The Inevitability of the Emergence of the Supramental Consciousness and Its Transformative Action On Body, Life and Mind

One of the limitations of Mind embedded in a physical body is that it tends to fixate on what it can experience ‘here and now’. It has a hard time correlating past, present and future and seeing and understanding trends, directions, trajectories and momentum, other than in specific areas such as physics or mechanics that focus the mind on those things. Things that are unseen are for the most part either ignored or dismissed. Another limitation is the fragmented approach that sees parts, but not the whole, and sees them in isolation from the other parts, as if they are totally separate and distinct entities existing independently from one another. thus, it has a hard time appreciating the “big picture” that makes sense out of the disparate elements. Additionally, it has a difficulty in appreciating that something that manifests in the future may, indeed, represent something entirely new and different from the present known and experienced ways of Nature.

For these reasons, it becomes almost impossible for any mental analysis to recognise and understand the evolution of consciousness through time, the transitional nature of the current stage, and the inevitability of a new phase that ushers in a consciousness that operates from a totally different perspective and power of action, based on what Sri Aurobindo calls a “reversal of consciousness”.

The mental consciousness cannot comprehend the type of radical differences that can occur with the advent of a new power of consciousness, involving changes in the way the physical body operates, the vital force acts and the mind responds.

Sri Aurobindo writes: “The descent of the supermind is a long process, or at least a process with a long preparation, and one can only say that the work is going on sometimes with a strong pressure for completion, sometimes retarded by the things that rise from below and have to be dealt with before farther progress can be made. The process is a spiritual evolutionary process, concentrated into a brief period; it could be done otherwise (by what men would regard as a miraculous intervention) only if the human mind were more flexible and less attached to its ignorance than it is. As we envisage it, it must manifest in a few first and then spread, but it is not likely to overpower the earth in a moment. It is not advisable to discuss to much what it will do and how it will do it, because these are things the supermind itself will fix, acting out of the Divine Truth in it, and the mind must not try to fix for it grooves in which it will run. Naturally, the release from subconscient ignorance and from disease, duration of life at will, and a change in the functionings of the body must be among the ultimate elements of a supramental change; but the details of these things must be left for the supramental Energy to work out according to the Truth of its own nature.”

“The descent of the supramental is an inevitable necessity in the logic of things and is therefore sure. It is because people do not understand what the supermind is or realise the significance of the emergence of consciousness in a world of inconscient Matter that they are unable to realise this inevitability. I suppose a matter-of-fact observer, if there had been one at the time of the unrelieved reign of inanimate Matter in the earth’s beginning, would have criticised any promise of the emergence of life in a world of dead earth and rock and mineral as an asurdity and a chimera; so too, afterwards he would have repeated this mistake and regarded the emergence of thought and reason in an animal world as an absurdity and a chimera. It is the same now with the appearance of supermind in the stumbling mentality of this world of human consciousness and its reasoning ignorance.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Hidden Forces of Life, Ch.6 Hidden Worlds and Evolutionary Forces, pp.151-152