Sri Aurobindo

The Hour of God

and other writings

III. On Yoga

The Supramental Yoga [3]

This divinisation of the nature of which we speak is a metamorphosis, not a mere growth into some kind of super-humanity, but a change from the falsehood of our ignorant nature into the truth of God-nature. The mental or vital demi-God, the Asura, Rakshasa and Pisacha, — Titan, vital giant and demon, — are superhuman in the pitch and force and movement and in the make of their characteristic nature, but these are not divine and these are not supremely divine, for they live in a greater mind-power or life-power only, but they do not live in the supreme Truth, and only the supreme Truth is divine. Only those who live in a supreme Truth-Consciousness and embody it are inwardly made or else remade in the Divine image.

The aim of the supramental Yoga is to change into this supreme Truth-Consciousness, but this truth is something beyond mind and this consciousness is far above the highest mind- consciousness. For truth of mind is always relative, uncertain and partial, but this greater Truth is peremptory and whole. Truth of mind is a representation, always an inadequate, most often a misleading representation, and even when most accurate, only a reflection, Truth's shadow and not its body. Mind does not live in Truth or only seeks after it and grasps at best some threads from its robe; the Supermind lives in Truth and its native substance, form and expression; it has not to seek after it, but possesses it always automatically and is what it possesses. This is the very heart of the difference.

The change that is effected by the transition from mind to Supermind is not only a revolution in knowledge or in our power for knowledge. If it is to be complete and stable, it must be a divine transmutation of our will too, our emotions, our sensations, all our power of life and its forces, in the end even of the very substance and functioning of our body. Then only can it be said that the Supermind is there upon earth, rooted in its very earth-substance and embodied in. a new race of divinised creatures.

Supermind at its highest reach is the divine Gnosis, the Wisdom-Power-Light-Bliss of God by which the Divine knows and upholds and governs and enjoys the universe.