“Are We There Yet?”

Just about anyone who has experienced a long trip with young children will relate to the question ‘Are We There Yet?’. Ten minutes into the journey, and every 5 or 10 minutes thereafter, the children ask if we are at the destination yet. They have no realistic sense of time, distance or process. They become bored and want to move on to whatever is next.

In a certain sense, we all are like the children in the journey when we reflect on the process of the manifestation of a next stage of consciousness in evolutionary time. Our short human lifetime simply cannot comprehend or encompass the vast time needed for each stage of consciousness to evolve, integrate itself into the manifestation and prepare for the next stage that must inevitably follow after. The evolution of the vital nature took billions of years. The evolution of the mental nature took at least hundreds of millions of years to reach the current stage. So when we reflect on the changes needed to bring forth the supramental nature, we need a certain amount of perspective and ability to separate our individual lifetime and ego-individuality from that larger process.

Rather than an overnight, short-term transformation, the evolutionary process is more like a very long ‘relay race’ where the runners are tasked with carrying the baton to the next runner, who then runs and hands off to the subsequent runner, until eventually a final runner reaches the ‘finish line’. This does not rule out some type of ‘evolutionary saltus’ as Sri Aurobindo has termed it, the sudden manifestation of something that has been preparing unseen until it is ready to burst forth. Yet this also does not obviate the need for the detailed working out of that force of consciousness through the entirety of the earth-nature.

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have pointed out that the conscious participation of spiritual aspirants, with a basis of the evolved mentality, and a developed psychic being or soul presence, should be able to dramatically speed up the process, so that it should not take hundreds of millions or even hundreds or tens of thousands of years! Each phase of the yoga of Nature occurs dramatically faster than the earlier stages. Each stage needs to both manifest and then integrate itself into the earth-nature. Thus, for the supramental force to fully evolve, the entire earth-consciousness needs to be prepared, ‘textured’ for an ability to receive, hold and utilize that force effectively within the framework of earthly existence. Until that is done, any individual remains subject to the complex and difficult process along the way. That is why, in various places, the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have implied a time frame of hundreds of years at a minimum. Putting that into context, those who take up this yoga today, in the early days of the process, are like the early relay runners who have to carry out the work, without impatience, with perseverance, and be satisfied that they are helping the larger process along through their own inner growth and development. In other words, we are not ‘there yet” and to claim otherwise is essentially shutting down the internal process in favor of egoistic self-aggrandisement which is more or less a dead end in this journey.

The Mother, who declared the initial advent of the supramental force into the earth atmosphere, spent many years after that working on making the body’s cells receptive and preparing them for the supramental force to work at that level. She did not claim the complete transformation of human nature; rather she demonstrated the selfless efforts that aid the process for the long term. She described the type of changes that would be needed in the physical body to carry out the complete transition to a supramental being, a new race with dramatically different bodily functionality.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “It is very unwise for anyone to claim prematurely to have possession of the supermind or even to have a taste of it. The claim is usually accompanied by an outburst of super-egoism, some radical blunder of perception or a gross fall, wrong condition and wrong movement. A certain spiritual humility, a serious unarrogant 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 the supramental change.”

Sri Aurobindo, Bases of Yoga, Chapter 2, Faith — Aspiration — Surrender, pp. 35-36