Question of the month

“Men run after pleasure and clasp feverishly that burning bride to their tormented bosoms; meanwhile a divine and faultless bliss stands behind them waiting to be seen and claimed and captured.

Men hunt after petty successes and trivial masteries from which they fall back into exhaustion and weakness; meanwhile all the infinite force of God in the universe waits vainly to place itself at their disposal.

Men burrow after little details of knowledge and group them into bounded and ephemeral thought­systems; meanwhile all infinite wisdom laughs above their heads and shakes wide the glory of her iridescent pinions.

Men seek laboriously to satisfy and complement the little bounded being made of the mental impressions they have grouped about a mean and grovelling ego; meanwhile the spaceless and timeless Soul is denied its joyous and splendid manifestation.”

Q: This state of things must change for the supramental consciousness to reign on earth. But although the supramental consciousness has been at work on earth for more than a year, has anything changed in this miserable condition ?

-          28 February 1970

Q: Since the supramental consciousness is at work on earth, won't these miserable conditions change in spite of everything?

A:  The Mother: Naturally, the first effect will be a change of consciousness, first among the most receptive, and then in a greater number of people.

A change in the general conditions of collective life can only come later, perhaps long after individual reactions have been transformed. The first noticeable result is a heightening of the general confusion, because the old principles have lost their authority, and men (except for a very few) are not ready to obey the Divine Command, because they are incapable of perceiving it.

-          1 March 1970

(The Mother, ‘CWM’, Vol. 10, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry)

“God is infinite Possibility. Therefore Truth is never at rest; therefore, also, Error is justified of her children. To listen to some devout people, one would imagine that God never laughs; Heine was nearer the mark when he found in Him the divine Aristophanes.”

A:  The Mother: Yes, he means that what is true at one time is no longer true at another. And this is why “Error is justified of her children.”

Q: Perhaps he means that there is no error?

A:  The Mother: Yes, it is the same thing, another way of saying the same thing. That is to say, what we call Error was Truth at a certain time.

Error is a concept in time.

Q: Some things may really appear to be errors ?

A:  The Mother: For a moment.

The impression is this: all our judgments are momentary. They are... one moment, it is like this; the next moment, it is no longer like this. And for us they are errors, because we see things one after another. But to the Divine they cannot appear like this, because everything is within Him.

Now just try to imagine that you are the Divine, for a moment! Everything is within you; you simply amuse yourself by bringing it out in a certain order. But for you, in your consciousness, everything is there at the same time; there is no time -- neither past nor future nor present -- everything is together. And every possible combination. He amuses Himself by bringing out first one thing and then another, like that. So the poor fellows down below who can see only a tiny part -- they can see only so much of it -- say, “Oh, that is an error!” In what way is it an error? Simply because they can only see a tiny part.

This is clear, isn't it? It is easy to understand. This concept of error is a concept that belongs to time and space.

It is like the feeling that something cannot be and not be at the same time. And yet this is true, it is and it is not. It is the concept of time which introduces the concept of error --- of time and space.

Q: What do you mean, that a thing is and is not at the same time? How is that ?

A:  The Mother: It is, and at the same time there is its opposite. So, for us, it cannot be yes and no at the same time. But for the Lord it is all the time yes and no at the same time.

It is like our concept of space; we say, “I am here, therefore you are not here.” But I am here, you are here and everything is here! (Mother laughs.) Only you must be able to leave the concept of space and time behind in order to understand.

This is something that can be felt very concretely, but not with our way of seeing.

Certainly, many of these aphorisms were written at the point where the higher mind suddenly emerges into the Supermind. It has not yet forgotten how it is in the ordinary way, but it also sees how it is in the supramental way. And so the result is this kind of thing, this paradoxical form. Because the one is not forgotten and the other is already perceived.

(The Mother, ‘CWM’, Vol. 10, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry)

Q: Here it is written: “It is very unwise for anyone to claim prematurely to have possession of the supermind or even to have a taste of it.” What is a foretaste of the supermind ?

A:  The Mother: It is still more unwise to imagine that one has it. That’s it. Yes, because some people, as soon as they find a phrase in a book, in a teaching, immediately imagine that they have realised that. So, when Sri Aurobindo began speaking about the supermind in what he was writing—everyone wrote to him: “I have seen the supramental Light, I had an experience of the supermind!” Now, it is better to keep the word “supermind” for a later time. For the moment let us not speak about it.

Somewhere he has written a very detailed description of all the mental functions accessible to man. Well, when we read this, we say that merely to traverse the mental domain to its highest limit there are so many stages which have not yet been crossed that truly we don’t need to speak about the supermind for the time being.

When he speaks of the higher ranges of the mind, one becomes aware that one very rarely lives in these places. It is very rare for one to be in this state of consciousness. On the contrary it is in what he calls the altogether ordinary mind, the mind of the ordinary man, that we live. And to the ordinary consciousness the reason seems to belong to a very high region; and the reason for him is one of the average faculties of the human mind. There are mental regions very much higher than that, which he has described in detail. And it is quite certain that those correspondents, if they had... Suddenly they said that they were having wonderful supramental experiences, because one is rarely in these regions which lie beyond the reason, which are regions of direct perception intuition and other faculties of intuition of the same kind, which go far beyond the reason; and these are still mental regions, they have nothing of the supramental.

Q: Mother, you said that between the supermind and the mind there are many stages, didn’t you? And it is written that the next logical stage in the evolution of Nature is the superman. Why not a race which is...

A:  The Mother: Intermediary? We shall see that later.

Q: Does this mean that from the mind we can go to the supermind without passing through the intermediary stages?

A:  The Mother: I did not say that they were between the mind and the supermind. I said it is in the mind itself, without coming out of the mind, that there are all these regions which are almost inaccessible for most human beings. I did not say between the mind and supermind. You mean this evening or at some other time? What are you speaking of, of something I said this evening or something I said on another day?

Q: This very evening, you were saying...

A:  The Mother: No, you did not hear. I said in the mind itself. Before reaching the extreme limit of the mind, there are so many regions and mental activities which are not at all accessible to most human beings. And even for those who can reach them, they are not regions where they constantly live. They must make an effort of concentration to get there and they don’t always arrive. There are regions which Sri Aurobindo has described which only very rare individuals can reach, and still he speaks of them as mental regions. He does not use for them the word supramental.

(The Mother, ‘CWM’, Vol. 6, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry)