Supermind
and the Life Divine
Page 1
A
divine life upon earth, the ideal we have placed before
us, can only come about by a spiritual change of our being
and aradical and fundamental change, an evolution or revolution
of our nature. The embodied being upon earth would have
to rise out of the domination over it of its veils of mind,
life and body into the full consciousness and possession
of its spiritual reality, and its nature also would have
to be lifted out of the consciousness and power of consciousness
proper to a mental, vital and physical being into the greater
consciousness and greater power of being and the larger
and freer life of the spirit. It would not lose these former
veils but they would no longer be veils or imperfect expressions
but true manifestations; they would be changed into states
of light, powers of spiritual life, vehicles of a spiritual
existence. But this again could not be if mind, life and
body were not taken up and transformed by a state of being
and a force of being superior to them, a power of Supermind
as much above our incomplete mental nature as that is above
the nature of animal life and animated Matter, as it is
immeasurably above the mere material nature.
The
Supermind is in its very essence a truth-consciousness,
a consciousness always free from the Ignorance which is
the foundation of our present natural or evolutionary existence
and from which nature in us is trying to arrive at
self-knowledge and world-knowledge and a right consciousness
and the right use of our existence in the universe.The Supermind,
because it is a truth-consciousness, has this knowledge
inherent in it and this power of true existence; its course
is straight and can go direct to its aim, its field is wide
and can even be made illimitable. This is because its very
nature is knowledge: it has not to acquire knowledge but
possesses it in its own right;its
steps are not from nescience or ignorance into some imperfect
light, but from truth to greater truth, from right perception
to deeper perception, from intuition to intuition, from
illumination to utter and boundless luminousness, from growing
widenesses to the utter vasts and to very infinitude. On
its summits it possesses the divine omniscience and omnipotence,
but even in an evolutionary movement of its own graded self-manifestation
by which it would eventually reveal its own highest heights,
it must be in its very nature essentially free from ignorance
and error: it starts from truth and light and moves always
in truth and light. As its knowledge is always true, so
too its will is always true; it does not fumble in its handling
of things or stumble in its paces. In the Supermind feeling
and emotion do not depart from their truth, make no slips
or mistakes, do not swerve from the right and the real,
cannot misuse beauty and delight or twist away from a divine
rectitude. In the Supermind sense cannot mislead or deviate
into the grossnesses which are here its natural imperfections
and the cause of reproach, distrust and misuse by our ignorance.
Even an incomplete statement made by the Supermind is a
truth leading to a further truth, its incomplete action
a step towards completeness. All the life and action and
leading of the Supermind is guarded in its very nature from
the falsehoods and uncertainties that are our lot; it moves
in safety towards its perfection. Once the truth-consciousness
was established here on its own sure foundation, the evolution
of divine life would be a progress in felicity, a march
through light to Ananda.
Supermind
is an eternal reality of the divine Being and the divine
Nature. In its own plane it already and always exists and
possesses its own essential law of being; it has not to
be created or to emerge or evolve into existence out of
involution in Matter or out of non-existence, as it might
seem to the view of mind which itself seems to its own view
to have so emerged from life and Matter or to have evolved
out of an involution in life and Matter. The nature of Supermind
is always the same, a being of knowledge, proceeding from
truth to truth, creating or rather manifesting what has
to be manifested by the power of a pre-existent knowledge,
not by hazard but by a self existent destiny in the being
itself, a necessity of the thing in itself and therefore
inevitable. Its manifestation of the divine life will also
be inevitable; its own life on its own plane is divine and,
if Supermind descends upon the earth, it will bring necessarily
the divine life with it and establish it here.
Supermind
is the grade of existence beyond mind, life and Matter and,
as mind, life and Matter have manifested on the earth, so
too must Supermind in the inevitable course of things manifest
in this world of Matter. In fact, a supermind is already
here but it is involved, concealed behind this manifest
mind, life and Matter and not yet acting overtly or in its
own power: if it acts, it is through these inferior powers
and modified by their characters and so not yet recognisable.
It is only by the approach and arrival of the descending
Supermind that it can be liberated upon earth and reveal
itself in the action of our material, vital and mental parts
so that these lower powers can become portions of a total
divinised activity of our whole being: it is that that will
bring to us a completely realised divinity or the divine
life. It is indeed so that life and mind involved in Matter
have realised themselves here; for only what is involved
can evolve, otherwise there could be no emergence.
The
manifestation of a supramental truth-consciousness is therefore
the capital reality that will make the divine life possible.
It is when all the movements of thought, impulse and action
are governed and directed by a self-existent and luminously
automatic truth-consciousness and our whole nature comes
to be constituted by it and made of its stuff that the life
divine will be complete and absolute. Even as it is, in
reality though not in the appearance of things, it is a
secret self-existent knowledge and truth that is working
to manifest itself in the creation here. The Divine is already
there immanent within us, ourselves are that in our inmost
reality and it is this reality that we have to manifest;
it is that which constitutes the urge towards the divine
living and makes necessary the creation of the life divine
even in this material existence.
-
Sri Aurobindo
