Sri Aurobindo

Letters on Himself and the Ashram

The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35

His Life and Attempts to Write about It
The Terminology of His Writings

Supermind and Overmind [4]

I sent up an article on your Yoga some time ago. You returned it without comment. I do not know whether you have gone through it and approve of its publication or not.

There are some errors about the Supermind and Overmind,— the two getting rather mixed up as they always do (I had much difficulty in separating them myself); I have tried to clear that up but it is difficult to put in language that the mind can grasp. I hope you will manage to unravel the writing which has become microscopically illegible owing to lack of space for the corrections.

Supermind by the way is synthetic only in the lowest spaces of itself where it has to prepare the principles of Overmind — synthesis is necessary only where analysis has taken place; one has dissected everything, put in pieces (analysis) so one has to piece together. But Supermind is unitarian, has never divided up, so it does not need to add and piece together the parts and fragments. It has always held the conscious Many together as the conscious One.

26 October 1938