An evolution of consciousness is the central motive of terrestrial existence. The evolutionary working of Nature has a double process: an evolution of forms, an evolution of the soul. Man occupies the crest of the evolutionary wave. With him occurs the passage from an unconscious to a conscious evolution. At each step one receives an intimation of what the following step will be. The nature of the next step is indicated by the deep aspirations awakening in the human race. A change of consciousness is the major fact of the next evolutionary transformation, and the consciousness itself, by its own mutation, will impose and effect any necessary mutation of the body. There is no reason to suppose that this transformation is impossible on earth. In fact, it would give the truest meaning to earthly existence. Man's urge towards spirituality is an undeniable indication of the inner drive of the Spirit within towards emergence, its insistence towards the next step of its manifestation.   more »

A divine life in a divine body is the formula of the ideal that we envisage... The process of the evolution upon earth has been slow and tardy—what principle must intervene if there is to be a transformation, a progressive or sudden change?

It is indeed as a result of our evolution that we arrive at the possibility of this transformation. As Nature has evolved beyond Matter and manifested Life, beyond Life and manifested Mind, so she must evolve beyond Mind and manifest a consciousness and power of our existence free from the imperfection and limitation of our mental existence, a supramental or truth-consciousness and able to develop the power and perfection of the spirit. Here a slow and tardy change need no longer be the law or manner of our evolution; it will be only so to a greater or less extent so long as a mental ignorance clings and hampers our ascent; but once we have grown into the truth-consciousness its power of spiritual truth of being will determine all...

It might be also that the transformation might take place by stages; there are powers of the nature still belonging to the mental region which are yet potentialities of a growing gnosis lifted beyond our human mentality and partaking of the light and power of the Divine and an ascent through these planes, a descent of them into the mental being might seem to be the natural evolutionary course. But in practice it might be found that these intermediate levels would not be sufficient for the total transformation since, being themselves illumined potentialities of mental being not yet supramental in the full sense of the word, they could bring down to the mind only a partial divinity or raise the mind towards that but not effectuate its elevation into the complete supramentality of the truth-consciousness. Still these levels might become stages of the ascent which some would reach and pause there while others went higher and could reach and live on superior strata of a semi-divine existence. It is not to be supposed that all humanity would rise in a block into the supermind...   more »

There are ranges of consciousness beyond the mental and they have their own tools of cognition and operation. Surely, it means, the tools of the mental will prove to be blunt in those beyond-mind domains. But, fortunately, there is the mental rather the human potential to exceed itself by a conscious choice and effort. That is built into the very scheme of things and that is therefore our valid hope also. To be brief: we have a series: physical instruments of observation in the scientific sense, such as microscopes, telescopes, modern accelerators; physical organs of contact, eye-ear-taste-smell-touch; behind them manas, mind as the true sense; finally is sense in its purity samjňāna that exists behind and beyond mind. The knowledge of samjňāna has a wideness as well as penetration which physical mind is incapable of having. It is by a purposeful series of limiting transitions that the higher suffers diminution, and therefore what the lower conceives becomes an extremely partial view of things. To present to it the higher then becomes self contradictory. But let us quickly look at the Upanishadic insights about the instruments of cognition and their functions...   more »