Supermind and Mind of Light

This is the eighth and last in the series of articles Sri Aurobindo wrote during 1949-50 and it had appeared first in the 24 November 1950 issue of the Bulletin d' Education Physique (Bulletin of Physical Education). The following is absolutely the last piece of Sri Aurobindo’s prose writings. This article was probably dictated towards the end of September or early in November 1950.

 

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.

 

It seems that Sri Aurobindo wanted to develop the series “to look at the Mind of Light” further to characterise the type of New Humanity that will be formed, a humanity paving the path for the arrival of the Gnostic Race and in the progressive sequel of the Divine Life upon Earth. Sri Aurobindo’s own withdrawal on 5 December 1950 was a yogic act in that direction.

 

But absolutely the last piece of Sri Aurobindo’s creative writings is the 72-line passage (589 words) in Savitri dictated around 15 November 1950, just three weeks before his self-willed withdrawal. It appears in the Book of Fate which he had picked up again for the last revision, the Book that was already published on one or two occasions. Actually, this cannot be called a revision;  it was an addition made with a definite intention, indicating the prophetic nature of the Mother’s work of the Supramental Descent and Transformation. Here is the passage: (pp. 460-62)

 

Queen, strive no more to change the secret will;

Time's accidents are steps in its vast scheme.

 

Bring not thy brief and helpless human tears

Across the fathomless moments of a heart

That knows its single will and God's as one:

It can embrace its hostile destiny;

It sits apart with grief and facing death,

Affronting adverse fate armed and alone.

 

In this enormous world standing apart

In the mightiness of her silent spirit's will,

In the passion of her soul of sacrifice

Her lonely strength facing the universe,

Affronting fate, asks not man's help nor god's:

Sometimes one life is charged with earth's destiny,

It cries not for succour from the time-bound powers.

 

Alone she is equal to her mighty task.

Intervene not in a strife too great for thee,

A struggle too deep for mortal thought to sound,

Its question to this Nature's rigid bounds

When the soul fronts nude of garbs the infinite,

Its too vast theme of a lonely mortal will

Pacing the silence of eternity.

 

As a star, uncompanioned, moves in heaven

Unastonished by the immensities of space,

Travelling infinity by its own light,

The great are strongest when they stand alone.

 

A God-given might of being is their force,

A ray from self's solitude of light the guide;

The soul that can live alone with itself meets God;

Its lonely universe is their rendezvous.

 

A day may come when she must stand unhelped

On a dangerous brink of the world's doom and hers,

Carrying the world's future on her lonely breast,

Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole

To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge.

 

Alone with death and close to extinction's edge,

Her single greatness in that last dire scene,

She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time

And reach an apex of world-destiny

Where all is won or all is lost for man.

 

In that tremendous silence lone and lost

Of a deciding hour in the world's fate,

In her soul's climbing beyond mortal time

When she stands sole with Death or sole with God

Apart upon a silent desperate brink,

Alone with her self and death and destiny

As on some verge between Time and Timelessness

When being must end or life rebuild its base,

Alone she must conquer or alone must fall.

 

No human aid can reach her in that hour,

No armoured God stand shining at her side.

Cry not to heaven, for she alone can save.

 

For this the silent Force came missioned down;

In her the conscious Will took human shape:

She only can save herself and save the world.

 

O queen, stand back from that stupendous scene,

Come not between her and her hour of Fate.

 

Her hour must come and none can intervene:

Think not to turn her from her heaven-sent task,

Strive not to save her from her own high will.

 

Thou hast no place in that tremendous strife;

Thy love and longing are not arbiters there,

Leave the world's fate and her to God's sole guard.

 

Even if he seems to leave her to her lone strength,

Even though all falters and falls and sees an end

And the heart fails and only are death and night,

God-given her strength can battle against doom

Even on a brink where Death alone seems close

And no human strength can hinder or can help.

 

Think not to intercede with the hidden Will,

Intrude not twixt her spirit and its force

But leave her to her mighty self and Fate.

 

So, absolutely the last line is: “But leave her to her mighty self and Fate.” It seems interesting, the last word uttered by Sri Aurobindo in his literary compositions was “Fate”. In any case, this marks the completion of the long writing career beginning from the series New Lamps for Old on 7 August 1893 and coming to an end in mid-November 1950. It started with “If the blind lead the blind, shall they not both fall into a ditch?”, the end coming in the phrase “her mighty self and Fate”. Her mighty self and Fate, the divine Shakti and Niyati, that is the theme of the Transcendental’s working in this mortal Creation.

The essential character of Supermind is a Truth-Consciousness which knows by its own inherent right of nature, by its own light: it has not to arrive at knowledge but possesses it. It may indeed, especially in its evolutionary action, keep knowledge behind its apparent consciousness and bring it forward as if from behind the veil; but even then this veil is only an appearance and does not really exist: the knowledge was always there, the consciousness its possessor and present revealer. This too is only in the evolutionary play and on the supramental plane itself the consciousness lives always in an immediacy of knowledge and acts by a direct immediacy of knowledge. In Mind as we see it here the action is very different; it starts from an apparent absence of knowledge, a seeming ignorance or nescience, even, in material Nature, from an inconscience in which any kind of knowing does not seem at all to exist. It reaches knowledge or the action of knowledge by steps which are not at all immediate but rather knowledge at first seems utterly impossible and foreign to the very substance of this Matter. Yet, in the blindness of Matter itself there are signs of a concealed consciousness which in its hidden fundamental being sees and has the power to act according to its vision and even by an infallible immediacy which is inherent in its nature. This is the same Truth that is apparent in Supermind but is here involved and seems not to be. The Mind of Light is a subordinate action of Supermind, dependent upon it even when not apparently springing direct from it, in which the secret of this connection becomes evident and palpable.

 

The Truth-Consciousness is not only a power of knowledge; it is a being of consciousness and knowledge, a luminous many-sided dynamis and play of the omniscient Spirit; in it there can be a spiritual feeling, a spiritual sensation, a spiritual essentiality of substance that knows and reveals, that acts and manifests in an omniscience which is one with omnipotence. In Mind this Truth-Consciousness and these workings of the Truth-Consciousness can be there and even though it limits itself in Mind and has a subordinate or an indirect working, its action can be essentially the same. There can even be a hidden immediacy which hints at the presence of something absolute and is evidence of the same omnipotence and omniscience. In the Mind of Light when it becomes full-orbed this character of the Truth reveals itself though in a garb that is transparent even when it seems to cover: for this too is a truth-consciousness and a self-power of knowledge. This too proceeds from the Supermind and depends upon it even though it is limited and subordinate. What we have called specifically the Mind of Light is indeed the last of a series of descending planes of consciousness in which the Supermind veils itself by a self-chosen limitation or modification of its self-manifesting activities, but its essential character remains the same: there is in it an action of light, of truth, of knowledge in which inconscience, ignorance and error claim no place. It proceeds from knowledge to knowledge; we have not yet crossed over the borders of the truth-conscious into ignorance. The methods also are those of a self-luminous knowing and seeing and feeling and a self-fulfiling action within its own borders; there is no need to seek for something missing, no fumbling, no hesitation: all is still a gnostic action of a gnostic power and principle. There has been a descent from full Supermind into Mind, but this Mind though a self-limited is not yet an agnostic consciousness unsure of itself or unsure of its workings; there is still a comprehending or anapprehending consciousness which goes straight to its object and does not miss its mark or have to hunt for it in the dark or in insufficient light: it sees, knows, puts its hand immediately on things of self and things of Nature. We have passed into Mind but mind has still not broken its inherent connection with the supramental principle.

 

Still there is an increasing self-limitation which begins even with Overmind: Overmind is separated by only a luminous border on the full light and power of the supramental Truth and it still commands direct access to all that Supermind can give it. There is a further limitation or change of characteristic action at each step downwards from Overmind to Intuition, from Intuition to Illumined Mind, from Illumined Mind to what I have called the Higher Mind: the Mind of Light is 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.

 

Still, again there will be a difference between the superhuman and the human, a difference in nature and power but a difference especially in the access and way of admission to the Truth-Consciousness and its activities: there may indeed be two orders of its truth, direct and half-direct, immediate and near or even only a reception at a distance. But this we must consider afterwards; at present it is sufficient to mark certain differences in the descending order of gnostic mind which culminates here. We may say that there is a higher hemisphere of our being in which Mind luminous and aware of its workings still lives in the Light and can be seen as a subordinate power of the Supermind; it is still an agent of the Truth-Consciousness, a gnostic power that has not descended into the mental ignorance; it is capable of a mental gnosis that preserves its connection with the superior light and acts by its power. This is the character of Overmind in its own plane and of all the powers that are dependent on the Overmind: the Supermind works there but at one remove, as if in something that it has put forth from itself but which is no longer entirely itself but is still a delegate of the Truth and invested with its authority. We are moving towards a transitional border beyond which lies the possibility of the Ignorance, but the Ignorance is not yet here. In the order of the evolutionary descent we stand in the Mind of Light on that border and a step downward can carry us beyond it into the beginnings of an ignorance which still bears on its face something of the luminosity that it is leaving behind it. On the other hand, in the ascending order of the evolution we reach a transition in which we see the light, are turned towards it, reflected in our consciousness and one further step carries us into the domain of the Light. The Truth becomes visible and audible to us and we are in immediate communication with its messages and illuminations and can grow into it and be made one with its substance. Thus there is a succession of ranges of consciousness which we can speak of as Mind but which belongs practically to the higher hemisphere although in their ontological station they are within the domain of the lower hemisphere. For the whole of being is a connected totality and there is in it no abrupt passage from the principle of Truth and Light into their opposite. The creative truth of things works and can work infallibly even in the Inconscient: the Spirit is there in Matter and it has made a series of steps by which it can travel from it to its own heights in an uninterrupted line of gradations: the depths are linked to the heights and the Law of the one Truth creates and works everywhere.

 

Even in the material world which seems to us a world of ignorance, a world of the workings of a blind and inconscient Force starting from inconscience and proceeding through Ignorance and reaching with difficulty towards an imperfect Light and Knowledge, there is still a secret Truth in things which arranges all, guides towards the Self many contrary powers of being and rises towards its own heights where it can manifest its own highest truth and fulfil the secret purpose of the universe. Even this material world of existence is built upon a pattern of the truth in things which we call Law of Nature, a truth from which we climb to a greater truth until we emerge in the Light of the Supreme. This world is not really created by a blind force of Nature: even in the Inconscient the presence of the supreme Truth is at work; there is a seeing Power behind it which acts infallibly and the step of the Ignorance itself are guided even when they seem to stumble; for, what we call the Ignorance is a cloaked Knowledge, a Knowledge at work in a body not its own but moving towards its own supreme self-discovery. This Knowledge is the covert Supermind which is the support of the creation and is leading all towards itself and guides behind this multitude of minds and creatures and objects which seem each to be following its own law of nature; in this vast and apparently confused mass of existence there is a law, a one truth of being, a guiding and fulfilling purpose of the world-existence. The Supermind is veiled here and does not work according to its characteristic Jaw of being and self-knowledge, but without it nothing could reach its aim. A world governed by an ignorant mind would soon drift into a chaos; it could not in fact come into existence or remain in existence unless supported by the secret Omniscience of which it is the cover; a world governed by a blind inconscient force might repeat constantly the same mechanical workings but it would mean nothing and arrive nowhere. This could not be the cause of an evolution that creates life out of Matter, out of life mind, and a gradation of planes of Matter, Life and Mind culminating in the emergence of Supermind. The secret truth that emerges in Supermind has been there all the time, but now it manifests itself and the truth in things and the meaning of our existence.

 

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.