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3 (a) There has been a little perplexity among the Mother's readers owing to a broad use of the term "physical mind" in two talks of hers and to a vague reference in them to some writing or letter of Sri Aurobindo's in the past. She says on 18 December 1971: "I heard something written by Sri Aurobindo saying that for the Supramental to manifest upon earth the physical mind must receive it and manifest it - and it is just the physical mind, that is to say, the body mind, that is the only thing that remains in me now. And then, the reason why only this part has remained became quite clear to me. It is on the way to being converted in a very rapid and interesting manner. This physical mind is being developed under the Supramental Influence. And it is just what Sri Aurobindo has written, that this is indispensable so that the Supramental can manifest itself permanently upon earth. " So it is going on well...but it is not easy.... "I could say truly that I have become another person. There is only this (Mother touches the outer form of her body) which remains as it was.... To what extent would it be able to change? Sri Aurobindo has said that if the physical mind were transformed, the transformation of the body would follow quite naturally. We shall see." On 22 December 1971 she says: "A letter of Sri Aurobindo was read to me in which he said that for the Supramental to be fixed here (he had seen that the Supramental came into him and then it withdrew, and then it came back again and again withdrew - it was not stable); for it to become stable it must enter and settle itself in the physical mind. It is this work which is being done in me for months now. The mind has been withdrawn and the physical mind..., the mind that is in the body, became wide, it had a global view of things, and its entire way of its seeing was absolutely
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different. I have seen, it is this: the Supramental is at work there. I am passing through extraordinary hours." In the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, February 1972, where both the talks appear in the series "Notes on the Way" on pp. 83-84 and 91 respectively, a footnote has been put in connection with the second talk, reading: "We do not know exactly the text to which Mother refers here, but it must be some writing similar to the following: '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 variations in the activities 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

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movements and docile 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' " Taken along with other talks of the same period, what the Mother is speaking of is obviously the work going on in her of the illumination of the body's cells by the Supermind. However, it is very improbable that some writing of Sri Aurobindo like the letter quoted in the editorial footnote should be the one to which she refers. No doubt, like her two talks, the letter points to "an obscure mind of the body" or "body mind" at work in the cells (as well as in the molecules, the corpuscles) and it also mentions the task of converting this mind and the important role its conversion will play in stabilising - that is, in manifesting permanently - the Super- mind in earth-Nature. But there is here no focusing on this . Letters on Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 22, p. 340.
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task of conversion as the one master-key to the physical transformation, the supramentalisation of the body. And what is equally if not more significant - the omitted sentence, which immediately precedes in this letter the words quoted in the footnote, actually differentiates the "physical mind" from the "mind of the body" or "body mind" belonging to "the very cells", for we read: "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..." Here the "body mind", to which the Mother alludes, is specially regarded as additional to and not overlapping with the physical mind. Finally, where in the letter is any hint about Sri Aurobindo's having seen the Supramental coming into him and then withdrawing and again coming and once more withdrawing? Such an experience as a background is not evident in any letter of his. Besides, all the letters at our disposal touching on the themes concerned in the two talks of the Mother - in fact, all the letters on any subject - go without a single assertion that the Supermind has not only been at work in Sri Aurobindo's inner parts but also descended into his body-substance for however short a time. Therefore, the letter in question as well as every other on allied topics is ruled out: nothing in his correspondence has a straight bearing on the Mother's themes. An oblique bearing, from the Mother's memory of Sri Aurobindo's correspondence, is possible, but to get to the definite point of her reference we must look elsewhere. We do not need to search long. Two published statements of her own are at hand - statements which must have been read to her - and the second one quotes Sri Aurobindo's words as she remembers them. The first dates back to 1954. It appears in an article by my then Associate Editor, Soli Albless. He read out the article to the Mother before its publication in Mother India. It contained a report which I reproduced afterwards in two places:
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(1) verbatim in a pamphlet I published with the Mother's approval on 29 February 1960, where all that had been written by Sri Aurobindo and her up to that year about the Supermind's advent was collected, and (2) in a paraphrase in an essay I wrote in Mother India in February 1970. The Mother's report runs: "Even in 1938 I used to see the Supermind descending into Sri Aurobindo. What he could not do at that time was to fix it down." Here we have the exact gist of her bracketed phrase in the talk of 22 December 1971: "(he had seen that the

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Supramental came into him and then it withdrew, and then it came back again and again withdrew - it was not stable)." Nowhere, except in Albless's article and my collection and my own essay, is this fact given expression. Nor could it have been expressed in any of the letters we can pick out as relevant in one way or another, for they all precede 1938. The Supermind's descent, no matter how intermittently, into Sri Aurobindo's physical substance took place only in that year in which the Mother had told me, when I left Pondicherry at February's end for a visit to Bombay, that something great and definite was expected to occur in the course of the year and that she would inform me of it as soon as it happened, so that I might hurry back. No call came for me for months and then I wrote to Sri Aurobindo asking why I had not received the Mother's summons. He replied on 1 August 1938: "A general descent of the kind you speak of is not in view at the moment..." Yes, a manifestation on a universal scale such as was attested, by the Mother for 29 February 1956 was somehow delayed - for 18 years as it proved to be - but a breakthrough was achieved on the individual scale and this is what the Mother's statement first cited by Albless implied. From my later essay the statement was pressed into service in a brochure on Auroville which the architect Roger Anger was preparing in 1970. It was then read out to the . Life-Literature-Yoga: Some Letters of Sri Aurobindo (Revised and Enlarged Second Edition, Sri Aurobindo Ashram,
Pondicherry, 1967), p. 43. Page - 57

Mother again after nearly 16 years. She criticised it saying it seemed to assert that Sri Aurobindo did not have the Supermind in his body until 1938. Such an assertion she dubbed "utter nonsense". And when I had an interview with her on my birthday on 25 November 1970 she scolded me for letting this suggestion spread. After I had apologised and she had characteristically responded, "Oh, it doesn't matter," she put before me the correct position of things: "Clearly, Sri Aurobindo did not have the supramental body, and neither do I have it. But that does not mean that the Supermind was not in his body. The two things are quite different. One can have the Supermind in the body without the body being supramentalised. It is not true that the Supermind descended into Sri Aurobindo's body only in 1938 or that it was not fixed there but merely coming and going." In view of what the Mother said in her talk of 22 December 1971, a little more than a year after my interview, the full situation appears to be, as follows. Sri Aurobindo did have the Supermind in his body before 1938 but it had not penetrated his body-substance anywhere: it was a presence in the body inasmuch as it had settled within his embodied mental and vital and even subtle-physical being. His letters testify to individual "perfection" or "transformation" having been sufficiently achieved up to the subtle-physical level, but they repeatedly admit that the Supermind had not entered Matter. In one letter he says that it was on the point of doing so.4 Thus we may infer that the entry into the body-substance happened only in 1938 and that even then it was fluctuant and not established once for all. The Mother evidently accepted towards the end of 1971 her own statement in the sense I have just tried to elucidate. She even repeated from it the word "fixed"; and the words of . Light and Laughter: Some Talks at Pondicherry by Amal Kiran and Nirodbaran, p. 84. . Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (1953), p. 100. . Ibid., p. 380.
4

. Ibid., p. 215.
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Sri Aurobindo, which along with it she interprets to the effect that for the Supermind to be fixed and stable on earth it must enter and settle itself in the physical mind, hail from a note which Nolini sent to me from her on 29 June 1953 when I was writing my article on "the Mind of Light". The note ran: "The Supermind had descended long ago - very long ago - in the mind and even in the vital: it was working in the physical also but indirectly through these intermediaries. The question now was about the direct action of the Supermind in the physical. Sri Aurobindo said it could be possible only if the physical mind received the supramental light; the physical mind receiving the supramental light Sri Aurobindo called the Mind of Light." While answering very closely to the phraseology of the second talk, this statement anticipates almost word-for-word the first talk's turn of speech. The first talk refers at the start to "Sri Aurobindo saying that for the Supramental to manifest upon earth the physical mind must receive it and manifest it" - and at the close the talk refers to his having "written that this is indispensable so that the Supramental may manifest itself permanently upon earth". No question, I hold, can any more be raised as to what exactly was the text upon which the Mother drew. However, her usage of the term "physical mind" requires discussion. But, before we discuss it, we may say a few words on a point which must have puzzled many students of the Aurobindonian sadhana. In the thirties the Master wrote semi-humorously of glimpsing the Supermind above his head and of trying to catch its tail and pull it down into himself. Evidently this tantalising situation, which was pictured to Nirodbaran in a letter of 1935 and a talk of 1938, persisted until Sri . The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo by K. D. Sethna (Mother India, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1968), p. 100. . Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, 1954), pp. 92,104. See also Talks with Sri Aurobindo
(Sri Aurobindo Pathmandir, Calcutta, 1966), p. 52. Page - 59

Aurobindo's passing away, since even in 1947 he was still preoccupied with progressively supramentalising the Over-mind at the brain-level and using on the world the Overmind force from there and not the sheer supramental. But if, as the Mother declares and the Master also implies, the supramental realisation was complete in him except that the Supermind had not yet permeated his body-substance - if the Truth- Consciousness had already descended into his inner mind, inner vital being and even subtle-physical nature - why could it not emerge into the gross-physical from within instead of being glimpsed up to the end above his head with its tail dangling just beyond? The query is hardly illegitimate, but it overlooks an occult fact. There is a necessity for each part of the being to receive a separate independent descent. Not by an efflux from the Supermind already descended into the parts other than the gross-physical but by a direct pull from the latter upon the Supramental Consciousness, the Divine Gnosis, existing above in its own plane; would that Highest Reality be natural, authentic and inalienable to this part. Just as every component of us - the mental, the vital, the physical - must make its spontaneous individual surrender to the Supreme under the influence of the inmost psyche, in order to make integral our self-surrendering, so too the supramental descent must be accomplished essentially by a straight and unmediated relationship of each component to the Gnostic Truth. Even when the inner nature has been inhabited by that Truth, the consciousness in the outer substance has to act towards that higher Reality almost as if nothing of this Truth were achieved elsewhere in the being. No doubt, the consciousness of the outer substance would be influenced by the manysided victory in the inner dimension and find its task helped to a certain degree; yet this victory could still leave

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room for a defeat in the outer region. The outer region has to pay its own crucial price for the laurel and the crown of supramentalisation . Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (1953), p. 245.
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to rest on its head. Thus alone would the Supermind "involved" in matter meet its free "overhead" counterpart and hold supramentalisation as if it were its innate dharma, its intrinsic self-law. Not to understand this paradox of transformative perfection may lead us to a confused misreading of what Sri Aurobindo did or left undone until his mighty self-sacrifice on 5 December 1950. A further misreading can there be if we confine the Integral Yoga to the phenomenon of descent. In understanding Sri Aurobindo's spirituality we must not forget that, while the Supermind's descent into all the components of earthly existence is the ultimate aim, knowledge of the Supermind is not born only of this descent. Sri Aurobindo's Yoga strives also for ascent - the consciousness rising from its embodied state to "overhead" planes. All the planes above the mind were known to Sri Aurobindo before he undertook the responsibility of the monthly Arya in 1914, although detailed acquaintance with their specific powers obviously came later, as we saw in the preceding chapter. In 1947, at the very time that he declared what his preoccupation and capacity were, he unmistakably implied that he had the freedom of the topmost height itself of the "overhead" Spirit. This height was the far extreme of his multi-realised being. What he did at the moment was his own choice inspired by the Avataric mission he had accepted: transformation of embodied life in its totality, down to divinisation of the body, by the one. sole agency that could consummate it: the Supramental Light and Force and Bliss. He begins the 1947 letter: "If I had been standing on the Supermind level and acting on the world by the instrumentation of Supermind, that world would have changed or would be changing much more rapidly and in a different fashion from what is happening now. My present effort is not to stand up on a high and distant Supermind level and change the world from there, but to bring some- thing of it down here and to stand on that and act by that..." . Ibid., pp. 244-45.
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(b) Now we may turn to ponder the Mother's usage of the term "physical mind". She equates it to "the body mind" or "the mind that is in the body" and the letter editorially excerpted from Sri Aurobindo as relevant, with its mention of "this body mind" to signify "an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles", leaves us in no uncertainty about the Mother's meaning. She means by "the physical mind" the dim mental consciousness which is working in the cells of the body. And such a meaning is even explicitly mentioned by her in April 1967: "there is the consciousness of the physical mind (what I call cellular mind)..." But "the physical mind" figuring in the note sent from her by Nolini to me in 1953 is surely a different proposition. What it was may be perceived from her declaration to me on an earlier occasion: "As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body, what he had called the Mind of Light got realised in me."-The word "realised" is most important here: it stands for the Higher Power's permanent stabilisation, an achieved conversion of the instrument, an entry and settlement of the new consciousness for good. There is no question of a continuing process. The Mother's "physical mind receiving the supramental light" is

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not like the physical mind of the two talks which is said to be "on the way to being converted" and in which "the work" for the Supramental's entry and settlement was "being done...for months" in order to stabilise it. The precise realisation is flash-lit by her comment on the two opening lines of a poem I wrote in the early fifties on the Mind of Light. The lines were: The core of a deathless Sun is now the brain And each grey cell bursts to omniscient gold. . Bulletin, August 1967, p. 63. . The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo, p. 100. To mask the personal element a little, the closing words in the book run: "...got
realised here." Page - 62

The Mother said that the expression here was revelatory, an absolutely inspired and accurate transcription of what had happened, whereas the rest of the poem was an imaginative reconstruction by me of the phenomenon envisaged. Thus the physical mind concerned was only the mind in its brain- functioning, the cells concerned were solely the brain-cells and not those of the whole body though these must have been partially affected. We are face to face with an understanding of "the physical mind" dissimilar to the one prompted by "the body mind". Not to appreciate the dissimilarity would confuse the sense of "the Mind of Light" and the place of this Mind's realisation in the progressive stages of the Integral Yoga, the Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation. How is "the physical mind" of those two talks to be interpreted in the light of Sri Aurobindo's employment of the term in his various letters? We may outline his usage with the help of his Letters on Yoga, from which the extract in the Bulletin's footnote was made. In Sri Aurobindo the term covers two aspects. First, "the externalising mind" (p. 326) which is "a prolongation of the mind proper" (p. 340) - that is of "the thinking mind" which "does not belong to the physical" but "is a separate power" (p. 327) - into the physical formula. This prolongation he labels as "the physical mental" (p. 373) as distinguished from "the mental physical" or "mind in the physical" (p. 326). The latter is the second aspect of "physical mind" (ibid.) insofar as a certain functioning which is not too distant from the former is concerned. In this functioning, the physical mind "is limited by the physical view and experience of things, it mentalises the experiences brought by the contacts of out- ward life and things, and does not go beyond that (though it can do that much very cleverly), unlike the externalising mind which deals with them from the reason and its higher intelligence" (pp. 326-27). We may consider the "physical mental", which Sri Aurobindo designates "the true physical mind" (p. 328), as the high part of the physical mind, and the "mental physical" at its best operation as the low one.
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Another "part of the physical mind" (p.329), a "much' lower action of the mental physical" (p.327), is "the mechanical mind...which, left to itself, would only repeat customary ideas and record the natural reflexes of the physical consciousness to the contacts of outward life and things" {ibid.). The mechanical mind is also called "body-mind" (p.328). A turn of phrase similar to "body-mind" occurs when Sri Aurobindo says: "Everything has a physical part - even the mind has a physical part; there is a mental physical, a mind of the body and the material..." (p.351). It is evidently the "mind of the body and the material" that he speaks of in writing of "the gross material part" thus: "it must be remembered that this too has a consciousness of its own, the obscure consciousness proper

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to the limbs, cells, tissues, glands, organs" (p.348). The description "body-mind" is not applied by Sri Aurobindo to anything above "the mechanical mind whose nature is to go on\ turning round in a circle the thoughts that come into it" (p.329). At its lowest the description applies to "an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles" which has a "mechanical clinging to past movements and docile oblivion and rejection of the new" (p.340). Hence "the physical mind" of the two talks by the Mother may be taken, from the Aurobindonian viewpoint, to cover in general all that works mechanically in the mental physical and in particular the element of mental mechanicality in the cellular stuff of the body. We may broadly name it "body- mind" in distinction from "brain-mind". Broadly, because the mechanical mind has still to do with "thoughts" and hence with the brain and so cannot quite be on a par with "the obscure consciousness" of the sheer bodily components. Strictly speaking, it is this consciousness that the Mother mentions by her specially narrowed employment of the words "physical mind" and it is also from this consciousness that, strictly speaking, the "brain-mind" is to be demarcated. In the latter the externalising mind and the mental in the physical, though unlike each other in several
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respects, are "in practice...mixed together" (p.327). Further, through the externalising mind still greater mental activities than its own come into play in the mind of the brain. For, as we have noted, the externalising mind prolongs into the physical the mind proper and consequently what is characteristic of the mind proper is drawn to some extent into this aspect of the physical mind. " The mind proper," says Sri Aurobindo, "is divided into three parts - the thinking Mind, dynamic Mind, externalising Mind - the former concerned with ideas and knowledge in their own right, the second with the putting out of mental forms for realisation of the idea, the third with the expression of them in life (not only by speech, but by any form it can give)" (p.326). How the greater mental activities enter in may be yet more vividly seized from Sri Aurobindo's elaboration of his phrase "the true physical mind". He says: "The true physical mind is the receiving and externalising intelligence which has two functions - first, to work upon external things and give them a mental order with a way of practically dealing with them and, secondly, to be the channel of materialising and putting into effect whatever the thinking and dynamic mind sends down to it for the purpose" (p.328). Thus the mixture of the physical mental and the mental physical has a halo as it were of higher things than its actual constituents. And this subtly rich mixture, which is the full sense of the "brain-mind", is what, on receiving the supramental light, gets converted into the Mind of Light. The conversion of the "body-mind" by means of the supramental light cannot be quite the same phenomenon. Inasmuch as mentality is still present we should adopt the same nomenclature but a new shade of it has to be clearly set forth, a corporeal shade standing off from the cerebral. In a talk almost seven years earlier than the two we have discussed, the Mother does actually imply a distinction between the brain-mind and the body-mind, giving the term "physical mind" a higher connotation than in these two talks. She draws even finer lines of difference while pinpointing her
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subject - the part of the being with which she is busy - thus: "It is not the physical mind...it is the mind of Matter. It is the mental substance which belongs to Matter itself, to the cells. That is what was once called 'the spirit of the form' when it was said that the mummies kept their body intact so long as the spirit of the form persisted. It is that mind, this wholly material mind." In the same talk she says about herself: "It is long since the physical mind has

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changed" - and explains: "The physical mind is the mind of the physical personality formed by the body but it is not the mind of Matter: it is the mind of the physical being." In differentiating what she has been working upon at the moment she goes so far as to state: "You cannot even call it the bodily mind - it is the mind of the cells...." Then we learn from her: "...the physical mind, as soon as you take up an integral yoga, must be dealt with, but this material mind, the cellular one, I assure you, is altogether new...." Finally, we get an autobiographical disclosure: "Sri Aurobindo had said that it was unorganisable and it had only to be thrown out of existence. And I too had the same impression. But when the action for transformation upon the cells is constant, this material mind begins to be organised. It is this that is wonderful...." A year later (1966) the Mother has another pronouncement on the same lines and of autobiographical interest: "When we were working in the physical cells, Sri Aurobindo realised the difficulty of transforming the mind of the physical cells. I am not speaking of the physical mind or physical consciousness. He thought of leaving the mind of the physical cells alone. Then I saw that their refusal to change was not due to any bad will but to ignorance. The cells have a great aspiration and the progress is steady, there is no vacillation as in the mind of the vital. So Sri Aurobindo, before he left his body, entrusted to me this work and said that I alone could do it, but it takes long and I can't give sufficient time to it. I work upon it only in the first part of the . Bulletin, November 1965, p. 87.
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night. In the second part I go about [in the subtle body] visiting people and things. Otherwise they go wrong. When the work in the cells will have been finished, there won't be any further difficulty". The Mind of Light in an increased aspect which has to do with the mental substance belonging to Matter itself - an aspect involving an extension of the Supermind's establishment in the cerebral mentality which the Mother had realised in the immediate wake of Sri Aurobindo's departure - is the goal she posited for herself in the period of the two talks when she wanted her "physical mind" to be "developed under the Supramental Influence". Already at the time of talking, a remarkable development was in evidence, since, in her own words, "this physical mind, the mind that is in the body had become wide, had a global view of things and the entire way of its seeing was absolutely different." As hers had been the first incalculable experiment in supramentalising the most obscure part of bodily existence, the process had been fraught with a great deal of suffering, but she was well on the way to acquiring a radical lever for the transformation which would pass from the mental physical to the vital physical and then to the material physical, which is the physical proper. Suddenly on 17 November 1973 she chose to give up her embodied state, put in abeyance her terrestrial progress and join Sri Aurobindo to work from behind a veil - for reasons which must essentially be the same as inspired his strategic self-sacrifice: the future good of humanity's spiritual career. Before she took the momentous step, she had contributed appreciably to Sri Aurobindo's spiritual system not only in the realm of visioning but also in the field of living. . The Mother - Sweetness and Light by Nirodbaran (Auropress, Auroville, 1978), p. 149.
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SRI AUROBINDO'S VIEWS VIS--VIS THE MOTHER'S

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SOME QUESTIONS AND THEIR ANSWERS A Reader's Letter to Amal Kiran (K. D. Sethna) September 5,1979 Kindly read this patiently. Your series of articles. The Development of Sri Aurobindo's Spiritual System and the Mother's Contribution to It, is very very very much liked and appreciated by me. But you seem to have stirred a hornet's nest! Some people might have attacked you as saying that Sri Aurobindo had not the total knowledge about the Supermind and its "derivatives" from the very beginning. Well, I am not that orthodox. I fully agree with your views expressed (except the concept of an independent subtle-physical typal layer of consciousness, though it is reasonable to expect not only a typal subtle-physical layer to exist but all the combinations of the Mental, Vital and Physical to have typal counterparts). I relate in the following a few points, as many as I can remember just now - more I may write later. 1) Sri Aurobindo's prime interest in Education (mentioned by the Mother in the inaugural address at the AllIndia University Convention in 1951). There is no proof for this. No indication by Sri Aurobindo that Physical Education or educational activity by the Ashram was the only pursuable object (after his departure). 2) The Mother's statement about the Supramental Consciousness or Power flowing into her from Sri Aurobindo's body at the time of his leaving the body. Is the Supramental like a watery fluid that it can flow from one body to another? Then why did it not do so earlier? Why did it not flow from the Mother into any other sadhak later?
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3) The Mind of Light was first mentioned by Sri Aurobindo in his last articles in the Bulletin. According to your line of reasoning there might be a typal layer of the Mind of Light. (I won't mind, even if it is newly created by the Mother's efforts.) This is said to have been realised in the Mother on 5-12-50. But it was never mentioned by Sri Aurobindo in the Arya- times or many years thereafter. So your statements that the Supramental concept grew from time to time are very true. 4) If the Mother's and Sri Aurobindo's consciousness are one.... a) Why did she not know that he had decided to leave his body? Why was she shocked? b) Why did she not know the "mathematical formula" of transformation till her end. (Vide "Notes on the Way".) 5) The Mother's statements about visualising Savitri-lines night after night while Sri Aurobindo was writing

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them in the next room and before he recited them to her later. a) What was she visualising when he was correcting, emending, remoulding, expanding continuously the same parts? b) Is she right in insisting that Savitri is complete, as it is and no more additions were intended by Sri Aurobindo? 6) The sadhana through the opening of the Sahasradala-Chakras changing to sadhana through the opening of the psychic being. Sri Aurobindo has again reverted to Chakra for transformation, in his book The Supramental Manifestation. 7) A sadhak asking the Mother whether one could go straight to Supermind without the intermediate planes. The Mother snubs him saying why not, and inquired where Sri Aurobindo had said that. (The last chapters of the The Life Divine allude to it, though.)
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8) The Mother saying that Sri Aurobindo told her of at least 300 years being required for transformation. No proof from Sri Aurobindo's pen so far! 9) Supramental being. Superman, Superhuman being, distinguished variously by the Mother PLUS Superman consciousness (latest). Then what about Sri Aurobindo writing in The Life Divine about various types of Supramental beings having various intermixtures of planes between the Mind and Supermind? (Last chapters of L.D.) 10) The Mother's announcement of the descent of Supermind in February 1956. Later she corrected/herself that it was the descent of the "Power" aspect Only. This compares with Sri Aurobindo classifying the 1926-descent (later) as not of Supermind proper but of Overmind. 11) The Mother's announcement of Superman consciousness arriving. Where is it at present? What did it do? There is no mention in her "Notes on the Way" of her getting any help or otherwise from that being or consciousness. 12) The Mother's stress on the psychic opening and, later, on the transformation of "cells". Was this a correct line? She would have later to go on to transform chromosomes, RNA-DNA, atoms, protons, electrons and almost 300 subatomic particles! She admitted that Sri Aurobindo had not disclosed to her his "mathematical formula" till the last. So was this her own experimentation? The same would apply to the psychicopening approach because he had reverted to Chakras in his last articles. In any case, the psychic-approach stress or priority has no precedent in the old Yogas, while Sri Aurobindo's approach has the full Force of the past Yogas.

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Well, this will be all for the present. It hardly needs to be mentioned that I am not pitting Sri Aurobindo against the Mother or vice versa. I have full faith in both. But seeming (or apparent) things have to get a correct assessment in one's thought. There is no use in anyone being dogmatic and rebuking you for your extremely lucid and fine analysis. Amal Kiran's Reply September 12,1979 Thank you for your keen appreciation of my recent articles. Your various questions in the assumed role of advocatus diaboli are welcome. I have attempted below to satisfy their demands. I know that you would never doubt the Mother's word: so there is no misunderstanding on my part. I regard as a necessary intellectual exercise the representation you have made of the doubts in the minds of "sceptics". Before I get down to the main task, let me say a word on the problem of what you call "the subtle-physical typal layer". When I wrote of the earth's subtle-physical layer (or "atmosphere", to use the Mother's metaphorical term) I did not dub it "typal". Whatever pertains to the earth or, for that matter ("matter" is rather an apt turn of speech here!), to the universe of which the earth is a member is not typal but evolutionary - at least in essence even if not everywhere so in process. We usually think of our universe as the world of Matter. But actually the world of Matter belongs to the same typal series that contains the worlds of Life and Mind, etc. Our material universe is an evolute of the Inconscient, which is not, any more than the sheer Superconscient, a plane in the sense in which the typal worlds are planes. The real material universe is a typal level. In relation to ours we name it "subtle-physical". As I have mentioned, this subtle-physical is not the same as the earth's "atmosphere":- the latter is an evolutionary dimension, not a typal one. When the typal world of Matter presses down from its own free plane upon
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the Inconscient which holds all the planes "involved" in it, and when the "involved" counterpart of the typal world of Matter pushed upward both by its "evolutionary" urge and in response to the pressure from above, there emerges a composite of gross and subtle-physical stuff/ just .as later in evolutionary history we have vitalised and mentalised emergents of the Inconscient. Composites are to be distinguished from the typal dimensions, though they are connected with them. At least this is how I look at the phenomenon of the evolving Inconscient in relation to the non-evolving ladder of existence. The subject is rather complex, and light from other Aurobindonian interpreters may be solicited without rigid dogmatism on one's part. Now I come to the main burden of your song set to the tune of the "sceptics". 1) During Sri Aurobindo's lifetime and with his approval and inspiration, it was projected to convert Pondicherry into a University town with an independence of its own within the Indian Union. Sri Aurobindo was prepared to be the Director of the University. Of course, not education as such but sadhana is the chief activity in a life along Aurobindonian lines, but the preparation of the psychological and physical being of the young by a special system of education within the permeating spiritual atmosphere of the Ashram-consciousness can be considered a very important mode of building with the minds and bodies of aspirant youth a new illumined future. I believe we can consider Sri Aurobindo to have been keenly interested and concerned here. There is "proof" for

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the Mother's reference during the 1951 Convention. The reference itself is not to an exclusive primacy of Education. The Mother speaks only of one of the best means. And even this, essentially, is just a particular channel for sadhana. 2) The Supramental Consciousness can flow from one bodily being to another not before it has been brought down into the embodied system - and even then it can flow in its own proper form not before one is ready for it. That is what
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happened between Sri Aurobindo and the Mother at the time of the former's "departure". In an indirect way, the Supra- mental Consciousness has flowed from both our Gurus to their disciples throughout the years I have been in the Ashram. In the Master-disciple relationship, the flow of the Master's spiritual consciousness to the disciple is the most potent factor in the sadhana. Even when the Master is no longer embodied, the call to the Masterconsciousness to flow into one remains the central mode of the Yogic life. Surely one has to practise aspiration and rejection but the crowning process for advancement is surrender, the laying open of oneself to the Divine Presence and offering oneself to its Peace, Light, Knowledge, Power, Ananda as much as possible so that they may flow into one. The doubt over the Mother's "flow"-image is misconceived. Besides, Matter is not the only concrete reality that can do concrete things like flowing. Supraphysical realities are the source and cause of Matter's concreteness which is actually a diminished version of theirs. Sri Aurobindo has written of psychological movements coming literally in streams or waves: e.g. someone's anger. 3) The Mind of Light is not a typal overhead plane. That is why it does not figure in Sri Aurobindo's old hierarchy of planes. It is a creation in the physical mind by the Supramental Light's reception there. Merely because it is "involutionary" in the Mother's sense - that is, a Light descending from above - it does not rank as typal. 4) The Mother's Consciousness and Sri Aurobindo's are essentially one but in the dynamics of the play they are both one and two. Each has a specialised role in certain fields and knowledge can be veiled between them for the purposes of the world-game and because of the circumstances within whose framework they have chosen to act their parts. No mental "why" has any ultimate rationale here. 5) What you call the Mother's "statements" about visualising Savitri-lines are actually reports. I believe there is some misunderstanding here. As far as I know, the basic truth
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simply is that, as she once told Huta,whose account she subsequently read and fully confirmed, the Mother long before she came to Pondicherry had passed through a series of visions and experiences which later she found expressed in Savitri when Sri Aurobindo read it out "to her day after day at a certain period of the Ashram" visions and experiences about which she had not spoken to him during the time he had been composing the epic. If you read the very first article of my series "Our Light and Delight", you will get the correct perspective in two of the opening pages. Let me quote from them: "Owing to my sustained aspiration to write what Sri Aurobindo has termed 'overhead poetry', that is, poetic inspiration caught from secret levels of consciousness above the mind, levels of a superhuman light and delight, Sri Aurobindo generously granted the incredible favour of letting me see portions of his epic, which was then still in the making. Without letting anyone know, he started sending me, every morning, in sealed envelopes the opening cantos. On October 25, 1936, written in his own fine and sensitive yet forceful hand, there burst upon me the beauty and amplitude of the first sixteen lines of the poem's prelude of 'symbol dawn' as it stood at that time.

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The precious gift of passages kept coming to me in private for months and months and a happy discussion of them went to and fro. Before enclosing them, usually with the Mother's 'Amal' inscribed on the covers, Sri Aurobindo must have daily read the verse out to her prior to breaking up their joint sessions of correspondence with the sadhaks through the night and the small hours of the morning. Some time in early 1938 the Amal-ward stream of Savitri ceased like the fabled river Saraswati of the Rigveda symbolism... The year and a half from nearly October's end in 1936 to almost the close of February 1938 must be the 'certain period of the Ashram' to which Huta's article refers..." . "Spiritual and Occult Truths", Mother India, February 21,1978, p. 172. . "Our Light and Delight", ibid., pp. 70-71.
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Apropos of your argument, I may remark that line-visualisation during the correcting, emending, remoulding and expanding of Savitri by Sri Aurobindo does not necessarily follow from the "statements" mentioned in the first column, though one may feel prompted to posit it as a sequel. Especially if the substance remained the same, the positing would be all the more a non-sequitur. But, of course, the picture I have given of "the basic-truth" of the situation renders the whole problem raised by you irrelevant. Regarding the length of Savitri, I may recall that when I announced to the Mother that the poem ran to 23,813 lines she at once exclaimed: "It should have been 24,000!" The number 24 is the double of 12 which is Sri Aurobindo's number according to the Mother and which, according to Sri Aurobindo, signifies the all-fulfilling integral New Creation, towards which our evolutionary earth tends. 6) To speak of the Sahasradala, "the thousand-petalled lotus", which is at the top of the head and whose opening was emphasised by Sri Aurobindo in the early days, is not to speak of an order of reality essentially different from the psychic being; for the latter is the inmost part of another Chakra, the Hrid-padma, the heartlotus. The Sahasradala has also a spiritual reality centred within it, the Atman or Supreme Self. More accurately, we may say that this Chakra is the seat of the Jivatman, the true individual Self which is not divided from the universal and infinite Atman - the free Jivatman, whose delegate in the evolution is .the psyche. The attention Sri Aurobindo paid to the Chakras in his writings is related to the transformation of the gross body with the aid of the potentialities of the Chakras in the subtle- physical sheath: it does not imply any lack of attention to the psychic being, the spiritual core of the bodily transformative process. 7) What Sri Aurobindo said in The Life Divine and even afterwards was before the manifestation of the Supermind in the earth's subtle layer. Conditions must change to a good
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extent after this event. Now it is conceivable that especially the psychic being can have a direct contact with the Supermind. But one may wonder how far the general consciousness can absorb the Supramental Presence without this conscious- ness having been prepared by contact with the planes inter- mediate between mind and Supermind. 8) Sri Aurobindo has not mentioned, in his writings, 300 years for the body's transformation, but he has definitely said in a letter that such transformation is a matter of a rather distant future and cannot figure among the immediate or even near-future realities of his Yoga. 9) In the Mother's scheme the true supramental race will come without the sex-process, but only after the realisation on earth of supramentalised man who is superman" superhuman being= intermediate race. In The Life Divine scheme, supramentalised man is the crown of evolution. The embodied mixtures of Supermind with other

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planes may be compared to the intermediate race in its various stages. 10) It is a mistake to speak of the descent of Supermind in February 1956. I have already used the right term given by the Mother: manifestation. "Descent" is in relation to the individual embodied being - with its upper and lower directions, its ladder of levels: physical, vital, mental (corresponding to certain lower and upper parts of the body) and "overhead". Where the universe is concerned, such a ladder has little meaning. So descent and ascent are irrelevant terms. As to what manifested, the Mother has clearly said that the Supramental Light and Force and Consciousness came but not the Supramental Ananda. There was no declaration that the whole Supermind had manifested in the earth's subtle- physical. In regard to "Power", what she has said is that the primary aspect the embodied Supermind would need is "Power" so as to defend the new beings against attack from the millennially entrenched lower consciousness's instruments. . Sri Aurobindo on Himself and on the Mother (1953), pp. 423-24.
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11) There is a good deal of talk ("Notes on the Way", January 1, 4, 8, 18; February 15, 1969) on the arrival of the Superman-consciousness and on its mode of working and its quality and texture, so to speak, as felt by the Mother. On 14 March 1970 we are told of a great change in the Mother's sadhana. It is crystallised in the words: "The physical is capable of receiving the higher Light, the Truth, the true Consciousness and of manifesting it.... It took a little more than a year for this Consciousness to win this victory. And still, naturally, it is not visible except to those who have the inner vision, but it is done... This is the fourteenth month since the Consciousness came..." A footnote identifies what the Mother is referring to: "The superman consciousness which manifested on 1 January 1969." We have also a brief reference on 5 August of the same year to its pressure for "sincerity" - and on this occasion the Mother has used "He" to designate the Superman-consciousness. Perhaps an indirect commentary may be understood, from all that she has said, about the Intermediate Race which is the Superman's precursor or preparer of the advent of supramental beings or the Supramental Race by a straight materialisation. 12) The Mother's stress on the psychic opening and afterwards on the transformation of the "cells" has nothing to puzzle one. In an Integral Yoga, which is an adventure into the unknown, all sorts of different stresses are put at different times. The final centring in the psychic is the logical conclusion of a process coming down increasingly to the transformation of the embodied being. The psychic is the pivot of the evolutionary progress - it is the embodied being's ever- growing core. Whether other Yogas had the stress on it or not shouldn't bother us. You say that, in contrast to this stress by the Mother, Sri Aurobindo's approach has the full force of the past Yogas. The words "full force" are incorrect. If they were quite appropriate, his approach would be merely an extraluminous rehash of Veda, Upanishad and Gita. It certainly is
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not that and Sri Aurobindo has emphasised this point time and again. What he has granted is that in them there were intuitions or even experiences whose true development would be a sign-post towards the Aurobindonian vision. Thus he has given original interpretations of the Rigveda, the Isha and Kena Upanishads and the Gita, bringing out the trend in them which would show itself because ultimately the Super- mind is secretly pushing to its own earthly fulfilment through all human illuminations. Also, Sri Aurobindo has accepted

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the essence of the great basic realisations of old - Nirvana, the All-Brahman, the Ishwara-Shakti, the Cosmic Consciousness, the great Gods and Goddesses, the Jnana, Bhakti and Karma Yogas, the Tantra. The Mother accepts this essence just as much, though she may not employ the ancient Indian terminology as easily. In the stress on the psychic being, Sri Aurobindo is on a par with her from a certain stage of their jointly developed Integral Yoga. The stress need not conflict with the talk of Chakras. These too are factors in the Integral Yoga, even if not exactly in the old way. You say that the psychic being was not a part of the past Yogas. But the psychic being is the true fountainhead of spiritual evolution. Even the urge towards a supracosmic realisation comes ultimately from it. In fact the psychic being hails from the Transcendent, the negative aspect of which is the Supracosmic in the sense of the Extracosmic Unmanifest. Since the past Yogas did not envisage a fulfilment here and now but strained in one way or another towards the Beyond, the psychic's full play was never known or allowed. Even so, in the Bhakti Yoga, especially of the Vaishnava kind la Chaitanya, the play of the psychic is extremely intense. What was still not seen was the complete direction of its intensity. From the age of the Rigveda with its Agni, the flame of aspiration, "the Immortal in the mortal", and from the age of the Upanishads with their Purusha no bigger than the thumb of a man in the cave of the heart - the Chaitya Purusha or Antaratman, as Sri Aurobindo doubly calls it - the psychic being was known. The Upanishadic Yoga is actually a universalisation
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of consciousness into the infinite and eternal Self from the heart-centre where the Chaitya Purusha, the Antaratman, the thumb-like Purusha, is seated. The Gita with its call for total surrender to the Divine beyond all dharmas is fundamentally a call to the psychic being from the Purushottama, the Super-personal Transcendent who is higher than the mutable (Kshara) and the immutable (Akshara) Purushas - the Super-personal Being from whose transcendence the "soul" in its earthly embodiment in life after life has derived. Of course with the transformation of the cells, all their constituents - chromosomes, molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks and what else - will automatically get divinised in the individual body. One need not be surprised at such a consummation being involved by the Supermind's work in the cells. The constituents no less than the cells have potential divinity. Don't you remember the octave of that sonnet of Sri Aurobindo's? The electron on which forms and worlds are built, Leaped into being, a particle of God. A spark from the eternal energy spilt, It is the Infinite's blind minute abode. In that small flaming chariot Shiva rides. The One devised innumerably to be; His oneness in invisible forms he hides, Time's tiny temples of eternity. I shall end now - repeating your phrase: "Well, this will be all for the present." Let me express again my gratefulness for your frank praise of my many-sided and somewhat "unorthodox" analytical treatment
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The Reader's Comment September 18,1979 You have very well explained all the points and your explanation about the subtle-physical is so elaborate and convincing to my understanding that I could hardly have clarified it better. I am grateful to you for your favour.
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