The Nature and Action of the Overmind Gradation of Consciousness

In the Kena Upanishad, the various gods Agni, Vayu and Indra each are confronted by the Supreme and asked to use their utmost power to destroy what was presented before them. They each failed as their power was insufficient to meet the force of the Supreme. Indra eventually discovered that there was a higher truth than what he and the other gods were able to manifest. We see in our world today, a multitude of gods, whether they are anthropomorphized nature gods, or gods related to a particular people or belief system. They frequently war with one another, and they compete, through their human adherents, in a determination of which one is the greatest God. frequently this has been sorted out by the human devotees of one god or another by ‘trial by combat’. The Old Testament of the Bible is replete with stories of how the god of the Jewish people helped them prevail over other people who followed other gods. The god of the Christians was held as all powerful as the Christians attempted to control and convert aboriginal and tribal people around the world to their “true faith”. These are examples, but such an approach has occurred with many religions, many gods, and many civilizations over time.

The gods referenced within each religion are r real, albeit limited in their scope and power. They may be aware of a larger force of Oneness that overarches their activities, but they act as if they were the ultimate powers within the scope of their action. The Hindu tradition identifies many such gods, and shows that they are all aspects, representing a particular focus or power of the higher Divine Truth. The gods develop the tremendous diversity and the numerous aspects of the possibilities of existence, and thus, their role has been important, even essential, in developing the plenitude of the manifestation we experience today.

The Mother writes: “Above the mind there are several levels of conscious being, among which the really divine world is what Sri Aurobindo has called the Supermind, the world of the Truth. But in between is what he has distinguished as the Overmind, the world of the cosmic Gods. Now it is this Overmind that has up to the present governed our world: it is the highest that man has been able to attain in illumined consciousness. It has been taken for the Supreme Divine and all those who have reached it have never for a moment doubted that they have touched the true Spirit. For, its splendours are so great to the ordinary human consciousness that it is absolutely dazzled into believe that here at last is the crowning reality. And yet the fact is that the Overmind is far below the true Divine. it is not the authentic home of the Truth. It is only the domain of the formateurs, all those creative powers and deities to whom men have bowed down since the beginning of history. And the reason why the true Divine has not manifested and transformed the earth-nature is precisely that the Overmind has been mistaken for the Supermind. The cosmic Gods do not wholly live in the Truth-Consciousness: they are only in touch with it and represent, each of them, an aspect of its glories.”

“No doubt, the Supermind has also acted in the history of the world but always through the Overmind. It is the direct descent of the Supramental Consciousness and Power that alone can utterly re-create life in terms of the Spirit. For, in the Overmind there is already the play of possibilities which marks the beginning of this lower triple world of Mind, Life and Matter in which we have our existence. And whenever there is this play and not the spontaneous and infallible working of the innate Truth of the Spirit, there is the sed of distortion and ignorance. Not that the Overmind is a field of ignorance; but it is the borderline between the Higher and the Lower, for, the play of possibilities, of separate even if not yet divided choice, is likely to lead to deviation from the Truth of things.”

“The Overmind, therefore, does not and cannot possess the power to transform humanity into divine nature. For that, the Supramental is the sole effective agent.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 2, Planes and Parts of the Being, pp. 76-77