An advice was given by a wise elderly to a youngster who had inflated expectations from people where he would be going: “… don't be satisfied with a psychic opening; you need to rise to the higher mental levels as well.” This kind of advice prompted a seeker to check with the Mother. What she says is given in the following. She is emphatic about the psychic coming forward and guiding us: “There is … only one remedy: be on your guard, hold fast to the psychic, do not allow anything in your consciousness to slip in between your psychic and yourself, close your ears and your understanding to all other suggestions and rely only on the psychic.”

The Mother continues: “Usually, those who become conscious of their psychic being expect that it will liberate them from vital and physical attractions and activities; they seek to escape from the world in order to live in the joy of contemplation of the Divine, and in the immutable peace of constant contact with Him. The attitude of those who want to practise Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga is quite different. When they have found their psychic being and are united with it, they ask it to turn its gaze towards the physical being in order to act on it with the knowledge that comes from the contact with the Divine, and to transform the body so that it may be able to receive and manifest the divine consciousness and harmony.”

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Sri Aurobindo was once asked by one of his young disciples Nagin Doshi what he and the Mother had been doing in their former births. “Carrying on the evolution” was the answer that he received from his Guru. When asked to elaborate, Sri Aurobindo wrote back: “That would mean writing the whole of human history. I can only say that as there are special descents to carry on the evolution to a farther stage, so also something of the Divine is always there to help through each stage itself in one direction or another.”

Both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother took birth to foster the progress of evolution of mankind and in each birth they played a very significant role. Each birth was unique in its own way: sometimes they came as rulers, sometimes as warriors and sometimes as artists or philosophers. As artists, their artistic creations are still admired; as philosophers, their works are still read even after the passing of several centuries. As rulers and warriors, their contribution to the society is still remembered. But what remain unknown are the former incarnations of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Sri Aurobindo has always been very silent about his past births but compared to him the Mother was more expressive and she spoke about her former births only in passing. As a matter of fact she, along with Nolini Kanta Gupta, has been the primary source of information about hers and Sri Aurobindo’s previous incarnations. In the following pages we shall discuss about their former births based on the information they themselves have provided.

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Between Genesis and the Apocalypse is the struggle and the striving and reaching out. Creation issuing out of God and Man’s fulfilment as his destiny are the subjects of the two Testaments. But eating of the forbidden fruit f knowledge is another story and it is for the poets to write about it. Virgil’s “tears in mortal things”, Keats’s “this nest of pain”, Shelley’s falling on the thorns of life and bleeding, Eliot’s “hollow men” or the “inoperancy of the world of the spirit”, even the Gita’s “this “transient and sorrowful world” are a poignancy that has to be borne on this difficult and dangerous pilgrim’s march. The frustrating endeavour and travail lie in between the two glorious ends; a tortuous hiatus separates birth and death. But there is another dimension to this labour and toil, even to death in the sequence of life, put aphoristically by Sri Aurobindo: “He stung Himself with bliss and called it pain.” To the woe of our heart He does not consent but tells us simply that its grief is just another name for joy. The horror of night about which we complain is but an opportunity to emerge into the day. Death is after all a passage towards life making the adventure worthwhile.

Nolini Kant Gupta believed that the entire history of mankind, seen in its essential psycho-spiritual sense, is a mighty effort of human life, almost a poetry of triumph, transcending itself and entering into the law of harmony, beauty, sweetness, truth, knowledge, even power, a wondrous movement born of and sustained by secret delight that is its own cause and its own effect, a great creative urge touching and pervading everything.

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His eyes were perfect, but like a blind star
He walked through the long night when were asleep
The skilled gods of time, and the guards who keep
Vigil on swift things, in the lands that are
Priceless and precious, stretching wide and far;
In those realms of gold he saw a huge heap
Of papers and, rather with a snarly leap,
Took hold of them, wonders that had no scar.

One by one all the missed commas were found
And many a word looked quite dubious;
The poet had lost his sense, in a voice bold
He declared to the sleepy world. What ground…?
But the sudden hand of death, furious,
Took away his soul ere it could be sold.

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Can we say that the Mother’s work of physical transformation is a triumph? There are people who express doubts about it; they maintain that both she and Sri Aurobindo had promised it in the here-and-now, at this particular juncture, during this birth of theirs, right today, in our own lifetime, and not in some other age, in the distant future. In the strictest literal sense, for those who put forward scholarly dialectical arguments, the answer to the question if transformation is a triumph would then simply be ‘No.’ This is particularly so when they even go to the strangest extent of saying that Sri Aurobindo's retirement after getting the Overmind siddhi in the physical, in November 1926, was due to "inner despair". If not this assertive ‘No’, at the best, as if to accommodate or patronize the believers of the Avataric success, their line of thinking would be to concede a highly condescending ‘Yes’. But then is that the kind of a report the Guardian Spirit is going to give to the Eternal that she who had come "to open the doors of Fate, the iron doors that seemed for ever closed" forgot her mission, that the power he kindled in her body failed,

His labourer returns, her task undone?

However, such a question simply belongs to the category of the physical mind and could perhaps be ignored. Or else the answer itself would be in the manner of the physical mind passing judgements on matters beyond its domain, matters that are totally occult-spiritual. Both lack perception and in the deeper sense one need not be much concerned about the question. There has to be another vision and another observant intuition, intuition born of wide luminous knowledge that comes only by identification with the spirit of the things. But in the absence of it one can at least be perceptive and try to understand the situation more open-mindedly, open-heartedly. Rational mind surely has the capacity to grow; it can acquire gnostic sense cognisant of spiritual shades and nuances and it should be promoted. The discerning insight of enlightened reason could be a sufficiently good guide.

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Here is something impossible to understand through a text-book. Can a history teacher explain this? this mystery of American history?

Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.
John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.
Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860.
John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960.
Both were particularly concerned with civil rights.
Both wives lost their children while living in the White House.
Both Presidents were shot on a Friday.
Both Presidents were shot in the head.

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Nirodbaran about Nadkarni’s Savitri talks: “As much as the talks it was the atmosphere created by them that was the magnet. I felt a Presence pervading the room. The reason that struck me for it, if any reason can be given for an occult phenomenon, is that, by the lecturer’s own admission, Savitri was a madness and a passion with him. If that was so, the Aurobindonian ‘God-touch’ was bound to be there. And the passion was felt in every word, each expression of his, either in interpretation or in elucidation or in reading of relevant passages. This made everything living. His fluent, spontaneous delivery with a masterly command over the language combined with his easy and simple manner accounted further for the Presence, and the great success resulting from it came extra graceful because of his handsome appearance.”

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This is absolutely the last of Sri Aurobindo’s articles published in the 24 November 1950 issue of the Bulletin of Physical Education. In it the absolutely last sentence dictated by Sri Aurobindo is the following: “It is in this series of the order of existence and as the last word of the lower hemisphere of being, the first word of the higher hemisphere that we have to look at the Mind of Light and see what is its nature and the powers which characterise it and which it uses for its self-manifestation and workings, its connection with Supermind and its consequences and possibilities for the life of a new humanity.” In it the last phrase is “the life of a new humanity”. It is significant that absolutely the last line in Savitri Sri Aurobindo dictated around 15 November 1950, just three weeks before his withdrawal, is very assertive of the work that Savitri the radiant daughter of Aswapati has been entrusted with: “But leave her to her mighty self and Fate,” tells Narad to the royal parents, particularly her mother Malawi. Preparing the world for the arrival of a new humanity is the foremost task she has to attend to, confront Fate in the midst of all the conflicting forces operating here. Savitri is at it and she has to work out the complex modus operandi in the pragmatics prevailing in the circumstances at this point of time.

It is in that sense we see the importance of the Mind of Light, it preparing a new humanity that will open to the Gnostic or Supramental possibilities. While at the moment the details have been left unspecified, the indications are sufficiently vivid in their implications. The working of the covert Supermind in the material world prepares the Mind of Light to receive in evolution directly the Supermind proper for its full dynamic play here. It is the concealed Supermind in, or behind, the gross and stiff physical’s mind receiving the superconscient Supermind which alone can bring the certitude of the fully transformed divine life upon earth. New humanity is an intermediate stage in that process, this humanity governed by the Mind of Light: it is the well-prepared humanity with the physical’s mind ready to receive the Supramental proper. Sri Aurobindo found it expedient as an intermediate stage before the fuller and truer divinization of life on this mortal globe of ours becomes a realized fact.

Sri Aurobindo makes it abundantly clear: “The Mind of Light is a subordinate action of Supermind [marking] a transitional passage by which we can pass from Supermind and superhumanity to an illumined humanity. For the new humanity will be capable of at least a partly divinised way of seeing and living because it will live in the light and in knowledge and not in the obscuration of the Ignorance.” In any case, it is a faculty wherein is the unmistakable action of light, of truth, of knowledge, and where there is no place for inconscience, ignorance, error to exist. Sri Aurobindo asserts: “It proceeds from knowledge to knowledge.” The beauty is, with it, even this material world receives on it the stamp of truth and it is that which gives us confidence in it.

In my copy of the 1952 edition of The Supramental Manifestation I have a comment in pencil which runs as follows: It looks as though the Mind of Light is Sri Aurobindo’s creation in the sense that he felt its necessity and brought it into operation. Earlier in the 1930s he spoke of vast tracts between Overmind and Supermind, but they had remained until then unexplored. Never did he on previous occasions mention anytime anything about the Mind of Light, neither in letters nor in conversations. If it were a pre-established plane in the evolutionary ladder he would have certainly spoken about it. He saw the great difficulty in bringing down the Supermind directly in the earth-nature and therefore the focus of his yoga-tapasya in the 1940s was essentially fixed in solving this problem. As a part of that modus operandi he brought down a power of Supermind close to the earth making it a station for higher operation. The Mind of Light became the physical receiving the supramental. This is a new station, a stage created by him for the higher transition or evolution. A possibility of new humanity has been worked out. This power of Mind of Light he made directly operative in himself. He established it in his own body-consciousness. At the time of passing away he gave it as a parting gift to the Mother. His supreme sacrifice is to fix the unmanifest supramental Light permanently on the earth. Having fixed it, he shifted his own station from the earthly physical to the subtle physical invoking the further descent. The Mother speaks of the enormous power he himself gained after the withdrawal from here. The supramental Descent of 1956 was a direct consequence of this action of his. So that is the great contribution: creating and establishing the Mind of Light as a part of the evolutionary process. That is the path into the higher hemisphere of Knowledge he has opened out when physically present here. It became supramentally dynamic in the earth’s subtle-physical in 1956.

On one occasion Amal Kiran happened to borrow my copy of the book and, quite understandably, read my comments and notes at various places in it. Not only that; he himself added his remarks. There is this observation in the above against which he has made a comment in pencil in the margin: “As a part of that modus operandi he brought down a power of Supermind close to the earth making it a station for higher operation. The Mind of Light became the physical receiving the supramental.” Amal writes: “This is in line with my article but hardly in line with Sri Aurobindo’s articles.” True enough. But this is our way of understanding Sri Aurobindo, and that is the best we can do. Even as we grow more and more in him, that understanding also grows; that is the best of ours and it is wonderful that we agree in it—and of course this best need not necessarily be the last; it should not be.

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This article appeared in the August 1950 issue of the Bulletin of Physical Education and explains what exactly Sri Aurobindo meant by the phrase ‘Mind of Light’. It is relatively a new coinage and has a specific connotation in his yogic terminology. We do not have its occurrence anywhere else, not even in his letters written in response to the queries of the disciples in the 1930s. There is a phrase in Savitri, though, which describes the nature of the young girl Savitri, that she was one with the greater Nature even in the acceptance of the mortal birth by her: a mind of light, a life of rhythmic force, even the body instinct with hidden divinity was there that prepared an image of the god about to arrive. But the loaded association the phrase had in his last pieces of writings is of a different kind. The Savitri draft pertaining to this book, The Book of Birth and Quest, was written around 1945, after the completion of the first three Books of the Epic between 1942 and 1944. So the phrase has to be understood in terms of the latest yogic developments which were rapidly taking place during those last few years, 1945-1950.

Sri Aurobindo’s yoga-tapasya had by now advanced to such an extent that even his physical started responding to the supramental light and force, started receiving it, a thing which was not steadying until then. Sri Aurobindo had by now firmly established in himself, in his very physical, a transformative superconscient power which he called the Mind of Light. Later the Mother defined it as the physical’s mind, the mind of the physical, the body’s mind, opening to the Supramental. In fact, it was this Mind of Light which Sri Aurobindo made as a parting gift to the Mother; this was very early in the morning at the time of his passing away on 5 December 1950, when she was standing by the side of his bed almost for half an hour. During their first meeting he had given to her the silent mind as the first gift. Between these two gifts was the diamond-bright yoga-tapasya that changed the entire course not only of the world events, but of the very evolutionary process. In it a new element entered into operation—the Mind of Light. We shall serialize under the present head a few postings related with this Mind of Light and try to see the kind of progress made towards the physical transformation.

We may en passant look into the very pregnant phrase that appears in the third line of Savitri—“the huge foreboding mind of Night” standing across the path of the divine Event. If the mind of Light is the physical’s mind receiving the supramental, we may interpret the mind of Night as the physical’s mind formed by the Inconscient. At one stage, at the mysterious beginning of things, this mind of Night was absolutely essential. It is that which could hold back, steady the inconscient material creation from the all-swallowing power of the Non-Being’s Emptiness. Matter survived the Hunger of the Void because of the firmness of form it rendered to it. But now it is that very firmness which poses itself as the mighty obstacle across the path of the divine Event, the prospects coming into view for a superior manifestation.

In the present article Sri Aurobindo explains the role of the Mind of Light shaping a new humanity as a necessary step towards the fuller manifestation of the Gnostic or the Supramental Race. The first descent of the Supermind in the form of Mind of Light carrying in it the supramental inevitability in evolution is the firm gain in the earth-process. In its inevitable ascent it is the beginning of a new gradation, marking a stage of humanity embodying more and more of spirituality. It will gather itself out of the vast sea of Ignorance and assemble its constituent elements; its next step will be to build up its shapes and types till the joining with the Supermind’s is accomplished. The uncertainty which was left in Savitri’s dream or swapna experience when she had just set herself on the Yoga-path gets full resolved in this formulation: the uncertainty was in relationship with the three alternatives she saw, whether this world be led to a new world or a new world is discovered or an entirely new world is created.

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