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Sri Aurobindo: Not in their entirety [ ] — for that is not our business. It is ourselves that we have to transform and change the earth consciousness by bringing in the supramental principle into the evolution there. Once there it will necessarily have a powerful inﬂuence on the whole earth-life — as mind has had through the evolution of men, but much greater.
Sri Aurobindo: It is not possible for a force like the Supramental to come down without making a large change in earth conditions. It does not follow that all will become supramentalised and it is not necessary — but mind itself will be inﬂuenced as life has been inﬂuenced by the development of mind on earth. Nothing permanent can be done without the real Supramental Force. But the result of its descent would be that in human life intuition would become a greater and more developed force than it now is and the other intermediate powers between Mind and Supermind would become also more common and develop an organised action.
Sri Aurobindo: It is not for considerations of gain or loss that the Divine Consciousness acts — that is a human standpoint necessary for human development. The Divine, as the Gita says, has nothing to gain and nothing that it has not, yet it puts forth its power of action in the manifestation. It is the earth-consciousness, not the supramental world that has to gain by the descent of the supramental principle — that is sufﬁcient reason for it to descend. The supramental worlds remain as they are and are in no way affected by the descent.
Sri Aurobindo: It [ ]
Sri Aurobindo: would not necessarily be known by everybody beforehand. Besides even if the descent were here one would have to be ready before one could get the ﬁnal change. It is the supermind we have to bring down, manifest, realise.
Sri Aurobindo: Anything higher than that is impossible at this stage of the evolution except as a reﬂection in the consciousness or a power delegated and modiﬁed in its descent. The descent of the Supramental can hasten things, but it is not going to act as a patent universal medicine or change everything in the twinkle of an eye. But what will happen when the supramental comes down is a matter for the supramental to decide — no use laying down laws for it beforehand with the mind.
Sri Aurobindo: It is the Truth-consciousness, sir — it will act according to the divine Truth behind things. It is the very principle of this Yoga that only by the supramentalisation of the consciousness which means rising above mind to supermind and the descent of the supermind into the nature can the ﬁnal transformation be made. So if nobody can rise above mind to supermind or obtain the descent of the supermind, then logically this Yoga becomes impossible. Every being is in essence one with the Divine and in his individual being a portion of the Divine, so there is no insuperable bar to his becoming supramental.
Sri Aurobindo: It is no doubt impossible for the human nature being mental in its basis to overcome the Ignorance and rise to or obtain the descent of the Supermind by its own unaided effort, but by surrender to the Divine it can be done. One brings it down into the earth Nature through his own consciousness and so opens the way for the others, but the change has to be repeated in each consciousness to become individually effective. There need not be [ ]. There will necessarily be great changes but they are not bound to be catastrophic. When there is a strong pressure from Overmind forces for change, then there are likely to be catastrophes because of the resistance and clash of forces.
Sri Aurobindo: The supramental has a greater, in its fullness a complete mastery of things and power of harmonisation which can overcome resistance by other means than dramatic struggle and violence. There are three powers of the cosmos to which all things are subject — creation, preservation and destruction; whatever is created lasts for a time, then begins to crumble down. The taking away of the power of destruction implies a creation that will not be destroyed but last and develop always. In the Ignorance destruction is necessary for progress — in the Knowledge, the Truth-creation, the law is that of a constant unfolding without any Pralaya. It is not by a general descent that people come out of the physical mind.
Sri Aurobindo: If one chooses to remain in the physical mind, one million descents can come down and make no difference to him. The Supermind coming down on earth will change nothing in a man if he clings to the ego. What is a perfect technique of Yoga or rather of a worldchanging and Nature-changing Yoga? Not one that takes a man by a little bit of him somewhere, attaches a hook and pulls him up by a pulley into Nirvana or Paradise.
Sri Aurobindo: The technique of a world-changing Yoga has to be as multiform, sinuous, patient, all-including as the world itself. If it does not deal with all the difﬁculties or possibilities and carefully deal with each necessary element, has it any chance of success? And can a perfect technique which everybody can understand do that? It is not like writing a small poem in a ﬁxed metre with a limited number of modulations. If you take the poem simile, it is the Mahabharata of a Mahabharata that has to be done.
Sri Aurobindo: And what, compared with the limited Greek perfection, is the technique of the Mahabharata? Next, what is the use of in such a case? If one has to get to a new consciousness which surpasses the reasoning intellect, can one do it on lines which are to be judged and understood by the reasoning intellect, controlled at every step by it, told by the intellect what it is to do, what is the measure of its achievements, what its steps must be and what their value? If one does that, will one ever get out of the range of the reasoning intelligence into what is beyond it? And if one does, how shall others judge what one is doing by the intellectual measure?
Sri Aurobindo: How can one judge what is beyond the ordinary consciousness when one is oneself in the ordinary consciousness? Is it not only by exceeding yourself that you can feel, experience, judge what exceeds you? What is the value of a judgment without the feeling and experience? What the Supramental will do the mind cannot foresee or lay down. The mind is Ignorance seeking for the Truth, the Supramental by its very deﬁnition is Truth Consciousness, Truth in possession of itself and fulﬁlling itself by its own power.
Sri Aurobindo: In a supramental world imperfection and disharmony are bound to disappear. But what we propose just now is not to make the earth a supramental world but to bring down the Supramental as a power and established consciousness in the midst of the rest — to let it work there and fulﬁl itself as Mind descended into Life and Matter and has worked as a Power there to fulﬁl itself in the midst of the rest. This will be enough to change the world and to change Nature by breaking down her present limits. But what, how, by what degrees it will do it is a thing that ought not to be said now — when the Light is there, the Light will itself do its work — when the Supramental Will stands on earth, that Will will decide. It will establish a perfection, a harmony, a Truth-creation — for the rest, well, it will be the rest — that is all.
Sri Aurobindo: I certainly hope to bring down an effective power of the Truth which will replace eventually the Falsehood that has governed the minds and hearts of men for so long. The liberation of a few individuals is a thing that is always possible and has always been done — but, to my seeing, it cannot be the sole aim of existence. Whatever the struggles and sufferings and blunders of humanity, there is still in it an urge towards the Light, an impulse towards a greater Truth not only of the soul but the life. If it has not been done yet, it is surely because those who reached the Light and the greater Truth, rested there and saw in it more a means of escape for the soul than a means of transformation for the life.
Sri Aurobindo: The liberation of the spirit is necessary, nothing can be done without it — but the transformation is also possible. You have missed altogether the qualifying words which I put with great care and prominent emphasis — if you don’t read carefully, you will necessarily misunderstand what I write. I said cannot be done individually .” No individual solitary transformation apart from the work for the earth (which means more than any individual transformation) would be either possible or useful.
Sri Aurobindo: (Also no individual human being can by his own power alone work out the transformation, nor is it the object of the Yoga to create an individual superman here and there.) The object of the Yoga is to bring down the supramental consciousness on earth, to ﬁx it there, to create a new race with the principle of the supramental consciousness governing the inner and outer individual and collective life. Therefore the existence of the Asram, whatever difﬁculties it created for ourselves or for the individual, was inevitable. The method was the preparation of the earth consciousness in the human being as represented by the members of the Asram and others (with also a certain working in the general earth consciousness) so as to make the descent of the supramental Force possible. That Force accepted by individual after individual according to their preparation would establish the supramental consciousness in the physical world and so create a nucleus for its own expansion.
Sri Aurobindo: As far as I can see, once the supramental is established in Matter, the transformation will be possible under much less troublesome conditions than now are there. These bad conditions are due to the fact that the Ignorance is in possession and the hostile Powers an established authority, as it were, who do not care to give up their hold and there is no full force of Light established in the earth consciousness which would not only meet but outweigh their full force of darkness.
Sri Aurobindo: It is the darkest nights that prepare the greatest dawns — and it is so because it is into the deep inconscience of material life that we have to bring, not an intermediate glimmer, but the full glory of the divine Light. When there is a pressure on the vital world due to the preparing Descent from above, that world usually precipitates something of itself into the human. The vital world is very large and far exceeds the human in extent. But usually it dominates by inﬂuence not by descent.
Sri Aurobindo: Of course the effort of this part of the vital world is always to maintain humanity under its sway and prevent the higher Light. The vital descent cannot prevent the supramental — still less can the possessed nations do it by their material power, since the supramental descent is primarily a spiritual fact which will bear its necessary outward consequences. What previous vital descents have done is to falsify the Light that came down as in the history of Christianity where it took possession of the teaching and distorted it and deprived it of any widespread fulﬁlment. But the supermind is by deﬁnition a Light that cannot be distorted if it acts in its own right and by its own presence. It is only when it holds itself back and allows inferior Powers of consciousness to use a diminished and already deﬂected Truth that the knowledge can be seized by the vital Forces and made to serve their own purpose.
Sri Aurobindo: When the mind, life and body are entirely divine and supramentalised, that is the perfect transformation and the true transformation is the process that leads towards it. It is not a question of “can” or “cannot” [ ] — it is a question of what is necessary for the true transformation. Theoretically the Force can transform you in one hundredth of a second from an animal to a god, but that would not be transformation or the working out of a spiritual evolution, it would be mere thaumaturgy, i.e. miracle working without a signiﬁcance or purpose.
Sri Aurobindo: The whole of humanity cannot be changed at once. What has to be done is to bring the Higher Consciousness down into the earth-consciousness and establish it there as a constant realised force, just as mind and life have been established and embodied in Matter, so to establish and embody the Supramental Force.
Sri Aurobindo: It would not be possible to change all that [ ] in a moment — we have always said that the whole of humanity will not change the moment there is the Descent. But what can be done is to establish the higher principle in the earth consciousness in such a way that it will remain and go on strengthening and spreading itself in the earth-life. That is how a new principle in the evolution must necessarily work.
Sri Aurobindo: There is no proposal to transform the whole earth consciousness — it is simply to introduce the supramental principle there which will transform those who can receive and embody it. The earth is the place of evolution in which all these [] forces meet and try to manifest and out of their working something has to develop. On the other planes (the mental, vital etc.) there is not the evolution — there each acts separately according to its own law.
Sri Aurobindo: It [ ] contains all the potentialities which come out in the beings of earth and also much that is unexpressed.
Sri Aurobindo: It is ﬁrst through the individual that it [ ] becomes part of the earth consciousness and afterwards it spreads from the ﬁrst centres and takes up more and more of the global consciousness till it becomes an established force there.
Sri Aurobindo: The consciousness of this Earth alone [ .]. There is a separate global consciousness of the earth (as of other worlds) which evolves with the evolution of life on the planet.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, all that [] is the earth consciousness — mineral = matter, vegetable = the vital-physical creation, animal = the vital creation, man = the mental creation. Into the earth consciousness so limited to mind, vital, matter has to come the supramental creation. Necessarily it cannot be in a great number — but even if it is only in a few at ﬁrst, that does not mean that it will have no effect on the rest or will not change the whole balance of the earth-nature. The supramental change is the ultimate stage of siddhi and it is not likely to come so soon; but there are many levels between the normal mind and the supermind and it is easy to mistake an ascent into one of them or a descent of their consciousness or inﬂuence for a supramental change. It is quite impossible to ascend to the real Ananda (except in a profound trance), until after the supramental consciousness has been entered, realised and possessed; but it is quite possible and normal to feel some form of Ananda on any level.
Sri Aurobindo: This consciousness wherever it is felt is a derivation from the Ananda plane, but it is very much diminished in power and modiﬁed to suit the lesser power of receptivity of the inferior levels. I presume it is the development of the Truth Power and the Ananda Power in the overmind consciousness that is being pursued. The transcendent Ananda in itself could descend only after the complete Supramentalisation of the being and would mean a stupendous change in the earth consciousness. It is the divine Truth in the overmind and the divine Ananda in the overmind that can now prepare their manifestation and it is that which is being indicated in these experiences.
Sri Aurobindo: It is not possible to have the direct supramental working now. The Adhar is not yet ready. First one must accept an indirect working which prepares the lower planes for the supramental change. The gate of the supramental cannot be smashed open like that.
Sri Aurobindo: The Adhar has to be steadily prepared, changed, made ﬁt for the supramental Descent. There are several powers between the ordinary mind and the supramental and these must be opened up and absorbed by the consciousness — only then is the supramental change possible. To speak of “receiving power from the supramental when we are not conscious” is strange.
Sri Aurobindo: When one is not conscious, one can still receive a force; the Divine Shakti works often from behind the veil, otherwise in the ignorant and unconscious condition of the human being she would not be able to work at all. But the nature of the force or action is modiﬁed to suit the condition of the sadhak. One must develop a very full consciousness before one can receive anything from the direct supramental Power and one must be very advanced in consciousness even to receive something of it modiﬁed through the Overmind or other intermediate region. Who told you that it [] was descending on the physical consciousness without touching the mind and vital? Certainly no part of the Nature has been supramentalised — that is not possible, until the whole being has been put under the supramental inﬂuence.
Sri Aurobindo: The supramental inﬂuence must come ﬁrst, the supramental transformation can only come afterwards. A touch or inﬂuence of the supramental is not the same thing as supramentalisation. To suppose that the physical can be supramentalised before the mental and vital is an absolute absurdity.
Sri Aurobindo: What I said was that the mind and vital could not be supramentalised so long as the physical was left as it was, untouched by the supramental descent. It is quite impossible for the supramental to take up the body before there has been the full supramental change in the mind and the vital. and others seem always to expect some kind of unintelligible miracle — they do not understand that it is a concentrated evolution, rapid but following the law of creation, that has to take place. A miracle can be only a moment’s wonder.
Sri Aurobindo: A change according to the Divine Law can alone endure. If the supramental can stand in the mind and vital, then it must stand in the physical also. If it does not stand in the physical, it cannot stand in the mind and vital also; it will be something else, not the supramental.
Sri Aurobindo: It [] cannot be brought down into the mind and vital without being brought down into the physical also. One can feel its inﬂuence or get something from it, but bringing down means much more than that. The supermind is a harmonious whole — it is not a mixture of light and ignorance.
Sri Aurobindo: If the physical mind is not supramentalised, then there will be in mind a mixture of ignorance, but then it will not be supermind there, but something else. So also with the vital. All that can manifest in the mind separately is a partly supramentalised overmind.
Sri Aurobindo: There can be no conquest of the other planes by the supermind, but only an inﬂuence, so long as the physical is not ready. Aspiration is necessary in all spiritual aims from whatever part of the consciousness. The supermind can descend into the physical only if there is brought down into it the power of higher and higher levels till the supramental intensity is possible.
Sri Aurobindo: It is very unwise for anyone to claim prematurely to have possession of the supermind or even a taste of it. The claim is usually accompanied by an outburst of superegoism, some radical blunder of perception or a gross fall into wrong condition and wrong movement. A certain spiritual humility, a serious un-arrogant look at oneself and quiet perception of the imperfections of one’s present nature and, instead of self-esteem and self-assertion, a sense of the necessity of exceeding one’s present self, not from egoistic ambition, but from an urge towards the Divine would be, it seems to me, for this frail terrestrial and human composition far better conditions for proceeding towards its supramental change. He is using the word supermind too easily.
Sri Aurobindo: What he describes as supermind is a higher illumined consciousness; a modiﬁed supramental light may touch it, but not the full power of the supermind; and, in any case, it is not the supermind. He speaks of a supramental part which is unreceptive, — that is impossible, the supramental cannot be unreceptive. The supermind is the Truth-consciousness itself; it already possesses the Truth and does not even need to receive it. The word is sometimes used for the higher illumined Intelligence in communication with the Truth, and this must be the part in himself which he felt — but this is not the supermind. One can enter into supermind only at the very end of the sadhana, when all difﬁculties have disappeared and there is no obstacle any longer in the way of the realisation.
Sri Aurobindo: The question arose and always arises because of an eagerness in the vital to take any stage of strong experience as the ﬁnal stage, even to take it for the overmind, supermind, full siddhi. The supermind or the overmind either is not so easy to reach as that, even on the side of Knowledge or inner experience only. What you are experiencing belongs to the spiritualised and liberated mind. At this stage there may be intimations from the higher mind levels, but these intimations are merely isolated experiences, not a full change of consciousness.
Sri Aurobindo: The supermind is not part of mind or a higher level of mind — it is something entirely different. No sadhak can reach the supermind by his own efforts and the effort to do it by personal tapasya has been the source of many mishaps. One has to go quietly stage by stage until the being is ready and even then it is only the Grace that can bring the real supramental change. The action that took place was not supramental; the fact that you were aware of a centre in the brain shows that it was through the mind that it was done.
Sri Aurobindo: The force that acted was the Divine Power which can work in this way on any plane, supramental, mental, vital or physical or on all the planes together. The supramental action can only be achieved after a long discipline of Yoga directed towards that end; it cannot be an initial experience. That there was no mental expectation was all to the good; if there had been an expectation, the mind might have been active and interfered and either prevented the experience or else stood in the way of its being pure and complete. It is quite true that the surrender and the consequent transformation of the whole being is the aim of the Yoga — the body is not excluded, but at the same time this part of the endeavour is the most difﬁcult and doubtful — the rest, though not facile, is comparatively less difﬁcult to accomplish. One must start with an inner control of the consciousness over the body, a power to make it obey more and more the will or the force transmitted to it.
Sri Aurobindo: In the end as a higher and higher Force descends and the plasticity of the body increases, the transformation becomes possible. It is absolutely idle to think of transforming the body when other things that are so much easier to do — though of course none is easy — are not done. The inner must change before the outermost can follow.
Sri Aurobindo: So what is the use of such a concentration — unless one thinks that everything else is perfect, which would be a rather astonishing claim. What has to be done with the body at ﬁrst is to make it open to the Force, so as to receive strength against illness and fatigue — when they come, there must be the power to react and throw them off and to keep a constant ﬂow of force into the body. If that is done, the rest of the bodily change can wait for its proper time. The supramental perfection means that the body becomes conscious, is ﬁlled with consciousness and that as this is the Truth consciousness all its actions, functionings etc. become by the power of the consciousness within it harmonious, luminous, right and true — without ignorance or disorder. The Hathayogic method is to bring an immense vital force into the body and by this and by certain processes keep it strong and in good health and a capable instrument.
Sri Aurobindo: It [] is the luminous body spoken of in the Veda as possessed by the beings of the higher planes. It is supposed by certain schools of Yoga in the East and West that in the ﬁnal transformation on earth man will develop a body having these qualities. It was called the , “body of glory”, by the Mother’s ﬁrst spiritual instructor. It has been the idea of many who have speculated on the subject that the body of the future race will be a luminous body ( ) and that might mean radio-active.
Sri Aurobindo: But also it has to be considered (1) that a supramental body must necessarily be one in which the consciousness determines even the physical action and reaction to the most material and these therefore are not wholly dependent on material conditions or laws as now known, (2) that the subtle process will be more powerful than the gross, so that a subtle action of Agni will be able to do the action which would now need a physical change such as increased temperature. I did not intend to evade anything, except that in so far as I do not yet know what will be the chemical constitution of the changed body, I could not answer anything to that. That was why I said it needed investigation. I was simply putting my idea on the matter which has always been that it is the supramental which will create its own physical basis.
Sri Aurobindo: If you mean that the supramental cannot in the present body with its present processes that is true. The processes will obviously have to be altered. How far the constitution of the body will be changed and in what direction is another question. As I said it may become as you suggest radio-active: Th´eon (Mother’s teacher in occultism) spoke of it as luminous, But all that does not make it impossible for the supramental to act in the present body for change.
Sri Aurobindo: It is what I am looking forward to at present. Of course a certain preliminary transformation is necessary, just as the psychic and spiritual transformation precedes the supramental. But this is a change of the physical consciousness down to the submerged consciousness of the cells so that they may respond to higher forces and admit them and to a certain extent a change or at least a greater plasticity in the processes. The rules of food etc. are meant to help that by minimising obstacles. How far this involves a change of the chemical constitution of the body I cannot say.
Sri Aurobindo: It seems to me still that whatever preparatory changes there may be, it is only the action of the supramental Force that can conﬁrm and complete them. If the consciousness cannot determine the physical action and reaction in the present body, if it needs a different basis, then that means this different basis must be prepared by different means. By what means?
Sri Aurobindo: Physical? The old Yogis tried to do it by physical tapasya; others by seeking the elixir of life etc. According to this Yoga, the action of the higher Force and consciousness which includes the subtle action of Agni has to open and prepare the body and make it more responsive to Consciousness-Force instead of being rigid in its present habits (called laws). But a different basis can only be created by the supramental action itself. What else but the supermind can determine its own basis?
Sri Aurobindo: I read the Bible, — very assiduously at one time. When I have looked at it, it has always given me a sense of imprecision in the thought-substance, in spite of the vividness of the expression, and that makes it very difﬁcult to be sure about these things. This passage about the body, for instance — although St. Paul had remarkable mystic experiences and, certainly, much profound spiritual knowledge (profound rather than wide, I think) — I would not swear to it that he is referring to the supramentalised body (). Perhaps to the supramental body or to some other luminous body in its own space and substance, which he found sometimes as if enveloping him and abolishing this body of death which he felt the material envelope to be. This verse like many others is capable of several interpretations and might refer to a quite supraphysical experience.
Sri Aurobindo: The idea of a transformation of the body occurs in different traditions, but I have never been quite sure that it meant the change in this very matter. There was a Yogi some time ago in this region who taught it, but he hoped when the change was complete, to disappear in light. The Vaishnavas speak of a divine body which will replace this one when there is the complete siddhi. But, again, is this a divine physical or supraphysical body? At the same time there is no obstacle in the way of supposing that all these ideas, intuitions, experiences point to, if they do not exactly denote, the physical transformation.
Sri Aurobindo: The physical Nature does not mean the body alone but the phrase includes the transformation of the whole physical mind, vital, material nature — not by imposing siddhis on them, but by creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the supramental being in a new evolution. I am not aware that this has been done by any Hathayogic or other process. Mental or vital occult power can only bring siddhis of the higher plane into the individual life — like the Sannyasi who could take any poison without harm, but he died of a poison after all when he forgot to observe the conditions of the siddhi. The working of the supramental power envisaged is not an inﬂuence on the physical giving it abnormal faculties, but an entrance and permeation changing it wholly into a supramentalised physical.
Sri Aurobindo: I did not learn the idea from Veda or Upanishad, and I do not know if there is anything of the kind there. What I received about the supermind was a direct, not a derived knowledge given to me; it was only afterwards that I found certain conﬁrmatory revelations in the Upanishad and Veda. That [ ] is hardly possible. The body consciousness is there and cannot be ignored, so that one can neither transform the higher parts completely leaving the body for later dealing nor make each stage complete in all its parts before going to the next. I tried that method but it never worked.
Sri Aurobindo: A predominant overmentalisation of mind and vital is the ﬁrst step, for instance, when overmentalising, but the body consciousness retains all the lower movements unovermentalised and until these can be pulled up to the overmental standard, there is no overmental perfection, always the body consciousness brings in ﬂaws and limitations. To perfect the overmind one has to call in the supramental force and it is only when the overmind has been partially supramentalised that the body begins to be more and more overmental. I do not see any way of avoiding this process, though it is what makes the thing so long. The fallacy of the argument [ ] lies in the premiss laid down in the beginning that even after supramentalisation difﬁculties and attacks will continue.
Sri Aurobindo: In the supramental consciousness such attacks are not possible — the coexistence of the supramental and the lower darkness in the same being and body is not possible. It is precisely for that reason that the supramentalisation of the body consciousness is laid down as the condition of the successful transformation. If attacks continue and can come in successfully, it means that the body consciousness is not yet supramentalised. The change of the consciousness is the necessary thing and without it there can be no physical siddhi. But the fullness of the supramental change is not possible if the body remains as it is, a slave of death, disease, decay, pain, unconsciousness and all the other results of the ignorance.
Sri Aurobindo: If these are to remain the descent of the supramental is hardly necessary — for a change of consciousness which would bring mental-spiritual union with the Divine, the Overmind is sufﬁcient, even the Higher Mind is sufﬁcient. The supramental descent is necessary for a dynamic action of the Truth in mind, vital and body. This would imply as a ﬁnal result the disappearance of the unconsciousness of the body; it would no longer be subject to decay and disease. That would mean that it would not be subject to the ordinary processes by which death comes. If a change of body had to be made, it would have to be by the will of the inhabitant.
Sri Aurobindo: This (not an obligation to live 3000 years, for that too would be a bondage) would be the essence of physical immortality. Still, if one wanted to live 1000 years or more, then supposing one had the complete siddhi, it should not be impossible. Death is necessary in the evolution, because the body can progress no longer — cannot sufﬁce any longer as an instrument for the progress or evolution of the consciousness — it has to change its physical instrument and get a new one.
Sri Aurobindo: If something can be brought into the body that will make it a plastic instrument for the soul, then only death is no longer necessary. If the supramental transformation is complete that is what should happen. It [] has no separate existence by itself, it is only a result of the principle of decay in the body and that principle is there already — it is part of the physical nature. At the same time it is not inevitable; if one could have the necessary consciousness and force, decay and death is not inevitable.
Sri Aurobindo: But to bring that consciousness and force into the whole of the material nature is the most difﬁcult thing of all — at any rate in such a way as to annul the decay principle. Immunity from death by anything but one’s own will to leave the body, immunity from illness are things that can be achieved only by a complete change of consciousness which each man has to develop in himself, — there can be no automatic immunity without that achievement. That is the argument of the Mayavadin to whom all manifestation is useless and unreal because it is temporary — even the life of the gods is no use because it is in Time, not in the Timeless. But if manifestation is of any use, then it is worthwhile having a perfect manifestation rather than an imperfect one.
Sri Aurobindo: “Have to be left willingly” is a contradiction in terms. One keeps the body as long as one wills, with an illumined will, leaves it or changes it according to the same will. That is a very different thing from a body assailed constantly by desire and suffering and death brought on by decay or illness. Always assuming that the divine manifestation or any manifestation is worthwhile. As for the second argument, change and progress are not excluded from the supramental life.
Sri Aurobindo: I do not see why the change of cells, supposing it continues in the supramentalised body, takes away from the value of the transformation, if it is a change to something equally or more conscious and luminous. Well, don’t you know that old men sometimes get a new or third set of teeth in their old age? And if monkey glands can renew functionings and forces and can make hair grow on a bald head, as Voronoff has proved by living examples, — well? And mark that Science is only at the beginning of these experiments [ ].
Sri Aurobindo: If these possibilities are opening before Science, why should one declare their absolute impossibility by other means? There is no ambiguity that I can see. “” and “” do not convey any sense of inevitability.
Sri Aurobindo: “” means simply that in fact, actually, as things are at present all life (on earth) has death attached to it as its end; but it does not in the least convey the idea that it can never be otherwise or that this is the unalterable law of all existence. It is at present a fact for certain reasons which are stated, — due to certain mental and physical circumstances — if these are changed, death is not inevitable any longer. Obviously the alteration can only come “if” certain conditions are satisﬁed — all progress and change by evolution depends upon an “if” which gets satisﬁed. If the animal mind had not been pushed to develop speech and reason, mental man would never have come into existence, — but the “if”, a stupendous and formidable one, was satisﬁed. So with the ifs that condition a farther progress.
Sri Aurobindo: As for the conquest of death, it is only one of the sequelae of supramentalisation — and I am not aware that I have forsworn my views about the supramental descent. But I never said or thought that the supramental descent would automatically make everybody immortal. The supramental descent can only make the best conditions for anybody who can open to it then or thereafter attaining to the supramental consciousness and its consequences. But it would not dispense with the necessity of sadhana. If it did, the logical consequence would be that the whole earth, men, dogs and worms, would suddenly wake up to ﬁnd themselves supramental.
Sri Aurobindo: There would be no need of an Asram or of Yoga. What is vital is the supramental change of consciousness — conquest of death is something minor and, as I have always said, the last physical result of it, not the ﬁrst result of all or the most important — a thing to be added to complete the whole, not the one thing needed and essential. To put it ﬁrst is to reverse all spiritual values — it would mean that the seeker was actuated not by any high spiritual aim but by a vital clinging to life or a selﬁsh and timid seeking for the security of the body — such a spirit could not bring the supramental change. Certainly, everything depends on my success. The only thing that could prevent it, so far as I can see, would be my own death or the Mother’s.
Sri Aurobindo: But did you imagine that that [] would mean the cessation of death on this planet, and that sadhana would cease to be necessary for anybody? There can be no immortality of the body without supramentalisation; the potentiality is there in the Yogic force and Yogis can live for 200 or 300 years or more, but there can be no real principle of it without the Supramental. Even Science believes that one day death may be conquered by physical means and its reasonings are perfectly sound.
Sri Aurobindo: There is no reason why the Supramental Force should not do it. Forms on earth do not last (they do in other planes) because these forms are too rigid to grow expressing the progress of the spirit. If they become plastic enough to do that, there is no reason why they should not last.
Sri Aurobindo: Death is there because the being in the body is not yet developed enough to go on growing in the same body without the need of change and the body itself is not sufﬁciently conscious. If the mind and vital and the body itself were more conscious and plastic, death would not be necessary. As for immortality, it cannot come if there is attachment to the body, — for it is only by living in the immortal part of oneself which is unidentiﬁed with the body and bringing down its consciousness and force into the cells that it can come.
Sri Aurobindo: I speak of course of Yogic means. The scientists now hold that it is (theoretically at least) possible to discover physical means by which death can be overcome, but that would mean only a prolongation of the present consciousness in the present body. Unless there is a change of consciousness and change of functioning, it would be a very small gain. Immortality is one of the possible results of supramentalisation, but it is not an obligatory result and it does not mean that there will be an eternal or indeﬁnite prolongation of life as it is.
Sri Aurobindo: That is what many think it will be, that they will remain what they are with all their human desires and the only difference will be that they will satisfy them endlessly; but such an immortality would not be worth having and it would not be long before people are tired of it. To live in the Divine and have the divine consciousness is itself immortality and to be able to divinise the body also and make it a ﬁt instrument for divine works and divine life would be its material expression only. It depends on the consciousness [ ]. As it is, at present, most people do not get tired of life; they die because they must, not because they want to —
Sri Aurobindo: at least, that is true of the vital; it is only a minority that tire of life and for many of these it is due to the discomforts of old age, continued ill-health, misfortune. Supposing a consciousness descended in the body that got rid of these discomforts, would people get tired of life in the same way merely because of its length or would they have some source of perpetual interest within as well as without that would keep them on — that is the question. Of course physical immortality would not mean that one is tied down to the body, but that one is not subject to disease and death, but can keep or leave the body at will. I don’t know whether Ashwatthaman lives on because he cannot die or because he won’t die — whether it is for him a doom or a privilege. There are by the way animals that live for many centuries, but as they have not the philosophic mind the question for them does not arise — probably they take it as a matter of course.
Sri Aurobindo: What you say about being tired of life, is true. Edison’s family was very long lived but his grandfather after a century found it too long and died because he wanted to. On the other hand there are men who are strongly vital and do not get tired of life, like the Turk who died recently at 150, I think, but was still eager to live.
Sri Aurobindo: The ideal would be not to be subject to Death, but to change the body whenever it is necessary with full consciousness. The [] method of the supramental is more likely to be psychological than material. But these are things that we leave to the Supermind to arrange when it is there.
Sri Aurobindo: It is not at all certain that the hereditary method will be used for the reproduction of supermen. If it were used, the seed would have to be very different from what it is now — and the question would not arise. Intellectual truths? Do you think that the intellectual truth of the Divine is its real truth?
Sri Aurobindo: In that case there is no need of Yoga. Philosophy is enough. Philosophy knows nothing about peace and silence or the inner and outer vital.
Sri Aurobindo: These things are discovered only by Yoga. Yoga is not a thing of ideas but of inner spiritual experience. Merely to be attracted to any set of religious or spiritual ideas does not bring with it any realisation.
Sri Aurobindo: Yoga means a change of consciousness; a mere mental activity will not bring a change of consciousness, it can only bring a change of mind. And if your mind is sufﬁciently mobile, it will go on changing from one thing to another till the end without arriving at any sure way or any spiritual harbour. The mind can think and doubt and question and accept and withdraw its acceptance, make formations and unmake them, pass decisions and revoke them, judging always on the surface and by surface indications and therefore never coming to any deep and ﬁrm experience of Truth, but by itself it can do no more. There are only three ways by which it can make itself a channel or instrument of Truth. Either it must fall silent in the Self and give room for a wider and greater consciousness; or it must make itself passive to an inner Light and allow that Light to use it as a means of expression; or else it must itself change from the questioning intellectual superﬁcial mind it now is to an intuitive intelligence, a mind of vision ﬁt for the direct perception of the divine Truth.
Sri Aurobindo: If you want to do anything in the path of Yoga, you must ﬁx once for all what way you mean to follow. It is no use setting your face towards the future and then always looking back towards the past; in this way you will arrive nowhere. If you are tied to your past, return to it and follow the way you then choose; but if you choose this way instead, you must give yourself to it single-mindedly and not look back at every moment.
Sri Aurobindo: My reason for wanting you to get rid of the mental concepts is that they are rigid and keep you tied to the idea and feeling of your incapacity and the impossibility of the sadhana. Get rid of that and a great obstacle disappears. You would then see that there is no reason for the constant sense of grief and despair that reacts upon your effort and makes it sterile. I simply want you to put yourself, if it is possible, in that state of quietude and openness which is favourable to the higher consciousness and its action; if it is not possible at present, I have still said that I will do my utmost to help you to the experience. That does not mean that the utmost has been yet done or that it can be done in a few days.
Sri Aurobindo: But (although people are not giving me the freedom of mind and disposal of time which I had asked for), it will be done. The point about the intellect’s misrepresentation of the “formless” (the result of a merely negative expression of something that is inexpressibly intimate and positive) is very well made and hits the truth in the centre. No one who has had the Ananda of the Brahman can do anything but smile at the charge of coldness; there is an absoluteness of immutable ecstasy in it, a concentrated intensity of silent and inalienable rapture that it is quite impossible even to suggest to anyone who has not had the experience. The eternal Reality is neither cold nor dry nor empty — you might just as well talk of the midsummer sunlight as cold or the ocean as dry or perfect fullness as empty. Even when you enter into it by elimination of form and everything else, it seizes as a miraculous fullness that is truly the Purnam — when it is entered afﬁrmatively as well as by negation, there can obviously be no question of emptiness or dryness.
Sri Aurobindo: All is there and more than one could ever dream of as the all. That is why one has to object to the intellect thrusting itself in as the judge — if it kept to its own limits, there would be no objection to it. But it makes constructions of words and ideas which have no application to the Truth, babbles foolish things in its ignorance and makes its constructions a wall which refuses to let in the Truth that surpasses its own capacities or scope. You can tell him Mother does not discuss these mental problems [] even with the disciples.
Sri Aurobindo: It is quite useless trying to reconcile these things with the intellect. For there are two things: the Ignorance from which the struggle and discord come and the secret Light, Unity, Bliss and Harmony. The intellect belongs to the Ignorance. It is only by getting into another consciousness that one can live in the Light and Bliss and Unity and not be touched by the outward discord and struggle. That change of consciousness therefore is the only thing that matters; to reconcile with the intellect could make no difference.
Sri Aurobindo: Yes, you need not listen to the “common sense” of others at least; usually there is much that is common in it but very little that is sense. What your inner being feels is rather to be followed than the superﬁcial reasonings of the outer intelligence.
Sri Aurobindo: How can Reason be the sole arbiter []? Whose reason? The reason in different men comes to different, opposite or incompatible conclusions. We cannot say that Reason is infallible, any more than feeling is infallible or the senses are infallible.
Sri Aurobindo: Russell has the doubts because he has no spiritual experience, Rolland because he takes his emotional intellectuality for spirituality, Tagore — If one is blind, it is quite natural — for the human intelligence which is rather an asinine thing at its best — to deny light; if one’s highest natural vision is that of glimmering mists, it is equally natural to believe that all high vision is only a mist or a glimmer. But Light exists for all that — and for all that, spiritual Truth is more than a mist and a glimmer. I have read Leonard Woolf’s article, but I do not propose to deal with it in my comments on Professor Sorley’s letter — for apart from the ignorant denunciation and cheap satire in which it deals, there is nothing much in its statement of the case against spiritual thought or experience; its reasoning is superﬁcial and springs from an entire misunderstanding of the case for the mystic. There are four main arguments he sets against it and none of them have any value. Argument number one.
Sri Aurobindo: Mysticism and mystics have always risen in times of decadence, of the ebb of life and their loud quacking is a symptom of the decadence. This argument is absolutely untrue. In the East the great spiritual movements have arisen in the full ﬂood of a people’s life and culture or on a rising tide and they have themselves given a powerful impulse of expansion and richness to its thought and art and life; in Greece the mystics and the mysteries were there at the prehistoric beginning and in the middle (Pythagoras was one of the greatest of mystics) and not only in the ebb and decline; the mystic cults ﬂourished in Rome too when its culture was at high tide; many great spiritual personalities of Italy, France, Spain sprang up in a life that was rich, vivid and not in the least touched with decadence. This hasty and inept generalisation has no truth in it and therefore no value. Argument number two.
Sri Aurobindo: A spiritual experience cannot be taken as a truth (it is a chimaera) unless it is proved just as the presence of a chair in the next room can be proved by showing it to the eye. Of course, a spiritual experience cannot be proved in that way, for it does not belong to the order of physical facts and is not physically visible or touchable. The writer’s position would amount to this that only what is or can easily be made evident to everybody without any need of training, development, equipment or personal discovery, is to be taken as true. This is a position which, if accepted, would conﬁne knowledge or truth within very narrow limits and get rid of a great deal of human culture. A spiritual peace, for example, — the peace that passeth all understanding — is a common experience of the mystics all over the world — it is a fact but a spiritual fact, a fact of the invisible; when one enters it or it enters into one, one knows that it is a truth of existence and is there all the time behind life and visible things.
Sri Aurobindo: But how am I to “prove” these invisible facts to Mr. Leonard Woolf? he will turn away saying that this is the usual decadent quack quack and pass contemptuously on — perhaps to write another cleverly shallow article on some subject of which he has no personal knowledge or experience. Argument number three. The generalisations based on spiritual experience are irrational as well as unproven. Irrational in what way?
Sri Aurobindo: Are they merely foolish and inconceivable — infrarational — or do they belong to a suprarational order of experience to which the ordinary intellectual canons do not apply because these are founded on phenomena as they appear to the external mind and sense and not to an inner realisation which surpasses these phenomena? That is the contention of the mystics and it cannot be dismissed by merely saying that as they do not agree with ordinary experience, therefore they are nonsense and false. I would not undertake to defend as unimpeachable all that Joad or Radhakrishnan may have written — such as the formula that “the universe is good”, — but for many or most of the statements marshalled for condemnation by the writer one can surely say that they are not irrational at all. “Integrating the personality” may have no meaning to him, it has a very clear meaning to many, for it is a truth of experience — and, if modern psychology is to be believed, it is not irrational since there is in our being not only a conscious but an unconscious or subconscious or concealed subliminal part and it is not impossible to become aware of both and make some kind of integration. To “transcend both consciousness and unconsciousness” gets at once a rational meaning if we admit that as there is a subconscious so there may be a superconscious part of our being.
Sri Aurobindo: To reconcile disparate parts of our nature or our perception or experience of things is also not such a ridiculous or meaningless phrase. It is not absurd to say that the doctrine of Karma reconciles determinism and free-willism, since this doctrine supposes that our own past action and therefore our past will determined to a great extent the present results but not so as to exclude a present will modifying them and creating a fresh determinism of our existence yet to be. The phrase about the value of the world is quite intelligible once we see that it refers to a progressive value not determined by the good or bad experience of the moment, a value of existence developing through time and taken as a whole. As for the statement about God, it may have little or no meaning if it is taken in connection with the superﬁcial idea of the Divine current in popular religion, but it is a perfectly logical result of the premiss that there is an Inﬁnite and Eternal which is manifesting in itself Time and things that are phenomenally ﬁnite. One may accept or reject this complex idea of the Divine which is founded on a coordination of the data of long spiritual experience passed through by thousands of seekers in all times, but I fail to see why it should be considered unreasonable.
Sri Aurobindo: If it is because that would mean “to have it not only in both ways but in every way”, I do not see why this should be so reprehensible or a complex manifestation of a single Essence, Consciousness or Force should be considered inadmissible. There can be after all a synthetic and global view and consciousness of things which is not bound by the oppositions and divisions of a more analytical and selective or dissecting intelligence. Argument number four. The plea of intuition is only a facile cover for an inability to explain or establish by the use of reason — Joad and Radhakrishnan reason, but take refuge in intuition because their reasoning fails. Can the issue be settled in so easy and trenchant a way?
Sri Aurobindo: The fact is that the mystic stands on an inner knowledge, an inner experience — but if he philosophises, he must try to explain to the reason, though not necessarily always by the abstract reason alone, what he has seen to be the Truth. He cannot but say, “I am explaining a truth which is beyond outer phenomena and the intelligence which depends on phenomena; it is really the outcome of a certain kind of direct experience and the intuitive knowledge which arises from that experience, so it cannot be adequately communicated by symbols appropriate to the world of outer phenomena — yet I am obliged to do as well as I can with these to help me towards some statement which will be intellectually acceptable to you.” There is no wickedness or deceitful cunning therefore in using metaphors and symbols with a cautionary “as it were”, — so objected to by Mr. Woolf in the simile of the focus, which is surely not intended as an argument but as a suggestive image. I may observe that the writer himself takes refuge in metaphor, beginning with the famous “quack quack”, and an adversary might well reply that he does so in order to damn the opposite side while avoiding the necessity of a sound philosophical reply to the ideas he dislikes and repudiates. An intensity of belief is not the measure of truth, but neither is an intensity of unbelief the right measure.
Sri Aurobindo: As to the real nature of intuition and its relation to the intellectual mind, that is quite another and very large and complex question which cannot be dealt with in a short space. I have conﬁned myself to pointing out that this article is a quite inadequate and superﬁcial criticism. A case can be made against spiritual experience and spiritual philosophy and its positions, but to deserve a serious reply it must be put forward by a better advocate and it must touch the real centre of the problem which lies here. As there is a category of facts to which our senses are our best available but very imperfect guide, as there is a category of truths which we seek by the keen but still imperfect light of our reason, so according to the mystic, there is a category of more subtle truths which surpass the reach both of the senses and the reason but can be ascertained by an inner direct knowledge and direct experience. These truths are supersensuous but not the less real for that — they have immense results upon the consciousness changing its substance and movement, bringing especially deep peace and abiding joy, a great light of vision and knowledge, a possibility of the overcoming of the lower animal nature, vistas of a spiritual self-development which without them do not exist.
Sri Aurobindo: A new outlook on things arises which brings with it, if fully pursued into its consequences, a great liberation, inner harmony, uniﬁcation — many other possibilities besides. These things have been experienced, it is true, by a small minority of the human race, but still there has been a host of independent witnesses to them in all times, climes and conditions and numbered among them are some of the greatest intelligences of the past, some of the world’s most remarkable ﬁgures. Must these possibilities be immediately condemned as chimaeras because they are not only beyond the average man in the street but also not easily seizable even by many cultivated intellects or because their method is more difﬁcult than that of the ordinary sense or reason? If there is any truth in them, is not this possibility opened by them worth pursuing as opening a highest range to self-discovery and world-discovery by the human soul? At its best, taken as true, it must be that — at its lowest, taken as only a possibility, as all things attained by man have been only a possibility in their earlier stages, it is a great and may well be a most fruitful adventure.
Sri Aurobindo: I know it is the Russian explanation of the recent trend to spirituality and mysticism that it is a phenomenon of capitalist society in its decadence. But to read an economic cause, conscious or unconscious, into all phenomena of man’s history is part of the Bolshevik gospel born of the fallacy of Karl Marx. Man’s nature is not so simple and one-chorded as all that — it has many lines and each line produces a need of his life.
Sri Aurobindo: The spiritual or mystic line is one of them and man tries to satisfy it in various ways, by superstitions of all kinds, by ignorant religionism, by spiritism, demonism and what not, in his more enlightened parts by spiritual philosophy, the higher occultism and the rest, at his highest by the union with the All, the Eternal or the Divine. The tendency towards the search for spirituality began in Europe with a recoil from the nineteenth century’s scientiﬁc materialism, a dissatisfaction with the pretended all-sufﬁciency of the reason and the intellect and a feeling out for something deeper. That was a pre-war phenomenon, and began when there was no menace of Communism and the capitalistic world was at its height of insolent success and triumph, and it came rather as a revolt against the materialistic bourgeois life and its ideals, not as an attempt to serve or sanctify it. It has been at once served and opposed by the post-war disillusionment — opposed because the post-war world has fallen back either on cynicism and the life of the senses or on movements like Fascism and Communism; served because with the deeper minds the dissatisfaction with the ideals of the past or the present, with all mental or vital or material solutions of the problem of life has increased and only the spiritual path is left.
Sri Aurobindo: It is true that the European mind having little light on these things dallies with vital will-o’-thewisps like spiritism or theosophy or falls back upon the old religionism; but the deeper minds of which I speak either pass by them or pass through them in search of a greater Light. I have had contact with many and the above tendencies are very clear. They come from all countries and it was only a minority who hailed from England or America. Russia is different — unlike the others it had lingered in mediaeval religionism and not passed through any period of revolt — so when the revolt came it was naturally anti-religious and atheistic.
Sri Aurobindo: It is only when this phase is exhausted that Russian mysticism can revive and take not a narrow religious but the spiritual direction. It is true that mysticism, turned upside down, has made Bolshevism and its endeavour a creed rather than a political theme and a search for the paradisal secret millennium on earth rather than the building of a purely social structure. But for the most part Russia is trying to do on the communistic basis all that nineteenth-century idealism hoped to get at — and failed — in the midst of or against an industrial competitive environment. Whether it will really succeed any better is for the future to decide — for at present it only keeps what it has got by a tension and violent control which is not over. One feels here [] a stream from the direct sources of Truth that one does not meet so often as one could desire.

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