Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
CWSA 35
Fragment ID: 8732
1935 [24]
Do tell me please if you are getting anything solid from this nebulous supramental. X1 tells me you have scaled and winged 
like lightning on its pinions. Have you really? Was it something like motion on a sort of marvellous Calm which seems like motion through some supramental jugglery of consciousness? Some enlightenment on this bewildering problem would be highly edifying even to the mentals and humans, you may be sure. Also, Y has to be gagged somehow. He talks of nothing but the supramental. And what am I to answer?
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 have got many solid things from much lower forces, I do not see why the highest ones should only give nebulosities. But that seems the human mind’s position, only what is earthy is solid, what is high is misty and unreal – the worm is a reality, but the eagle is a vapour!
However, I have not told X that I am scaling and winging – on the contrary I am 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, twenty-seven years ago and I can assure you they were solid enough and marvellous enough without any need of supramentality to make it more so! Again, a calm that “seems like motion” is a phenomenon of which I know nothing. A calm or silence which can support or produce action – that I know and that is what I have had – the proof is that out of an absolute silence of the mind I edited the Bande Mataram for four months and wrote 6½ volumes of the Arya, not to speak of all the letters and messages etc. 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 Asram 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 it is not the Supramental but at most the Overmind that helped me to these non-nebulous motions. 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 will conclude by saying that I have not told X that I have taken possession of the supramental – I only admit to be very near to it or at least to its tail. But “very near” is – well, after all a relative phrase like all human phrases.
I don’t know how you are to “gag” Y. You might perhaps try my two formulas, but it is doubtful. Or perhaps you might tell him that the supramental is 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 tail of the supramental and can come and tell the mentals and humans – no doubt in language which will be unintelligible to them, for they have totally misunderstood even the little I have already written about it.
23 August 1935
1 The recipient of the letters of July and August 1935 on pages 343 – 45. – Ed.