Supramental
Mahashakti
There
are other great Personalities of the Divine Mother,
but they were more difficult to bring down and have
not stood out in front with so much prominence in the
evolution of the earth-spirit. There are among them
Presences indispensable for the supramental realisation,—most
of all one who is her Personality of that mysterious
and powerful ecstasy and Ananda which flows from a supreme
divine Love, the Ananda that alone can heal the gulf
between the highest heights of the supramental spirit
and lowest abysses of Matter, the Ananda that holds
the key of a wonderful divinest Life and even now supports
from its secrecies the work of all the other Powers
of the universe. But human nature bounded, egoistic
and obscure is inapt to receive these great Presences
or to support their mighty action. Only when the Four
have founded their harmony and freedom of movement in
the transformed mind and life and body, can those other
rarer Powers manifest in the earth movement and the
supramental action become possible. For when her Personalities
are all gathered in her and manifested and their separate
working has been turned into a harmonious unity and
they rise in her to their supramental godheads, then
is the Mother revealed as the supramental Mahashakti
and brings pouring down her luminous transcendences
from their ineffable ether. Then can human nature change
into dynamic divine nature because all the elemental
lines of the supramental Truth-consciousness and Truth-force
are strung together and the harp of life is fitted for
the rhythms of the Eternal.
If
your desire this transformation, put yourself in the
hands of the Mother and her Powers without cavil or
resistance and let her do unhindered her work within
you. Three things you must have, consciousness, plasticity,
unreserved surrender. For you must be conscious in your
mind and soul and heart and life and the very cells
of your body, aware of the Mother and her Powers and
their working; for although she can and does work in
you even in your obscurity and your unconscious parts
and moments, it is not the same thing as when you are
in an awakened and living communion with her. All your
nature must be plastic to her touch,—not questioning
as the self-sufficient ignorant mind questions and doubts
and disputes and is the enemy of its enlightenment and
change; not insisting on its own movements as the vital
in man insists and persistently opposes its refractory
desires and ill-will to every divine influence; not
obstructing and entrenched in incapacity, inertia and
tamas as man's physical consciousness obstructs and
clinging to its pleasure in smallness and darkness cries
out against each touch that disturbs its soulless routine
or its dull sloth or its torpid slumber. The unreserved
surrender of your inner and outer being will bring this
plasticity into all the parts of your nature; consciousness
will awaken everywhere in you by constant openness to
the Wisdom and Light, the Force, the Harmony and Beauty,
the Perfection that come flowing down from above. Even
the body will awake and unite at last its consciousness
subliminal no longer to the supramental superconscious
Force, feel all her powers permeating from above and
below and around it and thrill to a supreme Love and
Ananda.
But
be on your guard and do not try to understand and judge
the Divine Mother by your little earthly mind that loves
to subject even the things that are beyond it to its
own norms and standards, its narrow reasonings and erring
impressions, its bottomless aggressive ignorance, its
petty self-confident knowledge. The human mind shut
in the prison of its half-lit obscurity cannot follow
the many-sided freedom of the steps of the Divine Shakti.
The rapidity and complexity of her vision and action
outrun its stumbling comprehension; the measures of
her movement are not its measures. Bewildered by the
swift alteration of her many different personalities,
her making of rhythms and her breaking of rhythms, her
accelerations of speed and her retardations, her varied
ways of dealing with the problem of one and of another,
her taking up and dropping now of this line and now
of that one and her gathering of them together, it will
not recognise the way of the Supreme Power when it is
circling and sweeping upwards through the maze of the
Ignorance to a supernal Light. Open rather your soul
to her and be content to feel her with the psychic nature
and see her with the psychic vision that alone make
a straight response to the Truth. Then the Mother herself
will enlighten by their psychic elements your mind and
heart and life and physical consciousness and reveal
to them too her ways and her nature.
Avoid
also the error of the ignorant mind's demand on the
Divine Power to act always according to our crude surface
notions of omniscience and omnipotence. For our mind
clamours to be impressed at every turn by miraculous
power and easy success and dazzling splendour; otherwise
it cannot believe that here is the Divine. The Mother
is dealing with the Ignorance in the fields of the Ignorance;
she has descended there and is not all above. Partly
she veils and partly she unveils her knowledge and her
power, often holds them back from her instruments and
personalities and follows that she may transform them
the way of the seeking mind, the way of the aspiring
psychic, the way of the battling vital, the way of the
imprisoned and suffering physical nature. There are
conditions that have been laid down by a Supreme Will,
there are are many tangled knots that have to be loosened
and cannot be cut abruptly asunder. The Asura and Rakshasa
hold this evolving earthly nature and have to be met
and conquered on their own terms in their own long-conquered
fief and province; the human in us has to be led and
prepared to transcend its limits and is too weak and
obscure to be lifted up suddenly to a form far beyond
it. The Divine Consciousness and Force are there and
do at each moment the thing that is needed in the conditions
of the labour, take always the step that is decreed
and shape in the midst of imperfection the perfection
that is to come. But only when the supermind has descended
in you can she deal directly as the supramental Shakti
with supramental natures. If you follow your mind, it
will not recognise the Mother even when she is manifest
before you. Follow you soul and not your mind, your
soul that answers to the Truth, not your mind that leaps
at appearances; trust the Divine Power and she will
free the godlike elements in you and shape all into
an expression of the Divine Nature.
The
supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable
in the evolution of the earth-consciousness; for its
upward ascent is not ended and mind in not its last
summit. But that the change may arrive, take form and
endure, there is needed the call from below with a will
to recognise and not deny the Light when it comes, and
there is needed the sanction of the Supreme from above.
The power that mediates between the sanction and the
call is the presence and power of the Divine Mother.
The Mother's power and not any human endeavour and tapasya
can alone rend the lid and tear the covering and shape
the vessel and bring down into this world of obscurity
and falsehood and death and suffering Truth and Light
and Life divine and the immortal's Ananda.
-
Sri Aurobindo
