Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume 2. 1934 — 1935

Letter ID: 610

Sri Aurobindo — Roy, Dilip Kumar

August 22, 1935

But do tell me please do you really get anything solid from this nebulous Supramental? He looks too suspiciously like leaving-in-the-lurch kind of customer. Nirod tells me you scaled and winged like lightning on Its pinions. Have you really? I mean did it mean something like motion or a sort of Marvellous Calm which seems like motion through some Supramental jugglery of consciousness. Some enlightenment on this bewildering problem would be highly edifying even to the mortals and humans you may be sure. Also Rajani¹ has to be gagged somehow: he talks of nothing but the Supramental. And what am I to answer? Shall I try some imaginative blood-curdling stunt? Please let me know if I may.

You have created your own “bewildering problem” by supplying your own data! There is nothing nebulous about the supramental, its action depends on the utmost precision possible. As for solidity, since I have got many solid things from much lower forces, I do not see why the highest ones should only give nebulosities. But that seems the human mind’s position, only what is earthy is solid, what is high is misty and unreal – the worm is a reality, but the eagle’s a vapour!

However; I have not told Nirod that I am scaling and winging – on the contrary I am dealing with very hard practical facts. I only told him I had got the formula of solution for the difficulty that had been holding me up since last November and I am working it out.

To return to the supramental – the supramental is simply the direct self-existent Truth consciousness and the direct self-effective Truth Power. There can therefore be no question of jugglery about it. What is not true is not supramental. As for calm and silence, there is no need of the supramental to get that. One can get it even on the level of Higher Mind which is the next above the human intelligence. I got these things in 1908, twenty seven years ago and I can assure you they were solid enough and marvellous enough without any need of supramentality to make it more so! Again, a calm that “seems like motion” is a phenomenon of which I know nothing. A calm or silence which can support or produce action – that I know and that is what I have had – the proof is that out of an absolute silence of the mind I edited the Bande Mataram for four months and wrote six and a half volumes of the Arya, not to speak of all the letters and messages, etc., etc. I have written since. If you say that writing is not an action or motion but only something that seems like it, a jugglery of the consciousness – well, still out of that calm and silence I conducted a pretty strenuous political activity and have also taken my share in keeping up an Ashram which has at least an appearance to the physical senses of being solid and material! If you deny that these things are material or solid (which of course metaphysically you can), then you land yourself plump into Shankara’s illusionism, and there I will leave you.

You will say however that it is not the Supramental but at most the Overmind that helped me to these non-nebulous notions. But the Supermind is by definition a greater dynamic activity than mind or Overmind. I have said that what is not true, is not supramental; I will add that what is ineffective is not supramental. And finally I will conclude by saying that I have [not] told Nirod that I have taken possession of the Supramental – I only admit to be very near to it or at least to its tail. But very near is – well, after all a relative phrase like all human phrases².

I don’t know how you are to “gag” Rajani. You might perhaps by my two formulas, but it is doubtful. Or perhaps you might tell him that the supramental is silence – only it would be untrue! So I leave you in your fix – there is no other go. At least until I have firm physical hold of the tail of the supramental and can come and tell the mortals and humans – no doubt in language which will be unintelligible to them, for they have totally misunderstood even the little I have already written about it.

¹ Rajani Palit.

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² Here is an extract from Correspondence with Sri Aurobindo by Nirodbaran:

“... What about the uprush of mud? Has it settled down, and are people now floating in the flood of the Supramental?” “It is still there, but personally I have become superior to it and am travelling forward like a flash of lightning, that is to say zigzag but fairly fast. Now I have got the hang of the whole hanged thing – like a very Einstein I have got the mathematical formula of the whole affair (unintelligible as in his case to anybody but myself) and am working it out figure by figure.”

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