The Evolutionary Process of the Manifestation of the Supramental Consciousness

The gradations of consciousness beyond the human level represent levels of awareness and power that far exceed anything that we can appreciate from the purely human mental level. In the Taittiriya Upanishad, there is a “calculus” of gradations of bliss. “Let there be a young man, excellent and lovely in his youth, a great student; let him have fair manners and a most firm heart and great strength of body, and let all this wide earth be full of wealth for his enjoying. That is the measure of bliss of one human being.” If we reflect on this for a moment, we will quickly recognize that even this level goes far beyond the experience of almost every human being. Yet, beyond this there are expounded 10 successive levels of bliss, each one “a hundred and a hundred fold” of the preceding gradation. The gradations of consciousness above the mind are to be similarly understood.

The transition to higher levels of consciousness is not something that occurs in isolation. The development of the mental level of consciousness is not yet fully completed for all human beings, yet we do have a general mental atmosphere, or noosphere, which carries the vibration of the mental level for all those who can experience it. Development of the next levels will necessarily involve a preparation of the texture of consciousness more generally among all of humanity, and an increasing readiness and receptivity to the vibrations of these higher planes or spheres, a process that can take considerable time.

Sri Aurobindo points out that conscious participation by the yogic practitioner can speed up the process of the evolution of consciousness. If we recognize that the development of each stage has taken place over many millennia, it becomes realistic to ask, how quickly even a speeded up evolution to the next term can actually occur. If a process that would ordinarily take 5000 years can be truncated to one that occurs in 400 years, there is clearly a dramatic speeding up of the process.

This does not mean that there is no progress or development or transitional signs along the way. It simply means that the yogic practitioner has to have unending patience, perseverance, and unflagging devotion to an end result that will primarily impact future generations.

A disciple asks: “Here it is written: ‘It is very unwise for anyone to claim prematurely to have possession of the supermind or even to have a taste of it.’ [Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga] What is a foretaste of the supermind?”

The Mother responds: “It is still more unwise to imagine that one has it. That’s it. Yes, because some people, as soon as they find a phrase in a book, in a teaching, immediately imagine that they have realised that. So, when Sri Aurobindo began speaking about the supermind — in what he was writing — everyone wrote to him: ‘I have seen the supramental Light, I had an experience of the supermind!’ Now, it is better to keep the word ‘supermind’ for a later time. For the moment let us not speak about it.”

“Somewhere he has written a very detailed description of all the mental functions accessible to man. Well, when we read this, we say that merely to traverse the mental domain to its highest limit there are so many stages which have not yet been crossed that truly we don’t need to speak about the supermind for the time being.”

“When he speaks of the higher ranges of the mind, one becomes aware that one very rarely lives in these places. It is very rare for one to be in this state of consciousness. On the contrary it is in what he calls the altogether ordinary mind, the mind of the ordinary man, that we live. And to the ordinary consciousness the reason seems to belong to a very high region; and the reason for him is one of the average faculties of the human mind. There are mental regions very much higher than that, which he has described in detail. And it is quite certain that those correspondents, if they had… Suddenly they said that they were having wonderful supramental experiences, because one is rarely in these regions which lie beyond the reason, which are regions of direct perception, intuition and other faculties of intuition of the same kind, which go far beyond the reason; and these are still mental regions, they have nothing of the supramental.”

“… it is in the mind itself, without coming out of the mind, that there are all these regions which are almost inaccessible for most human beings. … Before reaching the extreme limit of the mind, there are so many regions and mental activities which are not at all accessible to most human beings. And even for those who can reach them, they are not regions where they constantly live. They must make an effort of concentration to get there and they don’t always arrive. These are regions which Sri Aurobindo has described which only very rare individuals can reach, and still he speaks of them as mental regions. He does not use for them the word supramental.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 2, Planes and Parts of the Being, pp. 77-79