Integral Yoga - An Outline of Major Aims Processes, Methods and Results - Part Four

PART FOUR

Ascent to the Supermind, Descent of the Supermind and Supramental Transformation

The process of ascent to the supermind from the mind and the descent of the supermind, which would transform successively the Overmind, Intuitive mind, Illumined mind, Higher mind, mind and the rest cannot be a logical series of separate segments. Sri Aurobindo has stated that while a sufficient integration of one status has to be complete before an ascent to the next higher station will be entirely secure, it is a totality of ascending powers of being which interpenetrate and dovetail and exercise in their action on each other a power of mutual modification. As a result, when the higher descends into the lower consciousness, it alters the lower but is also modified and diminished by it; similarly, when the lower ascends, it is sublimated but at the same time qualifies the sublimating substance and power. Sri Aurobindo compares the evolution of the whole consciousness with the movement of an ascending ocean of Nature; the movement of a tide or a mounting flux, a leading fringe touches the higher degrees of a cliff or hill, but the rest is still below. At each stage the higher parts of the nature may be provisionally but incompletely organized in the new consciousness; but lower are in a state of flux or formation, partly moving in the old way though influenced and beginning to change, partly belonging to the new kind but still imperfectly achieved and not yet firm in the change. Sri Aurobindo also compares this movement with that of an

army. As he explains:

"Another image might be that of an army advancing in columns which annexes new ground, while the main body is still behind in a territory overrun but too large to be effectively occupied, so that there has to be frequent halt and partial return to the traversed areas for consolidation and assurance of the hold on the occupied country and assimilation of its people. A rapid conquest might be possible, but it would be of the nature of an encampment or domination established in a foreign country; it would not be the assumption, total assimilation, integration needed for the entire supramental change."⁵²

A capital problem of transformation is related to the fact that in the substance of the Inconscience, there is a self-protective law of blind imperative Necessity which limits the play of the possibilities that emerge from it or enter into it and prevents them from establishing their free action and result or realizing the intensity of their own absolute. The inconscience opposes the higher power and their intensities when they descend into it or enter into it. The inconscience has established an inexorable Law, and it meets always the claim of life with the law of death, the demand of Light with the need of a relief of shadow and a background of darkness, the sovereignty and freedom and dynamism of the Spirit with its own force of adjustment by limitation, demarcation by incapacity, foundation of energy on the repose of an original Inertia.

There is, of course, as Sri Aurobindo explains, an occult truth behind the negations of the inconscient; negations contain the power which sustains them, and that power can be manifested only when a higher power is able to penetrate

in the depth of the inconscience. That power has to be the highest power which can reconcile the truth behind the negation and the truth which is manifest in the operation of the higher power. As Sri Aurobindo points out, there is an occult truth behind the negations of the Inconscience which only the Supermind with its reconciliation of contraries in the original Reality can take up and so discover the pragmatic solution of the enigma. In the words of Sri Aurobindo:

"Only the supramental Force can entirely overcome this difficulty of the fundamental Nescience; for with it enters an opposite and luminous imperative Necessity which underlies all things and is the original and final self-determining truth-force of the self-existent Infinite. This greater luminous spiritual Necessity and its sovereign imperative alone can displace or entirely penetrate, transform into itself and so replace the blind Ananke of the Inconscience."⁵³

When the supermind descends, the whole substance of the being comes to be changed supramentally. At the lowest level of material nature, the involved Supermind emerges to meet and join with the supramental light and power descending from the superconscient. The consequence of the transformation of the Inconscient would mean the appearance in the evolution of a Gnostic being and a Gnostic nature, Gnostic Purusha and Gnostic Prakriti. Humanity today is, in respect to the higher possible evolution, much in the position of the original Ape of the Darwinian Theory. That ape, leading his instinctive arboreal life in primitive forests would have been utterly incapable of conceiving that there would be one day an animal on the earth who would use a new faculty called reason upon the materials of his inner and outer existence, who would dominate by that power his

instincts and habits, change the circumstances of his physical life; it would have been impossible for that Ape to conceive that a rational animal would build for himself houses of stone, manipulate Nature's forces, sail the seas, ride the air, develop codes of conduct, evolve conscious methods for his mental and spiritual development. Could he have imagined that by any progress of Nature or long effort of will and tendency he himself could develop into that animal? It is true that man, because he has acquired reason and still more because he has indulged his power of imagination and intuition, is able to conceive existence higher than his own and even to envisage his personal elevation beyond his present state into that existence. Sri Aurobindo points out that man's dream of God and Heaven is really a dream of his own perfection. But he finds the same difficulty in accepting its practical realization here for his ultimate aim as would the ancestor Ape, if called upon to believe in himself as the future Man. And yet, when we study the law of evolution in the light of the operations of spiritual consciousness, and if we compare the Darwinian Ape and the human animal that we call Man more intimately, and when we discover the soul in man and the intentions of that soul as also the intention that seems to be operating of the supermind that is above and the supermind that is in the inconscience, we shall be led to the conclusion that man is a transitional being and that he is a living and thinking laboratory in whom the nature, with the collaboration of the conscious will in man, is working out a new species, the supramental species.

Evolution and Establishment of the Supermind in Matter

According to Sri Aurobindo, all problems of existence

are essentially problems of harmony; all Nature, he points out, seeks a harmony, life and matter in their own sphere as much as mind in the arrangement of its perceptions. It is that drive towards harmony that reconciles Life and Matter, and even when they are sufficiently not reconciled, the drive towards complete harmony is still at work to arrive at a complete harmony. It is that drive which has to some extent reconciled life and mind, and not satisfied with whatever harmony has so far been achieved, there is yet a continuous drive towards arrival of a perfect harmony. Similarly, there is upward impulse of man towards the harmony and perfect integration of the body, life and mind with the supermind. That perfect harmony is the logical completion of a fundamental method of Nature and the very sense of her universal strivings. Sri Aurobindo states:

"The accordance of active Life with a material of form in which the condition of activity itself seems to be inertia, is one problem of opposites that Nature has solved and seeks always to solve better with greater complexities; for its perfect solution would be the material immortality of a fully organized mind-supporting animal body. The accordance of a conscious mind and conscious will with a form and a life in themselves not overtly self-conscious and capable at best of a mechanical or sub-conscious will is another problem of opposites in which she has produced astonishing results and aims always at higher marvels; for there her ultimate miracle would be an animal consciousness no longer seeking but possessed of Truth and Light, with the practical omnipotence which would result from the possession of a direct and perfected knowledge. Not only, then, is the upward impulse of man towards the accordance of yet higher opposites rational in itself, but it is the only logical completion of a rule

and an effort that seem to be a fundamental method of Nature and the very sense of her universal strivings."⁵⁴

This method of nature is illustrated in the undeniable fact of evolution of Life in Matter and the evolution of Mind in Matter. What could be the driving force of evolution, unless it could be the presence of involved Life in Matter and of Mind in Matter? And considering that at the base of evolution is inconscience, that inconscience itself must be a state of involved Life and Mind. But considering that evolution is still continuing and man is striving upward towards higher manifestation of consciousness, we are obliged to fathom into the depths of the inconscience and observe that Inconscience is a state of involved Supermind. As Sri Aurobindo points out, there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond mind. There is, Sri Aurobindo affirms, the unconquerable impulse in man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality, and this impulse can be seen in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond mind. The impulse of life towards the mind bears a great analogical relationship with the impulse of the mind towards what can be called the higher, supramental and divine life. As Sri Aurobindo states:

"As the impulse towards Mind ranges from the more sensitive reactions of Life in the metal and the plant up to its full organization in man, so in man himself there is the same ascending series, the preparation, if nothing more, of a higher and divine life. The animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man. Man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose

conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god. Or shall we not say, rather, to manifest God? For if evolution is the progressive manifestation by Nature of that which slept or worked in her, involved, it is also the overt realization of that which she secretly is. We cannot, then, bid her pause at a given stage of her evolution, nor have we the right to condemn with the religionist as perverse and presumptuous or with the rationalist as a disease or hallucination any intention she may evince or effort she may make to go beyond. ."⁵⁵

Intention of the Supramental Evolution

But apart from these indications which can be derived from the evolutionary movement, the intention of the supramental evolution on the earth is revealed by the supermind itself as also from the knowledge that can be gained of the purpose of the descent of the soul in the evolutionary movement on the earth. As Sri Aurobindo points out, the individual soul or the jivatman has possibility of entering into unity with the active nature of the Supreme and not only into a static essential oneness. And, the Supreme must surely know himself and also how the world process has come about and how, from the inconscience, evolution has proceeded and the role that the jivatman plays in respect of the evolutionary process. In the deepest experiences of the soul, the delegate of the Jivatman in evolution, it is discovered that the purpose for which the exclusive concentration of consciousness has resulted in ignorance is to trace the cycle of self-oblivion and self-discovery. Sri Aurobindo points out that it is to find himself in the apparent opposites of his being and his nature that Sachchidananda descends into the material Nescience and

puts on its phenomenal ignorance as a superficial mask in which he hides himself from his own conscious energy, leaving itself forgetful and absorbed in its works and forms. He further points out that it is in those forms that the slowly awaking soul has to accept the phenomenal action of an ignorance which is really knowledge awaking progressively out of the original nescience, and it is in the new conditions created by these workings that it has to rediscover itself and divinely transform by that light the life which is thus labouring to fulfill the purpose of its descent into the Inconscience. The real purpose of the descent of Sachchidananda and the descent of the soul is stated by Sri Aurobindo as follows:

"Not to return as speedily as may be to heavens where perfect light and joy are eternal or to the supracosmic bliss is the object of this cosmic cycle, nor merely to repeat a purposeless round in a long unsatisfactory groove of ignorance seeking for knowledge and never finding it perfectly, — in that case the ignorance would be either an inexplicable blunder of the All-conscient or a painful and purposeless Necessity equally inexplicable, — but to realize the Ananda of the Self in other conditions than the supracosmic, in cosmic being, and to find its heaven of joy and light even in the oppositions offered by the terms of an embodied material existence, by struggle therefore towards the joy of self-discovery, would seem to be the true object of the birth of the soul in the human body and of the labour of the human race in the series of its cycles. The Ignorance is a necessary, though quite subordinate term which the universal Knowledge has imposed on itself that that movement might be possible, — not a blunder and a fall, but a purposeful descent, not a curse, but a divine opportunity. To find and

embody the All-Delight in an intense summary of its manifoldness, to achieve a possibility of the infinite Existence which could not be achieved in other conditions, to create out of Matter a temple of the Divinity would seem to be the task imposed on the spirit born into the material universe."⁵⁶

Aim of Building Material Temple of Divinity on the Earth

The manifestation of the supermind on the earth would be the fulfillment of the aim of building the material temple of divinity; in that condition, the soul would participate in the integrality of the supramental gnosis, and the descent of the Gnostic Light would effectuate a complete transformation of the Ignorance and even penetration into the Inconscience; even the supramental consciousness could come to be fixed in the physical consciousness. As Sri Aurobindo points out, a supramental change of the whole substance of the being can take place when the involved Supermind in Nature would emerge to meet and join with the supramental light and power descending from Super-nature. Sri Aurobindo goes farther and states that when the supramental principle is established permanently on the earth, the intervening powers of Overmind and Spiritual mind would be able to found themselves securely upon it and reach their own perfection. They would become, according to Sri Aurobindo, a hierarchy of states of consciousness in the earth-existence rising out of Mind and physical life to the supreme supramental level. In the context of this development, mind and mental humanity would remain as one step in the spiritual evolution; but other degrees above it would be there formed and accessible by which the embodied mental being,

as it became ready, could climb into the gnosis and change into an embodied supramental being.