blue with gold light around. The functions are, according to our yoga, — (1) commanding the physical consciousness and the subconscient; (2) commanding the small vital movements, the little greeds, lusts, desires, the small sense-movements; (3) commanding the larger life-forces and the passions and larger desire-movements; (4) commanding the higher emotional being with the psychic deep behind it; (5) commanding expression and all externalisation of the mind movements and mental forces; (6) commanding thought, will, vision; (7) commanding the higher thinking mind and the illumined mind and opening upwards to the intuition and overmind. The seventh is sometimes or by some identified with the brain, but that is an error — the brain is only a channel of communication situated between the thousand-petalled and the forehead centre. The former is sometimes called the void centre, sunya , either because it is not in the body, but in the apparent void above or because rising above the head one enters first into the silence of the self or spiritual being.” Letters on Yoga*

“The colours of the lotuses and the numbers of petals are respectively, from bottom to top:—(1) the Muladhara or physical consciousness centre, four petals, red; (2) the abdominal centre, six petals, deep purple red; (3) the navel centre, ten petals, violet; (4) the heart centre, twelve petals, golden pink; (5) the throat centre, sixteen petals, grey; (6) the forehead centre between the eye-brows, two petals, white; (7) the thousand-petalled lotus above the head, blue with gold light around. The functions are, according to our yoga,—(1) commanding the physical consciousness and the subconscient; (2) commanding the small vital movements, the little greeds, lusts, desires, the small sense-movements; (3) commanding the larger life-forces and the passions and larger desire-movements; (4) commanding the higher emotional being with the psychic deep behind it; (5) commanding expression and all externalisation of the mind movements and mental forces; (6) commanding thought, will, vision; (7) commanding the higher thinking mind and the illumined mind and opening upwards to the intuition and overmind. The seventh is sometimes or by some identified with the brain, but that is an error—the brain is only a channel of communication situated between the thousand-petalled and the forehead centre. The former is sometimes called the void centre, sunya , either because it is not in the body, but in the apparent void above or because rising above the head one enters first into the silence of the self or spiritual being.” Letters on Yoga

“The cosmic consciousness has many levels—the cosmic physical, the cosmic vital, the cosmic Mind, and above the higher planes of cosmic Mind there is the Intuition and above that the overmind and still above that the supermind where the Transcendental begins. In order to live in the Intuition plane (not merely to receive intuitions), one has to live in the cosmic consciousness because there the cosmic and individual run into each other as it were, and the mental separation between them is already broken down, so nobody can reach there who is still in the separative ego.” Letters on Yoga

"The cosmic consciousness is that in which the limits of ego, personal mind and body disappear and one becomes aware of a cosmic vastness which is or filled by a cosmic spirit and aware also of the direct play of cosmic forces, universal mind forces, universal life forces, universal energies of Matter, universal overmind forces. But one does not become aware of all these together; the opening of the cosmic consciousness is usually progressive. It is not that the ego, the body, the personal mind disappear, but one feels them as only a small part of oneself. One begins to feel others too as part of oneself or varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modified by Nature in other bodies. Or, at the least, as living in the larger universal self which is henceforth one"s own greater reality. All things in fact begin to change their nature and appearance; one"s whole experience of the world is radically different from that of those who are shut up in their personal selves. One begins to know things by a different kind of experience, more direct, not depending on the external mind and the senses. It is not that the possibility of error disappears, for that cannot be so long as mind of any kind is one"s instrument for transcribing knowledge, but there is a new, vast and deep way of experiencing, seeing, knowing, contacting things; and the confines of knowledge can be rolled back to an almost unmeasurable degree. The thing one has to be on guard against in the cosmic consciousness is the play of a magnified ego, the vaster attacks of the hostile forces — for they too are part of the cosmic consciousness — and the attempt of the cosmic Illusion (Ignorance, Avidya) to prevent the growth of the soul into the cosmic Truth. These are things that one has to learn from experience; mental teaching or explanation is quite insufficient. To enter safely into the cosmic consciousness and to pass safely through it, it is necessary to have a strong central unegoistic sincerity and to have the psychic being, with its divination of truth and unfaltering orientation towards the Divine, already in front in ::: —the nature.” Letters on Yoga*

“The cosmic consciousness is that in which the limits of ego, personal mind and body disappear and one becomes aware of a cosmic vastness which is or filled by a cosmic spirit and aware also of the direct play of cosmic forces, universal mind forces, universal life forces, universal energies of Matter, universal overmind forces. But one does not become aware of all these together; the opening of the cosmic consciousness is usually progressive. It is not that the ego, the body, the personal mind disappear, but one feels them as only a small part of oneself. One begins to feel others too as part of oneself or varied repetitions of oneself, the same self modified by Nature in other bodies. Or, at the least, as living in the larger universal self which is henceforth one’s own greater reality. All things in fact begin to change their nature and appearance; one’s whole experience of the world is radically different from that of those who are shut up in their personal selves. One begins to know things by a different kind of experience, more direct, not depending on the external mind and the senses. It is not that the possibility of error disappears, for that cannot be so long as mind of any kind is one’s instrument for transcribing knowledge, but there is a new, vast and deep way of experiencing, seeing, knowing, contacting things; and the confines of knowledge can be rolled back to an almost unmeasurable degree. The thing one has to be on guard against in the cosmic consciousness is the play of a magnified ego, the vaster attacks of the hostile forces—for they too are part of the cosmic consciousness—and the attempt of the cosmic Illusion (Ignorance, Avidya) to prevent the growth of the soul into the cosmic Truth. These are things that one has to learn from experience; mental teaching or explanation is quite insufficient. To enter safely into the cosmic consciousness and to pass safely through it, it is necessary to have a strong central unegoistic sincerity and to have the psychic being, with its divination of truth and unfaltering orientation towards the Divine, already in front in—the nature.” Letters on Yoga

“The Cosmic Spirit or Self contains everything in the cosmos—it upholds cosmic Mind, universal Life, universal Matter as well as the overmind. The Self is more than all these things which are its formulations in Nature.” Letters on Yoga

“The intermediate zone means simply a confused condition or passage in which one is getting out of the personal consciousness and opening into the cosmic (cosmic Mind, cosmic vital, cosmic physical, something perhaps of the cosmic higher Mind) without having yet transcended the human mind levels. One is not in possession of or direct contact with the divine Truth on its own levels , but one can receive something from them, even from the overmind, indirectly. Only, as one is still immersed in the cosmic Ignorance, all that comes from above can be mixed, perverted, taken hold of for their purposes by lower, even by hostile Powers.

The Intuition is the first plane in which there is a real open* ing to the full possibility of realisation ; It U through it that one goes farther — first to the overmind and then to the supermlnd.

The mantra as I have tried to describe it in The Future Poetry is a word of power and light that comes from the Overmind inspiration or from some very high plane of Intuition. Its characteristics are a language that conveys infinitely more than the mere surface sense of the words seems to indicate, a rhythm that means even more than the language and is born out of the Infinite and disappears into it, and the power to convey not merely the mental, vital or physical contents or indications or values of the thing uttered, but its significance and figure in some fundamental and original consciousness which is behind all these and greater.
   Ref: CWSA Vol. 27, Page: 26-27


“The overmind is the highest of the planes below the supramental.” Letters on Yoga

The overmind is the protective Double, a delegate of the

The overmind is the region of the gods, the beings of divine origin who have been charged with supervising, directing and organising the evolution of the universe; and more specifically, since the formation of the earth they have served as messengers and intermediaries to bring to the earth the aid of the higher regions and to preside over the formation of the mind and its progressive ascension. It is usually to the gods of the overmind that the prayers of the various religions are addressed. These religions most often choose, for various reasons, one of these gods and transform him for their personal use into the supreme God.

The overmind is the world of the gods.

“The overmind sees calmly, steadily, in great masses and large extensions of space and time and relation, globally; it creates and acts in the same way—it is the world of the great Gods, the divine Creators.” Letters on Yoga

There is only one psychic being for each human being, but the beings of the higher planes, eg. the Gods of the Overmind can manifest in more than one human body at a time by send- ing different emanations into different bodies.

The spiritual transformation proper begins or becomes possible when one rises above the mind and lives there governing all from above. Even in the psychic transformation one can rise above by a sort of going above of the mental, vital, physical being and a return, but one does not yet live above in the summit consciousness where overmind has its seat with the other planes that are above the human Mind.
   Ref: SABCL Vol. 22-23-24, Page: 1092-93


The world of the Asuras is prior to the evolution, so are the worlds of the mental, vital or subtle-physical Devas — but these beings are different from each other. The great Gods belong to the Overmind plane ::: in the Supennind they are unified as aspects of the Divine, in the Overmind they appear as separate personali- ties. Any godhead can descend by emanation to the physical plane and associate himself with the evolution of a human being with whose line of manlfestion he is in affinity.

thought-Mind ::: Sri Aurobindo: "Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit. Its basic substance is a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable of the formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming, of all of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge. It is therefore a power that has proceeded from the Overmind, — but with the Supermind as its ulterior origin, — as all these greater powers have proceeded: but its special character, its activity of consciousness are dominated by Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of Spirit-born conceptual knowledge. An all-awareness emerging from the original identity, carrying the truths the identity held in itself, conceiving swiftly, victoriously, multitudinously, formulating and by self-power of the Idea effectually realising its conceptions, is the character of this greater mind of knowledge. " *The Life Divine

tions; 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. …

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. …

—we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; for though we have applied that word for want of a better to any supra-intellectual direct way of knowing, yet what we actually know as intuition is only one special movement of self-existent knowledge. This new range is its origin; it imparts to our intuitions something of its own distinct character and is very clearly an intermediary of a greater Truth-Light with which our mind cannot directly communicate. At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies,—not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality. This then is the occult link we were looking for; this is the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance….

What is the work of the Overmind?



QUOTES [26 / 26 - 27 / 27]


KEYS (10k)

   20 Sri Aurobindo
   3 The Mother
   1 Satprem
   1 Ken Wilber?
   1 Ken Wilber

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

   19 Sri Aurobindo
   2 The Mother
   2 Ken Wilber

1:Division of consciousness is the basis of the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya,
2:A pure intuition is a rare occurrence in our mental activity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya,
3:Mind as we know it is a power of the Ignorance seeking for Truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya,
4:The highest heights of mind or of overmind come still within the belt of a mitigated ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Vijnana or Gnosis,
5:Then stretches the boundless finite's last expanse,
The cosmic empire of the Overmind,
Time's buffer state bordering Eternity, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,
6:The Overmind has to be reached and brought down before the Supermind descent is at all possible-for the Overmind is the passage through which one passes from mind to Supermind.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, 155,
7:The radiant world of the everlasting Truth
Glimmered like a faint star bordering the night
Above the golden Overmind's shimmering ridge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Soul's Release,
8:Radha-krishna
The radiant world of the everlasting Truth
Glimmered like a faint star bordering the night
Above the golden Overmind's shimmering ridge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Soul's Release,
9:It is (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly) by the power of the Overmind releasing the mind from its close partitions that the cosmic consciousness opens in the seeker and he becomes aware of the cosmic spirit and the play of the cosmic forces.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, 152,
10:Till Nature is ready, the supramental Force has to act indirectly; it puts the intermediary powers of overmind or intuition in front, or it works through a modification of itself to which the already half-transformed being can be wholly or partially respo ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Ascent towards Supermind,
11:In the Upanishad the sun is the symbol of the supramental Truth and it is said that those who pass into it may return but those who pass through the gates of the Sun itself do not; possibly this means that an ascent into the supermind itself above the golden lid of overmind was the definitive liberation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,
12: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. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya,
13:There are gods of the Overmind who are the great creators of the earth - until now. There are the gods of the Vedas who are mentioned in everything that has come down from the Rishis. And there are the gods of the Supermind, those who are going to manifest on earth, although of course they exist from all eternity on their own plane. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1957-1958,
14:The High-Subtle Self ::: "...cognitive style- actual intuition and literal inspiration, archetypal Form, audible illumination, revelations of light and sound affective elements- rapture, bliss, ecstatic release into superconsciousness motivational/conative factors-karuna, compassion, overwhelming love and gratefulness temporal mode- transtemporal, moving into eternity mode of self- archetypal-divine, overself, overmind." ~ Ken Wilber, The Atman Project pg.80,
15:It is from the Overmind that all these different arrangements of the creative Truth of things originate. Out of the Overmind they come down to the Intuition and are transmitted from it to the Illumined and higher Mind to be arranged there for our intelligence. But they lose more and more of their power and certitude in the transmission as they come down to the lower levels. What energy of directly perceived Truth they have is lost in the human mind; for to the human intellect they present themselves only as speculative ideas, not as realised Truth, not as direct sight, a dynamic vision coupled with a concrete undeniable experience.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, 155,
16:The intermediate zone means simply a confused condition or passage in which one is getting out of the personal consciousness and opening into the cosmic (cosmic Mind, cosmic vital, cosmic physical, something perhaps of the cosmic higherMind) without having yet transcended the human mind levels. One is not in possession of or direct contact with the divine Truth on its own levels, but one can receive something from them, even from the Overmind, indirectly.Only, as one is still immersed in the cosmic Ignorance, all that comes from above can be mixed, perverted, taken hold of for their purposes by lower, even by hostile Powers.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Himself And The Ashram, 118,
17:... All the works of mind and intllect must be first heightened and widened, then illumined, lifted into the domain of a higher Intelligence, afterwards translated into workings of a greater non-mental Intuition, these again transformed into the dynamic outpourings of the Overmind radiance, and those transfigured into the full light and sovereignty of the supramental Gnosis. It is this that the evolution of consciousness in the world carries prefigured but latent in its seed and in the straining tense intention of its process; nor can that process, that evolution cease till it has evolved the instruments of a perfect in place of its now imperfect manifestation of the Spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, 149,
18:Overmind is the highest source of the cosmic consciousness available to the embodied being in the Ignorance. It is part of the cosmic consciousness-but the human individual when he opens into the cosmic usually remains in the cosmic Mind-Life-Matter receiving only inspirations and influences from the higher planes of Intuition and Overmind. He receives through the spiritualised higher and illumined mind the fundamental experiences on which spiritual knowledge is based; he can become even full of intuitive mind movements, illuminations, various kinds of powers and illumined light, liberation, Ananda. But to rise fully into the Intuition is rare, to reach the Overmind still rarer- although influences and experiences can come down from there.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, 152,
19:Finally, in terms of overall spiritual intelligence-which we have been briefly tracking-on the other side of the leading edge of evolution we have 3 or 4 higher, at this point mostly potential, levels of development, including levels of spiritual intelligence. Individually, their basic strcture-rungs are referred to as para-mind, meta-mind, overmind, and supermind; collectively, they are called 3rd tier. What all 3rd-tier structures have in common is some degree of direct transpersonal identity and experience. Further, each 3rd-tier structure of consciousness is integrated, in some fashion, with a particular state of consciousness (often, para-mental with the gross, meta-mental with subtle, overmind with causal/Witnessing, and supermind with nondual, although this varies with each individual's actual history).
   ~ Ken Wilber?,
20:Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the spirit. Its basic substance is a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable of the formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming, of all of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge. It is therefore a power that has proceeded from the Overmind,-but with the Supermind as its ulterior origin,-as all these greater powers have proceeded: but its special character, its activity of consciousness are dominated by Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of spirit-born conceptual knowledge.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,
21:If we regard the Powers of the Reality as so many Godheads, we can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, communication and interplay with the others.
There are in the Veda different formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Existence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods together or contains them in his being; and yet again each is a separate Deity acting sometimes in unison with companion deities, sometimes separately, sometimes even in apparent opposition to other Godheads of the same Existence. In the Supermind all this would be held together as a harmonised play of the one Existence; in the Overmind each of these three conditions could be a separate action or basis of action and have its own principle of development and consequences and yet each keep the power to combine with the others in a more composite harmony. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind Mind and the Overmind Maya,
22:If we are religious-minded, perhaps we will see the gods who inhabit this world. Beings, forces, sounds, lights, and rhythms are just so many true forms of the same indefinable, but not unknowable, Essence we call God; we have spoken of God, and made temples, laws or poems to try to capture the one little pulsation filling us with sunshine, but it is free as the wind on foam-flecked shores. We may also enter the world of music, which in fact is not different from the others but a special extension of this same, great inexpressible Vibration. If once, only once, even for a few moments in a lifetime, we can hear that Music, that Joy singing above, we will know what Beethoven and Bach heard; we will know what God is because we will have heard God. We will probably not say anything grandiose; we will just know that That exists, whereupon all the suffering in the world will seem redeemed.
   At the extreme summit of the overmind, there only remain great waves of multi-hued light, says the Mother, the play of spiritual forces, which later translate - sometimes much later - into new ideas, social changes, or earthly events, after crossing one by one all the layers of consciousness and suffering a considerable distortion and loss of light...
   ~ Satprem, Sri Aurobindo Or The Adventure Of Consciousness,
23:Supermind and the human mind are a number of ranges, planes or layers of consciousness - one can regard it in various ways - in which the element or substance of mind and consequently its movements also become more and more illumined and powerful and wide. The Overmind is the highest of these ranges; it is full of lights and powers; but from the point of view of what is above it, it is the line of the soul's turning away from the complete and indivisible knowledge and its descent towards the Ignorance. For although it draws from the Truth, it is here that begins the separation of aspects of the Truth, the forces and their working out as if they were independent truths and this is a process that ends, as one descends to ordinary Mind, Life and Matter, in a complete division, fragmentation, separation from the indivisible Truth above. There is no longer the essential, total, perfectly harmonising and unifying knowledge, or rather knowledge for ever harmonious because for ever one, which is the character of Supermind. In the Supermind mental divisions and oppositions cease, the problems created by our dividing and fragmenting mind disappear and Truth is seen as a luminous whole. In the Overmind there is not yet the actual fall into Ignorance, but the first step is taken which will make the fall inevitable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I,
24:What is "the heavenly archetype of the lotus"?
  
It means the primal idea of the lotus.
   Each thing that is expressed physically was conceived somewhere before being realised materially.
   There is an entire world which is the world of the fashioners, where all conceptions are made. And this world is very high, much higher than all the worlds of the mind; and from there these formations, these creations, these types which have been conceived by the fashioners come down and are expressed in physical realisations. And there is always a great distance between the perfection of the idea and what is materialised. Very often the materialised things are like caricatures in comparison with the primal idea. This is what he calls the archetype. This takes place in worlds... not always the same ones, it depends on the things; but for many things in the physical, the primal ideas, these archetypes, were in what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind.
   But there is a still higher domain than this where the origins are still purer, and if one reaches this, attains this, one finds the absolutely pure types of what is manifested upon earth. And then it is very interesting to compare, to see to what an extent earthly creation is a frightful distortion. And moreover, it is only when one can reach these regions and see the reality of things in their essence that one can work with knowledge to transform them here; otherwise on what can we take our stand to conceive a better world, more perfect, more beautiful than the existing one? It can't be on our imagination which is itself something very poor and very material. But if one can enter that consciousness, rise right up to these higher worlds of creation, then with this in one's consciousness one can work at making material things take their real form. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955, 121,
25:If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, - an image which in this experience becomes a reality, - we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; for though we have applied that word for want of a better to any supra-intellectual direct way of knowing, yet what we actually know as intuition is only one special movement of self-existent knowledge. This new range is its origin; it imparts to our intuitions something of its own distinct character and is very clearly an intermediary of a greater Truth-Light with which our mind cannot directly communicate. At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, - not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality. This then is the occult link we were looking for; this is the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind Mind and the Overmind Maya, 293,
26:If the Divine that is all love is the source of the creation, whence have come all the evils abounding upon earth?"

   "All is from the Divine; but the One Consciousness, the Supreme has not created the world directly out of itself; a Power has gone out of it and has descended through many gradations of its workings and passed through many agents. There are many creators or rather 'formateurs', form-makers, who have presided over the creation of the world. They are intermediary agents and I prefer to call them 'Formateurs' and not 'Creators'; for what they have done is to give the form and turn and nature to matter. There have been many, and some have formed things harmonious and benignant and some have shaped things mischievous and evil. And some too have been distorters rather than builders, for they have interfered and spoiled what was begun well by others." - Questions and Answers 1929 - 1931 (30 June 1929)

   You say, "Many creators or rather 'formateurs', formmakers, have presided over the creation of the world." Who are these 'formateurs'?

   That depends. They have been given many names. All has been done by gradations and through individual beings of all kinds. Each state of being is inhabited by entities, individualities and personalities and each one has created a world around him or has contributed to the formation of certain beings upon earth. The last creators are those of the vital world, but there are beings of the Overmind (Sri Aurobindo calls this plane the Overmind), who have created, given forms, sent out emanations, and these emanations again had their emanations and so on. What I meant is that it is not the Divine Will that acted directly on Matter to give to the world the required form, it is by passing through layers, so to say, planes of the world, as for example, the mental plane - there are so many beings on the mental plane who are form-makers, who have taken part in the formation of some beings who have incarnated upon earth. On the vital plane also the same thing happens.

   For example, there is a tradition which says that the whole world of insects is the outcome of the form-makers of the vital world, and that this is why they take such absolutely diabolical shapes when they are magnified under the microscope. You saw the other day, when you were shown the microbes in water? Naturally the pictures were made to amuse, to strike the imagination, but they are based on real forms, so magnified, however, that they look like monsters. Almost the whole world of insects is a world of microscopic monsters which, had they been larger in size, would have been quite terrifying. So it is said these are entities of the vital world, beings of the vital who created that for fun and amused themselves forming all these impossible beasts which make human life altogether unpleasant.

   Did these intermediaries also come out of the Divine Power?
   Through intermediaries, yes, not directly. These beings are not in direct contact with the Divine (there are exceptions, I mean as a general rule), they are beings who are in relation with other beings, who are again in relation with others, and these with still others, and so on, in a hierarchy, up to the Supreme.(to be continued....) ~ The Mother, Question and Answers,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:Division of consciousness is the basis of the Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya,
2:A pure intuition is a rare occurrence in our mental activity. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya,
3:Mind as we know it is a power of the Ignorance seeking for Truth. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya,
4:The highest heights of mind or of overmind come still within the belt of a mitigated ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, Vijnana or Gnosis,
5:Then stretches the boundless finite’s last expanse,
The cosmic empire of the Overmind,
Time’s buffer state bordering Eternity, ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real,
6:The Overmind has to be reached and brought down before the Supermind descent is at all possible-for the Overmind is the passage through which one passes from mind to Supermind.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, 155,
7:The radiant world of the everlasting Truth
Glimmered like a faint star bordering the night
Above the golden Overmind’s shimmering ridge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Soul’s Release,
8:Radha-krishna
The radiant world of the everlasting Truth
Glimmered like a faint star bordering the night
Above the golden Overmind’s shimmering ridge. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, The Yoga of the King, The Yoga of the Soul’s Release,
9:It is (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly) by the power of the Overmind releasing the mind from its close partitions that the cosmic consciousness opens in the seeker and he becomes aware of the cosmic spirit and the play of the cosmic forces.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, 152,
10:Till Nature is ready, the supramental Force has to act indirectly; it puts the intermediary powers of overmind or intuition in front, or it works through a modification of itself to which the already half-transformed being can be wholly or partially respo ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, The Ascent towards Supermind,
11:In the Upanishad the sun is the symbol of the supramental Truth and it is said that those who pass into it may return but those who pass through the gates of the Sun itself do not; possibly this means that an ascent into the supermind itself above the golden lid of overmind was the definitive liberation. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - II,
12:There is a belief that there is a hyperobject called Overmind, or God, that casts a shadow into time. History is our group experience if this shadow. As one draws closer and closer to the source of the shadow, the paradoxes intensify, the rate of change intensifies. What is happening is that the hyperobject is beginning to ingress into three-dimensional space. ~ Terence McKenna,
13:There are gods of the Overmind who are the great creators of the earth - until now. There are the gods of the Vedas who are mentioned in everything that has come down from the Rishis. And there are the gods of the Supermind, those who are going to manifest on earth, although of course they exist from all eternity on their own plane. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1957-1958,
14:The High-Subtle Self ::: "...cognitive style- actual intuition and literal inspiration, archetypal Form, audible illumination, revelations of light and sound affective elements- rapture, bliss, ecstatic release into superconsciousness motivational/conative factors-karuna, compassion, overwhelming love and gratefulness temporal mode- transtemporal, moving into eternity mode of self- archetypal-divine, overself, overmind." ~ Ken Wilber, The Atman Project pg.80,
15:It is from the Overmind that all these different arrangements of the creative Truth of things originate. Out of the Overmind they come down to the Intuition and are transmitted from it to the Illumined and higher Mind to be arranged there for our intelligence. But they lose more and more of their power and certitude in the transmission as they come down to the lower levels. What energy of directly perceived Truth they have is lost in the human mind; for to the human intellect they present themselves only as speculative ideas, not as realised Truth, not as direct sight, a dynamic vision coupled with a concrete undeniable experience.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, 155,
16:The intermediate zone means simply a confused condition or passage in which one is getting out of the personal consciousness and opening into the cosmic (cosmic Mind, cosmic vital, cosmic physical, something perhaps of the cosmic higherMind) without having yet transcended the human mind levels. One is not in possession of or direct contact with the divine Truth on its own levels, but one can receive something from them, even from the Overmind, indirectly.Only, as one is still immersed in the cosmic Ignorance, all that comes from above can be mixed, perverted, taken hold of for their purposes by lower, even by hostile Powers.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Himself And The Ashram, 118,
17:... All the works of mind and intllect must be first heightened and widened, then illumined, lifted into the domain of a higher Intelligence, afterwards translated into workings of a greater non-mental Intuition, these again transformed into the dynamic outpourings of the Overmind radiance, and those transfigured into the full light and sovereignty of the supramental Gnosis. It is this that the evolution of consciousness in the world carries prefigured but latent in its seed and in the straining tense intention of its process; nor can that process, that evolution cease till it has evolved the instruments of a perfect in place of its now imperfect manifestation of the Spirit. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis Of Yoga, The Ascent of the Sacrifice - 1, 149,
18:Overmind is the highest source of the cosmic consciousness available to the embodied being in the Ignorance. It is part of the cosmic consciousness-but the human individual when he opens into the cosmic usually remains in the cosmic Mind-Life-Matter receiving only inspirations and influences from the higher planes of Intuition and Overmind. He receives through the spiritualised higher and illumined mind the fundamental experiences on which spiritual knowledge is based; he can become even full of intuitive mind movements, illuminations, various kinds of powers and illumined light, liberation, Ananda. But to rise fully into the Intuition is rare, to reach the Overmind still rarer- although influences and experiences can come down from there.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I, 152,
19:Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the spirit. Its basic substance is a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable of the formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming, of all of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge. It is therefore a power that has proceeded from the Overmind,-but with the Supermind as its ulterior origin,-as all these greater powers have proceeded: but its special character, its activity of consciousness are dominated by Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of spirit-born conceptual knowledge.
   ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine,
20:Finally, in terms of overall spiritual intelligence-which we have been briefly tracking-on the other side of the leading edge of evolution we have 3 or 4 higher, at this point mostly potential, levels of development, including levels of spiritual intelligence. Individually, their basic strcture-rungs are referred to as para-mind, meta-mind, overmind, and supermind; collectively, they are called 3rd tier. What all 3rd-tier structures have in common is some degree of direct transpersonal identity and experience. Further, each 3rd-tier structure of consciousness is integrated, in some fashion, with a particular state of consciousness (often, para-mental with the gross, meta-mental with subtle, overmind with causal/Witnessing, and supermind with nondual, although this varies with each individual's actual history).
   ~ Ken Wilber?,
21:If we regard the Powers of the Reality as so many Godheads, we can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, communication and interplay with the others.
There are in the Veda different formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Existence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods together or contains them in his being; and yet again each is a separate Deity acting sometimes in unison with companion deities, sometimes separately, sometimes even in apparent opposition to other Godheads of the same Existence. In the Supermind all this would be held together as a harmonised play of the one Existence; in the Overmind each of these three conditions could be a separate action or basis of action and have its own principle of development and consequences and yet each keep the power to combine with the others in a more composite harmony. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind Mind and the Overmind Maya,
22:If we are religious-minded, perhaps we will see the gods who inhabit this world. Beings, forces, sounds, lights, and rhythms are just so many true forms of the same indefinable, but not unknowable, Essence we call God; we have spoken of God, and made temples, laws or poems to try to capture the one little pulsation filling us with sunshine, but it is free as the wind on foam-flecked shores. We may also enter the world of music, which in fact is not different from the others but a special extension of this same, great inexpressible Vibration. If once, only once, even for a few moments in a lifetime, we can hear that Music, that Joy singing above, we will know what Beethoven and Bach heard; we will know what God is because we will have heard God. We will probably not say anything grandiose; we will just know that That exists, whereupon all the suffering in the world will seem redeemed.
   At the extreme summit of the overmind, there only remain great waves of multi-hued light, says the Mother, the play of spiritual forces, which later translate - sometimes much later - into new ideas, social changes, or earthly events, after crossing one by one all the layers of consciousness and suffering a considerable distortion and loss of light...
   ~ Satprem, Sri Aurobindo Or The Adventure Of Consciousness,
23:Supermind and the human mind are a number of ranges, planes or layers of consciousness - one can regard it in various ways - in which the element or substance of mind and consequently its movements also become more and more illumined and powerful and wide. The Overmind is the highest of these ranges; it is full of lights and powers; but from the point of view of what is above it, it is the line of the soul's turning away from the complete and indivisible knowledge and its descent towards the Ignorance. For although it draws from the Truth, it is here that begins the separation of aspects of the Truth, the forces and their working out as if they were independent truths and this is a process that ends, as one descends to ordinary Mind, Life and Matter, in a complete division, fragmentation, separation from the indivisible Truth above. There is no longer the essential, total, perfectly harmonising and unifying knowledge, or rather knowledge for ever harmonious because for ever one, which is the character of Supermind. In the Supermind mental divisions and oppositions cease, the problems created by our dividing and fragmenting mind disappear and Truth is seen as a luminous whole. In the Overmind there is not yet the actual fall into Ignorance, but the first step is taken which will make the fall inevitable. ~ Sri Aurobindo, Letters On Yoga - I,
24:If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, - an image which in this experience becomes a reality, - we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; for though we have applied that word for want of a better to any supra-intellectual direct way of knowing, yet what we actually know as intuition is only one special movement of self-existent knowledge. This new range is its origin; it imparts to our intuitions something of its own distinct character and is very clearly an intermediary of a greater Truth-Light with which our mind cannot directly communicate. At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, - not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality. This then is the occult link we were looking for; this is the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance. ~ Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Supermind Mind and the Overmind Maya, 293,
25:What is "the heavenly archetype of the lotus"?
  
It means the primal idea of the lotus.
   Each thing that is expressed physically was conceived somewhere before being realised materially.
   There is an entire world which is the world of the fashioners, where all conceptions are made. And this world is very high, much higher than all the worlds of the mind; and from there these formations, these creations, these types which have been conceived by the fashioners come down and are expressed in physical realisations. And there is always a great distance between the perfection of the idea and what is materialised. Very often the materialised things are like caricatures in comparison with the primal idea. This is what he calls the archetype. This takes place in worlds... not always the same ones, it depends on the things; but for many things in the physical, the primal ideas, these archetypes, were in what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind.
   But there is a still higher domain than this where the origins are still purer, and if one reaches this, attains this, one finds the absolutely pure types of what is manifested upon earth. And then it is very interesting to compare, to see to what an extent earthly creation is a frightful distortion. And moreover, it is only when one can reach these regions and see the reality of things in their essence that one can work with knowledge to transform them here; otherwise on what can we take our stand to conceive a better world, more perfect, more beautiful than the existing one? It can't be on our imagination which is itself something very poor and very material. But if one can enter that consciousness, rise right up to these higher worlds of creation, then with this in one's consciousness one can work at making material things take their real form. ~ The Mother, Questions And Answers 1955, 121,
26:Finally, in terms of overall spiritual intelligence—which we have been briefly tracking—on the other side of the leading edge of evolution we have 3 or 4 higher, at this point mostly potential, levels of development, including levels of spiritual intelligence. Individually, their basic strcture-rungs are referred to as para-mind, meta-mind, overmind, and supermind; collectively, they are called 3rd tier. What all 3rd-tier structures have in common is some degree of direct transpersonal identity and experience. Further, each 3rd-tier structure of consciousness is integrated, in some fashion, with a particular state of consciousness (often, para-mental with the gross, meta-mental with subtle, overmind with causal/Witnessing, and supermind with nondual, although this varies with each individual’s actual history). Previously, in 1sst and 2nd tier, structures and states were relatively independent. One could have a state center of gravity at gross and yet structurally evolve all the way to Integral without fully objectifying the gross stage (i.e., fully making it an object, fully transcending it). But beginning with the 3rd-tier para-mind, whenever you experience that structure, you also implicitly or intuitively understand or experience the gross realm as objectified, which means that state is intimately connected to the structure at this level, which gives rise, or can give rise, to expanded states such as nature mysticism (this can be experienced at earlier levels but not inherently, and is interpreted according to the Views of those lower levels; but at this level becomes an inherent potential). Likewise, because of the conjunction with the gross state, this level often carries variations of the realization that the physical world is not merely physical, but is rather psychophysical in its true nature. This can also evoke flashes of higher state presences, such as Witnessing states or even nondual. And so on with the subtle state and meta-mind; causal/Witnessing and overmind; and nondual Suchness and supermind. Those states are all “minimally” connected to those structures, in the sesne that, for example, a person at meta-mind might have already and previously moved his or her state center of gravity to subtle, but if not, the person cannot proceed beyond the meta-mind without doing so at this point. And likewise with causal/Witnessing and overmind; and nondual Suchness and supermind. ~ Ken Wilber,
27:"If the Divine that is all love is the source of the creation, whence have come all the evils abounding upon earth?"

   "All is from the Divine; but the One Consciousness, the Supreme has not created the world directly out of itself; a Power has gone out of it and has descended through many gradations of its workings and passed through many agents. There are many creators or rather 'formateurs', form-makers, who have presided over the creation of the world. They are intermediary agents and I prefer to call them 'Formateurs' and not 'Creators'; for what they have done is to give the form and turn and nature to matter. There have been many, and some have formed things harmonious and benignant and some have shaped things mischievous and evil. And some too have been distorters rather than builders, for they have interfered and spoiled what was begun well by others." - Questions and Answers 1929 - 1931 (30 June 1929)

   You say, "Many creators or rather 'formateurs', formmakers, have presided over the creation of the world." Who are these 'formateurs'?

   That depends. They have been given many names. All has been done by gradations and through individual beings of all kinds. Each state of being is inhabited by entities, individualities and personalities and each one has created a world around him or has contributed to the formation of certain beings upon earth. The last creators are those of the vital world, but there are beings of the Overmind (Sri Aurobindo calls this plane the Overmind), who have created, given forms, sent out emanations, and these emanations again had their emanations and so on. What I meant is that it is not the Divine Will that acted directly on Matter to give to the world the required form, it is by passing through layers, so to say, planes of the world, as for example, the mental plane - there are so many beings on the mental plane who are form-makers, who have taken part in the formation of some beings who have incarnated upon earth. On the vital plane also the same thing happens.

   For example, there is a tradition which says that the whole world of insects is the outcome of the form-makers of the vital world, and that this is why they take such absolutely diabolical shapes when they are magnified under the microscope. You saw the other day, when you were shown the microbes in water? Naturally the pictures were made to amuse, to strike the imagination, but they are based on real forms, so magnified, however, that they look like monsters. Almost the whole world of insects is a world of microscopic monsters which, had they been larger in size, would have been quite terrifying. So it is said these are entities of the vital world, beings of the vital who created that for fun and amused themselves forming all these impossible beasts which make human life altogether unpleasant.

   Did these intermediaries also come out of the Divine Power?
   Through intermediaries, yes, not directly. These beings are not in direct contact with the Divine (there are exceptions, I mean as a general rule), they are beings who are in relation with other beings, who are again in relation with others, and these with still others, and so on, in a hierarchy, up to the Supreme.(to be continued....) ~ The Mother, Question and Answers,

IN CHAPTERS [180/180]



  123 Integral Yoga


   86 Sri Aurobindo
   58 The Mother
   39 Satprem
   23 Nolini Kanta Gupta
   5 A B Purani
   3 George Van Vrekhem


   14 Letters On Yoga I
   12 The Life Divine
   10 Letters On Yoga III
   10 Letters On Yoga II
   10 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03
   9 The Synthesis Of Yoga
   8 Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness
   8 Agenda Vol 03
   7 Letters On Yoga IV
   7 Letters On Poetry And Art
   5 Questions And Answers 1929-1931
   5 Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo
   4 Questions And Answers 1956
   4 Questions And Answers 1955
   4 Questions And Answers 1953
   4 Agenda Vol 08
   3 Savitri
   3 Record of Yoga
   3 Questions And Answers 1957-1958
   3 Preparing for the Miraculous
   3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06
   3 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04
   3 Agenda Vol 05
   3 Agenda Vol 04
   2 Words Of The Mother III
   2 Questions And Answers 1954
   2 Questions And Answers 1950-1951
   2 On Thoughts And Aphorisms
   2 Essays In Philosophy And Yoga
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05
   2 Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01
   2 Agenda Vol 13
   2 Agenda Vol 07
   2 Agenda Vol 02
   2 Agenda Vol 01


00.03 - Upanishadic Symbolism, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 02, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The third in the line of ascension is the region of Varuna and the Adityas, that is to say, of the large Mind and its lightsperhaps it can be connected with Tantric Ajnachakra. The fourth is the domain of Soma and the Marutsthis seems to be the inner heart, the fount of delight and keen and sweeping aspirations the Anahata of the Tantras. The fifth is the region of the crown of the head, the domain of Brahma and the Sadhyas: it is the Overmind status from where comes the descending inflatus, the creative Maya of Brahma. And when you go beyond, you pass into the ultimate status of the Sun, the reality absolute, the Transcendent which is indescribable, unseizable, indeterminate, indeterminable, incommensurable; and once there, one never returns, neverna ca punarvartate na ca punarvartate.
   VIII. How Many Gods?

0.08 - Letters to a Young Captain, #Some Answers From The Mother, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  What is the work of the Overmind?3
  The Overmind is the region of the gods, the beings of divine
  origin who have been charged with supervising, directing and
  --
  progressive ascension. It is usually to the gods of the Overmind
  that the prayers of the various religions are addressed. These religions most often choose, for various reasons, one of these gods
  --
  a zone corresponding to the Overmind and an Overmind consciousness, before one can rise above it, to the Supermind, or
  open oneself to it.
  --
  development and mastery of the Overmind.
  27 November 1959
  --
  What is meant by "a zone corresponding to the Overmind" and how can one develop it in oneself? What is
  meant by the "mastery of the Overmind"?
  The individual being is made up of states of being corresponding
  --
  I spoke of when I mentioned the mastery of the Overmind.
  It goes without saying that all this is not done in a day,
  --
  "There is as yet no Overmind being or organised Overmind nature, no supramental being or organised supermind nature acting either on our surface or in our
  normal subliminal parts."4 Sweet Mother, now after the
  --
  and organised Overmind being and Overmind life, and still fewer
  are those who have an organised supramental being and supramental life, even admitting that there are any at all. Certainly
  --
  he opens to the higher mind and Overmind, and through those
  Series Eight - To a Young Captain

01.02 - Natures Own Yoga, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The first contact that one has with this static supra-reality is through the higher ranges of the mind: a direct and closer communion is established through a plane which is just above the mind the Overmind, as Sri Aurobindo calls it. The Overmind dissolves or transcends the ego-consciousness which limits the being to its individualised formation bounded by an outward and narrow frame or sheath of mind, life and body; it reveals the universal Self and Spirit, the cosmic godhead and its myriad forces throwing up myriad forms; the world-existence there appears as a play of ever-shifting veils upon the face of one ineffable reality, as a mysterious cycle of perpetual creation and destructionit is the overwhelming vision given by Sri Krishna to Arjuna in the Gita. At the same time, the initial and most intense experience which this cosmic consciousness brings is the extreme relativity, contingency and transitoriness of the whole flux, and a necessity seems logically and psychologically imperative to escape into the abiding substratum, the ineffable Absoluteness.
   This has been the highest consummation, the supreme goal which the purest spiritual experience and the deepest aspiration of the human consciousness generally sought to attain. But in this view, the world or creation or Nature came in the end to be looked upon as fundamentally a product of Ignorance: ignorance and suffering and incapacity and death were declared to be the very hallmark of things terrestrial. The Light that dwells above and beyond can be made to shed for a while some kind of lustre upon the mortal darkness but never altogether to remove or change itto live in the full light, to be in and of the Light means to pass beyond. Not that there have not been other strands and types of spiritual experiences and aspirations, but the one we are considering has always struck the major chord and dominated and drowned all the rest.
   But the initial illusory consciousness of the Overmind need not at all lead to the static Brahmic consciousness or Sunyam alone. As a matter of fact, there is in this particular processes of consciousness a hiatus between the two, between Maya and Brahman, as though one has to leap from the one into the other somehow. This hiatus is filled up in Sri Aurobindo's Yoga by the principle of Supermind, not synthetic-analytic2 in knowledge like Overmind and the highest mental intelligence, but inescapably unitarian even in the utmost diversity. Supermind is the Truth-consciousness at once static and dynamic, self-existent and creative: in Supermind the Brahmic consciousness Sachchidanandais ever self-aware and ever manifested and embodied in fundamental truth-powers and truth-forms for the play of creation; it is the plane where the One breaks out into the Many and the Many still remain one, being and knowing themselves to be but various self-expressions of the One; it develops the spiritual archetypes, the divine names and forms of all individualisations of an evolving existence.
   SRI AUROBINDO
   The Upanishads speak of a solar and a lunar Path in the spiritual consciousness. Perhaps they have some reference to these two linesone through the Mayic consciousness of the Overmind enters into the static Bliss, ecstatic Nihil, and the other mounts still farther to the solar status which is a mass, a sea, an infinity of that light and ecstasy but which can at the same time express and embody itself as the creative Truth-consciousness (srya svitr ).
   In the Supermind things exist in their perfect spiritual reality; each is consciously the divine reality in its transcendent essence, its cosmic extension, its, spiritual individuality; the diversity of a manifested existence is there, but the mutually exclusive separativeness has not yet arisen. The ego, the knot of separativity, appears at a later and lower stage of involution; what is here is indivisible nexus of individualising centres of the one eternal truth of being. Where Supermind and Overmind meet, one can see the multiple godheads, each distinct in his own truth and beauty and power and yet all together forming the one supreme consciousness infinitely composite and inalienably integral. But stepping back into Supermind one sees something moreOneness gathering into itself all diversity, not destroying it, but annulling and forbidding the separative consciousness that is the beginning of Ignorance. The first shadow of the Illusory Consciousness, the initial possibility of the movement of Ignorance comes in when the supramental light enters the penumbra of the mental sphere. The movement of Supermind is the movement of light without obscurity, straight, unwavering, unswerving, absolute. The Force here contains and holds in their oneness of Reality the manifold but not separated lines of essential and unalloyed truth: its march is the inevitable progression of each one assured truth entering into and upholding every other and therefore its creation, play or action admits of no trial or stumble or groping or deviation; for each truth rests on all others and on that which harmonises them all and does not act as a Power diverging from and even competing with other Powers of being. In the Overmind commences the play of divergent possibilities the simple, direct, united and absolute certainties of the supramental consciousness retire, as it were, a step behind and begin to work themselves out through the interaction first of separately individualised and then of contrary and contradictory forces. In the Overmind there is a conscious underlying Unity but yet each Power, Truth, Aspect of that Unity is encouraged to work out its possibilities as if it were sufficient to itself and the others are used by it for its own enhancement until in the denser and darker reaches below Overmind this turns out a thing of blind conflict and battle and, as it would appear, of chance survival. Creation or manifestation originally means the concretisation or devolution of the powers of Conscious Being into a play of united diversity; but on the line which ends in Matter it enters into more and more obscure forms and forces and finally the virtual eclipse of the supreme light of the Divine Consciousness. Creation as it descends' towards the Ignorance becomes an involution of the Spirit through Mind and Life into Matter; evolution is a movement backward, a return journey from Matter towards the Spirit: it is the unravelling, the gradual disclosure and deliverance of the Spirit, the ascension and revelation of the involved consciousness through a series of awakeningsMatter awakening into Life, Life awakening into Mind and Mind now seeking to awaken into something beyond the Mind, into a power of conscious Spirit.
   The apparent or actual result of the movement of Nescienceof Involutionhas been an increasing negation of the Spirit, but its hidden purpose is ultimately to embody the Spirit in Matter, to express here below in cosmic Time-Space the splendours of the timeless Reality. The material body came into existence bringing with it inevitably, as it seemed, mortality; it appeared even to be fashioned out of mortality, in order that in this very frame and field of mortality, Immortality, the eternal Spirit Consciousness which is the secret truth and reality in Time itself as well as behind it, might be established and that the Divine might be possessed, or rather, possess itself not in one unvarying mode of the static consciousness, as it does even now behind the cosmic play, but in the play itself and in the multiple mode of the terrestrial existence.
  --
   The Supermind is not merely synthetic. The Supermind is synthetic only on the lowest spaces of itself, where it has to prepare the principles of Overmind,synthesis is necessary only where analysis has taken place, one has dissected everything, put in pieces (analysis), so one has to piece together. But Supermind is unitarian, has never divided up, so it does not need to add and piece together the parts and fragments. It has always held the conscious Many together in the conscious One.
   ***

01.03 - The Yoga of the King - The Yoga of the Souls Release, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Above the golden Overmind's shimmering ridge.
  Even were caught as through a cunning veil

0 1958-08-09, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   Evidently the gods of the Puranas are a good deal worse than human beings, as we saw in that film the other day1 (and that story was absolutely true). The gods of the Overmind are infinitely more egocentric the only thing that counts for them is their power, the extent of their power. Man has in addition a psychic being, so consequently he has true love and compassionwherein lies his superiority over the gods. It was very, very clearly expressed in this film, and its very true.
   The gods are faultless, for they live according to their own nature, spontaneously and without constraint; it is their godly way. But if one looks at it from a higher point of view, if one has a higher vision, a vision of the whole, they have fewer qualities than man. In this film, it was proved that through their capacity for love and self-giving, men can have as much power as the gods, and even morewhen they are not egoists, when they can overcome their egoism.

0 1958-11-04 - Myths are True and Gods exist - mental formation and occult faculties - exteriorization - work in dreams, #Agenda Vol 01, #unset, #Zen
   All these regions, all these realms are filled with beings who exist separately in their own realms, and if you are awake and conscious on a given plane for example, if while going out of a more material body you awaken on some higher planeyou can have the same relationship with the things and people of that plane as with the things and people of the material world. In other words, there exists an entirely objective relationship that has nothing to do with your own idea of things. Naturally, the resemblance becomes greater and greater as you draw nearer the physical world, the material world, and there is even a moment when one region can act directly upon the other. In any case, in what Sri Aurobindo calls the kingdoms of the Overmind, you find a concrete reality entirely independent of your personal experience; whenever you come back to it, you again find the same things, with some differences that may have occurred DURING YOUR ABSENCE. And your relationships with the beings there are identical to those you have with physical beings, except that they are more flexible, more supple and more direct (for example, there is a capacity to change the outer form, the visible form, according to your inner state), but you can make an appointment with someone, come to the meeting and again find the same being, with only certain differences that may have occurred during your absence but it is absolutely concrete, with absolutely concrete results.
   However, you must have at least a little experience of these things to understand them. Otherwise, if you are convinced that all this is just human fancy or mental formations, if you believe that these gods have such and such a form because men have imagined them to be like that, or that they have such and such defects or qualities because men have envisioned it that wayas with all those who say God is created in the image of man and exists only in human thoughtall such people wont understand, it will seem absolutely ridiculous to them, a kind of madness. You must live a little, touch the subject a little to know how concrete it is.

0 1961-07-28, #Agenda Vol 02, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Take the experience of Mind, for example: Mind, in the evolution of Nature, gradually emerging from its involution; well and this is a very concrete experience these initial mentalized forms, if we can call them that, were necessarily incomplete and imperfect, because Natures evolution is slow and hesitant and complicated. Thus these forms inevitably had an aspiration towards a sort of perfection and a truly perfect mental state, and this aspiration brought the descent of already fully conscious beings from the mental world who united with terrestrial formsthis is a very, very concrete experience. What emerges from the Inconscient in this way is an almost impersonal possibility (yes, an impersonal possibility, and perhaps not altogether universal, since its connected with the history of the earth); but anyway its a general possibility, not personal. And the Response from above is what makes it concrete, so to speak, bringing in a sort of perfection of the state and an individual mastery of the new creation. These beings in corresponding worlds (like the gods of the Overmind,4 or the beings of higher regions) came upon earth as soon as the corresponding element began to evolve out of its involution. This accelerates the action, first of all, but also makes it more perfectmore perfect, more powerful, more conscious. It gives a sort of sanction to the realization. Sri Aurobindo writes of this in SavitriSavitri lives always on earth, with the soul of the earth, to make the whole earth progress as quickly as possible. Well, when the time comes and things on earth are ready, then the divine Mother incarnates with her full powerwhen things are ready. Then will come the perfection of the realization. A splendor of creation exceeding all logic! It brings in a fullness and a power completely beyond the petty shallow logic of human mentality.
   People cant understand! To put oneself at the level of the general public may be all very well5 (personally I have never found it so, although its probably inevitable), but to hope that they will ever understand the splendor of the Thing. They have to live it first!
  --
   In Sri Aurobindo's terminology, the ' Overmind' represents the highest level of the mind, the world of the gods and origin of all the revelations and highest artistic creations the world that has ruled mental man till now. in his gradations of the worlds, Sri Aurobindo speaks of two hemispheres, the upper hemisphere and the lower. The Overmind is the line between these two hemispheres, 'This line is the intermediary Overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, but in receiving it divides, distributes, breaks up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds.' In the words of the Upanishad, 'The face of the Truth is covered by a golden lid.'
   Mother is referring to the book Satprem will write on Sri Aurobindo, which prompted the questions posed in this conversation.

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.

0 1962-03-11, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Ah, they arent from the vital at all! Not at all! They are manifestations of Overmind2 beings, projected into the vital world for a specific action. But they arent vital beings: they have an Origin, they are still linked to a being from another world. Oh, no, not at all!
   The same goes for all those beings the Tantrics deal withtheir origin is not vital, they belong to Nature. They are personified natural forces obedient to the laws of Nature. In other words, they originate from below, not from the vital but the physical world. They are vital forces in the physical, but not of vital origin.
  --
   In Sri Aurobindo's terminology, the Overmind represents the highest level of the mind, the world of the gods and origin of all the revelations and highest artistic creations the world that has ruled mental man till now.
   ***

0 1962-07-11, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   This has never happened before, its brand-new. Before, there was always that Power transmitted through the higher mind (what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind); it was up there, dissolving, dispersing, changing, doing a whole lot of work, without any difficulty, effortlessly (gesture above the head showing the tranquil, irresistible flowing of a stream), nothing to it. That was my constant, second-to-second action, everywhere, all the time, for everything that came to me. But THIS is completely, completely new. Its a sort of imposition, almost like an imposition on the PHYSICAL brain (I presume it must be for changing the brain cells). And I am allowed to do only one thing (Mother grips the mental construction presented to her); its right in front of me like this and wont leave me, it clings like a leech, stock-still. So I have to bring in the supreme, divine Vibration, the Vibration I experienced the other day [April 13], and hold it steadily (sometimes it takes quite a while) until all is hushed in a divine silence.
   (silence)

0 1962-07-25, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Yours is more than a psychic being. As I have told you, your psychic being is accompanied by something which has come for a special purpose, with a particular intellectual powera luminous, conscious powerwhich has come from regions higher than the mind, regions Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, to do a special work. It is here (gesture enveloping the chest and head) and, along with the psychic, its trying to organize everything. This, in your psychic, is what you are feeling. It must have great power. Dont you feel a kind of luminous force?
   Oh, yes, I feel it!

0 1962-09-15, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Somewhere in the Overmind (beyond the higher mind and from the Overmind onwards), things are luminous IN THEMSELVES. Light doesnt have to strike them: things themselves are luminous. And this makes a considerable difference in vision. Things are no longer lit from outside, they are luminous in themselves. This is the main difference in the quality of the light.
   It has even come to the point where things lit from outside seem artificial to me. They have lost their light.

0 1962-09-26, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I would especially like to understand the difference between the Overmind and the Supermindto understand it concretely, not abstractly.
   The Overmind isnt part of the intellect. Its the domain of the gods.
   It is the domain of the gods, and thats what has been ruling the earth. All the gods men have known, worshipped and had contact with are there.
  --
   Yes, the gods stop at the Overmind.
   I am unfamiliar with the purely Hindu traditions, but the gods are the beings the Vedas and people of Vedic times were in touch wi that least I think so. I learned what I know about the gods before coming here, through the other tradition, the Chaldean. But Thon used to say that this tradition and the Vedic (which he knew well) were outgrowths of a more ancient tradition common to both. The story goes, according to him, that the first Emanations, who were perfectly independent, separated themselves from the Supreme in their action, creating all the disorder thats what caused the creations disorder. Afterwards the gods were emanated, to repair the evil that had been wrought and to organize the world according to the supreme Will. Of course, this is a childlike way of putting it, but its comprehensible. So all these gods work in harmony and order. Thats what the ancient tradition says.
  --
   No, what I mainly want to know is the difference when you cross to the other side, into the Supermind the difference in vision between the Supermind and the Overmind.
   I dont know what Sri Aurobindo would tell you.
  --
   Sri Aurobindo didnt put too much emphasis on the Overmind. The one significant point is that the Overmind has ruled the world through the different religions. And it is the dwelling place of all the gods, all the beings humans have made into gods in their religions. Those beings exist in their own world, and some humans, coming in touch with them, have been overwhelmed by their powers and their superiority, and have made gods and religions out of them.
   But its better not to emphasize this [in your book]. As I have said, we can bypass that plane, or even pass through without knowing it. It interested me to read in the Vedas that if you dont ascend the way youre supposed to, if you try to bypass the gods, then unpleasant things happen to you and your way is blockeddo you remember that?1 That gives you an idea of what it is. Its like an intermediary zone, far superior to the earth, but still intermediary. Some have tried to cross it without stopping; and there, they say, you run into trouble. Personally, I am not sure, I can only speak of my own experience: there was always a sense of fraternityas you can imagine! I knew them, I was on friendly terms with them, so there was no question of bypassing them or not!
  --
   But the gods belong to the present curve. The Overmind belongs to this curve.
   Those gods are all very nice! For some people theyre unbearable at times (Mother laughs), but theyre really very nice! They have their faults, they have their good points, but with me they have always been very nice!

0 1962-10-06, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   But what you havent made exactly clear to me is the difference between THE thing and the Overmind.
   It is the experience of Oneness.
   No, but the difference in vision Im speaking of vision. You told me, for instance, that objects in the Overmind were self-luminous.
   Yes, from the Overmind onwards.
   Did you mean that one sees terrestrial objects become luminous?2
   No, no! I mean all the things and forms in the Overmind itself (the raiment of the gods, for instance, their jewels and crowns there are all kinds of things in the Overmind). In those worlds there are all kinds of forms, which we translate into images from terrestrial life but its only a translation.
   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.
  --
   At their maximum, at the height of their possibilities, human conceptions can at the VERY BEST express something or other of the Overmind. For me it is very vivid, very familiar, because I have lived there a lot. But even so, I consider words too awkward to express italthough with poetic metaphors you might just manage to convey an impression of it. But as for speaking of the Other Thing, I am quite aware that. Because even when youre right in the Experience, the only thing you feel like doing is keeping quiet. You cant talk. As soon as you utter a word, poof! It all clouds over. Its useless.
   But physically, for instance, you see this object [Satprem picks up a paperweight]. Now, I see it in a certain way but you, with a supramental consciousness?

0 1962-10-30, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Do those zones of music and painting and so forth form part of the Overmind or not?
   Hmm, yes I dont know. You see, all classifications, of any kind, always seem too rigid to me; they lack the suppleness that exists in the universe. We always feel the need to put one box inside another, one box inside another (Mother laughs), but thats not how it is! Its more a correspondence that being a part of something. Or all right, one is part of the other but which one is part of which other? In fact, they are part of something that is neither this, that, nor the other!

0 1962-11-10, #Agenda Vol 03, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   (Mother listens to Satprem read a chapter from his manuscript entitled "Under the Sign of the Gods," in which he speaks of the Overmind's inadequacy for attaining the plenitude of evolution, Afterwards, Mother tells what she saw while he was reading.)
   Theres a kind of cadence.
  --
   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.
  --
   But the gods may not be so pleased; after all, I say the Overmind is inadequate!
   Of course they will!

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 1963-05-11, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   The deeper significance of figures There are countless traditions, countless scriptures which I took great care not to follow. But the deeper significance of figures came to me in Tlemcen, when I was in the Overmind. I dont remember the names Thon used to give to those various worlds, but it was a world that corresponded to the highest and most luminous regions of Sri Aurobindos Overmind. It was above, just above the gods region. And it was something in accord with the Overmind creation the earth under the gods influence. That was where figures took on a living meaning for menot a mental speculation: a living meaning. That was where Madame Thon recognized me, because of the formation of twelve pearls she saw above my head; and she told me, You are that because you have this. Only that can have this! (Mother laughs) It hadnt even remotely occurred to me, thank God!
   But figures are alive for me. They have a concrete reality.

0 1963-05-18, #Agenda Vol 04, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Of course, all these things are lights, so you cant reproduce them. But still, it must be a violet that is not dull and not dark (Mother starts from the most material Nature). What she has put is too red, but if its too blue, it wont be good eitheryou understand the difficulty? Then after violet there is blue, which must be truly blue, not too light, but it must be a bright blue. Not too light because there are three consecutive blues: there is the blue of the Mind, and then comes the Higher Mind, which is paler, and then the Illumined Mind, which is the color of the flag [Mothers flag], a silver blue, but naturally paler than that. And after this comes yellow, a yellow that is the yellow of the Intuitive Mind; it must not be golden, it must be the color of cadmium. Then after this yellow, which is pale, we have the Overmind with all the colors they must all be bright colors, not dark: blue, red, green, violet, purple, yellow, all of them, all the colors. And after that, we then have all the golds of the Supermind, with its three layers. And then, after that, there is one layer of golden whiteit is white, but a golden white. After this golden white, there is silver whitesilver white: how can I explain that? (H. has sent me some ridiculous pictures of a sun shining on waterit has nothing to do with that.) If you put silver, silver gray (Mother shows a silver box nearby shining brilliantly in the sun), silver gray together with white that is, it is white, but if you put the four whites together you see the difference. There is a white white, then there is a white with a touch of pink, then a silvery white and a golden white. It makes four worlds.
   I have explained this [to H.] as I am explaining it to you, but H. has not seen it so she cant understand. I want to show her on paper. It is twelve different things [or twelve worlds], one after another.1
  --
   Mother seems to have forgotten the red of the vital, which comes between material Nature's violet and the Mind's blue. Thus we have twelve worlds: violet, red, blue (the Mind's three blues), yellow, then the Overmind's prismatic colors, which makes five lower worlds, then finally the three golds of the Supermind and the four whites of the supreme creative Joy or Ananda.
   Mother means that there is no proof that the order was restored because of the Lord's intervention rather than by some other, "natural" mechanism.

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 1964-10-24a, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   What triggered the whole experience (I forgot to tell you this), when I asked the Lord, Why? Why couldnt I do something for these people who are really nice? is that that story of the past came back, when Sri Aurobindo told me, You are doing a work of the Overmind, you will work miracles that will fill the world with admiration and so on, I told you the story. It came back massively, exactly the same thing: That is not the truth we want. And thats also why I stopped all those pujas of the Mother in October-November, because they all used to come with the idea of getting something: miracles, miracles, miraclesnever for the True Thing. And thats what they expect of God, of course, miracles or favors, illogical and unreasonable things, instead of wanting the Divines progressive advance.
   Obviously, thats more difficult.

0 1964-10-30, #Agenda Vol 05, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   And that wisdom! Its an almost cellular wisdom (its odd). For instance, I was looking at the relationship I had with all those great beings of the Overmind and higher, the perfectly objective and very familiar relationship I had with all those beings and the inner perception of being the eternal Motherall that is very well, but for me its almost ancient history! The me that exists now is HERE, its at ground level, in the body; its the body, its Matter; its at ground level; and to tell the truth, it doesnt care much about the intervention of all those beings who ultimately know nothing at all! They dont know the true problem: they live in a place where there are no problems. They dont know the true problem the true problem is here.
   Its an amused way of looking at religions and all the gods the way you would look at they are like theater performances. Theyre pastimes; but thats not what can teach you to know yourself, not at all, not at all! You must go right down to the bottom.

0 1965-05-29, #Agenda Vol 06, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I saw the other dayit was very interesting, the very day he was on his way here (I wasnt thinking of him I never think of people), suddenly I saw all that the knowledge of the pundits and those who profess to follow a spiritual life (the whole class of sannyasins, pundits, purohits,1 etc.), all that that represents. (I am not referring to religions in other countries: its specific to India.) And they are people who have a knowledge, a mental knowledge, of course, but very precise and very exact, of the movements in relation to the Overmind: all the gods and godheads and their ways of being and the relationships between men and gods; and they have tried to organize and formulate the relationships men have with gods so that, as was said in the past, men would not be the cattle of the godsthey have tried to change the human position with regard to deities. Its interesting, its a whole interesting field which to me does not represent the true thing. They on their part think that is spiritual lifeits not spiritual life, but it is a higher mental region which borders on the Overmind, which even enters into the Overmind, and which is completely organized; its a sort of legislation of the relationships between men and gods. From that point of view, its interesting.
   I saw that very clearly: the place it has in the universal organization. And if its in its place, then its quite all rightwhen a thing is in its place it becomes very good.

0 1966-02-26, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Thons idea (which also fits with the teaching here in India in which they say it was the sense of separation that created the whole DisorderDeath, Falsehood and all the rest), Thons idea was that those first four Emanations, that is, Consciousness, Love, Life, and Truth (Love was the last, I think, but I no longer remember what he said), those four individual emanated Beings, according to him, in full consciousness of their power and existence, cut themselves off from their Origin. In other words, they wanted to depend only on themselves, they didnt even feel the need to keep the connection with their Origin (I am putting it very materially). So then, that cut is what instantly caused Consciousness to become Unconsciousness, Love to become Suffering (it wasnt Loveit was actually Ananda which became Suffering), Life to become Death and Truth to become Falsehood. And they hurled themselves into the creation like that. Then, there was a second creation, which was the creation of the gods, to mend the mischief caused by those four (the story is told in almost a childlike way in order not to be abstract, in order to become concrete). The gods are the second emanation and they came to mend. In India and everywhere, they were given various names and functions, and they are found in the Overmind region, that is to say, above the physical quaternary, the material quaternary. And the function of those gods is to mend the damage wrought by the others. And the region in which the others (the first Emanations) concentrated is the vital region.
   All this can be translated philosophically, intellectually and so on. It is told as a story so that the most physical intellectuality may understand. But in principle, its the separation from the Origin that created the whole Disorder. And, as far as I know, in India too the Upanishads say the same thing; Sri Aurobindo, at any rate, says that Disorder came with the sense of Separation. So those are different ways of saying the same thing. In one case, seen in a certain way, its a willed separation; in the other case, its an inevitable consequenceinevitable consequence of of what? I dont know.

0 1966-05-18, #Agenda Vol 07, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Its the same with the gods, mon petit, the same thing! The relationship with all those beings of the Overmind, with all those gods, the form those relationships take depends on the human consciousness. You can be The scriptures say, Man is cattle for the gods but thats if man ACCEPTS the role of cattle. There is in the essence of human nature a sovereignty over all those things which is spontaneous and natural, when its not warped by a certain number of ideas and a certain amount of so-called knowledge.
   We could say that man is the all-powerful master of all the states of being of his nature, but that he has forgotten to be so.

0 1967-03-04, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   There is the occult way, which brings all the intermediary worlds into play. There is a very detailed knowledge of all the powers and personalities, all the intermediary regions, and it makes use of all that.2 Thats where one makes use of the Overmind godheads: its in this second way. Shiva, Krishna, all the aspects of the Mother are part of this second way.
   Then there is the higher intellectual approach, which is the projection of a surpassing scientific mind and takes up the problem from below. It has its importance too. From the standpoint of the detail of the operation, it reduces approximation, it gives a more direct and precise action.

0 1967-04-15, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Also, the contact with all those beings of the Overmind, all those gods, all those Entities, all those divinities. There is here, in the cells, a sort of (what can I call it?) rectitude, and, yes, sincerity and honesty that says, Oh, what fuss they make! How all this is (Mother puffs up her cheeks) puff! puff! swollen up. Its very interesting, really very interesting. The vision of the world is quite different. Its far more honestfar more honest, far more sincere, far more upright. Its strange.
   The consciousness expressed in transformed cells is a marvel. It justifies all those ages of misery. To reach that was really worth the trouble. Really worth it.

0 1967-08-02, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Actually, there are, inside oneself naturally (and consequently around oneself), forces that oppose ones realization, and the system of those [Tantric] mantras is to look for the support of those Overmind beings against those forces, which are much more powerful than they (the gods)the proof is that despite all their goodwill, they (the Overmind gods) have never been able to make the earth a harmonious place. We cant help noting the fact. So I told him it was a direct fight, all those mantras are a direct fight against the difficulty, whereas (and thats what gave him the terrible headache he complains about: its dangerous, of course, it can unsettle the whole functioning). I told him to stop and use that (Mothers Mantra). I explained it all to him yesterday. I told him he shouldnt wage a direct fight: one must try to find the support in the force one has inside oneself, which is everywhere and can overcome the difficulty: Instead of fighting, live in the other consciousness. But I saw he was closedlocked inwith a hard look. He didnt want to understand. So
   For half an hour he kept me here. It was half past twelve!

0 1967-08-30, #Agenda Vol 08, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I have often wondered if the memory of physical forms is what makes me see that world in that way, or IF IT IS really like that. Sometimes there is no doubt because it has its own specific character, but at other times I have a doubt and wonder if its not in the active memory. Because at that moment I am very conscious, everything is extremely natural, you understand; and its permanent: I find the same things in the same places again, sometimes with slight differences, but differences made necessary by action. That is to say, its a coherent world, not wild imaginings. But to what extent are those forms the reflection of material forms? To what extent ARE they really like that, or do we SEE them that way? I am not very sure yet. I had the same problem in the past when I used to go into the Overmind and see the Gods: I always had a kind of hesitation as to whether they really are like that, or whether we perceive them like that because of our physical habits. There, after a time I reached a conclusion, but here, physically?
   Strangely, there are no doors, no windows, no ceiling or floor, all that is self-existent and does not appear to be subject to the law of gravity, that is, there isnt the earths magnetic attraction, yet what you write with (laughing) looks like a fountain pen! What you write on looks like paper; the documents are placed in what look like filing cabinets. You do feel that the substance isnt the same, but the appearance is very close. And I am still wondering about that appearance: is it because of our ordinary cerebral function that we put the appearance upon things, or is it really like that?

0 1968-07-27, #Agenda Vol 09, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Overmind is obliged to respect the freedom of the individual.
   Oh, thats a revelation! I didnt know that.
  --
   Supermind is not merely a step higher than Overmindit is beyond the line, that is a different consciousness and power beyond the mental limit.
   (then a question:)

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 1970-05-27, #Agenda Vol 11, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Theres a practical point. In an Agenda some time ago [January 3], you spoke of the Overmind and the Supermind, and once or twice I feel you used one word for the other. But Id like to be sure. [Satprem takes out the text]. At first, you speak of a new kind of perception that combines all organs together: a sort of total perception that combines hearing, sight, and so on. Then you say:
   All that is certainly the consciousness of what Sri Aurobindo called [here you say the Overmind, but I think its the Supermind] the supramental: the being to come after man.
   Yes, its supramental.

0 1971-04-17, #Agenda Vol 12, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Now, you have completely confused the psychic and the spiritual. The psychic, the soul, the Fire within, Agni, does not belong to the mental bubble or to any bubble: it is the Divine in matter. It is that little Fire which opens the door to the great solar Fire of the New Consciousness. It is the instrument of the yoga of the superman (when I speak of turning on the psychic switch, I am there taking the word in the vulgar and ridiculous sense of people seeking visionary and occult experiencesnot in the true sense). Others in every age have had the experience of the psychic, of the inner Fire, but aside from the Rishis, no one used it to transform matter; the religions have made a purely devotional and mystical thing out of it. As for the spiritual, that includes all the planes of consciousness above the ordinary mind. It is the path of ascent. And that is where I repeatedly and emphatically, and from experience, say that those great Experiences, which have to be turned into spiritual summits, are part of the mental bubble (including the Overmind): they are the rarefied summits on which the being thins out into a marvelous whiteness, immense, royal, without a ripple of trouble, in an eternal peacewhich can last for millenniums without its changing the world one iota, by definition. But the spiritual is not the supramental, and when one touches the supramental, it seems to be almost a whole other Spirit, it is so compact, warm, powerful, present, embodied and radiantly solid in broad daylight. That is the Radiance which Sri Aurobindo and Mother came to bring down on earththey said over and over that their yoga was new, new, newand it is through the simple little fire inside us that we can enter into direct contact with That, without sitting in the lotus position or leaving life. When one touches That, the spiritual heights seem pale. That is all I have to say. So we do not at all need to be superyogis to have this contact, and those who have found Nirvana, or what have you, have not advanced one inch toward That, because the clue to That is not up there at all or outside, but in your own small capacity of flame.
   So if instead of splitting hairs, you set out boldly on the road, afire, you would perhaps discover that we are indeed at the Hour of God and that a single spark of sincere effort, at ones own level, opens doors which have been closed for millenniums.

0 1972-04-15, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Indeed, for passing into the supramental being it isnt necessary to pass though the Overmind
   I dont understand.
  --
   What Sri Aurobindo calls Overmind.
   Oh, no! No.
  --
   What Sri Aurobindo called Overmind is the realm of the gods.
   So it isnt necessary to pass through that.

0 1972-04-26, #Agenda Vol 13, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Whats more, it feels awful and ridiculous. Ridiculous and awful. Its the first effect of the consciousness of what has to be, it exerts a pressure. Even higher humanity is an awful and ridiculous thing for the Overmind (Mother corrects herself), for the supramental (supramental is a word I dont like too much; I understand why Sri Aurobindo used it, he didnt want supermanits not superman at all). There is a far greater difference between a supramental being and a human being than between a human being and a chimpanzee.
   Oh, yes!

02.01 - Our Ideal, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Such a movement of transforming evolution is not merely a possibility or a probability: it is a fact of Nature. Indeed, natural evolution means nothing less than that. First of all, evolution means the reversibility of Nature; for, it is the backward movement of an involutionary process. We have said that the supreme truth and realitysat-cit-ananda, as it is calledmultiplied and concretised itself gradually through various steps and stages of a diminishing power of expression or an increasing entropy of self-concealment: the main grades being the Supermind, the Overmind, the Higher Mind, the Mind, Life and lastly the body or Matter. Having arrived at the extreme end that Matter represents,the farthest apparently from the original source, the movement turns round and seeks to go up the ladder through the same gradations it has traversed. But this process of reversal is not merely a resolution and dissolution, it is a process of greater fulfilment and synthetisation, of sublimation as well as of integration.
   Matter is the starting-point of evolution, it is there merely a physico-chemical entity. But it undergoes a change, the first of its kind, a transmutation when it is taken up by life, when it becomes the basis and receptacle of a living organism: vitalised Matter behaves differently from physico-chemical Matter. A farther and greater change is brought about in Matter when it is raised still higher and taken up by the mind, when it answers to the vibrations of a mental organism: mentalised Matter has yet a third norm of behaviour. The' transformation of Matter in slow degrees towards a greater plasticity and spontaneity, a growing sentiency and luminosity is evident as one proceeds up the rungs of natural evolution.

02.02 - Lines of the Descent of Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The next steps, farther down or away, arrive when the drive towards differentiation and multiplication gathers momentum becomes accentuated, and separation and isolation increase in degree and emphasis. The lines of individuation fall more and more apart from each other, tending to form closed circles, each confining more and more exclusively to itself, stressing its own particular and special value and function, in contradistinction to or even against other lines. Thus the descent or fall from the Supermind leads, in the first instance, to the creation or appearance of the Overmind. It is the level of consciousness where the perfect balance of the One and the Many is disturbed and the emphasis begins to be laid on the many. The source of incompatibility between the two just starts here as if Many is notOne and One is not Many. It is the beginning of Ignorance, Avidya, Maya. Still in the higher hemisphere of the Overmind, the sense of unity is yet maintained, although there is no longer the sense of absolute identity of the two; they are experienced as complementaries, both form a harmony, a harmony as of different and distinct but conjoint notes. The Many has come forward, yet the unity is also there supporting it-the unity is an immanent godhead, controlling the patent reality of the Many. It is in the lower hemisphere of the Overmind that unity is thrown into the background half-submerged, flickering, and the principle of multiplicity comes forward with all insistence. Division and rivalry are the characteristic marks of its organisation. Yet the unity does not disappear altogether, only it remains very much inactive, like a sleeping partner. It is not directly perceived and envisaged, not immediately felt but is evoked as reminiscence. The Supermind, then, is the first crystallisation of the Infinite into individual centres, in the Overmind these centres at the outset become more exclusively individualised and then jealously self-centred.
   The next step of Descent is the Mind where the original unity and identity and harmony are disrupted to a yet greater degree, almost completely. The self-delimitation of consciousness which is proper to the Supermind and even to the Overmind, at least in its higher domainsgives way to self-limitation, to intolerant egoism and solipsism. The consciousness withdraws from its high and wide sweep, narrows down to introvert orbits. The sense of unity in the mind is, at most, a thing of idealism and imagination; it is an abstract notion, a supposition and a deduction. Here we enter into the very arcana of Maya, the rightful possession of Ignorance. The individualities here have become totally isolated and independent and mutually conflicting lines of movement. Hence the natural incapacity of mind, as it is said, to comprehend more than one object simultaneously. The Super mind and, less absolutely, the Overmind have a global and integral outlook: they can take in each one in its purview all at once the total assemblage of things, they differentiate but do not divide the Supermind not at all, the Overmind not categorically. The Mind has not this synthetic view, it proceeds analytically. It observes its object by division, taking the parts piecemeal, dismantling them, separating them, and attending to each one at a time. And when it observes it fixes itself on one point, withdrawing its attention from all the rest. If it bas to arrive at a synthesis, it can only do so by collating, aggregating and summing. Mental consciousness is thus narrowly one pointed: and in narrowing itself, being farther away from the source it becomes obscurer, more and more outward gazing (parci khni) and superficial. The One Absolute in its downward march towards multiplicity, fragmentation and partiality loses also gradually its subtlety, its suppleness, its refinement, becomes more and more obtuse, crude, rigid and dense.
   Between the Overmind and the Mind proper, varying according to the degree of immixture of the two, according to the degree of descent and of emergence of one and the other respectively, there are several levels of consciousness of which three main ones have been named and described by Sri Aurobindo. The first one nearest to the Overmind and the least contaminated by the Mind is pure Intuition; next, the intermediary one is called the Illumined Mind, and last comes the Higher Mind. They are all powers of the Overmind functioning in the Mind. The higher ranges are always more direct, intense, synthetic, dynamic than the lower ones where consciousness is slower, duller, more uncertain, more disintegrated. The lower the consciousness descends the more veiled it becomes, losing more and more the directness, the sureness, the intensity and force and the synthetic unity native to the highest ranges of our consciousness and being.
   A further descent into obscurity occurs when consciousness passes from Mind to Life. Darkness is almost visible here: there is a greater withdrawal on the part of each unit from its surrounding reality, a narrower concentration upon one's own separative existenceshades of the prison-house have gathered close around. The light, already dulled and faint in the mind, has become a lurid glare here. Passion has arisen and desire and hunger and battle and combat.
  --
   Thus we see that evolution, the unfolding of consciousness follows exactly the line of its involution, only the other way round: the mounting consciousness re-ascends step by step the same gradient, retraces the same path along which it had descended. The descending steps are broadly speaking (I) Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, (2) Supermind and its secondary form Overmind, (3) Mind(i) mind proper and (ii) the intermediary psyche, (4) Life, (5) Matter. The ascending consciousness starting from Matter rises into Life, passes on through Life and Psyche into Mind, driving towards the Supermind and Sachchidananda. At the present stage of evolution, consciousness has arrived at the higher levels of Mind; it is now striving to cross it altogether and enter the Overmind and the Supermind. It will not rest content until it arrives at the organisation in and through the Supermind: for that is the drive and purpose of Nature in the next cycle of evolution.
   Physical Science speaks of irreversibility and entropy in Nature's process. That is to say, it is stated that Nature is rushing down and running down: she is falling irrevocably from a higher to an ever lower potential of energy. The machine that Nature is, is driven by energy made available by a break-up of parts and particles constituting its substance. This katabolic process cannot be stopped or retraced; it can end only when the break-up ceases at dead equilibrium. You cannot lead the river up the channel to its source, it moves inevitably, unceasingly towards the sea in which it exhausts itself and finds its last repose andextinction. But whatever physical Science may say, the science of the spirit declares emphatically that Nature's process is reversible, that a growing entropy can be checked and countermanded: in other words, Nature's downward current resulting in a continual loss of energy and a break-up of substance is not the only process of her activity. This aspect is more than counterbalanced by another one of upward drive and building up, of re-energisation and re-integration. Indeed, evolution, as we have explained it, is nothing but such a process of synthesis and new creation.
   Evolution, which means the return movement of consciousness, consists, in its apparent and outward aspect, of two processes, or rather two parallel lines in a single process. First, there is the line of sublimation, that is to say, the lower purifies and modifies itself into the higher; the denser, the obscurer, the baser mode of consciousness is led into and becomes the finer, the clearer, the nobler mode. Thus it is that Matter rises into Life, Life into Psyche and Mind, Mind into Overmind and Supermind. Now this sublimation is not simply a process of refinement or elimination, something in the nature of our old Indian nivtti or pratyhra, or what Plotinus called epistrophe (a turning back, withdrawal or reabsorption): it includes and is attended by the process of integration also. That is to say, as the lower rises into the higher, the lower does not cease to exist thereby, it exists but lifted up into the higher, infused and modified by the higher. Thus when Matter yields Life, Matter is not destroyed: it means Life has appeared in Matter and exists in and through Matter and Matter thereby has attained a new mode and constitution, for it is no longer merely a bundle of chemical or mechanical reactions, it is instinct with life, it has become organic matter. Even so, when Lire arrives at Mind, it is not dissolved into Mind but both Life and Matter are taken up by the mental stuff, life becomes dynamic sentience and Matter is transformed into the grey substance of the brain. Matter thus has passed through a first transformation in Life and a second transformation in Mind; it awaits other transformations on other levels beyond Mind. Likewise, Life has passed through a first transformation in Mind and there are stages in this transformation. In the plant, Life is in its original pristine mode; in the animal, it has become sentient and centralised round a rudimentary desire-soul; in man, life-force is taken up by the higher mind and intelligence giving birth to idealism and ambition, dynamisms of a forward-looking purposive will.
   We have, till now, spoken of the evolution of consciousness as a movement of ascension, consisting of a double process of sublimation and integration. But ascension itself is only one line of a yet another larger double process. For along with the visible movement of ascent, there is a hidden movement of descent. The ascent represents the pressure from below, the force of buoyancy exerted by the involved and secreted consciousness. But the mere drive from below is not sufficient all by itself to bring out or establish the higher status. The higher status itself has to descend in order to be manifest. The urge from below is an aspiration, a yearning to move ever upward and forward; but the precise goal, the status to be arrived at is not given there. The more or less vague and groping surge from below is canalised, if assumes a definite figure and shape, assumes a local habitation and a name when the higher descends at the crucial moment, takes the lower at its peak-tide and fixes upon it its own norm and form. We have said that all the levels of consciousness have been createdloosened outby a first Descent; but in the line of the first Descent the only level that stands in front at the outset is Matter all the other levels are created no doubt but remain invisible in the background, behind the gross veil of Matter. Each status stands confined, as it were, to its own region and bides its time when each will be summoned to concretise itself in Matter. Thus Life was already there on the plane of Life even when it did not manifest itself in Matter, when mere Matter, dead Matter was the only apparent reality on the material plane. When Matter was stirred and churned sufficiently so as to reach a certain tension and saturation, when it was raised to a certain degree of maturity, as it were, then Life appeared: Life appeared, not because that was the inevitable and unavoidable result of the churning, but because Life descended from its own level to the level of Matter and took Matter up in its embrace. The churning, the development in Matter was only the occasion, the condition precedent. For, however much one may shake or churn Matter, whatever change one may create in it by a shuffling and reshuffling of its elements, one can never produce Life by that alone. A new and unforeseen factor makes its appearance, precisely because it comes from elsewhere. It is true all the planes are imbedded, submerged, involved in the complex of Matter; but, in point of fact, all planes are involved in every other plane. The appearance or manifestation of a new plane is certainly prepared, made ready to the last the last but onedegree by the urge of the inner, the latent mode of consciousness that is to be; still the actualisation, the bursting forth happens only when the thing that has to manifest itself descends, the actual form and pattern can be imprinted and established by that alone. Thus, again, when Life attains a certain level of growth and maturity, a certain tension and orientationa definite vector, so to say, in the mathematical languagewhen it has, for example, sufficiently organised itself as a vehicle of the psychic element of consciousness, then it buds forth into Mind, but only when the Mind has descended upon it and into it. As in the previous stage, here also Life cannot produce Mind, cannot develop into Mind by any amount of mechanical or chemical operations within itself, by any amount of permutation and combination or commutation and culture of its constituent elements, unless it is seized on by Mind itself. After the Mind, the next higher grade of consciousness shall come by the same method and process, viz. first by an uplifting of the mental consciousnessa certain widening and deepening and katharsis of the mental consciousness and then by a descent, gradual or sudden, of the level or levels that lie above it.
  --
   Next is the domain of the Supermind with which the manifestation of the Divine starts. We have said it is the world of typal realities, of the first seed-realities, where the One and the Many are united and fused in each other, where the absolute unity of the Supreme maintains itself in undiminished magnitude and expresses and formulates itself perfectly in and through the original multiplicity. Here take birth the first personalities, absolute truth-forms of the Divine. Here are the highest gods, the direct formations of the Divine himself. Here are the Four Powers and Personalities of swara whom Sri Aurobindo has named after the Vaishnava terminology: (i) Mahavira, embodying the Brahmin quality of Knowledge and Light and wide Consciousness, (ii) Balarama, embodying the Kshatriya quality of Force and intense dynamism, (iii) Pradyumna, embodying the quality of love and beauty the Vaishya virtue of mutuality and harmony and solidarity, and (iv) Aniruddha, embodying the Sudra quality of competent service, of organisation and execution in detail. Corresponding with these Four there are the other Four Powers and Personalities of the Divine Mother war (i) Maheshwari, (ii) Mahakali, (iii) Mahalakshmi and (iv) Mahasaraswati. Next in the downward gradient comes the Overmind where the individualised powers and personalities of the Divine tend to become self-sufficient and self-regarding; their absolute unity is loosened and the lines of multiplicity begin to be more independent of each other, each aiming at a special fulfilment of its own. Still the veil that is being drawn over the unity is yet transparent which continues to be sufficiently dynamic. This is the abode of the gods, the true and high gods: it is these that the Vedic Rishis appear to have envisaged and sought after. The all gods (vive dev) were indeed acknowledged to be but different names and forms of one supreme godhead (dev) it is the one god, says Rishi Dirghatamas, who is called multifariously whether as Agni or Yam a or Matariswan; it is the one god, again, who is described as having a thousand heads and a thousand feet. And yet they are separate entities, each has his own distinct and distinctive character and attribute, each demands a characteristic way of approach and worship. The tendency towards an exclusive stress is already at work on this level and it is the perception of this truth that lies behind the term henotheism used by European scholars to describe the Vedic Religion.
   The next stage of devolution is the Mind proper. There or perhaps even before, on the lower reaches of the Overmind, the gods have become all quite separate, self-centred, each bounded in his own particular sphere and horizon. The Overmind gods the true godsare creators in a world of balanced or harmoniously held difference; they are powers that fashion each a special fulfilment, enhancing one another at the same time (parasparam bhvayantah). Between the Overmind and the Mind there is a class of lesser godsthey have been called formateurs; they do not create in the strict sense of the term, they give form to what the anterior gods have created and projected. These form-makers that consolidate the encasement, fix definitely the image, have most probably been envisaged in the Indian dhynamrtis. But in the Mind the gods become still more fixed and rigid, stereotyped; the mental gods inspire exclusive systems, extreme and abstract generalisations, theories and principles and formulae that, even when they seek to force and englobe all in their cast-iron mould, can hardly understand or tolerate each other.
   Mind is the birth-place of absolute division and exclusivismit is the own home of egoism. Egoism is that ignorant modea twist or knot of consciousness which cuts up the universal unity into disparate and antagonistic units: it creates isolated, mutually exclusive whorls in the harmonious rhythm and vast commonalty of the one consciousness or conscious existence. The Sankhya speaks of the principle of ego coming or appearing after the principle of vastness (mahat). The Vast is the region above the Mind, where the unitary consciousness is still intact; with the appearance of the Mind has also appeared an intolerant self-engrossed individualism that culminates, as its extreme and violent expression, in the asuraAsura, the mentalised vital being.
  --
   All the ancient legends about a principle and a personalityof Denial and Ignorance, of an Everlasting Nayrefer to this fact of a descending consciousness, a Fall. The Vedantic my, spoken of sometimes as the Dark Mother, seems to be the personification of the lower Overmind, Jehovah and Satan of the Hebrews, Olympians and Titans of the Greeks, Ahriman and Ahura Mazda of old Iran, the sons of Diti and Aditi the Indian Puranas speak of, are powers and personalities of consciousness when it has descended entirely into the mind and the vital where the division is complete. These lower reaches have completely lost the unitary consciousness; still there are beings even here that have succeeded in maintaining it as a memory or an aspiration, although in a general way the living reality of the oneness is absent. It is significant that the term asura which came to mean in classical and mythological ages a + sura, not-god, the Titan, had originally a different connotation and etymology, asu + ra, one having force or strength, and was used as a general attri bute of all the gods. The degradation in the sense of the word is a pointer to the spiritual Fall: Satan was once Lucifer, the bringer or bearer of light. We may mention in this connection that these beings of which we are speaking, dwelling in unseen worlds, are of two broad categories(1) beings that are native to each plane and immutably confined and bound to that plane, and (2) those that extend their existence through many or all planes and assume on each plane the norm and form appropriate to that plane. But this is a problem of individual destiny with which we are not concerned at present.
   We were speaking of the descent into the Vital, the domain of dynamism, desire and hunger. The Vital is also the field of some strong creative Powers who follow, or are in secret contact with the line of unitary consciousness, who are open to influences from a deeper or higher or subtler consciousness. Along with the demons there is also a line of daimona, guardian angels, in the hierarchy of vital beings. Much of what is known as aesthetic or artistic creation derives its spirit from this sphere. Many of the gods of beauty and delight are denizens of this heaven. Gandharvas and Kinnaras are here, Dionysus and even Apollo perhaps (at least in their mythological aspectin their occult reality they properly belong to the Overmind which is the own home of the gods), many of the angels, seraphs and cherubs dwell here. In fact, the mythological heaven for the most part can be located in this region.
   All this is comprised within what we term the Higher or the Middle Vital. In the lower vital, we have said, consciousness has become still more circumscribed, dark, ignorantly obstinate, disparately disintegrated. It is the seed-bed of lust and cruelty, of all that is small and petty and low and mean, all that is dirt and filth. It is here that we place the picas, djinns, ghouls and ghosts, and vampires, beings who possess the possessed.
  --
   Thus naturally there appear gradations of the human personality; as the consciousness in the human being rises higher and higher, the psychic centre organises a higher and higher a richer, wider, deeper personality. The first great conversion, the first turning of the human personality to a new mode of life and living, that is to say, living even externally according to the inner truth and reality, the first attempt at a conscious harmonisation of the psychic consciousness with its surface agents and vehicles is what is known as spiritual initiation. This may happen and it does happen even when man lives in his normal mental consciousness. But there is the possibility of growth and evolution and transformation of personality in higher and a higher spiritual degree through the upper reaches of the higher Mind, the varying degrees of the Overmind and finally the Supermind. These are the spheres, the fields, even the continents of the personality, but the stuff, the substance of the personality, the inner nucleus of consciousness-force is formed, first, by the flaming aspiration, the upward drive within the developing and increasing psychic being itself, and secondly, by the descent, to a greater and greater degree, of the original Being from which it emanated. The final coalescence of the fully and integrally developed psychic being with the supreme splendour of its very source, the Jivatman, occurs in the Supermind. When this happens the supramental personality becomes incarnate in the physical body: Matter in the material plane is transformed into a radiant substance made of pure consciousness, the human personality becomes a living form of the Divine. Thus the wheel comes full circle: creation returns to the point from which it started but with an added significance, a new fulfilment.
   The mystery of rebirth in the evolution of the human personality is nothing but the mystery of the developing psyche. At first this psyche or soul is truly a being: no bigger than the thumb it is the hardly audible still small voice. The experiences of lifesweet or bitter, happy or unhappy, good or bad, howsoever they may appear to the outward eye and perceptionall the dialectics of a terrestrial existence contri bute to the growth and development of the psychic consciousness. Each span of life means a special degree or mode of growth necessitated by the inner demand and drive of the divine Individual seated within the heart. The whole end in view of this secret soul is to move always towards and be united again with its Oversoul, its original and high archetype in the Divine Consciousness: the entire course of its earthly evolution is chalked out and patterned by the exact need of its growth. Whatever happens in each particular life, all the currents of all the lives converge and coalesce, and serve the psychic consciousness to swell in volume and intensity and be one with the Divine Consciousness. Or, in a different imagery, one can say that the multifarious experiences of various lives are as fuel to the Inner Firethis Psychic Agni which is just a spark or a thin tongue at the outset of the human evolutionary course; but with the addition of fuel from life to life this Fire flames up, indeed, becomes ultimately a conflagration that bums and purifies the entire outer vehicle and transforms it into radiant mattera fit receptacle, incarnation of the supernal Light. The mounting Fire (the consciousness-energy secreted in the earth-bound heart of Matter) finally flares up, discloses itself in its full amplitude and calls and attracts into it the incandescent supramental Solar Sphere which is the type and pattern it has to embody and express. This is the marriage of Heaven and Earth, of which the mystics all over the earth in all ages spoke and sangto which the Vedic Rishi refers when he declares:

02.03 - An Aspect of Emergent Evolution, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   This, however, is an aspect of the problem with which we are not immediately concerned. There is one question with which we have omitted to deal but which is nearer to us and touches present actualities. We spoke of the emergence of the Deity and of the Supreme Deityafter Mind. The question is, how long after? I do not refer to the duration of time needed, but to the steps or the stages that have to be passed. For between Mind and Deity, certainly between Mind and the Supreme Deity (Purushottama, as we would say), there may presumably still lie a course of graded emergence. In fact, Sri Aurobindo speaks of the Overmind and the Supermind, as farther steps of the evolutionary progress coming after Mind. He says that Mind closes the interior hemisphere of man's nature and consciousness; with Overmind man enters into the higher sphere of the Spirit. In this view, the religious feeling or perception or conduct would be but an intermediary stage between Mind and Overmind. They are not really emergent properties, but reflections, faint echoes and promises of what is to come, mixed up with attributes of the present mentality. The Overmind brings in a true emergence.
   Still Overmindwhose characteristic is a cosmic consciousness and a transcendence of all ego-senseis not the firm basis on which a new terrestrial organisation can stand and endure. It is still a basis of unstable equilibrium. For it is not the supernal light and, although it transcends all ignorance, yet does not possess that absolute synthetic unity, that transcendent power of consciousness which is at once the cosmic and the individual. That is the domain of the Supermind.
   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.

02.15 - The Kingdoms of the Greater Knowledge, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  He scanned the secrets of the Overmind,
  He bore the rapture of the Oversoul.

04.04 - Evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Thus, the highest and most comprehensive description of the Divine is perhaps the formula Sat-chit-ananda. But even so, it is a very general and, after all, an inadequate description. It has to be filled in and supplemented by other categories as well, if one may say so. For Sat-chit-ananda presents to us the Sat Brahman. There is also the Asat Brahman. And again we must accept a reality which is neither Sat nor Asatnsadsnno sadst, says the Veda. And as for the filling up of the details in an otherwise almost blank and featureless infinity, Sri Aurobindo's charting of that vast unknownwith the categories of the Supermind and its various levels, of the Overmind and its levels too, all forming the Divine Status and Consciousness is a new, almost a revolutionary revelation, just the required science which the present world needs and demands and for which it has been prepared through all the cycles of evolution.
   This means to say that with the knowledge that is given us today, one can determine more or less definitely the altitudes to which the various spiritual realisations of the past rose and one can see also the degrees or graded stages of the evolution of the spiritual consciousness. A broad landmark can be noted here which concerns us at the present moment. The spiritual consciousness has been rising to higher and higher peaks and possessing them one after another. At the present moment we are at a crisis, at a crucial crossing. The spiritual consciousness attained till now and securely held in human possession (in man's inner nature) is confined to the highest level of the mind with some infiltration from the Overmind and through that, as a springing board, a leap into an indefinite, almost a blank Beyond. Now the time is come and the conditions are ready for the spiritual consciousness in humanity to arrive at the status above the Overmind to the Supermind, and make that a living reality and build in and through that its normal consciousness.
   A progressive revelation of higher and higher and more integral states of the spiritual consciousness in and through the realisations of mystics and sages and seersdivine men of all ages, such is the process of evolution that marks the life of man upon earth. This spiritual evolution, however, may not be obviously visible in the external life and character of man: it has been a phenomenon more in his inner being and consciousness, an occult phenomenon. Hence there has intervened a veil, wall of separation between the two. The veil has not been rent precisely because the very highest spiritual potential has not been reached and brought into play. The call of the present age is just to do away with this veil, make of human nature a unified, a streamlined entity, a complete incarnation of the spiritual consciousness in the fullness of its own nature at its source and origin.

04.06 - Evolution of the Spiritual Consciousness, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Thus, the highest and most comprehensive description of the Divine is perhaps the formula Sat-chit-ananda. But even so, it is a very general and, after all, an inadequate description. It has to be filled in and supplemented by other categories as well, if one may say so. For Sat-chit-ananda presents to us the Sat Brahman. There is also the Asat Brahman. And again we must accept a reality which is neither Sat nor Asatnsadsnno sadst, says the Veda. And as for the filling up of the details in an otherwise almost blank and featureless infinity, Sri Aurobindo's charting of that vast unknownwith the categories of the Supermind and its various levels, of the Overmind and its levels too, all forming the Divine Status and Consciousness is a new, almost a revolutionary revelation, just the required science which the present world needs and demands and for which it has been prepared through all the cycles of evolution.
   This means that with the knowledge that is given us today one can determine more or less definitely the altitudes to which the various spiritual realisations of the past rose and one can see also the degrees or graded stages of the evolution of the spiritual consciousness. A broad landmark can be noted here which concerns us at the present moment. The spiritual consciousness has been rising to higher and higher peaks and possessing them one after another. At the present moment we are at a crisis, at a crucial crossing. The spiritual consciousness attained till now and securely held in human possession (in man's inner nature) is confined to the highest level of the mind with some infiltration from the Overmind and through that, as a springing board, a leap into an indefinite, almost a blank Beyond. Now the time is come and the conditions are ready for the spiritual consciousness in humanity to arrive at the status above the Overmind, the Supermind, and make that a living reality and build in and through that its normal consciousness.
   A progressive revelation of higher and higher and more integral states of the spiritual consciousness in and through the realisations of mystics and sages and seersdivine menof all ages, such is the process of evolution that marks the life of man upon earth. This spiritual evolution, however, may not be obviously visible in the external life and character of man: it has been a phenomenon more in his inner being and consciousness, an occult phenomenon. Hence there has intervened a veil, a wall of separation between the two. The veil has not been rent precisely because the very highest spiritual potential has not been reached and brought into play. The call of the present age is just to do away with this veil, make of human nature a unified, a streamlined entity, a complete incarnation of the spiritual consciousness in the fullness of its own nature at its source and origin.

05.01 - Man and the Gods, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 01, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Human understanding, we know, is a tangled skein of light and shademore shade perhaps than lightof knowledge and ignorance, of ignorance straining towards knowledge. And yet this limited and earthly frame that mind is has something to give which even the Overmind of the gods does not possess and needs. It is indeed a frame, even though perhaps a steel frame, to hold and fix the pattern of knowledge, that arranges, classifies, consolidates effective ideas, as they are translated into facts and events. It has not the initiative, the creative power of the vision of a god, but it is an indispensable aid, a precious instrument for the canalisation and expression of that vision, for the intimate application of the divine inspiration to physical life and external conduct. If nothing else, it is a sort of blue print which an engineer of life cannot forego if he has to execute his work of building a new life accurately and beautifully and perfectly.
   III

05.12 - The Soul and its Journey, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The higher Gods, like those, for example, envisaged in the Veda, may be considered each as an emanation of one or other of these Divine Aspects. They are dwellers of Swar or the Overmind. Varuna seems to be an emanation of Mahavira, a son of Maheshwari: for he is pre-eminently the god of the pure and vast consciousness who releases us from the triple bonds and shows us the winding way into the embrace of the infinite Mother. His associate, Mitra, is the lord of love and harmony, evidently an emanation of Pradyumna (or Mahalakshmi). Other gods of the same category are Bhaga and Soma. The Balarama or Mahakali aspect is manifested in Aryaman: Rudra being another form of the same. And Mahasaraswati (or Aniruddha) must have given birth to and inspired the Ribhus, who are artisans of divinity. The Puranic trinityBrahma, Vishnu and Shivawith lndra as the fourth member forms a parallel system embodying a similar conception.
   Another tradition gives the Four Supernals as (1) Light or Consciousness, (2) Truth or Knowledge, (3) Life and (4) Love. The tradition also says that the beings representing these four fundamental principles of creation were the first and earliest gods that emanated from the Supreme Divine, and that as they separated themselves from their source and from each other, each followed his own independent line of fulfilment, they lost their divinity and turned into their oppositesLight became obscurity, Consciousness unconsciousness or the inconscient, Truth became falsehood and Knowledge ignorance, Life became death and finally Love and Delight became suffering and hatred. These are the fallen angels, the Asuras that deny their divine essence and now rule the world. They have possessed mankind and are controlling earthly existence. They too have their emanations, forces and beings that are born out of them and serve them in their various degrees of power. Men talk and act inspired and impelled by these beings and when they do so, they lose their humanity and become worse than animals.
  --
   First then there are the supreme divinities, aspects or own personalities of the Divine in his supreme status, the Super-mind; next come the first emanations, the true or pure gods in the Overmind. Thence or simultaneously there is the line of deformation, that of the false gods and godheads, the Asuras and Titans. These too extend in a series of emanations down to the subtle physical; except when they themselves incarnate on the earth in an earthly body.
   Man, the soul, we said, comes direct from the Divine and is thrown and almost stuck into the earth as a spark, as a point of luminous consciousness-force. This soul, as it develops, we find, belongs to one or other of the fundamental type of divine personality, it is a lineal descendant, as it were, of one of the quaternary and its growth means growing into the nature of that particular godhead and its fulfilment means identification with that.

07.01 - Realisation, Past and Future, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The whole material and physical world, the whole earth I mention earth, because we are concerned directly and much more with it than other regionshas been till now governed by forces of consciousness that come from what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind. Even the thing man has named God is a force, a power in the Overmind. The entire universe has been, so to say, under the domination of this status of consciousness. Even then, you have to pass through many intermediary grades, or levels to arrive at the Overmind and when you reach there the first impression is that of a dazzling light that almost blinds you. But one can and has to press on and go beyond. Sri Aurobindo says, the rule of the Overmind is precisely coming to its end and the rule of the Supermind will replace it. All the past spiritual experiences were concerned with the Overmind: so it is a thing known to all who have found the Divine and are identified with Him. What Sri Aurobindo says is this that there is something more than the Overmind, something that lies a step higher and that it is now the turn of this higher status to come down and reign. We need not talk much of Overmind, because all the saints and seers, all religions and spiritual disciplines, scriptures and philosophies have spoken about it at length. All the gods known and familiar to men are there in its Pantheon. What we want, what is needed at present is a new revelation, a manifestation in a new manner of which very few were conscious in the past. We are not here merely to repeat the past.
   But it is so difficult. It is difficult for people to come out of experiences they have had, of what they have heard and read about always and everywhere. It is difficult for them not to think of the Supermind in terms of the Overmind, not to confuse the Supermind with the Overmind. They are unable to conceive of anything beyond or different. Sri Aurobindo used to say always that his Yoga Began where all the past Yogas ended: in order to realise his Yoga one must have already arrived at the extreme limit of what the ancients realised. In other words, one must have had already the perception of the Divine, the union and identification with the Divine. This divinity, Sri Aurobindo says, is the Divine of the Overmind which is itself something quite unthinkable for the human consciousness, and even to reach there one has to rise through many planes of consciousness and, as I said, one gets dazzled and dazed even at this level.
   There are beings of the vital world who, whenever they appear to man, are taken by him for the supreme godhead. You may call it a disguise, but it is a very successful disguise, for people who see it most often get thoroughly convinced that what they see is indeed God himself. And yet such a god is only a vital being. Even so, the beings of the Over mind are stupendous in comparison with us, human beings, who are truly bewildered whenever we come in contact with such entities. And Supermind and supramental beings are yet beyond. So you realise the distance to be covered.

07.04 - The World Serpent, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Reverting to the image of the serpent, one can say that its head represents the spirit, the supreme consciousness, and the tail the other end, matter or supreme unconsciousness. The image, furthermore, gives a graphic picture of the great truth that the extremes meet, the head bends round and catches the tail. Psychologically this means that if one rises higher and higher in consciousness, starting from the body consciousness, traversing Life and Mind and Overmind and reaches the very source, the head and front of consciousness, then, curious to say, one finds oneself all on a sudden landed in the heart of matter. In the occult language this is expressed by saying that the consciousness that shines on the highest peak, is imbedded also here below in the cavern of dead matter. If one rises sufficiently high, rung by rung, to the extreme end of the ladder, one comes round exactly at the point from where one started without having to pass through all the rungs. Conversely too if one probes sufficiently deep into the farthest corner of matter, the last limit of inconscience, one comes out into the blaze of the same infinity that covers above and below and around.
   One can recall here the curious conclusion reached by some modern scientists in regard to the spherical character of the universe that the universe being an endless bounded plane it is quite likely that a particular star you see in front of you may not at all be situated direct against you, but that it might be sending out rays that have come round the whole sphere and taken you, as it were, from behind!

07.11 - The Problem of Evil, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 03, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   God has created the world, the material world as it is? Yes and No, more No than Yes. For he has not created it directly. There have been many creators, rather formateurs, form-makers, in between the world and God, who joined in the work of creation. Who are they? They have been given various names. Creation generally follows a principle of gradation. It is done step by step, world rising out of world successively. Each world is a particular state of being, a particular mode of consciousness. Each state is inhabited by entities, individualities, personalities and each one has created a world around him or assisted in the creation of certain types or species upon earth. The last of these creators or fashioners are those of the vital. At the top are those of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind. It was these that created, that is to say, gave the first forms to earthly beings and things. They sent out their emanations and these again theirs in their turn and so on. Thus it was not the Divine Will which acted directly upon Matter and gave the world the form it could or should have had. There are layers and planes, graded intermediaries through which the Will has had to act. I spoke of the over-mental and the vital plane. There is also the mental plane between them. There are mental beings who are also creators, giving form to some beings that have taken body upon earth.
   Thus, there is a tradition which says that the world of insects is the outcome of the creators of the vital world. That is why when you see the insects under a microscope they take on appearances that are absolutely diabolical. Enlarged on a screen they look like veritable monsters, so terrifying they are. Microscopic monsters they are. So it is said, beings of the vital world thought of amusing themselves and created these impossible beasts making human existence uncomfortable.

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
  --
   The Psychic is like the wire between the generator and the lamp. What is the generator and what is the lamp, or rather, who is the generator and who the lamp? The Divine is the generator and the body, the visible being, is the lamp. The function then of the Psychic is to connect the two. In other words, if there were no Psychic in Matter, Matter could not come in direct contact with the Divine. All human beings, including yourself, all carry the Divine within you, you have only to enter within you to find Him. It is a unique speciality of the human being, rather of all embodied beings living upon earth. In the human being, the psychic becomes more conscious and formed; more conscious and therefore also more free, it is individualised. You should note that it is a speciality of the earth alone. It is the direct infusion of a purifying and redeeming agent into the most obscure and unconscious Matter to awaken it by degrees towards the divine consciousness, the divine presence, to the Divine Himself. It is the psychic presence that makes of man an exceptional being. Perhaps it is not good to tell it to him too often, for as it is he is already puffed up and thinks very highly of himself and there is no need to encourage him in that direction. Still it is a fact: so much so that beings from other worlds, worlds of what are known as demigods or even gods, beings from what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, are eager to take a physical body upon earth so that they may experience the Psychic, as they do not possess it. These beings have very many qualities which men have not, but they lack this divine presence which is quite an exceptional thing belonging to the earth alone. All the inhabitants of the higher worlds the Higher Mind, the Overmind and other domainsdo not have the psychic being. Naturally, the beings of the vital worlds have not got it either. But these vital beings do not regret, for they do not want to have it. There are, however, a few exceptional beings on this level who wish to be converted and therefore desire a physical body; but the rest do not want, they are bound to the law of their being and cannot repudiate it.
   So I say and we are bound to admit that it is an exceptional virtue in the human being to bear the psychic in him. But to tell the truth, he does not seem to have profited much by it. He does not look like considering his virtue as something very desirable, from the manner he has been treating this presence. He prefers to it his mental ideals, he prefers to it his vital demands and he prefers to it his physical habits. I do not know how many of you have read the Bible. But there is a story that I used to like always. There were two brothers, Esau and Jacob. Esau had gone out hunting and felt tired and hungry. He came back home and found his brother preparing a dish. He asked Jacob to feed him. Jacob said he would give him food if he, Esau, sold his birthright to him. Esau said, of what use is the birthright to me now, and sold it to his brother. You understand the significance? You can of course take it quite in the superficial way. But I took it differently. The birthright is the right to be the son of God. And Esau was quite ready to give up his divine right for a mess of pottage. It is an old story, but it is eternally true.

08.27 - Value of Religious Exercises, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   But if you take a truly divine being, that is not the thing he likes or appreciates. He does not like to be worshipped; worship does not give him special pleasure. But if he sees anywhere a fine intuitive sense, a good feeling, a movement of unselfishness or spiritual enthusiasm, he considers that as infinitely more valuable than prayers and Pujas. I tell you seriously, if you place a true god upon a chair and compel him to remain there all the time you are doing him Puja, he can amuse himself by letting you do it, but surely it gives him no happiness, none! He feels neither flattered nor satisfied nor glorified by your Puja. You must get that idea out of your head. There is an entire region between the spiritual world and the material, belonging to the vital beings and it is this region that is full of such things as are liked by them, because they are their food. They are happy, they feel important when men call them, pray to them, make their offerings to them: the being that has the largest number of adorers is the most satisfied, the most glorified, the most puffed up. How can you imagine that a true god, a god even of the Overmindalthough those of this region are already somewhat touched by human frailties that is to say, one who has the higher consciousness, would get any pleasure out of these things? I repeat, an act of real kindness, intelligence, unselfishness or fine understanding or sincere aspiration is for him an altogether higher and more valuable thing than any petty religious ceremony. There is no comparison. You speak of religious ceremonies. There is, for example, a being called Kali; there are many Kalis, of many varieties, installed in temples and homes. All of them almost are vital beings and forces, some are ugly and terrible. I have known people who had such a fear of Kalitheir household Kali that they trembled at the thought of offending her in any way, of committing the least fault that would displease her; for that means Kali's vengeance. I know, I know very well these entities: they are beings of the vital world, they are vital formations the forms are given by the human mind and what forms! To think that men worship such terrible and demoniac things!
   From this standpoint it is good that for a time humanity should come out of the religious atmosphere, full of fear and blind superstitious submission by which the adverse forces have profited so monstrously. The age of negation, of atheism and positivism is from this view quite indispensable for man's liberation from sheer ignorance. It is only when you have come out of this, this abject submission to the evil forces of the Vital that you can rise to truly spiritual heights and then become there collaborators and right instruments of the forces of the Truth and Consciousness and Power. The superstitions of the lower levels you must leave far behind to rise high.

09.03 - The Psychic Being, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   It is a thing characteristic of earthly creatures. It is a speciality of the earth. But only in the human being does the psychic become more conscious, more formed and also more independent; it is there individualised. It is the presence of the psychic that makes of man an exceptional being, so much so that beings of other domains in the universe, those, for example, belonging to what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, the demi-gods and even the gods are very eager to take a physical body upon earth so that they can have the experience of the psychic. These beings possess certainly many qualities which men have not, but they lack this direct Divine Presence which is quite exceptional, which is a fact of the earth and is found nowhere else. All these inhabitants of the higher worlds, of Higher Mind and Overmind and other regions do not possess a psychic being.
   Naturally, the beings of the vital world do not have it either. They do not regret it, they do not want it. In their origin, of course, they descended directly from the Divine, but that was only in their origin and it is so long ago. Now they have no direct contact with the Divine within them, they do not have the psychic being. If they had converted themselves under these conditions nothing would have remained of them, because they are made wholly of the opposite movement. They are entirely made of self-assertion, despotic power, alienation from the origin and the utmost disdain for all that is pure and beautiful and noble. Those only, very rare, among them who wish to be converted do one thing immediately: take a physical body. But others do not want it; that ties them, restricts them to a rule which they defy.

10.04 - The Dream Twilight of the Earthly Real, #Savitri, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The cosmic empire of the Overmind,
  Time's buffer state bordering Eternity,

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
  matter, here on earth. Miracles and all kinds of things were
  --
  this is a creation of the Overmind. It is very interesting,
  very well done. You will cause miracles which will make
  --
  a creation of the Overmind. And it is not the success that
  we want: we want to establish the Supermind upon earth.

1.03 - Preparing for the Miraculous, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  surmental, the Overmind. This error is unfortunately the
  source of an enormous confusion, for other translators fol-

1.03 - The Gods, Superior Beings and Adverse Forces, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  In their aspect above the Overmind, in the higher regions, the aspects of the Mother have very simple forms and dont have multiple limbs.
  Words of the Mother III

1.04 - Religion and Occultism, #Words Of The Mother III, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  As for the relation with the beings of the Overmind, if this relation exists already, each case must have its own solution.
  Why do men cling to a religion?

1.05 - Consciousness, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  We will not dwell here on the description of these centers as tradition refers to them, for it is better to experience things oneself rather than to talk about them, nor will we discuss their positions in the body; the seeker will feel them himself without any difficulty as soon as he becomes a little clear. Suffice it to say that these centers (called Chakras in India) are not located in our physical body but in another dimension, though their concentration may at times become so intense that we have an acute, localized physical sensation. Some of them, though not all, are in fact quite close to the body's nervous plexuses. Roughly speaking, there are seven centers distributed in four zones: (1) The Superconscient, with one center slightly above the top of the head,44 which controls our thinking mind and communicates with higher mental realms: illumined mind, intuitive mind, Overmind,
  etc. (2) The Mind, with two centers: one between the eyebrows, which controls the will and dynamism of our mental activity (it is also the center of subtle vision, the "third eye" certain traditions speak of); the other, at throat level, controls all the forms of mental expression. (3)

1.05 - The Ascent of the Sacrifice - The Psychic Being, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
     These two changes are the signs of a first effectuation in which the activities of the mental nature are lifted up, spiritualised, widened, universalised, liberated, led to a consciousness of their true purpose as an instrumentation of the Divine creating and developing its manifestation in the temporal universe. But this cannot be the whole scope of the transformation; for it is not in these limits that the integral seeker can cease from his ascension or confine the widening of his nature. For, if it were so, knowledge would still remain a working of the mind, liberated, universalised, spiritualised, but still, as all mind must be, comparatively restricted, relative, imperfect in the very essence of its dynamism; it would reflect luminously great constructions of Truth, but not move in the domain where Truth is au thentic, direct, sovereign and native. There is an ascension still to be made from this height, by which the spiritualised mind will exceed itself and transmute into a supramental power of knowledge. Already in the process of spiritualisation it will have begun to pass out of the brilliant poverty of the human intellect; it will mount successively into the pure broad reaches of a higher mind and next into the gloaming belts of a still greater free intelligence illumined with a Light from above. At this point it will begin to feel more freely, admit with a less mixed response the radiant beginnings of an Intuition, not illumined, but luminous in itself, true in itself, no longer entirely mental and therefore subjected to the abundant intrusion of error. Here too is not an end, for it must rise beyond into the very domain of that untruncated Intuition, the first direct light from the self-awareness of essential Being and, beyond it, attain that from which this light comes. For there is an Overmind behind Mind, a Power more original and dynamic which supports Mind, sees it as a diminished radiation from itself, uses it as a transmitting belt of passage downward or an instrument for the creations of the Ignorance. The last step of the ascension would be the surpassing of Overmind itself or its return into its own still greater origin, its conversion into the supramental light of the Divine Gnosis. For there in the supramental Light is the seat of the divine Truth-Consciousness that has native in it, as no other consciousness below it can have, the power to organise the works of a Truth which is no longer .tarnished by the shadow of the cosmic Inconscience and Ignorance. There to reach and thence to bring down a supramental dynamism that can transform the Ignorance is the distant but imperative supreme goal of the integral Yoga.
     As the light of each of these higher powers is turned upon the human activities of knowledge, any distinction of sacred and profane, human and divine, begins more and more to fade until it is finally abolished as otiose; for whatever is touched and thoroughly penetrated by the Divine Gnosis is transfigured and becomes a movement of its own Light and Power, free from the turbidity and limitations of the lower intelligence. It is not a separation of some activities, but a transformation of them all by the change of the informing consciousness that is the way of liberation, an ascent of the sacrifice of knowledge to a greater and ever greater light and force. All the works of mind and intellect must be first heightened and widened, then illumined, lifted into the domain of a higher Intelligence, afterwards translated into workings of a greater non-mental Intuition, then again transformed into the dynamic outpourings of the Overmind radiance, and these transfigured into the full light and sovereignty of the supramental Gnosis. It is this that the evolution of consciousness in the world carries prefigured but latent in its seed and in the straining tense intention of its process; nor can that process, that evolution cease till it has evolved the instruments of a perfect in place of its now imperfect manifestation of the Spirit.
     If knowledge is the widest power of the consciousness and its function is to free and illumine, yet love is the deepest and most intense and its privilege is to be the key to the most profound and secret recesses of the Divine Mystery. Man, because he is a mental being, is prone to give the highest importance to the thinking mind and its reason and will and to its way of approach and effectuation of Truth and, even, he is inclined to hold that there is no other. The heart with its emotions and incalculable movements is to the eye of his intellect an obscure, uncertain and often a perilous and misleading power which needs to be kept in control by the reason and the mental will and intelligence. And yet there is in the heart or behind it a profounder mystic light which, if not what we call intuition -- for that, though not of the mind, yet descends through the mind -- has yet a direct touch upon Truth and is nearer to the Divine than the human intellect in its pride of knowledge. According to the ancient teaching the seat of the immanent Divine, the hidden Purusha, is in the mystic heart, -- the secret heart-cave, hrdaye gunayam, as the Upanishads put it, -- and, according to the experience of many Yogins, it is from its depths that there comes the voice or the breath of the inner oracle.

1.07 - Savitri, #Twelve Years With Sri Aurobindo, #Nirodbaran, #Integral Yoga
  In another letter of the same year: "The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening. Most of the stuff of the first Book is new or else the old so altered as to be no more what it was; the best of the old has sometimes been kept almost intact because it had already the higher inspiration. Moreover, there have been made several successive revisions, each trying to lift the general level higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry. As it now stands there is a general Overmind influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them."
  Sri Aurobindo, sitting on the bed, used to dictate Savitri to Nirod.

1.09 - Sleep and Death, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  which, we should note, always look somewhat artificial, flashy, and a bit hard (this region is particularly deceptive); to the lights of the Mind, which become increasingly powerful and pure as one rises toward the Origin. From the Overmind and above (we will discuss the Overmind later), a radical change occurs in the nature of the vision:
  the objects, beings and things we see no longer seem to be illumined from the outside, flatly (as is the Earth by the sun), but they are luminous in themselves, and ultimately there is no longer anyone "outside" looking in, but only ecstasy in a still, resplendent Light,

1.1.02 - The Aim of the Integral Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The aim of the Yoga is to open the consciousness to the Divine, to live in the inner consciousness more and more while acting from it on the external life, to bring the inmost psychic into the front and by the power of the psychic to purify and change the being so that it may become ready for transformation and in union with the Divine Knowledge, Will and Love. Secondly, to develop the Yogic consciousness - i.e. to universalise the being on all the planes, become aware of the cosmic being and cosmic forces and be in union with the Divine on all the planes up to the Overmind. Thirdly, to come into contact with the transcendent Divine, beyond the Overmind, through the supramental consciousness, supramentalise the consciousness and the nature and make oneself an instrument for the realisation of the dynamic Divine Truth and its transforming descent into the earth-nature.
  A Yoga Not for Ourselves

1.1.03 - Brahman, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  There is no thought in the pure Impersonal, it is silent - but it is true that divine Truth can manifest in the background of the silence. This is of course the truth of things up to the Overmind.
  The Inactive Brahman and the Active Brahman

1.1.04 - The Self or Atman, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The Cosmic Spirit or Self contains everything in the cosmos - it upholds cosmic Mind, universal Life, universal Matter as well as the Overmind. The Self is more than all these things which are its formulations in Nature.
  The Self or Atman
  --
  The Cosmic Spirit contains the Supermind, but it keeps it above and works for the present between the Overmind and the physical. It is only when the Ignorance is removed that the Supramental becomes directly a dynamic part of the workings of cosmic Nature here. Till then there are only reflections of it.
  The Self is essentially universal; the individualised self is only the universal experienced from an individual centre. If what you have realised is not felt to be one in all, then it is not the

1.1.1.01 - Three Elements of Poetic Creation, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The originating source may be anywhere; the poetry may arise or descend from the subtle physical plane, from the higher or lower vital itself, from the dynamic or creative intelligence, from the plane of dynamic vision, from the psychic, from the illumined mind or Intuition,even, though this is the rarest, from the Overmind widenesses. To get the Overmind inspiration is so rare that there are only a few lines or short passages in all poetic literature that give at least some appearance or reflection of it. When the source of inspiration is in the heart or the psychic there is more easily a good will in the vital channel, the flow is spontaneous; the inspiration takes at once its true form and speech and is transmitted without any interference or only a minimum of interference by the brain-mind, that great spoiler of the higher or deeper splendours. It is the character of the lyrical inspiration, to flow in a jet out of the beingwhe ther it comes from the vital or the psychic, it is usually spontaneous, for these are the two most powerfully impelling and compelling parts of the nature. When on the contrary the source of inspiration is in the creative poetic intelligence or even the higher mind or the illumined mind, the poetry which comes from this quarter is always apt to be arrested by the outer intellect, our habitual thought-production engine. This intellect is an absurdly overactive part of the nature; it always thinks that nothing can be well done unless it puts its finger into the pie and therefore it instinctively interferes with the inspiration, blocks half or more than half of it and labours to substitute its own inferior and toilsome productions for the true speech and rhythm that ought to have come. The poet labours in anguish to get the one true word, the au thentic rhythm, the real divine substance of what he has to say, while all the time it is waiting complete and ready behind; but it is denied free transmission by some part of the transmitting agency which prefers to translate and is not willing merely to receive and transcribe. When one gets something through from the illumined mind, then there is likely to come to birth work that is really fine and great. When there comes with labour or without it something reasonably like what the poetic intelligence wanted to say, then there is something fine or adequate, though it may not be great unless there is an intervention from the higher levels. But when the outer brain is at work trying to fashion out of itself or to give its own version of what the higher sources are trying to pour down, then there results a manufacture or something quite inadequate or faulty or, at the best, good on the whole, but not the thing that ought to have come.
  2 June 1931

1.1.1.03 - Creative Power and the Human Instrument, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  If the parts of a poem come from different planes, it is because one starts from some high plane but the connecting consciousness cannot receive uninterruptedly from there and as soon as it flickers or wavers it comes down to a lower, perhaps without noticing it, or the lower comes in to supply the continuation of the flow or on the contrary the consciousness starts from a lower plane and is lifted in the vea, perhaps occasionally, perhaps more continuously higher for a time or else the higher force attracted by the creative will breaks through or touches or catches up the less exalted inspiration towards or into itself. I am speaking here especially of the overhead planes where this is quite natural; for the Overmind for instance is the ultimate source of intuition, illumination or heightened power of the planes immediately below it. It can lift them up into its own greater intensity or give out of its intensity to them or touch or combine their powers together with something of its own greater poweror they can receive or draw something from it or from each other. On the lower planes beginning from the mental downwards there can also be such variations or combinations, but the working is not the same, for the different powers here stand more on a footing of equality whether they stand apart from each other, each working in its own right, or cooperate.
  29 April 1937

11.15 - Sri Aurobindo, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 04, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   We say, then, supramentalisation of consciousness is the goal Nature is aiming at and man striving for: it is the next step that earth and man are taking in their evolutionary urge. Man, however, represents a very crucial stagehe is the dividing line between two hemispherestwo modes of consciousness, two types of creation. As I have said, up to man it is a natural spontaneous unreflecting unconscious evolution: with man it is conscious, deliberate, wilful evolution. What was being done behind the veil in ignorance will now be done openly in full knowledge. The very first result will be the shortening of the time factor. The conscious process increases the tempo, telescopes into decades or years a process or development that would take centuries or more otherwise; in man a growth is achieved in one life that would normally need several lives. The other characteristic result is that when the Supermind establishes itself, there is no more ignorance, it is all light and knowledge. Till the mental range, even at its highest heights it is a mixture of light and darkness, of knowledge and ignorance: there is always an element of doubt, uncertainty or partial perception: there is a groping, a trial and one moves at best from greater darkness to lesser shade. With the Supermind all that changes: the Superman lives always in the full daylight, in the zenith consciousness, in the plenitude of knowledge. He moves from light to light, knowledge to knowledge, no longer bound to the division and duality inherent in the present human consciousness. It may be that man may not at a bound reach the peak of the Supermind: for there are lower ranges, voluntary limitations of the Light, less absolute formulations of the perfect being through which man will have to pass for a greater enrichment of his nature and for the establishment of other orders of luminous existence upon earth. Sri Aurobindo has, in this connection, spoken of the Overmind and the Mind of Light. But these too lie beyond the border of mental twilight and are domains of Light, own delegates of Supermind.
   It may not be out of place here just to mention a few characters proper to this supramental over-border consciousness. First of all, it is the seat and organon of complete knowledge: knowledge here is not the result of the deductive and inductive process of reason, it does not balance pros and cons and out of uncertain possibilities strike out an average probability: it is direct, straight, immediate, certain and absolute. Knowledge here comes by identity the knower and the known are one and what is known is therefore self-knowledge, Secondly, the will too is not an effort or striving and struggling, but the spontaneous expression of the self-power of the consciousness; willing means achieving, one wills the inevitable truth for, knowledge and will too are one. Thirdly, it is the status of perfect delight, for one has passed beyond the vale of tears and entered the peace that passeth understanding, one has found that Joy is the source of creation and the truth of existence is held in Ecstasy.

1.11 - The Kalki Avatar, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
  Krishna opens the possibility of Overmind, Buddha tries to
  shoot beyond to the supreme liberation but that liberation
  --
  supports the evolution through the Overmind leading it to-
  wards Ananda. 66 ... The last Avatar, Kalki, only accom-
  --
  Krishna opened the possibility of Overmind with its
  two sides of realization, static and dynamic. Buddha tried to

1.11 - The Master of the Work, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
     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.
     And yet there remains a contradiction between these two terms, the aloof divine Silence and the all-embracing divine Action, which we may heal in ourselves in a certain manner, in a certain high degree which seems to us complete, yet is not complete because it cannot altogether transform and conquer. A universal Peace, Light, Power, Bliss is ours, but its effective expression is not that of the Truth-Consciousness, the divine Gnosis, but still, though wonderfully freed, uplifted and illumined, supports only the present self-expression of the Cosmic Spirit and does not transform, as would a transcendental Descent, the ambiguous symbols and veiled mysteries of a world of Ignorance. Ourselves are free, but the earth-consciousness remains in bondage; only a further transcendental ascent and descent can entirely heal the contradiction and transform and deliver.

1.12 - The Superconscient, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  Before reaching the supramental plane, which is the beginning of the higher hemisphere of existence, the seeker will go through several mental layers or worlds, which Sri Aurobindo has respectively called, in ascending order, the higher mind, the illumined mind, the intuitive mind, and the Overmind. We may of course use a different terminology, but these four zones correspond to very specific experiences, verifiable by anyone who has the capacity to consciously undertake the ascent.
  Theoretically, these four zones of consciousness belong to the Superconscient. We say theoretically, because the superconscious threshold varies with individuals: for some, the higher mind or even the illumined mind is not superconscious, but a normal part of their waking consciousness, while for others, the mere reasoning mind is still a remote possibility of inner development; in other words, the line dividing the superconscient from the rest tends to recede upward as our evolution progresses. If the subconscient is our evolutionary past, the Superconscient is our evolutionary future, gradually becoming our normal waking consciousness.
  --
  If instead of rushing to his pen or brush or into a torrent of words to relieve himself of the excess of light received, the seeker strives to preserve his silence and transparency, if he remains patient, he will see the flashes gradually multiply, draw nearer, as it were, and observe another consciousness slowly dawn within him at once the fulfillment and the source of both the illumined mind and the intuitive mind, and of all human mental forms. This is the Overmind.
  194 - Savitri, 28:315
  --
  

e) The Overmind


  The Overmind is the rarely attained summit of human consciousness.
  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.
  --
  Mantras, great poetry, great music, or the sacred Word, all come from the Overmind plane. It is the source of all creative or spiritual activity (the two cannot be separated: the categorical divisions of the intellect vanish in this clear space where everything is sacred, even the profane). We might now attempt to describe the particular vibration or rhythm of the Overmind. First, as anyone knows who has the capacity to enter more or less consciously in contact with the higher planes a poet, a writer, or an artist it is no longer ideas one perceives and tries to translate when one goes beyond a certain level of consciousness: one hears. Vibrations, or waves, or rhythms, literally impose themselves and take possession of the seeker, and subsequently garb themselves with words and ideas, or music, or colors, during the descent. But the word or idea, the music or color is merely a result, a byproduct: it only gives a body to that first, highly compelling vibration. If the poet, the true one, next corrects and recorrects his draft, it is not to improve the form, as it were, or to find a more adequate expression, but to capture the vibrating life behind more accurately; if the true vibration is absent, all the magic disintegrates, as a Vedic priest mispronouncing the mantra of the sacrifice. When the consciousness is transparent, the sound can be heard distinctly, and it is a seeing sound, as it were, a sound-image or a sound-idea, which inseparably links hearing to vision and thought within the same luminous essence. All is there, self-contained, within a single vibration. On all the intermediate planes higher mind, illumined or intuitive mind the vibrations are generally broken up as flashes, pulsations, or eruptions, while in the Overmind they are great notes.
  They have neither beginning nor end, and they seem to be born out of the Infinite and disappear into the Infinite 206 ; they do not "begin" anywhere, but rather flow into the consciousness with a kind of halo of eternity, which was vibrating beforeh and and continues to vibrate long afterward, like the echo of another voyage behind this one:
  --
  At the extreme summit of the Overmind, there only remain great waves of multi-hued light, says the Mother, the play of spiritual forces, which later translate sometimes much later into new ideas, social changes, or earthly events, after crossing one by one all the layers of consciousness and suffering a considerable distortion and loss of light in the process. There are some rare and silent sages on this earth who can wield and combine these forces and draw them down onto the earth, the way others combine sounds to write a poem. Perhaps they are the true poets. Their existence is a living mantra precipitating the Real upon earth. This concludes the description of the ascent Sri Aurobindo underwent alone in his cell at Alipore. We have only presented a few human reflections of these higher regions; we have said nothing about their essence, nothing about these worlds as they exist in their glory, independently of our pale translations: one must hear and see that for oneself!
  Calm heavens of imperishable Light,

1.13 - The Divine Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  10:This distinction between the lower and the higher Maya is the link in thought and in cosmic Fact which the pessimistic and illusionist philosophies miss or neglect. To them the mental Maya, or perhaps an Overmind, is the creatrix of the world, and a world created by mental Maya would indeed be an inexplicable paradox and a fixed yet floating nightmare of conscious existence which could neither be classed as an illusion nor as a reality. We have to see that the mind is only an intermediate term between the creative governing knowledge and the soul imprisoned in its works. Sachchidananda, involved by one of His lower movements in the self-oblivious absorption of Force that is lost in the form of her own workings, returns towards Himself out of the self-oblivion; Mind is only one of His instruments in the descent and the ascent. It is an instrument of the descending creation, not the secret creatrix, - a transitional stage in the ascent, not our high original source and the consummate term of cosmic existence.
  11:The philosophies which recognise Mind alone as the creator of the worlds or accept an original principle with Mind as the only mediator between it and the forms of the universe, may be divided into the purely noumenal and the idealistic. The purely noumenal recognise in the cosmos only the work of Mind, Thought, Idea: but Idea may be purely arbitrary and have no essential relation to any real Truth of existence; such Truth, if it exists, may be regarded as a mere Absolute aloof from all relations and irreconcilable with a world of relations. The idealistic interpretation supposes a relation between the Truth behind and the conceptive phenomenon in front, a relation which is not merely that of an antinomy and opposition. The view I am presenting goes farther in idealism; it sees the creative Idea as Real-Idea, that is to say, a power of Conscious Force expressive of real being, born out of real being and partaking of its nature and neither a child of the Void nor a weaver of fictions. It is conscious Reality throwing itself into mutable forms of its own imperishable and immutable substance. The world is therefore not a figment of conception in the universal Mind, but a conscious birth of that which is beyond Mind into forms of itself. A Truth of conscious being supports these forms and expresses itself in them, and the knowledge corresponding to the truth thus expressed reigns as a supramental Truth-consciousness organising real ideas in a perfect harmony before they are cast into the mental-vital-material mould. Mind, Life and Body are an inferior consciousness and a partial expression which strives to arrive in the mould of a various evolution at that superior expression of itself already existent to the Beyond-Mind. That which is in the Beyond-Mind is the ideal which in its own conditions it is labouring to realise.

1.13 - The Supermind and the Yoga of Works, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   an intense activity of the intuitivised mind and life-power or an ascent into these ranges can bring a true but still incomplete light easily exposed to mixture, a light which is spiritual in its source though it does not always remain spiritual in its active character when it comes down into the lower nature. But none of these things is the supramental light, the supramental power; that can only be seen and grasped when we have reached the summits of mental being, entered into Overmind and stand on the borders of an upper, a greater hemisphere of spiritual existence. There the ignorance, the inconscience, the original blank Nescience slowly awaking towards a half-knowledge, which are the basis of material Nature and which surround, penetrate and powerfully limit all our powers of mind and life, cease altogether; for an unmixed and unmodified Truth-consciousness is there the substance of all the being, its pure spiritual texture. To imagine that we have reached such a condition when we are still moving in the dynamics of the Ignorance, though it may be an enlightened or illumined Ignorance, is to lay ourselves open either to a disastrous misleading or to an arrest of the evolution of the being.
  For if it is some inferior state that we thus mistake for the supermind, it lays us open to all the dangers we have seen to attend a presumptuous egoistic haste in our demand for achievement. If it is one of the higher states that we presume to be the highest, we may, though we achieve much, yet fall short of the greater, more perfect goal of our being; for we shall remain content with an approximation and the supreme transformation will escape us. Even the achievement of a complete inner liberation and a high spiritual consciousness is not that supreme transformation; for we may have that achievement, a status perfect in itself, in essence, and still our dynamic parts may in their instrumentation belong to an enlightened spiritualised mind and may be in consequence, like all mind, defective even in its greater power and knowledge, still subject to a partial or local obscuration or a limitation by the original circumscribing nescience.

1.13 - Under the Auspices of the Gods, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  Whether one takes the mystic path or the slower path of the poet, the artist, or all the great creators, ultimately the consciousness seems to vanish at a white frontier, and everything is canceled out. The "someone" who could serve as a bridge disappears, all pulsations die out, all vibrations cease in a frost of light. Sooner or later, the human dissolves into a Nonhuman, as if the goal of this whole evolutionary ascent were only to leave the human smallness and return to the Source, which logically we never should have left in the first place. Even assuming there were some unknown gradation of consciousness beyond the Overmind, would it not be a more rarefied,
  more evanescent gradation? One climbs higher and higher, more and more divinely, but farther and farther away from the earth. The individual may be transfigured, but the world remains as it is. What,
  --
  more and more intuitive, and will perhaps finally open to the Overmind. One might suppose that a humanity opened to the Overmind would be capable of handling life's intricate diversity. The Overmind is a godlike consciousness, indeed the very consciousness of the greatest prophets the world has ever known, a mass of stable light, so it would seem that everything should be harmonized in that all-embracing light.
  Unfortunately, however, two facts shatter this hope: the first has to do with the very nature of the Overmind itself. To be sure, the Overmind seems formidably powerful compared to our mind, but this is a superiority in degree within the same type; it is not a transcendence of the mental principle, but only an epitomization of it. The Overmind can broaden the human scope, not change it. It can divinize man, but it also colossalises213 him, as Sri Aurobindo puts it; for if man attaches this new power to his ego instead of to his soul, he will become a Nietzschean superman, not a god. We do not need a superconsciousness; what we need is another consciousness. Even if man accepted to obey his soul and not his ego, the Overmind would still not transform life, for the very reasons that prevented Christ and all the great prophets from transforming life: because the Overmind is not a new principle of consciousness, but the very one that has presided over our evolution since the appearance of man; from the Overmind have come all the higher ideas and creative forces, and we have lived under the auspices of the gods for thousands of years
  sometimes through the voices of our prophets and religions,
  --
  The deficiencies of the Overmind are retraceable to several causes.
  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
  --
  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
  On Yoga II, Tome 2, 263
  --
  If we look at the evolutionary future from an individual standpoint instead of a collective one, the Overmind does not bring us, either, the living fulfillment to which we aspire. If the goal of evolution is merely to produce more Beethovens and Shelleys, and perhaps even a few super Platos, one cannot help thinking that this is really a paltry culmination for so many millions of years and so many billions of individuals expended along the way. Beethoven or Shelley, or even St.
  John, cannot be evolutionary goals, or else life has no true meaning
  --
  Sri Aurobindo was searching for a true life here. Life, not a remote silent or high-uplifted ecstatic Beyond Life alone, is the field of our Yoga.217 He was realizing that the summits of consciousness are not sufficient to turn life into a true life. We may have attained the Overmind, found joy, a singing immensity, but not that of life, which continues to grate. When you are high up in the consciousness, the Mother remarked, you know, but when you come back down in Matter, it is like water entering sand. We have sent our rockets high into the spiritual heavens, have sung what is best in man without bothering with the lower levels, content if the brute in us was asleep enough not to upset our divine dreams; but this is precisely why life does remain brute, like ourselves: To hope for a true change of human life without a change of human nature is an irrational and unspiritual proposition; it is to ask for something unnatural and unreal, an impossible miracle.218 This is also why our islands of light are 217
  218
  --
  The Secret, what Sri Aurobindo called the Supramental, is not a further gradation above the Overmind, not a super-mind or a superascent, but a new Auspice, unconnected to the gods and the religions,
  on which the very future of our evolution depends.

1.14 - The Secret, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  Sri Aurobindo has never told us the circumstances of his discovery. He was always extraordinarily silent about himself, not out of reserve but simply because the "I" did not exist. "One felt," his Chandernagore host reports with naive surprise, "one felt when he spoke as if somebody else were speaking through him. I placed the plate of food before him, he simply gazed at it, then ate a little, just mechanically! He appeared to be inwardly absorbed even when he was eating; he used to meditate with open eyes." 219 It was only later, from his writings and some fragments of conversations, that his experience could be pieced together. The first clue came from a chance remark made to one of his disciples. It shows that from Alipore onward he was on the trail: I was mentally subjected to all sorts of torture for fifteen days. I had to look upon pictures of all sorts of suffering.220 We must remember that in those worlds, seeing is synonymous with experiencing. Thus, as Sri Aurobindo ascended toward the Overmind, his consciousness was descending into what we are used to calling hell. This is also one of the first phenomena the seeker experiences, in varying degrees. This is not a yoga for the weak, as the Mother says, and it is true. For if the first tangible result of Sri Aurobindo's yoga is to bring out new poetic and artistic faculties, the second, perhaps even the immediate consequence, is to shine a merciless spotlight on all the undersides of the consciousness, first individual, then universal. This close, and puzzling, linkage between superconscient and subconscient was certainly the starting point of Sri Aurobindo's breakthrough.
  

The Gradations of the Subconscient


  --
  Night, Evil, Death are masks. The supreme Opposition awakens the supreme Intensity, and the analogous becomes Itself there is only One, tad ekam. The Solar World, the supreme, supramental, divine consciousness, of which all the other worlds are separate rays, was present in the very heart of Matter. The step above the Overmind is not "above"; it is here within all things. The door below opens the door above and everywhere:
  A fathomless sealed astonishment of Light.246

1.15 - The Supramental Consciousness, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  The Supramental Vision The supramental vision is a global vision. The mind dissects little fragments and opposes them to one another. The Overmind connects everything with a single beam, but its beam terminates in a single point, and it sees everything from its own particular point of view; it is unitary and universal either by way of excluding all other perspectives or else by annexing them. The Supramental, or Supermind, sees not only the whole of things and beings within a single vision, connecting all the beams together without opposing anything, but it also sees the point of view of each separate thing, each being, each force; it is an all-encompassing view that does not terminate in a single, central point but in myriads of points:
  a single innumerable look. . .259
  --
  The mind, even the Overmind of our prophets, is irreversibly bound to dualities (dualities within Unity): if God is above, He cannot be below; if this is white, it is not black. For the supramental experience, however, everything is embraced; it is always yes and no at the same time, the Mother remarked. The two poles of each thing are constantly integrated within another "dimension" ("the secret inner spaces," as the Vedic rishis called them, II.4.9). Thus, the Transcendent is not elsewhere, outside the world; it is everywhere here, at once fully within and fully without. The supramental consciousness, likewise, is fully in the world and fully outside the world; it is seated on the unshakable Rock and in the middle of the current. This is why it can truly enjoy life and be in control of life; for if we are exclusively in the current we find neither peace nor control;
  we are merely carried away like a straw. We might be able to guess what the supramental experience is by going back to the first experiences of the beginning of yoga. Indeed, we had noticed that by stepping back in our consciousness, by a slight movement of withdrawal, we entered an expanse of silence behind, as if a portion of
  --
  The parallel with nuclear physics is even more striking if we describe the supramental power as it appears to one who inwardly sees. We have said that the higher we rise in consciousness, the more stable and unbroken the light: from the intuitive sparks to the "stable flashes" of the Overmind, the light becomes more and more homogeneous. One might imagine, then, that the supramental light is a kind of luminous totality, utterly still and compact, without the tiniest interstice. But, remarkably, the quality of the supramental light is very different from that of other levels of consciousness: it combines both complete stillness and the most rapid movement; here, too, the two opposite poles have become integrated. We can only state the fact without being able to explain it. This is how the Mother describes her first experience with the supramental light: There was an overwhelming impression of power, warmth, gold: it wasn't fluid; it was like a powdering. And each of these things (one can't call them particles or fragments, or even dots, unless "dot" is used in the mathematical sense of a point that takes up no space) was like living gold a warm gold dust. It wasn't bright, it wasn't dark, nor was it a light as we understand it: a multitude of tiny golden points, nothing but that. It was as if they were touching my eyes, my face. And with a sense of tremendous power! At the same time, there was a feeling of such plenitude the peace of omnipotence. It was rich, full. It was movement at its utmost, infinitely faster than anything we can conceive of, yet at the same time, there was absolute peace and perfect stillness.284 Years later, when the experience had become quite familiar to her, the Mother spoke of it in these terms: It is a movement that is like an eternal Vibration, with neither beginning nor end.
  Something that exists from all eternity, for all eternity, and that has no divisions in time; only when it is projected upon a screen does it begin assuming time-divisions; it isn't possible to say one second, or one instant . . . it's very difficult to explain. Scarcely has it been perceived,

1.16 - Man, A Transitional Being, #Sri Aurobindo or the Adventure of Consciousness, #Satprem, #Integral Yoga
  This ceaseless movement from Being to Becoming is what Sri Aurobindo called devolution. The transition is gradual; the supreme Consciousness does not all at once become Matter. Matter is the final precipitate, the end product of an increasing fragmentation or "materialization" of consciousness, which is worked out slowly, one level at a time. At the "top" of this devolutive course though it is not a top but a supreme Point that is everywhere at once stands the supramental Consciousness-Force, which encompasses in a single Glance all the infinite possibilities of the Becoming, as the solar Fire contains all its rays within its center: "They unyoked the horses of the Sun," says the Rig Veda, "the ten thousand stood together, there was that One, tad ekam." (V.62.1) Then comes the Overmind: the "great clevage" of consciousness begins; the rays of the Sun branch off; the single Consciousness-Force is henceforth scattered into trillions of forces, each seeking its own absolute realization. Once begun, the Play will not stop until all the possibilities have been exhausted,
  including those that seem to be the very contradiction of the eternal Player. Force is cast in an ever more passionate movement, as if it wanted to burst forth to its utmost frontiers, to meet itself always farther in order to replace the One by an impossible sum. Then consciousness scatters. It breaks up into smaller and smaller fragments, becoming increasingly heavy and obscure, forming layers or worlds inhabited by their own beings and forces, each with its particular life; all the traditions have described them; we too, can see them in our sleep, or with our eyes open once our vision has become unsealed. From the gods to the symbolic gnomes, consciousness shrinks, crumbles, and falls to dust Overmind, intuitive mind,
  illumined mind, higher mind, then vital, and subtle physical. It becomes more and more ensnared and mired in its force, scattered into microscopic instincts or survival-oriented tropisms, until its final dispersion in Matter, in which everything becomes fragmented. "In the 317

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

1.2.01 - The Upanishadic and Purancic Systems, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  (supermind, Overmind, etc.) is beyond even that range and is to the mind like a deep sleep.
  Letters on Yoga - I

1.2.12 - Vigilance, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  To give up restraint would be to give free play to the vital and that would mean leave for all kinds of forces to enter in. So long as there is not the supramental consciousness controlling and penetrating everything, in all the being from the Overmind downwards, there is an ambiguous play of forces, and each force, however divine in origin, may be used by the Powers of light or intercepted as it passes through the mind and the vital by the Powers of darkness. Vigilance, discrimination, control cannot be abandoned till the complete victory has been won and the consciousness transmuted.
  Grace is all right, but there should also be care and vigilance.

1.24 - The Advent and Progress of the Spiritual Age, #The Human Cycle, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The thing to be done is as large as human life, and therefore the individuals who lead the way will take all human life for their province. These pioneers will consider nothing as alien to them, nothing as outside their scope. For every part of human life has to be taken up by the spiritual,not only the intellectual, the aesthetic, the ethical, but the dynamic, the vital, the physical; therefore for none of these things or the activities that spring from them will they have contempt or aversion, however they may insist on a change of the spirit and a transmutation of the form. In each power of our nature they will seek for its own proper means of conversion; knowing that the Divine is concealed in all, they will hold that all can be made the spirits means of self-finding and all can be converted into its instruments of divine living. And they will see that the great necessity is the conversion of the normal into the spiritual mind and the opening of that mind again into its own higher reaches and more and more integral movement. For before the decisive change can be made, the stumbling intellectual reason has to be converted into the precise and luminous intuitive, until that again can rise into higher ranges to Overmind and supermind or gnosis. The uncertain and stumbling mental will has to rise towards the sure intuitive and into a higher divine and gnostic will, the psychic sweetness, fire and light of the soul behind the heart, hdaye guhym, has to alchemise our crude emotions and the hard egoisms and clamant desires of our vital nature. All our other members have to pass through a similar conversion under the compelling force and light from above. The leaders of the spiritual march will start from and use the knowledge and the means that past effort has developed in this direction, but they will not take them as they are without any deep necessary change or limit themselves by what is now known or cleave only to fixed and stereotyped systems or given groupings of results, but will follow the method of the Spirit in Nature. A constant rediscovery and new formulation and larger synthesis in the mind, a mighty remoulding in its deeper parts because of a greater enlarging Truth not discovered or not well fixed before, is that Spirits way with our past achievement when he moves to the greatnesses of the future.
  This endeavour will be a supreme and difficult labour even for the individual, but much more for the race. It may well be that, once started, it may not advance rapidly even to its first decisive stage; it may be that it will take long centuries of effort to come into some kind of permanent birth. But that is not altogether inevitable, for the principle of such changes in Nature seems to be a long obscure preparation followed by a swift gathering up and precipitation of the elements into the new birth, a rapid conversion, a transformation that in its luminous moment figures like a miracle. Even when the first decisive change is reached, it is certain that all humanity will not be able to rise to that level. There cannot fail to be a division into those who are able to live on the spiritual level and those who are only able to live in the light that descends from it into the mental level. And below these too there might still be a great mass influenced from above but not yet ready for the light. But even that would be a transformation and a beginning far beyond anything yet attained. This hierarchy would not mean as in our present vital living an egoistic domination of the undeveloped by the more developed, but a guidance of the younger by the elder brothers of the race and a constant working to lift them up to a greater spiritual level and wider horizons. And for the leaders too this ascent to the first spiritual levels would not be the end of the divine march, a culmination that left nothing more to be achieved on earth. For there would be still yet higher levels within the supramental realm, as the old Vedic poets knew when they spoke of the spiritual life as a constant ascent,

1.28 - Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  object:1.28 - Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya
  class:chapter
  --
  7:It is in the latter alternative that we find the secret we are seeking, the means of the transition, the needed step towards a supramental transformation; for we perceive a graduality of ascent, a communication with a more and more deep and immense light and power from above, a scale of intensities which can be regarded as so many stairs in the ascension of Mind or in a descent into Mind from That which is beyond it. We are aware of a sealike downpour of masses of a spontaneous knowledge which assumes the nature of Thought but has a different character from the process of thought to which we are accustomed; for there is nothing here of seeking, no trace of mental construction, no labour of speculation or difficult discovery; it is an automatic and spontaneous knowledge from a Higher Mind that seems to be in possession of Truth and not in search of hidden and withheld realities. One observes that this Thought is much more capable than the mind of including at once a mass of knowledge in a single view; it has a cosmic character, not the stamp of an individual thinking. Beyond this Truth-Thought we can distinguish a greater illumination instinct with an increased power and intensity and driving force, a luminosity of the nature of Truth-Sight with thought formulation as a minor and dependent activity. If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, - an image which in this experience becomes a reality, - we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truthaction, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; for though we have applied that word for want of a better to any supra-intellectual direct way of knowing, yet what we actually know as intuition is only one special movement of self-existent knowledge. This new range is its origin; it imparts to our intuitions something of its own distinct character and is very clearly an intermediary of a greater Truth-Light with which our mind cannot directly communicate. At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies, - not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality. This then is the occult link we were looking for; this is the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance.
  8:In its nature and law the Overmind is a delegate of the Supermind Consciousness, its delegate to the Ignorance. Or we might speak of it as a protective double, a screen of dissimilar similarity through which Supermind can act indirectly on an Ignorance whose darkness could not bear or receive the direct impact of a supreme Light. Even, it is by the projection of this luminous Overmind corona that the diffusion of a diminished light in the Ignorance and the throwing of that contrary shadow which swallows up in itself all light, the Inconscience, became at all possible. For Supermind transmits to Overmind all its realities, but leaves it to formulate them in a movement and according to an awareness of things which is still a vision of Truth and yet at the same time a first parent of the Ignorance. A line divides Supermind and Overmind which permits a free transmission, allows the lower Power to derive from the higher Power all it holds or sees, but automatically compels a transitional change in the passage. The integrality of the Supermind keeps always the essential truth of things, the total truth and the truth of its individual self-determinations clearly knit together; it maintains in them an inseparable unity and between them a close interpenetration and a free and full consciousness of each other: but in Overmind this integrality is no longer there. And yet the Overmind is well aware of the essential Truth of things; it embraces the totality; it uses the individual self-determinations without being limited by them: but although it knows their oneness, can realise it in a spiritual cognition, yet its dynamic movement, even while relying on that for its security, is not directly determined by it. Overmind Energy proceeds through an illimitable capacity of separation and combination of the powers and aspects of the integral and indivisible all-comprehending Unity. It takes each Aspect or Power and gives to it an independent action in which it acquires a full separate importance and is able to work out, we might say, its own world of creation. Purusha and Prakriti, Conscious Soul and executive Force of Nature, are in the supramental harmony a two-aspected single truth, being and dynamis of the Reality; there can be no disequilibrium or predominance of one over the other. In Overmind we have the origin of the cleavage, the trenchant distinction made by the philosophy of the Sankhyas in which they appear as two independent entities, Prakriti able to dominate Purusha and cloud its freedom and power, reducing it to a witness and recipient of her forms and actions, Purusha able to return to its separate existence and abide in a free self-sovereignty by rejection of her original overclouding material principle. So with the other aspects or powers of the Divine Reality, One and Many, Divine Personality and Divine Impersonality, and the rest; each is still an aspect and power of the one Reality, but each is empowered to act as an independent entity in the whole, arrive at the fullness of the possibilities of its separate expression and develop the dynamic consequences of that separateness. At the same time in Overmind this separateness is still founded on the basis of an implicit underlying unity; all possibilities of combination and relation between the separated Powers and Aspects, all interchanges and mutualities of their energies are freely organised and their actuality always possible.
  9:If we regard the Powers of the Reality as so many Godheads, we can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, communication and interplay with the others. There are in the Veda different formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Existence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods together or contains them in his being; and yet again each is a separate Deity acting sometimes in unison with companion deities, sometimes separately, sometimes even in apparent opposition to other Godheads of the same Existence. In the Supermind all this would be held together as a harmonised play of the one Existence; in the Overmind each of these three conditions could be a separate action or basis of action and have its own principle of development and consequences and yet each keep the power to combine with the others in a more composite harmony. As with the One Existence, so with its Consciousness and Force. The One Consciousness is separated into many independent forms of consciousness and knowledge; each follows out its own line of truth which it has to realise. The one total and manysided Real-Idea is split up into its many sides; each becomes an independent Idea-Force with the power to realise itself. The one Consciousness-Force is liberated into its million forces, and each of these forces has the right to fulfil itself or to assume, if needed, a hegemony and take up for its own utility the other forces. So too the Delight of Existence is loosed out into all manner of delights and each can carry in itself its independent fullness or sovereign extreme. Overmind thus gives to the One Existence-Consciousness-Bliss the character of a teeming of infinite possibilities which can be developed into a multitude of worlds or thrown together into one world in which the endlessly variable outcome of their play is the determinant of the creation, of its process, its course and its consequence.
  10:Since the Consciousness-Force of the eternal Existence is the universal creatrix, the nature of a given world will depend on whatever self-formulation of that Consciousness expresses itself in that world. Equally, for each individual being, his seeing or representation to himself of the world he lives in will depend on the poise or make which that Consciousness has assumed in him. Our human mental consciousness sees the world in sections cut by the reason and sense and put together in a formation which is also sectional; the house it builds is planned to accommodate one or another generalised formulation of Truth, but excludes the rest or admits some only as guests or dependents in the house. Overmind Consciousness is global in its cognition and can hold any number of seemingly fundamental differences together in a reconciling vision. Thus the mental reason sees Person and the Impersonal as opposites: it conceives an impersonal Existence in which person and personality are fictions of the Ignorance or temporary constructions; or, on the contrary, it can see Person as the primary reality and the impersonal as a mental abstraction or only stuff or means of manifestation. To the Overmind intelligence these are separable Powers of the one Existence which can pursue their independent self-affirmation and can also unite together their different modes of action, creating both in their independence and in their union different states of consciousness and being which can be all of them valid and all capable of coexistence. A purely impersonal existence and consciousness is true and possible, but also an entirely personal consciousness and existence; the Impersonal Divine, Nirguna Brahman, and the Personal Divine, Saguna Brahman, are here equal and coexistent aspects of the Eternal. Impersonality can manifest with person subordinated to it as a mode of expression; but, equally, Person can be the reality with impersonality as a mode of its nature: both aspects of manifestation face each other in the infinite variety of conscious Existence. What to the mental reason are irreconcilable differences present themselves to the Overmind intelligence as coexistent correlatives; what to the mental reason are contraries are to the Overmind intelligence complementaries. Our mind sees that all things are born from Matter or material Energy, exist by it, go back into it; it concludes that Matter is the eternal factor, the primary and ultimate reality, Brahman. Or it sees all as born of Life-Force or Mind, existing by Life or by Mind, going back into the universal Life or Mind, and it concludes that this world is a creation of the cosmic Life-Force or of a cosmic Mind or Logos. Or again it sees the world and all things as born of, existing by and going back to the Real Idea or Knowledge-Will of the Spirit or to the Spirit itself and it concludes on an idealistic or spiritual view of the universe. It can fix on any of these ways of seeing, but to its normal separative vision each way excludes the others. Overmind consciousness perceives that each view is true of the action of the principle it erects; it can see that there is a material world-formula, a vital world-formula, a mental world-formula, a spiritual worldformula, and each can predominate in a world of its own and at the same time all can combine in one world as its constituent powers. The self-formulation of Conscious Force on which our world is based as an apparent Inconscience that conceals in itself a supreme Conscious-Existence and holds all the powers of Being together in its inconscient secrecy, a world of universal Matter realising in itself Life, Mind, Overmind, Supermind, Spirit, each of them in its turn taking up the others as means of its selfexpression, Matter proving in the spiritual vision to have been always itself a manifestation of the Spirit, is to the Overmind view a normal and easily realisable creation. In its power of origination and in the process of its executive dynamis Overmind is an organiser of many potentialities of Existence, each affirming its separate reality but all capable of linking themselves together in many different but simultaneous ways, a magician craftsman empowered to weave the multicoloured warp and woof of manifestation of a single entity in a complex universe.
  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
   The first definitive and distinctive higher status is that of the Overmind. Its character is a global and entire being and consciousness, a cosmic and universal all-inclusive existence. Each being attains its self and each self lives in every other self and all selves together and at the same time live in each self. The diversities are not abolishedas in the unitary consciousness and being of the absolute Existence, Brahmanvariations are maintained as the multiple aspects or modalities of the same single infinite eternal power.
   I am now speaking here of samrajya-siddhi, the realisation of the world-empire, the spiritual or Divine Empire. First of course there is, as the basis of the samrajya, the svarajya, the kingdom or reign of the individual's own self. In effect, the world-empire or the imperial reign of the Spirit has three gradations. At the outset each element, that is, each individual human being (we limit ourselves to the human collectivity at present) has to attain svarajya, self-rule, a perfectly homogeneous integral spiritual whole in himself: then all such individuals should achieve integrality with one another. Each lives in and through every other and all together live in everyone. The whole forms an indissoluble integral and unitary life. This collective integration means all individuals have one mind, one vital being, even one physical consciousness, not of course one material body but still a feeling of the kind. One mind or one vital or one physical consciousness does not mean everyone has the same identical formations and movements in these respective regions, but all possess substantially the same stuff belonging to a self-same unit. A comparison or analogy may explain and illustrate the point. For example, the different parts of a human body form one integrated texture: they are all bound up, united although not fused together, in an inextricable, "inexorable" unity. Action in one part creates a reaction, re-echoes or re-doubles in every other part: they all rise up like one man as it is popularly said, at a single touch. Different in form, different in function, they are identical in their substantial composition, in their fundamental stuff-the organic plasma; even so, the minds of all, their vital movements, their physical movements too, however different and diverse, contrary or contradictory, are in their own respective domains part and particles of the one and the same substance and all together contri bute to form, to create a symphony, a grand Beethovenesque orchestra.
  --
   To spiritualise Matter does not mean dematerialising Matter! It means rather re-materialising the Spirit. And that is the task of the Supermind and its intermediate and immediate helpersagents and emissaries the Overmind and Above-mind.
   The Supermind is of Course the last and ultimate or other wise the first and original Support and inspiration of all other levels of being and living. Apart from this fundamental, this one source of sustenance, each intermediary level depends directly and leans upon the one that lies just above it, over arches it as it were. Thus speaking of the major intermediaries, the Overmind is under the direct control and guidance of the over-arching Supermind. And Overmind itself over-arches, broods over the mind and from behind guides and controls it. The Mind has evolved primarily because of the pressure of the Overmind standing immediately above it in the hierarchy of the grades of existence. And because of this constant ruling presence of the Overmind, the mind in man is a progressive entity unveiling powers lent or delegated to it, sent down into it from the Overmind. The animal, on the contrary, is not a progressive being like man, for the Overmind does not reach it. The animal is not in contact with the Overmind. It is in contact, a somewhat precarious contact, with the Mind. Something of the Mental has made an inroad into him, into his vital texture. It is to be noted that the mind in the animal is of a different kind from the human mind: it is only in the domesticated animals, the animals living in the neighbourhood of man, having contact with him, that something of the human mind percolates Or is imbibed. As I have said, the human mind has developed and is developing fast, specially in recent years, to an extraordinary degree, in the domain of physical science leading to discoveries that appear so subtle and distant, far off as almost to be out of reach of his normal means of experience. Discoveries of other kinds, hints and intimations with regard to other forms and fields of knowledge and experience are explained most logically and adequately by the fact of an interruption or intervention of another type of consciousness into the present constitution of the human mind. We are referring to the influence of the Overmind, gradually becoming more and more explicit, extensive and effective, the immediately directing power, the guide of the new age. And this naturally because of the operative presence, in and through the Overmind, of the Supramental upon earth and in earth.
   ***

1.3.05 - Silence, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Let us not exaggerate anything. It is not so much getting rid of mental activity as converting it into the right thing. Krishnaprem has mental activity, but it is a mind that has gone inside and sees things from there, an intuitive mind; I have mental activity (in the midst of silence) whenever necessary, but it is a mind that has gone up and sees things from above, an Overmind action.
  What has to be surpassed and changed is the intellectual reason which sees things from outside only by analysis and inference

1.4.02 - The Divine Force, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is only if the supramental Power came fully down, not merely sent its influences through the Overmind, that things could be very radically altered in this respect - and that is why my main effort is directed towards that object - for then the sanction would not be rare! For the Law of the Truth would be at work not constantly balanced by the law of the Ignorance.
  Still the Yoga-force is always tangible and concrete in the way I have described and has tangible results. But it is invisible

14.07 - A Review of Our Ashram Life, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 05, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The ground had already been prepared, we may note, by the descent of the 24th November 1926the descent of the Overmind or Krishna-consciousness into Sri Aurobindo's body-consciousness and thence generally into the earth-atmosphere and becoming its natural and permanent possession.
   But arrived at one point, Sri Aurobindo happened to make an observation which meant halt! The Mother narrates to us the story in an amusing way. One day Sri Aurobindo was telling the Mother: What you are doing is very fine and very grand. It will bring you name and fame, you will become a world-figure and your work a marvel. It will be a "grand succs." Well, that was sufficient. The whole thing dropped from Mother's hands. The new creation vanished in a moment, as it were: there was a pralaya.
  --
   This creation of a luminous world in a higher sphere of the mind which Mother attempted could not be fully achieved; for the foundations were not properly laid, the basic ground was not prepared. Any higher structure of the mind and Overmind must be built upon man's vital being and physical life. The new creation left out of account these realities of basement, so one had to come down, forgetting for the moment the higher realisation, into these darker regions and make a thorough cleaning of them. The regions of the vital consciousness and physical consciousness are, as we all know, full of human failings and dangerous complications. One had to leave the heavens and come down to these lower levels and tackle the problems that beset them, the crucial problems whose solution alone could lay a strong foundation for the final consummation, the supreme transformation. One had to face the stark realities there and master them before one could think of a heavenly ascent. So we all became once more ordinary human beings with human weaknesses and a modicum of aspiration perhaps. This was then the task given to all to battle through and conquer here below. The scene changed completely. A mid-summer night's dream turned almost into a sombre Hamlet-tragedy.
   The first sign of this Return, this resumption of life as it is, was the re-assertion of the individual, the freedom of the personal unit. Because of the increased number of people and because of the incursion of children, the earlier frame could no longer hold good. The willing surrender of individuality is a lesson that has to be acquired and achieved: it is not just God's gift, for the many. The many have to grow, grow by degrees, through toil and trouble, and slowly led into the mysteries of the higher realisation of surrender and self-giving. And towards that consummation independence, freedom, is the first step. But once the climb down begins, it does not admit of an arrest, it becomes slide down, a continuous descent until you reach the very rock-bottom of the vale of tears. The Roman poet spoke of the easy descent down the cliffs to the river.2

1929-04-21 - Visions, seeing and interpretation - Dreams and dreaml and - Dreamless sleep - Visions and formulation - Surrender, passive and of the will - Meditation and progress - Entering the spiritual life, a plunge into the Divine, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  Jeanne dArc was evidently in relation with some entities belonging to what we call the world of the Gods (or as the Catholics say, the world of the Saints, though it is not quite the same). The beings she saw she called archangels. These beings belong to the intermediate world between the higher mind and the supramental, the world that Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind. It is the world of the creators, the Formateurs.
  The two beings who were always appearing and speaking to Jeanne dArc would, if seen by an Indian, have a quite different appearance; for when one sees, one projects the forms of ones mind. To what you see you give the form of that which you expect to see. If the same being appeared simultaneously in a group where there were Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Shintoists, it would be named by absolutely different names. Each would say, in reference to the appearance of the being, that he was like this or like that, all differing and yet it would be one and the same manifestation. You have the vision of one in India whom you call the Divine Mother, the Catholics say it is the Virgin Mary, and the Japanese call it Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy, and others would give other names. It is the same Force, the same Power, but the images made of it are different in different faiths.

1951-03-01 - Universe and the Divine - Freedom and determinism - Grace - Time and Creation- in the Supermind - Work and its results - The psychic being - beauty and love - Flowers- beauty and significance - Choice of reincarnating psychic being, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   The universe contains all the domains higher than the physical: there is a global physical comprising the mental, the vital, etc., and all the domains above the mental are domains of a spiritual order, domains which are, for us, domains of the spirit, and it is this spirit which little by little, progressively, materialises itself to arrive at Matter as we conceive it. The beings of the Overmind, for instance, and all the beings of the higher regions have no psychic being the angels have no psychic being. It is only upon earth that the psychic life begins, and it is just the process by which the Divine has awakened material life to the necessity of rejoining its divine origin. Without the psychic, Matter would never have awakened from its inconscience, it would never have aspired for the life of its origin, the spiritual life. Therefore, the psychic being in the human being is the manifestation of spiritual aspiration; but there is a spiritual life independent of the psychic.
   Is there a correspondence between the psychic world and the earth?

1951-05-11 - Mahakali and Kali - Avatar and Vibhuti - Sachchidananda behind all states of being - The power of will - receiving the Divine Will, #Questions And Answers 1950-1951, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   I believe I have already told you once that there are the original beings in their higher reality and these are of a particular kind; then, as they manifest in more and more material regions, nearer and nearer the earth, they assume different forms and also multiply in a strange way. If you like, the beings Sri Aurobindo speaks of here belong to regions quite close to the Supermind, they are still in quite a clear and conscious contact with the supramental origin. These beings manifest also in what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind and there the form becomes as it were more marked, a little more precise and at the same time reduced in power and capacity. Then, from the Overmind they come down into the human mind, the terrestrial mind and there Take for instance this poor Mahakali; you have a multitude of Kalis, one more horrible than another; some are absolutely terrifying and horrifying, and they sometimes become quite repulsive beings who are exclusively human formations, that is, the outer form is given by human imagination, by the human minds capacity of formation. There may be within that a vague reflection of the force of Mahakali, but it is so diminished, deformed, dwarfed, brought within the range of human consciousness, that truly she can very well deny that it is she! I have seen all possible horrors by way of images representing Mahakali. Of the images we wont speak. If great artists have made them perhaps some beauty is still left, but as they are generally daubers, nothing remains. As for the images (statues or pictures) which have to be installed in a temple, a religious ceremony is performed, and if the priest or the assistant is a man with occult powers, even limited ones, he can, with his aspiration and through the ritual, bring a supraterrestrial consciousness into these forms. That is the principle; you are told, This is not a piece of wood, this is not a stone, this is not a picture; there is within it a force which the religious ritual has brought down and to this you may speak. This is right, but the nature of the priest must be known, his occult knowledge and also the forces with which he has an affinity. So, there may be many things in there. There is something (unless it is a stupid ignoramus who has performed the ceremony, one who has no power at all, has brought down nothing, made only a show but this is rather rare; I cant say it happens frequently, it is quite rare), generally there is something, but then the nature, the quality of this something, you know this varies infinitely and it is sometimes a little disturbing. I gave the example of Mahakali, because the conception of Mahakali in the human consciousness is especially horrible. When one goes to other divinities like Mahasaraswati, for instance, to whom all kinds of artistic, literary and other capacities are ascribed, it is no longer so terrible. But Mahakali particularly Their conception of power, force, warlike energy is so terrible that what they bring down is indeed a little dangerous for those who worship it. I have heard innumerable stories since my coming to India. I have been put in touch with innumerable images and have known many people who had in their homes a Kali they worshipped and to whom, sometimes, quite dreadful things had happened. I always put them on their guard, I told them, Dont think at all that Mahakali is responsible for your misfortunes, for she is not responsible for them. But it is likely that the Kali you have in your home must be harbouring some vindictive being, probably one very jealous, extremely wilful and with a very strong spirit of vengeance, and as you have faith and as it is generally a vital power, there may be truly dangerous consequences. I have known people who, after having had all kinds of unfortunate experiences, have taken the statue of Mahakali and thrown it into the Ganges. If at the same time they could acquire a certain freedom of spirit, all the damage would disappear, but some of them are so frightened of what they have done that the bad effects continue.
   These things should never be touched unless one has at least the first elements of occult knowledge. Unfortunately, in religionsall religions, not only here but everywhereknowledge is never given to the faithful. Sometimes the priests have it (I dont say always), but when they have it they take good care not to give it to the faithful, for that would deprive them of their authority and power, and that really is the evil behind all religious institutions.

1953-09-16, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   It is not quite so simple as that. The psychic being is the result of evolution, that is to say, evolution of the divine Consciousness which spread into Matter and slowly lifted up Matter, made it develop to return to the Divine. The psychic being was formed by this divine centre progressively through all the births. There comes a time when it reaches a kind of perfection, perfection in its growth and formation. Then, most often, as it has an aspiration for realisation, for a greater perfection to manifest yet better the Divine, it generally draws towards itself a being from the involution, that is to say, one of those entities belonging to what Sri Aurobindo calls Overmind, who comes then to incarnate in this psychic being. It can be one of those entities men generally call gods, some kind of deities. And when this fusion occurs the psychic being naturally is magnified and shares in the nature of the being incarnated in it. And then it has the power to produce emanations. These beings have the power to produce emanations, that is to say, they project out of themselves a part of themselves which becomes independent and goes into others to incarnate itself. So there can be not only two, but three, four or five emanations. That depends upon cases, it can happen thus. That is to say, one can have the same origin, psycho-divine, we might say. And generally when there are a number of emanations, the different persons feel themselves to be that being, and rightly so, for they carry in themselves something of that godhead: it is as though a part of the godhead has cast itself out of itself and become independent in another being. It is not a self-duplication but a kind of self-projection. (To the child who put the question:) Duplication gives the idea that what has been duplicated has lost a part of its capability: if you cut your body in two, only half of it will remain for you; but if you have the power to emanate something out of you, you remain quite whole, as you are, and at the same time, there is another Tara who is there in another person. You understand? It is like that.
   When the hands of the pianist entered the hands of another, would the one who lent his hands be able to play?

1953-09-30, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   For a very simple reason, because till now the whole physical, material world, the whole earth (let us take the earth) has been ruled by forces and the consciousness that come from what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind. Even what men call God is a force, a power coming from the Overmind and the whole universe was under the rule of the Overmind. To get there one has to pass through many intermediate planes and very few people can reach there without getting dazzled. But what Sri Aurobindo said is that now the time for the rule of the Overmind is coming to its end and is going to be replaced by the rule of the Supermind. All who have had spiritual experiences and have discovered the Divine and become united with Him, know what it is, the Overmind. But what Sri Aurobindo says is that beyond the Overmind there is something and that it is now the turn of this something to come and rule the earth, to manifest upon earth and rule the earth. Therefore, there is no need to speak of the Overmind, for many people have spoken about it already and have had the experience of it; whereas this is something new that is going to manifest itself in a new way and nobody has been aware of it before. That is why. The old accounts theres no lack of people who have experienced these things or described them, or of books written on the subject. There is no need to repeat once more what others have said. Sri Aurobindo came to say something new. And it is precisely because people are unable to come out of the experiences they have known and heard being spoken of, that they try to identify this Force which Sri Aurobindo called supramental with their experience of the intermediary worlds including the Overmind. For they cannot conceive that there could be something else. Sri Aurobindo always said that his Yoga began where the former Yogas ended, that to be able to realise his Yoga it was necessary first of all to have reached the extreme limit of what the older Yogas had realised, that is to say, the perception of the Divine, the union, the identification with the Divine. But that Divine, Sri Aurobindo says, is the Divine of the Overmind which is already something quite unthinkable, in comparison with the human consciousness, because even to reach there one must pass through several planes and in these planes one feels dazzled.
   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.
  --
   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?!
   If you had around you people like Vivekananda, for example, your work would be more easy, wouldnt it? Instead of having unrefined stuff like us? (laughter)

1953-10-14, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   That depends. They have been given many names. All has been done by gradations and through individual beings of all kinds. Each state of being is inhabited by entities, individualities and personalities and each one has created a world around him or has contri buted to the formation of certain beings upon earth. The last creators are those of the vital world, but there are beings of the Overmind (Sri Aurobindo calls this plane the Overmind), who have created, given forms, sent out emanations, and these emanations again had their emanations and so on. What I meant is that it is not the Divine Will that acted directly on Matter to give to the world the required form, it is by passing through layers, so to say, planes of the world, as for example, the mental planethere are so many beings on the mental plane who are form-makers, who have taken part in the formation of some beings who have incarnated upon earth. On the vital plane also the same thing happens.
   For example, there is a tradition which says that the whole world of insects is the outcome of the form-makers of the vital world, and that this is why they take such absolutely diabolical shapes when they are magnified under the microscope. You saw the other day, when you were shown the microbes in water? Naturally the pictures were made to amuse, to strike the imagination, but they are based on real forms, so magnified, however, that they look like monsters. Almost the whole world of insects is a world of microscopic monsters which, had they been larger in size, would have been quite terrifying. So it is said these are entities of the vital world, beings of the vital who created that for fun and amused themselves forming all these impossible beasts which make human life altogether unpleasant.

1953-10-21, #Questions And Answers 1953, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   The evolutionary being is the one thats the continuation of the animals, and the other is a being from higher worlds who, when the earth was formed, materialised itself upon earthit does not come from below, it has come from above. But in the evolutionary being there is that central light which is the origin of the psychic being, which will develop into the psychic being, and when the psychic being is fully formed, there is a moment when it can unite with a being from above which can incarnate in it. So this being from above which descends into a psychic being is an involutionary beinga being of the Overmind plane or from elsewhere.
   That is all?

1954-06-30 - Occultism - Religion and vital beings - Mothers knowledge of what happens in the Ashram - Asking questions to Mother - Drawing on Mother, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  I assure you what I am telling you is very serious: if you seat a real god in a chair and oblige him to remain there all the while you are doing puja, he may perhaps have a little fun watching you do it, but it certainly gives him no satisfaction. None at all! He does not feel either flattered or happy or glorified by your pujas You must get rid of that idea There is an entire domain between the spiritual and the material worlds which belongs to vital beings, and it is this domain that is full of all these things, because these beings live upon that, are happy with it, and it immediately gives them importance; and the one who has the greatest number of believers, devotees and worshippers is the happiest and the most puffed up. But how can anyone imagine that the gods could value The gods I am speaking of the true gods, even those of the Overmind, though they are still a bit well, so-so they seem to have taken on many human defects, but still, despite all that, they really have a higher consciousness it does not please them at all. An act of true goodness, intelligence, unselfishness or a subtle understanding or a very sincere aspiration are for them infinitely higher than a small religious ceremony. Infinitely! There is no comparison. Religious ceremony! For example, there are so many of these entities called Kaliwho are given, besides, quite terrible appearancesso many are even placed in houses as the family-goddess; they are full of a terrible vital force! I knew people who were so frightened of the Kali they had at home that indeed they trembled to make the least mistake, for when catastrophes came they thought it was Kali who sent them! It is a frightful thing, thought. I know them, those entities. I know them very well, but they are vital beings, vital forms which, so to say, are given a form by human thought, and what forms! And to think that men worship such terrible and monstrous things; and whats more that these poor gods are given, are paid the compliment of believing that it is
  From this point of view, it is good that for some time men get out of this religious atmosphere, so full of fear, and this sort of blind, superstitious submission of which the hostile forces have taken a dreadful advantage. The period of denial, positivism, is from this viewpoint quite indispensable in order to free men from superstition. It is only when one comes out of that and the abject submission to monstrous vital forces that one can rise to truly spiritual heights and there become the collaborator and true instrument of the forces of Truth, the real Consciousness, the true Power.

1954-12-08 - Cosmic consciousness - Clutching - The central will of the being - Knowledge by identity, #Questions And Answers 1954, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  It is one of those planes, one of those regions we were speaking about last time, which are intermediary between the higher mind and the Overmind.
  How does it manifest, Sweet Mother?intuition.

1955-04-13 - Psychoanalysts - The underground super-ego, dreams, sleep, control - Archetypes, Overmind and higher - Dream of someone dying - Integral repose, entering Sachchidananda - Organising ones life, concentration, repose, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  object:1955-04-13 - Psychoanalysts - The underground super-ego, dreams, sleep, control - Archetypes, Overmind and higher - Dream of someone dying - Integral repose, entering Sachchidananda - Organising ones life, concentration, repose
  class:chapter
  --
  There is an entire world which is the world of the fashioners, where all conceptions are made. And this world is very high, much higher than all the worlds of the mind; and from there these formations, these creations, these types which have been conceived by the fashioners come down and are expressed in physical realisations. And there is always a great distance between the perfection of the idea and what is materialised. Very often the materialised things are like caricatures in comparison with the primal idea. This is what he calls the archetype. This takes place in worlds not always the same ones, it depends on the things; but for many things in the physical, the primal ideas, these archetypes, were in what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind.
  But there is a still higher domain than this where the origins are still purer, and if one reaches this, attains this, one finds the absolutely pure types of what is manifested upon earth. And then it is very interesting to compare, to see to what an extent earthly creation is a frightful distortion. And moreover, it is only when one can reach these regions and see the reality of things in their essence that one can work with knowledge to transform them here; otherwise on what can we take our stand to conceive a better world, more perfect, more beautiful than the existing one? It cant be on our imagination which is itself something very poor and very material. But if one can enter that consciousness, rise right up to these higher worlds of creation, then with this in ones consciousness one can work at making material things take their real form.

1955-05-18 - The Problem of Woman - Men and women - The Supreme Mother, the new creation - Gods and goddesses - A story of Creation, earth - Psychic being only on earth, beings everywhere - Going to other worlds by occult means, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  No, no! Why should they be human formations? I have never said that they were of human formation. The gods and goddesses of the Overmind are gods and goddesses differentiated in their form. It is not man who has created the gods of the Overmind, the gods of the Overmind come of a direct creation. I dont know if they preceded men, but I think so. I think terrestrial creation, the terrestrial formation was made by the godheads of the Overmind, and that in fact there are many godheads of the Overmind who were fashioners upon earth, not incarnated upon earth but fashioners of what occurred upon earth, who gave the ideas, the forms. Sri Aurobindo always used to say that what was formerly called god was a being of the Overmind, that the supreme godhead was a being of the Overmind.
  Mother, if there is a differentiation between the forms of the gods and goddesses, does the same problem come up for them also?
  --
  She formed at first four beings; when she received the mission to create she put out four emanations from her being; and these four emanations were made and given the charge to develop the universe. And then I think I have already spoken to you about this onceit turned out badly, we could put it like that; and so when things went wrong, she made another creation of all the beings who became the gods; and parallel to the disorder created by the first four emanations, there was the development in order, that is, under the guidance of the Supreme, the creation in order of all the worlds descending further and further towards Matter. And it is to this line that the gods belong who were manifested later, a formation, a greater and greater materialisation in the domain which Sri Aurobindo has termed the Overmind. And from there they presided over the creation of the material universe and the earth. And one of the proceedings was the formation of the earth as a symbolic creation representative of the whole universe, in order to condense and concentrate the problem so that it might be solved more easily. And this earth, though it may be from the astronomical point of view something infinitesimal and as unimportant as can be, from the occult point of view of the universal creation it is a symbol which represents the universe so perfectly that by transforming the earth one can through contagion or analogy transform the universe, because the earth is the symbol of the universe. This was the procedure adopted by the gods. And the place thats the seat of existence of these gods Sri Aurobindo has called the Overmind.
  Of course things are not like that. Dont think that I have just told you the story as it really happened. Things are not like that, but its a way of speaking, a way of making them understandable to the brain. It appears to have occurred like that.

1955-06-15 - Dynamic realisation, transformation - The negative and positive side of experience - The image of the dry coconut fruit - Purusha, Prakriti, the Divine Mother - The Truth-Creation - Pralaya - We are in a transitional period, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  Sweet Mother, I am mixing up things. Here it is written: But one who has not mastered and lived the truths of Overmind cannot reach the supramental Truth.
  Yes.
  It is here that I am getting mixed up. Often you have said that the reign of Overmind is finished and that of the Supermind is to come, and that one doesnt need to go through the same experiences of the Overmind, because thats already done.
  What is he saying? Pavitra, do you understand what he is saying?
  (Pavitra) Mother, you have said several times that the reign of the Overmind is finished and now it is the reign of the Supermind.
  Yes, in a way, yes.
  Therefore it is not necessary to pass through the experiences of the Overmind to reach the Supermind.
  I have said that there was no need to pass through the experiences of the Overmind in order to have the supramental experiences? Have I ever said such a thing?
  I dont say that you have said that, but perhaps I have understood it like that.
  Ah, well! In any case I dont think so. I dont know if I have said it, but I dont think so, because we are in a transitional period. It is absolutely certain that, in a general way, it is still the Overmind which is ruling and that if the Supermind comes, its that it is only beginning to come and to have an influence, and that, in a period of transition, what Sri Aurobindo says here is absolutely obvious: If you understand nothing of the Overmind you will understand still less of the Supermind, and he has repeated, I dont know how often, that one must not try to leap to the highest summit without having climbed all the steps. Once again when did I read its not so long ago that it was necessary to climb all the steps to go to the top? You cant take a leap and neglect all the rest. It is not possible. You can do it quickly. What can happen is that what took several lifetimes can be done in a few years or even perhaps in a few months; but you have to do it.
  When we all have supramental bodies and when within ourselves we are in the supramental consciousness, we shall perhaps be able to manufacture little supramental beings who will not need to pass through these experiences! But it is only when, it is not so at present. (Laughter)

1955-07-20 - The Impersonal Divine - Surrender to the Divine brings perfect freedom - The Divine gives Himself - The principle of the inner dimensions - The paths of aspiration and surrender - Linear and spherical paths and realisations, #Questions And Answers 1955, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  But Sri Aurobindo says something he has always said that there are the godheads of the Overmind who indeed are very similarwe have said this several timesvery similar to human beings, infinitely greater and more powerful but with resemblances which are a little too striking. Beyond these there is the impersonal Godhead, the impersonal Divine; but beyond the impersonal Divine there is the Divine who is the Person himself; and we must go through the Impersonal to reach the Supreme Divine who is beyond.
  Only it is good, as I said, for those who have been put by education into contact with too individual, too personal a God, to seek the impersonal Divine, because this liberates them from many superstitions. After that if they are capable they will go farther and have once again a personal contact with a Divine who indeed is beyond all these other godheads.

1956-01-25 - The divine way of life - Divine, Overmind, Supermind - Material body for discovery of the Divine - Five psychological perfections, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  object:1956-01-25 - The divine way of life - Divine, Overmind, Supermind - Material body for discovery of the Divine - Five psychological perfections
  author class:The Mother
  --
  I say this, not as a joke, but because I am quite convinced that if we go back some thousands of years, when men spoke of the Divineif ever they did speak of the Divine, as I believe they spoke perhaps of a state like that of the godheads of the Overmind; and now this mode of being of the Overmind godheads who, obviously, have governed the earth and formed many things on earth for a very long time, seems to us far inferior to what we conceive the Supermind to be. And this Supermind, which is, precisely, what we now call the Divine and try to bring down on earth, will probably strike us in the same way a few thousand or million years hence as the Overmind does today.
  And I am sure that in the manifestation, that is, in His self-expression, the Divine is progressive. Outside the manifestation He is something we cannot conceive; but as soon as He manifests in this kind of perpetual being, well, He manifests more and more of Himself, as though He were reserving for the end the most beautiful things in His Being.

1956-06-13 - Effects of the Supramental action - Education and the Supermind - Right to remain ignorant - Concentration of mind - Reason, not supreme capacity - Physical education and studies - inner discipline - True usefulness of teachers, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
    Already in the process of spiritualisation it [the spiritualised mind] will have begun to pass out of the brilliant poverty of the human intellect; it will mount successively into the pure broad reaches of a higher mind and next into the gleaming belts of a still greater free intelligence illumined with a Light from above. At this point it will begin to feel more freely, admit with a less mixed response the radiant beginnings of an Intuition, not illumined, but luminous in itself, true in itself, no longer entirely mental and therefore subjected to the abundant intrusion of error. Here too is not an end, for it must rise beyond into the very domain of that untruncated Intuition, the first direct light from the self-awareness of essential Being and, beyond it, attain that from which this light comes. For there is an Overmind behind Mind, a Power more original and dynamic which supports Mind, sees it as a diminished radiation from itself, uses it as a transmitting belt of sage downward or an instrument for the creations of the Ignorance. The last step of the ascension would be the surpassing of Overmind itself or its return into its own still greater origin, its conversion into the supramental light of the Divine Gnosis.
    Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, pp. 138-39

1956-07-11 - Beauty restored to its priesthood - Occult worlds, occult beings - Difficulties and the supramental force, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  Well, the occult world is not one single region where everything is mixed, which only becomes occult because we cant see it. The occult world is a gradation of regions, one could perhaps say, of more and more etherial or subtle regions, anyway, those farther and farther removed in their nature from the physical materiality we ordinarily see. And each one of these domains is a world in itself, having its forms and inhabited by beings with a density, one might say, analogous to that of the domain in which they live. Just as in the physical world we are of the same materiality as the physical world, so in the vital world, in the mental world, in the Overmind world and in the supramental world and in many others, infinite others there are beings which have a form whose substance is similar to the one of that world. This means that if you are able to enter consciously into that world with the part of your being which corresponds to that domain, you can move there quite objectively, as in the material world.
  And there, there are as many, and even many more things to see and observe than in our poor little material world, which belongs to only one zone of this infinite gradation. You meet all sorts of things in these domains, and you need to make a study as profound, perhaps still more profound than in the physical world, to be able to know what is happening there, to have relations with the beings who live there.

1956-11-21 - Knowings and Knowledge - Reason, summit of mans mental activities - Willings and the true will - Personal effort - First step to have knowledge - Relativity of medical knowledge - Mental gymnastics make the mind supple, #Questions And Answers 1956, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  But if you want to attain true knowledge, that is, spiritual knowledge, which can be obtained only through identification, you must go beyond this reason and enter a domain higher than the mind, where one is in direct contact with the Light either of the Overmind or the Supermind. And Sri Aurobindo says this, that so long as you are in the mental field, reason helps you, it is your helper, your guide; but if you want to have true knowledge by identity, reason becomes a limitation and a bar. That is not to say that you should lose it! But it must be subordinated to your movement of ascent. Sri Aurobindo does not tell you to become unreasonable, he says you must pass beyond reason into a higher Truth and Light.
  And what is interesting in the structure of this section is that the reflection Sri Aurobindo makes about the mental being, the intellectual activity of man, he also makes for the vital activity, the power of action and realisation. He takes mental activity as the basis of human life, for it belongs to man in his own right, exclusively; and in the process of life, that is, of human existence, human realisation, thought normally comes first. Man, because he is a thinking being, first gets an idea, then he invests this idea with a force, a vital power, a power for action, and changes it, transforms it into will. This will is then concentrated on the object to be realised, and with the vital force and effort added to the thought, the conception, it becomes the lever of action.

1957-05-15 - Differentiation of the sexes - Transformation from above downwards, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  Now, there are many people who are very keen on this distinction they may keep it if they like!but it is not at all something final or eternal or perfect in itself. It was perhaps the ideal of the Overmind creation, that is possible and yet, even then not totally, only partially. But still those who are so fond of this differentiationlet them keep it if they like! If it gives them pleasure. It has its advantages and disadvantages, many disadvantages.
  Mother, then why do the forces of the vital world escape this condition?

1957-07-10 - A new world is born - Overmind creation dissolved, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  object:1957-07-10 - A new world is born - Overmind creation dissolved
  class:chapter
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  One day, I went as usual to relate to Sri Aurobindo what had been happeningwe had come to something really very interesting, and perhaps I showed a little enthusiasm in my account of what had taken place then Sri Aurobindo looked at me and said: Yes, this is an Overmind creation. It is very interesting, very well done. You will perform miracles which will make you famous throughout the world, you will be able to turn all events on earth topsy-turvy, indeed, and then he smiled and said: It will be a great success. But it is an Overmind creation. And it is not success that we want; we want to establish the Supermind on earth. One must know how to renounce immediate success in order to create the new world, the supramental world in its integrality.
  With my inner consciousness I understood immediately: a few hours later the creation was gone and from that moment we started anew on other bases.
  --
  In any case, to simplify things, it could be said that characteristically the old world, the creation of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, was an age of the gods, and consequently the age of religions. As I said, the flower of human effort towards what is above it gave rise to innumerable religious forms, to a religious relationship between the best souls and the invisible world. And at the very summit of all that, as an effort towards a higher realisation there has arisen the idea of the unity of religions, of this one single thing which is behind all these manifestations; and this idea has truly been, so to speak, the extreme limit of human aspiration. Well, that is at the frontier, it is something that still belongs completely to the Overmind world, the Overmind creation and which from there seems to be looking towards this other thing which is a new creation it cannot graspwhich it tries to reach, feels coming, but cannot grasp. To grasp it, a reversal is needed. It is necessary to leave the Overmind creation. It was necessary that the new creation, the supramental creation should take place.
  And now, all these old things seem so old, so out-of-date, so arbitrarysuch a travesty of the real truth.

1958-08-15 - Our relation with the Gods, #Questions And Answers 1957-1958, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  There are gods of the Overmind who are the great creators of the earthuntil now. There are the gods of the Vedas who are mentioned in everything that has come down from the Rishis. And there are the gods of the Supermind, those who are going to manifest on earth, although of course they exist from all eternity on their own plane.
  Here Sri Aurobindo is speaking mostly about the Vedic gods, but not exclusively nor in a very definite way. At any rate these gods are higher than the gods of the Puranas.

1958 09 19, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   Later, when one has emerged from the mental consciousness into a higher consciousness beyond the mind, beyond even the higher mind, and when one opens oneself to the Overmind regions, and through the Overmind to the Supermind, one can receive inspirations directly. And naturally at that point they become more frequent, richer, if one may say so, more complete. There comes a time when inspiration can be obtained at will, but this obviously demands considerable inner development.
   As we have just said, this inspiration from regions far above the mind surpasses in value and quality the highest achievements of the mind, such as reason. Reason is certainly at the apex of human mental activity. It can review and control the knowledge acquired with the help of the senses. It has often been said that the senses are altogether defective instruments of knowledge, that they are incapable of perceiving things as they are, that the information they supply is superficial and very often faulty. When it is fully developed, the human reason knows this and does not trust the knowledge of the senses. It is only if one is infra-rational, if I may say so, that one believes that all one sees, hears, or touches is absolutely true. As soon as one is developed in the region of higher reason, one knows that all these notions are almost essentially false, and that one can in no way rely on them. But the knowledge one receives from this supramental or divine region surpasses all that can be conceived or understood by reason, at least to the same extent that reason surpasses the knowledge of the senses.

1965 01 12, #On Thoughts And Aphorisms, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
   For me, it is very simple. Narada was a demi-god, he belonged to the Overmind world and he was able to materialise himself, but these beings have no psychic. The gods do not have within them the divine spark, which is the core of the psychic, because only on earth I am not even speaking of the material universeonly on earth did this descent of divine Love take place, which was the origin of the divine Presence in the core of Matter. And naturally, since they have no psychic being, they do not know the psychic being. Some of these beings have even wanted to take a physical body so as to have the experience of the psychic being but not many of them.
   As a rule, they did it only partially, through an emanation, not a total descent. For example, Vivekananda is said to have been an incarnationa Vibhtiof Shiva; but Shiva himself has clearly expressed his will to come down on earth only with the supramental world. When the earth is ready for the supramental life, he will come. And almost all these beings will manifest they are waiting for that moment, they do not want any of the present struggle and the obscurity.

2.01 - Indeterminates, Cosmic Determinations and the Indeterminable, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Overmind consciousness is such a state or principle beyond individual mind, beyond even universal mind in the Ignorance; it carries in itself a first direct and masterful cognition of cosmic truth: here then we might hope to understand something of the original working of things, get some insight into the fundamental movements of cosmic Nature. One thing indeed becomes clear; it is self-evident here that both the individual and the cosmos come from a transcendent Reality which takes form in them: the mind and life of the individual being, its self in nature must therefore be a partial self-expression of the cosmic Being and, both through that and directly, a self-expression of the transcendent Reality, - a conditional and half-veiled expression it may be, but still that is its significance. But also we see that what the expression shall be is also determined by the individual himself: only what he can in his nature receive, assimilate, formulate, his portion of the cosmic being or of the Reality, can find shape in his mind and life and physical parts; something that derives from the Reality, something that is in the cosmos he expresses, but in the terms of his own self-expression, in the terms of his own nature. But the original question set out for us by the phenomenon of the universe is not solved by the Overmind knowledge, - the question, in this case, whether the building of thought, experience, world of perceptions of the mental Person, the mind Purusha, is truly a self-expression, a self-determination proceeding from some truth of his own spiritual being, a manifestation of that truth's dynamic possibilities, or whether it is not rather a creation or construction presented to him by Nature, by Prakriti, and only in the sense of being individualised in his personal formation of that Nature can it be said to be his own or dependent on him; or, again, it might be a play of a cosmic Imagination, a fantasia of the Infinite imposed on the blank indeterminable of his own eternal pure existence. These are the three views of creation that seem to have an equal chance of being right, and mind is incapable of definitely deciding between them; for each view is armed with its own mental logic and its appeal to intuition and experience.
   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.
  If we enter through the Saguna into some ultimate possible of experience, we arrive at a divine Absolute, a personal supreme and omnipresent Godhead, transcendent as well as universal, an infinite Master of all relations and determinations who can uphold in his being a million universes and pervade each with a single ray of his self-light and a single degree of his ineffable existence. The Overmind consciousness maintains equally these two truths of the Eternal which face the mind as mutually exclusive alternatives; it admits both as supreme aspects of one Reality: somewhere, then, behind them there must be a still greater Transcendence which originates them or upholds them both in its supreme Eternity. But what can that be of which such opposites are equal truths, unless it be an original indeterminable Mystery of which any knowledge, any understanding by the mind is impossible? We can know it indeed to some degree, in some kind of experience or realisation, by its aspects, powers, constant series of fundamental negatives and positives through which we have to pursue it, independently in either or integrally in both together; but in the last resort it seems to escape even from the highest mentality and remain unknowable.
  But if the supreme Absolute is indeed a pure Indeterminable, then no creation, no manifestation, no universe is possible.
  --
  At the stage when from the mental it has to move towards its supramental status, one most liberatingly helpful, if not indispensable experience that may intervene is the entry into a total Nirvana of mentality and mental ego, a passage into the silence of the Spirit. In any case, a realisation of the pure Self must always precede the transition to that mediating eminence of the consciousness from which a clear vision of the ascending and descending stairs of manifested existence is commanded and the possession of the free power of ascent and descent becomes a spiritual prerogative. An independent completeness of identity with each of the primal aspects and powers - not narrowing as in the mind into a sole engrossing experience seeming to be final and integral, for that would be incompatible with the realisation of the unity of all aspects and powers of existence is a capacity inherent in consciousness in the Infinite; that indeed is the base and justification of the Overmind cognition and its will to carry each aspect, each power, each possibility to its independent fullness. But the Supermind keeps always and in every status or condition the spiritual realisation of the Unity of all; the intimate presence of that unity is there even within the completest grasp of each thing, each state given its whole delight of itself, power and value: there is thus no losing sight of the affirmative aspects even when there is the full acceptance of the truth of the negative. The Overmind keeps still the sense of this underlying Unity; that is for it the secure base of the independent experience. In Mind the knowledge of the unity of all aspects is lost on the surface, the consciousness is plunged into engrossing, exclusive separate affirmations; but there too, even in the Mind's ignorance, the total reality still remains behind the exclusive absorption and can be recovered in the form of a profound mental intuition or else in the idea or sentiment of an underlying truth of integral oneness; in the spiritual mind this can develop into an ever-present experience.
  All aspects of the omnipresent Reality have their fundamental truth in the Supreme Existence. Thus even the aspect or power of Inconscience, which seems to be an opposite, a negation of the eternal Reality, yet corresponds to a Truth held in itself by the self-aware and all-conscious Infinite. It is, when we look closely at it, the Infinite's power of plunging the consciousness into a trance of self-involution, a self-oblivion of the Spirit veiled in its own abysses where nothing is manifest but all inconceivably is and can emerge from that ineffable latency. In the heights of Spirit this state of cosmic or infinite trance-sleep appears to our cognition as a luminous uttermost Superconscience: at the other end of being it offers itself to cognition as the Spirit's potency of presenting to itself the opposites of its own truths of being - an abyss of non-existence, a profound Night of inconscience, a fathomless swoon of insensibility from which yet all forms of being, consciousness and delight of existence can manifest themselves, - but they appear in limited terms, in slowly emerging and increasing self-formulations, even in contrary terms of themselves; it is the play of a secret all-being, all-delight, allknowledge, but it observes the rules of its own self-oblivion, self-opposition, self-limitation until it is ready to surpass it. This is the Inconscience and Ignorance that we see at work in the material universe. It is not a denial, it is one term, one formula of the infinite and eternal Existence.
  --
  It might be objected that the supramental cognition is, after all, not the final truth of things. Beyond the supramental plane of consciousness which is an intermediate step from Overmind and mind to the complete experience of Sachchidananda, are the greatest heights of the manifested Spirit: here surely existence would not at all be based on the determination of the One in multiplicity, it would manifest solely and simply a pure identity in oneness. But the supramental truth-consciousness would not be absent from these planes, for it is an inherent power of Sachchidananda: the difference would be that the determinations would not be demarcations, they would be plastic, interfused, each a boundless finite. For there all is in each and each is in all radically and integrally, - there would be to the utmost a fundamental awareness of identity, a mutual inclusion and interpenetration of consciousness: knowledge as we envisage it would not exist, because it would not be needed, since all would be direct action of consciousness in being itself, identical, intimate, intrinsically self-aware and all-aware. But still relations of consciousness, relations of mutual delight of existence, relations of self-power of being with self-power of being would not be excluded; these highest spiritual planes would not be a field of blank indeterminability, a vacancy of pure existence.
  It might be said again that, even so, in Sachchidananda itself at least, above all worlds of manifestation, there could be nothing but the self-awareness of pure existence and consciousness and a pure delight of existence. Or, indeed, this triune being itself might well be only a trinity of original spiritual self-determinations of the Infinite; these too, like all determinations, would cease to exist in the ineffable Absolute. But our position is that these must be inherent truths of the supreme being; their utmost reality must be pre-existent in the Absolute even if they are ineffably other there than what they are in the spiritual mind's highest possible experience. The Absolute is not a mystery of infinite blankness nor a supreme sum of negations; nothing can manifest that is not justified by some self-power of the original and omnipresent Reality.

2.01 - On Books, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Disciple: Yes. I don't find the transformation in the Gita. The exposition of the levels of consciousness beyond mind, their functions, a dear, rational statement of intuitive consciousness, inspiration, revelation, and the ascent of the consciousness through the Overmind to the Supermind these things are quite new and not found even in the Upanishads.
   Sri Aurobindo: I think so. The Gita only opens out the way to our Yoga and philosophy. Among the Upanishads only the Taittiriya has some general idea of the higher terms. The Veda treats symbolically the same subject.

2.03 - Renunciation, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  There is in books a lot of talk about renunciation that you must renounce possessions, renounce attachments, renounce desires. But I have come to the conclusion that so long as you have to renounce anything you are not on this path; for, so long as you are not thoroughly disgusted with things as they are, and have to make an effort to reject them, you are not ready for the supramental realisation. If the constructions of the Overmind the world which it has built and the existing order which it supportsstill satisfy you, you cannot hope to partake of that realisation. Only when you find such a world disgusting, unbearable and unacceptable, are you fit for the change of consciousness. That is why I do not give any importance to the idea of renunciation. To renounce means that you are to give up what you value, that you have to discard what you think is worth keeping. What, on the contrary, you must feel is that this world is ugly, stupid, brutal and full of intolerable suffering; and once you feel in this way, all the physical, all the material consciousness which does not want it to be that, will want it to change, crying, I will have something else something that is true, beautiful, full of delight and knowledge and consciousness! All here is floating on a sea of dark unconsciousness. But when you want the Divine with all your will, all your resolution, all your aspiration and intensity, it will surely come. But it is not merely a matter of ameliorating the world. There are people who clamour for change of government, social reform and philanthropic work, believing that they can thereby make the world better. We want a new world, a true world, an expression of the Truth-Consciousness. And it will be, it must beand the sooner the better!
  It should not, however, be just a subjective change. The whole physical life must be transformed. The material world does not want a mere change of consciousness in us. It says in effect: You retire into bliss, become luminous, have the divine knowledge; but that does not alter me. I still remain the hell I practically am! The true change of consciousness is one that will change the physical conditions of the world and make it an entirely new creation.

2.06 - Reality and the Cosmic Illusion, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   widest reality which admits their truth and exceeds it. This is, we may say, a sign of the relativity of all truth and all experience, since both vary with the outlook and the inlook of the knowing and experiencing mind and being; each man is said to have his own religion according to his own nature, but so too each man may be said to have his own philosophy, his own way of seeing and experience of existence, though only a few can formulate it. But from another point of view this variety testifies rather to the infinity of aspects of the Infinite; each catches a partial glimpse or a whole glimpse of one or more aspects or contacts or enters into it in his mental or his spiritual experience. To the mind at a certain stage all these view-points begin to lose their definitiveness in a large catholicity or a complex tolerant incertitude, or all the rest may fall away from it and yield place to an ultimate truth or a single absorbing experience. It is then that it is liable to feel the unreality of all that it has seen and thought and taken as part of itself or its universe. This "all" becomes to it a universal unreality or a many-sided fragmental reality without a principle of unification; as it passes into the negativing purity of an absolute experience, all falls away from it and there remains only a silent and immobile Absolute. But the consciousness might be called to go farther and see again all it has left in the light of a new spiritual vision: it may recover the truth of all things in the truth of the Absolute; it may reconcile the negation of Nirvana and the affirmation of the cosmic consciousness in a single regard of That of which both are the self-expressions. In the passage from mental to Overmind cognition this many-sided unity is the leading experience; the whole manifestation assumes the appearance of a singular and mighty harmony which reaches its greatest completeness when the soul stands on the border between Overmind and Supermind and looks back with a total view upon existence.
  This is at least a possibility that we have to explore and pursue this view of things to its ultimate consequence. A consideration of the possibility of a great cosmic Illusion as the explanation of the enigma of being had to be undertaken because this view and experience of things presents itself powerfully at

2.1.02 - Classification of the Parts of the Being, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Indian systems did not distinguish between two quite different powers and levels of consciousness, one which we can call Overmind and the other the true Supermind or Divine Gnosis. That is the reason why they got confused about Maya ( OvermindForce or Vidya-Avidya) and took it for the supreme creative power. In so stopping short at what was still a half-light they lost the secret of transformation - even though the Vaishnava and Tantra Yogas groped to find it again and were sometimes on the verge of success. For the rest, this, I think, has been the stumbling-block of all attempts at the discovery of the dynamic divine Truth; I know of none that has not imagined, as soon as it felt the Overmind lustres descending, that this was the true illumination, the gnosis, - with the result that they either stopped short there and could get no farther, or else concluded that this too was only Maya or Lila and that the one thing to do was to get beyond it into some immovable and inactive Silence of the Supreme.
  Perhaps, what may be meant by supernals [in a text submitted by the correspondent] is rather the three fundamentals of the present manifestation. In the Indian system, these are
  --
  Supermind and Overmind - might be called the three Supernals.
   Overmind stands at the top of the lower hemisphere, and you have to pass through and beyond Overmind if you would reach
  Letters on Yoga - I
  --
  You speak of the gulf below the Overmind. But is there a gulf - or any other gulf than human unconsciousness? In all the series of the planes or grades of consciousness there is nowhere any real gulf, always there are connecting gradations and one can ascend from step to step. Between the Overmind and the human mind there are a number of more and more luminous gradations; but, as these are superconscient to human mind
  (except one or two of the lowest of which it gets some direct touches), it is apt to regard them as a superior Inconscience.
  --
   will, feeling, emotion, sensation and physical contact. So, proceeding from intuition to a greater Overmind height, there is a new conversion and we look at and experience everything from the Overmind consciousness and through a mind, heart, vital and body surcharged with the Overmind thought, sight, will, feeling, sensation, play of force and contact. But the last conversion is the supramental, for once there, once the nature is supramentalised, we are beyond the Ignorance and conversion of consciousness is no longer needed, though a farther divine progression, even an infinite development is still possible.
  The inner consciousness means the inner mind, inner vital, inner physical and behind them the psychic which is their inmost being. But the inner mind is not the higher mind; it is more in touch with the universal forces and more open to the higher consciousness and capable of an immensely deeper and larger range of action than the outer or surface mind - but it is of the same essential nature. The higher consciousness is that above the ordinary mind and different from it in its workings; it ranges from higher mind through illumined mind, intuition and Overmind up to the border line of the supramental.
  If the psychic were liberated, free to act in its own way, there would not be all this stumbling in the Ignorance. But the psychic is covered up by the ignorant mind, vital and physical and compelled to act through them according to the law of the Ignorance. If it is liberated from this covering, then it can act according to its own nature with a free aspiration, a direct contact with the higher consciousness and a power to change the ignorant nature.

2.1.02 - Nature The World-Manifestation, #Essays Divine And Human, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The Supreme is not manifest to our minds encased in matter; numberless superphysical planes separate our terrestrial consciousness from all direct touch of our Source, and there can be no question of an unveiled immediate intimate presence and guidance of that Ineffable. And yet the Divine Consciousness and Force, the everlasting Chitshakti, the original Power, the transcendent and eternal Mother, because she holds the Supreme concealed in her, can put us into some kind of touch with that inexpressible Glory and communicate to us a highest Will and its consequence. This cannot be done through the mind; for the thinking mind can only form some inadequate and quite abstract conception of an Absolute or a supreme Person or an impersonal Principle or Presence. And even the higher mind that experiences returns only a pale reflection of Sachchidananda which it takes for that Ineffable or a vague sense of the Eternal or the Infinite. It cannot lay hold upon That and it cannot enter, for if it tries, either that vanishes from it or itself it disappears in a featureless trance, extinction, annihilation, void or dissolution, nirvikalpa samadhi, nirvana, vinasha, shunya, laya. But what the mind cannot do, the soul and a great secret Overmind
  [can.]
  --
   in the Supermind the intensity of consciousness is ever luminous and undiminished; in Overmind it is already diminished and diffuse; the highest intensity of mind is a poor thing in comparison with the splendour of Overmind, and so it goes diminishing till it reaches an apparent zero which we call inconscience.
  The degree and amount of pain which mind, life and body can bear is by our human standards considerable; but their capacity for pleasure is very limited and pale in its intensity, low in its degree. What we call ecstasy would seem to a god to be ridiculously thin and vapid and edgeless. Its capacity of duration also is pitifully brief and measurable by the moments.

21.03 - The Double Ladder, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   Now from where did this speck of light or consciousness come? Indeed, from where did come the dead dust-particle itself? The rishis declare that the origin of things, of the whole creation is Sat, Being, pure Being, absolute Existence. It is absolute unity, indivisibility, immobility. It has two other fundamental qualities, Chit or Consciousness and Ananda or Delight, but fused into the Being and one with it. However, in this Being there occurred a movement, a stirring, which meant a division in the indivisibility. This urge to division sent the Being rushing head forward, as it were, right down into its opposite, the dead material being, inconscient matter where it pulverised itself into infinite infinitesimal particles, the two standing as though at opposite poles. But the original division - apart from its first downward rectilinear dash so to say - had another chequered career. It was also a gradual movement of fission, or a process of genealogical multiplication as it were. Division meant subdivision leading to further subdivisions, stretching ad infinitumdownwards, towards regions more and more impure, imperfect, narrow and dense, of lesser and lesser values till we reach the bedrock of them all, the earth. I may give here a picture or illustration of what the process of division and subdivision was like. In the first original gesture the One Supreme Being divided into a double Existence - Ishwara and Ishwari. They further subdivided themselves, that is to say, sent down - In the gradation of consciousness - parts and portions, personalities and emanations of themselves in diminishing values. In the present cycle of terrestrial evolution, Sri Aurobindo says, four are the powers of the supreme Ishwari that have come forward to guide and effectuate the destiny of the hour. They are the supreme effective Powers, they are from - what is called - the Supramental Consciousness. But they have sent down into the still lower regions nearer to the human consciousness, more easily available to it, other forms and figures of the divine Personality. They are chiefly the gods of the Overmind who are interested in the human destiny and some of them appear as presiding deities or Ishta-devata and establish individual relations with men.
   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.

2.13 - Exclusive Concentration of Consciousness-Force and the Ignorance, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Upanishad, constituted by the action of Mind itself: it is in Overmind a golden lid which hides the face of the supramental Truth but reflects its image; in Mind it becomes a more opaque and smoky-luminous coverture. That action is the absorbed looking downward of Mind on the diversity which is its characteristic movement and away from the supreme unity which that diversity expresses, until it forgets altogether to remember and support itself by the unity. Even then the unity supports it and makes its activities possible, but the absorbed Energy is unaware of its own origin and greater, real self. Since Mind forgets that from which it derived, because of absorption in the workings of formative Energy, it becomes so far identified with that Energy as to lose hold even on itself, to become totally oblivious in a trance of work which it still supports in its somnambulist action, but of which it is no longer aware. This is the last stage of the descent of consciousness, an abysmal sleep, a fathomless trance of consciousness which is the profound basis of the action of material Nature.
  Exclusive Concentration and the Ignorance

2.16 - The Integral Knowledge and the Aim of Life; Four Theories of Existence, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Mind in its turn, when it emerges, becomes dominant; it uses Life and Matter as means of its expression, a field for its own growth and sovereignty, and it begins to look as if it were the true reality and the creator even as it is the witness of existence. But Mind also is a limited and derivative power; it is an outcome of Overmind or it is here a luminous shadow thrown by the divine Supermind: it can only arrive at its own perfection by admitting the light of a larger knowledge; it must transform its own more ignorant, imperfect and conflicting powers and values into the divinely effective potencies and harmonious values of the supramental truth-consciousness. All the powers of the lower hemisphere with their structures of the Ignorance can find their true selves only by a transformation in the light that descends to us from the higher hemisphere of an eternal self-knowledge.
  All these three lower powers of being build upon the Inconscient and seem to be originated and supported by it: the black dragon of the Inconscience sustains with its vast wings and its back of darkness the whole structure of the material universe; its energies unroll the flux of things, its obscure intimations seem to be the starting-point of consciousness itself and the source of all life-impulse. The Inconscient, in consequence of this origination and predominance, is taken now by a certain line of enquiry as the real origin and creator. It has indeed to be accepted that an inconscient force, an inconscient substance are the starting-point of the evolution, but it is a conscious Spirit and not an inconscient Being that is emerging in the evolution. The Inconscient and its primary works are penetrated by a succession of higher and higher powers of being and are made subject to Consciousness so that its obstructions to the evolution, its circles of restriction, are slowly broken, the Python coils of its obscurity shot through by the arrows of the Sun-God; so are the limitations of our material substance diminished until they can be transcended and mind, life and body can be transformed through a possession of them by the greater law of divine Consciousness, Energy and Spirit. The integral knowledge admits the valid truths of all views of existence, valid in their own field, but it seeks to get rid of their limitations and negations and to harmonise and reconcile these partial truths in a larger truth which fulfils all the many sides of our being in the one omnipresent Existence.

2.1.7.05 - On the Inspiration and Writing of the Poem, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  You wrote to me the other day that Savitri is not supramental poetry, but I suppose there are lines in it which can be considered supramental. And why have you refrained from making it all supramental? As everything in the universe, including human language, is derived at the highest from the Overmind, I wonder if it will not be necessary to introduce some radical change in language to express supramental idea and rhythm. Can supramental speech be understood or appreciated by those who havent any glimmering of the influence of its source? Of course if it has a special symbology, one who is not supramentalised will find it very hard to grasp it, until explained, but will even its rhythm be incomprehensible?
  All these are questions for the Supermind to settle when it has got down and settled into power.
  --
  The poem was originally written from a lower level, a mixture perhaps of the inner mind, psychic, poetic intelligence, sublimised vital, afterwards with the Higher Mind, often illumined and intuitivised, intervening. Most of the stuff of the first book is new or else the old so altered as to be no more what it was; the best of the old has sometimes been kept almost intact because it had already the higher inspiration. Moreover there have been made successive revisions each trying to lift the general level higher and higher towards a possible Overmind poetry. As it now stands there is a general Overmind influence, I believe, sometimes coming fully through, sometimes colouring the poetry of the other higher planes fused together, sometimes lifting any one of these higher planes to its highest or the psychic, poetic intelligence or vital towards them.
  3 November 1936

2.1.7.07 - On the Verse and Structure of the Poem, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  I was trying doublets again because in the third Section, first subsection (Yoga of the Lord of the Horse Ascent to Godhead) there is a long passage describing Aswapatis progress through the subtle physical, vital and mental worlds towards the Overmind which is far yet from being either complete or au point. It was only a brief interlude of a few lines formerly, but I had been leng thening it out afterwards with much difficulty in getting it right. I have now got the subtle physical and lower vital worlds into some kind of order, but the big dark Asuric vital and the vital heavens are still roaming about in a state of half solid incompleteness. Still I suppose as I am taking my vacation (from correspondence), I may have time to put all that right.
  1 November 1936

2.1.7.08 - Comments on Specific Lines and Passages of the Poem, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Are not these lines a snatch of the sheer Overmind?
  All in her pointed to a nobler kind.
  --
  This passage is, I believe, what I might call the Overmind Intuition at work expressing itself in something like its own rhythm and language. It is difficult to say about ones own poetry, but I think I have succeeded here and in some passages later on in catching that very difficult note; in separate lines or briefer passages (i.e. a few lines at a time) I think it comes in not unoften.
  3 November 1936
  --
  The passage running from It was the gate of a false Infinite to None can reach heaven who has not passed through hell [pp. 221-27] suggests that there was an harmonious original plan of the Overmind Gods for earths evolution, but that it was spoiled by the intrusion of the Rakshasic worlds. I should, however, have thought that an evolution, arising from the stark inconscients sleep and the mute void, would hardly be an harmonious plan. The Rakshasas only shield themselves with the covering Ignorance, they dont create it. Do you mean that, if they had not interfered, there wouldnt have been resistance and conflict and suffering? How can they be called the artificers of Natures fall and pain?
  An evolution from the Inconscient need not be a painful one if there is no resistance; it can be a deliberately slow and beautiful efflorescence of the Divine. One ought to be able to see how beautiful outward Nature can be and usually is although it is itself apparently inconscientwhy should the growth of consciousness in inward Nature be attended by so much ugliness and evil spoiling the beauty of the outward creation? Because of a perversity born from the Ignorance, which came in with Life and increased in Mind that is the Falsehood, the Evil that was born because of the starkness of the Inconscients sleep separating its action from the secret luminous Conscience that was all the time within it. But it need not have been so except for the overriding Will of the Supreme which meant that the possibility of Per version by inconscience and ignorance should be manifested in order to be eliminated though being given their chance, since all possibility has to manifest somewhere. Once it is eliminated the Divine Manifestation in Matter will be greater than it otherwise could be because it will gather all the possibilities involved in this difficult creation and not some of them as in an easier and less strenuous creation might naturally be.

2.17 - December 1938, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Sri Aurobindo: You know I was talking about the tail of the Supermind to Y. I know what it is, I had flashes and glimpses of it. I have been trying to Supramentalise the Overmind. Not that the Supermind is not acting. It is doing so through Overmind and Intuition and the intermediate powers have come down. Supermind is above the Overmind (he showed it by placing one palm above the other) so that one may mistake one for the other. I remember the day when people here claimed to have got it. I myself had made mistakes about it in the beginning, and I did not know about the many planes. It was Vivekananda who used to come to me in Alipore Jail who showed to me the Intuitive plane. For about two to three weeks, he gave me instructions regarding Intuition. Afterwards I began to see the still higher planes. I am not satisfied with only a part, or a flash of Supermind, I want to bring down the whole mass of the Supermind pure, and that is an extremely difficult business.
   Disciple: We hear that there will be a selected number of people who will first receive the Supermind.
  --
   Sri Aurobindo: Why not? There can be anger, like Durvasa's, or sex. You have not heard of the fall of Rishis through anger or through sex? The Yogis pass beyond the stage of good and evil. Ordinary questions of morality don't arise in them. They may look upon outer nature as a child behaving according to its wants. I think Z's fall came in that way. He had gone into the higher mind, perhaps, not even to the Overmind state; he used to be guided by an inner voice which he accepted as the voice of the Divine and did everything in the light of that voice. When people were asking him about his conduct, I am told, he replied that it was by the voice of God and that every Siddha had done that. You have heard of Agamyananda Swami who went to London? He was arrested in England for making advances to women in public places.
   Disciple: Would not the inner realisation stop because of these outer indulgences?
  --
   At the Overmind stage knowledge begins to rush in upon you from all sides and you see the objects and situations from all points of view. All of them tend to get related to each other; and there the Cosmic Consciousness is not merely in its static aspect but also in its dynamic reality: it is the expression of something Above. When you become cosmic even though you speak of yourself as 'I' it is not the ego that 'I-ness' disappears, and the mental, vital and the physical appear as representatives of that Consciousness. Ramakrishna speaks of that state as the form of ego left for action. When you reach the Supermind you become not only cosmic but something beyond the universe transcendental, and there is indivisibility of unity and individuality. There, the cosmic and the individual all co-exist.
   The same principle works out in science. The scientists at one time reduced all multiplicity of elements to Ether and described it in the most contradictory terms. Now they have found the electron as the basis of Matter. By the difference of position and number of electrons you get the whole multiplicity of objects. There also you find the One that is Many, and yet they are not two different things. Both the One and the Many are true and through both you have to go to the Truth.

2.18 - January 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   Disciple: Does the experience of the Cosmic Spirit correspond to what you have termed the Overmind?
   Sri Aurobindo: Yes, but you can have the experience of the Cosmic Consciousness on any other level of consciousness also. Generally, you have it on the level of the Higher Mind where you feel the two aspects, static and dynamic, as separate. But as you go above, you find the Overmind overarches all the other levels and there the two aspects are gathered together and combined in the same consciousness. (Turning to N) So you see, Hitler is responsible so long as he does not feel that he is not Hitler.
   Disciple: But does he feel that he is responsible?

2.18 - The Evolutionary Process - Ascent and Integration, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Sachchidananda. In ourselves, behind our surface natural being, there is a soul, an inner mind, an inner life-part which can open to these heights as well as to the occult spirit within us, and this double opening is the secret of a new evolution; by that breaking of lids and walls and boundaries the consciousness rises to a greater ascent and a larger integration which, as the evolution of mind has mentalised, so will by this new evolution spiritualise all the powers of our nature. For the mental man has not been Nature's last effort or highest reach, - though he has been, in general, more fully evolved in his own nature than those who have achieved themselves below or aspired above him; she has pointed man to a yet higher and more difficult level, inspired him with the ideal of a spiritual living, begun the evolution in him of a spiritual being. The spiritual man is her supreme supernormal effort of human creation; for, having evolved the mental creator, thinker, sage, prophet of an ideal, the self-controlled, self-disciplined, harmonised mental being, she has tried to go higher and deeper within and call out into the front the soul and inner mind and heart, call down from above the forces of the spiritual mind and higher mind and Overmind and create under their light and by their influence the spiritual sage, seer, prophet, God-lover, Yogin, gnostic, Sufi, mystic.
  This is man's only way of true self-exceeding: for so long as we live in the surface being or found ourselves wholly on Matter, it is impossible to go higher and vain to expect that there can be any new transition of a radical character in our evolutionary being. The vital man, the mental man have had an immense effect upon the earth-life, they have carried humanity forward from the mere human animal to what it is now. But it is only within the bounds of the already established evolutionary formula of the human being that they can act; they can enlarge the human circle but not change or transform the principle of consciousness or its characteristic operation. Any attempt to heighten inordinately the mental or exaggerate inordinately the vital man, - a Nietzschean supermanhood, for example, - can only colossalise the human creature, it cannot transform or divinise him. A different possibility opens if we can live within in the inner being and make it the direct ruler of life or station ourselves on the spiritual and intuitive planes of being and from there and by their power transmute our nature.

2.19 - Knowledge of the Scientist and the Yogi, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  The climax of the ordinary consciousness is Science. For Science, what is upon the earth is true, simply because it is there. What it calls Nature is for it the final reality, and its aim is to build up a theory to explain the workings of it. So it climbs as high as the physical mind can go and tries to find out the causes of what it assumes to be the true, the real world. But in fact it adapts causes to effects, for it has already taken that which is for the true, the real, and seeks only to explain it mentally. For the yogic consciousness, however, this world is not the final reality. Rising above the mind into the Overmind and then into the Supermind, it enters the divine world of first truths, and looking down from there sees what has happened to those truths here. How distorted they have become, how completely falsified! So the so-called world of fact is for the Yogi a falsehood and not at all the only true reality. It is not what it ought to be, it is almost the very opposite; whereas for the scientist it is absolutely fundamental.
  Our aim is to change things. The scientist says that whatever is, is natural and cannot be changed at heart. But, really speaking, the laws of which he usually speaks are of his own mental making; and because he accepts Nature as it is as the very basis, things do not and cannot change for him in any complete sense. But, according to us, all this can be changed, because we know that there is something above, a divine truth seeking manifestation. There are no fixed laws here; even Science in its undogmatic moments recognises that the laws are mere mental constructions. There are only cases, and if the mind could apply itself to all the circumstances it would find that no two cases are similar. Laws are for the minds convenience, but the process of the supramental manifestation is different, we may even say it is the reverse of the mind. In the supramental realisation, each thing will carry in itself a truth which will manifest at each instant without being bound by what has been or what will follow. That elaborate linking of the past with the present, which gives things in Nature such an air of unchangeable determinism is altogether the minds way of conceiving, and is no proof that all that exists is inevitable and cannot be otherwise.

2.2.02 - Becoming Conscious in Work, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But the Jivanmukta feels no bondage [in work]. In all work and action, he feels perfectly free, because the work is not done by him personally (there is no sense of limited ego) but by the cosmic Force. The limitations of the work are those put by the cosmic Force itself on its own action. He himself lives in communion of oneness with the Transcendent which is above the cosmos and feels no limitation. That is at least how it is felt in the Overmind.
    This passage is not available.Ed.

2.20 - Nov-Dec 1939, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   The talk was about how the yogis working on the events of the last war, each in his own way, may have cut across each others work, because up to the Overmind everything is a play of possibilities and one may counteract another.
   Sri Aurobindo: Quite so. Dayananda [of Bengal] had an idea of establishing world peace by bringing all the nations together. He could have said that he established the League of Nations and somebody else disestablished it.
  --
   When you want to describe a spiritual experience you are obliged to use mental terms which are quite inadequate. That is why the Vedantists say that mind and speech cannot express the Truth. Still you can somehow manage to express something so long as you deal with levels up to the Overmind. But when you enter the Supermind then it is almost impossible. And if you proceed still higher towards the Absolute, well, it is impossible.
   Disciple: It is so perhaps because reason is obliged to consider the Infinite.

2.21 - The Order of the Worlds, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But against this hypothesis there stands the fact that we find these higher worlds in our vision and experience of them to be in no way based upon the material universe, in no way its results, but rather greater terms of being, larger and freer ranges of consciousness, and all the action of the material plane looks more like the result and not the origin of these greater terms, derivatory from them, even partly dependent on them in its evolutionary endeavour. Immense ranges of powers, influences, phenomena descend covertly upon us from the Overmind and the higher mental and vital ranges, but of these only a part, a selection, as it were, or restricted number can stage and realise themselves in the order of the physical world; the rest await their time and proper circumstance for revelation in physical term and form, for their part in the terrestrial5 evolution which is at the same time an evolution of all the powers of the spirit.
  This character of the other worlds defeats all our attempts to give the premier importance to our own plane of being and to our own part in the mundane manifestation. We do not create God as a myth of our consciousness, but are instruments for a progressive manifestation of the Divine in the material being.

2.22 - Vijnana or Gnosis, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  This is the first summit which enters into the divine perfection, sadharmaya, sadrsya; for all the rest only look up to it or catch some rays of its significance. The highest heights of mind or of Overmind come still within the belt of a mitigated ignorance; they can refract a divine Light but not pass it on in undiminished power to our lower members. For so long as we are within the triple stratum of mind, life and body, our active nature continues to work in the force of the ignorance even when the soul in Mind possesses something of the knowledge. And even if the soul were to reflect or to represent all the largeness of the knowledge in its mental consciousness, it would be unable to mobilise it rightly in force of action. The truth in its action might greatly increase, but it would still be pursued by a limitation, still condemned to a divisibility which would prevent it from working integrally in the power of the infinite. The power of a divinely illumined mind may be immense compared with ordinary powers, but it will still be subject to incapacity and there can be no perfect correspondence between the force of the effective will and the light of the idea which inspires it. The infinite Presence may be there in status, but dynamis of the operations of nature still belongs to the lower prakriti, must follow its triple modes of working and cannot give any adequate form to the greatness within it. This is the tragedy of ineffectivity, of the hiatus between ideal and effective will, of our constant incapacity to work out in living form and action the truth we feel in our inner consciousness that pursues all the aspiration of mind and life towards the divinity behind them. But the vijnana or gnosis is not only truth but truth-power, it is the very working of the infinite and divine nature; it is the divine knowledge one with the divine will in the force and delight of a spontaneous and luminous and inevitable self-fulfilment. By the gnosis, then, we change our human into a divine nature.
  What then is this gnosis and how can we describe it? Two opposite errors have to be avoided, two misconceptions that disfigure opposite sides of the truth of gnosis. One error of intellect-bounded thinkers takes vijnana as synonymous with the other Indian term buddhi and the buddhi as synonymous with the reason, the discerning intellect, the logical intelligence. The systems that accept this significance, pass at once from a plane of pure intellect to a plane of pure spirit. No intermediate power is recognised, no diviner action of knowledge than the pure reason, is admitted; the limited human means for facing truth is taken for the highest possible dynamics of consciousness, its topmost force and original movement. An opposite error, a misconception of the mystics identifies vijnana with the consciousness of the Infinite free from all ideation or else ideation packed into one essence of thought, lost to other dynamic action in the single and invariable idea of the One. This is the caitanyaghana of the Upanishad and is one movement or rather one thread of the many-aspected movement of the gnosis. The gnosis, the Vijnana is not only this concentrated consciousness of the infinite Essence, it is also and at the same time an infinite knowledge of the myriad play of the Infinite. It contains all ideation (not mental but supramental), but it is not limited by ideation, for it far exceeds all ideative movement. Nor is the gnostic ideation in its character an intellectual thinking; it is not what we call the reason, not a concentrated intelligence. For the reason is mental in its methods, mental in its acquisitions, mental in its basis, but the ideative method of the gnosis is self-luminous, supramental, its yield of thought-light spontaneous, not proceeding by acquisition, its thought-basis a rendering of conscious identities, not a translation of the impressions born of indirect contacts. There is a relation and even a sort of broken identity between the two forms of thought; for one proceeds covertly from other. Mind is born from that which is beyond mind. But they act on different planes and reverse each other's process.

2.23 - Supermind and Overmind, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  object:2.23 - Supermind and Overmind
  class:chapter
  --
  Above the mind there are several levels of conscious being, among which the really divine world is what Sri Aurobindo has called the Supermind, the world of the Truth. But in between is what he has distinguished as the Overmind, the world of the cosmic Gods. Now it is this Overmind that has up to the present governed our world: it is the highest that man has been able to attain in illumined consciousness. It has been taken for the Supreme Divine and all those who have reached it have never for a moment doubted that they have touched the true Spirit. For, its splendours are so great to the ordinary human consciousness that it is absolutely dazzled into believing that here at last is the crowning reality. And yet the fact is that the Overmind is far below the true Divine. It is not the au thentic home of the Truth. It is only the domain of the formateurs, all those creative powers and deities to whom men have bowed down since the beginning of history. And the reason why the true Divine has not manifested and transformed the earth-nature is precisely that the Overmind has been mistaken for the Supermind. The cosmic Gods do not wholly live in the Truth-Consciousness: they are only in touch with it and represent, each of them, an aspect of its glories.
  No doubt, the Supermind has also acted in the history of the world but always through the Overmind. It is the direct descent of the Supramental Consciousness and Power that alone can utterly re-create life in terms of the Spirit. For, in the Overmind there is already the play of possibilities which marks the beginning of this lower triple world of Mind, Life and Matter in which we have our existence. And whenever there is this play and not the spontaneous and infallible working of the innate Truth of the Spirit, there is the seed of distortion and ignorance. Not that the Overmind is a field of ignorance; but it is the border-line between the Higher and the Lower, for, the play of possibilities, of separate even if not yet divided choice, is likely to lead to deviation from the Truth of things.
  The Overmind, therefore, does not and cannot possess the power to transform humanity into divine nature. For that, the Supramental is the sole effective agent. And what exactly differentiates our Yoga from attempts in the past to spiritualise life is that we know that the splendours of the Overmind are not the highest reality but only an intermediate step between the mind and the true Divine.
  ***

2.23 - The Conditions of Attainment to the Gnosis, #The Synthesis Of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  This universality is impossible to achieve in its completeness so long as we continue to feel ourselves, as we now feel, a consciousness lodged in an individual mind, life and body. There has to be a certain elevation of the Purusha out of the physical and even out of the mental into the vijnanamaya body. No longer can the brain nor its corresponding mental "lotus" remain the centre of our thinking, no longer the heart nor its corresponding "lotus" the originating centre of our emotional and sensational being. The conscious centre of our being, our thought, our will and action, even the original force of our sensations and emotions rise out of the body and mind and take a free station above them. No longer have we the sensation of living in the body, but are above it as its lord, possessor or Ishwara and at the same time encompass it with a wider consciousness than that of the imprisoned physical sense. Now we come to realise with a very living force of reality, normal and continuous, what the sages meant when they spoke of the soul carrying the body or when they said that the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul. It is from above the body and not from the brain that we shall ideate and will; the brain-action will become only a response and movement of the physical machinery to the shock of the thought-force and will-force from above. All will be originated from above; from above, all that corresponds in gnosis to our present mental activity takes place. Many, if not all, of these conditions of the gnostic change can and indeed have to be attained long before we reach the gnosis, -- but imperfectly at first as if by a reflection, -in higher mind itself and more completely in what we may call an Overmind consciousness between mentality and gnosis.
  But this centre and this action are free, not bound, not dependent on the physical machine, not clamped to a narrow ego-sense. It is not involved in body; it is not shut up in a separated individuality feeling out for clumsy contacts with the world out or groping inward for its own deeper spirit. For in this great transformation we begin to have a consciousness not shut up in a generating box but diffused freely and extending self-existently everywhere; there is or may be a centre, but it is a convenience for individual action, not rigid, not constitutive or separative. The very nature of our conscious activities is henceforth universal; one with those of the universal being, it proceeds from universality to a supple and variable individualisation. It has become the awareness of an infinite being who acts always universally though with emphasis on an individual formation of its energies. But this emphasis is differential rather than separative, and this formation is no longer what we now understand by individuality; there is no longer a petty limited constructed person shut up in the formula of his own mechanism. This state of consciousness is so abnormal to our present mode of being that to the rational man who does not possess it, it may seem impossible or even a state of alienation; but once possessed it vindicates itself even to the mental intelligence by its greater calm, freedom, light, power, effectivity of will, verifiable truth of ideation and feeling. For this condition begins already on the higher levels of liberated mind and can therefore be partly sensed and understood by mind-intelligence, only when it leaves behind the mental levels, but it rises to perfect self-possession only in the supramental gnosis.

2.24 - The Evolution of the Spiritual Man, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  In fact, the creative Consciousness-Force in our earth existence has to lead forward, in an almost simultaneous process but with a considerable priority and greater stress of the inferior element, a double evolution. There is an evolution of our outward nature, the nature of the mental being in the life and body, and there is within it, pressing forward for self-revelation because with the emergence of mind that revelation is becoming possible, a preparation at least, even the beginning of an evolution of our inner being, our occult subliminal and spiritual nature. But Nature's major preoccupation must necessarily be still and for a long time the evolution of mind to its greatest possible range, height, subtlety; for only so can be prepared the unveiling of an entirely intuitive intelligence, of Overmind, of supermind, the difficult passage to a higher instrumentation of the Spirit. If the sole intention were the revelation of the essential spiritual Reality and a cessation of our being into its pure existence, this insistence on the mental evolution would have no purpose: for at every point of the nature there can be a breaking out of the spirit and an absorption of our being into it; an intensity of the heart, a total silence of the mind, a single absorbing passion of the will would be enough to bring about that culminating movement. If Nature's final intention were other-worldly, then too the same law would hold; for everywhere, at any point of the nature, there can be a sufficient power of the other-worldly urge to break through and away from the terrestrial action and enter into a spiritual elsewhere. But if her intention is a comprehensive change of the being, this double evolution is intelligible and justifies itself; for it is for that purpose indispensable.
  This, however, imposes a difficult and slow spiritual advance: for, first, the spiritual emergence has to wait at each step for the instruments to be ready; next, as the spiritual formation emerges, it is mixed inextricably with the powers, motives, impulses of an imperfect mind, life and body, - there is a pull on it to accept and serve these powers, motives and impulses, a downward gravitation and perilous mixture, a constant temptation to fall or deviation, at least a fettering, a weight, a retardation; there is a necessity to return upon a step gained in order to bring up something of the nature which hangs back and prevents a farther step; finally, there is, by the very character of mind in which it has to work, a limitation of the emerging spiritual light and power and a compulsion on it to move by segments, to follow one line or another and leave altogether or leave till later on the achievement of its own totality. This hampering, this obstacle of the mind, life and body, - the heavy inertia and persistence of the body, the turbid passions of the life-part, the obscurity and doubting incertitudes, denials, other-formulations of the mind, - is an impediment so great and intolerable that the spiritual urge becomes impatient and tries rigorously to quell these opponents, to reject the life, to mortify the body, to silence the mind and achieve its own separate salvation, spirit departing into pure spirit and rejecting from it altogether an undivine and obscure Nature. Apart from the supreme call, the natural push of the spiritual part in us to return to its own highest element and status, this aspect of vital and physical Nature as an impediment to pure spirituality is a compelling reason for asceticism, for illusionism, for the tendency to other-worldliness, the urge towards withdrawal from life, the passion for a pure and unmixed Absolute. A pure spiritual absolutism is a movement of the self towards its own supreme selfhood, but it is also indispensable for Nature's own purpose; for without it the mixture, the downward gravitation would make the spiritual emergence impossible. The extremist of this absolutism, the solitary, the ascetic, is the standard-bearer of the spirit, his ochre robe is its flag, the sign of a refusal of all compromise, - as indeed the struggle of emergence cannot end by a compromise, but only by an entire spiritual victory and the complete surrender of the lower nature. If that is impossible here, then indeed it must be achieved elsewhere; if Nature refuses submission to the emerging spirit, then the soul must withdraw from her. There is thus a dual tendency in the spiritual emergence, on one side a drive towards the establishment at all cost of the spiritual consciousness in the being, even to the rejection of Nature, on the other side a push towards the extension of spirituality to our parts of nature. But until the first is fully achieved, the second can only be imperfect and halting.

2.25 - List of Topics in Each Talk, #Evening Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
   | 23-01-39 | Cosmic Will, Karma, Mukti; Cosmic Spirit, psychic. Overmind; Hitler, Mussolini; Nirvana, Self, adhikra;. Yoga and external conduct; philosophy, Sadhana, Divine Light |
   | 24-01-39 | Politicians and power; Polycrates, Asuras; humanity, Ashram |

2.25 - The Triple Transformation, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  But all this change and all this experience, though psychic and spiritual in essence and character, would still be, in its parts of life-effectuation, on the mental, vital and physical level; its dynamic spiritual outcome6 would be a flowering of the soul in mind and life and body, but in act and form it would be circumscribed within the limitations - however enlarged, uplifted and rarefied - of an inferior instrumentation. It would be a reflected and modified manifestation of things whose full reality, intensity, largeness, oneness and diversity of truth and power and delight are above us, above mind and therefore above any perfection, within mind's own formula, of the foundations or superstructure of our present nature. A highest spiritual transformation must intervene on the psychic or psycho-spiritual change; the psychic movement inward to the inner being, the Self or Divinity within us, must be completed by an opening upward to a supreme spiritual status or a higher existence. This can be done by our opening into what is above us, by an ascent of consciousness into the ranges of Overmind and supramental nature in which the sense of self and spirit is ever unveiled and permanent and in which the self-luminous instrumentation of the self and spirit is not restricted or divided as in our mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature. This also the psychic change makes possible; for lead away from life or to a Nirvana; but they are here being considered solely as steps in a transformation of the nature. as it opens us to the cosmic consciousness now hidden from us by many walls of limiting individuality, so also it opens us to what is now superconscient to our normality because it is hidden from us by the strong, hard and bright lid of mind, - mind constricting, dividing and separative. The lid thins, is slit, breaks asunder or opens and disappears under the pressure of the psycho-spiritual change and the natural urge of the new spiritualised consciousness towards that of which it is an expression here. This effectuation of an aperture and its consequences may not at all take place if there is only a partial psychic emergence satisfied with the experience of the Divine Reality in the normal degrees of the spiritualised mind: but if there is any awakening to the existence of these higher supernormal levels, then an aspiration towards them may break the lid or operate a rift in it. This may happen long before the psycho-spiritual change is complete or even before it has well begun or proceeded far, because the psychic personality has become aware and has an eager concentration towards the superconscience. An early illumination from above or a rending of the upper velamen can come as an outcome of aspiration or some inner readiness, or it may even come uncalled-for or not called for by any conscious part of the mind, - perhaps by a secret subliminal necessity or by an action or pressure from the higher levels, by something which is felt as the touch of the Divine Being, the touch of the Spirit, - and its results can be exceedingly powerful. But if it is brought about by a premature pressure from below, it can be attended with difficulties and dangers which are absent when the full psychic emergence precedes this first admission to the superior ranges of our spiritual evolution. The choice, however, does not always rest with our will, for the operations of the spiritual evolution in us are very various, and according to the line it has followed will be the turn taken at any critical phase by the action of the Consciousness-Force in its urge towards a higher self-manifestation and formation of our existence.
  If the rift in the lid of mind is made, what happens is an opening of vision to something above us or a rising up towards it or a descent of its powers into our being. What we see by the opening of vision is an Infinity above us, an eternal Presence or an infinite Existence, an infinity of consciousness, an infinity of bliss, - a boundless Self, a boundless Light, a boundless Power, a boundless Ecstasy. It may be that for a long time all that is obtained is the occasional or frequent or constant vision of it and a longing and aspiration, but without anything further, because, although something in the mind, heart or other part of the being has opened to this experience, the lower nature as a whole is too heavy and obscure as yet for more. But there may be, instead of this first wide awareness from below or subsequently to it, an ascension of the mind to heights above: the nature of these heights we may not know or clearly discern, but some consequence of the ascent is felt; there is often too an awareness of infinite ascension and return but no record or translation of that higher state. This is because it has been superconscient to mind and therefore mind, when it rises into it, is unable at first to retain there its power of conscious discernment and defining experience. But when this power begins to awake and act, when mind becomes by degrees conscious in what was to it superconscient, then there begins a knowledge and experience of superior planes of existence. The experience is in accord with that which is brought to us by the first opening of vision: the mind rises into a higher plane of pure self, silent, tranquil, illimitable; or it rises into regions of light or of felicity, or into planes where it feels an infinite Power or a divine Presence or experiences the contact of a divine Love or Beauty or the atmosphere of a wider and greater and luminous Knowledge. In the return the spiritual impression abides; but the mental record is often blurred and remains as a vague or a fragmentary memory; the lower consciousness from which the ascent took place falls back to what it was, with only the addition of an unkept or a remembered but no longer dynamic experience. In time the ascent comes to be made at will and the consciousness brings back and retains some effect or some gain of its temporary sojourn in these higher countries of the spirit. These ascents take place for many in trance, but are perfectly possible in a concentration of the waking consciousness or, where that consciousness has become sufficiently psychic, at any unconcentrated moment by an upward attraction or affinity.
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  Moreover, the necessity of working out the change separately in each part of the being in its own nature and character compels the consciousness to descend into each in turn and act there according to its state and its possibility. If the work were done from above, from some spiritual height, there might be a sublimation or uplifting or the creation of a new structure compelled by the sheer force of the influence from above: but this change might not be accepted as native to itself by the lower being; it would not be a total growth, an integral evolution, but a partial and imposed formation, affecting or liberating some parts of the being, suppressing others or leaving them as they were; a creation from outside the normal nature, by imposition upon it, it could be durable in its entirety only as long as there was a maintenance of the creating influence. A descent of consciousness into the lower levels is therefore necessary, but in this way also it is difficult to work out the full power of the higher principle; there is a modification, dilution, diminution which keeps up an imperfection and limitation in the results: the light of a greater knowledge comes down but gets blurred and modified, its significance misinterpreted or its truth mixed with mental and vital error, or the force, the power to fulfil itself is not commensurate with its light. A light and power of the Overmind working in its own full right and in its own sphere is one thing, the same light working in the obscurity of the physical consciousness and under its conditions is something quite different and, owing to dilution and mixture, far inferior in its knowledge and force and results. A mutilated power, a partial effect or hampered movement is the consequence.
  This is indeed the reason of the slow and difficult emergence of the Consciousness-Force in Nature: for mind and life have to descend into Matter and suit themselves to its conditions; changed and diminished by the obscurity and reluctant inertia of the substance and force in which they work, they are not able to make a complete transformation of their material into a fit instrument and a changed substance revelatory of their real and native power. The life consciousness is unable to effectuate the greatness and felicity of its mighty or beautiful impulses in the material existence; its impetus fails it, its force of effectuation is inferior to the truth of its conceptions, the form betrays the life intuition within it which it tries to render into terms of life being. The mind is unable to achieve its high ideas in the medium of life or matter without deductions and compromises which deprive them of their divinity; its clarities of knowledge and will are not matched by its force to mould this inferior substance to obey and express it: on the contrary, its own powers get affected, its will is divided, its knowledge confused and clouded by the turbidities of life and the incomprehension of Matter.
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  Only the supermind can thus descend without losing its full power of action; for its action is always intrinsic and automatic, its will and knowledge identical and the result commensurate: its nature is a self-achieving Truth-consciousness and, if it limits itself or its working, it is by choice and intention, not by compulsion; in the limits it chooses its action and the results of its action are harmonious and inevitable. Again, Overmind is, like mind, a dividing principle, and its characteristic operation is to work out in an independent formation a selected harmony; its global action enables it indeed to create a harmony whole and perfect in itself or to unite or fuse its harmonies together, to synthetise; but, labouring under the restrictions of mind, life and matter, it is obliged to do it by sections and their joinings. Its tendency of totality is hampered by its selective tendency which is accentuated by the nature of the mental and life material in which it is working here; what it can achieve is separate limited spiritual creations each perfect in itself, but not the integral knowledge and its manifestation. For this reason and because of the diminishing of its native light and power it is unable to do fully what is needed and has to call in a greater power, the supramental force, to liberate and fulfil it. As the psychic change has to call in the spiritual to complete it, so the first spiritual change has to call in the supramental transformation to complete it. For all these steps forward are, like those before them, transitional; the whole radical change in the evolution from a basis of Ignorance to a basis of Knowledge can only come by the intervention of the supramental Power and its direct action in earth-existence.
  This then must be the nature of the third and final transformation which finishes the passage of the soul through the Ignorance and bases its consciousness, its life, its power and form of manifestation on a complete and completely effective self-knowledge. The Truth-consciousness, finding evolutionary Nature ready, has to descend into her and enable her to liberate the supramental principle within her; so must be created the supramental and spiritual being as the first unveiled manifestation of the truth of the Self and Spirit in the material universe.

2.26 - The Ascent towards Supermind, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The transition to Supermind through Overmind is a passage from Nature as we know it into Super-Nature. It is by that very fact impossible for any effort of the mere Mind to achieve; our unaided personal aspiration and endeavour cannot reach it: our effort belongs to the inferior power of Nature; a power of the Ignorance cannot achieve by its own strength or characteristic or available methods what is beyond its own domain of Nature. All the previous ascensions have been effectuated by a secret Consciousness-Force operating first in Inconscience and then in the Ignorance: it has worked by an emergence of its involved powers to the surface, powers concealed behind the veil and superior to the past formulations of Nature, but even so there is needed a pressure of the same superior powers already formulated in their full natural force on their own planes; these superior planes create their own foundation in our subliminal parts and from there are able to influence the evolutionary process on the surface. Overmind and Supermind are also involved and occult in earth-Nature, but they have no formations on the accessible levels of our subliminal inner consciousness; there is as yet no Overmind being or organised Overmind nature, no supramental being or organised supermind nature acting either on our surface or in our normal subliminal parts: for these greater powers of consciousness are superconscient to the level of our ignorance. In order that the involved principles of Overmind and Supermind should emerge from their veiled secrecy, the being and powers of the superconscience must descend into us and uplift us and formulate themselves in our being and powers; this descent is a sine qua non of the transition and transformation.
  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.
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  The totality of this abandonment can only come if the psychic change has been complete or the spiritual transformation has reached a very high state of achievement. For it implies a giving up by the mind of all its moulds, ideas, mental formations, of all opinion, of all its habits of intellectual observation and judgment to be replaced first by an intuitive and then by an Overmind or supramental functioning which inaugurates the action of a direct Truth-consciousness, Truth-sight, Truth-discernment, a new consciousness which is in all its ways quite foreign to our mind's present nature. There is demanded too a similar giving up by the vital of its cherished desires, emotions, feelings, impulses, grooves of sensation, forceful mechanism of action and reaction to be replaced by a luminous, desireless, free and yet automatically self-determining force, the force of a centralised universal and impersonal knowledge, power, delight of which the life must become an instrument and an epiphany, but of which it has at present no inkling and no sense of its greater joy and strength for fulfilment. Our physical part has to give up its instincts, needs, blind conservative attachments, settled grooves of nature, its doubt and disbelief in all that is beyond itself, its faith in the inevitability of the fixed functionings of the physical mind, the physical life and the body, that they may be replaced by a new power which establishes its own greater law and functioning in form and force of Matter. Even the inconscient and subconscient have to become conscient in us, susceptible to the higher light, no longer obstructive to the fulfilling action of the Consciousness-Force, but more and more a mould and lower basis of the Spirit. These things cannot be done so long as either mind, life or physical consciousness are the leading powers of being or have any dominance. The admission of such a change can only be brought about by a full emergence of the soul and inner being, the dominance of the psychic and spiritual will and a long working of their light and power on the parts of the being, a psychic and spiritual remoulding of the whole nature.
  A unification of the entire being by a breaking down of the wall between the inner and outer nature, - a shifting of the position and centration of the consciousness from the outer to the inner self, a firm foundation on this new basis, a habitual action from this inner self and its will and vision and an opening up of the individual into the cosmic consciousness, - is another necessary condition for the supramental change. It would be chimerical to hope that the supreme Truth-consciousness can establish itself in the narrow formulation of our surface mind and heart and life, however turned towards spirituality. All the inner centres must have burst open and released into action their capacities; the psychic entity must be unveiled and in control. If this first change establishing the being in the inner and larger, a Yogic in place of an ordinary consciousness has not been done, the greater transmutation is impossible. Moreover the individual must have sufficiently universalised himself, he must have recast his individual mind in the boundlessness of a cosmic mentality, enlarged and vivified his individual life into the immediate sense and direct experience of the dynamic motion of the universal life, opened up the communications of his body with the forces of universal Nature, before he can be capable of a change which transcends the present cosmic formulation and lifts him beyond the lower hemisphere of universality into a consciousness belonging to its spiritual upper hemisphere. Besides he must have already become aware of what is now to him superconscient; he must be already a being conscious of the higher spiritual Light, Power, Knowledge, Ananda, penetrated by its descending influences, new-made by a spiritual change. It is possible for the spiritual opening to take place and its action to proceed before the psychic is far advanced or complete; for the spiritual influence from above can awaken, assist and complete the psychic transmutation: all that is necessary is that there should be a sufficient stress of the psychic entity for the spiritual higher overture to take place. But the third, the supramental change does not admit of any premature descent of the highest Light; for it can only commence when the supramental Force begins to act directly, and this it does not do if the nature is not ready. For there is too great a disparity between the power of the supreme Force and the capacity of the ordinary nature; the inferior nature would either be unable to bear or, bearing, unable to respond and receive or, receiving, unable to assimilate. Till Nature is ready, the supramental Force has to act indirectly; it puts the intermediary powers of Overmind or intuition in front, or it works through a modification of itself to which the already half-transformed being can be wholly or partially responsive.
  The spiritual evolution obeys the logic of a successive unfolding; it can take a new decisive main step only when the previous main step has been sufficiently conquered: even if certain minor stages can be swallowed up or leaped over by a rapid and brusque ascension, the consciousness has to turn back to assure itself that the ground passed over is securely annexed to the new condition. It is true that the conquest of the spirit supposes the execution in one life or a few lives of a process that in the ordinary course of Nature would involve a slow and uncertain procedure of centuries or even of millenniums: but this is a question of the speed with which the steps are traversed; a greater or concentrated speed does not eliminate the steps themselves or the necessity of their successive surmounting. The increased rapidity is possible only because the conscious participation of the inner being is there and the power of the Supernature is already at work in the half-transformed lower nature, so that the steps which would otherwise have had to be taken tentatively in the night of Inconscience or Ignorance can now be taken in an increasing light and power of Knowledge. The first obscure material movement of the evolutionary Force is marked by an aeonic graduality; the movement of life progress proceeds slowly but still with a quicker step, it is concentrated into the figure of millenniums; mind can still further compress the tardy leisureliness of Time and make long paces of the centuries; but when the conscious Spirit intervenes, a supremely concentrated pace of evolutionary swiftness becomes possible. Still, an involved rapidity of the evolutionary course swallowing up the stages can only come in when the power of the conscious Spirit has prepared the field and the supramental Force has begun to use its direct influence. All Nature's transformations do indeed wear the appearance of a miracle, but it is a miracle with a method: her largest strides are taken over an assured ground, her swiftest leaps are from a base that gives security and certainty to the evolutionary saltus; a secret all-wisdom governs everything in her, even the steps and processes that seem to be most unaccountable.
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  But even this larger mentalisation and vitalisation from within is still an inferior illumination: it can lessen but it does not get rid of the Ignorance; it assails and compels to recede but it does not overcome the powers and forces that maintain the subtle and secret rule of the Inconscience. The spiritual forces acting through this larger mentalisation and vitalisation can bring in a higher light, strength and joy; but the full spiritualisation, the completest new integration of consciousness, is at this stage still impossible. If the inmost being, the psychic, takes charge, then indeed a deeper mutation, not mental, can make the descent of spiritual force more effective; for the totality of the conscious being will have undergone a preliminary soul change which emancipates mind, life, body from the snare of their own imperfections and impurities. At this point, a greater spiritual dynamisation, the working of the higher powers of the spiritual mind and Overmind, can fully intervene: they may indeed have started their work before, though only as influences; but under the new conditions they can uplift the central being towards their own level and commence the last new integration of the nature.
  These higher powers work already in the human unspiritualised mind, but indirectly and in a fragmentary and diminished action; they are changed into substance and power of mind before they can work, and that substance and power are illumined and intensified in their vibrations, exalted and ecstasised in some of their movements by this entry, but not transformed. But when the spiritualisation begins and, as its greater results manifest themselves, - silence of the mind, the admission of our being into the cosmic consciousness, the Nirvana of the little ego in the sense of universal self, the contact with the Divine Reality, - the interventions of the higher dynamis and our openness to them can increase, they can assume a fuller, more direct, more characteristic power of their working, and this progression continues until some complete and mature action of them is possible. It is then that the turning of the spiritual towards the supramental transformation commences; for the heightening of the consciousness to higher and higher planes builds in us the gradation of the ascent to supermind, that difficult and supreme passage.
  It is not to be supposed that the circumstances and the lines of the transition would be the same for all, for here we enter into the domain of the infinite: but, since there is behind all of them the unity of a fundamental truth, the scrutiny of a given line of ascent may be expected to throw light on the principle of all ascending possibilities; such a scrutiny of one line is all that can be attempted. This line is, as all must be, governed by the natural configuration of the stair of ascent: there are in it many steps, for it is an incessant gradation and there is no gap anywhere; but, from the point of view of the ascent of consciousness from our mind upwards through a rising series of dynamic powers by which it can sublimate itself, the gradation can be resolved into a stairway of four main ascents, each with its high level of fulfilment. These gradations may be summarily described as a series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined Mind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; there is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis. All these degrees are gnostic in their principle and power; for even at the first we begin to pass from a consciousness based on an original Inconscience and acting in a general Ignorance or in a mixed Knowledge-Ignorance to a consciousness based on a secret selfexistent Knowledge and first acted upon and inspired by that light and power and then itself changed into that substance and using entirely this new instrumentation. In themselves these grades are grades of energy-substance of the Spirit: for it must not be supposed, because we distinguish them according to their leading character, means and potency of knowledge, that they are merely a method or way of knowing or a faculty or power of cognition; they are domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the spiritual being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal Consciousness-Force constituting and organising itself into a higher status. When the powers of any grade descend completely into us, it is not only our thought and knowledge that are affected, - the substance and very grain of our being and consciousness, all its states and activities are touched and penetrated and can be remoulded and wholly transmuted. Each stage of this ascent is therefore a general, if not a total, conversion of the being into a new light and power of a greater existence.
  The gradation itself depends fundamentally upon a higher or lower substance, potency, intensity of vibrations of the being, of its self-awareness, of its delight of existence, of its force of existence. Consciousness, as we descend the scale, becomes more and more diminished and diluted, - dense indeed by its coarser crudity, but while that crudity of consistence compacts the stuff of Ignorance, it admits less and less the substance of light; it becomes thin in pure substance of consciousness and reduced in power of consciousness, thin in light, thin and weak in capacity of delight; it has to resort to a grosser thickness of its diminished stuff and to a strenuous output of its obscurer force to arrive at anything, but this strenuousness of effort and labour is a sign not of strength but of weakness. As we ascend, on the contrary, a finer but far stronger and more truly and spiritually concrete substance emerges, a greater luminosity and potent stuff of consciousness, a subtler, sweeter, purer and more powerfully ecstatic energy of delight. In the descent of these higher grades upon us it is this greater light, force, essence of being and consciousness, energy of delight that enter into mind, life, body, change and repair their diminished and diluted and incapable substance, convert it into its own higher and stronger dynamis of spirit and intrinsic form and force of reality. This can happen because all is fundamentally the same substance, the same consciousness, the same force, but in different forms and powers and degrees of itself: a taking up of the lower by the higher is therefore a possible and, but for our second nature of inconscience, a spiritually natural movement; what was put forth from the superior status is enveloped and taken up into its own greater being and essence.
  Our first decisive step out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher Mind, a mind no longer of mingled light and obscurity or half-light, but a large clarity of the spirit. Its basic substance is a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable of the formation of a multitude of aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming, of all of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge. It is therefore a power that has proceeded from the Overmind, - but with the Supermind as its ulterior origin, - as all these greater powers have proceeded: but its special character, its activity of consciousness are dominated by Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of spirit-born conceptual knowledge. An all-awareness emerging from the original identity, carrying the truths the identity held in itself, conceiving swiftly, victoriously, multitudinously, formulating and by self-power of the Idea effectually realising its conceptions, is the character of this greater mind of knowledge. This kind of cognition is the last that emerges from the original spiritual identity before the initiation of a separative knowledge, base of the Ignorance; it is therefore the first that meets us when we rise from conceptive and ratiocinative mind, our best-organised knowledge-power of the Ignorance, into the realms of the Spirit: it is, indeed, the spiritual parent of our conceptive mental ideation, and it is natural that this leading power of our mentality should, when it goes beyond itself, pass into its immediate source.
  But here in this greater Thought there is no need of a seeking and self-critical ratiocination, no logical motion step by step towards a conclusion, no mechanism of express or implied deductions and inferences, no building or deliberate concatenation of idea with idea in order to arrive at an ordered sum or outcome of knowledge; for this limping action of our reason is a movement of Ignorance searching for knowledge, obliged to safeguard its steps against error, to erect a selective mental structure for its temporary shelter and to base it on foundations already laid and carefully laid but never firm, because it is not supported on a soil of native awareness but imposed on an original soil of nescience. There is not here, either, that other way of our mind at its keenest and swiftest, a rapid hazardous divination and insight, a play of the searchlight of intelligence probing into the little known or the unknown. This higher consciousness is a Knowledge formulating itself on a basis of self-existent all-awareness and manifesting some part of its integrality, a harmony of its significances put into thought-form. It can freely express itself in single ideas, but its most characteristic movement is a mass ideation, a system or totality of truth-seeing at a single view; the relations of idea with idea, of truth with truth are not established by logic but pre-exist and emerge already self-seen in the integral whole. There is an initiation into forms of an ever-present but till now inactive knowledge, not a system of conclusions from premisses or data; this thought is a self-revelation of eternal Wisdom, not an acquired knowledge.
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  The next step of the ascent brings us to the Overmind; the intuitional change can only be an introduction to this higher spiritual overture. But we have seen that the Overmind, even when it is selective and not total in its action, is still a power of cosmic consciousness, a principle of global knowledge which carries in it a delegated light from the supramental gnosis. It is, therefore, only by an opening into the cosmic consciousness that the Overmind ascent and descent can be made wholly possible: a high and intense individual opening upwards is not sufficient, - to that vertical ascent towards summit Light there must be added a vast horizontal expansion of the consciousness into some totality of the Spirit. At the least, the inner being must already have replaced by its deeper and wider awareness the surface mind and its limited outlook and learned to live in a large universality; for otherwise the Overmind view of things and the Overmind dynamism will have no room to move in and effectuate its dynamic operations. When the Overmind descends, the predominance of the centralising ego-sense is entirely subordinated, lost in largeness of being and finally abolished; a wide cosmic perception and feeling of a boundless universal self and movement replaces it: many motions that were formerly ego-centric may still continue, but they occur as currents or ripples in the cosmic wideness. Thought, for the most part, no longer seems to originate individually in the body or the person but manifests from above or comes in upon the cosmic mindwaves: all inner individual sight or intelligence of things is now a revelation or illumination of what is seen or comprehended, but the source of the revelation is not in one's separate self but in the universal knowledge; the feelings, emotions, sensations are similarly felt as waves from the same cosmic immensity breaking upon the subtle and the gross body and responded to in kind by the individual centre of the universality; for the body is only a small support or even less, a point of relation, for the action of a vast cosmic instrumentation. In this boundless largeness, not only the separate ego but all sense of individuality, even of a subordinated or instrumental individuality, may entirely disappear; the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness, the cosmic delight, the play of cosmic forces are alone left: if the delight or the centre of Force is felt in what was the personal mind, life or body, it is not with a sense of personality but as a field of manifestation, and this sense of the delight or of the action of Force is not confined to the person or the body but can be felt at all points in an unlimited consciousness of unity which pervades everywhere.
  But there can be many formulations of Overmind consciousness and experience; for the Overmind has a great plasticity and is a field of multiple possibilities. In place of an uncentred and unplaced diffusion there may be the sense of the universe in oneself or as oneself: but there too this self is not the ego; it is an extension of a free and pure essential self-consciousness or it is an identification with the All, - the extension or the identification constituting a cosmic being, a universal individual.
  In one state of the cosmic consciousness there is an individual included in the cosmos but identifying himself with all in it, with the things and beings, with the thought and sense, the joy and grief of others; in another state there is an inclusion of beings in oneself and a reality of their life as part of one's own being.
  Often there is no rule or governance of the immense movement, but a free play of universal Nature to which what was the personal being responds with a passive acceptance or a dynamic identity, while yet the spirit remains free and undisturbed by any bondage to the reactions of this passivity or this universal and impersonal identification and sympathy. But with a strong influence or full action of the Overmind a very integral sense of governance, a complete supporting or overruling presence and direction of the cosmic Self or the Ishwara can come in and become normal; or a special centre may be revealed or created overtopping and dominating the physical instrument, individual in fact of existence, but impersonal in feeling and recognised by a free cognition as something instrumental to the action of a Transcendent and Universal Being. In the transition towards the supermind this centralising action tends towards the discovery of a true individual replacing the dead ego, a being who is in his essence one with the supreme Self, one with the universe in extension and yet a cosmic centre and circumference of the specialised action of the Infinite.
  These are the general first results and create the normal foundation of the Overmind consciousness in the evolved spiritual being, but its varieties and developments are innumerable.
  The consciousness that thus acts is experienced as a consciousness of Light and Truth, a power, force, action full of Light and Truth, an aesthesis and sensation of beauty and delight universal and multitudinous in detail, an illumination in the whole and in all things, in the one movement and all movements, with a constant extension and play of possibilities which is infinite, even in its multitude of determinations endless and indeterminable. If the power of an ordering Overmind gnosis intervenes, then there is a cosmic structure of the consciousness and action, but this is not like the rigid mental structures; it is plastic, organic, something that can grow and develop and stretch into the infinite. All spiritual experiences are taken up and become habitual and normal to the new nature; all essential experiences belonging to the mind, life, body are taken up and spiritualised, transmuted and felt as forms of the consciousness, delight, power of the infinite existence. Intuition, illumined sight and thought enlarge themselves; their substance assumes a greater substantiality, mass, energy, their movement is more comprehensive, global, many-faceted, more wide and potent in its truth-force: the whole nature, knowledge, aesthesis, sympathy, feeling, dynamism become more catholic, all-understanding, all-embracing, cosmic, infinite.
  The Overmind change is the final consummating movement of the dynamic spiritual transformation; it is the highest possible status-dynamis of the spirit in the spiritual-mind plane. It takes up all that is in the three steps below it and raises their characteristic workings to their highest and largest power, adding to them a universal wideness of consciousness and force, a harmonious concert of knowledge, a more manifold delight of being.
  But there are certain reasons arising from its own characteristic status and power that prevent it from being the final possibility of the spiritual evolution. It is a power, though the highest power, of the lower hemisphere; although its basis is a cosmic unity, its action is an action of division and interaction, an action taking its stand on the play of the multiplicity. Its play is, like that of all Mind, a play of possibilities; although it acts not in the Ignorance but with the knowledge of the truth of these possibilities, yet it works them out through their own independent evolution of their powers. It acts in each cosmic formula according to the fundamental meaning of that formula and is not a power for a dynamic transcendence. Here in earth-life it has to work upon a cosmic formula whose basis is the entire nescience which results from the separation of Mind, Life and Matter from their own source and supreme origin. Overmind can bridge that division up to the point at which separative Mind enters into Overmind and becomes a part of its action; it can unite individual mind with cosmic mind on its highest plane, equate individual self with cosmic self and give to the nature an action of universality; but it cannot lead Mind beyond itself, and in this world of original Inconscience it cannot dynamise the Transcendence: for it is the supermind alone that is the supreme self-determining truth-action and the direct power of manifestation of that Transcendence. If then the action of evolutionary Nature ended here, the Overmind, having carried the consciousness to the point of a vast illumined universality and an organised play of this wide and potent spiritual awareness of utter existence, forceconsciousness and delight, could only go farther by an opening of the gates of the Spirit into the upper hemisphere and a will to enable the soul to depart out of its cosmic formation into the Transcendence.
  In the terrestrial evolution itself the Overmind descent would not be able to transform wholly the Inconscience; all that it could do would be to transform in each man it touched the whole conscious being, inner and outer, personal and universally impersonal, into its own stuff and impose that upon the Ignorance illumining it into cosmic truth and knowledge. But a basis of Nescience would remain; it would be as if a sun and its system were to shine out in an original darkness of Space and illumine everything as far as its rays could reach so that all that dwelt in the light would feel as if no darkness were there at all in their experience of existence. But outside that sphere or expanse of experience the original darkness would still be there and, since all things are possible in an Overmind structure, could reinvade the island of light created within its empire. Moreover, since Overmind deals with different possibilities, its natural action would be to develop the separate possibility of one or more or numerous dynamic spiritual formulations to their utmost or combine or harmonise several possibilities together; but this would be a creation or a number of creations in the original terrestrial creation, each complete in its separate existence. The evolved spiritual individual would be there, there might evolve also a spiritual community or communities in the same world as mental man and the vital being of the animal, but each working out its independent existence in a loose relation within the terrestrial formula. The supreme power of the principle of unity taking all diversities into itself and controlling them as parts of the unity, which must be the law of the new evolutionary consciousness, would not as yet be there. Also by this much evolution there could be no security against the downward pull or gravitation of the Inconscience which dissolves all the formations that life and mind build in it, swallows all things that arise out of it or are imposed upon it and disintegrates them into their original matter. The liberation from this pull of the Inconscience and a secured basis for a continuous divine or gnostic evolution would only be achieved by a descent of the Supermind into the terrestrial formula, bringing into it the supreme law and light and dynamis of the spirit and penetrating with it and transforming the inconscience of the material basis.
  A last transition from Overmind to Supermind and a descent of Supermind must therefore intervene at this stage of evolutionary Nature.
   Overmind and its delegated powers, taking up and penetrating mind and the life and body dependent upon mind, would subject all to a greatening process; at each step of this process a greater power and a higher intensity of gnosis less and less mixed with the loose, diffused, diminishing and diluting stuff of mind could establish itself: but all gnosis is in its origin power of supermind, so that this would mean a greater and greater influx of a half-veiled and indirect supramental light and power into the nature. This would continue until the point was reached at which Overmind would begin itself to be transformed into supermind; the supramental consciousness and force would take up the transformation directly into its own hands, reveal to the terrestrial mind, life, bodily being their own spiritual truth and divinity and, finally, pour into the whole nature the perfect knowledge, power, significance of the supramental existence.
  The soul would pass beyond the borders of the Ignorance and cross its original line of departure from the supreme Knowledge: it would enter into the integrality of the supramental gnosis; the descent of the gnostic Light would effectuate a complete transformation of the Ignorance.
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  This entails certain consequences which modify the clear successions of the evolution and prevent it from following the cleanly determined and firmly arranged course which our logical intelligence demands from Nature but seldom gets from her. As life and mind begin to appear when the organisation of Matter is sufficient to admit them but the more complex and perfect organisation of Matter comes with the evolution of life and mind, as mind appears when life is sufficiently organised to admit of a developed vibration of consciousness but life receives its full organisation and development only after mind can act upon it, as the spiritual evolution begins when man as mind is capable of the movements of spirituality but mind also rises to its own highest perfection by the growth of the intensities and luminosities of the spirit, so it is with this higher evolution of the ascending powers of the Spirit. As soon as there is a sufficient spiritual development, something of intuition, illumination of the being, the movements of the higher spiritual grades of Consciousness begins to manifest, - sometimes one, sometimes the other or all together, and they do not wait for each power in the series to complete itself before a higher power comes into action. An Overmind light and power may descend in some sort, create a partial form of itself in the being and take a leading part or supervise or intervene while the intuitive and illumining mind and higher mind are still incomplete; these would then remain in the whole, acting along with the greater Power, often penetrated or sublimated by it or rising into it to form a greater or Overmind intuition, a greater or Overmind illumination, a greater or Overmind spiritual thinking. This intricate action takes place because each descending power by its intensity of pressure on the nature and uplifting effect makes the being already capable of a still higher invasion before that earlier power itself is complete in its self-formation; but also it happens because the work of assumption and transformation of the lower nature can with difficulty be done if a higher and higher intervention does not take place. The illumination and the higher thought need the help of the intuition, the intuition needs the help of the Overmind to combat the darkness or ignorance in which they labour and to give them their own fullness. Still, it is not possible in the end for the Overmind status and integration to be complete until the higher mind and the illumined mind have been integrated and taken up into the intuition and the intuition itself subsequently integrated and taken up into the all-enlarging and all-sublimating Overmind energy. The law of the gradation has to be satisfied even in the complexity of the process of evolutionary Nature.
  A further cause of complexity arises from the need of integration itself; for the process is not only an ascent of the soul to a higher status, but a descent of the higher consciousness so gained to take up and transform the inferior nature. But this nature has a density of previous formation which resists and obstructs the descent; even when the higher power has broken the barrier and descended and is at work, we have seen that the nature of the Ignorance resists and obstructs the working, that it either strives to refuse transformation altogether or tries to modify the new power into some conformity with its own workings, or even throws itself upon it to seize and degrade and enslave it to its own way of action and lower purpose. Ordinarily, in their task of assumption and assimilation of this difficult stuff of Nature, the higher powers descend first into the mind and occupy the mind centres because these are nearest to themselves in intelligence and knowledge-power; if they descend first into the heart or into the vital being of force and sensation, as they sometimes do because these happen to be in some individuals more open and call them first, the results are more mixed and dubious, imperfect and insecure than if things happen in the logical order. But, even in its normal working when it takes up the being part by part in the natural order of descent, the descending power is not able to bring about a total occupation and transformation of each before it goes farther. It can only effect a general and incomplete occupation, so that the workings of each remain still partly of the new higher, partly of a mixed, partly of the old unchanged lower order. All the mind in its whole range cannot be transmuted at once, for the mind centres are not a region isolated from the rest of the being; the mind action is penetrated by the action of the vital and physical parts, and in those parts themselves are lower formations of mind, a vital mind, a physical mind, and these have to be changed before there can be an entire transformation of the mental being. The higher transforming power has, therefore, to descend, as soon as may be and without waiting for an integral mental change, into the heart so as to occupy and change the emotional nature, and afterwards into the inferior vital centres to occupy and change the whole vital and kinetic and sensational nature, and, finally, into the physical centres so as to occupy and change the whole physical nature. But even this finality is not final, for there are still left the subconscient parts and the inconscient foundation.
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  A supramental change of the whole substance of the being and therefore necessarily of all its characters, powers, movements takes place when the involved supermind in Nature emerges to meet and join with the supramental light and power descending from Supernature. The individual must be the instrument and first field of the transformation; but an isolated individual transformation is not enough and may not be wholly feasible. Even when achieved, the individual change will have a permanent and cosmic significance only if the individual becomes a centre and a sign for the establishment of the supramental Consciousness-Force as an overtly operative power in the terrestrial workings of Nature, - in the same way in which thinking Mind has been established through the human evolution as an overtly operative power in Life and Matter. This would mean the appearance in the evolution of a gnostic being or Purusha and a gnostic Prakriti, a gnostic Nature. There must be an emergent supramental Consciousness-Force liberated and active within the terrestrial whole and an organised supramental instrumentation of the Spirit in the life and the body, - for the body consciousness also must become sufficiently awake to be a fit instrument of the workings of the new supramental Force and its new order. Till then any intermediate change could be only partial or insecure; an Overmind or intuitive instrumentation of Nature could be developed, but it would be a luminous formation imposed on a fundamental and environmental Inconscience. A supramental principle and its cosmic operation once established permanently on its own basis, the intervening powers of Overmind and spiritual Mind could found themselves securely upon it and reach their own perfection; they would become in the earth-existence a hierarchy of states of consciousness rising out of Mind and physical life to the supreme spiritual level. Mind and mental humanity would remain as one step in the spiritual evolution; but other degrees above it would be there formed and accessible by which the embodied mental being, as it became ready, could climb into the gnosis and change into an embodied supramental and spiritual being. On this basis the principle of a divine life in terrestrial Nature would be manifested; even the world of ignorance and inconscience might discover its own submerged secret and begin to realise in each lower degree its divine significance.

2.27 - The Gnostic Being, #The Life Divine, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  AS WE reach in our thought the line at which the evolution of mind into Overmind passes over into an evolution of Overmind into supermind, we are faced with a difficulty which amounts almost to an impossibility. For we are moved to seek for some precise idea, some clear mental description of the supramental or gnostic existence of which evolutionary Nature in the Ignorance is in travail; but by crossing this extreme line of sublimated mind the consciousness passes out of the sphere, exceeds the characteristic action and escapes from the grasp, of mental perception and knowledge. It is evident indeed that supramental nature must be a perfect integration and consummation of spiritual nature and experience: it would also contain in itself, by the very character of the evolutionary principle, though it would not be limited to that change, a total spiritualisation of mundane Nature; our world-experience would be taken up in this step of our evolution and, by a transformation of its parts of divinity, a creative rejection of its imperfections and disguises, reach some divine truth and plenitude. But these are general formulas and give us no precise idea of the change.
  Our normal perception or imagination or formulation of things spiritual and things mundane is mental, but in the gnostic change the evolution crosses a line beyond which there is a supreme and radical reversal of consciousness and the standards and forms of mental cognition are no longer sufficient: it is difficult for mental thought to understand or describe supramental nature.
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  At the same time certain deductions can be made from the very fact of this difference of nature which might be valid at least for a general description of the passage from Overmind to Supermind or might vaguely construct for us an idea of the first status of the evolutionary supramental existence.
  This passage is the stage at which the supermind gnosis can take over the lead of the evolution from the Overmind and build the first foundations of its own characteristic manifestation and unveiled activities; it must be marked therefore by a decisive but long-prepared transition from an evolution in the Ignorance to an always progressive evolution in the Knowledge. It will not be a sudden revelation and effectuation of the absolute Supermind and the supramental being as they are in their own plane, the swift apocalypse of a truth-conscious existence ever self-fulfilled and complete in self-knowledge; it will be the phenomenon of the supramental being descending into a world of evolutionary becoming and forming itself there, unfolding the powers of the gnosis within the terrestrial nature. This is indeed the principle of all terrestrial being; for the process of earth-existence is the play of an infinite Reality concealing itself first in a succession of obscurely limited, opaque and incomplete half-figures which by their imperfection and character of disguise distort the truth of which they are in labour, but afterwards arriving more and more at half-luminous figures of itself which can become, once there is the supramental descent, a true progressive revelation. The descent from original supermind, the assumption of evolutionary supermind is a step which the supramental gnosis can very well undertake and accomplish without changing its own essential character. It can assume the formula of a truth-conscious existence founded in an inherent self-knowledge but at the same time taking up into itself mental nature and nature of life and material body. For the supermind as the truth-consciousness of the Infinite has in its dynamic principle the infinite power of a free self-determination. It can hold all knowledge in itself and yet put forward in formulation only what is needed at each stage of an evolution; it formulates whatever is in accordance with the Divine Will in manifestation and the truth of the thing to be manifested. It is by this power that it is able to hold back its knowledge, hide its own character and law of action and manifest Overmind and under Overmind a world of ignorance in which the being wills on its surface not to know and even puts itself under the control of a pervading Nescience. But in this new stage the veil thus put on will be lifted; the evolution at every step will move in the power of the truth-consciousness and its progressive determinations will be made by a conscious Knowledge and not in the forms of an Ignorance or Inconscience.
  As there has been established on earth a mental Consciousness and Power which shapes a race of mental beings and takes up into itself all of earthly nature that is ready for the change, so now there will be established on earth a gnostic Consciousness and Power which will shape a race of gnostic spiritual beings and take up into itself all of earth-nature that is ready for this new transformation. It will also receive into itself from above, progressively, from its own domain of perfect light and power and beauty all that is ready to descend from that domain into terrestrial being. For the evolution proceeded in the past by the The Gnostic Being upsurging, at each critical stage, of a concealed Power from its involution in the Inconscience, but also by a descent from above, from its own plane, of that Power already self-realised in its own higher natural province. In all these previous stages there has been a division between surface self and consciousness and subliminal self and consciousness; the surface was formed mainly under the push of the upsurging force from below, by the Inconscient developing a slowly emergent formulation of a concealed force of the spirit, the subliminal partly in this way but mainly by a simultaneous influx of the largeness of the same force from above: a mental or a vital being descended into the subliminal parts and formed from its secret station there a mental or a vital personality on the surface. But before the supramental change can begin, the veil between the subliminal and the surface parts must have been already broken down; the influx, the descent will be in the entire consciousness as a whole, it will not take place partly behind a veil: the process will be no longer a concealed, obscure and ambiguous procedure but an open outflowering consciously felt and followed by the whole being in its transmutation. In other respects the process will be identical, - a supramental inflow from above, the descent of a gnostic being into the nature, and an emergence of the concealed supramental force from below; the influx and the unveiling between them will remove what is left of the nature of the Ignorance. The rule of the Inconscient will disappear: for the Inconscience will be changed by the outburst of the greater secret Consciousness within it, the hidden Light, into what it always was in reality, a sea of the secret Superconscience. A first formation of a gnostic consciousness and nature will be the consequence.
  The creation of a supramental being, nature, life on earth, will not be the sole result of this evolution; it will also carry with it the consummation of the steps that have led up to it: for it will confirm in possession of terrestrial birth the Overmind, the intuition and the other gradations of the spiritual natureforce and establish a race of gnostic beings and a hierarchy, a shining ladder of ascending degrees and successive constituent formations of the gnostic light and power in earth-nature. For the description of gnosis applies to all consciousness that is based upon Truth of being and not upon the Ignorance or Nescience.
  All life and living beings ready to rise beyond the mental ignorance, but not ready yet for the supramental height, would find in a sort of echelon or a scale with overlapping degrees their assured basis, their intermediate steps of self-formation, their expression of realised capacity of spiritual existence on the way to the supreme Reality. But also the presence of the liberated and now sovereign supramental light and force at the head of evolutionary Nature might be expected to have its consequences in the whole evolution. An incidence, a decisive stress would affect the life of the lower evolutionary stages; something of the light, something of the force would penetrate downwards and awaken into a greater action the hidden TruthPower everywhere in Nature. A dominant principle of harmony would impose itself on the life of the Ignorance; the discord, the blind seeking, the clash of struggle, the abnormal vicissitudes of exaggeration and depression and unsteady balance of the unseeing forces at work in their mixture and conflict, would feel the influence and yield place to a more orderly pace and harmonic steps of the development of being, a more revealing arrangement of progressing life and consciousness, a better lifeorder. A freer play of intuition and sympathy and understanding would enter into human life, a clearer sense of the truth of self and things and a more enlightened dealing with the opportunities and difficulties of existence. Instead of a constant intermixed and confused struggle between the growth of Consciousness and the power of the Inconscience, between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, the evolution would become a graded progression from lesser light to greater light; in each stage of it the conscious beings belonging to that stage would respond to the inner Consciousness-Force and expand their own law of cosmic Nature towards the possibility of a higher degree of that Nature. This is at least a strong possibility and might be envisaged as the natural consequence of the direct action of supermind on the evolution. This intervention would not annul The Gnostic Being the evolutionary principle, for supermind has the power of withholding or keeping in reserve its force of knowledge as well as the power of bringing it into full or partial action; but it would harmonise, steady, facilitate, tranquillise and to a great extent hedonise the difficult and afflicted process of the evolutionary emergence.
  There is something in the nature of supermind itself that would make this great result inevitable. It is in its foundation a unitarian and integralising and harmonic consciousness, and in its descent and evolutionary working out of the diversity of the Infinite it would not lose its unitarian trend, its push towards integralisation or its harmonic influence. The Overmind follows out diversities and divergent possibilities on their own lines of divergence: it can allow contradictions and discords, but it makes them elements of a cosmic whole so that they are forced, however unwittingly and in spite of themselves, to contri bute their share to its wholeness. Or we may say that it accepts and even encourages contradictions, but obliges them to support each other's existence so that there may be divergent roads of being and consciousness and experience that lead away from the One and from each other but still maintain themselves on the Oneness and can lead back again each on its own path to the Oneness. That is the secret sense even of our own world of Ignorance which works from the Inconscience but with the underlying cosmicity of the Overmind principle. But the individual being in such a creation does not possess this secret principle in knowledge and does not base upon it his action. An Overmind being here would perceive this secret; but he might still work on his own lines of Nature and law of action, Swabhava, Swadharma, according to the inspiration, the dynamic control or the inner governance of the Spirit or the Divine within him and leave the rest to their own line in the whole: an Overmind creation of knowledge in the Ignorance might therefore be something separate from the surrounding world of Ignorance and guarded from it by the luminous encircling and separating wall of its own principle. The supramental gnostic being, on the contrary, would not only found all his living on an intimate sense and effective realisation of harmonic unity in his own inner and outer life or group life, but would create a harmonic unity also with the still surviving mental world, even if that world remained altogether a world of Ignorance. For the gnostic consciousness in him would perceive and bring out the evolving truth and principle of harmony hidden in the formations of the Ignorance; it would be natural to his sense of integrality and it would be within his power to link them in a true order with his own gnostic principle and the evolved truth and harmony of his own greater life-creation. That might be impossible without a considerable change in the life of the world, but such a change would be a natural consequence of the appearance of a new Power in Nature and its universal influence. In the emergence of the gnostic being would be the hope of a more harmonious evolutionary order in terrestrial Nature.
  A supramental or gnostic race of beings would not be a race made according to a single type, moulded in a single fixed pattern; for the law of the supermind is unity fulfilled in diversity, and therefore there would be an infinite diversity in the manifestation of the gnostic consciousness although that consciousness would still be one in its basis, in its constitution, in its allrevealing and all-uniting order. It is evident that the triple status of the supermind would reproduce itself as a principle in this new manifestation: there would be below it and yet belonging to it the degrees of the Overmind and intuitive gnosis with the souls that had realised these degrees of the ascending consciousness; there would be also at the summit, as the evolution in Knowledge proceeded, individual beings who would ascend beyond a supermind formulation and reach from the highest height of supermind to the summits of unitarian self-realisation in the body which must be the last and supreme state of the epiphany of the Creation. But in the supramental race itself, in the variation of its degrees, the individuals would not be cast according to a single type of individuality; each would be different from the other, a unique formation of the Being, although one with all the rest in foundation of self and sense of oneness and in the principle of his being. It is only this general principle of The Gnostic Being the supramental existence of which we can attempt to form an idea however diminished by the limitations of mental thought and mental language. A more living picture of the gnostic being supermind only could make; for the mind some abstract outlines of it are alone possible.
  The gnosis is the effective principle of the Spirit, a highest dynamis of the spiritual existence. The gnostic individual would be the consummation of the spiritual man; his whole way of being, thinking, living, acting would be governed by the power of a vast universal spirituality. All the trinities of the Spirit would be real to his self-awareness and realised in his inner life. All his existence would be fused into oneness with the transcendent and universal Self and Spirit; all his action would originate from and obey the supreme Self and Spirit's divine governance of Nature.
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  In our present way of living the soul expresses itself, as best it can or as badly as it must, through the mind and the vitality, or, more The Gnostic Being often, allows the mind and the vitality to act with its support: the body is the instrument of this action. But the body, even in obeying, limits and determines the mind's and the life's selfexpression by the limited possibilities and acquired character of its own physical instrumentation; it has besides a law of its own action, a movement and will or force or urge of movement of its own subconscious or half-emerged conscious power of being which they can only partially - and even in that part more by an indirect than by a direct or, if direct, then more by a subconscious than a willed and conscious action - influence or alter. But in the gnostic way of being and living the will of the spirit must directly control and determine the movements and law of the body. For the law of the body arises from the subconscient or inconscient: but in the gnostic being the subconscient will have become conscious and subject to the supramental control, penetrated with its light and action; the basis of inconscience with its obscurity and ambiguity, its obstruction or tardy responses will have been transformed into a lower or supporting superconscience by the supramental emergence. Already even in the realised highermind being and in the intuitive and Overmind being the body will have become sufficiently conscious to respond to the influence of the Idea and the Will-Force so that the action of mind on the physical parts, which is rudimentary, chaotic and mostly involuntary in us, will have developed a considerable potency: but in the supramental being it is the consciousness with the Real-Idea in it which will govern everything. This real-idea is a truth-perception which is self-effective; for it is the idea and will of the spirit in direct action and originates a movement of the substance of being which must inevitably effectuate itself in state and act of being. It is this dynamic irresistible spiritual realism of the Truth-consciousness in the highest degree of itself that will have here grown conscient and consciously competent in the evolved gnostic being: it will not act as now, veiled in an apparent inconscience and self-limited by law of mechanism, but as the sovereign Reality in self-effectuating action. It is this that will rule the existence with an entire knowledge and power and include in its rule the functioning and action of the body. The body will be turned by the power of the spiritual consciousness into a true and fit and perfectly responsive instrument of the Spirit.
  This new relation of the spirit and the body assumes - and makes possible - a free acceptance of the whole of material Nature in place of a rejection; the drawing back from her, the refusal of all identification or acceptance, which is the first normal necessity of the spiritual consciousness for its liberation, is no longer imperative. To cease to be identified with the body, to separate oneself from the body-consciousness, is a recognised and necessary step whether towards spiritual liberation or towards spiritual perfection and mastery over Nature. But, this redemption once effected, the descent of the spiritual light and force can invade and take up the body also and there can be a new liberated and sovereign acceptance of material Nature. That is possible, indeed, only if there is a changed communion of the Spirit with Matter, a control, a reversal of the present balance of interaction which allows physical Nature to veil the Spirit and affirm her own dominance. In the light of a larger knowledge Matter also can be seen to be the Brahman, a self-energy put forth by the Brahman, a form and substance of Brahman; aware of the secret consciousness within material substance, secure in this larger knowledge, the gnostic light and power can unite itself with Matter, so seen, and accept it as an instrument of a spiritual manifestation. A certain reverence, even, for Matter and a sacramental attitude in all dealings with it is possible. As in the Gita the act of the taking of food is spoken of as a material sacrament, a sacrifice, an offering of Brahman to Brahman by Brahman, so also the gnostic consciousness and sense can view all the operations of Spirit with Matter. The Spirit has made itself Matter in order to place itself there as an instrument for the well-being and joy, yogaks.ema, of created beings, for a selfoffering of universal physical utility and service. The gnostic being, using Matter but using it without material or vital attachment or desire, will feel that he is using the Spirit in this form of itself with its consent and sanction for its own purpose.
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  Even, a power of willed physical insensibility can intervene or a power of mental separation from all shock and injury can be acquired which shows that the ordinary reactions and the debile submission of the bodily self to the normal habits of response of material Nature are not obligatory or unalterable. Still more significant is the power that comes on the level of spiritual mind The Gnostic Being or Overmind to change the vibrations of pain into vibrations of Ananda: even if this were to go only up to a certain point, it indicates the possibility of an entire reversal of the ordinary rule of the reacting consciousness; it can be associated too with a power of self-protection that turns away the shocks that are more difficult to transmute or to endure. The gnostic evolution at a certain stage must bring about a completeness of this reversal and of this power of self-protection which will fulfil the claim of the body for immunity and serenity of its being and for deliverance from suffering and build in it a power for the total delight of existence. A spiritual Ananda can flow into the body and inundate cell and tissue; a luminous materialisation of this higher Ananda could of itself bring about a total transformation of the deficient or adverse sensibilities of physical Nature.
  An aspiration, a demand for the supreme and total delight of existence is there secretly in the whole make of our being, but it is disguised by the separation of our parts of nature and their differing urge and obscured by their inability to conceive or seize anything more than a superficial pleasure. In the body consciousness this demand takes shape as a need of bodily happiness, in our life parts as a yearning for life happiness, a keen vibrant response to joy and rapture of many kinds and to all surprise of satisfaction; in the mind it shapes into a ready reception of all forms of mental delight; on a higher level it becomes apparent in the spiritual mind's call for peace and divine ecstasy. This trend is founded in the truth of the being; for Ananda is the very essence of the Brahman, it is the supreme nature of the omnipresent Reality. The supermind itself in the descending degrees of the manifestation emerges from the Ananda and in the evolutionary ascent merges into the Ananda. It is not, indeed, merged in the sense of being extinguished or abolished but is there inherent in it, indistinguishable from the self of awareness and the selfeffectuating force of the Bliss of Being. In the involutionary descent as in the evolutionary return supermind is supported by the original Delight of Existence and carries that in it in all its activities as their sustaining essence; for Consciousness, we may say, is its parent power in the Spirit, but Ananda is the spiritual matrix from which it manifests and the maintaining source into which it carries back the soul in its return to the status of the Spirit. A supramental manifestation in its ascent would have as a next sequence and culmination of self-result a manifestation of the Bliss of the Brahman: the evolution of the being of gnosis would be followed by an evolution of the being of bliss; an embodiment of gnostic existence would have as its consequence an embodiment of the beatific existence. Always in the being of gnosis, in the life of the gnosis some power of the Ananda would be there as an inseparable and pervading significance of supramental self-experience. In the liberation of the soul from the Ignorance the first foundation is peace, calm, the silence and quietude of the Eternal and Infinite; but a consummate power and greater formation of the spiritual ascension takes up this peace of liberation into the bliss of a perfect experience and realisation of the eternal beatitude, the bliss of the Eternal and Infinite. This Ananda would be inherent in the gnostic consciousness as a universal delight and would grow with the evolution of the gnostic nature.
  --
  Higher-Mental being would act through the truth of thought, the truth of the idea and accomplish that in the life-action: but in the supramental gnosis thought is a derivative movement, it is a formulation of truth-vision and not the determining or the main driving force; it would be an instrument for expression of knowledge more than for arrival at knowledge or for action, - or it would intervene in action only as a penetrating point of the body of identity-will and identity-knowledge. So too in the illumined gnostic being truth-vision and in the intuitive gnostic being a direct truth-contact and perceptive truth-sense would be the mainspring of action. In the Overmind a comprehensive immediate grasp of the truth of things and the principle of being of each thing and all its dynamic consequences would originate and gather up a great wideness of gnostic vision and thought and create a foundation of knowledge and action; this largeness of being and seeing and doing would be the varied result of an underlying identity-consciousness, but the identity itself would not be in the front as the very stuff of the consciousness or the very force of the action. But in the supramental gnosis all this luminous immediate grasp of the truth of things, truth-sense, truth-vision, truth-thought would get back into its source of identity-consciousness and subsist as a single body of its knowledge. The identity-consciousness would lead and contain everything; it would manifest as an awareness in the very grain of the being's substance putting forth its inherent self-fulfilling force and determining itself dynamically in form of consciousness and form of action. This inherent awareness is the origin and principle of the working of supramental gnosis; it could be sufficient in itself with no need of anything to formulate or embody it: but the play of illumined vision, the play of a radiant thought, the play of all other movements of the spiritual consciousness would not be absent; there would be a free instrumentation of them for their own brilliant functioning, for a divine richness and diversity, for a manifold delight of selfmanifestation, for the joy of the powers of the Infinite. In the intermediate stages or degrees of the gnosis there might be the manifestation of various and separate expressions of the aspects of the divine Being and Nature, a soul and life of love, a soul and life of divine light and knowledge, a soul and life of divine power and sovereign action and creation, and innumerable other forms of divine life; on the supramental height all would be taken up into a manifold unity, a supreme integration of being and life. A fulfilment of the being in a luminous and blissful integration of its states and powers and their satisfied dynamic action would be the sense of the gnostic existence.
  All supramental gnosis is a twofold Truth-consciousness, a consciousness of inherent self-knowledge and, by identity of self and world, of intimate world-knowledge; this knowledge is the criterion, the characteristic power of the gnosis. But this is not a purely ideative knowledge, it is not consciousness observing, forming ideas, trying to carry them out; it is an essential light of consciousness, the self-light of all the realities of being and becoming, the self-truth of being determining, formulating and effectuating itself. To be, not to know, is the object of The Gnostic Being the manifestation; knowledge is only the instrumentation of an operative consciousness of being. This would be the gnostic life on earth, a manifestation or play of truth-conscious being, being grown aware of itself in all things, no longer lost to consciousness of itself, no longer plunged into a self-oblivion or a half-oblivion of its real existence brought about by absorption in form and action, but using form and action with a delivered spiritual power for its free and perfect self-expression, no longer seeking for its own lost or forgotten or veiled and hidden significance or significances, no longer bound, but delivered from inconscience and ignorance, aware of its own truths and powers, determining freely in a movement always concurrent and in tune in every detail with its supreme and universal Reality its manifestation, the play of its substance, the play of its consciousness, the play of its force of existence, the play of its delight of existence.
  --
  This would be the nature of the being, life and action of the gnostic individual so far as we can follow the evolution with our mental conception up to that point where it will emerge out of Overmind and cross the border into supramental gnosis. This nature of the gnosis would evidently determine all the relations of the life or group-life of gnostic beings; for a gnostic collectivity would be a collective soul-power of the Truth-consciousness, even as the gnostic individual would be an individual soulpower of it: it would have the same integration of life and action in unison, the same realised and conscious unity of being, the same spontaneity, intimate oneness-feeling, one and mutual truth-vision and truth-sense of self and each other, the same truth-action in the relation of each with each and all with all; this collectivity would be and act not as a mechanical but a spiritual integer. A similar inevitability of the union of freedom and order would be the law of the collective life; it would be a freedom of the diverse play of the Infinite in divine souls, an order of the conscious unity of souls which is the law of the supramental Infinite. Our mental rendering of oneness brings into it the rule of sameness; a complete oneness brought about by the mental reason drives towards a thoroughgoing standardisation as its one effective means, - only minor shades of differentiation would be allowed to operate: but the greatest richness of diversity in the self-expression of oneness would be the law of the gnostic life. In the gnostic consciousness difference would not lead to discord but to a spontaneous natural adaptation, a sense of The Gnostic Being complementary plenitude, a rich many-sided execution of the thing to be collectively known, done, worked out in life. For the difficulty in mind and life is created by ego, by separation of integers into component parts which figure as contraries, opposites, disparates: all in which they separate from each other is easily felt, affirmed and stressed; that in which they meet, whatever holds their divergences together, is largely missed or found with difficulty; everything has to be done by an overcoming or an adjustment of difference, by a constructed unity. There is, indeed, an underlying principle of oneness and Nature insists on its emergence in a construction of unity; for she is collective and communal as well as individual and egoistic and has her instrumentation of associativeness, sympathies, common needs, interests, attractions, affinities as well as her more brutal means of unification: but her secondary imposed and too prominent basis of ego-life and ego-nature overlays the unity and afflicts all its constructions with imperfection and insecurity. A farther difficulty is created by the absence or rather the imperfection of intuition and direct inner contact making each a separate being forced to learn with difficulty the other's being and nature, to arrive at understanding and mutuality and harmony from outside instead of inwardly through a direct sense and grasp, so that all mental and vital interchange is hampered, rendered ego-tainted or doomed to imperfection and incompleteness by the veil of mutual ignorance. In the collective gnostic life the integrating truth-sense, the concording unity of gnostic nature would carry all divergences in itself as its own opulence and turn a multitudinous thought, action, feeling into the unity of a luminous life-whole. This would be the evident principle, the inevitable result of the very character of the Truth-Consciousness and its dynamic realisation of the spiritual unity of all being.
  This realisation, the key to the perfection of life, difficult to arrive at on the mental plane, difficult even when realised to dynamise or organise, would be naturally dynamic, spontaneously self-organised in all gnostic creation and gnostic life.
  --
  In either case the gnostic principle might be expected, if not at once, yet finally to dominate the whole. The higher spiritualmental degrees would be in touch with the supramental principle now overtly supporting them and holding them together and would be delivered from the once enveloping hold of the Ignorance and Inconscience. As manifestations of the truth of being, though in a qualified and modified degree, they would draw all their light and energy from the supramental gnosis and would be in large contact with its instrumental powers; they would themselves be conscious motive-powers of the spirit and, although not yet in the full force of their entirely realised spiritual substance, they would not be subjected to a lesser instrumentation fragmented, diluted, diminished, obscured by the substance of the Nescience. All Ignorance rising or entering into the Overmind, into the intuitive, into the illumined or higher-mind being would cease to be ignorance; it would enter into the light, realise in that light the truth which it had covered with its darkness and undergo a liberation, transmutation, new state of consciousness and being which would assimilate it to these higher states and prepare it for the supramental status. At the same time the involved principle of the gnosis, acting now as an overt, arisen and constantly dynamic force and no longer only as a concealed power with a secret origination or a veiled support of things or an occasional intervention as its only function, would be able to lay something of its law of harmony on the still existing Inconscience and Ignorance. For the secret gnostic power concealed in them would act with a greater strength of its support and origination, a freer and more powerful intervention; the beings of the Ignorance, influenced by the light of the gnosis through their association with gnostic beings and through the evolved The Gnostic Being and effective presence of the supramental Being and Power in earth-nature, would be more conscious and responsive. In the untransformed part of humanity itself there might well arise a new and greater order of mental human beings; for the directly intuitive or partly intuitivised but not yet gnostic mental being, the directly or partly illumined mental being, the mental being in direct or part communion with the higher-thought plane would emerge: these would become more and more numerous, more and more evolved and secure in their type, and might even exist as a formed race of higher humanity leading upwards the less evolved in a true fraternity born of the sense of the manifestation of the One Divine in all beings. In this way, the consummation of the highest might mean also a lesser consummation in its own degree of what must remain still below. At the higher end of the evolution the ascending ranges and summits of supermind would begin to rise towards some supreme manifestation of the pure spiritual existence, consciousness and delight of being of Sachchidananda.
  A question might arise whether the gnostic reversal, the passage into a gnostic evolution and beyond it would not mean sooner or later the cessation of the evolution from the Inconscience, since the reason for that obscure beginning of things here would cease. This depends on the farther question whether the movement between the Superconscience and the Inconscience as the two poles of existence is an abiding law of the material manifestation or only a provisional circumstance. The latter supposition is difficult to accept because of the tremendous force of pervasiveness and durability with which the inconscient foundation has been laid for the whole material universe.

2.2.9.02 - Plato, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Plato says [according to Weber, p. 86]: The world of sense is the copy of the world of Ideas, and conversely, the world of ideas resembles its image; it forms a hierarchy. In our visible world there is a gradation of beings. The same holds true of the intelligible realm or the pattern of the world; the Ideas are joined together by means of other Ideas of a higher order; the Ideas constantly increase in generality and force, until we reach the top, the last, the highest, the most powerful Idea or the Good, which comprehends, contains or summarizes the entire system. I think he is nearly on the verge of a mental understanding of the Overmind.
  He was trying to express in a mental way the One containing the multiplicity which is brought out (created) from the One that is the Overmind realisation. Plato had these ideas not as realisations but as intuitions which he expressed in his own mental form.
  There are many such thoughts in Platos philosophy. Did he get them from Indian books?

2.2.9.04 - Plotinus, #Letters On Poetry And Art, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Plotinus says [according to Weber, p. 171]: Intelligence is the first divine emanation. Creation is a fall, a progressive degeneration of the divine. In the intelligence, the absolute unity of God splits up into intelligence proper and the intelligible world. Does he mean the separation that begins to take place at Overmind or the Para and Apara Prakriti?
  He was speaking of the cosmic mind, I suppose. In these philosophies there is no distinction made between different grades of mind or between intellect and the consciousness beyond the intellectual.
  --
  )while by intelligence he means buddhi (cosmic), but endows the buddhi with the qualities proper to the Intuition and Overmind.
  12 October 1933

2.3.02 - The Supermind or Supramental, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The Supermind is an entirely different consciousness not only from the spiritualised Mind, but from the planes above spiritualised Mind which intervene between it and the supramental plane. Once one passes beyond Overmind to Supermind, one enters into a consciousness to which the norms of the other planes do not at all apply and in which the same Truth, e.g.
  Sachchidananda and truth of this universe, is seen in quite a different way and has a different dynamic consequence. This necessarily results from the fact that Supermind has an indivisible knowledge, while Overmind proceeds by union in division and Mind by division taking division as the first fact, for that is the natural process of its knowledge.
  In all planes the essential experience of Sachchidananda, pure Existence, Consciousness, Bliss is the same and Mind is often contented with it as the sole Truth and dismisses all else as part of the grand Illusion, but there is also a dynamic experience of the Divine or of Existence (e.g. as One and Many, Personal and Impersonal, the Infinite and Finite etc.) which is essential for the integral knowledge. The dynamic experience is not the same in the lower planes as in the higher, in the intermediate spiritual planes and in the Supramental. In these the oppositions
  --
  The Supracosmic, the Supramental, the Overmind and Nirvana
  (1) I mean by the supracosmic Reality the supreme Sachchidananda who is above this and all manifestations, not bound by any, yet from whom all manifestation proceeds and all universe.
  --
  (4) The Overmind is a sort of delegation from the Supermind
  (this is a metaphor only) which supports the present evolutionary universe in which we live here in Matter. If Supermind were
  --
   to start here from the beginning as the direct creative Power, a world of the kind we see now would be impossible; it would have been full of the divine Light from the beginning, there would be no involution in the inconscience of Matter, consequently no gradual striving evolution of consciousness in Matter. A line is therefore drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness, parardha, and the lower half, aparardha. The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental) - the lower half of mind, life, Matter. This line is the intermediary Overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness such as we reach in Mind to regard as the sole or the chief
  Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictory to it.
  To this action of the Overmind may be applied the words of the Upanishad, "The face of the Truth is covered by a golden
  Lid", or those of the Vedic r.tena r.tam apihitam. Here there is the working of a sort of vidya-avidyamay maya which makes possible the predominance of avidya. It is by this primitive divisional principle that the Mind is enabled to regard for example the Impersonal as the Truth and the Personal as only a mask or the personal Divine as the greatest Truth and impersonality as only an aspect; it is so too that all the conflicting philosophies and religions arise, each exalting one aspect or potentiality of
  --
   is the reason why mental knowledge can never arrive at a final solution of anything, for the aspects of Existence as distributed by Overmind are numberless and one can go on multiplying philosophies and religions for ever.
  In the Overmind itself there is not this confusion, for the
   Overmind knows the One as the support, essence, fundamental power of all things, but in the dynamic play proper to it it lays emphasis on its divisional power of multiplicity and seeks to give each Power or Aspect its full chance to manifest, relying on the underlying Oneness to prevent disharmony or conflict.
  Each Godhead, as it were, creates his own world, but without conflict with others; each Aspect, each Idea, each Force of things can be felt in its full separate energy or splendour and work out its values, but this does not create a disharmony because the Overmind has the sense of the Infinite and in the true (not spatial) Infinite many concording infinities are possible. This peculiar security of Overmind is however not transferable to the lower planes of consciousness which it supports and governs, because as one descends in the scale the stress on division and multiplicity increases and in the Mind the underlying oneness becomes vague, abstract, indeterminate and indeterminable and the only apparent concreteness is that of the phenomenal which is by its nature a form and representation - the self-view of the
  One has already begun to disappear. Mind acts by representations and constructions, by the separation and weaving together of its constructed data; it can make a synthetic construction and see it as the whole, but when it looks for the reality of things, it takes refuge in abstractions - it has not the concrete vision, experience, contact sought by the mystic and the spiritual seeker. To know Self and Reality directly or truly, it has to be silent and reflect some light of these things or undergo selfexceeding and transformation, and this is only possible either by a higher Light descending into it or by its ascent, the taking up or immergence of it into a higher Light of existence. In Matter, descending below Mind, we arrive at the acme of the principle of fragmentation and division; the One, though secretly there, is lost to knowledge and we get the fullness of the Ignorance,
  --
  (5) If we regard Vaikuntha or Goloka each as the world of a Divinity, Vishnu or Krishna, we would be naturally led to seek its place or its origin in the Overmind plane. The Overmind is the plane of the highest worlds of the Gods. But Vaikuntha and Goloka are human conceptions of states of being that are beyond humanity. Goloka is evidently a world of Love, Beauty and Ananda full of spiritual radiances (the cow is the symbol of spiritual light) of which the souls there are the keepers or possessors, Gopas and Gopis. It is not necessary to assign any single plane to this manifestation - in fact there can be a reflection or possession of it or of its conditions on any plane of consciousness - the mental, vital or even the subtle physical plane. The explanation of it which you mention is not therefore excluded, it is quite feasible.
  (6) It is not possible to situate Nirvana as a world or plane, for the Nirvana push is to a withdrawal from world and worldvalues; it is therefore a state of consciousness or rather of superconsciousness without habitation or level. There is more than one kind of Nirvana (extinction or dissolution) possible. Man being a mental being in a body, manomaya purus.a, makes this attempt at retreat from the cosmos through the spiritualised mind, he cannot do otherwise and it is this that gives it the appearance of an extinction or dissolution, laya, nirvan.a; for extinction of the mind and all that depends on it including the separative ego in something Beyond is the natural way, almost the indispensable way for such a withdrawal. In a more affirmative Yoga seeking transcendence but not withdrawal there would not be this indispensability, for there would be the way already alluded to of self-exceeding or transformation of the mental being. But it is possible also to pass to that through a certain experience of Nirvana, an absolute silence of mind and cessation of its activities, constructions, representations which can be so complete that not only to the silent mind but also to the passive senses the whole world is emptied of its solidity and reality and things appear only as unsubstantial forms without
  --
  But, one might ask, if the higher planes or if the Overmind itself were to manifest their consciousness with all that power, light, freedom and vastness and these things were to descend into an individual consciousness here, would not that make unnecessary both the cosmic negation or the Nirvanic push and the urge towards some Divine Transcendence? But in the result, though one might live in a union with the Divine in a luminous wide free consciousness embracing the universe in itself and be a channel of great energies or creations, spiritual or external, yet this world here would remain fundamentally the same - there would be a gulf of difference between the Spirit within and its medium and stuff on which it acted, between the inner consciousness and the world in which it was working.
  The achievement inner, subjective, individual might be perfect, but the dynamic outcome insufficient, disparate, a mixture, not a perfect harmony of the inner and the outer, a new integral rhythm of existence here that could be called truly divine. Only a consciousness like the supramental, unconditioned and in perfect unity with its source, a Truth-Consciousness empowered to create its own free determinations would be able to establish some perfect harmony and rhythm of the higher hemisphere in this lowest rung of the lower hemisphere. Whether it is to do so or not depends on the significance of the evolutionary
  --
  Nirvana or a positive way of transcendence, perhaps by breaking the shining lid of Overmind, hiran.maya patra, into what is above it, would be the final end of the soul escaping from this meaningless universe; unless indeed like the Amitabha Buddha one were held by compassion or else the Divine Will within to continue helping and sharing the upward struggle towards the Light of those here still in the darkness of the Ignorance. If on the contrary this world is a Lila of spiritual involution and evolution in which one power after another up to the highest is to appear as Matter, Life and Mind have already appeared out of an apparent indeterminate Inconscience, then another culmination is possible.
  The push to Nirvana has two motive forces behind it. One is the sense of the imperfection, sorrow, death, suffering of this world - the original motive force of the Buddha. But for escape from these afflictions Nirvana might not be necessary, if there are higher worlds into which one can ascend where there is no such imperfection, sorrow, death or suffering. But this other possibility of escape is met by the idea that these higher worlds too are transient and part of the Ignorance, that one has to return here always till one overcomes the Ignorance, that the Reality and the cosmic existence are as Truth and Falsehood, opposite, incompatible. This brings in the second motive force, that of the call to Transcendence. If the Transcendent is not only supracosmic but an aloof Incommunicable, avyavaharyam, which one cannot reach except by a negation of all that is here, then some kind of Nirvana, an absolute Nirvana even is inevitable. If on the other hand the Divine is transcendent but not incommunicable, the call will still be there and the soul will leave the chequered cosmic play for the beatitude of the transcendent existence, but an absolute Nirvana would not be indispensable; a beatific union with the Divine offers itself as the way before the seeker. This is the reason why the Cosmic Consciousness is not sufficient and the push away from it is so strong, - it is only if the golden
  --
   lid of the Overmind is overpassed and opened and the dynamic contact with the Supermind and a descent of its Light and Power here is intended that it can be otherwise.
  Supermind and Other Planes
  --
  It is only the supramental that is all Knowledge. All below that from Overmind to Matter is Ignorance - an Ignorance growing at each level nearer to the full Knowledge. Below Supermind there may be Knowledge but it is not all Knowledge.
  I have not said that everything is falsehood except the supramental Truth. I said that there was no complete Truth below the supramental. In the Overmind the Truth of supermind which is whole and harmonious enters into a separation into parts, many Truths fronting each other and moved each to fulfil itself, to make a world of its own or else to prevail or take its share in worlds made of a combination of various separated Truths and Truth-forces. Lower down in the scale, the fragmentation
  The Supermind or Supramental
  --
  Matter. This world here has come out of the Inconscience and developed the Mind which is an instrument of Ignorance trying to reach out to the Truth through much limitation, conflict, confusion and error. To get back to Overmind, if one can do it completely, which is not easy for physical beings, is to stand on the borders of the supramental Truth with the hope of entry there.
  If the supermind were not to give us a greater and completer truth than any of the lower planes, it would not be worth while trying to reach it. Each plane has its own truths. Some of them are no longer true on a higher plane; e.g. desire and ego are truths of the mental, vital and physical Ignorance - a man there without ego or desire would be a tamasic automaton. As we rise higher, ego and desire appear no longer as truths, they are falsehoods disfiguring the true person and the true will. The struggle between the Powers of Light and the Powers of Darkness is a truth here - as we ascend above, it becomes less and less of a truth and in the supermind it has no truth at all. Other truths remain but change their character, importance, place in the whole. The difference or contrast between the Personal and
  Impersonal is a truth of the Overmind - there is no separate truth of them in the supermind, they are inseparably one. But one who has not mastered and lived the truths of Overmind cannot reach the supramental Truth. The incompetent pride of man's mind makes a sharp distinction and wants to call all else untruth and leap at once to the highest truth whatever it may be
  - but that is an ambitious and arrogant error. One has to climb the stairs and rest one's feet firmly on each step in order to reach the summit.
  --
  Supermind and Overmind
  Supermind is not merely a step higher than Overmind - it is beyond the line, that is, a different consciousness and power beyond the mental limit.
  It is hardly possible to say what the Supermind is in the language of Mind, even spiritualised Mind, for it is a different consciousness altogether and acts in a different way. Whatever may be said of it is likely to be not understood or misunderstood. It is only by growing into it that one can know what it is and this also cannot be done until after a long process by which mind heightening and illuminating becomes pure Intuition (not the mixed thing that ordinarily goes by that name) and Intuition widens and masses itself into Overmind; after that Overmind can be lifted into and suffused with Supermind till it undergoes a transformation.
  In the Supermind all is self-known self-luminously, there are no divisions, oppositions or separated aspects as in Mind whose principle is division of Knowledge into parts and setting each part against another. Overmind approaches this at its top and is often mistaken for Supermind, but it cannot reach it - except by uplifting and transformation.
  By the Supermind is meant the full Truth-consciousness of the
  --
  Supermind and the human mind are a number of ranges, planes or layers of consciousness - one can regard it in various ways - in which the element or substance of mind and consequently its movements also become more and more illumined and powerful and wide. The Overmind is the highest of these ranges; it is full of lights and powers; but from the point of view of what is above it, it is the line of the soul's turning away from the complete and indivisible knowledge and its descent towards the Ignorance.
  For although it draws from the Truth, it is here that begins the separation of aspects of the Truth, the forces and their working out as if they were independent truths and this is a process that ends, as one descends to ordinary Mind, Life and Matter, in a complete division, fragmentation, separation from the indivisible Truth above. There is no longer the essential, total, perfectly harmonising and unifying knowledge, or rather knowledge for ever harmonious because for ever one, which is the character of
  --
  The Supermind is the One Truth deploying and determining the manifestation of its Powers - all these Powers working as a multiple Oneness, in harmony, without opposition or collision, according to the One Will inherent in all. The Overmind takes these Truths and Powers and sets each working as a force in itself with its necessary consequences - there can be harmony in their action, but the Overmind's harmonies are synthetic and partial rather than inherent, total and inevitable and, as one descends from the highest Overmind, separation, collision and conflict of forces increase, separability dominates, ignorance grows, existence becomes a clash of possibilities, a mixture of conflicting half-truths, an unsolved and apparently unsolvable riddle and puzzle.
  148
  --
  The Supermind is the Truth-Consciousness; below it there intervenes the Overmind of which the principle is to receive the powers of the Divine and try to work them out separately, each acting in its own right and working to realise a world of its own or, if it has to act with others, enforcing its own principle as much as possible. Souls descending into the Overmind act in the same way. The principle of separated Individuality is from here.
  At first still aware of its divine origin, it becomes as it descends still more and more separated and oblivious of it, governed by the principle of division and ego. For Mind is farther removed from the Truth than Overmind, Vital Nature is engrossed in the realisation of ignorant forces, while in Matter the whole passes into what seems an original Inconscience. It is the Overmind
  Maya that governs this world, but in Matter it has deepened into
  Inconscience out of which consciousness reemerges and climbs again bringing down into Matter life and mind, and opening in mind to the higher reaches - which are still in some direct connection with the Truth (Intuition, Overmind, Supermind).
  At the time when these chapters [the last chapters of The Synthesis of Yoga] were written, the name " Overmind" had not been found, so there is no mention of it. What is described in these chapters is the action of the supermind when it descends into the Overmind plane and takes up the Overmind workings and transforms them.1 It was intended in later chapters to show how difficult even this was and how many levels there were between human mind and supermind and how even supermind, descending, could get mixed with the lower action and turned into something that was less than the true Truth. But these later chapters were not written.
  The distinction [between the Supermind and the Overmind] has
  1 The highest Supermind or Divine Gnosis existent in itself is something that lies beyond still and quite above.
  --
   not been made in the Arya because at that time what I now call the Overmind was supposed to be an inferior plane of the
  Supermind. But that was because I was seeing them from the
  Mind. The true defect of Overmind, the limitation in it which gave rise to a world of Ignorance, is seen fully only when one looks at it from the physical consciousness, from the result
  (Ignorance in Matter) to the cause ( Overmind division of the
  Truth). In its own plane Overmind seems to be only a divided, many-sided play of the Truth, so can easily be taken by the
  Mind as a supramental province. Mind also when flooded by the Overmind lights feels itself living in a surprising revelation of divine Truth. The difficulty comes when we deal with the vital and still more with the physical. Then it becomes imperative to face the difficulty and to make a sharp distinction between
   Overmind and Supermind - for it then becomes evident that the Overmind Power (in spite of its lights and splendours) is not sufficient to overcome the Ignorance because it is itself under the law of Division out of which came the Ignorance. One has to pass beyond and supramentalise Overmind so that mind and all the rest may undergo the final change.
  The Supermind is the total Truth Consciousness; the Overmind draws down the truths separately and gives them a separate activity - e.g. in the Supermind the Divine Peace and Power,
  Knowledge and Will are one. In the Overmind each of these becomes a separate aspect which can exist or act on its own lines apart from the others. When it comes down to Mind, this turns into an ignorance and incapacity - because Knowledge can come without a Will to support it or Peace can be disturbed by the action of Power etc.
  Supermind by the way is synthetic only in the lowest spaces of itself where it has to prepare the principles of Overmind - synthesis is necessary only where analysis has taken place; one has dissected everything, put in pieces (analysis) so one has to
  150
  --
  You will say however that it is not the Supramental but at most the Overmind that helped me to these non-nebulous motions. But the Supermind is by definition a greater dynamic activity than mind or Overmind. I have said that what is not true is not supramental; I will add that what is ineffective is not supramental. And finally I will conclude by saying that I have
  The Supermind or Supramental
  --
  One must have already become intuitively conscious to know about the Overmind and the supermind. To give "signs" is useless, for the mind would only make mistakes in trying to judge by the "signs" - one has to become conscious within and know directly.
  Knowledge and Will in the Supermind

2.3.03 - The Overmind, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  object:2.3.03 - The Overmind
  author class:Sri Aurobindo
  --
  The Overmind
   Overmind and the Cosmic Consciousness
   Overmind is the highest source of the cosmic consciousness available to the embodied being in the Ignorance. It is part of the cosmic consciousness - but the human individual when he opens into the cosmic usually remains in the cosmic Mind-LifeMatter receiving only inspirations and influences from the higher planes of Intuition and Overmind. He receives through the spiritualised higher and illumined mind the fundamental experiences on which spiritual knowledge is based; he can become even full of intuitive mind movements, illuminations, various kinds of powers and illumined light, liberation, Ananda. But to rise fully into the Intuition is rare, to reach the Overmind still rarer - although influences and experiences can come down from there.
  It is (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly) by the power of the Overmind releasing the mind from its close partitions that the cosmic consciousness opens in the seeker and he becomes aware of the cosmic spirit and the play of the cosmic forces.
  It is from or at least through the Overmind plane that the original prearrangement of things in this world is effected; for from it the determining vibrations originally come. But there are corresponding movements on all the planes, the mind, the vital, the physical even, and it is possible in a very clear or illumined condition of the lower consciousness to become aware of these movements and understand the plan of things and be a conscious instrument or even, to a limited extent, a determinant Will or
  Force. But the stuff of the lower planes always mixes with the Overmind forces and diminishes or even falsifies and perverts their truth and power.
  It is even possible for the Overmind to transmit to the lower
  The Overmind
  153
  --
  Light is modified in Overmind itself and still further modified in the application by the needs, the demands, the circumscribing possibilities of the individual nature. The success of this diminished and modified Light, e.g. in purifying the physical, cannot be immediate and absolute as the full and direct supramental action would be; it is still relative, conditioned by the individual nature and the balance of the universal forces, resisted by adverse powers, baulked of its perfect result by the unwillingness of the lower workings to cease, limited either in its scope or in its efficacy by the want of a complete consent in the physical nature.
  Probably what X calls Overmind is the first "above-mind" layers of consciousness. Or it may be experiences from the larger Mind or Vital ranges. To the human mind all these are so big that it is easy to take them for Overmind or even supermind.
  One can get indirect Overmind touches if one opens into the cosmic consciousness, still more if one enters freely into that consciousness. Direct Overmind experience cannot come unless part of the being at least is seated in the wideness and peace.
  You cannot do it [recognise the different planes of the Overmind] at present. Only those who have got fully into the cosmic consciousness can do it and even they cannot do it at first. One must first go fully through the experience of higher mind and illumined mind and intuition before it can be done.
  Planes of the Overmind
  There are different planes of the Overmind. One is mental, directly creative of all the formations that manifest below in the mental world - that is the mental Overmind. Above is the Overmind Intuition. Still above are the planes of Overmind that are more and more connected with the supermind and have a
  154
  --
   partly supramental character. Highest in the Overmind ranges is the supramental Overmind or Overmind gnosis. But these are things you cannot understand until you get a higher experience.
  It [the Overmind] can for convenience be divided into four planes - mental Overmind and the three you have written [intuitive Overmind, true Overmind and supramental Overmind] - but there are many layers in each and each of these can be regarded as a plane in itself.
  There are many stages in the transition from mental Overmind to supramentalised Overmind and then from that to supramental Overmind and from that to supermind. Do not be in a hurry to say, "This is the last highest Overmind."
  What you call supramental Overmind1 is still Overmind - not a part of the true Supermind. One cannot get into the true Supermind (except in some kind of trance or Samadhi) unless one has first objectivised the Overmind Truth in life, speech, action, external knowledge and not only experienced it in meditation and inner experience.
  The Overmind, the Intuition and Below
  The Overmind receives the Divine Truth and disperses it in various formations and diverse play of forces, building thus different worlds out of this dispersion.
  In the Intuition the nature of Knowledge is Truth not global or whole, but coming out in so many points, edges, flashes of a
  --
  1 This expression is a misnomer since Overmind cannot be supramental: it can at most receive some light and truth from the higher source.
  The Overmind
  155
  It is from the Overmind that all these different arrangements of the creative Truth of things originate. Out of the Overmind they come down to the Intuition and are transmitted from it to the
  Illumined and higher Mind to be arranged there for our intelligence. But they lose more and more of their power and certitude in the transmission as they come down to the lower levels. What energy of directly perceived Truth they have is lost in the human mind; for to the human intellect they present themselves only as speculative ideas, not as realised Truth, not as direct sight, a dynamic vision coupled with a concrete undeniable experience.
  The Overmind and the Supermind Descent
  The Overmind has to be reached and brought down before the
  Supermind descent is at all possible - for the Overmind is the passage through which one passes from mind to Supermind.
  The Overmind and the Karan.a Deha
  The karan.a deha may be simply a form answering to the higher consciousness (overmental, intuitive etc.) and I suppose a being could be there working in that consciousness and body. It is not likely to be the supramental being and supramental body - for in that case the whole consciousness, thought, action subjective and objective would begin to be faultlessly true and irresistibly effective. Nobody has reached that stage yet, even the Overmind is, for all but the Mother and myself, either unrealised or only an influence mostly subjective.
  The Dividing Aspect of the Overmind
  There are no Overmind dangers - it is only the lower consciousness misusing Overmind or higher consciousness intimations that can make a danger. There are also no Overmind Falsehoods.
  The Overmind is part of the Ignorance in this sense that it is the highest knowledge to which the Ignorance can attain, but the knowledge is still divided and so can be a knowledge of parts
  156
  --
  Divine [Personal and Impersonal] is a creation of the Overmind which takes various aspects of the Divine and separates them into separate entities. Thus it divides Sat, Chit and Ananda, so that they become three separate aspects different from each other. In fact in the Reality there is no separateness, the three aspects are so fused into each other, so inseparably one that they are a single undivided reality. It is the same with the Personal and Impersonal, the Saguna and Nirguna, the Silent and the
  Active Brahman. In the Reality they are not contrasted and incompatible aspects; what we call Personality and what we call
  --
  In fact "fused together" even is a wrong phrase, because there they were never separated so that they have to be fused. All the quarrels about either the Impersonal being the only true truth or the Personal being the only highest truth are mind-created quarrels derivative from this dividing aspect of the Overmind.
  The Overmind does not deny any of the aspects as the Mind does, it admits them all as aspects of the One Truth, but by separating them it originates the quarrel in the more ignorant and more limited and divided Mind, because the Mind cannot see how two opposite things can exist together in one Truth, how the Divine can be nirgun.o gun.; - having no experience of what is behind the two words it takes each in an absolute sense. The Impersonal is Existence, Consciousness, Bliss, not a
  Person, but a state. The Person is the Existent, the Conscious, the Blissful; consciousness, existence, bliss taken as separate things are only states of his being. But in fact the two (personal being and eternal state) are inseparable and are one reality.
  The Overmind and the World
  [How the world appears to one living at the Overmind level:] As
  The Overmind
  157
  --
  In the highest Overmind all these prepare to meet and reunite themselves in one central Truth which is the Supramental.

2.3.04 - The Higher Planes of Mind, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The higher planes are the higher mind, illumined, intuitive, Overmind, supermind. The psychic, mind, vital, physical belong to the ordinary manifestation.
  The planes and the body are not the same. Above the head are seen all the planes from the Overmind down to the higher mind, but this is only a correlation in the consciousness - not an actual location in space.
  The spiritual mind is a mind which, in its fullness, is aware of the
  --
  The planes below [the Supermind, from the Overmind to the
  Higher Mind] are of the spiritual consciousness but when there
  --
  The Intuition is the first plane on which there is a real opening to the full possibility of realisation - it is through it that one goes farther - first to Overmind and then to Supermind.
  It [the individual Self] is not specially related [to intuition] - intuition is the highest power the embodied individual can reach without universalising itself; when it universalises itself it is then possible for it to come in contact with Overmind. If by the individual Self is meant the Jivatman, it can be on any plane of consciousness.
  By the intuitive self I meant the intuitive being, that part which belongs to the intuitive plane or is in connection with it. The intuition is one of the higher planes of consciousness between the human thinking mind and the supramental plane.
  --
  The intuitive "mind" does not get the touch direct from the supramental. Above it is the Overmind - in which there is a higher and greater intuition and above that are the supermind ranges.
  162
  --
  Mental intuitive knowledge catches directly some aspect of a truth but without any completeness or certitude and the intuition is easily mixed with ordinary mental stuff that may be erroneous; in application it may easily be a half truth or be so misinterpreted and misapplied as to become an error. Also, the mind easily imitates the intuition in such a way that it is difficult to distinguish between a true or a false intuition. That is the reason why men of intellect distrust the mental intuition and say that it cannot be accepted or followed unless it is tested and confirmed by the intellect. What comes from the Overmind intuition has a light, a certitude, an effective force of Truth in it that the mental intuition at its best even has not.
  Yes,1 but it does not necessarily come from the original source

2.3.06 - The Mind, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The right activity of the buddhi is always to observe, discern, discriminate, understand rightly and give the right direction to the vital and the body. But it does it imperfectly so long as it is in the Ignorance; by opening to the Mother it begins to get the true light and direction. Afterwards it is transformed into intuition and from intuition to the instrumental action of the Overmind or the supermind Consciousness.
  Chitta
  --
  Above the physical mind and the vital mind is the mental intelligence, the mind proper. Beyond the ordinary thinking mind or intellect is the higher mind; beyond the higher mind is the illumined mind and beyond that is the intuitive mind. Above the intuitive mind are the Intuition and the Overmind.
  The Mind proper is divided into three parts - thinking Mind, dynamic Mind, externalising Mind - the former concerned with ideas and knowledge in their own right, the second with the putting out of mental forces for realisation of the idea, the third with the expression of them in life (not only by speech, but by any form it can give). The word "physical mind" is rather ambiguous, because it can mean this externalising mind and the mental in the physical taken together.

2.3.07 - The Mother in Visions, Dreams and Experiences, #The Mother With Letters On The Mother, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Mahakali - but Mahakali herself in the Overmind is golden.
  What you saw was the Mother herself in her body of light with the Mahakali power in her, but not the actual form of Mahakali.

2.3.07 - The Vital Being and Vital Consciousness, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  They wouldn't be heavens if they were not immune [from attacks by hostile powers] - a heaven with fear in it would be no heaven. The Life Heavens have an influence on earth and so have the Life Hells, but it does not follow that they influence each other in their own domain. Overmind can influence earth, so can the hostile Powers, but it does not follow that hostile Powers can penetrate the Overmind - they can't: they can only spoil what it sends to the earth. Each power of the Divine (life like mind and matter are powers of the Divine) has its own harmony inherent in the purity of its own principle - it is only if it is disturbed or perverted that it produces disorder. That is another reason why the evolution could have been a progressing harmony, not a series of discords through which harmony of a precarious and wounded kind has to be struggled for at each step: for the
  Divine Principle is there within. Each plane therefore has its heavens; there are the subtle physical heavens, the vital heavens, the mental heavens. If Powers of disharmony got in, they would cease to be heavens.

2.3.1 - Ego and Its Forms, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  I have said so much in order to let you understand why we do not deal in the same way with X as with you or another. The tendency to take what I lay down for one and apply it without discrimination to another is responsible for much misunderstanding. A general statement too, true in itself, cannot be applied to everyone alike or applied now and immediately without consideration of condition or circumstance or person or time. I may say generally that to bring down the supermind is my aim in the Yoga or that to do that one has first to rise out of mind into Overmind, but if on the strength of that, anybody and everybody began trying to pull down the supermind or force his way immediately out of mind into Overmind, the result would be disaster.
  Therefore concern yourself with your own progress and follow there the lead the Mother gives you. Leave X or others to do the same; the Mother is there to guide and help them according to their need and their nature. It does not in the least matter if the way she follows with him seems different or the opposite of that which she takes with you. That is the right one for him as this is the right one for you.

2.3.2 - Desire, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Demand and desire are only two different aspects of the same thingnor is it necessary that a feeling should be agitated or restless to be a desire; it can be, on the contrary, quietly fixed and persistent or persistently recurrent. Demand or desire comes from the mental or the vital and a psychic or spiritual need is a different thing. The psychic does not demand or desire; it aspires; it does not make conditions for its surrender or withdraw if its aspiration is not immediately satisfied for the psychic has complete trust in the Divine or in the guru and can wait for the right time or the hour of the divine grace. The psychic has an insistence of its own, but it puts its pressure not on the Divine, but on the nature, placing a finger of light on all the defects there that stand in the way of the realisation, sifting out all that is mixed, ignorant or imperfect in the experience or in the movements of the Yoga and never satisfied with itself or with the nature till it has got it perfectly open to the Divine, free from all forms of ego, surrendered, simple and right in the attitude and all the movements. This is what has to be established entirely in the mind and vital and in the physical consciousness before supramentalisation of the whole nature is possible. Otherwise what one gets is more or less brilliant, half luminous, half cloudy illuminations and experiences on the mental and vital and physical planes, half truth, half error or at the best true only for those planes and inspired either from some larger mind or larger vital or at the best from the mental reaches above the human that intervene between the intellect and the Overmind. These can be very stimulating and satisfying up to a certain point and are good for those who want some spiritual realisation on these planes; but the supramental realisation is something much more difficult and exacting in its conditions and the most difficult of all is to bring it down on to the physical level.
  ***

2.4.01 - Divine Love, Psychic Love and Human Love, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The Intuitive or Overmind are more open to the truth of Divine Love and more capable of universalising love than the mind ordinarily islove there is also more calm in its intensity, less ego-bound than in the mental parts. But the mind can also approach their quality of love, if the love in it grows psychic and spiritual.
  ***

24.03 - Notes on Savitri II, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   The cosmic empire of the Overmind,
   Times buffer state bordering Eternity,
  --
   The image is that of the composition of an army or that of a mathematical series (e.g., arithmetical or geometrical progression). It is composed of regularised units of different values (group of sums),but all measured and definite and precise - e.g., in the case of an army - company, brigade, battalion, army - an ascending scale, the whole also forming one big unit, taken in at a glance - that is the nature of Overmind vision.
   Note, a unit is a summation or-sub-units - even the ultimate units are composites (masses,in case of bigger units) - e.g., molecule, atom, particle (nucleon), point.

28.01 - Observations, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 06, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   16000 is a symbolic figure. 16 means full fullness - purnasya purnam; four represents completeness and square of four is complete completeness. The figure 1000 again means integrality, wholeness, cosmocity - infinity. Krishna consciousness is all this. Sahasrasirsa purusah. Gopikas - divine powers, emanations - Matrikas - to rule His new creation, His divine Lila. He was the lord of the Overmind, the cosmic manifestation. He cannot be satisfied with less than cosmic dimensions!
   ***

3.08 - The Thousands, #Questions And Answers 1929-1931, #The Mother, #Integral Yoga
  There is also an interesting reflection, that a victory over oneself is the only victory which is truly safe from the intervention of any god or power of Nature or any instrument of evil. If you have gained self-mastery on one point, that goes beyond the reach of any intervention even from the very highest powers, whether they are gods of the Overmind or any anti-divine powers in the world.
  The opening text says that a single word that gives you peace is worth more than thousands of words that have no meaningthis anybody can understand but it is also said that the word that gives you peace is worth more than thousands of words that can satisfy the mental activity but have no psychological effect on your being.

3.1.02 - Spiritual Evolution and the Supramental, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Spiritual and supramental are not the same thing. The spiritual planes from higher mind to Overmind are accessible to the old sadhanas so there is no difficulty about that. If they were not accessible there would have been no Yoga at all and no Yogis in the past in India.
  If spiritual and supramental were the same thing, as you say my readers imagine, then all the sages and devotees and Yogis and sadhaks throughout the ages would have been supramental beings and all I have written about the supermind would be so much superfluous stuff, useless and otiose. Anybody who had spiritual experiences would then be a supramental being; the
  --
  The Overmind and the Supramental
  There are many aspects of the Divine and of existence manifested as separate by the Overmind. Different minds are drawn by different aspects and each follows its own path to its own goal.
  Each is free to follow its own path and is not bound by another.
  As for the Supramental, it is by definition a consciousness above the Overmind in which all aspects are infused in the integral Divine. But none is bound to seek after the Supramental consciousness if his tendency is elsewhere.
  The manifestation is complex and there are beings in it who belong to various levels. If a soul wishes to plunge into the Divine through Nirvana or seeks spiritual fulfilment in a world of the
  --
  Yes, there has been some progress in that respect [psychicisation] and all progress in the psychic or spiritual consciousness of the sadhaks makes the descent more easy. But the main cause [of the descent of Light and Power] is that the Overmind principle which is the immediate secret support of the present earth-nature with all its limitations is more and more undergoing the pressure of the Supramental and letting through a greater Light and
  Power. For so long as the Overmind intervenes (the principle of the Overmind being a play of forces, each trying to realise itself as the Truth) the law of struggle remains and with it the opportunity for the adverse Forces.
  It is not immortality of the body, but the consciousness of immortality in the body that can come with the descent of

3.1.04 - Transformation in the Integral Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Spiritualisation means the descent of the higher peace, force, light, knowledge, purity, Ananda etc. which belong to any of the higher planes from Higher Mind to Overmind, for in any of these the Self can be realised. It brings about a subjective transformation; the instrumental Nature is only so far transformed that it becomes an instrument for the Cosmic Divine to get some work done while the self within remains calm and free and united to the Divine. But this is an incomplete individual transformation the full transformation of the instrumental Nature can only come when the Supramental change takes place. Till then the nature remains full of many imperfections, but the self in the higher planes does not mind them, as it is itself free and unaffected. The inner being down to the inner physical can also become free and unaffected. The Overmind is subject to limitations in the working of the effective Knowledge, limitations in the working of the Power, subjection to a partial and limited Truth, etc. It is only in the supermind that the full Truth consciousness comes into being.
  ***

3.1.3 - Difficulties of the Physical Being, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The physicals tendency to inertia is very great; even after the habit of living in the higher consciousness is there, some part may feel the pressure of the inertiagenerally the outermost or most material parts. The inertia usually rises up from the subconscient. It does not abolish the higher consciousness in the physical, but dulls its action or else brings it down from a higher to a lower level, e.g. from the intuition to the higher mind or from the higher to the lower ranges of Overmind. For some time it resists the completeness of the siddhi. It is only when the most material and the subconscient and the environmental consciousness are quite liberated that this retarding or lowering effect of the primal Inertia is entirely overcome.
  ***

3.2.01 - The Newness of the Integral Yoga, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Certainly, the realisation of the Spirit comes long before the development of Overmind or Supermind; hundreds of sadhaks in all times have had the realisation of the Atman on the higher mental plane, buddhe parata, but the supramental realisation was not theirs. One can get partial realisations of the Self or Spirit or the Divine on any plane, mental, vital, physical even, and when one rises above the ordinary mental plane of man into a higher and larger mind, the Self begins to appear in all its conscious wideness. It is by full entry into this wideness of the Self that cessation of mental activity becomes possible; one gets the inner Silence. After that this inner Silence can remain even when there is activity of any kind; the being remains silent within, the action goes on in the instruments and one receives all the necessary indications and execution of action whether mental, vital or physical from a higher source without the fundamental peace and calm of the Spirit being troubled.
  The Overmind and Supermind states are something yet higher than this; but before one can understand them, one must first have the self-realisation, the full action of the spiritualised mind and heart, the psychic awakening, the liberation of the imprisoned consciousness, the purification and entire opening of the dhra. Do not think now of those ultimate things ( Overmind, Supermind), but get first these foundations in the liberated nature.
  ***

3.2.02 - The Veda and the Upanishads, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is quite probable that the sloka [Katha Upanishad 2.3.4] refers to a going up into higher worlds of felicity and light and this can be called a liberation or release. In later times the idea grew strong that from all these higher worlds return is inevitable and it is only release from all cosmic existence that gives mukti. The Vedic Rishis seem to have looked to an ascent into a divine luminous world or state above the falsehood and ignorance. In the Upanishad the sun is the symbol of the supramental Truth and it is said that those who pass into it may return but those who pass through the gates of the Sun itself do not; possibly this means that an ascent into the supermind itself above the golden lid of Overmind was the definitive liberation. The Veda speaks of the Truth hidden by a Truth where the Sun looses his horses from his car and there all the myriad rays are drawn together into One and that was considered the goal. The Isha Upanishad also speaks of the golden lid hiding the face of the Truth by removing which the Law of the Truth is seen and the highest knowledge in which the One Purusha is known (soham asmi) is described as the kalyatama form of the Sun. All this seems to refer to the supramental states of which the Sun is the symbol.
  ***

32.05 - The Culture of the Body, #Collected Works of Nolini Kanta Gupta - Vol 07, #Nolini Kanta Gupta, #Integral Yoga
   For, we must realise that the body can become healthy, strong and efficient with any kind of true permanence and integrality, only when its self-consciousness can be changed into the right consciousness. By right consciousness I mean a true and harmonious consciousness. It can come, in the first place, from the depths of our inner and inmost being; that is the consciousness of the inner self, the indwelling inner Being. It may be called the inner consciousness. And secondly, the right consciousness can come, not from within or at least not primarily from there but from the environment, from a wider expanse, a universal wideness extending beyond the limits of the individual ego. This we shall call the environmental consciousness. The right consciousness may on the other hand come from above, in the for of a higher consciousness. The "above" too has many levels or planes. The highest of these is called the Supreme Consciousness. There may be added an intermediary level of the higher consciousness which we term in general the Supramental, a consciousness which begins the first step rising beyond the mind-planes including the Overmind.
   These then are the main gradations or steps in the growth of consciousness: (1) unconsciousness, (2) consciousness, (3) active consciousness, (4) inner consciousness, (5) environmental consciousness, (6) Supramental consciousness, (7) Supreme or Transcendental consciousness. These correspond to the seven layers of our being, sapta-kosa,the seven worlds or the seven oceans; these are the seven tongues of the Fire-God, Agni, the seven horses of the Sun-God, Surya. Any of these planes of consciousness can take charge of the being and its principal knot, the ego, with attendant consequences.

3.2.06 - The Adwaita of Shankaracharya, #Letters On Yoga II, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  When I wrote in the Arya, I was setting forth an Overmind view of things to the mind and putting it in mental terms, that was why I had sometimes to use logic. For in such a workmediating between the intellect and the supra-intellectuallogic has a place, though it cannot have the chief place it occupies in purely mental philosophies. The Mayavadin himself labours to establish his point of view or his experience by a rigorous logical reasoning. Only, when it comes to an explanation of Maya he, like the scientist dealing with Nature, can do no more than arrange and organise his ideas of the process of this universal mystification; he cannot explain how or why his illusionary mystifying Maya came into existence. He can only say, Well, but it is there.
  Of course, it is there. But the question is, first, What is it? is it really an illusionary Power and nothing else, or is the Mayavadins idea of it a mistaken first view, a mental imperfect reading, even perhaps itself an illusion? And next, Is illusion the sole or the highest Power which the Divine Consciousness or Superconsciousness possesses? The Absolute is an absolute Truth free from Maya, otherwise liberation would not be possible. Has then the supreme and absolute Truth no other active Power than a power of falsehood and with it, no doubt, for the two go together, a power of dissolving or disowning the falsehood,which is yet there for ever? I suggested that this sounded a little queer. But queer or not, if it is so, it is so for as you point out, the Ineffable cannot be subjected to the laws of logic.

3.2.1 - Food, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The vital of most people is of this kind [too weak to restrain its desires for pleasure], except in a few who are indifferent to sex or to food desire or to both, by temperament and nature. There is always something in the lower vital which is recalcitrant and takes a pleasure in following its own way and disregarding the higher dictate, and there are always external forces hostile to the Yoga which try to take advantage of its obscurities, revolts and weaknesses. Neither neglect this turn of the nature (food desire) nor make too much of it; it has to be dealt with, purified and mastered but without giving it too much importance. There are two ways of conquering itone of detachment, learning to regard food as only a physical necessity and the vital satisfaction of the stomach and the palate as a thing of little or no importance; the other is to be able to take without insistence or seeking any food given and to find in it (whether pronounced good or bad by others) the equal rasa, not of the food for its own sake, but of the universal Ananda. But the latter comes usually only when one can live in the cosmic consciousness or rise into the Overmind and for this you are not yet ready. So the first way is the one you should keep in view.
  ***

3.3.1 - Illness and Health, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is certainly better not to dwell on the difficulties or give them too much voice, because, our experience shows us, to do so helps to make them return like a recurring decimal. The Cou formula is too crude and simple to be entirely true in principle, but it has a great practical force, and behind it there is a very great truth in a world and a consciousness governed by the Overmind Maya: it is this, that what we affirm strongly gets power to persist in the consciousness and experience and calls circumstances to its support, what we deny and reject and refuse to support by the power of the Word, tends, after a time and some resistance, to lose force in the consciousness and the circumstances and movements that support it tend also to recur less often and finally disappear. It is fundamentally the principle of the mantra. On that ground I approve of your resolution not to give any more the avalambana of the written word to these things. A constant affirmation from within on the other sideof that which is to be realisedbrings always in the end a response from above.
  ***

4.1.2.02 - The Three Transformations, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The physical is of course the basis - that of the Overmind is in between the two hemispheres. The lower hemisphere must contain all the mind including its higher planes, the vital, the physical. The upper hemisphere contains the Divine existenceconsciousness-bliss, with the Supermind as its means of selfformulation. The Overmind is at the head of the lower hemisphere and is the intermediate or transitional plane between the two.
  The psychic being stands behind the heart supporting the mind, life and body. In the psychic transformation there are three main elements: (1) the opening of the occult inner mind, inner vital, inner physical, so that one becomes aware of all that lies behind the surface mind, life and body; (2) the opening of the psychic being or soul by which it comes forward and governs the mind, life and body turning all to the Divine; (3) the opening of the whole lower being to the spiritual truth - this last may be called the psycho-spiritual part of the change. It is quite possible for the psychic transformation to take one beyond the individual into the cosmic. Even the occult opening establishes a connection with the cosmic mind, cosmic vital, cosmic physical. The psychic realises the contact with all existence, the oneness of the Self, the universal love and other realisations which lead to the cosmic consciousness.
  --
  The supramental transformation can only come when the lid between the lower and higher hemispheres or halves of existence is removed and the Supermind instead of the Overmind becomes the governing power of the existence - but of that nothing can be spoken now.

4.1.2.03 - Preparation for the Supramental Change, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Most, even in doing Yoga, live in the mind, vital, physical, lit up occasionally or to some extent by the higher mind and by the illumined mind; but to prepare for the supramental change it is necessary (as soon as, personally, the time has come) to open up to the Intuition and the Overmind, so that these may make the whole being and the whole nature ready for the supramental change. Allow the consciousness quietly to develop and widen, and the knowledge of these things will progressively come.
  Calm, discrimination, detachment (but not indifference) are all very important, for their opposites impede very much the transforming action. Intensity of aspiration should be there, but it must go along with these. No hurry, no inertia - neither

4.1.4 - Resistances, Sufferings and Falls, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  I have not said that to reach the Overmind is impossible; I have only said that it is difficult. Difficulty is not a reason why the things should not be done.
  It is not easy for a physical being to reach the highest truth because his consciousness is something ignorant that has emerged out of the material inconscience and is very much tied to and hampered by the obscurity of its originin addition to the mental and vital difficulties of ego and desire. Yoga itself is not easy; if it were so, it would be a multitude and not only a few that would be practising it.

4.2.5.05 - The Psychic and the Supermind, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  It is the supramental alone that can transform the material being, but the physical mind and physical vital can be very much changed by the action of the psychic and of the Overmind. The entire change however is made only when there is the supramental influence. But for the present the psychic is the force that may be relied on for the preliminary purification of the lower nature.

4.3.1.05 - The Self and the Cosmic Consciousness, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  as the Overmind. The Self is more than all these things which
  are its formulations in Nature.

4.3.2.04 - Degrees in the Higher Consciousness, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  through illumined mind, intuition and Overmind up to the border line of the supramental.
  The Self governs the diversity of its creation by its unity on all
  --
  - through a chain or coordinated harmony of revelations, inspirations, intuitions, swift discriminations. The Overmind sees
  calmly, steadily, in great masses and deep and large extensions
  --
  acts in the same way - for the Overmind is the world of the great
  Gods, the divine Creators. But each Godhead creates in his own

4.3.2.05 - The Higher Planes and the Supermind, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  higher planes between mind and Overmind is already sufficiently
  difficult without insisting on Supermind as the immediate goal.
  One has to know about Overmind and Supermind but there
  should be no ambition to reach them - it should be regarded

4.3.2.08 - Overmind Experiences, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  object:4.3.2.08 - Overmind Experiences
  author class:Sri Aurobindo
  --
   Overmind experience comes when one rises to the Overmind
  plane and sees things as they are on that plane or as they look to
  the consciousness which sees the other planes from the Overmind
  view. When one is in the mind, life or physical plane, then it is
  the Overmind Influence that comes down and modifies the mind,
  life or physical workings in greater or less degree according to
  --
  as in the mind, - even thought in the Overmind is a concrete
  force and a palpable substance.
  Yes - it is one aspect of the Truth: for in the Overmind there
  are many aspects of Truth, separate or combined together or
  --
  Both [visions] are true on different levels of the Overmind
  plane or in different cosmic formulations that come from the
   Overmind. All aspects are there in the Overmind, even those
  which the intellect considers contradictory to each other - in
  --
  the Overmind they are not contradictions, but complementary
  to each other.
  --
  consciousness with the Overmind knowledge and they prepare
  it for transformation.
  The Overmind experience does not necessarily deliver from the
  lower vital and physical movements - it changes them only to

4.3.2.09 - Overmind Experiences and the Supermind, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  object:4.3.2.09 - Overmind Experiences and the Supermind
  author class:Sri Aurobindo
  --
  People talk very lightly of the Overmind and the supermind as if
  it were quite easy to enter into them and mistake inferior movements for the overmental or supramental, thereby confusing the
  --
  Certainly, it [the Overmind descent] is necessary for those who
  want the supramental change. Unless the Overmind opens, there
  can be no direct supramental opening of the consciousness. If
  --
  error. The Overmind presents truths in all sorts of arrangements
  Experiences on the Higher Planes
  --
  (1) He seems to say that beyond the Overmind there is a plane
  of "higher luminous Intelligence". This is impossible. Beyond the
   Overmind there is the Supermind - the Overmind is the highest
  of all the planes below the supramental, and he is not yet in
  touch with the supramental. What he calls here the Overmind
  cannot be the true Overmind. His experiences are those of the
  mind opening to the higher mental planes and trying to bring
  --
  the Overmind. But the Overmind experiences must come first
  and liberate the consciousness. It is only after the Overmind
  liberation that the true experience of the supermind can come.
  You must realise that the supramentalisation of the Overmind is
  one of the most difficult things possible and proceed with great

4.3.2 - Attacks by the Hostile Forces, #Letters On Yoga IV, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Vital forces can attack the mind and do. Many receive suggestions from them through the brain, so it is quite possible that it may be felt as coming in through the head from above. That does not mean that it came from regions above the mind (higher Mind, intuition or Overmind). Correct reasoning means no more than coherent argument from a certain standpoint and does not validate a fit of anger or indicate for it a non-adverse source.
  ***

4.4.3.05 - The Effect of Descent into the Lower Planes, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  the Overmind creative Truth in it, but gets very badly mixed
  with mental and vital formations that disfigure it and make it

4.4.4.08 - The Descent of Knowledge, #Letters On Yoga III, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  mind that predominates, then the intuition, next the Overmind,
  lastly the supermind; but the whole consciousness has to be

5.05 - Supermind and Humanity, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Light not only to its own but to lower levels of consciousness in their climb towards self-transcendence. Overmind, Intuition,
  Illumined Mind and what I have called Higher Mind, these and other levels of a spiritualised and liberated mentality, will be able to reflect in the uplifted human mind and its purified and exalted feeling and force of life and action something of their powers and prepare the ascent of the soul to their own plateaus and peaks of an ascending existence. This is essentially the change which can be contemplated as a result of the new evolutionary order, and it would mean a considerable extension of the evolutionary field itself and will answer the question as to the result on humanity of the advent of Supermind into the earth-nature.

5.08 - Supermind and Mind of Light, #Essays In Philosophy And Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Still there is an increasing self-limitation which begins even with Overmind: Overmind is separated by only a luminous border from the full light and power of the supramental Truth and
  590
  --
  There is a further limitation or change of characteristic action at each step downwards from Overmind to Intuition, from Intuition to Illumined Mind, from Illumined Mind to what I have called the Higher Mind: the Mind of Light is a transitional passage by which we can pass from supermind and superhumanity to an illumined humanity. For the new humanity will be capable of at least a partly divinised way of seeing and living because it will live in the light and in knowledge and not in the obscuration of the Ignorance.
  Still, again there will be a difference between the superhuman and the human, a difference in nature and power but a difference especially in the access and way of admission to the
  --
  Light and can be seen as a subordinate power of the Supermind; it is still an agent of the Truth-consciousness, a gnostic power that has not descended into the mental ignorance; it is capable of a mental gnosis that preserves its connection with the superior light and acts by its power. This is the character of Overmind in its own plane and of all the powers that are dependent on the Overmind: the Supermind works there but at one remove as if in something that it has put forth from itself but which is no longer entirely itself but is still a delegate of the Truth and invested with its authority. We are moving towards a transitional border beyond which lies the possibility of the Ignorance, but the Ignorance is not yet here. In the order of the evolutionary descent we stand in the Mind of Light on that border and a step downward can carry us beyond it into the beginnings of an ignorance which still bears on its face something of the luminosity that it is leaving behind it. On the other hand, in the ascending order of the evolution we reach a transition in which we see the
  Supermind and Mind of Light

5.1.01 - Terminology, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  Divine. You speak as if the evolution were the sole creation; the creation or manifestation is very vast and contains many planes and worlds that existed before the evolution, all different in character and with different kinds of beings. The fact of being prior to the evolution does not make them undifferentiated. The world of the Asuras is prior to the evolution, so are the worlds of the mental, vital or subtle physical Devas - but these beings are all different from each other. The great Gods belong to the Overmind plane; in the Supermind they are unified as aspects of the
  Divine, in the Overmind they appear as separate personalities.
  Any godhead can descend by emanation to the physical plane and associate himself with the evolution of a human being with whose line of manifestation he is in affinity. But these are things which cannot be very easily understood by the mind, because the mind has too rigid an idea of personality - the difficulty only disappears when one enters into a more flexible consciousness above where one is nearer to the experience of One in all and
  --
  Mother the Adya Shakti; in their cosmic action they are Powers and Personalities of the Divine each with his independent cosmic standing, function and work in the universe. They are not impersonal entities but cosmic Personalities, although they can and do ordinarily veil themselves behind the movement of impersonal forces. But while in the Overmind and the triple world they appear as independent beings, they return in the Supermind into the One and stand there united in a single harmonious action as multiple personalities of the one Person, the divine
  Purushottama.

5.1.02 - The Gods, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  The Gods and the Overmind
  The natives of the Overmind are Gods. Naturally the Gods rule the cosmos.
  The Overmind is the world of the Gods and the Gods are not merely Powers, but have Forms also.
  458
  --
  In the Overmind the Gods are still separated existences.
  Beyond the Overmind (in the supramental nearest the Overmind for instance) the Gods are eternal in their principle, but not in their forms and separate activities; they are there simply aspects of the One. If you meet a Godhead there, it is not as a separate
  Person; you feel only the Divine having a particular face, as it were, and relation with you for a certain purpose.
  The Formateurs of the Overmind have shaped nothing evil - it is the lower forces that receive from the Overmind and distort its forces.
  Vedic Gods of the Indian Tradition
  --
  There is no particular connection between Shiva and the Overmind - the Overmind is the higher station of all the Gods.
  Mahashiva means a greater manifestation than that ordinarily worshipped as Shiva - the creative dance of a greater Divine manifesting Power.

5.1.03 - The Hostile Forces and Hostile Beings, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
  - the hostiles are too pragmatic to care for Truth, they want only success. As for the greater Forces (e.g. Overmind) they are dynamic and try always to make consciousness effective, but they insist on consciousness, while the hostiles care nothing for that - the more unconscious you are and their automatic tool, the better they are pleased - for it is unconsciousness that gives them their chance.
  The Conquest of the Hostile Forces

5.4.01 - Occult Knowledge, #Letters On Yoga I, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   less on one side, the selection may be the other way, the saving element being present, and determine another orientation. But to understand the working of this Cosmic Something one must see not only the few outward factors observed by the human eye, but the whole working with all its multitudinous details - that one cannot do unless one is oneself in the cosmic consciousness and with some opening at least to the Overmind.
  There is no such thing as "free" will, but there is the power of the Purusha to say "yes" or "no" to any particular pressure of Prakriti and there is the power of the mind, vital etc. to echo feebly or strongly the Purusha's "yes" or "no" or to resist it. A constant (not a momentary) Yes or No has its effect in the play of the forces and the selection by the Something.

7 - Yoga of Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  come from what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind.
  Even the thing man has named God is a force, a power
  in the Overmind. The entire universe has been, so to say,
  under the domination of this status of consciousness.
  --
  grades or levels to arrive at the Overmind and when
  you reach there the first impression is that of a dazzling
  --
  of the Overmind is precisely coming to its end and the
  rule of the Supermind will replace it. All the past
  spiritual experiences were concerned with the Overmind:
  so it is a thing known to all who have found the Divine
  --
  is this that there is something more than the Overmind,
  something that lies a step higher and that it is now the
  --
  need not talk much of Overmind, because all the saints
  and seers, all religions and spiritual disciplines, scriptures
  --
  of the Overmind, not to confuse the Supermind with
  the Overmind. They are unable to conceive of anything
  beyond or different. Sri Aurobindo used to say always
  --
  of the Overmind which is itself something quite un-
  thinkable for the human consciousness, and even to reach
  --
  beings of the Overmind are stupendous in comparison
  REALISATION PAST AND FUTURE 5
  --
  and Mind and Overmind and reaches the very source,
  the head and front of consciousness, then, curious to
  --
  are those of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind. It
  was these that created, that is to say, gave the first forms
  --
  Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind, are anxious to take a
  physical body upon earth so that they may experience
  --
  higher worlds the Higher Mind, the Overmind and
  other domains do not have the psychic being. Naturally,

Blazing P3 - Explore the Stages of Postconventional Consciousness, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  wide. The Overmind is the highest of these ranges; it is full of lights and powers; but from the
  point of view of what is above it, it is the line of the souls turning away from the complete
  --
  The next step of the ascent brings us to the Overmind; the intuitional change can only be an
  introduction to this higher spiritual overture. But the Overmind, even when it is selective
  and not total in its action, is still a power of cosmic consciousness, a principle of global
  --
  only by an opening into the cosmic consciousness that the Overmind ascent and descent can
  Infancy to Enlightenment, Part III: Postconventional Consciousness
  --
  learned to live in a large universality; for otherwise the Overmind view of things and the
   Overmind dynamism will have no room to move in and effectuate its dynamic operations.
  When the Overmind descends, the predominance of the centralising ego-sense is entirely
  subordinated, lost in largeness of being and finally abolished; a wide cosmic perception and
  --
  It is (sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly) by the power of the Overmind releasing the
  mind from its close partitions that the cosmic consciousness opens the seeker and he
  --
  through the Overmind plane the original pre-arrangement of things in this world is effected;
  for from it the determining vibrations originally come.99
  --
  The Overmind has to be reached and brought down before the supermind descent is at all
  possible for the Overmind is the passage through which one passes from Mind to
  supermind.100
  --
  superconscient levels of mindHigher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition and Overmindare
  varying blends of Knowledge-Ignorance, Supermind is the Truth-Consciousness.135]
  --
  goes by that name) and masses itself into Overmind; after that Overmind can be lifted into
  and suffused with supermind till it undergoes a transformation.138

r1927 10 29, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   A day of relaxation, dismissal of out-of-date elements and preparation for the descent of gnosis into the Overmind system.
   These four days are for the transition to gnosis. Afterwards the whole system will be perfected and applied before there is the ascent to the supermind plane.

r1927 10 30, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Today the transition from T to T became decisive and with it there came the conception of the Ishwara in the bodily consciousness. The passive attitude of the T movement in which the nature is the plaything of the powers of the Overmind has been definitely abandoned and the passive-active attitude of T movement in which the Ishwara determines and the Powers may for a time resist and even modify temporarily what he has determined, but must now or in the end help to carry out his will, has begun to take its place. As yet the gnostic movement is imperfect and the Overmind powers are still powerful to determine results according to their choice, provided there is some supramental sanction behind it. All are powers of the Ishwara, but the play of disagreement and mutual opposition or emulation continues. T is entirely supramental or gnostic, T only has partially reached the same siddhi.
   ***

r1927 10 31, #Record of Yoga, #Sri Aurobindo, #Integral Yoga
   Today T (anishwara) has acquired the supramental and gnostic character. Not that all movements have entirely eliminated the mental element, but all are supramental or supramentalised or else even (now to some extent) gnostic Overmind. Infallible T is beginning more freely to emerge.
   Iswara consciousness is growing both below and above and Ishwara T is beginning.

Talks With Sri Aurobindo 1, #unset, #Arthur C Clarke, #Fiction
  flashes and glimpses of it. I have been trying to supramentalise the descended Overmind. Not that the Supermind is not acting. It is doing so
  through the Overmind; and the Intuition and the other intermediate powers
  have come down. The Supermind is above the Overmind. (Sri Aurobindo
  put one hand over the other.) So one may mistake the latter for the former. I
  --
  even touch the Overmind, and yet have a sexual fall. He may think he is
  guided by an inner divine voice and attempt to justify his erratic behaviour
  --
  At the Overmind stage, knowledge begins to rush in upon you from all
  sides and you see objects from all points of view and each thing from every
  --
  PURANI: Does the experience of the Cosmic Spirit correspond, to the experience of the Overmind?
  SRI AUROBINDO: Yes; but you can have the experience of the Cosmic Consciousness on any level. Generally you have it on the level of the Higher
  --
  But as you go above, you find the Overmind arching over all other levels
  and the two aspects are gathered together in it and combined in the same
  --
  SATYENDRA: Are Vishnu and Krishna Gods of the Overmind.?
  SRI AUROBINDO: Yes, that is, they manifest through the Overmind.
  Purani then related a few more experiences of that Mahratta lady. There
  --
  SRI AUROBINDO: Then he must be on the Overmind plane! (Laughter)
  NIRODBARAN: Why Overmind?
  SRI AUROBINDO: Because it is a plane of infinite possibilities.
  --
  being infinite, has many sides and all of them are true. In the Overmind, all
  the different truths converge and are held together.
  --
  SATYENDRA: Even so, up to Overmind everything is a play of possibilities.
  And one will counteract another.
  --
  the Overmind. When you enter the Supermind, then (Sri Aurobindo began to
  shake his head, and resumed after a pause) it is extremely difficult. And if
  --
  SRI AUROBINDO: He belongs to the Overmind then.
  NIRODBARAN: Dilip told me that Sirkar, B.C. Roy and Kiran S. Roy used to
  --
  the Overmind. (Laughter)
  NIRODBARAN: I went to Dilip today. He asked me if it was true that you had
  --
  PURANI: In The Life Divine's chapter on the Overmind, too.
  SATYENDRA: He can be referred to that chapter.
  PURANI: Better not refer him to it. He will say, "Now what is this Overmind?"
  NIRODBARAN: He is sure to misunderstand it.
  --
  Being and Non-being. Does the Non-Being come after Overmindor before
  it?
  --
  PURANI: He says that they come from Overmind.
  SATYENDRA: That is your term, Sir.
  --
  PURANI: Yes. By Overmind he means anything above the mind. He has many
  influential disciples and many rich persons follow him.
  --
  thinking in masses which is a frequent characteristic of the Overmind. As for
  the use of current French and Latin phrases, it may be condemned as objectionable on the same ground as the use of clichs and stock phrases in literary style, but they often hit the target more forcibly than any English equivalent and have a more lively effect on the mind of the reader. That may not

Talks With Sri Aurobindo 2, #Talks With Sri Aurobindo, #unset, #Zen
  consciousness and Overmind.
  SRI AUROBINDO: Relation? What relation?
  PURANI: I told him that Overmind is an instrument like Supermind.
  SRI AUROBINDO: Cosmic consciousness has many levels: it can be of
  mind, vital and matter; of Overmind too. So what does he mean by relation
  between them? Cosmic consciousness is a term used in contrast to individual consciousness. Through it you get to know about the universe. Overmind
  is a power of cosmic consciousness just as mind, vital and body are. Only,
  you can have body, vital and mind without any knowledge of cosmic consciousness, while to go to or know Overmind you must have cosmic consciousness. The cosmic working can be known by entering into Overmind,
  but for the source you have to go to Supermind. You can know the working
  from Overmind knowledge but to get control or comm and or the final secret
  you must have Supermind,. which is an instrument of self-determination of
  --
  DR. MANILAL: G is said to have had the Overmind experience. Is it true,
  Sir?

The Riddle of this World, #unknown, #Unknown, #unset
  consciousness, one which we can call Overmind and the other the true
  Supermind or Divine Gnosis. That is the reason why they got confused
  --
  (with Sat and Chit resting upon it), Supermind and Overmind might be
  called the three Supernals. Overmind stands at the top of the lower
  hemisphere, and you have to pass through and beyond Overmind, if
  you would reach Supermind, while still above and beyond Supermind
  --
  You speak of the gulf below the Overmind. But is there a gulf - or
  any other gulf than human unconsciousness? In all the series of the
  --
  Between the Overmind and the human mind there are a number of
  more and more luminous gradations; but, as these are super-conscient
  --
  proceeding from Intuition to a greater Overmind height, there is a new
  conversion and we look at and experience everything from the
  --
  surcharged with the Overmind thought, sight, will, feeling, sensation,
  play of force and contact. But the last conversion is the supramental, for
  --
  of this yoga, whether it be from Overmind or Intuition or Illumined Mind
  or some exalted Life Plane or from all these together, it is not definitive
  --
  the Overmind which was entered, for to go straight into the Overmind is
  impossible. The Overmind is indeed above and behind the whole action
  of the cosmic consciousness, but one can at first have only an indirect
  --
  anything like the full power and truth they have in the Overmind itself
  on its native levels. Most of the movements come not from the
  --
  claim to truth are not of the Overmind, but of the higher Mind or
  sometimes of the illumined Mind; but they are mixed with suggestions
  --
  can the lower Overmind be a passage to the possibility of the
  Supermind?"
  --
  In the Overmind the Truth of Supermind which is whole and
  harmonious enters into a separation into parts, many truths fronting
  --
  To get back to Overmind, if one can do it completely, which is not easy
  for physical beings, is to stand on the borders of the Supramental Truth

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