Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume I - Part 3

Fragment ID: 10398

As for the conquest of death, it is only one of the sequelae of supramentalisation – and I am not aware that I have forsworn my views about the supramental descent. But I never said or thought that the supramental descent would automatically make everybody immortal. The supramental descent can only make the best conditions for anybody who can open to it then or thereafter attaining to the supramental consciousness and its consequences. But it would not dispense with the necessity of sadhana. If it did, the logical consequence would be that the whole earth, men, dogs and worms, would suddenly wake up to find themselves supramental. There would be no need of an Asram or of Yoga.

What is vital is the supramental change of consciousness – conquest of death is something minor and, as I have always said, the last physical result of it, not the first result of all or the most important – a thing to be added to complete the whole, not the one thing needed and essential. To put it first is to reverse all spiritual values – it would mean that the seeker was actuated not by any high spiritual aim but by a vital clinging to life or a selfish and timid seeking for the security of the body – such a spirit could not bring the supramental change.

Certainly, everything depends on my success. The only thing that could prevent it, so far as I can see, would be my own death or the Mother’s. But did you imagine that that [my success] would mean the cessation of death on this planet, and that sadhana would cease to be necessary for anybody?