Lifting the golden lid

The transfer of power that matters

While the news coming out of Ukraine is getting grimmer by the day, the news coming out of the Unites States is getting more galling by the day. And Europe is finally waking up to the real possibility of a Russian invasion of a NATO country in the near future (estimates range from three to ten years) with the Unites States looking the other way.¹

“Our Lovely Neighbor” (Digital art by Boris Groh, Ukraine, 2023)

Two quotes from Sri Aurobindo keep reverberating in my mind. One I have already quoted several times. It is from the postscript chapter Sri Aurobindo added in 1950 to The Ideal of Human Unity. Having pointed out that The League of Nations was constituted after the first World War in order to prevent a second World War, and that the United Nations was constituted after the second World War in order to prevent a third World War, he called attention to the UN’s Achilles heel: “A strong surviving element of oligarchy remained in the preponderant place assigned to the five great Powers in the Security Council and was clinched by the device of the veto.” Today, the UN may still be useful for giving speeches, and at the recent Security Council discussion of the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, some decent ones were delivered²:

• Address by David Cameron, Foreign Secretary of the UK

• Address by Radoslaw Sikorski, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Poland

• Address by Gabrielius Landsbergis, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Lithuania

But when it come to actions beyond toothless resolutions—zilch.

Here is the first of the aforementioned quotes:

If the third war which is regarded by many if not by most as inevitable does come, it is likely to precipitate as inevitably a further step and perhaps the final outcome of this great world-endeavour [towards Human Unity]. Nature uses such means, apparently opposed and dangerous to her intended purpose, to bring about the fruition of that purpose. As in the practice of the spiritual science and art of Yoga one has to raise up the psychological possibilities which are there in the nature and stand in the way of its spiritual perfection and fulfilment so as to eliminate them, even, it may be, the sleeping possibilities which might arise in future to break the work that has been done, so too Nature acts with the world-forces that meet her on her way, not only calling up those which will assist her but raising too, so as to finish with them, those that she knows to be the normal or even the unavoidable obstacles which cannot but start up to impede her secret will. This one has often seen in the history of mankind; one sees it exampled today with an enormous force commensurable with the magnitude of the thing that has to be done. [The Ideal of Human Unity, 580–81]

What about the second quote? Having tried for years to locate it, the other day I finally chanced on it. But to understand it and its implications, one needs to have some idea of the difference between Sri Aurobindo’s terms “supermind” and “overmind” or the states of consciousness they denote.

In the Arya—a philosophical review brought out by Sri Aurobindo between 1914 and 1921—the words “supermind” and “supramental” occur 195 and 193 times, respectively. And “overmind”? Not once. The term first occurs in his Record of Yoga in the entry of October 29, 1927, less than a year after he arrived at a momentous turning point in his yoga, went into seclusion for the rest of his life, and put Mirra Alfassa in physical and spiritual charge of his disciples. It was then that Mirra Alfassa became “The Mother,” and the small group that had formed around them (twenty-four at the time) became the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

In a letter written in 1932, Sri Aurobindo explains why the distinction between the Supermind and the Overmind was not made in the Arya:

[A]t that time what I now call the Overmind was supposed to be an inferior plane of the Supermind. But that was because I was seeing them from the Mind. The true defect of Overmind, the limitation in it which gave rise to a world of Ignorance, is seen fully only when one looks at it from the physical consciousness, from the result (Ignorance in Matter) to the cause (Overmind division of the Truth). In its own plane Overmind seems to be only a divided, many-sided play of the Truth, so can easily be taken by the Mind as a supramental province.... The difficulty comes when we deal with the vital and still more with the physical. Then it becomes imperative to face the difficulty and to make a sharp distinction between Overmind and Supermind—for it then becomes evident that the Overmind Power (in spite of its lights and splendours) is not sufficient to overcome the Ignorance because it is itself under the law of Division out of which came the Ignorance. One has to pass beyond and supramentalise Overmind so that mind and all the rest may undergo the final change. [Letters on Yoga I, 149]

In a supramental world, each of the Many not only knows itself to be the One but also wields the creative power of the One. Ignorance comes into play when the Many lose sight of their identity with the One and hence with each other. But Ignorance comes into play gradually, via a descending series of supraphysical worlds, and this includes a whole series of worlds in which mind is the dominant determining principle—not only mind as we know it in the physical world but also higher degrees of separative consciousness. The corresponding higher levels of mental consciousness serve as steppingstones by which the evolutionary transition from human consciousness to a divine consciousness can be accomplished.

Between the Supermind and the human mind are a number of ranges, planes or layers of consciousness—one can regard it in various ways—in which the element or substance of mind and consequently its movements also become more and more illumined and powerful and wide. The Overmind is the highest of these ranges; it is full of lights and powers; but from the point of view of what is above it, it is the line of the soul’s turning away from the complete and indivisible knowledge and its descent towards the Ignorance. For although it draws from the Truth, it is here that begins the separation of aspects of the Truth, the forces and their working out as if they were independent truths and this is a process that ends, as one descends to ordinary Mind, Life and Matter, in a complete division, fragmentation, separation from the indivisible Truth above.... In the Overmind there is not yet the actual fall into Ignorance, but the first step is taken which will make the fall inevitable. [Ibid. 146–47]

Here the word “soul” has a generic sense, as may be gleaned from letters in which Sri Aurobindo refers to “the soul or individualised consciousness or whatever you may like to call it” [Ibid. p. 69] or explains that the principle of separated Individuality originates in the Overmind: at first still aware of their divine origin, “the souls descending into the Overmind [become] more and more separated and oblivious of it, governed by the principle of division and ego.” [Ibid. p. 148]

In The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo provides a detailed account of those ranges of consciousness. There is, he writes, “a graduality of ascent, a communication with a more and more deep and immense light and power from above, a scale of intensities which can be regarded as so many stairs in the ascension of Mind or in a descent into Mind from That which is beyond it.” [The Life Divine, 291]

First in order of ascent there is a Higher Mind, from which the human mind can receive “a sealike downpour of masses of a spontaneous knowledge which assumes the nature of Thought but has a different character from the process of thought to which we are accustomed; for there is nothing here of seeking, no trace of mental construction, no labour of speculation or difficult discovery; it is an automatic and spontaneous knowledge from a Higher Mind that seems to be in possession of Truth and not in search of hidden and withheld realities.” [Ibid. 291–92]

Beyond this Truth-Thought we can distinguish an Illumined Mind “instinct with an increased power and intensity and driving force, a luminosity of the nature of Truth-Sight with thought formulation as a minor and dependent activity. If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth,—an image which in this experience becomes a reality,—we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff.” [Ibid. 292]

Next comes Intuition, “a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth-thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; for though we have applied that word for want of a better to any supra-intellectual direct way of knowing, yet what we actually know as intuition is only one special movement of self-existent knowledge. This new range is its origin.” [Loc. cit.]

And finally, Overmind:

At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the Supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies,—not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality. This ... is the Power that at once connects and divides the supreme Knowledge and the cosmic Ignorance. [Ibid. pp. 292–93]

These passages appeared first in the “recast and enlarged” edition of 1940. The “brilliant golden lid” alludes to Verse 15 of the Isha Upanishad: “The face of Truth is covered with a brilliant golden lid; that do thou remove, O Fosterer, for the law of the Truth, for sight.” The Fosterer is Surya, the Vedic Sun-God who “represents the divine Illumination ... which exceeds mind and forms the pure self-luminous Truth of things.” [Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad, p. 9] The Overmind thus separates the two hemispheres of manifest existence, as Sri Aurobindo explains here in greater detail:

If Supermind were to start here from the beginning as the direct creative Power, a world of the kind we see now would be impossible; it would have been full of the divine Light from the beginning, there would be no involution in the inconscience of Matter, consequently no gradual striving evolution of consciousness in Matter. A line is therefore drawn between the higher half of the universe of consciousness, parārdha, and the lower half, aparārdha. The higher half is constituted of Sat, Chit, Ananda, Mahas (the supramental)—the lower half of mind, life, Matter. This line is the intermediary Overmind which, though luminous itself, keeps from us the full indivisible supramental Light, depends on it indeed, but in receiving it, divides, distributes, breaks it up into separated aspects, powers, multiplicities of all kinds, each of which it is possible by a further diminution of consciousness such as we reach in Mind to regard as the sole or the chief Truth and all the rest as subordinate or contradictory to it....

It is by this primitive divisional principle that ... all the conflicting philosophies and religions arise, each exalting one aspect or potentiality of Truth presented to Mind as the whole sufficient explanation of things or exalting one of the Divine’s Godheads above all others as the true God than whom there can be no other or none so high or higher. This divisionary principle pursues man’s mental knowledge everywhere and even when he thinks he has arrived at the final unity and harmony, it is only a constructed unity based on an Aspect. It is so that the scientist seeks to found the unity of knowledge on some original physical aspect of things, Energy or Matter [etc.], or the Mayavadin thinks he has arrived at absolute Adwaita by cutting existence into two and calling the upper side Brahman and the lower side Maya. It is the reason why mental knowledge can never arrive at a final solution of anything, for the aspects of Existence as distributed by Overmind are numberless and one can go on multiplying philosophies and religions for ever.

In the Overmind itself there is not this confusion, for the Overmind knows the One as the support, essence, fundamental power of all things, but in the dynamic play proper to it it lays emphasis on its divisional power of multiplicity and seeks to give each Power or Aspect its full chance to manifest, relying on the underlying Oneness to prevent disharmony or conflict.... This peculiar security of Overmind is however not transferable to the lower planes of consciousness which it supports and governs, because as one descends in the scale the stress on division and multiplicity increases and in the Mind the underlying oneness becomes vague, abstract, indeterminate and indeterminable. [Letters on Yoga I, 138–39]

Thus, unlike Overmind, Supermind is not a superlative mind. It is “not merely a step higher than Overmind—it is beyond the line, that is, a different consciousness and power beyond the mental limit.” [Letters on Yoga I, 146]

In the Supermind all is self-known self-luminously, there are no divisions, oppositions or separated aspects as in Mind whose principle is division of Knowledge into parts and setting each part against another. Overmind approaches this at its top and is often mistaken for Supermind, but it cannot reach it—except by uplifting and transformation. [loc. cit.]

This uplifting and transformation is the work Sri Aurobindo set out to accomplish when, on November 24, 1926, he went into seclusion for the rest of his life.³

The individuals inhabiting the Overmind are often referred to as Gods or Godheads. They are “cosmic Personalities, although they can and do ordinarily veil themselves behind the movement of impersonal forces. But while in the Overmind ... they appear as independent beings, they return in the Supermind into the One and stand there united in a single harmonious action as multiple personalities of the one Person, the divine Purushottama.” [Ibid. 454]

As to the Gods, man can build forms which they will accept; but these forms too are inspired into man’s mind from the planes to which the God belongs. All creation has the two sides, the formed and the formless; the Gods too are formless and yet have forms, but a Godhead can take many forms, here Maheshwari, there Pallas Athene.... [Ibid. 457]

If we regard the Powers of the Reality as so many Godheads, we can say that the Overmind releases a million Godheads into action, each empowered to create its own world, each world capable of relation, communication and interplay with the others. There are in the Veda different formulations of the nature of the Gods: it is said they are all one Existence to which the sages give different names; yet each God is worshipped as if he by himself is that Existence, one who is all the other Gods together or contains them in his being; and yet again each is a separate Deity acting sometimes in unison with companion deities, sometimes separately, sometimes even in apparent opposition to other Godheads of the same Existence. In the Supermind all this would be held together as a harmonised play of the one Existence; in the Overmind each of these three conditions could be a separate action or basis of action and have its own principle of development and consequences and yet each keep the power to combine with the others in a more composite harmony.

As with the One Existence, so with its Consciousness and Force. The One Consciousness is separated into many independent forms of consciousness and knowledge; each follows out its own line of truth which it has to realise. The one total and many-sided [supramental] Real-Idea is split up into its many sides; each becomes an independent Idea-Force with the power to realise itself. The one Consciousness-Force is liberated into its million forces, and each of these forces has the right to fulfil itself or to assume, if needed, a hegemony and take up for its own utility the other forces.

So too the Delight of Existence is loosed out into all manner of delights and each can carry in itself its independent fullness or sovereign extreme. Overmind thus gives to the One Existence-Consciousness-Bliss the character of a teeming of infinite possibilities which can be developed into a multitude of worlds or thrown together into one world in which the endlessly variable outcome of their play is the determinant of the creation, of its process, its course and its consequence. [The Life Divine, 294–95]

In several previous posts I stated that Brahman or the One—that which alone exists independently of anything else, that on which everything else depends for its existence—relates to the world in three ways: as a substance (sat) it constitutes the world, as a consciousness (chit) it contains it, and as an infinite quality/delight (ānanda) it experiences and expresses itself in it. Yet originally, in the higher hemisphere of manifest existence, the three relations are one. The scission between these three aspects of the One is a creation of the Overmind, as is the scission between the personal and impersonal aspects of the One.

[The Overmind] divides Sat, Chit and Ananda, so that they become three separate aspects different from each other. In fact in the Reality there is no separateness, the three aspects are so fused into each other, so inseparably one that they are a single undivided reality. It is the same with the Personal and Impersonal, the Saguna and Nirguna, the Silent and the Active Brahman. In the Reality they are not contrasted and incompatible aspects; what we call Personality and what we call Impersonality are inseparably fused together in a single Truth. In fact “fused together” even is a wrong phrase, because there they were never separated so that they have to be fused. All the quarrels about either the Impersonal being the only true truth or the Personal being the only highest truth are mind-created quarrels derivative from this dividing aspect of the Overmind. The Overmind does not deny any of the aspects as the Mind does, it admits them all as aspects of the One Truth, but by separating them it originates the quarrel in the more ignorant and more limited and divided Mind, because the Mind cannot see how two opposite things can exist together in one Truth, how the Divine can be nirguṇo guṇī;⁴—having no experience of what is behind the two words it takes each in an absolute sense. [Letters on Yoga I, 156]

If we would understand the difference of this global Overmind Consciousness from our separative and only imperfectly synthetic mental consciousness, we may come near to it if we compare the strictly mental with what would be an overmental view of activities in our material universe. To the Overmind, for example, all religions would be true as developments of the one eternal religion, all philosophies would be valid each in its own field as a statement of its own universe-view from its own angle, all political theories with their practice would be the legitimate working out of an Idea Force with its right to application and practical development in the play of the energies of Nature.

In our separative consciousness, imperfectly visited by glimpses of catholicity and universality, these things exist as opposites; each claims to be the truth and taxes the others with error and falsehood, each feels impelled to refute or destroy the others in order that itself alone may be the Truth and live: at best, each must claim to be superior, admit all others only as inferior truth-expressions. An overmental Intelligence would refuse to entertain this conception or this drift to exclusiveness for a moment; it would allow all to live as necessary to the whole or put each in its place in the whole or assign to each its field of realisation or of endeavour. This is because in us consciousness has come down completely into the divisions of the Ignorance; Truth is no longer either an Infinite or a cosmic whole with many possible formulations, but a rigid affirmation holding any other affirmation to be false because different from itself and entrenched in other limits. [The Life Divine, 298]

Canna lily: Connection Between the Supermind and the Physical—the physical centre open and full of the Supramental Light (Significance given by the Mother)

Near the end of this post, I quoted some messages by the Mother about an event that took place on the 29th of February 1956. Eight weeks after this event, which she later called “the first supramental manifestation,” she distributed the following message: “The manifestation of the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise but a living fact, a reality. It is at work here, and one day will come when the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognise it.”

In her Agenda of May 29, 1965, the Mother spoke of the intrusion of something belonging to the material field, which previously wasn’t there. When the disciple asked her whether this “something” was the supramental Force, the Mother answered:

I’d rather not name it, because they will make a dogma out of it. That’s what happened when what we called “the first supramental manifestation” took place in 1956. I tried my best to prevent it from being turned into a dogma. But if I say, “On such-and-such date, such-and-such a thing took place,” it will be printed in big characters, and if someone says something else, he will be told, “You are a heretic.” So I don’t want that. But it’s undeniable that the atmosphere has changed, there is something new in the atmosphere—we can call it “the descent of the supramental Truth” because for us these words have a meaning, but I don’t want to make a declaration about it, because I don’t want it to be THE classic or “true” way to describe the event. That’s why I keep it vague, deliberately.

There are numerous statements by the Mother to the effect that the Overmind “has up to the present governed our world.”

No doubt, the Supermind has also acted in the history of the world but always through the Overmind. [Questions and Answers 1929–1931, 173]

[T]ill now the whole physical, material world, the whole earth (let us take the earth) has been ruled by forces and the consciousness that come from what Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmind. [Questions and Answers 1953, 282]

Even the idea of the unity of all religions, which “has truly been, so to speak, the extreme limit of human aspiration ... is something that still belongs completely to the Overmind world, the Overmind creation.” [Questions and Answers 1957–58, 150]

“Now,” the Mother said in 1953, “the time for the ‘rule’ of the Overmind is coming to its end and is going to be replaced by the rule of the Supermind.” [Questions and Answers 1953, 283] The rule of the Overmind has, arguably, come to an end on that pivotal date of February 29, 1956. And this at last brings me to the second quote I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Asked whether there will be catastrophes when the Supermind descends, Sri Aurobindo answered:

There need not be. There will necessarily be great changes but they are not bound to be catastrophic. When there is a strong pressure from Overmind forces for change, then there are likely to be catastrophes because of the resistance and clash of forces. The supramental has a greater, in its fullness a complete mastery of things and power of harmonisation which can overcome resistance by other means than dramatic struggle and violence. [Letters on Yoga I, 292–93]

What this tells me is that the supramental descent/manifestation may bring humanity closer to the abyss than it has ever been when there was such a pressure from Overmind forces, for unlike the latter, the Supermind force (it has no plural!) can always prevent humanity from falling into it. Once the Supermind has “taken over the reins,” humanity may appear closer to the brink than it was at any time in the past—an appearance that may well be required to produce a necessary change—without there being a real danger of it’s being pushed over the brink. Certain passages in Mother’s Agenda illustrate this state of affairs. For example:

[T]here’s a kind of golden Force pressing down; it has no material substantiality, and yet it feels terribly heavy. It presses down on Matter, to force it, to compel it to turn INWARDLY to the Divine—not an external flight (pointing above) but inwardly turning to the Divine. And the apparent outcome seems to be inevitable catastrophes. But along with this sense of inevitable catastrophe, there come solutions to situations or events that look simply miraculous.... [May 6, 1972]

1. Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov thinks that acting like Putin’s first move on NATO will be tanks across the border is a strawman. Putin’s war on NATO started long ago and his tactics haven’t changed: weaponize the liberties of the free world against it using the media, political corruption, election interference, refugees (Feb 27, 2024).

2. It seems that some of these videos are blocked by certain internet providers in India.

3. By one account, the withdrawal took place gradually between the 24th and the end of the year.

4. The reference is to passages from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad (6: 2, 11, 16), in which the One is described as both possessed of qualities and beyond quality (guna).