“Two irrefutable signs prove that one is in relation with the Supramental:

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1. A perfect and constant equality: To be perfect, the equality must be invariable and spontaneous, effortless, towards all circumstances, all happenings, all contacts, material or psychological, irrespective of their character and impact.

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   2. An absolute certainty in the knowledge: The absolute and indisputable certainty of an infallible knowledge through identity."

THE MOTHER

TMCW-15/Words of The Mother-III/p-102,

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            “The capacities required to gain access to the supramental world.

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1. Capacity for indefinite expansion of consciousness on all planes including the material.

2. Limitless plasticity, to be able to follow the movement of becoming.

 

            Perfect equality abolishing all possibility of ego reaction."

THE MOTHER

 The Mother’s Agenda/January 12, 1962.

         

            “The Divinity mentioned by Sri Aurobindo is NOT A PERSON, but a condition to be shared and lived by all those who prepare themselves for it."
 

THE MOTHER

TMCW-15/Words of The Mother-III/p-104

               

 

            “And actually, to do Sri Aurobindo’s work is to realize the Supramental on earth. So I began that work and, as a matter of fact, this was the only thing I asked of my body. I told it, ‘Now you shall set right everything which is out of order and gradually realize this intermediate supermanhood between man and the supramental being or, in other words, what I call the superman.’... And this is what I have been doing for the last eight years, and even much more during the past two years, since 1956. Now it is the work of each day, each minute.”

The Mother

The Mother’s Agenda- 10th May 1958

            “When the Supramental manifests, an unequalled joy spreads over the earth.”

The Mother

TMCW-15/Words of the Mother-III/p-91

            “It seems to me that the purpose of the Supramental Yoga is to dissipate ignorance from the entire cosmos and remove the darkness of earthly nature, in order to make the divine life possible.”

Sri Aurobindo

CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram/p-279-280

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             All noble and high Religions aim at transfiguration of son of men into son of God and are having three fundamental ways or three essential affirmations of approaching life that can be adopted with regard to our existence: Firstly, the belief in the immortality, the eternal persistence of the individual human Spirit apart from the body, that is our Supra-terrestrial or other worldly existence or an occult link through which all things are ordered, governed and harmonised in their fundamental relations and process; secondly, it is in Heavens beyond that we must seek our entire Divine fulfilment, and their other assertion of the kingdom of God or the kingdom of the perfect upon Earth must be put aside as delusion, or in any case, the Absolute, the Parabrahman is the origin and goal of all existence, that is our Supracosmic view of things; thirdly, an emphasis on the development of the Ethical and Spiritual being as the means of ascension and therefore the one proper business of this brief life in this world of Matter; during this temporary stay from birth to death we have to study the laws of becoming and take the best advantage of them to realise the dynamism and potentiality in us, that is our cosmic and Terrestrial existence. It is practically impossible for man taken as a race to guide his life permanently or wholly by the leading motive of any of these three mental attitudes towards life to the exclusion of the other two claims on his nature. Thus, one of the above three does not harmonise with the other two and by this disharmony humanity is thrown into great perplexities of contradiction and hence subjects itself to doubt, division, denial and leap away from the problem. Integral Yoga rejects the above three limiting conclusions or unsatisfactory solutions that after liberating Mind, Life and Soul within one must turn from the unconquerable Material principle and from the intractable and unregenerated Earth to find elsewhere his Divine substance. The speciality and superiority of integral Yoga over all the Religious and Yogic schools is that a fourth fundamental theory is sufficiently nurtured¹⁹ which is integration, synthesis, mutual indwelling and reconciliation of the above three Religious factors and it is by knowing each in its completeness that the three reconcile to become one in our total Consciousness and total Knowledge. It recognises the other subtle states of Matter or an ascending series of the Divine gradations of substance and through acceptance of this higher law of ascending and descending Consciousness, the luminous and puissant material transfiguration is possible. In this last category would fall the view of Integral Spiritual Evolution where Supracosmic is accepted as source and support, the Supraterrestrial or otherworldly for a condition and connecting link (for bridging the gulf between Suparacosmic and terrestrial Matter) and the cosmic and Terrestrial for its field and circumstance, and with human Mind, Life and Body for its nodus, turning point and dynamic mould into which Supreme existence can be poured in, initially intermittently and finally continuously for a higher and even highest perfection.

              In India, three types of Divines are generally adored. The first type of Divine belongs to Moderate Spirituality, who is identified as the giver of boons and curses. Devotees worship Him with rapt attention with the intention of getting favour¹⁵ from Him. He is aware in his mind of the Divine’s personal form and oblivious of His Impersonal Spiritual form; thus, he transforms the high truth of swift Spiritual evolution into the slow evolution of religious movement. The second type of Divine belongs to later Vedantists, Illusionists and Nirvanists, where Brahman is experienced as That, which, being known, all becomes unreal and an incomprehensible mystery or as the Kena Upanishad recognises, ‘That is the divine Brahman and not this which men here adore.”⁴  This adoration of the Impersonal Divine of Jnana Yoga/Sankhya is identified as the principal motive and passage for higher Spiritual life for developing Souls/traditional Sadhakas/beginners of integral Yoga, dvija. The third type of Divine belongs to Ancient Vedantists where Brahman is experienced as That which being known all is known and nothing is lost¹⁶  or Brahman is experienced as the triple formula of Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental Self. (1) The Self is in all things, which is the basis of our Psychic individuality in the universal; (2) all things are within the Self, which is the basis of our Spiritual oneness in difference and (3) all things are made up of the stuff of the Self, which is the basis of our Supramental oneness with all. In this quest, a relation between Spirit and Matter is worked out and the force of Brahman penetrates into material life. In this trend, adoration of the Divine’s personal form (as Purushottama, Supramental Self) is identified as more important than His impersonal form (as Akshara Purusha, Spiritual Being). This subordination of Impersonal Divine to Personal Divine is the basis of Sadhana for a developed Soul¹ or Sadhaka of integral Yoga. Thus, Matter and Spirit get equal attention and importance and are reconciled.

              The Moderate and later Vedantic Spirituality are identified as escapist Spirituality¹³ and they cannot confront Death. In ancient Vedantic Spirituality, four imperfections or negations of Matter that of Ignorance, Falsehood, Suffering and Death, are purified, transformed and perfected into Knowledge, Truth, Delight and Immortality. During the hour of death and extreme adversity, the ancient Vedantists confront them, whereas Moderates submit before them and later Vedantists accept Death as a passage to Param Dham.

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               The God of popular Religion is a Power who must do favours to the devotees; they always want something, demand something, expect to get something and their whole life is a perpetual bargain to satisfy their desire. Their idea of the Divine is something that knows little more than they do and is at their exclusive service. The Gita confirms² that those who adore the Divine to satisfy their desire do not experience movement in higher planes of consciousness. In Spiritual life, this conditional worship is transformed into self-offering, self-giving, and self-consecration of what one has, what one is, and what one will become. The self-fulfilment by (1) sacrifice with Self-control, atma-samyama,⁶ and rejection of lower Nature, vairagya⁹ or (2) motiveless sacrificial work by renouncing the fruit of work, phala tyagam,⁷ or (3) desiring nothing from the supreme Lover and His creation, anapekhya,⁸ leads one to higher planes of Consciousness and these triple truths are less easily grasped by bound Souls. A religious man wants to take something from the Divine, while a Spiritual man wants to give himself to the Divine "The will of self-giving forces away by its power the veil between God and man; it annuls every error and annihilates every obstacle."¹⁴ The basis of Spiritual life is an intense need to become one with the Divine, to melt in the Divine, and to disappear in the Divine. The aim of Spiritual and Supramental action is not miraculous realisations without lasting results filling the world with admiration but a frequent or constant natural miracle that alone effects a lasting transformation and by full mastery of constantly calling down of the luminous dynamic Divine Shakti one can face/solve all the problems of existence which is the logical, natural and inevitable consequence of intense aspiration, sincere endeavour and firm conviction.

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               The Divinity visioned by Sri Aurobindo is an inherent all-pervading Consciousness-Force, ‘a half-veiled Manifestation present and near to us here in the universe’³  that does not reject but accepts and transcends the limitation of the personal God of popular Religion, which is a form restricted by his quality, representation, name, personality and is distinguished from all other Deities of other doctrines. The disadvantage of the gospel of personal extra-cosmic omnipotent Godhead who has created and governs this world in most of the religious schools is that this worship forms an unbridgeable gulf¹⁷ between God and man, Brahman and the world and the possibility of man ascending to the status of God becomes remote. The error created by man in his relation with God, a partial manifestation of the Divine, elevates an actual and practical differentiation in Being, Consciousness and Force into an essential division, confusion and ethical difficulty. If man has to ascent to the status of God, then he has to go beyond the paralysing division of the mind where Knowledge is not self-divided, Force is not self-divided, Being is not self-divided and there will be no idea clash with other ideas and no opposition of the will or force with other will or force.

 

            A Sadhak of integral Yoga has to realise Integral Godhead primarily as comprehensive Consciousness, Vijnana, the force of blissful Oneness, Harmony and Order, the harmonious invasion of 'fiery ocean of felicity,'¹² Truth, and Light; secondarily as impersonal Spiritual truth of the multiple Divine Concentration, Jnana, and this Light has descended sea like into an evolutionary world of Cosmic Ignorance and tertiarily as apprehensive Consciousness, Prajnana, cosmic differentiation, mental adoration of personal aspect of monotheistic and polytheistic Deities, Brahman and an infinite multiplicity of ignorant and suffering beings unaware of the Self.

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               The Divine or the Brahman of the East or the Absolute of the West has in its nature two sides or two terms of the Being, the fundamental Reality and the Becoming, an effectual Reality; it is only a pure infinite essence that can manifest in infinite ways. It is at once the supreme Person, the Being in its transcendental and cosmic Consciousness and Force, the Sachchidananda with infinite Quality and without any Quality, Saguna and Nirguna, Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnipresent which informs, embraces and governs all existences, the Controller of all energies, the Conscious in all that is Conscient and Inconscient, the inhabitant of all souls, minds, hearts and bodies, the Ruler and Over-ruler of all works, the Seer and Overseer of all happenings, the Enjoyer of all Delight, the Creator who has built all things in His own being, the All Person of whom all beings are personalities; in His Consciousness-Force He is the Creatrix Divine Mother, a Power and Energy working out of the Being; in His Being He is the Creator Father of all that is; in His Beauty and Joy He is the All-Beloved and All-Lover; in His existence He is the Friend of all creature; in His dynamism of Will to light and vision and Will to power and works He is the Master of all action; in His wisdom of state of Knowledge and power of Knowledge, He is the All-Teacher; in His world play He is the Divine Playmate. The Unknowable is something to us supreme, wonderful and ineffable by our mind-created speech, which continually formulates itself to our consciousness and continually escapes from the formulation it has made; but even when we are most aware of it, we cannot describe it because our language and thought can deal only with the relative. The Absolute does not deny the truth of His own existence but is so infinitely expansive that no finite positive iti iti (It is this, it is that) and finite negative, neti neti (It is not this, it is not that) can be formulated which can exhaust It or bind It to the limitation of the definition. So, the Divine can be limited neither by formlessness nor by form, neither by unity nor by multiplicity, neither by immobile stable status of Self nor by dynamic mobility of Nature; it can be restricted neither by these illimitable attributes nor by our most affirmative experiences which exceed all definitions, nor even can it be expressed by our largest conception of original self-concentration of Sachchidananda.

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               Though the Unknowable is not knowable by the finite mind or to our limited consciousness, it is not altogether and in every way unknowable; it is self-evident to an infinite Consciousness or a knowledge by Identity and the Spiritual Being within us can explore all the ranges of Consciousness from the dark Inconscient plane to the highest plane of Sachchidananda to unravel the whole of the Unknowable and its complete Divine manifestation.

              The human liberated Soul carries within him the triune Consciousness of the Individual, the Universal and the Transcendent, can alone work out at its critical turning point the movement of Divine self-manifestation which appears to us as involution and evolution of the impersonal Divine Consciousness between two terms of Ignorance and Knowledge. He is no longer considered as a subordinate or minor circumstance in the Divine Play or Lila of the Nara-Narayana, but one with the total movement of the Infinite, capable of incarnating Godhead Consciousness in himself. The individual Soul in Becoming arrives at Infinite Self-Knowledge and All-Knowledge when it knows the Supreme and Absolute as Bliss of Existence, Bliss of Consciousness and Bliss of Force or Will and possesses the Nature and Consciousness of the Transcendent and the Universal, the unity of One Being and all Beings and to live in that Knowledge and to transform his life by the evolution of seven-fold Power of Being (Brahman, the ancient Seers said is the Matter, is the Life, is the Mind, is the Supermind, Vijnana and is the triune glory of Sachchidananda) is his Divine destiny.

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               The main method or the indispensable self-disciplines of integral Yoga are derived from Ancient Vedanta (for example, the Isha, Taittiriya, Kena Upanishads etc) with comprehensive concentration as the principal instrument of sadhana, whereas the substitute methods or the dispensable self-disciplines of this Yoga are derived from the later Vedanta and the Tantra, where exclusive concentration is the chief instrument of Sadhana. The difference between the two Vedantic quests are that in the former two great formulas of existence, “One without a second”, ekamevadvitiyam¹⁰  and “All this is the Brahman”, sarvam khalu idam brahma¹¹ are successfully combined and hence Brahman is experienced as That which being known all is known, yasmin vijnate sarvam idam vijnatam; whereas in the latter quest exclusive importance is given to the first formula of existence to the total exclusion of the second formula and hence Brahman is experienced as That, which being known, all becomes unreal and an incomprehensible mystery, (mental) Maya. The exclusive quest of later Vedanta was a departure from the comprehensive quest of the ancient Vedanta, and the vehement, impatient longing of the former to possess the Divine exclusively gave birth to the psycho-physical methods of sadhana, whereas in the latter, integral faith, patience and courage to search the truth equally in Matter and Spirit gave birth to Spiritual methods of sadhana. The disadvantages of psycho-physical methods are that they stress the rise of the six Kundalini chakras from below, where the physical presence of the guru is indispensable in order to avoid any Spiritual fall and lower formulations are used for higher Spiritual gain. A dependency on psycho-physical methods only is to subject oneself to outer nature leading towards mechanised living, artificially constructed unity, and ‘will bring in a limitation and subjection to Prakriti,'¹⁸’ which can give birth to tamasic impatience and rajasic ambition of the exclusive kind. But if it can be an efficient subordinate of the Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental methods, then it will be the most powerful of all means for physical transformation.

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            Integral Yoga through Savitri book proposes a Sadhaka to attain the highest status of Jnana and Bhakti Yoga by becoming Karma Yogi or by doing consecrated action.

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               It proposes to pursue sadhana or Karma Yoga in double seclusion. Seclusion from the enjoyment of the five sense organs and seclusion from the attraction of the outer world.

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               Karma Yoga establishes a Sadhaka in kinghood of possession of inner and outer kingdom; Jnana Yoga establishes a Sadhaka in becoming a adventurer and pioneer of new Consciousness and of protecting the Kingdom or of guarding Truth’s diamond throne; Bhakti Yoga fulfils life of outer kingdom by manifestation of Beauty, Delight and Love. It enlarges the inner kingdom as the Divine 'Love’s golden wings have power to’⁵ bridge the void in Consciousness; ‘The feet of love tread naked hardest'’⁵ Subconscient and Inconscient worlds; Love labours in the depths of Inconscient, 'exults on the heights'⁵ of Sachchidananda’ to divinise life.

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               After one is established in the above three Yogas, he reconciles them and out of the effort of reconciliation a fourth Yoga is born, known as Yoga of Self-perfection. This higher instrumentation is responsible for Subconscient, Inconscient and Cellular transformation action. These are identified as the highest Call of integral Yoga through which the Divine Contact in the material world is established.

 

OM TAT SAT

                                                                                                References:

1: “Arjuna said: Those seekers of Bhakti Yoga who thus by a constant union seek after Thy personal Form and those seekers of Jnana Yoga who seek after Thy unmanifest Immutable impersonal Form, which of them are greater Yoga? The Blessed Lord said those who are most united with Me and adore Me through constant union, emotional mind is settled in Me and are possessed of the supreme faith of Bhakti Yoga, I consider them to be the greatest Yogi.” The Gita-12.1, 2,

2:  “The sacrifices offered with a view of getting personal fruit and benefit and also for ostentation, know that to be rajasic sacrifice.” (The Gita-17.12) “If one does work with attachment to the fruits of work then that sacrifice does not go to the Divine but to the ego, to Asura, Yakshas and Rakshasas.” (The Gita-17.4) “They who desire the fulfilment of the fruit of their works, siddhi, on earth sacrifice to Gods because by that sacrificial work without knowledge, one gets easy and swift result, khipram siddhirbhabati,” (The Gita-4.12). "Therefore without attachment perform ever the work that is to be done (done for the sake of the world, lokasangraha, as is made clear immediately afterwards); for by doing work without attachment man attains to the highest." (The Gita-3.19) Sacrificial work with knowledge of the wheel of Works, evam pravartitam chakram, (The Gita-3.16) and without attachment leads to higher planes of Consciousness.

3: CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-74,

4: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-72, "On the other hand, the weakness of a contemplative quietistic spirituality is that it arrives at this result by a too absolute abstraction and in the end it turns into a nothing or a fiction the human soul whose aspiration was yet all the time the whole sense of this attempt at union; for without the soul and its aspiration liberation and union could have no meaning. The little that this way of thinking recognises of his other powers of existence, it relegates to an inferior preliminary action which never arrives at any full or satisfying realisation in the Eternal and Infinite. Yet these things too which it restricts unduly, the potent will, the strong yearning of love, the positive light and all-embracing intuition of the conscious mental being are from the Divine, represent essential powers of him and must have some justification in their Source and some dynamic way of self-fulfilment in him." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-339-340,

5: Savitri-592,

6: The Gita-4.27,

7: The Gita-12.11, 12,

8: The Gita-12.16,

9: The Gita-6.35, 13.8,

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10: Chandogya Upanishad-6.2.1, 

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11: Chandogya Upanishad-3.14.1,

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12: Savitri-237,

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13: (Death said to Savitri) "Two only are the doors of man’s escape,

Death of his body Matter’s gate to peace,

Death of his soul his last felicity." Savitri-635,

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14: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-335,

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15: "In the transformation of ordinary religious worship into the Yoga of pure Bhakti we see this development from the motived and interested worship of popular religion into a principle of motiveless and self-existent love. This last is in fact the touch- stone of the real Bhakti and shows whether we are really in the central way or are only upon one of the bypaths leading to it. We have to throw away the props of our weakness, the motives of the ego, the lures of our lower nature before we can deserve the divine union." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga-553, "It may be asked how is that devotion high and noble, udara, which seeks God only for the worldly boons he can give or as a refuge in sorrow and suffering, and not the Divine for its own sake? Do not egoism, weakness, desire reign in such an adoration and does it not belong to the lower nature? Moreover, where there is not knowledge, the devotee does not approach the Divine in his integral all-embracing truth, vasudevah sarvam iti, (The Gita-7.19) but constructs imperfect names and images of the Godhead which are only reflections of his own need, temperament and nature, and he worships them to help or appease his natural longings. He constructs for the Godhead the name and form of Indra or Agni, of Vishnu or Shiva, of a divinised Christ or Buddha, or else some composite of natural qualities, an indulgent God of love and mercy, or a severe God of righteousness and justice, or an awe-inspiring God of wrath and terror and flaming punishments, or some amalgam of any of these, and to that he raises his altars without and in his heart and mind and falls down before it to demand from it worldly good and joy or healing of his wounds or a sectarian sanction for an erring, dogmatic, intellectual, intolerent knowledge. All this up to a certain point is true enough. Very rare is the great soul who knows that Vasudeva the omnipresent Being is all that is, vasudevah.  sarvam iti sa mahatma sudurlabhah. (The Gita-7.19) Men are led away by various outer desires which take from them the working of  the  inner  knowledge,  kamais  tais  tair  hritajnanah. (The Gita-7.20) Ignorant, they resort to other godheads, imperfect forms of the deity which correspond  to  their  desire,  prapadyante  ’nyadevatah (The Gita-7.20).  Limited, they set up this or that rule and cult, tam tam niyamam asthaya, (The Gita-7.20) which satisfies the need of their nature. And in all this it is a compelling personal determination, it is this narrow need of their own nature that they follow and take for the highest truth, incapable yet of the infinite and its largeness. The Godhead in these forms gives them their desires if their faith is whole; but these fruits and gratifications are temporary and it is a petty intelligence and unformed reason which makes the pursuit of them its principle of religion and life." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-285-286, "But the weakness of the kinetic and the emotional religions is that they are too much absorbed in some divine Personality and in the divine values of the finite. And, even when they have a conception of the infinite Godhead, they do not give us the full satisfaction of knowledge because they do not follow it out into its most ultimate and supernal tendencies. These religions fall short of a complete absorption in the Eternal and the perfect union by identity, — and yet to that identity in some other way, if not in the abstractive, since there all oneness has its basis, the spirit that is in man must one day arrive." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-339, "The weakness of the human heart wants only fair and comforting truths or in their absence pleasant fables; it will not have the truth in its entirety because there there is much that is not clear and pleasant and comfortable, but hard to understand and harder to bear. The raw religionist, the superficial optimistic thinker, the sentimental idealist, the man at the mercy of his sensations and emotions agree in twisting away from the sterner conclusions, the harsher and fiercer aspects of universal existence." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-381,

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16: "No God-knowledge can be integral, perfect or universally satisfying which leaves unfulfilled their absolute claim, no wisdom utterly wise which in its intolerant asceticism of search negates or in the pride of pure knowledge belittles the spiritual reality behind these ways of the Godhead... The greatness of the central thought of the Gita in which all its threads are gathered up and united, consists in the synthetic value of a conception which recognises the whole nature of the soul of man in the universe and validates by a large and wise unification its many-sided need of the supreme and infinite Truth, Power, Love, Being to which our humanity turns in its search for perfection and immortality and some highest joy and power and peace. There is a strong and wide endeavour towards a comprehensive spiritual view of God and man and universal existence. Not indeed that everything without any exception is seized in these eighteen chapters, no spiritual problem left for solution; but still so large a scheme is laid out that we have only to fill in, to develop, to modify, to stress, to follow out points, to work out hint and illuminate adumbration in order to find a clue to any further claim of our intelligence and need of our spirit. The Gita itself does not evolve any quite novel solution out of its own questionings. To arrive at the comprehensiveness at which it aims, it goes back behind the great philosophical systems to the original Vedanta of the Upanishads; for there we have the widest and profoundest extant synthetic vision of spirit and man and cosmos. But what is in the Upanishads undeveloped to the intelligence because wrapped up in a luminous kernel of intuitive vision and symbolic utterance, the Gita brings out in the light of a later intellectual thinking and distinctive experience." CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-340,

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17: “For myself it was Ramakrishna who personally came & first turned me to this Yoga. Vivekananda in the Alipore jail gave me the foundations of that knowledge which is the basis of our sadhana. The error of the Mission is to keep too much to the forms of Ramakrishna & Vivekananda & not keep themselves open for new outpourings of their spirit, — the error of all “Churches” and organised religious bodies.” CWSA-36/Autobiographical Note/p-177-178, “But I can tell you about my own experience. Until the age of about twenty-five, all I knew was the God of religions, God  as men have created him, and I did not want him at any price. I denied his existence but with the certitude that if such a God did exist, I detested him…When I was about twenty-five I discovered the inner God and at the same time I learned that the God described by most Western religions is none other than the Great Adversary…When I came to India, in 1914, and became acquainted with Sri Aurobindo’s teaching, everything became very clear.” The Mother/TMCW-10/On Thoughts and Aphorisms-331-332, “That is precisely the distortion in the Western attitude as opposed to the attitude of the Gita. It is extremely difficult for the Western mind to understand in a living and concrete manner that everything is the Divine.” The Mother/TMCW-10/On Thoughts and Aphorisms/p-101,

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18: "The Prana is not only a force for the action of physical and vital energy, but supports also the mental and spiritual action. Therefore the full and free working of the pranic shakti is required not only for the lower but still necessary use, but also for the free and full operation of mind and supermind and spirit in the instrumentality of our complex human nature. That is the main sense of the use of exercises of Pranayama for control of the vital force and its motions which is so important and indispensable a part of certain systems of Yoga. The same mastery must be got by the seeker of the integral Yoga; but he may arrive at it by other means and in any case he must not be dependent on any physical or breathing exercise for its possession and maintenance, for that will at once bring in a limitation and subjection to Prakriti. Her instrumentation has to be used flexibly by the Purusha, but not to be a fixed control on the Purusha. The necessity of the pranic force, however, remains and will be evident to our self-study and experience. It is in the Vedic image the steed and conveyance of the embodied mind and will, va¯ hana. If it is full of strength and swiftness and a plenitude of all its powers, then the mind can go on the courses of its action with a plenary and unhampered movement. But if it is lame or soon tired or sluggish or weak, then an incapacity is laid on the effectuation of the will and activity of the mind. The same rule holds good of the supermind when it first comes into action. There are indeed states and activities in which the mind takes up the pranic shakti into itself and this dependence is not felt at all; but even then the force is there, though involved in the pure mental energy. The supermind, when it gets into full strength, can do pretty well what it likes with the pranic shakti, and we find that in the end this life power is transformed into the type of a supramentalised prana which is simply one motor power of that greater consciousness. But this belongs to a later stage of the siddhi of the Yoga." CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-733-734,

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19: "The Asram has nothing to do with Hindu religion or culture or any religion or nationality. The Truth of the Divine which is the spiritual reality behind all religions and the descent of the supramental which is not known to any religion are the sole things which will be the foundation of the work of the future.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA-35/Letters on Himself and the Ashram/p-701

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