Versatile Genius

Jivanmukta and the Superman

(By Keshavmurti)

(Sri Keshavmurti, author of Space and Time, Sri Aurobindo: Hope of Man, is a sadhaka in Sri Aurobindo Ashram. He has been a keen student of Sastriar's writings).

In studying Sri Aurobindo's Teaching and Philosophy, it is of utmost importance to bear in mind the connotations of many of the key-terms that the Master uses in his expositions. If we fail to take into account the precise meanings of these terms, we are likely to miss the import of his teachings altogether. Sri Kapali Sastriar cautions us to be particularly careful in this matter and advises us not to use Sri Aurobindo's statements and definitions lightly. Understandably, in the earlier days, there was confusion in the minds of many disciples and seekers, concerning the meaning and significance of words like Evolution, Superman, Supermind, Transformation etc., and it was probably in order to remove misunderstanding and likely misuse that Sastriar chose two concepts—Jivanmukta and Superman—and wrote an illuminating article which was later included in his seminal book, Sri Aurobindo: Lights on the Teachings. Fortunately, in recent times, more elucidations and explanations have been forthcoming from the utterances and writings of the Mother, and also from those who are practising Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga over years, so much so that things have led to a better understanding of Sri Aurobindo's thoughts and concepts.

In the present paper, we propose to take up Sastriar's aforesaid article for a study in some detail, to see what light it throws on the two high spiritual ideals of Jivanmukti and Supermanhood, and to assess in what way and to what extent the ancient ideal of Jivanmukti stands related to Sri Aurobindo's and Mother's ideal of the Superman. In any case, as Jivanmukti is in many ways akin to mukti, we will take up the latter one first.

The word mukti or moksha is derived from the root muc, verb muncati. In the Vedic sense, it means 'untying', 'releasing' (a horse); in its extended sense it has come to mean liberation or deliverance from many kinds of fetters such as evil, disease, want, fear, death. In the Upanishadic sense, mukti means a release from all desires and freedom from bondage or works arising from desire. 'He who is established in brahman attains freedom from death (amaratva)'—says the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Those who become jnanis by performing tapasya or askesis follow the way of the gods (devayana) and finally attain brahman. They do not return to the world of samsara; they are freed from the cycles of rebirth. Thus the widespread meaning of mukti or moksha is deliverance from the cycle of existence, liberation from the world of matter. A mukta is he who has entered upon a state of freedom and felicity.

Rebirth in the world is looked upon as a source of bondage, bringing experience of pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, disease and death. It binds the soul to the play of the three gunas—sattva, rajas, tamas. It forges Karma which acts inexorably as a cause-effect sequence binding souls to cycles of existence. As the Upanishad says, 'As a person intends, so he acts; as he acts, so he becomes.' Thus the soul creates its own destiny. It is the energy of Karma that drags the soul to repeated births and deaths.

According to the Gita, it is not action as such which binds; it is Kama, desire. The real karmasanyasa is kamasanyasa, desirelessness. Desire produces attached activities. Desire is the motive-force. The Gita extols a life of activity but without desire and attachment. We should perform action with detachment, with devotion and to the best of our ability. By so doing, we cease to become links in the endless chain of Karma; ultimately we will reach le state of liberation, the compulsive need to be reborn arises no more.

But mukti is not easy to come by. Its demand is radical, its practice immensely difficult. It calls for a sustained and prolonged period of purification of mind, heart, emotions, sense, impulse, and other life-activities, and this kind of far-reaching purification requires an almost interminable time and toil probably extending over many lives. For example, it is not easy to surrender oneself to the Divine even with the best intentions to do so, and arrive at a state of Grace. It is the Divine Grace that dispels ignorance and brings about liberation. We have to learn to perform selfless action; we should be motivated by no selfish desire. We must shed our ego and surrender our will to the Divine Will.

At first glance, the flow of Divine Grace seems incompatible with the law of Karma. Karma binds souls and keep them in chains. How can Grace enter into the situation and nullify the law of Karma? The Truth is, behind Karma is the Lord, the all-knowing Divine. Karma is a power working out the Divine Intention. The Divine, we must suppose, is as concerned with the impartial working of Karma as he is with the welfare and progress of his creatures, with their upliftment, with their journey towards their destination. It is the Divine's all-knowing Will that determines the nature of man's destiny, no matter what the role of Karma within the working of the Supreme Will, may be. Karma is a maturing process; it can be, and indeed is, a way and means to liberation. Karma is subordinate to God. It is only a secondary cause. Grace can put Karma to flight, so to speak. Karma is never more powerful than Divine Grace. The soul is free at its own level, ever and always; it is less free on the mental level more bound on the lower levels of life-force and physical. As the absolutely imperishable Divine is the self-determining ruler of the universe, mukti is Divine's gift to the aspiring and striving soul. "The Self is not to be won by eloquent teaching, nor by brain power, nor by much learning: but only he whom this Being chooses can win Him; for to him this Self bares His body." Thus declares the Katha Upanishad. In surrendering himself to God in all ways, man knows that his self-offering is not his own but the Lord's. One may say that prapatti and Grace go together. It looks as if in the scheme of manifestation, both man and God wait for some excuse—one to receive the Grace and the other to bestow it, and at the end of the long evolutionary journey both man and God fuse in a grand play—Lila.

When his ignorance is dispelled, the mukta realises the freedom of his soul or spirit housed in his body. He sees Self in all beings and all beings in the Self. The separative consciousness which is at the root of Ignorance is replaced by the consciousness of the One, the Self. His spirit which is set free reaches the Divine. He will know brahman, in brahman he is established. He is a liberated man. He witnesses no distinction between within and without, between the knower and the known. For brahman is ever the same, residing in all things. In the words of Sri Aurobindo:

...the highest emergence is the liberated man who has realised the Self and Spirit within him, entered into the cosmic consciousness, passed into union with the Eternal and, so far as he still accepts life and action, acts by the light and energy of the Power within him working through his human instruments of Nature. The largest formulation of this spiritual achievement is a total liberation of soul, mind and heart and action, a casting of them all into the sense of the cosmic Self and the Divine Reality. This is the essence of the spiritual ideal and realisation held before us by the Gita...Beyond this height and large-less there opens only the supramental ascent or the incommunicable Transcendence".

Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine - II: The Evolution of the Spiritual Man

The Indian religious and spiritual tradition draws its deepest inspiration from the perennial founts of the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Gita. Yet these ancient scriptures branch out into several paths, leading to different kinds of disciplines and cluminating in as many ways of God-realisation. There is not one but many kinds of relations that can be established between the seeker and the Divine, various lines of mukti. Sri Aurobindo points out:

There is a union in spiritual essence by identity; there is a union by the indwelling of our soul in this highest Being and Consciousness; there is a dynamic union of likeness or oneness of nature between That and our instrumental being here. The first one is liberation from the Ignorance and identification with the Real and Eternal, moksha, sayujya, which is the characteristic aim of the Yoga of Knowledge. The second, the dwelling of the soul with or in the Divine, samipya, salokya, is the intense hope of all Yoga of Love and Beatitude. The third, identity in nature, likeness to the Divine, to be perfect as That is Perfect, sadharmya, is the high intention of all Yoga of Power and Perfection of Divine Works and Service. (The Synthesis of Yoga)

Against this background, let us consider the position of a Jivanmukta.

Jivanmukta is a mukta in a special sense. As the word denotes, it is the attainment of liberation while one still lives in one's physical body. There is a line of Vedantic thought to which Sastriar draws attention and that is that liberation is not possible while one lives in the body. Only videha mukti is recognised as the real and valid mukti, i.e., liberation is possible only after death and not while one lives in the body. According to this view, some kind of spiritualhood may be possible of attainment while living but true liberation follows only after the body is shed.

There are, of course, other points of view, other lines of truth of Jivanmukti. Jivanmukti is not only highly desirable but forms an indispensable state in a yoga like Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga. According to integral sadhana, mukti marks a stage, an important stage, in man's spiritual journey. Mukti in this sense is much more than freedom from rebirth and Karma. Admittedly, Jivanmukta attains spiritual consciousness, his soul or spirit is identified with the Highest Consciousness; he is assured of his freedom from rebirth. But it is not for the attainment of his freedom from rebirth that an integral seeker follows the spiritual quest. He has other goals, higher ends to reach, and Jivanmukti is just such a stage from where he embarks on a greater and higher spiritual journey.

Jivanmukti is an exalted condition of an embodied being in which as Sastriar puts it, 'wisdom reigns and dispels doubt, and action is no bondage.' He is a sada mukta, living in brahmic consciousness always even while engaged in external activities. He is in samadhi at all times even while engaged in outer life movements. This waking samadhi is his 'effortless normal stage of consciousness.'

Not all Jivanmuktas are stamped in the same mould. For instance, as Sastriar observes, one Jivanmukta, after realising his identity with the brahman, can stop all his mundane activities or keep them to the minimum possible. Another one, even while maintaining his identity with the Divine, can plunge himself into any kind of work, because he realises that all powers proceed from the Lord and executed by the Lord, the man being no more than a surrendered instrument of the Divine. If he has realised God through the Path of Knowledge, he could afford to say, in the words of Sastriar: "Why do you people flit from pillar to post, what is there to worry? It is maya. There is no bondage, no birth. We are all undying Self. Atman is alone true, the rest is unreal." That indeed is the state of his consciousness which is identified with the Self. On the other hand, if a Jivanmukta is temperamentally a devotee, he loves the whole manifestation—men, women, children, animals, plants. Or, he may be a soul, a Jivanmukta, chosen by the Divine for a specific work and he is under constant guidance of the all controlling eternal Divine Consciousness. Sastriar sums up these different types or moulds of Jivanmuktas in these words. "While the experience of unity and the realisation of brahman or God, the omnipresent One, may be common to all Jivanmuktas, their behaviour of life, their thoughts and language and the formulations of method, and, if they happen to be thinkers their construction of philosophical systems vary very largely and quite often."

Speaking of chosen souls, Mother observes:

Those who have gone beyond the stage of successive reincarnations and are destined to participate in a certain terrestrial action...for those who have come back on earth only for a particular work, personal external realisations are sacrificed to that.

We may note here the distinction which Sri Aurobindo makes between the Brahman and the Parabrahman in the context of Jivanmukti. In his commentary on Isha Upanishad, he equates Brahman with Sachchidananda. He who has attained the Brahman has become Sachchidananda and he is a Jivanmukta. If he chooses, he can, after the death of his body, merge with the Parabrahman, the Absolute, the Unknowable, and go out of manifestation. He may; however, choose to remain in the world. Sri Aurobindo points out that Brahman and Parabrahman are not contradictory terms; they are not two but in fact one. "Parabrahman can always and at will draw Sachchidananda into Itself and Sachchidananda can always and at will draw into Parabrahman. Then a question arises: when the individual self becomes identified with the Supreme, it becomes merged with the Supreme. Its evolution is then over; how then does it return into the phenomenal world to tell the story of its experience? Answering this question, Sri Aurobindo, in his The Upanishads refers to three highest lines of experience that are possible of attainment. Conceiving the Divine as a noble temple in a metaphorical sense, the first experience is, in his words, "when we stand at the entrance of the porch and look within; the second when we stand at the inner extremity of the porch and are really face to face with the Eternal; the third when we enter into the Holy of Holies...Well, then the first stage is well within the possible experience of man and from it man returns to be a Jivanmukta, one who lives and is yet released in his inner self from the bondage of phenomenal existence; the second stage once reached, man does not ordinarily return unless he is a supreme Buddha,—or perhaps as a world Avatar; from the third stage none returns...Brahman as realised by the Jivanmukta seen from the entrance of the porch, is that which we usually term Parabrahman, the supreme Eternal and the subject of the most exalted descriptions of the Vedanta."

In the Hour of God, Sri Aurobindo observes: "All who go out of the universal consciousness do not necessarily go into Parabrahman. Some go into undifferentiated Nature (avyakrita Prakriti), some lose themselves in God, some pass into a dark state of non-recognition of universe (asat, sunya), some into luminous state of non-recognition of universe,—pure undifferentiated Atman, Pure Sat or Existence-Basis of universe,—some into a temporary state of deep sleep (susupti) in the impersonal principles of Ananda, Chit or Sat. All these are forms of release and ego gets from God by his Maya or Prakriti the impulse towards any of these to which the supreme Purusha chooses to direct him. Those whom he wishes to liberate, yet keep in the world, he makes them Jivanmuktas or sends them out again as His vibhutis, they consenting to wear for the divine purposes a temporary veil of Avidya."

The Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother does not, however, seek after or favour immergence of individual self in the Parabrahman. Its Ultimate goal is different and as a step towards fulfilment of that aim it may seek Jivanmukti in the universe. We should live in the world, not realeased out of the world, says Sri Aurobindo, not because we need to be freed or for any other reason, but because that is God's Will in us. Certainly a Jivanmukta can go wherever he chooses to go, either into Nirvana or to one of the Divine Kingdoms and even while he is moving about in different planes or worlds or is staying in one of them he can keep himself in touch with the earth and return to it as often as he wants.

Is Jivanmukta still bound by his past action? We know there are various kinds of Karma: sanchita Karma is Karma accumulated and brought forward from our past embodiments into the present one,—that which will mature in future; prarabhdha Karma, that part of the sanchita which has to be worked out in the present life; agamiya Karma which is what is being forged in our present day-to-day life. Part of the last-mentioned Karma may be worked out in the present life itself and what is not exhausted is carried over to the pool of sanchita Karma. If a person progresses spiritually and becomes a fit instrument of the Divine and his soul relinquishes its agency, kartrutva, all the agamiya Karma acquired during his present embodiment is burnt up along with the entire heap of sanchita Karma, and the man is said to have arrived at a Jivanmukta's stage. His ego no longer exists and his will operates as an instrument of the Divines Will. Since the sense of I-ness and mine-ness in action is that which forges Karma and since it has been transcended by the soul, the Jivanmukta no longer acquires further agamiya Karma. He may probably go through utkata Karma, the ineluctable Karma, which has become imminent.

Sri Aurobindo holds that Jivanmukta will not be bound by further deeds but his past deeds have to be worked out. Admittedly, Jivanmukta is not bound, for he has realised his unity in God and he is only performing nishkama Karma. However, Prakriti attached to jivatman has built up Karma while it lived in Ignorance and these will have to be worked out in order not to disturb "the whole economy of nature." Sri Aurobindo makes this observation: "In order to maintain the world therefore Jivanmukta remains working like a prisoner on parole, not bound indeed by others, but detained by himself until the period previously appointed for his captivity shall have elapsed."

It has been pointed out earlier that without the Divine Grace attainment of mukti or Jivanmukti is impossible. Sastriar emphasises this truth in these explicit words: "Nor is such an exalted state reached by anyone through personal exertion alone. However straightforward, enlightened and onepointed may be the efforts made by the seeker, the ultimate result is not worked out by the ego-bound mentality of the man...personal exertion, though usually a necessary condition for preparing the human being for spiritual realisation, cannot bear fruit without the finishing touch for consummation favoured by the Higher Power which may act through a human Guru or may be directly the Divine Grace itself."

To sum up: Jivanmukta is one who has solved his personal problem, the problem of Ignorance. He has realised the Self, the Impersonal Divine or the Divine Personality whichever aspect was dear to him and he was after. Whether this phenomenal world appears to him real or illusory depends upon the type of realisation he has had. Pain and pleasure, happiness or sorrow have little or no relevance to him, they leave no trace. He fronts everything with an impenetrable calm and equality. He is no longer the ego he once was. He is through with the fear of birth or death, he is no more obsessed with fate or destiny. He cares less for the result of his works. Karma binds him not, for he has no personal desire and his will is tuned to the Divine Will for all time.

Granted the aspiring soul has reached Jivanmukti, what next? That is a gnawing question: Is the purpose of manifestation only this—to reach individual souls to the Source whence they came? Or, is recall or return,—be it the immergence in the Absolute or identity with the Brahman,—the sole intention of Creation, the purpose for which the world was made? The Mother raises this poignant question in her inimitable manner:

The whole creation, the whole universal manifestation appears at best a very bad joke if it only comes to this. Why begin at all if it is only to get out of it! What is the use of having struggled so much, suffered so much, if having created something which, at least in its external appearance, is so tragic and dramatic, if it is only to teach you how to get out of it—it would have been better not to begin at all.

Sri Aurobindo gives a friendly admonition. Addressing the liberated being he says in his epic Savitri

O soul, it is too early to rejoice. ||80.3||

Is liberation the sole mission of life, or is there still something Beyond? Is it for personal salvation that the soul takes birth? No. There is a nobler mission which gets started only after the soul obtains its deliverance from Ignorance and Falsehood. To stay put at the level of mukti has not much significance. The mukta must press on.

The life that wins its aim asks greater aims. ||54.46||

The liberated being can put this question to himself: by escaping from the cycles of rebirth what have I added to myself? What does my liberation mean to others who are groping in Ignorance and Darkness? My victory does not amount to much,

Because only half God's work is done. ||80.8||

Realisation of Self is not the end of the journey. All that the embodied soul has done is to push Ignorance and Falsehood away from it. But this is not to say that it has completed the work of the cosmos. It has accomplished only half the work. It has said NO to Ignorance and driven it away. Very rightly, for that is the great utility of a NO in the scheme of things. But what about the demand for a YES?

But where is the lover's everlasting Yes. ||80.9||

The heart clamours for something positive, a Yes, for love which arises from deep within. So the liberated man must proceed further. He has a new goal to reach and a more difficult path to tread. And that Path which Sri Aurobindo and Mother have discovered is the Path of the Supramental Yoga.

The Supramental Yoga is not an escape from the physical world which leaves it irrevocably to its fate, nor is it a helpless acceptance of material life for what it is, without any hope of a decisive change of man or of the world as the final expression of the Divine Will. The Integral Yoga (also called supramental yoga) aims at scaling all the degrees of consciousness from the ordinary mental consciousness to a Supramental and Divine Consciousness, and when the ascent is completed, to return to the material world and infuse it with the supra-mental Force and Consciousness that have been won, so that the earth may be gradually transformed into a supramental and divine world.

Both Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have pointed out that man, the highest-evolved creature in creation, is a transitional being. He has had several natures one after another in an ascending curve. He is moving farther towards acquiring and possessing a new kind of consciousness called the Supramental Consciousness, eventually transforming his human nature into Divine Nature, human being to supramental being. The Mother has affirmed that there would be a connecting link between the human being and the supramental being, and that link is called the Superman.

Before we discuss what Superman means in the context of Sri Aurobindo's Supramental Yoga, let us begin by noticing what Superman is not. Superman is not a super giant, a hero of impossible feats, a mighty man with extraordinary physical, vital and mental prowess. He is not a solitary ego who feels qualified to rule over men and worlds. He is not a Nietzchean superman who is, in the words of the Mother, "a man aggrandised, magnified, in whom Force has become superdominant, crushing under its might all the other attributes of man." Nor does it mean, as Sri Aurobindo puts it, "any Olympian, Appolonian or Dionysian, any angelic or demonaic supermanhood". What is he then?

Even as of old man came behind the beast
This high divine successor surely shall come
Behind man's inefficient mortal pace,
Behind his vain labour, sweat, and blood and tears;
He shall know what mortal mind barely durst think,
He shall do what the heart of the mortal could not dare. ||90.33||

Superman of Sri Aurobindo's and the Mother's vision is the pioneer of a new race, the man of tomorrow, the "One Immortal in His lower mental being." He is one "whose whole personality has been offered up into the being, nature and consciousness of the one transcendent and universal Divinity and by loss of the smaller self has found its greater self, has been divinised. Superman 'is the divinised human being, the Best.'

In dealing with the subject of superman, Sri Kapali Sastriar provides the necessary Vedantic background in the light of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy. There is one supreme Reality which creates or manifests the universe out of Itself and in Itself. All is Brahman, the one eternal Sachchidananda which is omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. And yet this world, with ourselves in it, which is the manifestation of the supreme Existence-Consciousness-Bliss, is not perfect, is not blissful. Why? Sastriar shows how the evolution or consciousness which forms an important plank of Sri Aurobindo's teaching explains this paradox. He mentions that man's present state of existence is not what the creation is intended to become eventually. Man is still in the process of becoming; he is yet to reach his goal.

In the words of the Mother:

The world is not immediately what it is. The earth is in a period of transition that certainly seems long to the brief human consciousness, but which is infinitesimal for the eternal consciousness. And this period will come to an end with the appearance of the supramental consciousness. The contradictions will then be replaced by harmonies and the oppositions by syntheses.

The Mother, On Education: Helping Humanity

At present man is in the middle term of his existence. What does the 'middle term' mean? The answer brings us to a consideration of Sri Aurobindo's philosophy of evolution. Stated in a few words: creation is an involution-evolution movement. The highest Divine Principle chooses to become progressively veiled and successively decends from the position of an all-knowing supreme Spirit at the top to the lowest level of inconscient Matter below. All the highest aspects of Sat-Chit-Ananda congeal to become their negations, their opposites as it were. This process of self-determination, self-limitation and self-absorption of the supreme Spirit and its descent is called involution. Then starts the evolution or the ascent from Nescience to Supreme Consciousness. The veiled power of the supreme Spirit inherent in the In-conscience serves as an urge towards the upward movement. Thus Life evolves in Matter because Life is already involved in Matter. And from Life emerges Mind, because Mind is inherent in life and matter. That is to say, Matter is a form of veiled life and Life is a form of veiled consciousness. And Mind itself is a veiled form of something beyond and higher than Mind. Then as Life has emerged from Matter, Mind from Life, something higher and greater than Mind must emerge from Mind as an evolutionary necessity. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have affirmed that such indeed is the case. Man the mental being, whose roots are in the Inconscient Matter, in the subconscient life, has to evolve and eventually blossom into something infinitely greater than mind which Sri Aurobindo calls the Supermind. Man is neither at the bottom of creation nor at the top, but he is in the middle. That is what it means that man is in the middle term of his existence. It is the characteristic feature of this middle state that Ignorance, Falsehood, Pain, Suffering, Disease and Death are the badges of his life. These are not, however, permanent. We accept them as temporary features of our ego-bound, limited, ignorant life. We must make earnest efforts to overpass them. Sri Aurobindo explains that the evolutionary labour of the Creative Spirit is to establish a new Consciousness and Force, called Supermind, which will make it possible for the eventual emergence of a new race of Gnostic beings in a Gnostic society which would usher in real Peace, Power, Light, Ananda, Immortality, securely and permanently in earth life.

Supermind is the creative power of Sachchidananda. It is the first status through which manifestation takes place. It is also called the Gnostic Mind or Gnosis, to differentiate it from the mind of Ignorance. Supermind is the dynamic Truth-Consciousness, Real-Idea, Rit-Chit of the Vedas, or Self-awareness of the Supreme in which Knowledge and Power are inseparably one like the light and heat of the sun. From the mind of Ignorance to the highest Light and Power of the Supermind is indeed a far cry. A thick veil separates the two, besides there are intervening planes—from mind to Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuitive Mind, Overmind etc., before the plane of Supermind is reached. Man is incapable of reaching Supermind on his own. So Herculean is the task of crossing these planes that in crucial stages of man's evolutionary career, Avatars have had to descend and bridge the great gulfs and make it possible for man to cross over and reach the Higher Consciousness. Krishna is one such Avatar who embodied Over-mind Consciousness and established it on earth. Now the Overmind plane has also been crossed, thanks to the unbending efforts of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and the highest principles of Super-mind have been firmly established in the earth consciousness.

The Mother clarifies that the supramental realisation cannot be described without first experiencing it. All that can be said in faith is that the realisation leads to the next step, i.e. transformation of human consciousness into the Divine and the supramental. In the supramental world, we do not discard our present world or ourselves, as we might do if we had accepted laya or dissolution in the Parabrahman as our spiritual goal. In fact in the supramental world we retain our personal form, our individualisation. We recognise that real fulfilment of life is not mukti, is not self-cancellation, but to become perfect as the Divine is perfect. The integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother is the path that leads man and earth to this destiny. Man is Nature's vessel and the medium; it is in him that She is seeking the fulfilment of her eventual goal, the summit of her aeons of labour. Man who has arrived at the stage of a self-conscious being must consciously enter into this forward movement, recognising the urge implanted in him, and carry the mantle of evolutionary progress. The rest is left to the Divine Power, the Divine Shakti. What we have to bear in mind is that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother are the pioneers of the Supramental age. For many decades they laboured, struggled and suffered and finally brought down the Supra-mental Consciousness for the first time in earth's history and made it part of the earth's consciousness. With the force of this New Consciousness man, when he takes his decision today or tomorrow or some day to fulfil the required conditions, can become a superman and from superman to supra-mental being.

How does superman come into the picture, we can ask.

'Superman', 'Transformation' are some of the key-terms in Sri Aurobindo's teaching. Let us take 'transformation' first. It is a comprehensive term and means much more than conversion or change of consciousness from the human to the Divine. The highmark of transformation consists in the conversion of human being into the Divine being and the human nature into the Divine Nature. It is a radical and durable change that proceeds from within, outwards. Such a transformation is clearly outside the scope of human effort. Mother and Sri Aurobindo have said that there will be an intermediate race linking man with supramental being. This intermediate race is the race of superman, It is at the level of supermanhood that all animal ways of being and of expression are likely to disappear. But superman will not have the absolute perfection of a body that is purely supramental in its formation. Mother adds:

It can be asserted with certainty that there will be an intermediate specimen between the mental and supramental being, a kind of superman, who still have the qualities and in part the nature of man, that is, who will still belong in his more external form to the human being with its animal origin, but will have transformed his consciousness sufficiently to belong in his realisation and activity to a new race, a race of superman.

The Mother, Questions and Answers (1957 - 1958): 16 April 1958

At another place she has said:

Since their (supermen's) origin is human, there is inevitably a contact; even if everything is transformed, even if their organs are transformed into centres of force, a sort of human colouration still remains. These are the beings...who will discover the secret of direct supramental creation, bypassing the process of ordinary Nature. Through them the true supramental beings will be born.

What is the actual process of transformation of nature that will enable the supramental creation to be established on earth? This remains an open question. Probably the process will proceed by stages, by degrees, with the needed faculties built slowly and suddenly emerging or manifesting in its own hour. As the Mother points out, it must be similar to what happened when the first man appeared. Though a lot of speculation still goes on, nobody knows for certain as to how the first human came into existence and under what conditions and environment. "Were they isolated individuals or were they in groups? Did the phenomena take place in a collective milieu or in isolation?" Nobody can say. Probably it is going to be the same in the coming supramental creation also.

Mother has made revealing observations concerning the coming superman. Superman is a being now in the making. He is a new species, a new race with new capacities, new force of consciousness bringing new principles of truth and action in the new age that is dawning. He does not resemble a man as man does not resemble a monkey. Admittedly superman will be born in the animal way but he creates a spiritual influx which even the best of men do not have. No one has reached the final stage of superman so far. The work of superman is to transform his physical being. The degree of transformation depends upon each one's capacity and there may be partial successes and there may even be failures in the attempts, but eventually we come to something like the superman, a new creation.

Talking of apprentice-supermen, Mother says:

All those who strive to overcome their ordinary nature, all those who try to realise materially the deeper experience which brought them into contact with the divine Truth, all those who, instead of yearning to the Beyond or the Highest, try to realise physically, externally, the change of consciousness they have realised within themselves—all are apprentice-supermen. And there, there are countless differences in the success of their efforts. Each time we try not to be an ordinary man, not live the ordinary life, to express in our movements, our actions and reactions the divine Truth, when we are governed by that Truth instead of being governed by the general ignorance, we are apprentice-supermen, and according to the success of our efforts, well, we are more or less able apprentices, more or less advanced on the way.