Part Three. Writings from the Arya (1914 – 1921 Part
Five, From the Bulletin of Physical Education (1949 – 1950)
Supermind and the Life Divine
A divine life upon earth, the ideal we have placed
before us, can only come about by a spiritual change of our being and a radical
and fundamental change, an evolution or revolution of our nature. The embodied
being upon earth would have to rise out of the domination over it of its veils
of mind, life and body into the full consciousness and possession of its
spiritual reality, and its nature also would have to be lifted out of the
consciousness and power of consciousness proper to a mental, vital and physical
being into the greater consciousness and greater power of being and the larger
and freer life of the spirit. It would not lose these former veils but they
would no longer be veils or imperfect expressions but true manifestations; they
would be changed into states of light, powers of spiritual life, vehicles of a
spiritual existence. But this again could not be if mind, life and body were not
taken up and transformed by a state of being and a force of being superior to
them, a power of Supermind as much above our incomplete mental nature as that is
above the nature of animal life and animated Matter, as it is immeasurably above
the mere material nature.
The Supermind is in its very essence a
truth-consciousness, a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is the
foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence and from which
nature in us is trying to arrive at self-knowledge and world-knowledge and a
right consciousness and the right use of our existence in the universe. The
Supermind, because it is a truth-consciousness, has this knowledge inherent in
it and this power of true existence; its course is straight and can go direct to
its aim, its field is wide and can even be made illimitable. This is because its
very nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but possesses it in
its own right; its steps are not from nescience
or ignorance into some imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from
right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from
illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing widenesses to the
utter vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it possesses the divine
omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an evolutionary movement of its own
graded self-manifestation by which it would eventually reveal its own highest
heights, it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance and
error: it starts from truth and light and moves always in truth and light. As
its knowledge is always true, so too its will is always true; it does not fumble
in its handling of things or stumble in its paces. In the Supermind feeling and
emotion do not depart from their truth, make no slips or mistakes, do not swerve
from the right and the real, cannot misuse beauty and delight or twist away from
a divine rectitude. In the Supermind sense cannot mislead or deviate into the
grossnesses which are here its natural imperfections and the cause of reproach,
distrust and misuse by our ignorance. Even an incomplete statement made by the
Supermind is a truth leading to a further truth, its incomplete action a step
towards completeness. All the life and action and leading of the Supermind is
guarded in its very nature from the falsehoods and uncertainties that are our
lot; it moves in safety towards its perfection. Once the truth-consciousness was
established here on its own sure foundation, the evolution of divine life would
be a progress in felicity, a march through light to Ananda.
Supermind is an eternal reality of the divine Being and
the divine Nature. In its own plane it already and always exists and possesses
its own essential law of being; it has not to be created or to emerge or evolve
into existence out of involution in Matter or out of non-existence, as it might
seem to the view of mind which itself seems to its own view to have so emerged
from life and Matter or to have evolved out of an involution in life and Matter.
The nature of Supermind is always the same, a being of knowledge, proceeding
from truth to truth, creating or rather
manifesting what has to be manifested by the power of a pre-existent knowledge,
not by hazard but by a self-existent destiny in the being itself, a necessity of
the thing in itself and therefore inevitable. Its manifestation of the divine
life will also be inevitable; its own life on its own plane is divine and, if
Supermind descends upon the earth, it will bring necessarily the divine life
with it and establish it here.
Supermind is the grade of existence beyond mind, life
and Matter and, as mind, life and Matter have manifested on the earth, so too
must Supermind in the inevitable course of things manifest in this world of
Matter. In fact, a supermind is already here but it is involved, concealed
behind this manifest mind, life and Matter and not yet acting overtly or in its
own power: if it acts, it is through these inferior powers and modified by their
characters and so not yet recognisable. It is only by the approach and arrival
of the descending Supermind that it can be liberated upon earth and reveal
itself in the action of our material, vital and mental parts so that these lower
powers can become portions of a total divinised activity of our whole being: it
is that that will bring to us a completely realised divinity or the divine life.
It is indeed so that life and mind involved in Matter have realised themselves
here; for only what is involved can evolve, otherwise there could be no
emergence.
The manifestation of a supramental truth-consciousness
is therefore the capital reality that will make the divine life possible. It is
when all the movements of thought, impulse and action are governed and directed
by a self-existent and luminously automatic truth-consciousness and our whole
nature comes to be constituted by it and made of its stuff that the life divine
will be complete and absolute. Even as it is, in reality though not in the
appearance of things, it is a secret self-existent knowledge and truth that is
working to manifest itself in the creation here. The Divine is already there
immanent within us, ourselves are that in our inmost reality and it is this
reality that we have to manifest; it is that which constitutes the urge towards
the divine living and makes necessary the creation of the life divine even in
this material existence.
A manifestation of the
Supermind and its truth-consciousness is then inevitable; it must happen in this
world sooner or later. But it has two aspects, a descent from above, an ascent
from below, a self-revelation of the Spirit, an evolution in Nature. The ascent
is necessarily an effort, a working of Nature, an urge or nisus on her side to
raise her lower parts by an evolutionary or revolutionary change, conversion or
transformation into the divine reality and it may happen by a process and
progress or by a rapid miracle. The descent or self-revelation of the Spirit is
an act of the supreme Reality from above which makes the realisation possible
and it can appear either as the divine aid which brings about the fulfilment of
the progress and process or as the sanction of the miracle. Evolution, as we see
it in this world, is a slow and difficult process and, indeed, needs usually
ages to reach abiding results; but this is because it is in its nature an
emergence from inconscient beginnings, a start from nescience and a working in
the ignorance of natural beings by what seems to be an unconscious force. There
can be, on the contrary, an evolution in the light and no longer in the
darkness, in which the evolving being is a conscious participant and cooperator,
and this is precisely what must take place here. Even in the effort and progress
from the Ignorance to Knowledge this must be in part if not wholly the endeavour
to be made on the heights of the nature, and it must be wholly that in the final
movement towards the spiritual change, realisation, transformation. It must be
still more so when there is a transition across the dividing line between the
Ignorance and the Knowledge and the evolution is from knowledge to greater
knowledge, from consciousness to greater consciousness, from being to greater
being. There is then no longer any necessity for the slow pace of the ordinary
evolution; there can be rapid conversion, quick transformation after
transformation, what would seem to our normal present mind a succession of
miracles. An evolution on the supramental levels could well be of that nature;
it could be equally, if the being so chose, a more leisurely passage of one
supramental state or condition of things to something beyond but still
supramental, from level to divine level, a building up of divine gradations, a free growth to the supreme Supermind or beyond
it to yet undreamed levels of being, consciousness and Ananda.
The supramental knowledge, the truth-consciousness of
the Supermind is in itself one and total: even when there is a voluntary
limitation of the knowledge or what might seem to be a partial manifestation, it
is so voluntarily; the limitation does not proceed from or result in any kind of
ignorance, it is not a denial or withholding of knowledge, for all the rest of
the truth that is not brought into expression is implicit there. Above all,
there are no contradictions: whatever would seem to be opposites to the mind,
here carry in themselves their own right relation and reconciling agreement,– if
indeed any reconciliation were needed, for the harmony of these apparent
opposites is complete. The mind tends to put the personal and the impersonal in
face of each other as if they were two contraries, but the Supermind sees and
realises them as, at the lowest, complements and mutually fulfilling powers of
the single Reality and, more characteristically, as interfused and inseparable
and themselves that single Reality. The Person has his aspect of impersonality
inseparable from himself without which he could not be what he is or could not
be his whole self: the Impersonal is in its truth not a state of existence, a
state of consciousness and a state of bliss, but a Being self-existent,
conscious of self, full of his own self-existent bliss, bliss the very substance
of his being,– so, the one single and illimitable Person, Purusha. In the
Supermind the finite does not cut up or limit the infinite, does not feel itself
contrary to the infinite; but rather it feels its own infinity: the relative and
temporal is not a contradiction of eternity but a right relation of its aspects,
a native working or an imperishable feature of the eternal. Time there is only
the eternal in extension and the eternal can be felt in the momentary. Thus the
integral Divine is there in the Supermind and no theory of illusion or
self-contradictory Maya need be thrust in to justify its way of existence. It
will be obvious that an escape from life is not necessary for the Divine to find
itself or its reality; it possesses that always whether in cosmic life or in its
transcendent existence. The divine life cannot
be a contradiction of the Divine or of the supreme reality; it is part of that
reality, an aspect or expression of it and it can be nothing else. In life on
the supramental plane all the Divine is possessed, and when the Supermind
descends on earth, it must bring the Divine with it and make that full
possession possible here.
The divine life will give to those who enter into it
and possess it an increasing and finally a complete possession of the
truth-consciousness and all that it carries in it; it will bring with it the
realisation of the Divine in self and the Divine in Nature. All that is sought
by the God-seeker will be fulfilled in his spirit and in his life as he moves
towards spiritual perfection. He will become aware of the transcendent reality,
possess in the self-experience the supreme existence, consciousness, bliss, be
one with Sachchidananda. He will become one with cosmic being and universal
Nature: he will contain the world in himself, in his own cosmic consciousness
and feel himself one with all beings; he will see himself in all and all in
himself, become united and identified with the Self which has become all
existences. He will perceive the beauty of the All-Beautiful and the miracle of
the All-Wonderful; he will enter in the end into the bliss of the Brahman and
live abidingly in it and for all this he will not need to shun existence or
plunge into the annihilation of the spiritual Person in some self-extinguishing
Nirvana. As in the Self, so in Nature, he can realise the Divine. The nature of
the Divine is Light and Power and Bliss; he can feel the divine Light and Power
and Bliss above him and descending into him, filling every strand of his nature,
every cell and atom of his being, flooding his soul and mind and life and body,
surrounding him like an illimitable sea and filling the world, suffusing all his
feeling and sense and experience, making all his life truly and utterly divine.
This and all else that the spiritual consciousness can bring to him the divine
life will give him when it reaches its utmost completeness and perfection and
the supramental truth-consciousness is fulfilled in all himself; but even before
that he can attain to something of it all, grow in it, live in it, once the
Supermind has descended upon him and has the direction of his existence. All relations with the Divine will be his: the trinity of
God-knowledge, divine works and devotion to God will open within him and move
towards an utter self-giving and surrender of his whole being and nature. He
will live in God and with God, possess God, as it is said, even plunge in him
forgetting all separate personality, but not losing it in self-extinction. The
love of God and all the sweetness of love will remain his, the bliss of contact
as well as the bliss of oneness and the bliss of difference in oneness. All the
infinite ranges of experience of the Infinite will be his and all the joy of the
finite in the embrace of the Infinite.
The descent of the Supermind will bring to one who
receives it and is fulfilled in the truth-consciousness all the possibilities of
the divine life. It will take up not only the whole characteristic experience
which we recognise already as constituting the spiritual life, but also all
which we now exclude from that category but which is capable of divinisation,
not excluding whatever of the earth-nature and the earth-life can be transformed
by the touch of the Supermind and taken up into the manifested life of the
Spirit. For a divine life on earth need not be a thing apart and exclusive
having nothing to do with the common earthly existence: it will take up human
being and human life, transform what can be transformed, spiritualise whatever
can be spiritualised, cast its influence on the rest and effectuate either a
radical or an uplifting change, bring about a deeper communion between the
universal and the individual, invade the ideal with the spiritual truth of which
it is a luminous shadow and help to uplift into or towards a greater and higher
existence. Mind it will uplift towards a diviner light of thought and will, life
towards deeper and truer emotion and action, towards a larger power of itself,
towards high aims and motives. Whatever cannot yet be raised into its own full
truth of being, it will bring nearer to that fullness; whatever is not ready
even for that change, will still see the possibility open to it whenever its
still incomplete evolution has made it ready for self-fulfilment. Even the body,
if it can bear the touch of Supermind, will become more aware of its own truth,–
for there is a body consciousness that has its
own instinctive truth and power of right condition and action, even a kind of
unexpressed occult knowledge in the constitution of its cells and tissues which
may one day become conscious and contribute to the transformation of the
physical being. An awakening must come in the earth-nature and in the
earth-consciousness which will be, if not the actual beginning, at least the
effective preparation and the first steps of its evolution towards a new and
diviner world order.
This would be the fulfilment of the divine life which
the descent of Supermind and the working of the truth-consciousness taking hold
of the whole nature of the living being would bring about in all who could open
themselves to its power or influence. Even its first immediate effect would be
on all who are capable the possibility of entering into the truth-consciousness
and changing all the movements of the nature more and more into the movements of
the supramental truth, truth of thought, truth of will, truth in the feelings,
truth in the acts, true conditions of the whole being even to the body,
eventually transformation, a divinising change. For those who could so open
themselves and remain open, there would be no limitation to this development and
even no fundamental difficulty; for all difficulties would be dissolved by the
pressure of the supramental light and power from above pouring itself into the
mind and the life-force and the body. But the result of the supramental descent
need not be limited to those who could thus open themselves entirely and it need
not be limited to the supramental change; there could also be a minor or
secondary transformation of the mental being within a freed and perfected scope
of the mental nature. In place of the human mind as it now is, a mind limited,
imperfect, open at every moment to all kinds of deviation from the truth or
missing of the truth, all kinds of error and openness even to the persuasions of
a complete falsehood and perversion of the nature, a mind blinded and pulled
down towards inconscience and ignorance, hardly arriving at knowledge, an
intellect prone to interpret the higher knowledge in abstractions and indirect
figures seizing and holding even the messages of the higher intuition with an
uncertain and disputed grasp, there could emerge
a true mind liberated and capable of the free and utmost perfection of itself
and its instruments, a life governed by the free and illumined mind, a body
responsive to the light and able to carry out all that the free mind and will
could demand of it. This change might happen not only in the few, but extend and
generalise itself in the race. This possibility, if fulfilled, would mean that
the human dream of perfection, perfection of itself, of its purified and
enlightened nature, of all its ways of action and living, would be no longer a
dream but a truth that could be made real and humanity lifted out of the hold on
it of inconscience and ignorance. The life of the mental being could be
harmonised with the life of the Supermind which will then be the highest order
above it, and become even an extension and annexe of the truth-consciousness, a
part and province of the divine life. It is obvious that if the Supermind is
there and an order of supramental being is established as the leading principle
in earth-nature, as mind is now the leading principle, but with a sureness, a
complete government of the earthly existence, a capacity of transformation of
all upon their level and within their natural boundaries of which the mind in
its imperfection was not capable, an immense change of human life, even if it
did not extend to transformation, would be inevitable.
It remains to consider what might be the obstacles in
the way of this possibility, especially those offered by the nature of the
earth-order and its function as a field of a graded evolution in which our
humanity is a stage and, it might be argued, its very imperfection an
evolutionary necessity, how far could or would Supermind by its presence and
government of things overcome this difficulty while respecting the principle of
gradation, and whether it could not rectify the wrong and ignorant order imposed
by the Ignorance and Inconscience and substitute for it a right gradation in
which the perfection and divinisation would be possible. Certainly, the way for
the individual would be open; whatever group of human beings aspire as united in
an endeavour at a perfect individual and collective living or aspire to the
divine life, would be assisted towards the attainment of its aspiration: that at
least the Supermind would make its minimum
consequence. But the greater possibility is also there and might even be offered
to the whole of humanity. This, then, we have to consider, what would the
descent of the Supermind mean for mankind and what would be its result or its
promise for the whole life and evolutionary future and destiny of the human
race?
its steps are not from nescience
or ignorance into some imperfect light, but from truth to greater truth, from
right perception to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from
illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing widenesses to the
utter vasts and to very infinitude. On its summits it possesses the divine
omniscience and omnipotence, but even in an evolutionary movement of its own
graded self-manifestation by which it would eventually reveal its own highest
heights, it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance and
error: it starts from truth and light and moves always in truth and light. As
its knowledge is always true, so too its will is always true; it does not fumble
in its handling of things or stumble in its paces. In the Supermind feeling and
emotion do not depart from their truth, make no slips or mistakes, do not swerve
from the right and the real, cannot misuse beauty and delight or twist away from
a divine rectitude. In the Supermind sense cannot mislead or deviate into the
grossnesses which are here its natural imperfections and the cause of reproach,
distrust and misuse by our ignorance. Even an incomplete statement made by the
Supermind is a truth leading to a further truth, its incomplete action a step
towards completeness. All the life and action and leading of the Supermind is
guarded in its very nature from the falsehoods and uncertainties that are our
lot; it moves in safety towards its perfection. Once the truth-consciousness was
established here on its own sure foundation, the evolution of divine life would
be a progress in felicity, a march through light to Ananda.
