Sri Aurobindo
The Hour of God
and other writings
II. Evolution — Psychology — The Supermind
Man a Transitional Being [1]
Man is a transitional being; he is not final. For in
man and high beyond him ascend the radiant degrees that to a divine
supermanhood. There lies our destiny and the liberating key to our aspiring but
troubled and limited mundane existence.
We mean by man mind imprisoned in a living body. But
mind is not the highest possible power of consciousness, for mind is not in
possession of Truth, but only its ignorant seeker. Beyond mind is a supramental
or gnostic power of consciousness that is in eternal possession of Truth. This
supermind is at its source the dynamic consciousness, in its nature at once and
inseparably infinite wisdom and infinite will of the divine Knower and Creator.
Supermind is superman; a gnostic supermanhood is the next distinct and
triumphant evolutionary step to be reached by earthly nature.
The step from man to superman is the next approaching
achievement in the earth's evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the
intention of the inner Spirit and the logic of Nature's process.
The appearance of a human possibility in a material and
animal world was the first glint of some coming divine Light, the first far-off
promise of a godhead to be born out of Matter. The appearance of the superman in
the human world will be the fulfilment of this divine promise. Out of the
material consciousness in which our mind works as a chained slave is emerging
the disk of a secret sun of Power and Joy and Knowledge. The supermind will be
the formed body of that radiant effulgence.
Supermanhood is not man climbed to his own natural
zenith, not a superior degree of human greatness, knowledge, power,
intelligence, will, character, genius, dynamic force, saintliness, love, purity
or perfection. Supermind is something beyond mental man and his limits; it is a
greater consciousness than the highest consciousness proper to human nature.
Man is a mental being
whose mentality works here involved, obscure and degraded in a physical brain.
Even in the highest of his kind it is baulked of its luminous possibilities of
supreme force and freedom by this dependence, shut off even from its own divine
Powers, impotent to change our life beyond certain narrow and precarious limits;
it is an imprisoned and checked force, most often nothing but a servitor or
caterer of interests or a purveyor of amusement to the life and the body. But
divine superman will be a gnostic spirit. Supermind in him will lay hands on the
mental and physical instruments and, standing above and yet Penetrating our
lower already manifested parts, it will transform mind, life and body.
Mind is the highest force in man. But mind in man is an
ignorant, clouded and struggling power. And even when most luminous it is
possessed only of a thin, reflected and pallid light. A supermind free, master,
expressive of divine glories will be the superman’s central instrument. Its
untrammelled movement of self-existent knowledge, spontaneous power and
untainted delight will impress the harmony of the life of the gods on the
earthly existence.
Man in himself is little more than an ambitious
nothing. He is a littleness that reaches to a wideness and a grandeur that are
beyond him, a dwarf enamoured of the heights. His mind is a dark ray in the
splendours of the universal Mind. His life is a striving, exulting, suffering,
an eager passion-tossed and sorrow-stricken or a blindly and dumbly longing
petty moment of the universal Life. His body is a labouring perishable speck in
the material universe. This cannot be the end of the mysterious up¬ward surge of
Nature. There is something beyond, something that mankind shall be; it is seen
now only in broken glimpses through rifts in the great wall of limitations that
deny its possibility and existence. An immortal soul is somewhere within him and
gives out some sparks of its presence; above an eternal spirit overshadows him
and upholds the soul-continuity of his nature. But this greater spirit is
obstructed from descent by the hard lid of his constructed personality; and that
inner luminous soul is wrapped, stifled, oppressed in dense outer coatings. In
all but a few the soul is seldom active, in most hardly perceptible. The 
soul and spirit in man seem rather to exist above and behind his nature
than to be a part of his external and visible reality. They are in course of
birth rather than born in Matter; they are for human consciousness possibilities
rather than things realised and present.
Man’s greatness is not in what he is, but in what he
makes possible. His glory is that he is the closed place and secret workshop of
a living labour in which supermanhood is being made ready by a divine Craftsman.
But he is admitted too to a yet greater greatness and it is this that, allowed
to be unlike the lower creation, he is partly an artisan of this divine change;
his conscious assent, his consecrated will and participation are needed that
into his body may descend the glory that will replace him. His aspiration is
earth’s call to the supramental creator.
If earth calls and the Supreme answers, the hour can be
even now for that immense and glorious transformation.