In the supramental realisation, each thing will carry in itself a truth which will manifest at each instant without being bound by what has been or what will follow. --The Mother

Palash is a native tree of tropical southern Asia, commonly found in Indian forests. It is a medium sized, dry season, deciduous tree, growing up to 15 m. Each leaf consists of three leaflets and is velvety to the touch. The tree goes bare during winter. But from January till March, when the flowers bloom, it really looks like flame of the forest, with its bright orange flowers covering the whole tree. Flowers are medium-sized with one central beaklike petal and two smaller lateral recurved pointed petals and a recurved pointed lower petal. The flowers contain nectar and many species of birds, like sunbirds, mynahs and babblers can be seen hurrying from flower to flower. A brilliant colouring matter can be obtained from the flowers which may be made into water-paint or a dye...   more »

In 1949, when the Bulletin of Physical Education was launched, Sri Aurobindo was requested by the Mother to initiate it with an article of his. On her request Sri Aurobindo dictated a series of eight articles. The initial articles were meant to reveal the value and importance of sports and gymnastics, but the later articles took a different and new turn and revealed some extraordinary facts in detail regarding the functioning of the Supermind. The articles were brought out in the form of a booklet titled The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth in 1952, that is, two years after the departure of Sri Aurobindo. This booklet was rightly termed as the sequel to The Life Divine by K. D. Sethna (Amal Kiran). In the sixth article titled Supermind in the Evolution, for the first time we come across the term ‘Mind of Light’. The chapter begins with the following words: “A new humanity would… be a race of mental beings on the earth and in the earthly body but delivered from its present conditions in the reign of the cosmic Ignorance so far as to be possessed of a perfected mind, a mind of light which could be a subordinate action of the supermind or Truth-Consciousness and in any case capable of the full possibilities of mind acting as a recipient of that truth and at least a secondary action of it in thought and life. It could even be a part of what could be described as a divine life upon earth and at least the beginnings of an evolution in the Knowledge and no longer entirely or predominantly in the Ignorance...”    more »

This is the first part of a longer meditation on the future bodies. I have entitled this section “Goodbye To All That” which is the title of Robert Graves autobiography in which he recounts his experiences in the trenches in WWI. What he is saying goodbye to is the passing of an era: of the naive, carefree, class based culture of Edwardian England, which did not survive the war. Sri Aurobindo wrote the passages referenced here at about the time the Edwardian era ended and the great war began. Because our views and valorization of nature are cultural constructions, to appreciate why Sri Aurobindo extrapolates a certain form of naturalism into the future body we must first excavate his conceptions of “what is natural.”

The context of his writing referenced here on evolution and the future body seems to flow naturally out of a post-romantic protestant view of Nature he must have been exposed to growing up in England which lived on well into the Edwardian era. To the British upper classes it was a view of nature as pristine, which they enjoyed in well manicured English country gardens, not yet smeared with the blood of the trenches. Above all nature was clearly distinct from the machinery given to us by culture.

In forming his view of nature Sri Aurobindo took account of Ruskin's, Carlyle's, and Arnold's critique of industrialism. This view of nature was certainly valuable for sacramentalizing nature at a time when the Industrial Revolution was rapidly desecrating it. Today however, the interpenetration of nature by information technologies and genetic engineering has added enough complexity to what it means to be natural/human that we can no longer escape environments which are increasingly mediated by technology. Electricity undergirds much of our phenomenological experience of the world, bio-technology sustains our physical presence in it. In such a brave new world the continuity of the already developed evolutionary form with all its biological naturalism seems to be a reality to which we have already said goodbye

But, what is important for us in Sri Aurobindo's vision of the future body ....    more »

I had one of those experiences that mark one's life. It happened upstairs in my room. I was doing my japa, walking up and down with my eyes wide open, when suddenly Krishna came—a gold Krishna, all golden, in a golden light that filled the whole room. I was walking, but I could not even see the windows or the rug any longer, for this golden light was everywhere with Krishna at its center. And it must have lasted at least fifteen minutes. He was dressed in those same clothes in which he is normally portrayed when he dances. He was all light, all dancing: 'You see, I will be there this evening during Darshan.' And suddenly, the chair I use for darshan came into the room! Krishna climbed up onto it, and his eyes twinkled mischievously, as if to say, 'I will be there, you see, and there'll be no room for you.' ...   more »

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Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute:
A new light breaks upon the earth,
A new world is born.
The things that were promised are fulfilled.

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... In July 1938 the Yogi-Poet had an assignation with the primordial Night, the Night of Creation. He went to meet her, carrying “God’s deathless light” in his breast. He was aware that this was going to be a very bold and dangerous rendezvous; it was going to be an exceptional and most decisive affair, fraught with possibilities. His fate and hence the fate of the world remained locked in them, in the possibility leading towards earthly deathlessness. So, he the pilgrim-soul made an assignation with the Night. But what was the outcome of that bold and dangerous rendezvous? What had actually transpired in the course of the meeting? But apart from dropping some broad hints, no communiqué was issued. If at all, it seemed that the way was lost and that there was no end to the “weary journeying”. Yet there was hope, there was conviction and certitude that the outcome was going to be a path leading towards immortality. There was the inalienable freedom, and the Yogi-Poet lived in the Spirit’s calm, and was in possession of the vast immobile bliss of the Being. Soon his rooms would get lit up with an endless Light, and rapture would be coursing through his nerves, and through every cell of his body. In a mute blaze of ecstasy, and preserving the “living sense of the Imperishable”, even in the bodily existence, he would proceed towards his goal. That was great indeed, marvellous. If the bodily existence was set ablaze in this way, it meant that there was the wonderful realisation or the siddhi of the Mind of Light in him, that the physical had started receiving the supramental. Sri Aurobindo had definitely moved towards it, a remarkable event, a landmark event in the evolutionary sequence. It is said that Pythagoras had a thigh of gold, and that Vamadeva, after crossing the hundredth year, lived in a golden body for sixteen full years. Something golden had happened in that far past, but now the Mind of Light has made the body its permanent base, permanent home. ...   more »

So, one understands. One understands: the psychic being materialises itself... and that gives continuity to evolution. This creation gives altogether the feeling that there is nothing arbitrary, there is a kind of divine logic behind and it is not like our human logic, it is very much superior to ours—but there is one, and that was fully satisfied when I saw this.

It is really interesting. I was very interested. It was there, calm and quiet, and it said to me, “You were looking, well, there it is, yes, it is that!”

And then I understood why the mind and the vital were sent out of this body, leaving the psychic being—naturally it was that which had been always governing all the movements, so it was nothing new, but there are no difficulties any more: all the complications that were coming from the vital and the mental, adding their impressions and tendencies, all gone. And I understood: “Ah! It is that, it is this psychic being which has to become the supramental being.”...   more »

Sri Aurobindo introduced the term ‘Mind of Light’ with a specific suggestion, with a kind of well-defined association; he introduced it in his very last prose writings when he was, at the request of the Mother, contributing a series of articles to the Bulletin of Physical Education during 1949-50. To this term he gave a special technical connotation involving a whole world of luminous yogic and psychological sense. It is indicative of the fact that his own yoga-tapasya had progressed to a stage from where the envisioned manifestation of a fuller divine life could come within the realisable range of the evolutionary ascent. The role of the Mind of Light as an active principle, in fact an effectuating power, is seen to be that of the leader of a type of new mental beings, of a presiding official over the intermediate race, the race governed, in the Mother’s phrase, by la conscience du surhomme, the superman consciousness. This new race, the new humanity, will be “not only capable of standing enlightened in the radiance of the Supermind but able to climb consciously towards it and into it.” This surhomme is not simply 'aboveman' or 'overman'; it is already governed not by Overmind but by the delegate power of the Supermind itself. Indeed, the appearance of the Mind of Light is the first definite and assured entry of the Supermind itself in the earth-consciousness, the beginning of the process of supramentalisation. It is that which will carry out the preparatory work and bring mortality’s travail closer to its end. It will be the initiation of termination of the presently death-processed evolution.   more »

The objective and final stage of integral yoga is to actualise the Supermind within one's being ("Supramentalisation"), this would constitute a divinisation of matter itself or a realisation of its inherent primordial propensity, and usher in a completely new, 'divine' way of existing. (The Life Divine, Book II, ch. 26-28). This involves bringing down of the Supramental consciousness, and the resulting transformation of the entire being, and ultimately, the divinization of the material world.

Supramentalisation requires both a spiritual and a psychic transformation as their necessary prerequisites.

Sri Aurobindo considered that most yogas and religions were concerned with the process of ‘ascent' or the process of ascending beyond the body and beyond time into a formless and timeless absolute or transcendent self. He wrote that the ‘old systems' arrived at an ‘infinite empty Negation or an infinite equally vacant Affirmation'. [1] He introduced the imperative for and the process by which the supramental (or greater than mental) consciousness would ‘descend' or firmly establish itself in Earthly life...   more »

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… 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… 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… 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.   more »

Is there a smallest piece of Matter? The question is short and simple but is of profound significance. But then why should such a question be posed at all, what could have prompted it to be put in that way? It already posits somewhere a distinct possibility which could have arisen from some deeper intuition about things that are not just aggregates or composites of their ingredients. No wonder we get different answers to it. Plato held that the elemental things are irreducible geometrical figures. Aristotle conceived all substances to be indefinitely breakable. Kant considers the phrasing of the question is such that it becomes unanswerable, which means that our way of thinking about these subjects is inadequate. It is unfortunate that young Heisenberg was unkind to Plato and spoke rather hastily that Plato’s ideas were “ridiculous”. He modified Plato by suggesting that not geometrical but mathematical forms alone can describe them. The present-day physicists do not pretend to answer the question but tell us to go out to do things and observe.

Yet, if we are true to thought, there are certain fundamentals which cannot be ignored. It is a spirituo-metaphysical fact that atomicity is due to the action of the cosmic Mind. The character of Mind is to analyse and analyse, divide and divide by fracturing things to bits, breaking them to a vanishing point yet without making them disappear altogether. If this nature of Mind is recognised then we see that it at once makes Aristotle’s infinite divisibility an aspect of its working. Regarding the world of ideas seen by Plato, however, we will have to be first sure about its location. Could it not be that this world exists somewhere far beyond the range of the cosmic Mind itself, for mental understanding is not the last summit of knowledge? If true, then we need not dismiss atomicity which might be occurring not in his world of ideas but elsewhere about which Plato may not be speaking at all. Kant is talking of human mind trying to read the cosmic Mind, and beyond, and hence it is unable to opine either way.

Yet, in spite of all these astounding gains and all these advances, there is the uneasy sense of inadequacy and disappointment. We get a feeling that we are investigating the physical world and developing means to arrive at the knowledge of the things, but we fail to recognise or experience the depths of the truth that lies beneath it. Indeed, one begins to wonder if the gigantic machines that have been built, and also planned, will at all reveal the truer materiality of Matter. The formulae of Science may be pragmatically correct and infallible, but they do not disclose the intrinsic how or why; rather they have the air of the formulae of a cosmic Magician, precise, irresistible, automatically successful each in its field, but their rationale is fundamentally unintelligible. When Einstein arrives at the equivalence of mass and energy he is simply stating the mechanical interconvertibilty of the two without being aware of the truth of existence and the truth of force behind them. The simultaneous emergence of quantity, design, number and of quality, property, character does not get revealed in E equals mcsquare.   more »

I had an experience which was for me interesting, because it was for the first time. It was yesterday or the day before, I do not remember. X was there just in front of me, and I saw her psychic being, dominating over her by so much (gesture indicating about twenty centimetres), taller. It was the first time. Her physical being was small and her psychic being was so much bigger. And it was an unsexed being, neither man nor woman. Then I said to myself (possibly it is always so, I do not know, but here I noticed it very clearly), I said to myself, “But it is the psychic being, it is that which will materialise itself and become the supramental being!”   more »

Originally published in Dutch, an English version of Beyond Man was brought out by HarperCollins in 1997. The present edition is an exact (and perhaps photographic) reprint. Some spelling mistakes have been set right. Ten years ago it was very refreshing to read Van Vrekhem’s child-like approach to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. The same holds true today as we turn the pages steadily to learn about these two brilliances who brought back the Vedic spirit of exploration to our days with the promise that life on Earth can definitely be transformed into the life divine. ...

As an Aurobindonian poet wrote at that time: “A light is lit in everyone, and those/ emblazon the Living Flame.” The Aurobindonian yoga being a collective yoga, this conclusion is inevitable. Having listed the questions, Beyond Man signs off with the seal of faith: “The Great Change in evolution is happening around us and within us, whether we want it or not.” For a world caught in despair and defeatism, this is nectarean hope.   more »

This is Part 1 of a series of quoted passages from the book The Field: the Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe, by science journalist Lynn McTaggart. It’s an excellent non-technical explanation about the metaphysical implications of modern quantum theory, especially what’s called the ‘Zero Point Field.’ I hope this can provide a useful vocabulary for our ongoing dialogues re possible relationships between science and spirituality. I’ll say more in future comments to these articles. ~ ron

...The notion of an electromagnetic field is simply a convenient abstraction invented by scientists (and represented by lines of 'force', indicated by direction and shape) to try to make sense of the seemingly remarkable actions of electricity and magnetism and their ability to influence objects at a distance — and, technically, into infinity — with no detectable substance or matter in between. Simply put, a field is a region of influence. As one pair of researchers aptly described it: 'Every time you use your toaster, the fields around it perturb charged particles in the farthest galaxies ever so slightly.' ... In the quantum world, quantum fields are not mediated by forces but by exchange of energy, which is constantly redistributed in a dynamic pattern. This constant exchange is an intrinsic property of particles, so that even 'real' particles are nothing more than a little knot of energy which briefly emerges and disappears back into the underlying field. According to quantum field theory, the individual entity is transient and insubstantial. Particles cannot be separated from the empty space around them. Einstein himself recognized that matter itself was 'extremely intense' — a disturbance, in a sense, of perfect randomness — and that the only fundamental reality was the underlying entity — the field itself. ...

The Zero Point Field is a repository of all fields and all ground energy states and all virtual particles — a field of fields. ...

The existence of the Zero Point Field implied that all matter in the universe was interconnected by waves, which are spread out through time and space and can carry on to infinity, tying one part of the universe to every other part. The idea of the Zero Point Field might just offer a scientific explanation for many metaphysical notions, such as the Chinese belief in the life force, or qi, described in ancient texts as something akin to an energy field. It even echoed the Old Testament's account of God's first dictum: 'Let there be light', out of which matter was created. ... If all subatomic matter in the world is interacting constantly with this ambient ground-state energy field, the subatomic waves of the Zero Point Field are constantly imprinting a record of the shape of everything. As the harbinger and imprinter of all wavelengths and all frequencies, the Zero Point Field is a kind of shadow of the universe for all time, a mirror image and record of everything that ever was. In a sense, the vacuum is the beginning and the end of everything in the universe. ... If that were true, it meant every part of the universe could be in touch with every other part instantaneously. ...

... If matter wasn't stable, but an essential element in an underlying ambient, random sea of energy ... then it should be possible to use this as a blank matrix on which coherent patterns could be written, particularly as the Zero Point Field had imprinted everything that ever happened in the world through wave interference encoding. This kind of information might account for coherent particle and field structures. But there might also be an ascending ladder of other possible information structures, perhaps coherent fields around living organisms, or maybe this acts a a non-biochemical 'memory' in the universe. It might even be possible to organize these fluctuations somehow through an act of will. ... this represented nothing less than a unifying concept of the universe, which showed that everything was in some sort of connection and balance with the rest of the cosmos. The universe's very currency might be learned information, as imprinted upon this fluid, mutable field of information. The Zero Point Field demonstrated that the real currency of the universe — the very reason for its stability — is an exchange of energy. If we were all connected through the Zero Point Field, then it just might be possible to tap into this vast reservoir of energy information and extract information from it. With such a vast energy bank to be harnessed, virtually anything was possible — that is, if human beings had some sort of quantum structure allowing them access to it. But there was the stumbling block. That would require that our bodies operated according to the laws of the quantum world. ...   more »