PART – I
SECTION ONE
The Supramental Evolution
THERE have been times when the seeking for spiritual
attainment was, at least in certain civilisations, more intense and widespread
than now or rather than it has been in the world in general during the past few
centuries. For now the curve seems to be the beginning of a new turn of seeking
which takes its start from what was achieved in the past and projects itself
towards a greater future. But always, even in the age of the Vedas or in Egypt,
the spiritual achievement or the occult knowledge was confined to a few, it was
not spread in the whole mass of humanity. The mass of humanity evolves slowly,
containing in itself all stages of the evolution from the material and the vital
man to the mental man. A small minority has pushed beyond the barriers, opening
the doors to occult and spiritual knowledge and preparing the ascent of the
evolution beyond mental man into spiritual and supramental being. Sometimes this
minority has exercised an enormous influence as in Vedic India, Egypt or,
according to tradition, in Atlantis, and determined the civilisation of the
race, giving it a strong stamp of the spiritual or the occult; sometimes they
have stood apart in their secret schools or orders, not directly influencing a
civilisation which was sunk in material ignorance or in chaos and darkness or in
the hard external enlightenment which rejects spiritual knowledge.
The cycles of evolution tend always
upward, but they are cycles and do not ascend in a straight line. The process
therefore gives the impression of a series of ascents and descents, but what is
essential in the gains of the evolution is kept or, even if eclipsed for a time,
re-emerges in new forms suitable to the new ages. The creation has descended all
the degrees of being from the Supermind to Matter and in each degree it has
created a world, reign, plane or order proper to that degree. In the creating of
the material world there was a plunge of this descending Consciousness into an
apparent Inconscience and an emergence of it out
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of that Inconscience, degree by degree, until it
recovers its highest spiritual and supramental summits and manifests their
powers here in Matter. But even in the Inconscience there is a secret
Consciousness which works, one may say, by an involved and hidden Intuition
proper to itself. In each stage of Matter, in each stage of Life, this Intuition
assumes a working proper to that stage and acts from behind the veil, supporting
and enforcing the immediate necessities of the creative Force. There is an
Intuition in Matter which holds the action of the material world from the
electron to the sun and planets and their contents. There is an Intuition in
Life which similarly supports and guides the play and development of Life in
Matter till it is ready for the mental evolution of which man is the vehicle. In
man also the creation follows the same upward process, − the Intuition within
develops according to the stage he has reached in his progress. Even the precise
intellect of the scientist, who is inclined to deny the separate existence or
the superiority of Intuition, yet cannot really move forward unless there is
behind him a mental Intuition, which enables him to take a forward step or to
divine what has to be done. Intuition therefore is present at the beginning of
things and in their middle as well as at their consummation.
But Intuition takes its proper form
only when one goes beyond the mental into the spiritual domain, for there only
it comes fully forward from behind the veil and reveals its true and complete
nature. Along with the mental evolution of man there has been going forward the
early process of another evolution which prepares the spiritual and supramental
being. This has had two lines, one the discovery of the occult forces secret in
Nature and of the hidden planes and worlds concealed from us by the world of
Matter and the other the discovery of man's soul and spiritual self. If the
tradition of Atlantis is correct, it is that of a progress which went to the
extreme of occult knowledge, but could go no farther. In the India of Vedic
times we have the record left of the other line of achievement, that of
spiritual self-discovery; occult knowledge was there but kept subordinate. We
may say that here in India the reign of Intuition came first, intellectual Mind
developing afterwards in the later philosophy and science. But in fact the mass
of men at the time, it is quite evident, lived
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entirely on the material plane,
worshipped the Godheads of material Nature, sought from them entirely material
objects. The effort of the Vedic mystics revealed to them the things behind
through a power of inner sight and hearing and experience which was confined to
a limited number of seers and sages and kept carefully secret from the mass of
humanity − secrecy was always insisted on by the mystic. We may very well
attribute this flowering of Intuition on the spiritual plane to a rapid
re-emergence of essential gains brought down from a previous cycle. If we
analyse the spiritual history of India we shall find that after reaching this
height there was a descent which attempted to take up each lower degree of the
already evolved consciousness and link it to the spiritual at the summit. The
Vedic age was followed by a great outburst of intellect and philosophy which yet
took spiritual truth as its basis and tried to reach it anew, not through a
direct Intuition or occult process as did the Vedic seers, but by the power of
the mind's reflective, speculative, logical thought; at the same time processes
of yoga were developed which used the thinking mind as a means of arriving at
spiritual realisation, spiritualizing
this mind itself at the same time. Then followed an era of the development of
philosophies and yoga processes which more and more used the emotional and
aesthetic being as the means of spiritual realisation and spiritualised the
emotional level in man through the heart and feeling. This was accompanied by
Tantric and other processes which took up the mental will, the life-will, the
will of sensations and made them at once the instruments and the field of
spiritualisation. In the Hathayoga and the various attempts at divinisation of
the body there is also a line of endeavour which attempted to arrive at the same
achievement with regard to living Matter; but this still awaits the discovery of
the true characteristic method and power of Spirit in the body. We may say
therefore that the universal Consciousness after its descent into Matter has
conducted the evolution there along two lines, one of ascent to the discovery of
the Self and Spirit, the other of descent through the already evolved levels of
mind, life and body so as to bring down the spiritual consciousness into these
also and to fulfil thereby some secret intention in the
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creation of the material universe. Our yoga is
in its principle a taking up and summarising and completing of this process, an
endeavour to rise to the highest possible supramental level and bring down its
consciousness and power into mind, life and body.
The condition of present-day
civilisation, materialistic with an externalised intellect and life-endeavour,
which you find so painful, is an episode, but one which was perhaps inevitable.
For if the spiritualisation of the mind, life and body is the thing to be
achieved, the conscious presence of the Spirit even in the physical
consciousness and material body, an age which puts Matter and the physical life
in the forefront and devotes itself to the effort of the intellect to discover
the truth of material existence, had perhaps to come. On one side, by
materialising everything up to the intellect itself it has created the extreme
difficulty of which you speak for the spiritual seeker, but, on the other hand,
it has given the life in Matter an importance which the spirituality of the past
was inclined to deny to it. In a way it has made the spiritualisation of it a
necessity for spiritual seeking and so aided the descent movement of the
evolving spiritual consciousness in the earth-nature. More than that we cannot
claim for it; its conscious effect has been rather to stifle and almost
extinguish the spiritual element in humanity; it is only by the divine use of
the pressure of contraries and an intervention from above that there will be the
spiritual outcome.
All the phases of human history may be regarded
as a working out of the earth-consciousness in which each phase has its place
and significance, so this materialistic intellectual phase had to come and has
had, no doubt, its purpose and significance. One may also hold that one of its
issues was as an experiment to see how far and whither the human consciousness
would go through an intellectual and external control of Nature with physical
and intellectual means only and without the intervention of any higher
consciousness and knowledge − or that it may help by resistance to draw the
spiritual consciousness that
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is growing behind all vicissitudes to attempt
the control of Matter and turn it towards the Divine, as the Tantriks and
Vaishnavas tried to do with the emotional and lower vital nature, not contenting
themselves with the Vedantic turning of the mind towards the Supreme. But it is
difficult to go farther than that or to hold that this materialism is itself a
spiritual thing or that the dark, confused and violent state of contemporary
Europe was an indispensable preparation for the descent of the Spirit. This
darkness and violence which seems bent on destroying such light of mental
idealism and desire of harmony as had succeeded in establishing itself in the
mind of humanity, is obviously due to a descent of fierce and dark vital Powers
which seek to possess the human world for their own, not for a spiritual
purpose. It is true that such a precipitation of Asuric forces from the darker
vital worlds has been predicted by some occultists as the one first result of
the pressure of the Divine descent on their vital domain, but it was regarded as
a circumstance of the battle, not as something helping towards the Divine
Victory. The churning of Matter by the attempt of human intellect to conquer
material Nature and use it for its purpose may break something of the passivity
and inertia, but it is done for material ends, in a rajasic spirit, with a
denial of spirituality as its mental basis. Such an attempt may end, seems to be
ending indeed, in chaos and disintegration, while the new attempts at creation
and reintegration seem to combine the obscure rigidity of material Nature with a
resurgence of the barbaric brutality and violence of a half-animal vital Nature.
How are the spiritual forces to deal with all that or make use of such a
churning of the energies of the material universe? The way of the Spirit is the
way of peace and light and harmony; if it has to battle, it is precisely because
of the presence of such forces which seek either to extinguish or to prevent the
spiritual light. In the spiritual change inertia has to be replaced by the
divine peace and calm, the rajasic troubled energy by a tranquil and potent,
pure and liberated dynamis, while the mind must be kept plastic for the workings
of a higher Light of knowledge. How will the activity of Materialism lend itself
to that change?
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Materialism can hardly be spiritual
in its basis, because its basic method is just the opposite of the spiritual way
of doing things. The spiritual works from within outward, the way of materialism
is to work from out inwards. It makes the inner a result of the outer,
fundamentally a phenomenon of Matter and it works upon that view of things. It
seeks to “perfect” humanity by outward means and one of its main efforts is to
construct a perfect social machine which will train and oblige men to be what
they ought to be. The loss of the ego in the Divine is the spiritual ideal; here
it is replaced by the immolation of the individual to the military and
industrial State. Where is there any spirituality in all that? Spirituality can
only come by opening of the mind, vital and physical to the inmost soul, to the
higher Self, to the Divine, and their subordination to the spiritual forces and
instrumentation as channels of the inner Light, the higher Knowledge and Power.
Other things, mental, aesthetic, vital, are often misnamed `spirituality', but
they lack the essential character without which the word loses its true
significance.
When there is a pressure on the vital world due
to the preparing Descent from above, that world usually precipitates something
of itself into the human. The vital world is very large and far exceeds the
human in extent. But usually it dominates by influence not by descent. Of course
the effort of this part of the vital world is always to maintain humanity under
its sway and prevent the higher Light.
The vital descent cannot prevent the supramental
− still less can the possessed
nations do it by their material power, since the supramental descent is
primarily a spiritual fact which will bear its necessary outward consequences.
What previous vital descents have done is to falsify the Light that came down as
in the history of Christianity where it took possession of the
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eaching and diluted it and deprived it of any
widespread fulfilment. But the supermind is by definition a Light that cannot be
distorted if it comes in its own right and by its own presence. It is only when
it holds itself back and allows inferior Powers of consciousness to use a
diminished and already deflected Truth that the knowledge can be seized by the
vital Forces and made to serve their own purpose.
All that you say only amounts, on the general
issue, to the fact that this is a world of slow evolution in which man has
emerged out of the beast and is still not out of it, light out of darkness, and
a higher consciousness out of first a dead and then a struggling and troubled
unconsciousness. A spiritual consciousness is emerging and it is through this
spiritual consciousness that one can meet the Divine. Religions, full of vital
and mental, mixed, troubled and ignorant stuff, can only get glimpses of the
Divine; positivist reason with its questioning based upon things as they are and
refusing to believe in anything that may or will be cannot get any vision at
all. The spiritual is a new consciousness that has to evolve and has been
evolving. It is quite natural that at first and for a long time only a few
should get the full light, while a greater number but still only a few compared
with the mass of humanity, should get it partially. But what has been gained by
the few can at a stage of the evolution be completed and more generalised and
that is the attempt which we are making. But if this greater consciousness of
light, peace and joy is to be gained, it cannot be by questioning and scepticism
which can only fall back on what is and say: “It is impossible, what has not
been in the past cannot be in the future, what is so imperfectly realised as yet
cannot be better realised in the future.” A faith, a will, or at least a
persistent demand and aspiration are needed − a feeling that with this and this
alone I can be satisfied and a push towards it that will not cease till it is
done. That is why a spirit of scepticism and denial stands in the way, because
they stand against the creation
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of the conditions under which spiritual
experience can unroll itself.
The descent of the supermind is a long process,
or at least a process with a long preparation, and one can only say that the
work is going on sometimes with a strong pressure for completion, sometimes
retarded by the things that rise from below and have to be dealt with before
further progress can be made. The process is a spiritual evolutionary process,
concentrated into a brief period; it could be done otherwise (by what men would
regard as a miraculous intervention) only if the human mind were more flexible
and less attached to its ignorance than it is. As we envisage it, it must
manifest in a few first and then spread, but it is not likely to overpower the
earth in a moment. It is not advisable to discuss too much what it will do and
how it will do it, because these are things the supermind itself will fix,
acting out of the Divine Truth in it, and the mind must not try to fix for it
grooves in which it will run. Naturally, the release from subconscient ignorance
and from disease, duration of life at will, and a change in the functionings of
the body must be among the ultimate elements of a supramental change; but the
details of these things must be left for the supramental Energy to work out
according to the Truth of its own nature.
The descent of the supramental is an
inevitable necessity in the logic of things and is therefore sure. It is because
people do not understand what the supermind is or realise the significance of
the emergence of consciousness in a world of inconscient Matter that they are
unable to realise this inevitability. I suppose a matter-of-fact observer, if
there had been one at the time of the unrelieved reign of inanimate Matter in
the earth's beginning, would have criticised any promise of the emergence of
life in a world of dead earth and rock and mineral as an absurdity and a
chimera; so too, afterwards he would have repeated this mistake and regarded the
emergence of thought and reason in an animal world as an absurdity and a
chimera. It is the same now with the appearance of supermind in the
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stumbling mentality of this world of human
consciousness and its reasoning ignorance.
It is quite possible that there have been
periods of harmony on different levels, not supramental, which were afterwards
disturbed − but that
could only be a stage or resting place in an arc of spiritual evolution out of
the Inconscience.
What is meant here is the Divine in its
essential manifestation which reveals itself to us as Light and Consciousness,
Power, Love and Beauty. But in its actual cosmic manifestation the Supreme,
being the Infinite and not bound by any limitation, can manifest in Itself, in
its consciousness of innumerable possibilities, something that seems to be the
opposite of itself, something in which there can be Darkness, Inconscience,
Inertia, Insensibility, Disharmony and Disintegration. It is this that we see at
the basis of the material world and speak of nowadays as the Inconscient
−
the Inconscient Ocean of the
Rigveda in which the One was hidden and arose in the form of this universe
−
or, as it is sometimes called,
the non-being, Asat. The Ignorance which is the characteristic of our mind and
life is the result of this origin in the Inconscience. Moreover, in the
evolution out of inconscient existence there rise up naturally powers and beings
which are interested in the maintenance of all negations of the Divine, error
and unconsciousness, pain, suffering, obscurity, death, weakness, illness,
disharmony, evil. Hence the perversion of the manifestation here, its inability
to reveal the true essence of the Divine. Yet in this very base of this
evolution all that is divine is there involved and pressing to evolve, Light,
Consciousness, Power, Perfection, Beauty, Love. For in the Inconscient itself
and behind the perversions of the Ignorance the Divine Consciousness lies
concealed and works and must more and more appear, throwing off in the end its
disguises. That is why it is said that the world is called to express the
Divine.
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Your statement about the supramental evolution
is correct except that it does not follow that humanity as a whole will become
supramental. What is more likely to happen is that the supramental principle
will be established in the evolution by the descent just as the mental principle
was established by the appearance of thinking Mind and Man in earthly life.
There will be a race of supramental beings on the earth just as now there is a
race of mental beings. Man himself will find a greater possibility of rising to
the planes intermediary between his mind and supermind and making their powers
effective in his life, which will mean a great change in humanity on earth, but
it is not likely that the mental stage will disappear from the ascending ladder
and, if so, the continued existence of a mental race will be necessary so as to
form a stage between the vital and the supramental in the evolutionary movement
of the Spirit.
Such a descent of higher beings as
you suggest may be envisaged as a part of the process of the change. But the
main part of the change will be the appearance of the supramental being and the
organisation of a supramental nature here, as a mental being has appeared and a
mental nature organised itself during the last stage of the evolution. I prefer
nowadays not to speak of the descent of the higher beings because my experience
is that it leads to a vain and often egoistic romanticism which distracts the
attention from the real work, that of the realisation of the Divine and the
transformation of the nature.
What we are doing, if and when we succeed, will
be a beginning, not a completion. It is the foundation of a new consciousness on
earth − a consciousness
with infinite possibilities of manifestation. The eternal progression is in the
manifestation and beyond it there is no progression.
If the redemption of the soul from
the physical vesture be the object, then there is no need of supramentalisation.
Spiritual Mukti and Nirvana are sufficient. If the object is to rise to
supraphysical planes, then also there is no need of
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supramentalisation. One can enter into some
heaven above by devotion to the Lord of that heaven. But that is no progression.
The other worlds are typal worlds, each fixed in its own kind and type and law.
Evolution takes place on the earth and therefore the earth is the proper field
for progression. The beings of the other worlds do not progress from one world
to another. They remain fixed to their own type.
The purely monistic Vedantist says,
all is Brahman, life is a dream, an unreality, only Brahman exists. One has
Nirvana or Mukti, then one lives only till the body falls − after that there is no such thing as
life.
They do not believe in
transformation, because mind, life and body are an ignorance, an illusion
−
the only reality is the
featureless relationless Self or Brahman. Life is a thing of relations; in the
pure Self, all life and relations disappear. What would be the use or the
possibility of transforming an illusion that can never be anything else (however
transformed) than an illusion? There is no such thing for them as a “Nirvanic
life”.
It is only some yogas that aim at a
transformation of any kind except that of ignorance into knowledge. The idea
varies, − sometimes a
divine knowledge or power or else a divine purity or an ethical perfection or a
divine love.
What has to be overcome is the
opposition of the Ignorance that does not want the transformation of the nature.
If that can be overcome, then old spiritual ideas will not form an obstacle.
It is not intended to supramentalise
humanity at large, but to establish the principle of the supramental
consciousness in the earth-evolution. If that is done, all that is needed will
be evolved by the supramental Power itself. It is not therefore important that
the mission should be widespread. What is important is that the thing should be
done at all in however small a number; that is the only difficulty. If the
transformation of the body is complete, that means no subjection to death
−
it does not mean that one will
be bound to keep the same body for all time. One creates a new body for oneself
when one wants to change, but how it will be done cannot be said now. The
present method is by physical
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birth − some occultists suppose that a time will come
when that will not be necessary − but the question must be left for the
supramental evolution to decide.
The questions about the supermind
cannot be answered profitably now. Supermind cannot be described in terms that
the mind will understand, because the terms will be mental and mind will
understand them in a mental way and mental sense and miss their true import. It
would therefore be a waste of time and energy which should be devoted to the
preliminary work −
psychicisation and spiritualisation of the being and nature without which no
supramentalisation is possible. Let the whole dynamic nature led by the psychic
make itself full of the dynamic spiritual light, peace, purity, knowledge,
force; let it afterwards get experience of the intermediate spiritual planes and
know, feel and act in their sense; then it will be possible to speak last of the
supramental transformation.
What is a perfect technique of yoga or rather of
a world-changing or Nature-changing yoga? Not one that takes a man by a little
bit of him somewhere, attaches a hook, and pulls him up by a pulley into Nirvana
or Paradise. The technique of a world-changing yoga has to be as multiform,
sinuous, patient, all-including as the world itself. If it does not deal with
all the difficulties or possibilities and carefully deal with each necessary
element, has it any chance of success? And can a perfect technique which
everybody can understand do that? It is not like writing a small poem in a fixed
metre with a limited number of modulations. If you take the poem simile, it is
the Mahabharata of a Mahabharata that has to be done. And what, compared with
the limited Greek perfection, is the technique of the Mahabharata?
Next, what is the use of vicārabuddhi in such a case? If one has
to get a new consciousness which surpasses the reasoning intellect, can one do
it on lines which are to be judged and understood by the reasoning intellect,
controlled at every step by it, told by the intellect what it is to do, what is
the measure
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of its achievements, what its steps must be and
what their value? If one does that, will one ever get out of the range of the
reasoning intelligence into what is beyond it? And if one does, how shall others
judge what one is doing by the intellectual measure? How can one judge what is
beyond the ordinary consciousness when one is oneself in the ordinary
consciousness? Is it not only by exceeding yourself that you can feel,
experience, judge what exceeds you? What is the value of a judgment without the
feeling and experience?
What the supramental will do the mind
cannot foresee or lay down. The mind is ignorance seeking for the Truth, the
supramental by its very definition is the Truth-Consciousness, Truth in
possession of itself and fulfilling itself by its own power. In a supramental
world imperfection and disharmony are bound to disappear. But what we propose
just now is not to make the earth a supramental world but to bring down the
supramental as a power and established consciousness in the midst of the rest
−
to let it work there and fulfil
itself as Mind descended into Life and Matter and has worked as a Power there to
fulfil itself in the midst of the rest. This will be enough to change the world
and to change Nature by breaking down her present limits. But what, how, by what
degrees it will do it, is a thing that ought not to be said now −
when the Light is there, the
Light will itself do its work − when the supramental Will stands on earth, that Will will decide. It will
establish a perfection, a harmony, a Truth-creation − for the rest, well, it will be the
rest − that is all.
The whole of humanity cannot be changed at once.
What has to be done is to bring the Higher Consciousness down into the
earth-consciousness and establish it there as a constant realised force. Just as
mind and life have been established and embodied in Matter, so to establish and
embody the supramental Force.
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It would not be possible to change all that in a
moment − we have always
said that the whole of humanity will not change the moment there is the Descent.
But what can be done is to establish the higher principle in the
earth-consciousness in such a way that it will remain and go on strengthening
and spreading itself in the earth-life. That is how a new principle in the
evolution must necessarily work.
It [the world] wants and it does not want
something that it has not got. All that the supramental could give, the inner
mind of the world would like to have, but its outer mind, its vital and physical
do not like to pay the price. But, after all, I am not trying to change the
world all at once but only to bring down centrally something into it
it has not yet, a new consciousness and power.
This transformation cannot be done individually
or in a solitary way only. No individual solitary transformation unconcerned
with the work for the earth (which means more than any individual
transformation) would be either possible or useful. Also no individual human
being can by his own power alone work out the transformation, nor is it the
object of the yoga to create an individual superman here and there. The object
of the yoga is to bring down the supramental consciousness on earth, to fix it
there, to create a new race with the principle of the supramental consciousness
governing the inner and outer individual and collective life.
That force accepted by individual
after individual according to their preparation would establish the supramental
consciousness in the physical world and so create a nucleus for its own
expansion.
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It is first through the individuals that it [the
supramental consciousness] becomes part of the earth-consciousness and
afterwards it spreads from the first centres and takes up more and more of the
global consciousness till it becomes an established force there.
All that is absurd. The descent of the
supramental means only that the Power will be there in the earth-consciousness
as a living force just as the thinking mental and higher mental are already
there. But an animal cannot take advantage of the presence of the thinking
mental Power or an undeveloped man of the presence of the higher mental Power
−
so too anybody will not be able
to take advantage of the presence of the supramental Power. I have also often
enough said that it will be at first for the few, not for the whole earth,
− only there will be a growing
influence of it on the earth-life.
It [the descent of the supermind into the
earth-consciousness] would not necessarily be known by everybody. Besides, even
if the descent were here one would have to be ready before one could get the
final change.
Not in their entirety − for that [the transformation of the
Cosmic Mind, Life and Matter] is not our business. It is ourselves that we have
to transform and change the earth-consciousness by bringing in the supramental
principle into the evolution there. Once there it will necessarily have a
powerful influence in the whole earth-life − as mind has had through the evolution of men,
but much greater.
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