K D Sethna - Note on Supra Mental Transformation and Physical Mind, Body Mind, Descent in Sri A

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(a)

There has been a little perplexity among the Mother's readers owing to a broad use of the term "physical mind" in

two talks of hers and to a vague reference in them to some writing or letter of Sri Aurobindo's in the past. She says

on 18 December 1971:

"I heard something written by Sri Aurobindo saying that for the Supramental to manifest upon earth the

physical mind must receive it and manifest it - and it is just the physical mind, that is to say, the body mind, that is

the only thing that remains in me now. And then, the reason why only this part has remained became quite clear to

me. It is on the way to being converted in a very rapid and interesting manner. This physical mind is being

developed under the Supramental Influence. And it is just what Sri Aurobindo has written, that this is

indispensable so that the Supramental can manifest itself permanently upon earth.

" So it is going on well...but it is not easy....

"I could say truly that I have become another person. There is only this (Mother touches the outer form of her

body) which remains as it was.... To what extent would it be able to change? Sri Aurobindo has said that if the

physical mind were transformed, the transformation of the body would follow quite naturally. We shall see."

On 22 December 1971 she says:"A letter of Sri Aurobindo was read to me in which he said that for the Supramental to be fixed here (he had

seen that the Supramental came into him and then it withdrew, and then it came back again and again withdrew - it

was not stable); for it to become stable it must enter and settle itself in the physical mind. It is this work which is

being done in me for months now. The mind has been withdrawn and the physical mind..., the mind that is in the

body, became wide, it had a global view of things, and its entire way of its seeing was absolutely

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different. I have seen, it is this: the Supramental is at work there. I am passing through extraordinary hours."

In the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, February 1972, where both the talks

appear in the series "Notes on the Way" on pp. 83-84 and 91 respectively, a footnote has been put in connection

with the second talk, reading:

"We do not know exactly the text to which Mother refers here, but it must be some writing similar to the

following:

'There is too an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles. Haeckel, the German

materialist, spoke somewhere of the will in the atom, and recent science, dealing with the incalculable variations

in the activities of the electrons, comes near to perceiving that this is not a figure but the shadow thrown by a

secret reality. This body-mind is a very tangible truth; owing to its obscurity and mechanical clinging to past

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movements and docile oblivion and rejection of the new, we find in it one of the chief obstacles to permeation by

the Supermind Force and the transformation of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively

converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilisation of the Supramental Light and Force

in material Nature' "

Taken along with other talks of the same period, what the Mother is speaking of is obviously the work going

on in her of the illumination of the body's cells by the Supermind. However, it is very improbable that some

writing of Sri Aurobindo like the letter quoted in the editorial footnote should be the one to which she refers. Nodoubt, like her two talks, the letter points to "an obscure mind of the body" or "body mind" at work in the cells (as

well as in the molecules, the corpuscles) and it also mentions the task of converting this mind and the important

role its conversion will play in stabilising - that is, in manifesting permanently - the Super- mind in earth-Nature.

But there is here no focusing on this

.Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 22, p. 340.

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task of conversion as the one master-key to the physical transformation, the supramentalisation of the body. And -

what is equally if not more significant - the omitted sentence, which immediately precedes in this letter the words

quoted in the footnote, actually differentiates the "physical mind" from the "mind of the body" or "body mind"

belonging to "the very cells", for we read: "The physical mind is technically placed below the vital and yet it is a

prolongation of the mind proper and one that can act in its own sphere by direct touch with the higher mental

intelligence. And there is too an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells..." Here the "body mind", to which the

Mother alludes, is specially regarded as additional to and not overlapping with the physical mind.

Finally, where in the letter is any hint about Sri Aurobindo's having seen the Supramental coming into him

and then withdrawing and again coming and once more withdrawing? Such an experience as a background is not

evident in any letter of his. Besides, all the letters at our disposal touching on the themes concerned in the two

talks of the Mother - in fact, all the letters on any subject - go without a single assertion that the Supermind hasnot only been at work in Sri Aurobindo's inner parts but also descended into his body-substance for however short

a time. Therefore, the letter in question as well as every other on allied topics is ruled out: nothing in his

correspondence has a straight bearing on the Mother's themes. An oblique bearing, from the Mother's memory of

Sri Aurobindo's correspondence, is possible, but to get to the definite point of her reference we must look

elsewhere.

We do not need to search long. Two published statements of her own are at hand - statements which must

have been read to her - and the second one quotes Sri Aurobindo's words as she remembers them.

The first dates back to 1954. It appears in an article by my then Associate Editor, Soli Albless. He read out

the article to the Mother before its publication in Mother India. It contained a report which I reproduced

afterwards in two places:

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(1) verbatim in a pamphlet I published with the Mother's approval on 29 February 1960, where all that had been

written by Sri Aurobindo and her up to that year about the Supermind's advent was collected, and (2) in a

paraphrase in an essay I wrote inMother India in February 1970. The Mother's report runs: "Even in 1938 I used

to see the Supermind descending into Sri Aurobindo. What he could not do at that time was to fix it down." Here

we have the exact gist of her bracketed phrase in the talk of 22 December 1971: "(he had seen that the


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Supramental came into him and then it withdrew, and then it came back again and again withdrew - it was not

stable)." Nowhere, except in Albless's article and my collection and my own essay, is this fact given expression.

Nor could it have been expressed in any of the letters we can pick out as relevant in one way or another, for they

all precede 1938. The Supermind's descent, no matter how intermittently, into Sri Aurobindo's physical substance

took place only in that year in which the Mother had told me, when I left Pondicherry at February's end for a visit

to Bombay, that something great and definite was expected to occur in the course of the year and that she would

inform me of it as soon as it happened, so that I might hurry back.No call came for me for months and then I wrote to Sri Aurobindo asking why I had not received the Mother's

summons. He replied on 1 August 1938: "A general descent of the kind you speak of is not in view at the

moment..." Yes, a manifestation on a universal scale such as was attested, by the Mother for 29 February 1956

was somehow delayed - for 18 years as it proved to be - but a breakthrough was achieved on the individual scale

and this is what the Mother's statement first cited by Albless implied.

From my later essay the statement was pressed into service in a brochure on Auroville which the architect

Roger Anger was preparing in 1970. It was then read out to the

.Life-Literature-Yoga: Some Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Revised and Enlarged Second Edition, Sri Aurobindo Ashram,

Pondicherry, 1967), p. 43.

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Mother again after nearly 16 years. She criticised it saying it seemed to assert that Sri Aurobindo did not have the

Supermind in his body until 1938. Such an assertion she dubbed "utter nonsense". And when I had an interview

with her on my birthday on 25 November 1970 she scolded me for letting this suggestion spread. After I had

apologised and she had characteristically responded, "Oh, it doesn't matter," she put before me the correct position

of things: "Clearly, Sri Aurobindo did not have the supramental body, and neither do I have it. But that does not

mean that the Supermind was not in his body. The two things are quite different. One can have the Supermind in

the body without the body being supramentalised. It is not true that the Supermind descended into Sri Aurobindo'sbody only in 1938 or that it was not fixed there but merely coming and going."

In view of what the Mother said in her talk of 22 December 1971, a little more than a year after my interview,

the full situation appears to be, as follows. Sri Aurobindo did have the Supermind in his body before 1938 but it

had not penetrated his body-substance anywhere: it was a presence in the body inasmuch as it had settled within

his embodied mental and vital and even subtle-physical being. His letters testify to individual "perfection" or

"transformation" having been sufficiently achieved up to the subtle-physical level, but they repeatedly admit that

the Supermind had not entered Matter. In one letter he says that it was on the point of doing so.4 Thus we may

infer that the entry into the body-substance happened only in 1938 and that even then it was fluctuant and not

established once for all.

The Mother evidently accepted towards the end of 1971 her own statement in the sense I have just tried to

elucidate. She even repeated from it the word "fixed"; and the words of

.Light and Laughter: Some Talks at Pondicherry by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran, p. 84.

. SriAurobindo on Himself and on the Mother(1953), p. 100.

.Ibid., p. 380.

4.Ibid., p. 215.

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Sri Aurobindo, which along with it she interprets to the effect that for the Supermind to be fixed and stable on

earth it must enter and settle itself in the physical mind, hail from a note which Nolini sent to me from her on 29

June 1953 when I was writing my article on "the Mind of Light". The note ran: "The Supermind had descended

long ago - very long ago - in the mind and even in the vital: it was working in the physical also but indirectly

through these intermediaries. The question now was about the direct action of the Supermind in the physical. Sri

Aurobindo said it could be possible only if the physical mind received the supramental light; the physical mind

receiving the supramental light Sri Aurobindo called the Mind of Light."

While answering very closely to the phraseology of the second talk, this statement anticipates almost

word-for-word the first talk's turn of speech. The first talk refers at the start to "Sri Aurobindo saying that for the

Supramental to manifest upon earth the physical mind must receive it and manifest it" - and at the close the talk

refers to his having "written that this is indispensable so that the Supramental may manifest itself permanently

upon earth".

No question, I hold, can any more be raised as to what exactly was the text upon which the Mother drew.

However, her usage of the term "physical mind" requires discussion. But, before we discuss it, we may say a few

words on a point which must have puzzled many students of the Aurobindonian sadhana.

In the thirties the Master wrote semi-humorously of glimpsing the Supermind above his head and of trying tocatch its tail and pull it down into himself. Evidently this tantalising situation, which was pictured to Nirodbaran

in a letter of 1935 and a talk of 1938, persisted until Sri

. The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo by K. D. Sethna (Mother India, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1968), p. 100.

. Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1954), pp. 92,104. See also Talks with Sri Aurobindo

(Sri Aurobindo Pathmandir, Calcutta, 1966), p. 52.

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Aurobindo's passing away, since even in 1947 he was still preoccupied with progressively supramentalising the

Over-mind at the brain-level and using on the world the Overmind force from there and not the sheer

supramental. But if, as the Mother declares and the Master also implies, the supramental realisation was complete

in him except that the Supermind had not yet permeated his body-substance - if the Truth- Consciousness had

already descended into his inner mind, inner vital being and even subtle-physical nature - why could it not emerge

into the gross-physical from within instead of being glimpsed up to the end above his head with its tail dangling

just beyond?

The query is hardly illegitimate, but it overlooks an occult fact. There is a necessity for each part of the being

to receive a separate independent descent. Not by an efflux from the Supermind already descended into the parts

other than the gross-physical but by a direct pull from the latter upon the Supramental Consciousness, the Divine

Gnosis, existing above in its own plane; would that Highest Reality be natural, authentic and inalienable to thispart. Just as every component of us - the mental, the vital, the physical - must make its spontaneous individual

surrender to the Supreme under the influence of the inmost psyche, in order to make integral our self-surrendering,

so too the supramental descent must be accomplished essentially by a straight and unmediated relationship of each

component to the Gnostic Truth. Even when the inner nature has been inhabited by that Truth, the consciousness

in the outer substance has to act towards that higher Reality almost as if nothing of this Truth were achieved

elsewhere in the being. No doubt, the consciousness of the outer substance would be influenced by the many-

sided victory in the inner dimension and find its task helped to a certain degree; yet this victory could still leave


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room for a defeat in the outer region. The outer region has to pay its own crucial price for the laurel and the crown

of supramentalisation

. Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother(1953), p. 245.

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to rest on its head. Thus alone would the Supermind "involved" in matter meet its free "overhead" counterpart and

hold supramentalisation as if it were its innate dharma, its intrinsic self-law.

Not to understand this paradox of transformative perfection may lead us to a confused misreading of what Sri

Aurobindo did or left undone until his mighty self-sacrifice on 5 December 1950.

A further misreading can there be if we confine the Integral Yoga to the phenomenon of descent. In

understanding Sri Aurobindo's spirituality we must not forget that, while the Supermind's descent into all the

components of earthly existence is the ultimate aim, knowledge of the Supermind is not born only of this descent.

Sri Aurobindo's Yoga strives also for ascent - the consciousness rising from its embodied state to "overhead"

planes. All the planes above the mind were known to Sri Aurobindo before he undertook the responsibility of the

monthly Arya in 1914, although detailed acquaintance with their specific powers obviously came later, as we saw

in the preceding chapter. In 1947, at the very time that he declared what his preoccupation and capacity were, he

unmistakably implied that he had the freedom of the topmost height itself of the "overhead" Spirit. This height

was the far extreme of his multi-realised being. What he did at the moment was his own choice inspired by the

Avataric mission he had accepted: transformation of embodied life in its totality, down to divinisation of the body,

by the one. sole agency that could consummate it: the Supramental Light and Force and Bliss. He begins the 1947

letter: "If I had been standing on the Supermind level and acting on the world by the instrumentation of

Supermind, that world would have changed or would be changing much more rapidly and in a different fashion

from what is happening now. My present effort is not to stand up on a high and distant Supermind level and

change the world from there, but to bring something of it down here and to stand on that and act by that..."

.Ibid., pp. 244-45.

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(b)

Now we may turn to ponder the Mother's usage of the term "physical mind". She equates it to "the body

mind" or "the mind that is in the body" and the letter editorially excerpted from Sri Aurobindo as relevant, with its

mention of "this body mind" to signify "an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles",

leaves us in no uncertainty about the Mother's meaning. She means by "the physical mind" the dim mental

consciousness which is working in the cells of the body. And such a meaning is even explicitly mentioned by her

in April 1967: "there is the consciousness of the physical mind (what I call cellular mind)..." But "the physical

mind" figuring in the note sent from her by Nolini to me in 1953 is surely a different proposition. What it was may

be perceived from her declaration to me on an earlier occasion: "As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his

body, what he had called the Mind of Light got realised in me."-The word "realised" is most important here: it

stands for the Higher Power's permanent stabilisation, an achieved conversion of the instrument, an entry and

settlement of the new consciousness for good.

There is no question of a continuing process. The Mother's "physical mind receiving the supramental light" is


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not like the physical mind of the two talks which is said to be "on the way to being converted" and in which "the

work" for the Supramental's entry and settlement was "being done...for months" in order to stabilise it. The precise

realisation is flash-lit by her comment on the two opening lines of a poem I wrote in the early fifties on the Mind

of Light. The lines were:

The core of a deathless Sun is now the brain

And each grey cell bursts to omniscient gold.

.Bulletin, August 1967, p. 63.

. The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo, p. 100. To mask the personal element a little, the closing words in the book run: "...got

realised here."

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The Mother said that the expression here was revelatory, an absolutely inspired and accurate transcription of what

had happened, whereas the rest of the poem was an imaginative reconstruction by me of the phenomenon

envisaged. Thus the physical mind concerned was only the mind in its brain- functioning, the cells concerned were

solely the brain-cells and not those of the whole body though these must have been partially affected. We are face

to face with an understanding of "the physical mind" dissimilar to the one prompted by "the body mind". Not to

appreciate the dissimilarity would confuse the sense of "the Mind of Light" and the place of this Mind's realisation

in the progressive stages of the Integral Yoga, the Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation.

How is "the physical mind" of those two talks to be interpreted in the light of Sri Aurobindo's employment of

the term in his various letters? We may outline his usage with the help of his Letters on Yoga, from which the

extract in theBulletin's footnote was made.

In Sri Aurobindo the term covers two aspects. First, "the externalising mind" (p. 326) which is "a prolongation

of the mind proper" (p. 340) - that is of "the thinking mind" which "does not belong to the physical" but "is a

separate power" (p. 327) - into the physical formula. This prolongation he labels as "the physical mental" (p. 373)as distinguished from "the mental physical" or "mind in the physical" (p. 326). The latter is the second aspect of

"physical mind" (ibid.) insofar as a certain functioning which is not too distant from the former is concerned. In

this functioning, the physical mind "is limited by the physical view and experience of things, it mentalises the

experiences brought by the contacts of outward life and things, and does not go beyond that (though it can do

that much very cleverly), unlike the externalising mind which deals with them from the reason and its higher

intelligence" (pp. 326-27). We may consider the "physical mental", which Sri Aurobindo designates "the true

physical mind" (p. 328), as the high part of the physical mind, and the "mental physical" at its best operation as

the low one.

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Another "part of the physical mind" (p.329), a "much' lower action of the mental physical" (p.327), is "the

mechanical mind...which, left to itself, would only repeat customary ideas and record the natural reflexes of the

physical consciousness to the contacts of outward life and things" {ibid.). The mechanical mind is also called

"body-mind" (p.328). A turn of phrase similar to "body-mind" occurs when Sri Aurobindo says: "Everything has a

physical part - even the mind has a physical part; there is a mental physical, a mind of the body and the material..."

(p.351). It is evidently the "mind of the body and the material" that he speaks of in writing of "the gross material

part" thus: "it must be remembered that this too has a consciousness of its own, the obscure consciousness proper


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to the limbs, cells, tissues, glands, organs" (p.348).

The description "body-mind" is not applied by Sri Aurobindo to anything above "the mechanical mind whose

nature is to go on\ turning round in a circle the thoughts that come into it" (p.329). At its lowest the description

applies to "an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles" which has a "mechanical

clinging to past movements and docile oblivion and rejection of the new" (p.340). Hence "the physical mind" of

the two talks by the Mother may be taken, from the Aurobindonian viewpoint, to cover in general all that works

mechanically in the mental physical and in particular the element of mental mechanicality in the cellular stuff ofthe body. We may broadly name it "body- mind" in distinction from "brain-mind".

Broadly, because the mechanical mind has still to do with "thoughts" and hence with the brain and so cannot

quite be on a par with "the obscure consciousness" of the sheer bodily components. Strictly speaking, it is this

consciousness that the Mother mentions by her specially narrowed employment of the words "physical mind" and

it is also from this consciousness that, strictly speaking, the "brain-mind" is to be demarcated. In the latter the

externalising mind and the mental in the physical, though unlike each other in several

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respects, are "in practice...mixed together" (p.327). Further, through the externalising mind still greater mental

activities than its own come into play in the mind of the brain. For, as we have noted, the externalising mind

prolongs into the physical the mind proper and consequently what is characteristic of the mind proper is drawn to

some extent into this aspect of the physical mind.

" The mind proper," says Sri Aurobindo, "is divided into three parts - the 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 forms 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)" (p.326). How the greater mental activities enter in may be yet more vividly

seized from Sri Aurobindo's elaboration of his phrase "the true physical mind". He says: "The true physical mind

is the receiving and externalising intelligence which has two functions - first, to work upon external things and

give them a mental order with a way of practically dealing with them and, secondly, to be the channel ofmaterialising and putting into effect whatever the thinking and dynamic mind sends down to it for the purpose"

(p.328).

Thus the mixture of the physical mental and the mental physical has a halo as it were of higher things than

its actual constituents. And this subtly rich mixture, which is the full sense of the "brain-mind", is what, on

receiving the supramental light, gets converted into the Mind of Light. The conversion of the "body-mind" by

means of the supramental light cannot be quite the same phenomenon. Inasmuch as mentality is still present we

should adopt the same nomenclature but a new shade of it has to be clearly set forth, a corporeal shade standing

off from the cerebral.

In a talk almost seven years earlier than the two we have discussed, the Mother does actually imply a

distinction between the brain-mind and the body-mind, giving the term "physical mind" a higher connotation than

in these two talks. She draws even finer lines of difference while pinpointing her

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subject - the part of the being with which she is busy - thus: "It is not the physical mind...it is the mind ofMatter.

It is the mental substance which belongs to Matter itself, to the cells. That is what was once called 'the spirit of the

form' when it was said that the mummies kept their body intact so long as the spirit of the form persisted. It is that

mind, this wholly material mind." In the same talk she says about herself: "It is long since the physical mind has


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changed" - and explains: "The physical mind is the mind of the physical personality formed by the body but it is

not the mind of Matter: it is the mind of the physical being." In differentiating what she has been working upon at

the moment she goes so far as to state: "You cannot even call it the bodily mind - it is the mind of the cells...."

Then we learn from her: "...the physical mind, as soon as you take up an integral yoga, must be dealt with, but this

material mind, the cellular one, I assure you, is altogether new...." Finally, we get an autobiographical disclosure:

"Sri Aurobindo had said that it was unorganisable and it had only to be thrown out of existence. And I too had the

same impression. But when the action for transformation upon the cells is constant, this material mind begins tobe organised. It is this that is wonderful...."

A year later (1966) the Mother has another pronouncement on the same lines and of autobiographical interest:

"When we were working in the physical cells, Sri Aurobindo realised the difficulty of transforming the mind of

the physical cells. I am not speaking of the physical mind or physical consciousness. He thought of leaving the

mind of the physical cells alone. Then I saw that their refusal to change was not due to any bad will but to

ignorance. The cells have a great aspiration and the progress is steady, there is no vacillation as in the mind of the

vital. So Sri Aurobindo, before he left his body, entrusted to me this work and said that I alone could do it, but it

takes long and I can't give sufficient time to it. I work upon it only in the first part of the

.Bulletin, November 1965, p. 87.

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night. In the second part I go about [in the subtle body] visiting people and things. Otherwise they go wrong.

When the work in the cells will have been finished, there won't be any further difficulty".

The Mind of Light in an increased aspect which has to do with the mental substance belonging to Matter itself

- an aspect involving an extension of the Supermind's establishment in the cerebral mentality which the Mother

had realised in the immediate wake of Sri Aurobindo's departure - is the goal she posited for herself in the period

of the two talks when she wanted her "physical mind" to be "developed under the Supramental Influence".

Already at the time of talking, a remarkable development was in evidence, since, in her own words, "thisphysical mind, the mind that is in the body had become wide, had a global view of things and the entire way of its

seeing was absolutely different." As hers had been the first incalculable experiment in supramentalising the most

obscure part of bodily existence, the process had been fraught with a great deal of suffering, but she was well on

the way to acquiring a radical lever for the transformation which would pass from the mental physical to the vital

physical and then to the material physical, which is the physical proper. Suddenly on 17 November 1973 she chose

to give up her embodied state, put in abeyance her terrestrial progress and join Sri Aurobindo to work from behind

a veil - for reasons which must essentially be the same as inspired his strategic self-sacrifice: the future good of

humanity's spiritual career.

Before she took the momentous step, she had contributed appreciably to Sri Aurobindo's spiritual system not

only in the realm of visioning but also in the field of living.

. The Mother - Sweetness and Lightby Nirodbaran (Auropress, Auroville, 1978), p. 149.

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SRI AUROBINDO'S VIEWS VIS--VIS

THE MOTHER'S


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SOME QUESTIONS AND THEIR ANSWERS

A Reader's Letter to Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna)

September

5,1979Kindly read this patiently.

Your series of articles. The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and the Mother's Contribution to

It, is very very very much liked and appreciated by me. But you seem to have stirred a hornet's nest! Some people

might have attacked you as saying that Sri Aurobindo had not the total knowledge about the Supermind and its

"derivatives" from the very beginning. Well, I am not that orthodox. I fully agree with your views expressed

(except the concept of an independent subtle-physical typal layer of consciousness, though it is reasonable to

expect not only a typal subtle-physical layer to exist but all the combinations of the Mental, Vital and Physical to

have typal counterparts).

I relate in the following a few points, as many as I can remember just now - more I may write later.

1) Sri Aurobindo's prime interest in Education (mentioned by the Mother in the inaugural address at the All-

India University Convention in 1951).

There is no proof for this. No indication by Sri Aurobindo that Physical Education or educational activity by the

Ashram was the only pursuable object (after his departure).

2) The Mother's statement about the Supramental Consciousness or Power flowing into her from Sri

Aurobindo's body at the time of his leaving the body.

Is the Supramental like a watery fluid that it can flow from one body to another? Then why did it not do so

earlier? Why did it not flow from the Mother into any other sadhak later?

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3) The Mind of Light was first mentioned by Sri Aurobindo in his last articles in theBulletin.

According to your line of reasoning there might be a typal layer of the Mind of Light. (I won't mind, even

if it is newly created by the Mother's efforts.)

This is said to have been realised in the Mother on 5-12-50. But it was never mentioned by Sri Aurobindo in

theArya- times or many years thereafter. So your statements that the Supramental concept grew from time to time

are very true.

4) If the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's consciousness are one....

a) Why did she not know that he had decided to leave his body? Why was she shocked?

b) Why did she not know the "mathematical formula" of transformation till her end. (Vide "Notes on the Way".)

5) The Mother's statements about visualising Savitri-lines night after night while Sri Aurobindo was writing


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them in the next room and before he recited them to her later.

a) What was she visualising when he was correcting, emending, remoulding, expanding continuously the same

parts?

b) Is she right in insisting that Savitri is complete, as it is and no more additions were intended by Sri Aurobindo?

6) The sadhana through the opening of the Sahasradala-Chakras changing to sadhana through the opening ofthe psychic being.

Sri Aurobindo has again reverted to Chakra for transformation, in his bookThe Supramental Manifestation.

7) A sadhak asking the Mother whether one could go straight to Supermind without the intermediate planes.

The Mother snubs him saying why not, and inquired where Sri Aurobindo had said that. (The last chapters of the

The Life Divine allude to it, though.)

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8) The Mother saying that Sri Aurobindo told her of at least 300 years being required for transformation.

No proof from Sri Aurobindo's pen so far!

9) Supramental being. Superman, Superhuman being, distinguished variously by the Mother PLUS

Superman consciousness (latest).

Then what about Sri Aurobindo writing in The Life Divine about various types of Supramental beings having

various intermixtures of planes between the Mind and Supermind? (Last chapters of L.D.)

10) The Mother's announcement of the descent of Supermind in February 1956.

Later she corrected/herself that it was the descent of the "Power" aspect Only. This compares with Sri Aurobindo

classifying the 1926-descent (later) as not of Supermind proper but of Overmind.

11) The Mother's announcement of Superman consciousness arriving.

Where is it at present? What did it do? There is no mention in her "Notes on the Way" of her getting any help or

otherwise from that being or consciousness.

12) The Mother's stress on the psychic opening and, later, on the transformation of "cells".

Was this a correct line? She would have later to go ontotransform chromosomes, RNA-DNA, atoms, protons,

electrons and almost 300 subatomic particles! She admitted that Sri Aurobindo had not disclosed to her his

"mathematical formula" till the last. So was this her own experimentation? The same would apply to the psychic-

opening approach because he had reverted to Chakras in his last articles. In any case, the psychic-approach stress

or priority has no precedent in the old Yogas, while Sri Aurobindo's approach has the full Force of the past Yogas.


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Well, this will be all for the present.

It hardly needs to be mentioned that I am not pitting Sri Aurobindo against the Mother or vice versa. I have

full faith in both. But seeming (or apparent) things have to get a correct assessment in one's thought. There is no

use in anyone being dogmatic and rebuking you for your extremely lucid and fine analysis.

Amal Kiran's Reply

September 12,1979

Thank you for your keen appreciation of my recent articles. Your various questions in the assumed role of

advocatus diaboli are welcome. I have attempted below to satisfy their demands. I know that you would never

doubt the Mother's word: so there is no misunderstanding on my part. I regard as a necessary intellectual exercise

the representation you have made of the doubts in the minds of "sceptics".

Before I get down to the main task, let me say a word on the problem of what you call "the subtle-physical

typal layer". When I wrote of the earth's subtle-physical layer (or "atmosphere", to use the Mother's metaphorical

term) I did not dub it "typal". Whatever pertains to the earth or, for that matter ("matter" is rather an apt turn of

speech here!), to the universe of which the earth is a member is not typal but evolutionary - at least in essence

even if not everywhere so in process. We usually think of our universe as the world of Matter. But actually the

world of Matter belongs to the same typal series that contains the worlds of Life and Mind, etc. Our material

universe is an evolute of the Inconscient, which is not, any more than the sheer Superconscient, a plane in the

sense in which the typal worlds are planes. The real material universe is a typal level. In relation to ours we name

it "subtle-physical". As I have mentioned, this subtle-physical is not the same as the earth's "atmosphere":- the

latter is an evolutionary dimension, not a typal one. When the typal world of Matter presses down from its own

free plane uponPage - 71

the Inconscient which holds all the planes "involved" in it, and when the "involved" counterpart of the typal world

of Matter pushed upward both by its "evolutionary" urge and in response to the pressure from above, there

emerges a composite of gross and subtle-physical stuff/ just .as later in evolutionary history we have vitalised and

mentalised emergents of the Inconscient. Composites are to be distinguished from the typal dimensions, though

they are connected with them. At least this is how I look at the phenomenon of the evolving Inconscient in relation

to the non-evolving ladder of existence. The subject is rather complex, and light from other Aurobindonian

interpreters may be solicited without rigid dogmatism on one's part.

Now I come to the main burden of your song set to the tune of the "sceptics".

1) During Sri Aurobindo's lifetime and with his approval and inspiration, it was projected to convert

Pondicherry into a University town with an independence of its own within the Indian Union. Sri Aurobindo was

prepared to be the Director of the University. Of course, not education as such but sadhana is the chief activity in a

life along Aurobindonian lines, but the preparation of the psychological and physical being of the young by a

special system of education within the permeating spiritual atmosphere of the Ashram-consciousness can be

considered a very important mode of building with the minds and bodies of aspirant youth a new illumined future.

I believe we can consider Sri Aurobindo to have been keenly interested and concerned here. There is "proof" for


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the Mother's reference during the 1951 Convention. The reference itself is not to an exclusive primacy of

Education. The Mother speaks only of one of the best means. And even this, essentially, is just a particular

channel for sadhana.

2) The Supramental Consciousness can flow from one bodily being to another not before it has been brought

down into the embodied system - and even then it can flow in its own proper form not before one is ready for it.

That is what

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happened between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother at the time of the former's "departure". In an indirect way, the

Supra- mental Consciousness has flowed from both our Gurus to their disciples throughout the years I have been

in the Ashram. In the Master-disciple relationship, the flow of the Master's spiritual consciousness to the disciple

is the most potent factor in the sadhana. Even when the Master is no longer embodied, the call to the Master-

consciousness to flow into one remains the central mode of the Yogic life. Surely one has to practise aspiration

and rejection but the crowning process for advancement is surrender, the laying open of oneself to the Divine

Presence and offering oneself to its Peace, Light, Knowledge, Power, Ananda as much as possible so that they

may flow into one. The doubt over the Mother's "flow"-image is misconceived.

Besides, Matter is not the only concrete reality that can do concrete things like flowing. Supraphysical

realities are the source and cause of Matter's concreteness which is actually a diminished version of theirs. Sri

Aurobindo has written of psychological movements coming literally in streams or waves: e.g. someone's anger.

3) The Mind of Light is not a typal overhead plane. That is why it does not figure in Sri Aurobindo's old

hierarchy of planes. It is a creation in the physical mind by the Supramental Light's reception there. Merely

because it is "involutionary" in the Mother's sense - that is, a Light descending from above - it does not rank as

typal.

4) The Mother's Consciousness and Sri Aurobindo's are essentially one but in the dynamics of the play they

are both one and two. Each has a specialised role in certain fields and knowledge can be veiled between them for

the purposes of the world-game and because of the circumstances within whose framework they have chosen toact their parts. No mental "why" has any ultimate rationale here.

5) What you call the Mother's "statements" about visualising Savitri-lines are actually reports. I believe there

is some misunderstanding here. As far as I know, the basic truth

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simply is that, as she once told Huta,whose account she subsequently read and fully confirmed, the Mother long

before she came to Pondicherry had passed through a series of visions and experiences which later she found

expressed in Savitri when Sri Aurobindo read it out "to her day after day at a certain period of the Ashram" -

visions and experiences about which she had not spoken to him during the time he had been composing the epic.

If you read the very first article of my series "Our Light and Delight", you will get the correct perspective in two

of the opening pages. Let me quote from them:

"Owing to my sustained aspiration to write what Sri Aurobindo has termed 'overhead poetry', that is, poetic

inspiration caught from secret levels of consciousness above the mind, levels of a superhuman light and delight,

Sri Aurobindo generously granted the incredible favour of letting me see portions of his epic, which was then still

in the making. Without letting anyone know, he started sending me, every morning, in sealed envelopes the

opening cantos. On October 25, 1936, written in his own fine and sensitive yet forceful hand, there burst upon me

the beauty and amplitude of the first sixteen lines of the poem's prelude of 'symbol dawn' as it stood at that time.


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The precious gift of passages kept coming to me in private for months and months and a happy discussion of them

went to and fro. Before enclosing them, usually with the Mother's 'Amal' inscribed on the covers, Sri Aurobindo

must have daily read the verse out to her prior to breaking up their joint sessions of correspondence with the

sadhaks through the night and the small hours of the morning. Some time in early 1938 the Amal-ward stream of

Savitri ceased like the fabled river Saraswati of the Rigveda symbolism... The year and a half from nearly

October's end in 1936 to almost the close of February 1938 must be the 'certain period of the Ashram' to which

Huta's article refers..."

. "Spiritualand Occult Truths",MotherIndia, February 21,1978, p. 172.

. "Our Light and Delight", ibid., pp. 70-71.

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Apropos of your argument, I may remark that line-visualisation during the correcting, emending, remoulding

and expanding ofSavitri by Sri Aurobindo does not necessarily follow from the "statements" mentioned in the

first column, though one may feel prompted to posit it as a sequel. Especially if the substance remained the same,

the positing would be all the more a non-sequitur. But, of course, the picture I have given of "the basic-truth" of

the situation renders the whole problem raised by you irrelevant.

Regarding the length of Savitri, I may recall that when I announced to the Mother that the poem ran to

23,813 lines she at once exclaimed: "It should have been 24,000!" The number 24 is the double of 12 which is Sri

Aurobindo's number according to the Mother and which, according to Sri Aurobindo, signifies the all-fulfilling

integral New Creation, towards which our evolutionary earth tends.

6) To speak of the Sahasradala, "the thousand-petalled lotus", which is at the top of the head and whose

opening was emphasised by Sri Aurobindo in the early days, is not to speak of an order of reality essentially

different from the psychic being; for the latter is the inmost part of another Chakra, the Hrid-padma, the heart-

lotus. The Sahasradala has also a spiritual reality centred within it, the Atman or Supreme Self. More accurately,

we may say that this Chakra is the seat of the Jivatman, the true individual Self which is not divided from theuniversal and infinite Atman - the free Jivatman, whose delegate in the evolution is .the psyche.

The attention Sri Aurobindo paid to the Chakras in his writings is related to the transformation of the gross

body with the aid of the potentialities of the Chakras in the subtle- physical sheath: it does not imply any lack of

attention to the psychic being, the spiritual core of the bodily transformative process.

7) What Sri Aurobindo said in The Life Divine and even afterwards was before the manifestation of the

Supermind in the earth's subtle layer. Conditions must change to a good

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extent after this event. Now it is conceivable that especially the psychic being can have a direct contact with the

Supermind. But one may wonder how far the general consciousness can absorb the Supramental Presence without

this consciousness having been prepared by contact with the planes intermediate between mind and Supermind.

8) Sri Aurobindo has not mentioned, in his writings, 300 years for the body's transformation, but he has

definitely said in a letter that such transformation is a matter of a rather distant future and cannot figure among the

immediate or even near-future realities of his Yoga.

9) In the Mother's scheme the true supramental race will come without the sex-process, but only after the

realisation on earth of supramentalised man who is superman" superhuman being= intermediate race. In The Life

Divine scheme, supramentalised man is the crown of evolution. The embodied mixtures of Supermind with other


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planes may be compared to the intermediate race in its various stages.

10) It is a mistake to speak of the descentof Supermind in February 1956. I have already used the right term

given by the Mother: manifestation. "Descent" is in relation to the individual embodied being - with its upper and

lower directions, its ladder of levels: physical, vital, mental (corresponding to certain lower and upper parts of the

body) and "overhead". Where the universe is concerned, such a ladder has little meaning. So descent and ascent

are irrelevant terms.

As to what manifested, the Mother has clearly said that the Supramental Light and Force and Consciousnesscame but not the Supramental Ananda. There was no declaration that the whole Supermind had manifested in the

earth's subtle- physical. In regard to "Power", what she has said is that the primary aspect the embodied

Supermind would need is "Power" so as to defend the new beings against attack from the millennially entrenched

lower consciousness's instruments.

. SriAurobindo on Himself and on the Mother(1953), pp. 423-24.

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11) There is a good deal of talk ("Notes on the Way", January 1, 4, 8, 18; February 15, 1969) on the arrival of

the Superman-consciousness and on its mode of working and its quality and texture, so to speak, as felt by the

Mother. On 14 March 1970 we are told of a great change in the Mother's sadhana. It is crystallised in the words:

"The physical is capable of receiving the higher Light, the Truth, the true Consciousness and ofmanifesting it.... It

took a little more than a year for this Consciousness to win this victory. And still, naturally, it is not visible except

to those who have the inner vision, but it is done... This is the fourteenth month since the Consciousness came..."

A footnote identifies what the Mother is referring to: "The superman consciousness which manifested on 1

January 1969."

We have also a brief reference on 5 August of the same year to its pressure for "sincerity" - and on this

occasion the Mother has used "He" to designate the Superman-consciousness.

Perhaps an indirect commentary may be understood, from all that she has said, about the Intermediate Racewhich is the Superman's precursor or preparer of the advent of supramental beings or the Supramental Race by a

straight materialisation.

12) The Mother's stress on the psychic opening and afterwards on the transformation of the "cells" has

nothing to puzzle one. In an Integral Yoga, which is an adventure into the unknown, all sorts of different stresses

are put at different times. The final centring in the psychic is the logical conclusion of a process coming down

increasingly to the transformation of the embodied being. The psychic is the pivot of the evolutionary progress - it

is the embodied being's ever- growing core. Whether other Yogas had the stress on it or not shouldn't bother us.

You say that, in contrast to this stress by the Mother, Sri Aurobindo's approach has the full force of the past Yogas.

The words "full force" are incorrect. If they were quite appropriate, his approach would be merely an extra-

luminous rehash of Veda, Upanishad and Gita. It certainly is

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not that and Sri Aurobindo has emphasised this point time and again. What he has granted is that in them

there were intuitions or even experiences whose true development would be a sign-post towards the

Aurobindonian vision. Thus he has given original interpretations of the Rigveda, the Isha and Kena Upanishads

and the Gita, bringing out the trend in them which would show itself because ultimately the Super- mind is

secretly pushing to its own earthly fulfilment through all human illuminations. Also, Sri Aurobindo has accepted


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the essence of the great basic realisations of old - Nirvana, the All-Brahman, the Ishwara-Shakti, the Cosmic

Consciousness, the great Gods and Goddesses, the Jnana, Bhakti and Karma Yogas, the Tantra. The Mother

accepts this essence just as much, though she may not employ the ancient Indian terminology as easily. In the

stress on the psychic being, Sri Aurobindo is on a par with her from a certain stage of their jointly developed

Integral Yoga. The stress need not conflict with the talk of Chakras. These too are factors in the Integral Yoga,

even if not exactly in the old way.

You say that the psychic being was not a part of the past Yogas. But the psychic being is the truefountainhead of spiritual evolution. Even the urge towards a supracosmic realisation comes ultimately from it. In

fact the psychic being hails from the Transcendent, the negative aspect of which is the Supracosmic in the sense of

the Extracosmic Unmanifest. Since the past Yogas did not envisage a fulfilment here and now but strained in one

way or another towards the Beyond, the psychic's full play was never known or allowed. Even so, in the Bhakti

Yoga, especially of the Vaishnava kind la Chaitanya, the play of the psychic is extremely intense. What was still

not seen was the complete direction of its intensity. From the age of the Rigveda with its Agni, the flame of

aspiration, "the Immortal in the mortal", and from the age of the Upanishads with their Purusha no bigger than the

thumb of a man in the cave of the heart - the Chaitya Purusha or Antaratman, as Sri Aurobindo doubly calls it - the

psychic being was known. The Upanishadic Yoga is actually a universalisation

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of consciousness into the infinite and eternal Self from the heart-centre where the Chaitya Purusha, the

Antaratman, the thumb-like Purusha, is seated. The Gita with its call for total surrender to the Divine beyond all

dharmas is fundamentally a call to the psychic being from the Purushottama, the Super-personal Transcendent

who is higher than the mutable (Kshara) and the immutable (Akshara) Purushas - the Super-personal Being from

whose transcendence the "soul" in its earthly embodiment in life after life has derived.

Of course with the transformation of the cells, all their constituents - chromosomes, molecules, atoms,

electrons, quarks and what else - will automatically get divinised in the individual body. One need not be surprised

at such a consummation being involved by the Supermind's work in the cells. The constituents no less than thecells have potential divinity. Don't you remember the octave of that sonnet of Sri Aurobindo's? -

The electron on which forms and worlds are built,

Leaped into being, a particle of God.

A spark from the eternal energy spilt,

It is the Infinite's blind minute abode.

In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides.

The One devised innumerably to be;

His oneness in invisible forms he hides,

Time's tiny temples of eternity.

I shall end now - repeating your phrase: "Well, this will be all for the present."

Let me express again my gratefulness for your frank praise of my many-sided and somewhat "unorthodox"

analytical treatment

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The Reader's Comment

September

18,1979

You have very well explained all the points and your explanation about the subtle-physical is so elaborate and

convincing to my understanding that I could hardly have clarified it better. I am grateful to you for your favour.

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