Will and Action, samkalpa and krīyā
The work of Aswapati as the Divine Incarnate is to will a new creation and establish it in the House of the Spirit. The next task of making it manifest upon earth is the task of Savitri as the Shakti Incarnate. Will and Action, samkalpa and krīyā, the first followed by the second, both are necessary for bringing about the birth of the new world here upon earth, in fact, wherever it has to be. The universal principle is: he wills and she executes. The second cannot happen without the first. It is as though a transcendental archetype, a dynamic and breathing design or model charged with the possibilities of expression, is the sine qua non if a new world is at all to take birth here. When it is created up there, in the Real-Idea, in its luminous potencies, then only can it materialise here, brought into the evolutionary process. It is absolutely the necessary condition for the terrestrial evolution to open itself to it, to make progress from light to greater light, from knowledge to higher knowledge, from joy to infinity of joy. Nothing can come up here unless an archetype exists in the Transcendental. In the Mother’s words, put negatively: without him I exist not; without me he is unmanifest.

The epic Savitri can therefore be treated as made up of two important parts: to will and found the new creation in the transcendent, and to make it manifest upon earth. The first ten thousand lines, Part I with its three Books, the first twenty-four cantos, is the Will or samkalpa-aspect in the nature of King Aswapati’s eighteen years of Yajna-Tapasya. The other parts of about the same length, with their twenty-five cantos deal with the aspect of execution or krīyā entrusted to Savitri.

In her prayer dated 25 September 1914 the Mother says:

The Lord has willed and Thou dost execute:
A new Light shall break upon the earth,
A new world shall be born,
And the things that were promised shall be fulfilled.

The act of willing by the supreme Lord and the difficult act of fulfilling the promise by the executive Power go in that expected sequence, which in their accomplishment, siddhi, give birth to the new world.

In this respect let us remember what in different contexts the Mother had said pertaining to the present theme:

# It matters little that there are thousands of beings plunged in the densest ignorance, He whom we saw yesterday is on earth; his presence is enough to prove that a day will come when darkness shall be transformed into light, and Thy reign shall be indeed established upon earth. O Lord, Divine Builder of this marvel, my heart overflows with joy and gratitude when I think of it, and my hope has no bounds. My adoration is beyond all words, my reverence is silent.

# Sri Aurobindo is an emanation of the Supreme who came on earth to announce the manifestation of a new race and a new world: the Supramental.

# Let us prepare for it in all sincerity and eagerness.

# Sri Aurobindo came on earth from the Supreme to announce the manifestation of a new race and the new world, the Supramental.

# Let us prepare for it in all sincerity and eagerness.

#Man is the creation of yesterday.
Sri Aurobindo came to announce the creation of tomorrow: the coming of the supramental being.

# Sri Aurobindo’s work is a unique earth-transformation.

# Each one has his own idea and finds out suitable sentences from Sri Aurobindo’s writings to support his views. Those who oppose such views can also find suitable sentences from his writings. That is the way mutual opposition works. Nothing can be truly done until Sri Aurobindo’s total view of things is taken.

# …Sri Aurobindo has come announcing to the world the realisation of tomorrow…

# Sri Aurobindo incarnated in a human body the supramental consciousness and has not only revealed to us the nature of the path to follow and the method of following it so as to arrive at the goal, but has also by his own personal realisation given us the example; he has provided us with the proof that the thing can be done and the time is now to do it.

# You must understand that what Sri Aurobindo represents in the world’s history, is not a teaching, not even a revelation; it is a decisive action direct from the Supreme. And I am just trying to fulfil that action.

# Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to announce the manifestation of the supramental world and not merely did he announce this manifestation but embodied also in part the supramental force and showed by example what one must do to prepare oneself for manifesting it. The best thing we can do is to study all that he has told us and endeavour to follow his example and prepare ourselves for the new manifestation. This gives life its real sense and will help us to overcome all obstacles. Let us live for the new creation and we shall grow stronger and stronger by remaining young and progressive.

# Sri Aurobindo came to tell the world of the beauty of the future that must be realised.

# He came to give not a hope but a certitude of the splendour towards which the world moves. The world is not an unfortunate accident, it is a marvel which moves towards its expression.

# The world needs the certitude of the beauty of the future. And Sri Aurobindo has given that assurance.

# Sri Aurobindo came to tell us how to find Thee and how to serve Thee.

# Grant that in this year of his centenary we may truly understand what he has taught us and in all sincerity put it into practice.

# What Sri Aurobindo represents in the world’s history is not a teaching, not even a revelation; it is a decisive action direct from the Supreme.

# What Sri Aurobindo represents in the history of the earth’s spiritual progress is not a teaching, not even a revelation; it is a mighty action straight from the Supreme.

# He has come to bid the earth to prepare for its luminous future.

# Sri Aurobindo has brought to the world the assurance of a divine future.

# Sri Aurobindo has come on earth not to bring a teaching or a creed in competition with previous creeds or teachings, but to show the way to overpass the past and to open concretely the route towards an imminent and inevitable future.

If we have to write a biography of Aswapati, it is this kind of willing, of making a decisive samkalpa, of performing the Yajna of the Creation, that we must first recognise and then present. Such is the most wonderful siddhi of the great Yogi. In fact he came to earth to hasten its advent and “to announce the manifestation of a new race and a new world: the Supramental.” Aswapati willed it and fixed it in the gleaming greatness of the Spirit. The contingent factor for its dynamic manifestation that remains to be reckoned with in the evolutionary process is its readiness to accept it. But such a 'readiness' is the work to be carried out by the executive Force.

RYD

Aswapati saw two negations
There was the pull of the past; there were wandering voices that moaned, not only moaned but also pleaded for heavenly leniency to the imperfections of the earth. Would heaven be lenient to them? Should it be? But then, in that case, the earth potentials would not emerge to receive what heaven can offer to them; heaven would not oblige the imperfect. Aswapati notices that these thousand instincts pushed themselves from the subconscious and there were fierce revolts from the unregenerate nature. In fact, even as he wished to tackle them, more and more did they grow, grow in direr and larger proportions; for, “the Inconscient too is infinite”, the Inconscient holding all the powers and possibilities in their negative modes. Aswapati had to remove these totally first from his person, after assuming them, accepting the shortcomings of mortality. Thus alone could these be seen to, taken care of. This is a strenuous and painful job and Aswapati undertakes it to make possible the Law of Excellence to operate everywhere, operate in a flawless and just and right manner. The problem is, this difficult inheritance tagged on to the evolving soul cannot be simply discarded, sent away, dismissed. It can be got rid of only by putting it in the cleansing fire; it has to be burned in the Fire of the Yoga, offered in the Fire-Sacrifice to Agni Pavaka, Fire the Purifier. He did it and

His mind answered to countless communing minds,
His words were syllables of the cosmos’ speech,
His life a field of the vast cosmic stir.
He felt the footsteps of a million wills
Moving in unison to a single goal.

Consequently, Aswapati witnesses everywhere the outbreak of Perfection’s Law, in and above and around, everywhere, with life pursuing, unwearied of her sport and

Joy in her heart and laughter on her lips,
The bright adventure of God’s game of chance.

Not only mind and life, but body too; there “Matter is the Spirit’s firm density.” But the most fundamental problem, the problem of problems yet remains unresolved. How is this Perfection’s Law going to be operative here, how in the world full of deprivation and suffering and incapacity is God’s bright adventure going to be received in its gladness? What Aswapati has experienced, what he has willed and achieved in the infinity of the Spirit, all that must become the earthly real. One who is operative here at the moment is the errant Power one who, by division, attempts to find the indivisible One, an impossible proposition. This Error must be obliterated, totally liquidated. Such is the task that Aswapati recognises, a task which must be done if this creation has to have any sense in it, any meaning to it; and he attends to it, right earnestly. This is the deconstruction needed to be done before any new scheme can be considered for implementation. Our response to the positive, the constructive and the creative, and the progressive, had been all along corrupt and frustrating and, therefore, deconstruction should take place at the origin of this corrupting and frustrating crookedness. In any case, it cannot be the popular metaphysical deconstruction; it has to be of the spiritual-occult kind.

Aswapati saw two negations, “a world that feels not its own inhabiting self” and “a spirit ignorant of the world it made”. There is present in the cosmic manifestation a silent spirit denying life, rather a strange paradox, and it has to be quickened to see the gainful aspect of this creation. If such should remain the spirit’s denial here, then the doubt and the uncertainty would be of a severe kind. Indeed, the question would be: how can at all the new world then be brought down here, if it is going to be an unwelcome guest, if it is going to be repelled by the things that detest it? But Aswapati has also the experience of the Oneness of the Spirit, oneness everywhere. In that instance, in that experience of Oneness, the descent of the Superconscient in the Subconscient and the Inconscient is not going to be paradoxical, is not going to be without a meaning and, therefore, the bringing down of the new world, though it might be a difficult task, is not incompatible with the aim of the evolutionary manifestation.

RYD

There must be a constant expansion and self-perfecting
In one of the footnotes to the Agni-hymns, Sri Aurobindo makes the following comment: “The supramental world has to be formed or created in us by the Divine Will as the result of a constant expansion and self-perfecting.” Both the terms are fixed in it, expansion and self-perfecting. Could this not have been the method of Aswapati in creating the new world in the supramental? He had become vast by his largeness, extending all the way up to the Unknowable and enveloping every bit of this vast manifestation, including those of the dark abysses; he had achieved self-perfection that no trace of the Inconscient and the Subconscient was present in it, the oneness that embraces all the positives and the negatives and rejects nothing, that it is all God’s creation.

The rendering of the corresponding Rik is as follows: (The Secret of the Veda)

O knower of the births, the man perfect in his works for whom thou createst that other blissful world, reaches a felicity that is peopled happily with his life’s swiftnesses, his herds of Light, the children of his soul, the armies of his energies.

In the context of Aswapati’s yoga-sadhana, we see that he has already done his part of the job and now he has to wait for the other term of the process to come into operation. In his Sachchidananda consciousness he has formed or created this new world, the supramental world, and now he prays to the Divine Will to enter into the play.

The Mother makes the point more explicit:

...to hope to receive, use and form in oneself a supramental being, and consequently a supramental world, there must first of all be an expansion of consciousness and constant personal progress... the constant idea of the being... the constant will of the being, the constant preoccupation of the being... there must be enough aspiration and adhesion in the being to make the expansion of the being, the expansion of consciousness possible… There must be great widening to make room for the movements of the Supermind.

The question put to the Mother was: “How is the Supermind going to act? What should be done to receive it? In what form will it manifest?” She is quite categorical in her statement that, it is the Divine Will who is going to do all that. What is expected of us is to have a constant aspiration for progress; we should make our consciousness wide and receptive, open our being more and more to the descending force and light and happiness, strive for self-perfection in every respect, every aspect of our personality, the soul-personality. Agni is the knower of the births, jātavedas, and it is based on our perfection in works that he will give new birth, create for us a new world of blessedness and felicity.

The Mother was the first to pick up this Sri Aurobindo’s very pregnant footnote to the Rik and significantly reveal that, though in reality everything is done by the Divine Will, the urge to progress is the necessary part that has to combine with it in the creation of the supramental world. That is how Aswapati, by his “constant” idea and will and preoccupation, succeeded in building the “godhead of the race”, the supramental race. That is how the real human potential will be fulfilled. That should be the authentic human effort, the human input needed for the process. Now, coupled with this effort, must come the sanction of the Supreme, the “fiat of the Word”, the most important executive pronouncement of Gayatri, the mighty voice of the operative Logos.

We should note that the Veda speaks of the Divine Fire, Agni, as one who is amuram, one who is not perplexed or bewildered, who is free from ignorance. (Rig Veda, III.19.1) At the same time, he is wide-seeing and is the knower of the births, and the bringer of the bright issues of the Eternal, brahma-prajā. He is therefore a supramental Godhead and in his will and action there is that supramental infallibility. The Word that he brings is the Word, brahma, whose light shines in Heaven.

But, then, will that light shine at all in the cave of this darkness also, in the terrestrial darkness, in the recesses of the Inconscience as well? Will it? Perhaps not,—if at all it will shine, it will shine only occasionally,—in its most occult connotation. The Vedic Word is still the Word for an individual aspirant, for the Rishi, to be reborn in the Riches of the Divine. It is not yet the transformative Word, a Word that can usher in the divine experience in this collectivity. For that to happen, that it becomes an aspect of universal working, the evolutionary depths of Inconscience will have to be first filled up with the light of the Supreme; it is it that that shall then give us the Truth, illumine us with it. The original creative Power, the supreme Shakti herself will have to do it. This is the new task which needs a certain urgency of attention, and Aswapati is alert to it. She must come down and do it; she and none else can do it. Aswapati’s concern therefore is to bring her down to carry out this divine work here.

RYD

He became vast by his largeness
In order to form a supramental world, there must be the expansion of consciousness and constant personal progress, there must be the constant idea of the being, the constant will of the being, the constant preoccupation of the being. There must be great widening to make room for the movements of the Supermind, Supermind by its very quality being vast. Thus Aswapati became vast by his largeness, in the largeness of his yoga-tapasya. He incarnated in a human body the supramental consciousness, came as Eternity’s delegate, his action a decisive action direct from the Supreme. Aswapati’s birth in the mortal world, mŗtyuloka, is to do the Yoga of the Supreme, the Yoga of Evolutionary Transformation. He does it and in it he creates the new world in the House of the Spirit. Not only that; he gathers within himself the needed power to support the action of the Divine Executrix, that this new world, the supramental world be brought down by her here, upon earth. In his yoga-tapasya is the mortal birth of the divine Savitri. Such great is presently the fruit of the Yoga of Evolutionary Transformation. She will come here again, and again, but those will not be the aspects of the mortal birth. Those new births of hers, and Aswapati’s, will be the divine births in Evolution. They will be for realisation of the divine possibilities through the divine birth, divya janma.

As his yoga-tapasya progressed, as it ascended, Aswapati got corresponding spiritual rewards, siddhis. A Seer was born within him who connected the mortal scheme to divinity; he was under the gaze of a spiritual dawn; he acquired “mighty ease” to carry out superhuman tasks. Cosmic consciousness and identity with all that is around, the waking up of the subtler sheaths of his body, listening in his silent mind to the footsteps of the Word that knows, strange powers touching his life,—these were already the rewards in his possession. In this world of travail and suffering, that arise because of mortality’s limitations in its ego-consciousness, he obtained great spiritual perfections. Then, in the broad and bright expanses of his Prajna awareness, there was the descent of the Consciousness-Force, the Divine Power in her luminous dynamism, the rhythmic and glowing Assertion that sets into motion what it promises and pledges in her creative mood. In the dumb and dark Subconscient caves it invoked the Inexpressible to take contour and form and, with its light, transform it into breathing divinity upon the earth. The transformative action was so complete that, awoke in exultation, even his body's cells opened themselves to the splendour of the invading Marvel.

Aswapati’s consciousness reached the summits of spiritual realisation. In his eyes there was the look of the Supreme. He got the vision of things in their details and in their full magnificence; it was the divine vision itself he got, the vision working transcendentally in everything. He experienced an identity, unity, oneness with all that is. No more were the roots stuck in the inconscient soil of darkness; they were now in the gleaming widenesses of Infinity. The life energies that swayed him and put him into action were the oceanic energies that flowed from the living spirit of Eternity. His were limitless movements in limitless peace. He had opened himself to the worlds of endless wonders.

The mission of Aswapati’s soul was never to lead him to the higher states of celestial happiness, happiness in heaven, that he may simply stay there. Indeed, he needed not those states for himself, he being their rightful or natural inhabitant. His soul therefore makes a unique choice for growing happiness on earth, a well-intentioned and deliberate choice in full awareness of the context of the evolutionary possibilities here.

Aswapati saw this immense world-pile as an expression of the One. Climbing from the depths of blind Darkness, andhahtamisra, to the endless marvels of the triple Splendour, jyotirmaya, this incessant hierarchy of the typal planes linked the extreme opposites in the play of Consciousness-Force. It turns out that this temple-tower, with its innumerable storeys, was established in adventure of the material birth, as a necessity in the process of evolutionary manifestation. So shall it release the powers and potencies packed in Nature, that earth may bear divinity in her warm and rich womb of joy:

World after world disclosed its guarded powers,
Heaven after heaven its deep beatitudes

Indeed, even in the nethermost worlds there is a mystery which lies asleep, a purposeful joyous Presence that is quiescent and unawaredly silent. The Puranas speak of it pretty glowingly. Aswapati has the clue that, behind this Night, there exists the Eternal’s Sun. When that Sun shall rise the radiant volume, the magnum opus entitled the Book of Bliss, shall be written. He makes himself vast for that to be written.

But, then, Aswapati’s siddhis up to this point were only pertaining to the knowledge and power of the Cosmic Being. These siddhis were at best the siddhis of the Overmind world. But the Overmental searchlight thrown on Nature, its action, has no inevitability of result in its consummation and it often gets scattered, or else returns baffled. The thick opacity of the material darkness can even deform and degrade it. A superior light must prevail over this Nature, work upon it. The refractive character of the medium must turn into receptive harmony.

Beyond Night and beyond Sleep is the supernal world of the supreme Trinity and that must establish itself in him if another failure or frustration is to be avoided. The arduous Raja Yoga of Aswapati has to first become Vishva Yoga of the Universal Being. But then even that Yoga must fulfill itself in the Adya Yoga of the Divine Shakti. Then only can the Colonist from Immortality hope to acquire the threefold mastery and become the Lord of Life. This is a major step, radical in its character, and it has got to be taken if the attempt is to succeed in this death-bound inconscient world. Aswapati recognises this and sets himself on the unprecedented task.

The groundwork is now completed, the path paved. It shall henceforth be the task of the Divine Mother to give shape and finality to what has been prepared and kept ready. Her birth as the creative-expressive Word can alone bring about God’s full birth in the Universe. The key for supernal birth here, in the earth-consciousness, is with her.

About Aswapati’s Yoga comprising of the three parts Sri Aurobindo explains it in a letter as follows:

...First, he is achieving his own spiritual self-fulfilment as the individual and this is described as the Yoga of the King. Next, he makes the ascent as a typical representative of the race to win the possibility of discovery and possession of all the planes of consciousness and this is described in the Second Book: but this too is as yet an individual victory. Finally, he aspires no longer for himself but for all, for a universal realisation and new creation. This is described in the Book of the Divine Mother.

There is the last Unknowable, the supreme Asat, the luminous Unmanifest, to which the Explorer must go and discover there, and know, the parameters by which this vast creation has come into being, its existence and its raison d’être. That is the great Mystery which shall unravel all the little mysteries of this manifestation. He must go to the Paratpara about which nothing can be gainfully said or talked, the sheer Ineffable. It is from there, from that infinite Potency, the rich Womb of All, that the new creation can emerge. In it shall be the universal realisation.

In the process Aswapati makes a great yogic bid, as if of withdrawing himself from himself. He dissolves his entire personality and in that experience witnesses only the formless Form of the Self. The last bit of individuality, as well as of cosmicity, is lost. He has won luminous Silence, Silence of the Featureless enveloping him and everything:

Alone and fronting an intangible Force
Which offered nothing to the grasp of Thought,
His spirit faced the adventure of the Inane.
Abandoned by the worlds of form he strove....
All glory of outline, sweetness of harmony,
Rejected like a grace of trivial notes,
Expunged from Being’s silence nude, austere,
Died into a fine and blissful Nothingness... .
The universe removed its coloured veil,
And at the unimaginable end
Of the huge riddle of created things
Appeared the far-seen Godhead of the whole,
His feet firm-based on Life’s stupendous wings,
Omnipotent, a lonely seer of Time,
Inward, inscrutable, with diamond gaze.

Aswapati’s moving through the different worlds, lokas, as a part of his quest to solve the riddle of created things is absolutely unique, something that never happened in the history of the evolutionary process. He has visited all the fourteen lokas of this vast creation, worlds of countless wonders as well as worlds of horror and suffering, worlds of darkness where no ray of light can penetrate. He could do so because of his spirit’s light, a blaze of a burning diamond, and he could face the attacks of the adversary powers because of the yogic merit he had acquired. But there is something more important to it than that.

Aswapati’s ‘visit’ to the several worlds and the description we have in Savitri belong to an altogether different order of truth, occult as well as spiritual. The description is not a routine travelogue, presenting in minute details the innumerable features of this immense creation; in fact there was no specific necessity of the kind for the alert yogi-poet to go through these long presentations, which otherwise would appear totally out of place, spoiling the aesthesis of the poetic creation, causing what could be called rasa-bhanga. The point is, Aswapati is not just exploring this vast cosmic manifestation. He is paying a purposeful visit to all the worlds, to these lokas.

His work is a work of unique earth-transformation. He has come to prepare the luminous future of the earth, the divine future. His is an emanation of the Supreme who came on earth to announce the manifestation of a new race and a new world: the Supramental. His coming is the coming of the Avatar. Therefore when the Avatar visits these different worlds, puts his feet on them, on these lokas, it is his Presence that he leaves behind, establishes it in them. That is the real purpose of the climbing of the World-stair. When he leaves behind him his Presence in these worlds, they become safe and secure for the action of the divine Power, the Shakti. That Presence is the support, ādhāra of great calm and luminosity for the action of the executive Force. Her dynamism needs the extension of that vastness and that comes because of this divine Presence everywhere. Thus Aswapati grows vast by his largeness for the action of the Truth-conscient Shakti, who shall incarnate here as Savitri.

RYD

Adhyatmayoga—the Yoga of Self-Perfection
In the creation of the supramental world in us by the Divine Will, both constant expansion and self-perfecting are needed. Aswapati’s Yoga of Self-Perfection has to take care of the second term. He had become vast by his largeness; he must achieve self-perfection required for it. The aspect of self-perfection is the aspect of not only rising above all the workings of the blind lower inconscient Nature or Andhaha Prakriti in us, but also to make her receptive to the divine working in her, she lending herself to the action of the Consciousness-Force who alone can make such a creation possible. In fact it is she who, in the Divine Will, can establish a new world, the supramental world. The Mother’s stipulation of “expansion of consciousness”, of becoming vast by our largeness has now to accompany the “constant personal progress”, of opening ourselves to the greater possibilities of our soul and our spirit.

In Savitri we have Aswapati engaging himself in the triple Yoga, the Individual, the Universal, and the Transcendental Yoga, the triple stride taken by the avataric Vishnu in the evolutionary march. This is the Adhyatmayoga he does, the Yoga of the Spirit in the earth-consciousness done to prepare the needed base for the new birth and the new action. About this Adhyatmayoga, Sri Aurobindo writes in the Yoga and its Objects the following:

The principle of Adhyatmayoga is, in knowledge, the realisation of all things that we see or do not see but are aware of,—men, things, ourselves, events, gods, titans, angels,—as one divine Brahman, and in action and attitude, an absolute self-surrender to the Paratpara Purusha, the transcendent, infinite and universal Personality who is at once personal and impersonal, finite and infinite, self-limiting and illimitable, one and many, and informs with his being not only the Gods above, but man and worm and the clod below. The surrender must be complete… the whole world seen and unseen must be recognised as one supreme expression of concealed Wisdom, Power and Bliss, and the entire being given up… for the divine Love, Might, and perfect Intelligence to do its work and fulfil its divine Lila.

“Put yourself in the hands of the Divine Mother and let her do her work unhindered in you”—that is the state in which our surrender has to reach. We have to also stand aside from all these thousand workings of the lower Prakriti and watch all these thousand workings as the witness Purusha. The third process of this Adhyatmayoga is to acquire God-vision, perceive all things as God, every bit of it in its authentic contents. All this is for the habitation of the Lord—that is the realised declaration of the Isha Upanishad.

Aswapati himself as the Supreme incarnate does here this Adhyatmayoga. First he releases himself from Nature’s hold. He finds the source from which his spirit came, knows his larger self and becomes one with all. But there is the ingrained reluctance in the earthly stuff. He must discover its cause and remove it. He does it. Now his body’s parts also open to higher things, to the greater light. With the soul’s release, Aswapati has achieved everything as an individual. There must now come the spirit’s freedom from all the contingencies. Engaged in the Yoga of Knowledge of the Time-Born Man, he now gets a new vision of himself and of the world. He is tied to the fate of this creation and there cannot be rest for him until the dusk from man’s soul is lifted. He must attend to it.

God created Hell in his mood of infinite love and justice, this is what a mystic says; but this love has to first conquer the appalling Inane. The existential problem is the denial of all that is God’s. Here are titans and maniac powers and cruel operators; here, as if allowed by the mighty Spirit, work determinedly terrible agencies. But Aswapati, in the strength of his soul, takes up the challenge. He surveys this kingdom of pain, travels through this world of sorrow and suffering and hate, of wickedness and malignancy. Not only that. Shiva-like, he drinks all the poison, drinks it till not a drop is left. In the vastness of Existence he even feels the smallness of this strange queer material creation. Aswapati observes that the inconscient Being is asleep and knows not what it built in that state of slumber. But he puts his finger upon the error and the pain,—and at once awakens there new knowledge in him. He has opened the Book of Bliss, and Life’s truth gets revealed. The dichotomy between Matter and Spirit gets resolved. When the Avatar puts his foot on the soil of the Night, it indeed marks the beginning of the Everlasting Day.

The one whom Aswapati met behind the World-Soul has to take possession of all that is and all that shall be. On the gleaming edge of this Transcendent, bordering the mortal world, in the prayer of his innermost soul, he awaits the arrival that shall change the mortal’s lot. (Savitri, pp. 314-15)

Towards her our knowledge climbs, our passion gropes,
In her miraculous rapture we shall dwell,
Her clasp will turn to ecstasy our pain.
Our self shall be one self with all through her.
In her confirmed because transformed in her,
Our life shall find in its fulfilled response
Above, the boundless hushed beatitudes,
Below, the wonder of the embrace divine.
This known as in a thunder-flash of God,
The rapture of things eternal filled his limbs;
Amazement fell upon his ravished sense;
His spirit was caught in her intolerant flame.

How marvellous indeed, to be caught so in her intolerant flame! “He yielded to her and his heart was glad.” That indeed is the finest moment in the sadhana of his Adhyatmayoga. In the knowledge of the Spirit arose the deep adoration of the Divine, Jnana became Bhakti. His surrender, the surrender of the incarnate Supreme to the divine Shakti is the great fulfilment of the Adhyatmayoga he had undertaken for the sake of the evolutionary soul of the earth. Aswapati the Yogi par excellence is persistent and there is the wonderful response: (p. 317)

In the unapproachable stillness of his soul
Intense, one-pointed, monumental, lone,
Patient he sat like an incarnate hope
Motionless on a pedestal of prayer.
A Strength he sought that was not yet on earth,
Help from a Power too great for mortal will,
The Light of a Truth now only seen afar,
A sanction from his high omnipotent Source.

But nothing happens. The Power he is invoking is too great for the mortality's smallness, and the dynamic Truth yet remains behind the veil, and there seems to be something still wanting in the yogic effort. Indeed, why is the Divine Mother unobliging? But (pp. 295-96)

He outstretched to her his folded hands of prayer.
Then in a sovereign answer to his heart
A gesture came as of worlds thrown away,
And from her raiment's lustrous mystery raised
One arm half-parted the eternal veil.
A light appeared still and imperishable.
Attracted to the large and luminous depths
Of the ravishing enigma of her eyes,
He saw the mystic outline of a face.
Overwhelmed by her implacable light and bliss,
An atom of her illimitable self
Mastered by the honey and lightning of her power,
Tossed towards the shores of her ocean ecstasy,
Drunk with a deep golden spiritual wine,
He cast from the rent stillness of his soul
A cry of adoration and desire
And the surrender of his boundless mind
And the self-giving of his silent heart.
He fell down at her feet unconscious, prone.

This is the surrender of the incarnate Divine to his own transcendental Power, to Para Shakti, the evolutionary Purusha offering himself to the dynamic Consciousness-Force. (pp. 315-16)

A vast surrender was his only strength.
A Power that lives upon the heights must act,
Bring into life’s closed room the Immortal’s air
And fill the finite with the Infinite.
All that denies must be torn out and slain
And crushed the many longings for whose sake
We lose the One for whom our lives were made.
Now other claims had hushed in him their cry:
Only he longed to draw her presence and power
Into his heart and mind and breathing frame;
Only he yearned to call for ever down
Her healing touch of love and truth and joy
Into the darkness of the suffering world.
His soul was freed and given to her alone.

She accepts his surrender and the beauty is, now, she will do whatever he should will. His vast surrender is in the harsh context of the suffering world which must not only be redeemed but must become a field for her divine activities. She must now oblige him. Her activities here—that is the birth of the new world. In his will she must incarnate herself here.

Such a birth is the birth of Savitri. The birth of Savitri means the birth of the new world.

RYD

Sapta Chatusthaya
The Yoga of Self-Perfection, one of the terms in the creation of the new world in the Divine Will, has its early foundation in the Sapta Chatusthaya, the seven elements or seven tetrads Sri Aurobindo received when he was in the Alipore Jail as an under-trial prisoner for his alleged act of sedition against the British government in India, during 1908-09. A note in the Supplement of the Birth Centenary publication says the following: “These mantras along with the notes which accompany them were written down by Sri Aurobindo, probably after his release from prison in May, 1909, and certainly before his departure from Chandernagore on March 31, 1910.” For want of judicial proofs, Sri Aurobindo was acquitted and released from the jail on 6 May 1909; however, the British were still after him and soon he had to go in hiding. He had received an inner command, ādeśa, and first he was in Chandernagore, not too far from Calcutta, for two and a half months and then he left for Pondicherry where he arrived on 4 April 1910, both the towns being French settlements at that time; Sri Aurobindo remained in Pondicherry ever since then, the place having become his Cave of Tapasya. It is here that the Mother was soon to join in the great work they had come to do together. The early seeds of the great work, from the point of view of Adhyatmayoga, were in these Chatusthayas, precise in their formulation, almost like Yoga Aphorisms.

But it is unfortunate that there is no text of the Chatusthayas available in Sri Aurobindo’s own handwriting. What we have are transcripts written down by the first young disciples. We are told that these transcripts or “copies were made either from now-lost manuscript written by Sri Aurobindo or, more likely, from one or more written records of a series of talks given by him.” In any case there cannot be any doubt about the authenticity of their yogic-spiritual contents. Never in yogic annals were given such precise steps, except perhaps what has come down to us in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. If one is chiefly concerned with the Rajayoga, the other has for it the objective of Adhyatmayoga.

Let us take an example of an entry, probably written in early 1913: “There is full perfection of the first chatusthaya; in the second, there are still defects, but you can see the immense progress made in the human parts of the system. Only the divine part is still imperfect. Till then the full intensity cannot come. The perfection is coming. This is the full attack on the karma, no longer of men, but of nature. They have called up the elements to aid them. The battle with the elements is still a losing battle for the present. Nor is the ideality is yet perfectly combined in detail. This is the proof of the ideality but it has yet to be perfected. The knowledge is once more working with a near approach to perfection, only some of the placements are still wrong. The power must be brought up to the same level in its ordinary movements, then in the body, then in the karma. The power will now begin to work in the ideality and in harmony with the knowledge, the telepathy and trikaldrishti. Although it is as yet incompletely done, still it is done…” (Record of Yoga, Part II, pp. 1309-10)

Sapta Chatusthaya, or Yoganga as it is called, could be briefly presented in its revised order as follows:

• Siddhi Chatusthaya—Shuddhi, Mukti, Bhukti, Siddhi
• Brahma Chatusthaya—Anantam, Jnanam, Anandam, Brahma
• Karma Chatusthaya—Krishna, Kali, Karma, Kama
• Shanti Chatusthaya—Samata, Shanti, Chandibhava, Sraddha
• Vijnana Chatusthaya—Jnana, Trikaladrishti, Ashtasiddhi, Samadhi
• Sharira Chatusthaya—Arogya, Utthapana, Saundarya, Vividhananda

Sri Aurobindo has incorporated many of these features in The Synthesis of Yoga dealing with the Yoga of Self-Perfection. Let us, however, take just one entry from his Record by way of an illustration, showing how meticulously and scientifically Sri Aurobindo was carrying out his yoga-tapasya, about which we have otherwise the least idea. Even with our best minds and our best faculties, we will simply stand aghast at the kind of things that are involved in this remarkable Yoga of his. The Mother’s Agenda is the only other thing that can stand together in this wonderment. What, then, about our little talk regarding the human potential and the technology promoting spiritual prospects! It looks such a small curious thing in comparison, perhaps no more than queer inquisitiveness! But let us read Sri Aurobindo’s entry, dated 30 April 1918. (pp. 1041-43)

Completion of Brahma-chatusthaya in the perception and sense of all things as the conscious body of the Purushottama. This was prepared by the sortilege

rasohamapsu kaunteya prabhāsmi śaśisūryayoh
pranavah sarvavedeşu śabdah khe pauruşam nŗşu

followed by the sense of the Ishwara as the delight, rasa, in the flood of the being, apsu, the light of knowledge in the vijnana (sun) and mentality (moon), the word and the thought, the tapas. This led to the perception and sense of all substance of matter and consciousness, quality, force, thought, action etc. as the Ishwara. Formerly new perceptions were of separate things (tattwas, elements) and temporary, though often of long duration, but now it is global, integral, steadfast. It rejects the remnants of the intellectual fragmentation and division which still come to deny its existence.

Ananda of samata has proved sufficiently firm throughout the month. It is now combined firmly with the tapas; desire has perished, though tapatya still remains, but only as a minor element. Therefore the touches of asamata can get no hold, are entirely external and cast out of the adhar automatically, as soon as they enter. External, moreover, not of any near, but of a distantly watching, rather environing mentality.

Tapas is now very strong; in the field of exercise the obstacle has no longer a genuine power of resistance, but only of persistence and this again persists only by a persistent recurrence which gives it after much difficulty the power for a time to reestablish itself rather than by a right of its own in the environment. This is even when the tapas is without knowledge of trikaldrishti. The movement has now begun which will turn Time from an obstacle with which the personal Tapas had to struggle into an instrument which the personal Tapas, become that of the transcendent will working upon the universal to modify it as well as through the universal, will use for the disposition of its results. This movement is as yet only initial; as it advances tapas and trikaldrishti will become entirely reconciled and identified. Trikaldrishti increases in frequency and has begun to carry with it the right perception of Time.

This development enables the Chandi in the devibhava to affirm its characteristic singhi element more firmly. The Ishwarabhava and attahasya are preparing to grow upon the system.

The intellect is generally fading out of the system, (lipi, euthanasia of the intellectuality) and the whole is becoming vijnana + intuitive mentality. Only a vague floating remnant of the real intellectuality is left; it acts most when faced with the obstacle in life.

All is being idealised in the samadhi, but the dialogue, narrative etc are still usually mental, swapnamaya, though much more sustained and coherent. Reading is still normally incoherent. All are occasionally ideal. Lipi is always ideal, but is less perfected in its eightfold quality and less free and spontaneously active in the antardarshi than in the bahirdarshi. Rupa and vishaya in the bahirdarshi are still unable to take firm hold of the etheric system.

On the whole the “liberty in the idealities” (lipi, 21st April) is working itself out, but does not cover the whole third chatusthaya and is nowhere quite absolute.

Is this not the kind of Yoga of Self-Perfection that was practised by Aswapati when he set himslef to create the new world in the House of the Spirit? The Purusha Yoga is done and now the Prakriti Yoga must begin, that this new world descend upon the earth.

RYD

A correction
Sorry there is a mix-up in the fourth and fifth Chatusthayas in the above. This should be corrected as follows:

• Siddhi Chatusthaya—Shuddhi, Mukti, Bhukti, Siddhi
• Brahma Chatusthaya—Anantam, Jnanam, Anandam, Brahma
• Karma Chatusthaya—Krishna, Kali, Karma, Kama
• Shanti Chatusthaya—Samata, Shanti, Sukha, Hasya
• Shakti Chatusthaya—Virya, Shakti, Chandibhava, Sraddha
• Vijnana Chatusthaya—Jnana, Trikaladrishti, Ashtasiddhi, Samadhi
• Sharira Chatusthaya—Arogya, Utthapana, Saundarya, Vividhananda

RYD

The Mother on Perfection

# To work for your perfection, the first step is to become conscious of yourself, of the different parts of your being and their activities. You must learn to distinguish these different parts one from another, so that you may become clearly aware of the origin of the movements that occur in you, the many impulses, reactions and conflicting wills that drive you to action.

# Auroville has been created …for the creation of a new world, the supramental, expressing the divine perfection. (12 December 1972)

# Significance of number 12—Double Perfection (spiritual and material)

# The divine embraces are embraces of soul and of consciousness, and they can be reproduced among human beings only by a widening of the consciousness, understanding and feelings—a widening that enables you to understand everything and love everything, without preference or exclusiveness. (26 November 1960)

# Supreme Lord, Perfection that we must become, Perfection that we must manifest
This body lives by You alone and goes on repeating to You: “Whatever You will, whatever You will” until the day when it shall automatically know what You will because its consciousness will be totally united with Yours. (23 February 1972)

# Thou art the one and only goal of my life and the centre of my aspiration, the pivot of my thought, the key of the synthesis of my being.
And as Thou art beyond all sensation, all feeling and all thought, Thou art the living but ineffable experience, the Reality lived in the depths of the being but untranslatable in our poor words...
Thou art eternal silence and perfect peace in what we are able to perceive of Thee.
Thou art all the perfection we must acquire, all the marvels to be realised, all the splendour to be manifested. (6 January 1914)

# Thou hast said
Thou hast said that the earth would die, and it will die to its old ignorance.
Thou hast said that the earth would live, and it will live in the renewal of Thy Power.
What words will ever tell the splendour of Thy Law and the magnificence of Thy Glory? What words will express the perfection of Thy Consciousness and the infinite bliss of Thy Love?
What words will sing Thy ineffable Peace and celebrate the majesty of Thy Silence and the grandeur of Thy all-powerful Truth?

# New Year Message—1.1.68
Remain young,
never stop striving towards perfection
The Mother

The perfection we must acquire
Perfection is the province of Mahasaraswati, one who is “the most skilful in executive faculty and the nearest to physical Nature… This Power is the strong, the tireless, the careful and efficient builder, organiser, administrator, artisan and classifier of the worlds. When she takes up the transformation and new building of nature, her action is laborious and minute and often seems to our impatience slow and interminable, but it is persistent, integral and flawless.”

Yoga is skill in works, yogah karmasu kauśalam. But most of these perfections are the perfections of the aspirant soul or seeker making progress on the spiritual path. They have only their corresponding siddhis, achievements. The perfection needed for the creation of the new world within us in the Divine’s Will is of another kind, the supramental perfection. What is individual and universal must first express itself in it.

The evolution of the mental into the supramental gnostic being is crucial in the Yoga of Self-Perfection, the sine qua non for the supramental manifestation. Indeed, “it is the supramental gnosis which, once effectively called into action, will progressively take up all the terms of intelligence, will, sense-mind, heart, the vital and sensational being and translate them by a luminous and harmonizing conversion into a unity of the truth, power and delight of a living existence. It is the power also of overcoming physical limitations and developing a more perfect and divine instrumental body.”

But going beyond even this stage of the supramental gnosis, there must come the gnostic perfection in the physical body, the decisive stage for the transformation of the physical. If all action needs the support of the physical body, then certainly it cannot be neglected or excluded from the possibilities of its own spiritual evolution; the physical body itself must open to the higher and greater light of the spirit, open to the action of the supramental force. This perfection has to be an indispensable part in the totality of the supramental transformation. "Pushed to its highest conclusion," says Sri Aurobindo, "this movement brings in spiritualising and illuminations of the whole physical consciousness and a divinising of the law of the body."

Let us read The Synthesis of Yoga:

A Yoga of integral perfection regards man as a divine spiritual being involved in mind, life and body; it aims therefore at a liberation and a perfection of his divine nature. It seeks to make an inner living in the perfectly developed spiritual being his constant intrinsic living and the spiritualised action of mind, life and body only its outward human expression. In order that this spiritual being may not be something vague and indefinable or else but imperfectly realised and dependent on the mental support and the mental limitations, it seeks to go beyond mind to the supramental knowledge, will, sense, feeling, intuition, dynamic initiation of vital and physical action, all that makes the native working of the spiritual being. It accepts human life, but takes account of the large supraterrestrial action behind the earthly material living, and it joins itself to the divine Being from whom the supreme origination of all these partial and lower states proceeds so that the whole of life may become aware of its divine source and feel in each action of knowledge, of will, of feeling, sense and body the divine originating impulse. It rejects nothing that is essential in the mundane aim, but enlarges it, finds and lives in its greater and its truer meaning now hidden from it, transfigures it from a limited, earthly and mortal thing to a figure of infinite, divine and immortal values. (p. 620)

To open oneself to the supracosmic Divine is an essential condition of this integral perfection; to unite oneself with the universal Divine is another essential condition. Here the Yoga of self-perfection coincides with the Yogas of knowledge, works and devotion; for it is impossible to change the human nature into the divine or to make it an instrument of the divine knowledge, will and joy of existence, unless there is a union with the supreme Being, Consciousness and Bliss and a unity with its universal Self in all things and beings. A wholly separative possession of the divine nature by the human individual, as distinct from a self-withdrawn absorption in it, is not possible. But this unity will not be an inmost spiritual oneness qualified, so long as the human life lasts, by a separative existence in mind, life and body; the full perfection is a possession, through this spiritual unity, of unity too with the universal Mind, the universal Life, the universal Form which are the other constant terms of cosmic being. Moreover, since human life is still accepted as a self-expression of the realised Divine in man, there must be an action of the entire divine nature in our life; and this brings in the need of the supramental conversion which substitutes the native action of spiritual being for the imperfect action of the superficial nature and spiritualises and transfigures its mental, vital and physical parts by the spiritual ideality. These three elements, a union with the supreme Divine, unity with the universal Self, and a supramental life action from this transcendent origin and through this universality, but still with the individual as the soul-channel and natural instrument, constitute the essence of the integral divine perfection of the human being. (p. 622)

But the creation of the new world has to go beyond this perfection. That perfection is possible only when, first, the mind of the physical opens to the higher light, light beyond intuitive mind, beyond overmind, when it opens to the supramental light and force. The physical mind’s opening to the supramental light and force is the necessary condition for the new creation to manifest upon earth. It has happened in the luminous subtle-physical; it must happen in the gross. But then it is more an aspect of manifestation than of creation which has already happened, happened in the transcendent. Our own part is, to open ourselves to it, in every respect, open the physical, the vital, the mental, the spiritual, the psychic to it, every dimension of the human potential lending itself to the process of manifestation. Perfection will not impose itself upon us, we have to open ourselves to it, allow it to work in us in the fulfilment of the human potential, in the expression of our true individuality, the swabhāva of our soul.

RYD

The Supramental Time Vision, trikāladŗşţi, in the Yoga of Self-Perfection
Vijnana Chatusthaya consists of Jnana, Trikaladrishti, Ashtasiddhi, and Samadhi as its four elements. Sri Aurobindo has presented the first two in the Yoga of Self-Perfection, in part IV of The Synthesis of Yoga when it was serialised in the Arya. But as the publication of the monthly ceased in January 1921, the last two remained uncovered. It is obvious that Sri Aurobindo intended to write about these two elements also, as can be observed from the opening passage he had already drafted around that time; in fact he wanted to revise the entire part at a later stage, but it didn’t happen.

In any case, these first two elements, Knowledge and the Supramental Time Vision themselves give us some great idea about the kind of possibilities that exist in their vast luminous extent. Thus the transition from mind to supermind entails two features: in it is the scope and reach of acquiring a superior instrument of thought and knowledge; but, and more importantly, it effects the conversion of the whole consciousness, opening it more and more to the supramental. In it is also born the supramental thought, will, sense, feeling. The working of these faculties begins with the mind, mind proceeding to the formation of the luminous mind, it eventually becoming wholly intuitivised. The final stage of the change comes “when the supermind occupies and supramentalises the whole being and turns even the vital and physical sheaths into moulds of itself, responsive, subtle and instinct with its powers. Man then becomes wholly the superman.” Obviously, the last cannot happen unless there is the ‘archetypal’ support available for it to come into existence in the evolutionary unfolding. There is the necessity of the new creation being present in the transcendent, the bright mother to bring out issues in this play of manifestation. It must precede the appearance of the superman on the earth. Sri Aurobindo’s whole work, although it has several subsidiary objectives as aspects of its overall dynamics, of its pragmatism, is concerned chiefly with it, with the gnostic race, and it is to that he was throughout committed.

Here we may ask quite a pertinent question, as to when could have been seen the possibility of the new creation, of the birth of the new world for the superman to arrive on the earth. It is interesting to note that, if the Sapta Chatusthaya belongs to the very early period of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual pursuit, perhaps when he was in the Alipore jail, then that possibility of forming the new world in the Divine’s Will could be traced back to that formative period, the Chatusthaya having direct connection with it. In his Uttarpara speech, dated 30 May 1909 after the release from the jail, he says that the Gita was placed in his hand by its author himself and that its author had taken charge of his work fully, that he was to do His work. In it the invisible seeds of that possibility, of the new world, were perhaps sown at that time, without making the thing explicit. Could it not be that that was the avataric work he was to do?

Interestingly, the phrase “a new world” appears for the first time in what the Mother wrote on 25 September 1914, just within six months of her meeting Sri Aurobindo on 29 March 1914:

The Lord has willed and Thou dost execute:
A new Light shall break upon the earth,
A new world shall be born,
And the things that were promised shall be fulfilled.

Forty-two years later, what was promised got fulfilled; a new world was born in the earth’s subtle physical—because it was already created in the transcendent. The long work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in the intervening period was to establish conditions for its realisation, for its materialisation as a distinct event in the evolutionary process.

Let us quickly run through the chapter Towards the Supramental Time Vision of the Synthesis:

All being, consciousness, knowledge moves, secretly for our present surface awareness, openly when we rise beyond it to the spiritual and supramental ranges, between two states and powers of existence, that of the timeless Infinite and that of the Infinite deploying in itself and organising all things in time. These two states are opposed to and incompatible with each other only for our mental logic with its constant embarrassed stumbling around a false conception of contradictions and a confronting of eternal opposites. In reality, as we find when we see things with a knowledge founded on the supramental identity and vision and think with the great, profound and flexible logic proper to that knowledge, the two are only coexistent and concurrent status and movement of the same truth of the Infinite.

The consciousness of the timeless Infinite can be brought home to us in various ways, but is most ordinarily imposed on our mentality by a reflection of it and a powerful impression or else made present to us as something above the mind, something of which it is aware, towards which it lifts, but into which it cannot enter because itself lives only in the time sense and in the succession of the moments. The supramental consciousness will have the knowledge of the three times, trikāladŗşţi, as its normal way of time knowledge.

The first condition of our consciousness is to prepare the intelligence for opening to the capacity of true knowledge. The second condition is that in which the mind seeks for its source of knowledge rather within than without. The third state of consciousness is that of the mind of knowledge in which all things and all truths are perceived and experienced as already present and known and immediately available by merely turning the inner light upon it. This last condition is only possible by a partial supramentalising of the intuitive mentality and its full openness to any and every communication from the supramental ranges. This mind of knowledge is in its essentiality a power of potential omnipotence, but in its actual working on the level of mind it is limited in its range and province.

If our knowledge of the present were not limited by our dependence on the physical mind and sense, we could be aware of all the present, all the action of physical, vital, mental energies at work in the moment; it is conceivable that we would be able to see their past too involved in them and their latent future or at least to proceed from present to past and future knowledge. And under certain conditions this might create a sense of real and ever present time continuity, a living in the behind and the front as well as the immediate, and a step farther might carry us into an ever present sense of our existence in infinite time and in our timeless self, and its manifestation in eternal time might then become real to us and also we might feel the timeless Self behind the worlds and the reality of his eternal world manifestation.

Meanwhile there are certain doors opening from the inner on to the outer consciousness which make an occasional but insufficient power of direct retro-vision of the past, circumvision of the present, prevision of the future even in the physical mind at least potentially feasible. These movements are instinctive perceptions, obscure intuitions of the sense mind and the vital being. If allowed a free scope, these could develop and supply data not available to the ordinary reason and the senses.

The true and direct knowledge or vision of past, present and future begins with the opening of the psychical consciousness and the psychical faculties, the subliminal self, the subtle or dream self. It is a door opened by chance or by an innate gift or by some kind of pressure between the waking and the subliminal mind and admitting only to the surface or the outskirts of the latter. The subliminal or psychic self can bring back or project itself into past states of consciousness and experience and anticipate or even.

But these powers are subject to this disadvantage that they are not by any means free from liability to confusion and error, and especially the lower ranges and more outer workings of the psychical consciousness are subject to dangerous influences, strong illusions, misleading, perverting and distorting suggestions and images. The coming of the intimations of the subliminal self to the surface and the activity of the psychical consciousness tend to turn the mind of ignorance into a mind of self-forgetful knowledge constantly illuminated with intimations and upsurgings from the inner being, antarātman.

All intuitive knowledge comes more or less directly from the light of the self-aware spirit entering into the mind. Accordingly the growth of the intuitive mind can bring with it the capacity of a time knowledge which comes to it not from outside indices, but from within the universal soul of things, its eternal memory of the past, its unlimited holding of things present and its prevision or, as it has been paradoxically but suggestively called, its memory of the future.

The intuitive mind dealing with the triple time movement has to see rightly in thought sense and vision three things, actualities, possibles and imperatives. There is first a primary intuitive action developed which sees principally the stream of successive actualities in time, even as the ordinary mind, but with an immediate directness of truth and spontaneous accuracy of which the ordinary mind is not capable. It sees them first by a perception, a thought action, a thought sense, a thought vision, which at once detects the forces at work on persons and things, the thoughts, intentions, impulsions, energies, influences in and around them, those already formulated in them and those in process of formation, those too that are coming or about to come into or upon them from the environment or from secret sources invisible to the normal mind, distinguishes by a rapid intuitive analysis free from seeking or labour or by a synthetic total view the complex of these forces, discerns the effective from the ineffective or partly effective and sees too the result that is to emerge. This is the integral process of the intuitive vision of actualities, but there are others that are less complete in their character. For there may be developed a power of seeing the result without any previous or simultaneous perception of the forces at work or the latter may be seen only afterwards and the result alone leap at once and first into the knowledge. These are stages in the development of the capacity for a total and unified vision of actualities.

It is possible to develop a mind of luminous inspiration which will be more at home among the greater potentialities of the time movement, see more easily distant things and at the same time take up into itself, into its more brilliant, wide and powerful light, the intuitive knowledge of actualities. This inspired mind will see things in the light of the world’s larger potentialities and note the stream of actuality as a selection and result from the mass of forceful possibles. It will be liable, however, if it is not attended with a sufficient revelatory knowledge of imperatives, to a hesitation or suspension of determining view. There could be the difficulty of an inferior power dealing with the materials given to it from the treasury of a higher light and force. But it is possible to develop a mind of luminous revelation which taking into itself the two inferior movements sees what is determined behind the play of potentialities and actualities and observes these latter as its means of deploying its imperative decisions.

An intuitive mind thus constituted and aided by an active psychic consciousness may be in command of a very remarkable power of time knowledge.

A greater perfection towards which the formation of the intuitive, inspired and revelatory mind is only a preparatory stage, comes by a constant instreaming and descent of more and more of the supramental light and energy into the whole mental being and a constant raising of the intuition and its powers towards their source in the open glories of the supramental nature. There is the double action of the intuitive mind aware of, open to and referring its knowledge constantly to the light above it for support and confirmation and of that light itself creating a highest mind of knowledge,—really the supramental action itself in a more and more transformed stuff of mind and a less and less insistent subjection to mental conditions. There is thus formed a lesser supramental action, a mind of knowledge tending always to change into the true supermind of knowledge.

When this mind of knowledge becomes a part of the physical’s mind, the certainty of the gnostic race becomes an aspect of the evolutionary growth from knowledge to greater knowledge, from light and force to higher light and force. In this way the Supramental Time Vision, trikāladŗşţi, in the Yoga of Self-Perfection, the Adhyatmayoga of the Supreme in its will creates a new world poised for appearance on the earth.

RYD

A stream of crystalline births
Let us run beside a particular stream that courses through lives of long centuries in their utter wonderment, assuring us that the ripe human soul has the prospects of lending itself to the growing self-perfection that can participate in the new creation. This is one individual line, distinct and noteworthy, of births wherein enter several elements shaped by the secret hand even as it offers itself to the higher Will, when it moves under the truest sunlight, in the Divine’s Grace.

Moses
“Along with God, it is the figure of Moses (Moshe) who dominates the Torah. Acting at God's behest, it is he who leads the Jews out of slavery, unleashes the Ten Plagues against Egypt, guides the freed slaves for forty years in the wilderness, carries down the law from Mount Sinai, and prepares the Jews to enter the land of Canaan.”

Floating down the river Nile in a basket let go by his mother Yocheved, the newly born baby was picked up by the kindly Pharaoh’s daughter and brought up by her in the palace. That baby left in the charge of Providence changed the history. Here grew a man who had a vision and, with the command received from God, he went to Egypt to save his people. What followed was the great exodus.

Not too long afterwards, Moses received the Commandments. But he found that, his people had become indulgent and were worshiping a Golden Calf. When threatened, he raged but turned not away from them. These are the Commands he received:

• I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of slavery.
• You shall have no other gods before Me.
• Do not make an image or any likeness of what is in the heavens above.
• Do not swear falsely by the name of the Lord.
• Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
• Honour your father and your mother.
• Do not murder. Do not commit adultery.
• Do not steal.
• Do not bear false witness against your neighbor.
• Do not covet your neighbor's house.

Moses finished advising the people and was preparing to leave, conferring blessings upon them. “He went up Mount Nebo to the top of Pisgah, looked over the country spread out before him, and died, at the age of one hundred and twenty. Moses was thus the human instrument in the creation of the Israelites nation; he communicated to it all its laws.”

Pythagoras
Pythagoras was the Rishi-Philosopher-Mathematician of the ancient Greece, born c. 580 BC. His friends were the numbers and he heard the music of the spheres in their delightful relationship with each other; he was the first to give the scientific theory of sound. His theorem in geometry made him immortal in the world of flat space, the rational world, even as he established a school proclaiming the mystical wisdom.

It is said of him that “he spoke the truth no less than did the Pythian; Iamblichus tells the story that the Pythia prophesied that his pregnant mother would give birth to a man supremely beautiful, wise, and of benefit to humankind.” He was advised to go to Memphis and acquire the Egyptian wisdom.

In his secret school founded in Croton, Pythagoras formulated strict rules of virtue to be followed without any deviation. The school was open to both male and female students, something unusual in those days. The Pythagoreans used the lyre to cure illness of the soul or body; poetry recitations occurred before and after sleep to aid the memory.

“The Pythagoreans observed a rule of silence called echemythia, the breaking of which was punishable by death. This was because the Pythagoreans believed that a man's words were usually careless and misrepresented him and that when someone was in doubt as to what he should say, he should always remain silent. Another rule that they had was to help a man in raising a burden, but do not assist him in laying it down, for it is a great sin to encourage indolence, and they said departing from your house, turn not back, for the furies will be your attendants; this axiom reminded them that it was better to learn none of the truth about mathematics, God, and the universe at all than to learn a little without learning all. The Pythagorean society is associated with prohibitions such as not to step over a cross-bar, and not to eat beans. The Pythagoreans are known for their theory of the transmigration of souls, and also for their theory that numbers constitute the true nature of things.”

That some of these ideas of Pythagoras should have influenced the thinking of Plato is quite understandable. The rational element in him provided a secure basis for thought and knowledge and was very acceptable to Plato.

Michael Angelo
The dome of the St Peter’s Basilica is the crowning glory of Michael Angelo, even as he said: “My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth’s loveliness.” Born in Florence, (6 March1475-18 February 1564) Michael Angelo was surely one of the greatest artists who ever lived here on earth. His art mirrored beauty which, in a human body represented, rather housed, the divinity itself.

Michael Angelo was a painter, Michael Angelo was a sculptor, Michael Angelo was an architect, Michael Angelo was a diplomat. But perhaps Michael Angelo was none of these. Michael Angelo was simply a genius, some wonderful soul who had come to express himself in things of beauty, give to the psychic the preeminence that never it had earlier in man’s expression of the ungraspable. To depict the Biblical scenes with over 3,000 figures, for four years the artist painted lying on his back, just a few inches from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, is itself an extraordinary feat. Genius he was, but he had the immense capacity also to do hard work.

Michael Angelo sculpted Pieta; he gave us the magnificent statue of David, justifying that he saw in the block of the Carrara marble an angel and that he had to be simply freed by chipping off the unnecessary parts hiding him. He set him free. “It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh.”

Was Michael Angelo the Renaissance man or it is he who brought renaissance? Did he create time or he was just a product of time? In any case, things were not the same afterwards. Another giant leap was taken by the evolutionary soul of man, leap towards greater perfection which had in it the sweetness and the fire of the psychic being.

Michael Angelo, “who was often arrogant with others and constantly dissatisfied with himself, saw art as originating from inner inspiration and from culture.” Perhaps the inspiration came from its primary source, and that is why it endures.

There is an anecdote connected with the Moses, San Pietro in Vincoli. It is said that Michael Angelo violently hit the knee of the statue with a hammer, shouting, "Why don't you speak to me?" And then speak it did.

It is said that in his private life Michael Angelo was a self-denying person, self-disciplined, moderate, kind of an ascetic, “indifferent to food and drink, eating”. He told his disc