Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

SABCL 26

Fragment ID: 7744

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 once have got many solid things from much lower forces, I do not see why the highest ones should only give us nebulosities. But that seems to be the human mind’s position: that only what is earthy is solid, what is high must be misty and unreal – the worm is a reality, the eagle only a vapour!

However, I have not told X that I have been scaling and winging – on the contrary, I have been 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, 27 years ago, and I can assure you they were solid enough and marvellous enough in all conscience without any need of supramentality to make it more so. Again, “a calm that looks like action and motion” is a phenomenon of which I know nothing. A calm or silence that is what I have had – the proof is that out of an absolute silence of the mind I edited the Bande Mataram for 4 months and wrote 6 volumes of the Arya, not to speak of all the letters and messages 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 this is not the supramental but at most the Overmind that helped me to these non-nebulous motions and action. 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 conclude by saying that I have not told X that I have taken complete possession of the supramental – I only admit to be very near to it. But “very near” is – well, after all – a relative phrase like all human phrases.

I don’t know how you are to answer Y. You might perhaps by my two formulas, but it is doubtful. Or perhaps you might tell him that the supramental was 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 supramental and can come and tell the mentals and humans,– no doubt in a language which will be intelligible to them,– I must be somewhat dumb, since they have wholly misunderstood even the little that has found voice through my writings up till now.

23-8-1935