These gods and goddesses of the new creation
How does the new creation look like? What are its characteristics, its distinct features, its powers of expression, its possibilities and its potentials in the superior harmony born in the joy of the spirit? What kind of connection will it bear with the world as we have here presently, this mortal world of anguish, this Keats’s nest of pain, this duhkhālya of the Buddhist, this haunt of ignorance, this home of Pain as declared by Narad? Will there be a bridge between the two, the mortal and the immortal, or will they ever exist aloof and apart from each other, unconcerned, indifferent, things here not changing in any definite way? The present essay in poetry, describing the outbreak of perfection’s law, so beautiful and precise and detailed, gives us some idea of the highlands and hinterlands, the valleys and mountains, and the rivers and the thick green luxurious forests and the birds and the animals that inhabit it in their divine contents over there, live under the perfection’s law. If it is a perfect world with these dazzling and colourful, with these positive and optimistic inhabitants, swift in their pleasant amicable moods of love and laughter, with knowledge and power and action, all in the fullness of life, in the delight of existence, then one really wonders as to what sort of perfection is it actually holding, whether it is archetypal or it is evolutionary, charged with the capabilities of the transcendental gods and goddesses in the play of a yet brighter and widening infinity? The contrast is caught in the following:

All here self-lost had there its divine place.
The Powers that here betray our hearts and err,
Were there sovereign in truth, perfect in joy,
Masters in a creation without flaw,
Possessors of their own infinitude.

And the Rig Veda hymns that a perfect path of the Truth has come into being for our journey to the other shore beyond the darkness. (I:46:11) Or else, it tells us that by the Truth they hold the Truth that holds all, in the power of the Sacrifice, in the supreme ether. (V:15:2) By the Truth they hold the Truth that holds all, says Rishi Vamadeva, ŗténa ŗtam dharuņam dhāraynta.

About the perfection of this new creation, let us read something from The Life Divine:

As there has been established on earth a mental Consciousness and Power which shapes a race of mental beings and takes up into itself all of earthly nature that is ready for the change, so now there will be established on earth a gnostic Consciousness and Power which will shape a race of gnostic spiritual beings and take up into itself all of earth-nature that is ready for this new transformation. It will also receive into itself from above, progressively, from its own domain of perfect light and power and beauty all that is ready to descend from that domain into terrestrial being. For the evolution proceeded in the past by the upsurging, at each critical stage, of a concealed Power from its involution in the Inconscience, but also by a descent from above, from its own plane, of that Power already self-realised in its own higher natural province. In all these previous stages there has been a division between surface self and consciousness and subliminal self and consciousness; the surface was formed mainly under the push of the upsurging force from below, by the Inconscient developing a slowly emergent formulation of a concealed force of the Spirit, the subliminal partly in this way but mainly by a simultaneous influx of the largeness of the same force from above: a mental or a vital being descended into the subliminal parts and formed from its secret station there a mental or a vital personality on the surface. But before the supramental change can begin, the veil between the subliminal and the surface parts must have been already broken down; the influx, the descent will be in the entire consciousness as a whole, it will not take place partly behind a veil: the process will be no longer a concealed, obscure and ambiguous procedure but an open out-flowering consciously felt and followed by the whole being in its transmutation. In other respects the process will be identical,—a supramental inflow from above, the descent of a gnostic being into the nature, and an emergence of the concealed supramental force from below; the influx and the unveiling between them will remove what is left of the nature of the Ignorance. The rule of the Inconscient will disappear: for the Inconscience will be changed by the outburst of the greater secret Consciousness within it, the hidden Light, into what it always was in reality, a sea of the secret Superconscience. A first formation of a gnostic consciousness and nature will be the consequence. (pp. 967-68)

The promise is, the greater rich and as yet mysterious new creation will change the smaller death-haunted creation in which we presently live, in which we attempt to develop our potential.

RYD

The powers that here betray had there their divine places
The perfection of the new creation is brought home to us by the poet-essayist with the help of a few recognizable examples. They give us some idea about its nature and its excellence. Very methodically, and in a lucid step by step manner, the revelatory thesis develops the theme with these few illustrations. The first example is regarding the mind that can open itself to the thoughts and visions of the spirit, the operation of the superior divine mind. In contrast to this, our mind is greatly limited in its working.

Mind for us is an instrument of analysis, and not an instrument of synthesis. All our present faculties of cognition also come more or less from its analytical functioning. Our mind is not an instrument of synthesis for arriving at the integral view of existence. Thus, it breaks the sunlight into a spectral range, but cannot give us back its white purity in the right proportions of its components. It breaks up water into hydrogen and oxygen, but does not know where the properties of water have disappeared; or, in the reverse, it cannot know how, from a certain chemical combination, the new properties appear. For it, it is a creation out of nothing, ex nihilo, something mysterious, inexplicable. Nor is there any hope of getting knowledge of the whole from the components. It has a functional utility in a certain domain of human pursuits no doubt, but by its success in that domain it cannot abrogate for itself the right of integral knowledge. This has been the great pitfall for enthusiastic men of reason, to claim everything for themselves, admit only the rational and dismiss all that is mystic and occult and spiritual. There are ranges beyond mind, the higher, the illumined, the intuitive and the highest spiritual, the Overmind, and these have to come into extensive operation before the very potentialities of the reasoning, but not reasonable, mind can properly emerge. There is the irresolvable dichotomy between the subject and the object, making even the material world an illusion. There is not only a mind in matter, but there is also the mind of matter and unless that becomes luminous the power of the highest cannot transform it into its kind, make it develop and use its true faculties, make matter a substance of the spirit. But in the new creation the true mind is a splendid sun of vision’s rays and it is that mind which, by the glory of its thoughts, shapes the substance, and gives to it the dreams of a new grandeur, opens to make it possible to receive the premier light that has no darkness in it. This mind of the physical opening to the higher light prepares matter to become a willing instrument of the spirit; it is that which can effect true transformation of matter, making it luminous.

In The Life Divine we have the following passage which might give us some idea about some of its aspects: (pp. 982-84)

The supramental transformation, the supramental evolution must carry with it a lifting of mind, life and body out of themselves into a greater way of being in which yet their own ways and powers would be, not suppressed or abolished, but perfected and fulfilled by the self-exceeding. For in the Ignorance all paths are the paths of the Spirit seeking for itself blindly or with a growing light; the gnostic being and life would be the Spirit's self-discovery and its seeing and reaching of the aims of all these paths but in the greater way of its own revealed and conscious truth of being. Mind seeks for light, for knowledge,—for knowledge of the one truth basing all, an essential truth of self and things, but also of all truth of diversity of that oneness, all its detail, circumstance, manifold way of action, form, law of movement and happening, various manifestation and creation; for thinking mind the joy of existence is discovery and the penetration of the mystery of creation that comes with knowledge. This the gnostic change will fulfil in an ample measure; but it will give it a new character. It will act not by the discovery of the unknown, but by the bringing out of the known; all will be the finding “of the self by the self in the self”. For the self of the gnostic being will not be the mental ego but the Spirit that is one in all; he will see the world as a universe of the Spirit. The finding of the one truth underlying all things will be the Identical discovering identity and identical truth everywhere and discovering too the power and workings and relations of that identity. The revelation of the detail, the circumstance, the abundant ways and forms of the manifestation will be the unveiling of the endless opulence of the truths of that identity, its forms and powers of self, its curious manifoldness and multiplicity of form bringing out infinitely its oneness. This knowledge will proceed by identification with all, by entering into all, by a contact bringing with it a leap of self-discovery and a flame of recognition, a greater and surer intuition of truth than the mind can reach; there will be an intuition too of the means of embodying and utilising the truth seen, an operative intuition of its dynamic processes, a direct intimate awareness guiding the life and the physical senses in every step of their action and service to the Spirit when they have to be called in as instruments for the effectuation of process in Life and Matter. A replacement of intellectual seeking by supramental identity and gnostic intuition of the contents of the identity, an omnipresence of Spirit with its light penetrating the whole process of knowledge and all its use,—so that there is an integration between the knower, knowledge and the thing known, between the operating consciousness, the instrumentation and the thing done, while the single self watches over the whole integrated movement and fulfils itself intimately in it, making it a flawless unit of self-effectuation,—will be the character of each gnostic movement of knowledge and action of knowledge. Mind, observing and reasoning, labours to detach itself and see objectively and truly what it has to know; it tries to know it as not-self, independent other-reality not affected by process of personal thinking or by any presence of self: the gnostic consciousness will at once intimately and exactly know its object by a comprehending and penetrating identification with it. It will overpass what it has to know, but it will include it in itself; it will know the object as part of itself as it might know any part or movement of its own being, without any narrowing of itself by the identification or snaring of its thought in it so as to be bound or limited in knowledge. There will be the intimacy, accuracy, fullness of a direct internal knowledge, but not that misleading by personal mind by which we constantly err, because the consciousness will be that of a universal and not a restricted and ego-bound person. It will proceed towards all knowledge, not setting truth against truth to see which will stand and survive, but completing truth by truth in the light of the one Truth of which all are the aspects. All idea and vision and perception will have this character of an inner seeing, an intimate extended self-perception, a large self-integrating knowledge, an indivisible whole working itself out by light acting upon light in a self-executing harmony of truth-being. There will be an unfolding, not as a delivery of light out of darkness, but as a delivery of light out of itself; for if an evolving supramental Consciousness holds back part of its contents of self-awareness behind in itself, it does this not as a step or by an act of Ignorance, but as the movement of a deliberate bringing out of its timeless knowledge into a process of Time-manifestation. A self-illumination, a revelation of light out of light will be the method of cognition of this evolutionary supramental Nature.

In a letter about the physical’s mind, Sri Aurobindo writes: (Letters on Yoga, p. 340)

Mind… is everywhere. The physical mind is technically placed below the vital and yet it is a prolongation of the mind proper and one that can act in its own sphere by direct touch with the higher mental intelligence. And there is too an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles. Haeckel, the German materialist, spoke somewhere of the will in the atom, and recent science, dealing with the incalculable individual variation in the activity of the electrons, comes near to perceiving that this is not a figure but the shadow thrown by a secret reality. This body-mind is a very tangible truth; owing to its obscurity and mechanical clinging to past movements and facile oblivion and rejection of the new, we find in it one of the chief obstacles to permeation by the supermind Force and the transformation of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilisation of the supramental Light and Force in material Nature.

The action of the Divine Mind may not be fully effective on the mind of the physical to effect this transformation, but in the ranges of mind proper it will prepare the necessary mental faculties to effect this process. It is only the direct action of the supermind on the physical mind that can bring about the decisive change.

RYD

The magical spell of imagination
If over there, in the perfection’s house, in the House of the Spirit, mind is a sun of vision’s rays and if it can shape substance by the sheer brilliance of its thoughts, imagination has the power to cast its spell on the unknown and make it dwell in it. Under its gainful charm truth wears rich and bright colours of the rainbow; or else it sings dream-notes and brings closer to us all that is far, makes all that is inaccessible proximate, known, makes the Real familiar. The wonder is, the power of imagination can make even the Unknowable tangible, true, graspable, knowable. It builds a temple wherein the One as the single deity of all can be installed and worshipped. Countless aspects of this God in his mood of manifestation are brought into play, the aspects of the Supreme himself. That indeed is something remarkable of imagination’s power, to make the potent the actual. Its speech voices the ineffable, its ray reveals the hidden presence, its forms disclose the formless, its ideas hold the Idea of the Infinite, divine in the house of the divine, it is the Word which has the mantric supremacy to usher the divine experience, to set things in its rhythm and movement, set all that is ready en rapport with the Law of the Truth in the strength of its Time, in the Dynamics of Ritam.

Let us read a few passages on imagination from some of the writings of Sri Aurobindo:

When one is living in the physical mind, the only way to escape from it is imagination… that is why poetry and art, etc. have so strong a hold. But these imaginations are often really shadows of supraphysical experience and once the barrier of the physical mind is broken or even swung a little open, there come the experiences themselves, if the temperament is favourable. (Letters on Yoga, p. 902)

An entire silence and inactivity of the mind cannot come at first—what is possible is a quietude of the mind... The imagination which the Mother recommended to you was a means of such concentration. (Letters on Yoga, p. 1177)

The intelligence can also follow this trend, but it ceases then to be the pure intellect; it calls in its power of imagination to its aid, it becomes the image-maker, the creator of symbols and values, a spiritual artist and poet. (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 580)

The supramental memory is different from the mental, not a storing up of past knowledge and experience, but an abiding presence of knowledge that can be brought forward or, more characteristically, offers itself, when it is needed: it is not dependent on attention or on conscious reception, for the things of the past not known actually or not observed can be called up from latency by an action which is yet essentially a remembrance. Especially on a certain level all knowledge presents itself as a remembering, because all is latent or inherent in the self of supermind. The future like the past presents itself to knowledge in the supermind as a memory of the preknown. The imagination transformed in the supermind acts on one side as a power of true image and symbol, always an image or index of some value or significance or other truth of being, on the other as an inspiration or interpretative seeing of possibilities and potentialities not less true than actual or realised things. These are put in their place either by an attendant intuitive or interpretative judgment or by one inherent in the vision of the image, symbol or potentiality, or by a supereminent revelation of that which is behind the image or symbol or which determines the potential and the actual and their relations and, it may be, overrides and overpasses them, imposing ultimate truths and supreme certitudes. (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 860)

Man, because he has acquired reason and still more because he has indulged his power of imagination and intuition, is able to conceive an existence higher than his own and even to envisage his personal elevation beyond his present state into that existence. (The Life Divine, p. 55)

But our mind has the faculty of imagination; it can create and take as true and real its own mental structures: here, it might be thought, is something analogous to the action of Maya. Our mental imagination is an instrument of Ignorance; it is the resort or device or refuge of a limited capacity of knowledge, a limited capacity of effective action. Mind supplements these deficiencies by its power of imagination: it uses it to extract from things obvious and visible the things that are not obvious and visible; it undertakes to create its own figures of the possible and the impossible; it erects illusory actuals or draws figures of a conjectured or constructed truth of things that are not true to outer experience. That is at least the appearance of its operation; but, in reality, it is the mind's way or one of its ways of summoning out of Being its infinite possibilities, even of discovering or capturing the unknown possibilities of the Infinite. But, because it cannot do this with knowledge, it makes experimental constructions of truth and possibility and a yet unrealised actuality: as its power of receiving inspirations of Truth is limited, it imagines, hypothetises, questions whether this or that may not be truths; as its force to summon real potentials is narrow and restricted, it erects possibilities which it hopes to actualise or wishes it could actualise; as its power to actualise is cramped and confined by the material world's oppositions, it figures subjective actualisations to satisfy its will of creation and delight of self-presentation. But it is to be noted that through the imagination it does receive a figure of truth, does summon possibilities which are afterwards realised, does often by its imagination exercise an effective pressure on the world's actualities. Imaginations that persist in the human mind, like the idea of travel in the air, end often by self-fulfilment; individual thought-formations can actualise themselves if there is sufficient strength in the formation or in the mind that forms it. Imaginations can create their own potentiality, especially if they are supported in the collective mind, and may in the long run draw on themselves the sanction of the cosmic Will. In fact all imaginations represent possibilities: some are able one day to actualise in some form, perhaps a very different form of actuality; more are condemned to sterility because they do not enter into the figure or scheme of the present creation, do not come within the permitted potentiality of the individual or do not accord with the collective or the generic principle or are alien to the nature or destiny of the containing world-existence. (The Life Divine, pp. 435-36)

Imagination itself is in its nature a substitute for a truer consciousness's faculty of intuition of possibility: as the mind ascends towards the Truth-Consciousness, this mental power becomes a truth-imagination which brings the colour and light of the higher truth into the limited adequacy or inadequacy of the knowledge already achieved and formulated and, finally, in the transforming light above it gives place wholly to higher truth-powers or itself turns into intuition and inspiration; the Mind in that uplifting ceases to be a creator of delusions and an architect of error… (The Life Divine, p. 436)

Imagination is a necessity for a partial being with an ignorant consciousness; for it has to supplement its ignorance by imaginations and conjectures: there can be no place for such a movement in the sole consciousness of a sole Reality. (The Life Divine, p. 444)

As we reach in our thought the line at which the evolution of Mind into Overmind passes over into an evolution of Overmind into Supermind, we are faced with a difficulty which amounts almost to an impossibility. For we are moved to seek for some precise idea, some clear mental description of the supramental or gnostic existence of which evolutionary Nature in the Ignorance is in travail; but by crossing this extreme line of sublimated Mind the consciousness passes out of the sphere, exceeds the characteristic action and escapes from the grasp, of mental perception and knowledge. It is evident indeed that supramental nature must be a perfect integration and consummation of spiritual nature and experience: it would also contain in itself, by the very character of the evolutionary principle, though it would not be limited to that change, a total spiritualisation of mundane nature; our world-experience would be taken up in this step of our evolution and, by a transformation of its parts of divinity, a creative rejection of its imperfections and disguises, reach some divine truth and plenitude. But these are general formulas and give us no precise idea of the change. Our normal perception or imagination or formulation of things spiritual and things mundane is mental, but in the gnostic change the evolution crosses a line beyond which there is a supreme and radical reversal of consciousness and the standards and forms of mental cognition are no longer sufficient: it is difficult for mental thought to understand or describe supramental nature. (The Life Divine, pp. 964-65)

RYD

Joy in her heart and laughter on her lips
In our life different parts of our being pulling us in different directions is a matter of daily occurrence. This is as truer in the individual as also in the collective social units or organisations. Each one asserts its own claim, mind with its fixed thoughts and ideas and theories, life-force quite often violently seeking the fulfilment of its desires, body with its dark mass of inertia refusing to change or respond to the higher gainful principle of aggregation and harmony. The age-old battle of life with matter finally leaves life in the hands of death; mind itself has to fight against the incapacity and limitation of body, as well as against the passions and cravings of life. Even when one rises beyond these, there is the quarrel of the spirit denying them all, its own needed instruments for growth. We witness only the spectacle of the war of the members, each member with its own set objectives, they behaving like independent fiduciary heads, they all leading to these thousand discordances. This leads to weakness, one as if trying to defeat the other. We make new year resolutions, only to break them the next day. We will one thing and act in another way; our actions do not corroborate our ideals, our visions, our thoughts. Our impressive proposals and designs quite often lack the needed infrastructure for their successful implementation; we say they are not realistic and we make meaningless and absurd compromises. Ours is Newton’s law of action-and-reaction, extended in another way to love and hatred, liking and prejudice, even to good and evil, joy and sorrow. In spite of the centuries-old warning we, knowing truth well, continue to get allured by falsehood. “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” That is what we are. Our ignorant will falls into error and before long incapacity and impotence take possession of it. The problem of existence reduces to the problem of establishing harmony, harmony between life and mind and body, and spirit too.

But in the new creation in the house of the spirit there is perfection, with harmony in perfection. Each one has its role to play and there are no conflicts. A harmony is woven between soul and soul, time in the flow of eternity acquires a divine character, there is concordance between act and will, what thought conceives gets materialised as fact. Life rushes everywhere in her joy, making in every activity of hers astounding discoveries. She surprises thought by her new creations, compels the breathing heart to dare the impossible, gives to truth a gleaming shape that it may express itself in a myriad truths, truths in their joy and awareness and their widening possibilities. No wonder “she never could exhaust its numberless thoughts and living dreams”. Hers is an ardent hunt of soul looking for soul, hers a seeking and a finding as of gods. They do seek and find, so must she.

Regarding life seeking perfection in the context of the gnostic race that must appear here, let us read a passage from The Life Divine: (pp. 984-85)

As mind seeks for light, for the discovery of knowledge and for mastery by knowledge, so life seeks for the development of its own force and for mastery by force: its quest is for growth, power, conquest, possession, satisfaction, creation, joy, love, beauty; its joy of existence is in a constant self-expression, development, diverse manifoldness of action, creation, enjoyment, an abundant and strong intensity of itself and its power. The gnostic evolution will lift that to its highest and fullest expression, but it will not act for the power, satisfaction, enjoyment of the mental or vital ego, for its narrow possession of itself and its eager ambitious grasp on others and on things or for its greater self-affirmation and magnified embodiment; for in that way no spiritual fullness and perfection can come. The gnostic life will exist and act for the Divine in itself and in the world, for the Divine in all; the increasing possession of the individual being and the world by the Divine Presence, Light, Power, Love, Delight, Beauty will be the sense of life to the gnostic being. In the more and more perfect satisfaction of that growing manifestation will be the individual's satisfaction: his power will be the instrumentation of the power of Supernature for bringing in and extending that greater life and nature; whatever conquest and adventure will be there, will be for that only and not for the reign of any individual or collective ego. Love will be for him the contact, meeting, union of self with self, of spirit with spirit, a unification of being, a power and joy and intimacy and closeness of soul to soul, of the One to the One, a joy of identity and the consequences of a diverse identity. It is this joy of an intimate self-revealing diversity of the One, the multitudinous union of the One and a happy interaction in the identity, that will be for him the full revealed sense of life. Creation aesthetic or dynamic, mental creation, life-creation, material creation will have for him the same sense. It will be the creation of significant forms of the Eternal Force, Light, Beauty, Reality,—the beauty and truth of its forms and bodies, the beauty and truth of its powers and qualities, the beauty and truth of its spirit, its formless beauty of self and essence.

RYD

Matter is Brahman
For Newton it was “brute matter”. But then that also gave contents, gave meaning and stability to his great ideas. The firm habits of matter made it possible to understand it to some extent; it is that which made it dependable. It acquired prestige and the quest of knowledge of the objective material world became reassuring. The discoverer and the researcher had the confidence that, mid-stream, it will not deceive him, throw off the back. Physics became physics because of this property of matter. The building of gigantic machines as tools of study, with international participation and plowing in of massive resources is a new phenomenon in the history of thought. In fact the investigation of matter with mind as the tool of investigation proved immensely fruitful, vastly rewarding, something that the centuries of philosophy or theology or spiritual metaphysics could never conceive of, could never achieve. The behaviour of matter and the formulation of rationalistic laws have become so convincing today that, we begin to wonder if tomorrow’s technology will not change the very course of evolution, will not prepare the new species as the next step in the line of its progress.

But in the discovery of Matter as the Eternal, Annam Brahma, this is hardly the first step taken, beginning with the empirical-rationalistic mind; Bhrigu has to retire again and do focused tapasya for one year. There is the ascending scale of substance, each step demanding its own tools of investigation and cognition. Will the modern Brighu climb this ascending series and come to know how Matter really is Brahman? “In a certain sense Matter is unreal and non-existent; that is to say, our present knowledge, idea and experience of Matter is not its truth, but merely a phenomenon of particular relation between our senses and the all-existence in which we move. When Science discovers that Matter resolves itself into forms of Energy, it has hold of a universal and fundamental truth; and when philosophy discovers that Matter only exists as substantial appearance to the consciousness and that the one reality is Spirit or pure conscious Being, it has hold of a greater and completer, a still more fundamental truth. But still the question remains why Energy should take the form of Matter and not of mere force-currents or why that which is really Spirit should admit the phenomenon of Matter and not rest in states, velleities and joys of the spirit.” (The Life Divine, p. 234)

Sri Aurobindo concludes this presentation with the following: “…we arrive at this truth of Matter that there is a conceptive self-extension of being which works itself out in the universe as substance or object of consciousness and which cosmic Mind and Life in their creative action represent through atomic division and aggregation as the thing we call Matter. But this Matter, like Mind and Life, is still Being or Brahman in its self-creative action. It is a form of the force of conscious Being, a form given by Mind and realised by Life. It holds within it as its own reality consciousness concealed from itself, involved and absorbed in the result of its own self-formation and therefore self-oblivious. And, however brute and void of sense it seems to us, it is yet, to the secret experience of the consciousness hidden within it, delight of being offering itself to this secret consciousness as object of sensation in order to tempt that hidden godhead out of its secrecy. Being manifest as substance, force of Being cast into form, into a figured self-representation of the secret self-consciousness, delight offering itself to its own consciousness as an object,—what is this but Sachchidananda? Matter is Sachchidananda represented to His own mental experience as a formal basis of objective knowledge, action and delight of existence.” (p. 239)

Bhrigu’s first glance at Matter, Matter is Brahman, Sachchidananda seen through the instrumentation of Mind, cannot be the decisive view of Matter in the New Creation, in the House of the Spirit. If Matter has to manifest Spirit another consciousness must enter into it, the Supramental. How that is going to happen, to be brought about? But that precisely is the avataric work involving complete identification with it, without losing oneself into it.

About the prospects of the new body and the senses for its functioning, let us read some relevant texts from Sri Aurobindo’s writings:

There Matter is the Spirit's firm density,
An artistry of glad outwardness of self,
A treasure-house of lasting images
Where sense can build a world of pure delight:
The home of a perpetual happiness,
It lodged the hours as in a pleasant inn.

The senses there were outlets of the soul;
Even the youngest child-thought of the mind
Incarnated some touch of highest things.

There substance was a resonant harp of self,
A net for the constant lightnings of the Spirit,
A magnet power of love's intensity
Whose yearning throb and adoration's cry
Drew God's approaches close, sweet, wonderful.

Its solidity was a mass of heavenly make;
Its fixity and sweet permanence of charm
Made a bright pedestal for felicity.

Its bodies woven by a divine sense
Prolonged the nearness of soul's clasp with soul;
Its warm play of external sight and touch
Reflected the glow and thrill of the heart's joy,
Mind's climbing brilliant thoughts, the spirit's bliss;
Life's rapture kept for ever its flame and cry.

All that now passes lived immortal there
In the proud beauty and fine harmony
Of Matter plastic to spiritual light.

Its ordered hours proclaimed the eternal Law;
Vision reposed on a safety of deathless forms;
Time was Eternity's transparent robe.

An architect hewing out self's living rock,
Phenomenon built Reality's summer-house
On the beaches of the sea of Infinity.

In our present way of living the soul expresses itself, as best it can or as badly as it must, through the mind and the vitality, or, more often, allows the mind and the vitality to act with its support: the body is the instrument of this action. But the body, even in obeying, limits and determines the mind’s and the life’s self-expression by the limited possibilities and acquired character of its own physical instrumentation; it has besides a law of its own action, a movement and will or force or urge of movement of its own subconscious or half-emerged conscious power of being which they can only partially,—and even in that part more by an indirect than by a direct or, if direct, then more by a subconscious than a willed and conscious action,—influence or alter. But in the gnostic way of being and living the will of the Spirit must directly control and determine the movements and law of the body. For the law of the body arises from the subconscient or inconscient: but in the gnostic being the subconscient will have become conscious and subject to the supramental control, penetrated with its light and action; the basis of inconscience with its obscurity and ambiguity, its obstruction or tardy responses will have been transformed into a lower or supporting superconscience by the supramental emergence… The body will be turned by the power of the spiritual consciousness into a true and fit and perfectly responsive instrument of the Spirit. This new relation of the Spirit and the body assumes,—and makes possible,—a free acceptance of the whole of material Nature in place of a rejection; the drawing back from her, the refusal of all identification or acceptance, which is the first normal necessity of the spiritual consciousness for its liberation, is no longer imperative… A certain reverence, even, for Matter and a sacramental attitude in all dealings with it is possible… As a result of this new relation between the Spirit and the body, the gnostic evolution will effectuate the spiritualisation, perfection and fulfilment of the physical being; it will do for the body as for the mind and life… A supramental self-acting self-effectuating awareness and knowledge, replacing this ignorance, will liberate and restore the obscured and spoiled intuitive instincts in the body and enlighten and supplement them with a greater conscious action. This change would institute and maintain a right physical perception of things, a right relation and right reaction to objects and energies, a right rhythm of mind, nerve and organism. It would bring into the body a higher spiritual power and a greater life-force unified with the universal life-force and able to draw on it, a luminous harmony with material Nature and the vast and calm touch of the eternal repose which can give to it its diviner strength and ease. Above all,—for this is the most needed and fundamental change,—it will flood the whole being with a supreme energy of Consciousness-Force which would meet, assimilate or harmonise with itself all the forces of existence that surround and press upon the body. (The Life Divine, pp.985-88)


A divine life in a divine body is the formula of the ideal that we envisage. But what will be the divine body? What will be the nature of this body, its structure, the principle of its activity, the perfection that distinguishes it from the limited and imperfect physicality within which we are now bound? What will be the conditions and operations of its life, still physical in its base upon the earth, by which it can be known as divine? If it is to be the product of an evolution, and it is so that we must envisage it, an evolution out of our human imperfection and ignorance into a greater truth of spirit and nature, by what process or stages can it grow into manifestation or rapidly arrive?...

This destiny of the body has rarely in the past been envisaged or else not for the body here upon earth; such forms would rather be imagined or visioned as the privilege of celestial beings and not possible as the physical residence of a soul still bound to terrestrial nature… The body, as we have seen, is an offspring and creation of the Inconscient, itself inconscient or only half-conscious; it began as a form of unconscious Matter, developed life and from a material object became a living growth, developed mind and from the subconsciousness of the plant and the initial rudimentary mind or incomplete intelligence of the animal developed the intellectual mind and more complete intelligence of man and now serves as the physical base, container and instrumental means of our total spiritual endeavour…

To the physical being it brings a bondage to the material instruments, to the brain and heart and senses, wed to materiality and materialism of all kinds, to the bodily mechanism and its needs and obligations, to the imperative need of food and the preoccupation with the means of getting it and storing it as one of the besetting interests of life, to fatigue and sleep, to the satisfaction of bodily desire. The life-force in man also is tied down to these small things; it has to limit the scope of its larger ambitions and longings, its drive to rise beyond the pull of earth and follow the heavenlier intuitions of its psychic parts, the heart's ideal and the soul's yearnings. On the mind the body imposes the boundaries of the physical being and the physical life and the sense of the sole complete reality of physical things with the rest as a sort of brilliant fireworks of the imagination, of lights and glories that can only have their full play in heavens beyond, on higher planes of existence, but not here; it afflicts the idea and aspiration with the burden of doubt, the evidence of the subtle senses and the intuition with uncertainty and the vast field of supraphysical consciousness and experience with the imputation of unreality and clamps down to its earth-roots the growth of the spirit from its original limiting humanity into the supramental truth and the divine nature. These obstacles can be overcome, the denials and resistance of the body surmounted, its transformation is possible…

The divine life must always be actuated by the push towards perfection; a perfection of the joy of life is part and an essential part of it, the body's delight in things and the body's joy of life are not excluded from it; they too have to be made perfect. A large totality is the very nature of this new and growing way of existence, a fullness of the possibilities of the mind transmuted into a thing of light, of the life converted into a force of spiritual power and joy, of the body transformed into an instrument of a divine action, divine knowledge, divine bliss. All can be taken into its scope that is capable of transforming itself, all that can be an instrument, a vessel, an opportunity for the expression of this totality of the self-manifesting Spirit…

the subtle physical agencies and the physical consciousness into a freer and a diviner activity, a many-dimensioned and unlimited operation of their consciousness, a large outbreak of higher powers and the sublimation of the bodily consciousness itself, of its instrumentation, capacity, capability for the manifestation of the soul in the world of Matter. The subtle senses now concealed in us might come forward into a free action and the material senses themselves become means or channels for the vision of what is now invisible to us or the discovery of things surrounding us but at present unseizable and held back from our knowledge… A total transformation of the body would demand a sufficient change of the most material part of the organism, its constitution, its processes and its set-up of nature…

This aim, it might be said, would be sufficiently served if the instrumentation of the centres and their forces reigned over all the activities of the nature with an entire domination of the body and made it both in its structural form and its organic workings a free channel and means of communication and a plastic instrument of cognition and dynamic action for all that they had to do in the material life, in the world of Matter. There would have to be a change in the operative processes of the material organs themselves and, it may well be, in their very constitution and their importance; they could not be allowed to impose their limitations imperatively on the new physical life. To begin with, they might become more clearly outer ends of the channels of communication and action, more serviceable for the psychological purposes of the inhabitant, less blindly material in their responses, more conscious of the act and aim of the inner movements and powers which use them and which they are wrongly supposed by the material man in us to generate and to use. The brain would be a channel of communication of the form of the thoughts and a battery of their insistence on the body and the outside world where they could then become effective directly, communicating themselves without physical means from mind to mind, producing with a similar directness effects on the thoughts, actions and lives of others or even upon material things. The heart would equally be a direct communicant and medium of interchange for the feelings and emotions thrown outward upon the world by the forces of the psychic centre. Heart could reply directly to heart, the life-force come to the help of other lives and answer their call in spite of strangeness and distance, many beings without any external communication thrill with the message and meet in the secret light from one divine centre. The will might control the organs that deal with food, safeguard automatically the health, eliminate greed and desire, substitute subtler processes or draw in strength and substance from the universal life-force so that the body could maintain for a long time its own strength and substance without loss or waste, remaining thus with no need of sustenance by material aliments, and yet continue a strenuous action with no fatigue or pause for sleep or repose. The soul's will or the mind's could act from higher sources upon the sex centre and the sex organs so as to check firmly or even banish the grosser sexual impulse or stimulus and instead of serving an animal excitation or crude drive or desire turn their use to the storing, production and direction towards brain and heart and life-force of the essential energy, ojas, of which this region is the factory so as to support the works of the mind and soul and spirit and the higher life-powers and limit the expenditure of the energy on lower things. The soul, the psychic being, could more easily fill all with the light and turn the very matter of the body to higher uses for its own greater purpose.

This would be a first potent change, but not by any means all that is possible or desirable. For it may well be that the evolutionary urge would proceed to a change of the organs themselves in their material working and use and diminish greatly the need of their instrumentation and even of their existence. The centres in the subtle body, suksma sarira, of which one would become conscious and aware of all going on in it, would pour their energies into material nerve and plexus and tissue and radiate them through the whole material body; all the physical life and its necessary activities in this new existence could be maintained and operated by these higher agencies in a freer and ampler way and by a less burdensome and restricting method. This might go so far that these organs might cease to be indispensable and even be felt as too obstructive: the central force might use them less and less and finally throw aside their use altogether. If that happened they might waste by atrophy, be reduced to an insignificant minimum or even disappear. The central force might substitute for them subtle organs of a very different character or, if anything material was needed, instruments that would be forms of dynamism or plastic transmitters rather than what we know as organs…

The new type, the divine body, must continue the already developed evolutionary form; there must be a continuation from the type Nature has all along been developing, a continuity from the human to the divine body, no breaking away to something unrecognisable but a high sequel to what has already been achieved and in part perfected. The human body has in it parts and instruments that have been sufficiently evolved to serve the divine life; these have to survive in their form, though they must be still further perfected, their limitations of range and use removed, their liability to defect and malady and impairment eliminated, their capacities of cognition and dynamic action carried beyond the present limits. New powers have to be acquired by the body which our present humanity could not hope to realise, could not even dream of or could only imagine. Much that can now only be known, worked out or created by the use of invented tools and machinery might be achieved by the new body in its own power or by the inhabitant spirit through its own direct spiritual force. The body itself might acquire new means and ranges of communication with other bodies, new processes of acquiring knowledge, a new aesthesis, new potencies of manipulation of itself and objects… It might not be impossible for it to possess or disclose means native to its own constitution, substance or natural instrumentation for making the far near and annulling distance, cognising what is now beyond the body's cognisance, acting where action is now out of its reach or its domain, developing subtleties and plasticities which could not be permitted under present conditions to the needed fixity of a material frame. These and other numerous potentialities might appear and the body become an instrument immeasurably superior to what we can now imagine as possible. There could be an evolution from a first apprehending truth-consciousness to the utmost heights of the ascending ranges of supermind and it may pass the borders of the supermind proper itself where it begins to shadow out, develop, delineate expressive forms of life touched by a supreme pure existence, consciousness and bliss which constitute the worlds of a highest truth of existence, dynamism of tapas, glory and sweetness of bliss, the absolute essence and pitch of the all-creating Ananda. The transformation of the physical being might follow this incessant line of progression and the divine body reflect or reproduce here in a divine life on the earth something of this highest greatness and glory of the self-manifesting Spirit. (Essays in Philosophy and Yoga: The Divine Body)

RYD

The Word that ushers divine experience
Let us read the following from The Secret of the Veda: (pp. 318-22)

The Divine, the Deva, manifests itself as conscious Power of the soul, creates the worlds by the Word out of the waters of the subconscient, apraketam salilam sarvam,—the inconscient ocean that was this all, as it is plainly termed in the great Hymn of Creation. This power of the Deva is Brahma, the stress in the name falling more upon the conscious soul-power than upon the Word which expresses it. The manifestation of the different world-planes in the conscient human being culminates in the manifestation of the superconscient, the Truth and the Bliss, and this is the office of the supreme Word or Veda. Of this supreme word Brihaspati is the master, the stress in this name falling upon the potency of the Word rather than upon the thought of the general soul-power which is behind it. Brihaspati gives the Word of knowledge, the rhythm of expression of the superconscient, to the gods and especially to Indra, the lord of Mind, when they work in man as “Aryan” powers for the great consummation. It is easy to see how these conceptions came to be specialised in the broader, but less subtle and profound Puranic symbolism into Brahma, the Creator, and Brihaspati, the teacher of the gods. In the name, Brahmanaspati, the two varying stresses are unified and equalised. It is the link-name between the general and the special aspects of the same deity.

Brihaspati is he who has established firmly the limits and definitions of the Earth, that is to say of the material consciousness. The existence out of which all formations are made is an obscure, fluid and indeterminate movement,—salilam, Water. The first necessity is to create a sufficiently stable formation out of this flux and running so as to form a basis for the life of the conscient. This Brihaspati does in the formation of the physical consciousness and its world, sahasā, by force, by a sort of mighty constraint upon the resistance of the subconscient. This great creation he effects by establishing the triple principle of mind, life and body, always present together and involved in each other or evolved out of each other in the world of the cosmic labour and fulfilment. The three together form the triple seat of Agni and there he works out the gradual work of accomplishment or perfection which is the object of the sacrifice. Brihaspati forms by sound, by his cry, raveņa, for the Word is the cry of the soul as it awakens to ever-new perceptions and formations. “He who established firmly by force the ends of the earth, Brihaspati in the triple seat of the fulfilment, by his cry.”

On him, it is said, the ancient or pristine Rishis meditated; meditating, they became illumined in mind; illumined, they set him in front as the god of the ecstatic tongue, mandra-jihvam, the tongue that takes joy of the intoxicating wine of Soma, mada, madhu, of that which is the wave of sweetness, madhumān ūrmih, hidden in the conscient existence and out of it progressively delivered.

But of whom is there question? The seven divine Rishis, ŗşayo divyāh, who fulfilling consciousness in each of its seven principles and harmonising them together superintend the evolution of the world, or the human fathers, pitaro manuşyāh, who first discovered the higher knowledge and formulated for man the infinity of the Truth-consciousness? Either may be intended, but the reference seems to be rather to the conquest of the Truth by the human fathers, the Ancients. The word dīdhyānāh in the Veda means both shining, becoming luminous, and thinking, meditating, fixing in the thought. It is constantly being used with the peculiar Vedic figure of a double or complex sense. In the first sense it must be connected with viprāh, and the suggestion is that the Rishis became more and more luminous in thought by the triumphant force of Brihaspati until they grew into Illuminates, viprāh. In the second it is connected with dadhire and suggests that the Rishis, meditating on the intuitions that rise up from the soul with the cry of Brihaspati in the sacred and enlightening Word, holding them firmly in the thought, became illuminated in mind, open to the full inflow of the superconscient. They were thus able to bring into the front of the conscious being that activity of the soul-thoughts which works usually in the background, veiled, and to make it the leading activity of their nature. As a result Brihaspati in them became able to taste for them the bliss of existence, the wine of Immortality, the supreme Ananda. The formation of the definite physical consciousness is the first step, this awakening to the Ananda by the bringing forward in mind of the intuitive soul as the leader of our conscious activities is the consummation or, at least, the condition of the consummation.

The result is the formation of the Truth-Consciousness in man. The ancient Rishis attained to the most rapid vibration of the movement; the most full and swift streaming of the flux of consciousness which constitutes our active existence, no longer obscure as in the subconscient, but full of the joy of perfected consciousness,—not apraketam like the Ocean described in the Hymn of Creation, but supraketam. Thus they are described, dhunetayah supraketam madantah. With this attainment of the full rapidity of the activities of consciousness unified with its full light and bliss in the human mentality they have woven for the race by the web of these rapid, luminous and joyous perceptions the Truth-Consciousness, ŗtam bŗhat, which is the womb or birth-place of this conscient being. For it is out of the superconscient that existence descends into the subconscient and carries with it that which emerges here as the individual human being, the conscious soul. The nature of this Truth-Consciousness is in itself this that it is abundant in its outflowings, pŗşantam, or, it may be, many-coloured in the variety of its harmonised qualities; it is rapid in its motion, sŗpram; by that luminous rapidity it triumphs over all that seeks to quell or break it, it is adabdham; above all it is wide, vast, infinite, ūrvam. In all these respects it is the opposite of the first limited movement which emerges out of the subconscient; for that is stinted and grey, slow and hampered, easily overcome and broken by the opposition of hostile powers, scanty and bounded in its scope. But this Truth-Consciousness manifested in man is capable of being again veiled from him by the insurgence of the powers that deny, the Vritras, Vala.

The Rishi therefore prays to Brihaspati to guard it against that obscuration by the fullness of his soul-force. The Truth-Consciousness is the foundation of the superconscient, the nature of which is the Bliss. It is the supreme of the supraconscient, paramā parāvat, from which the being has descended, the paramā parārdha of the Upanishads, the existence of Sachchidananda. It is to that highest existence that those arise out of this physical consciousness, atah, who like the ancient Rishis enter into contact with the Truth-Consciousness.

They make it their seat and home, kşaya, okas. For in the hill of the physical being there are dug for the soul those abounding wells of sweetness which draw out of its hard rigidity the concealed Ananda; at the touch of the Truth the rivers of honey, the quick pourings of the wine of Immortality trickle and stream and break out into a flood of abundance over the whole extent of the human consciousness.

Thus Brihaspati, becoming manifest first of the gods out of the vastness of that Light of the Truth-Consciousness, in that highest heavenly space of the supreme superconscient, maho jyotişah parame vyoman, presents himself in the full sevenfold aspect of our conscious being, multiply born in all the forms of the interplay of its seven principles ranging from the material to the purest spiritual, luminous with their sevenfold ray which lights all our surfaces and all our profundities, and with his triumphant cry dispels and scatters all powers of the Night, all encroachments of the Inconscient, all possible darknesses.

It is by the powers of the Word, by the rhythmic army of the soul-forces that Brihaspati brings all into expression and dispelling all the darknesses that encompass us makes an end of the Night. These are the “Brahma”s of the Veda, charged with the word, the brahman, the mantra; it is they in the sacrifice who raise heavenward the divine Rik, the Stubh or Stoma. Ŗk, connected with the word arka which means light or illumination, is the Word considered as a power of realisation in the illuminating consciousness; stubh is the Word considered as a power which affirms and confirms in the settled rhythm of things. That which has to be expressed is realised in consciousness, affirmed, finally confirmed by the power of the Word. The “Brahma”s or Brahmana forces are the priests of the Word, the creators by the divine rhythm.

RYD

I am posting a conversation from THE MOTHER'S AGENDA about the "Word".

May 11, 1963

(The beginning of this conversation was noted from memory.)

... If I could only have the "Word," as the Rishis said, the true mantra, I would keep at it, I'd do hours of japa if necessary, but I would go right to the end. It's as if I were told, "See this plot of land, there are ten million cubic feet of earth to dig, and at the end of it is freedom." Well, I'd set to it, whatever the time needed, because I'd know there is an end. But for that you need a pickax.

Nobody can give you the true mantra. It's not something that is given: it's something that wells up from within. It must spring from within all of a sudden, spontaneously, like a profound, intense need of your being - then it has power, because it's not something that comes from outside, it's your very own cry.

I saw, in my case, that my mantra has the power of immortality; whatever happens, if it is uttered, it's the Supreme that has the upper hand, it's no longer the lower law. And the words are irrelevant, they may not have any meaning - to someone else, my mantra is meaningless, but to me it's full, packed with meaning. And effective, because it's my cry, the intense aspiration of my whole being.

A mantra given by a guru is only the power to realize the experience of the discoverer of the mantra. The power is automatically there, because the sound contains the experience. I saw that once in Paris, at a time when I knew nothing of India, absolutely nothing, only the usual nonsense. I didn't even know what a mantra was. I had gone to a lecture given by some fellow who was supposed to have practiced "yoga" for a year in the Himalayas and recounted his experience (none too interesting, either). All at once, in the course of his lecture, he uttered the sound OM. And I saw the entire room suddenly fill with light, a golden, vibrating light.... I was probably the only one to notice it. I said to myself, "Well!" Then I didn't give it any more thought, I forgot about the story. But as it happened, the experience recurred in two or three different countries, with different people, and every time there was the sound OM, I would suddenly see the place fill with that same light. So I understood. That sound contains the vibration of thousands and thousands of years of spiritual aspiration - there is in it the entire aspiration of men towards the Supreme. And the power is automatically there, because the experience is there.

It's the same with my mantra. When I wanted to translate the end of my mantra, "Glory to You, O Lord," into Sanskrit, I asked for Nolini's help. He brought his Sanskrit translation, and when he read it to me, I immediately saw that the power was there - not because Nolini put his power into it (!), God knows he had no intention of "giving" me a mantra! But the power was there because my experience was there. We made a few adjustments and modifications, and that's the japa I do now - I do it all the time, while sleeping, while walking, while eating, while working, all the time.[[Mother later clarified: "'Glory to You, O Lord' isn't MY mantra, it's something I ADDED to it - my mantra is something else altogether, that's not it. When I say that my mantra has the power of immortality, I mean the other, the one I don't speak of! I have never given the words.... You see, at the end of my walk, a kind of enthusiasm rises, and with that enthusiasm, the 'Glory to You' came to me, but it's part of the prayer I had written in Prayers and Meditations: 'Glory to You, O Lord, all-triumphant Supreme' etc. (it's a long prayer). It came back suddenly, and as it came back spontaneously, I kept it. Moreover, when Sri Aurobindo read this prayer in Prayers and Meditations, he told me it was very strong. So I added this phrase as a kind of tail to my japa. But 'Glory to You, O Lord' isn't my spontaneous mantra - it came spontaneously, but it was something written very long ago. The two things are different." ]]

And that's how a mantra has life: when it wells up all the time, spontaneously, like the cry of your being - there is no need of effort or concentration: it's your natural cry. Then it has full power, it is alive. It must well up from within.... No guru can give you that.

Thanks Rakesh for this wonderful reference to the Mother’s revelation about the mantra. By the way, the first paragraph in the above is what Satprem had said to the Mother; the rest is her response. “Nobody can give you the true mantra. It's not something that is given: it's something that wells up from within. It must spring from within all of a sudden, spontaneously, like a profound, intense need of your being - then it has power, because it's not something that comes from outside, it's your very own cry.” How wonderful!

The sunlight of her soul was “What Thou Willest, Lord, What Thou Willest; Ce Que Tu Veux, Seigneur, Ce Que Tu Veux.” But to make the Mantra dynamically operative, the Mother had to do triple sadhana. She had to do intense and ardent Tapasya. It is in it she won whatever had to be won. She kindled the yogic fire and made the flame bright in the Sacrifice offered to the Supreme. She acquired siddhis in the inner world. She carried in her psychic being the psychic being of the earth. She made her spirit ready to be one with the transcendental Spirit, ready for the work of transformation. The Lord had given her the work of the Supramental Descent and Transformation. She knew that she could not exist without Him. But she also knew her responsibility, that He remains unmanifest without her. She spared no effort towards that, even if it meant pain and suffering.

When the Mother’s sadhana entered the stage of awakening consciousness of the body’s cells, she found that they started chanting constantly the name of the Lord. They were all the while imploring the Lord for the strength and the beauty, for the harmonious perfection needed to be the divine instruments upon earth. “Om Namo Bhagavate, Om Namo Bhagavate” became the specific Word of Realization. The Mother even spoke of the path that was never trod by anyone. Sri Aurobindo had done it in principle, she said on 26 November 1960. But she also added that the details had to be worked out.

To make the body’s cells awake to the divine reality was an unprecedented task and the Mother had to discover the means for accomplishing it. It is here that she found the power of the mantra coming to a definite aid in fixing the higher subtle-luminous in the dark and crude gross. She even suggests (19 May 1959) that Sri Aurobindo would have recognized its efficacy had he reached this stage of the sadhana of the body. The constant repetition of the Mantra gives “a kind of precision, a kind of solidity” that is essential to hold that divine reality in the physical. Only Japa or repetition of the Mantra has direct action on the body. While she was engaged in this intense Japa-sadhana, she was actually invoking “the Lord of Tomorrow”. She was doing the Mantra-Japa regularly and making the progress. When the same was tried by Satprem, it cracked. A necessary spiritual ādhāra, a foundational basis, the spiritual support is also needed to do Japa-sadhana.

But I suppose there is a difference between the power of the Word the Mother speaks of in the context of the cellular transformation and the Divine Word which creates the worlds in the Transcendent, by which the rhythm and movement of the worlds is set into motion, by which” Brihaspati becomes manifest first of the gods out of the vastness of that Light of the Truth-Consciousness, in that highest heavenly space of the supreme superconscient, maho jyotişah parame vyoman.” That is the perfection which has yet to come to this world of ours. One is the Word of Creation, the other is the Word of Realisation. So if we have to define true evolution it would mean, the Word of Realisation climbing the ascending slopes of Heaven to arrive at the Word of Creation, as much as the other stepping into it.

Thanks again

RYD

"One is the Word of Creation, the other is the Word of Realisation. So if we have to define true evolution it would mean, the Word of Realisation climbing the ascending slopes of Heaven to arrive at the Word of Creation, as much as the other stepping into it."

There was a time when the whole concept of the Word was very confusing to me. I used to wonder how the Word could create the world and how the same Word can liberate us.
You have put the idea in a very nice manner, one is the word of creation and the other the word of realisation.

Who else otherthan the Lord can take all this lower nature, ego and replace it with sweet ananda. Oh Man! Give it up, Give it up!
Nothing is yours!

The Supreme Word
If there is the Speech of our speech, then it is into that Speech our speech must strive to develop, the faltering-erring language into the expression of that flawlessness, that perfection which actualises what is ideal and idealises what is actual, the Word of the Real-Idea. But what does the Kena Upanishad mean by the phrase “Speech of our speech” in the context of its description of the Brahman? It seems, next to the Isha, Sri Aurobindo looked at this Upanishad with particular interest and wrote a detailed commentary, revealing its deep psycho-spiritual aspects. The problem of instruments of cognition is fundamental to our understanding of things, not only mystic-esoteric but also scientific-metaphysical, and it is that which has been presented by him in his treatise. Let us quickly run through the part relevant to the Savitri-phrase “the Word that ushers divine experience” we are having in the present posting. We will make in the following a brief, and rather a free, summary of the corresponding chapter: (pp. 124-28)

The phrase “Speech of our speech” in the Upanishad is an absolute expression, of the creative power of the Word, that is to say, by the Word Brahma creates the forms of the universe. In contrast to it, the human language is only a shadow, almost as if an artificial counterfeit; at its best it attempts to recover, by revelation and inspiration, an absolute expression of Truth which already exists in the Infinite above our mental range of awareness and comprehension.

While all creation is expression by the Word, the form which is expressed is only a symbol or representation of the thing which is. Human speech can present to the mind only a mental form of the object; but the object it seeks to express is itself a form or presentation of another Reality. That Reality is Brahman. Brahman expresses by the Word a form or presentation of himself in the objects of sense and consciousness which constitute the universe. That Word is creative with the utmost creativeness, a creativeness which the human speech is incapable of achieving.

Brahman, says the Upanishad, is that which cannot be so raised up before the mind by speech. Human speech raises up only the presentation of a presentation, the mental figure of an object which is itself only a figure of the sole Reality, Brahman. It has a power of new creation but all it does is, can do is to create only mental images.

Human speech is a particular application of the principle of sound. At first it is formed naturally and spontaneously to express the sensations and emotions created by an object or occurrence and only afterwards seized upon by the mind to express first the idea of the object and then ideas about the object. The value of speech would therefore seem to be only representative and not creative.

But speech, being creative, creates forms of emotion, mental images and impulses of action. The ancient Vedic theory and practice extended this creative action of speech by the use of the Mantra. The theory of the Mantra is that it is a word of power born out of the secret depths of our being where it has been brooded upon by a deeper consciousness than the mental, framed in the heart and held in the mind. The Mantra can not only create new subjective states in ourselves, alter our psychical being, reveal knowledge and faculties we did not before possess, can not only produce similar results in other minds than that of the user, but can produce vibrations in the mental and vital atmosphere which result in effects, in actions and even in the production of material forms on the physical plane.

While a mental vibration implies thought and perception, a supramental vibration has in it a supreme vision and discernment. All vibration of sound on that higher plane is instinct with and expressive of this supreme discernment of a truth in things and is at the same time creative, instinct with a supreme power which casts into forms the truth discerned and eventually, descending from plane to plane, reproduces it in the physical form or object created in Matter by etheric sound.

Thus we see that the theory of creation by the Word which is the absolute expression of the Truth, and the theory of the material creation by sound-vibration in the ether correspond and are two logical poles of the same idea. They both belong to the same ancient Vedic system.

This is the supreme Word, Speech of our speech. It is vibration of pure Existence, instinct with the perceptive and originative power of infinite and omnipotent consciousness, shaped by the Mind behind mind into the inevitable word of the Truth of things; out of whatever substance on whatever plane, the form or physical expression emerg