Introduction Physical Transformation—The Early Beginnings
getting the higher, the supramental siddhi in the substance of the body itself.
The body was not ready to hold the charge of luminous immortality in it. It did not possess the necessary spiritual merit for this purpose: it was still an unbaked vessel, atapta tanu, a pot fashioned from unprepared clay; another kind of tapasya was needed to overcome the difficulty. The cells of the body had not awakened yet to the reality that is seated deep within them.
What the Supramental will do, the mind cannot foresee or lay down. The mind is Ignorance seeking for the Truth, the Supramental by its very definition is the Truth-Consciousness: Truth in possession of itself and fulfilling itself by its own power.
Which God would willingly come down and accept this challenge, consent to pass through the portals of the birth that is a death? Only the Divine himself—the Avatar. He comes and accepts the mortal’s lot.
The concern was not with the beatitude of heaven but with the circumstance that is present in this ignorant world, down below in this mud.
But then, consequently, with the pressure from above the revolt of the subconscient from below also became fiercer. And there was the real danger that if the Godhead should awake too soon, that awakening might lead to total destruction, the support, ādhāra, not being there ready.
The reality of the falsehood in its operational aspects and in its harsh darkish details had to be admitted, had to be fully cognized in pragmatism of the entire spiritual endeavour.
In the filth and mire was kindled a fire, a new fire which has no smoky flames but which turns itself into an ever-growing blaze, into undying glory of the heavenly sun. The gain may not be immediately visible, but its occult print is already there for the eye of the finer vision to see. This definite gain is consolidated by giving to it a subtle-luminous body of the expressive Word; this is something wonderful, because the body of the Word is not only indestructible; it is a radiant centre from which spread dynamic contents it holds.
Here a unique thing has happened in the annals of spiritual time. It is now expected that, one day, this shall bring the “divine whole” to the transformed earth.
This fiery power could now enter into his being and fill his heart with her ecstatic radiances.
Voice of Infinity, sound in my heart,— Call of the One! Stamp there thy radiance, never to part, O living Sun.
To the Buddhist all life is pain and suffering and distress, primarily because of man’s ignorant cravings and a thousand wants in the pursuit of the futile. For him the only way out of this duhkha-filled mortality is to follow the Eightfold Path because, pragmatically, there is no way by which all that is here can be redeemed. The Large Boat can ferry to the shore of the Void or the indefinable Shunya, but what it brings back is just its calm iconic image. This is a solution no doubt, to escape from harshness of the day or from grim suffocation of the night. However, it has only a one-way validity and hence cannot be integrally satisfying or fulfilling. In it the life-urges remain unattended; perhaps neither can anyone rest peacefully in the blank of the Self. In contrast to this, for the Adwaitin of the Illusionist brand there is no question of bringing back anything when, with the appearance of knowledge, this illusory world itself,—which is after all a product of the ignorance of the Self,—disappears. For the ecstatic Vaishnava this whole creation is nothing but God’s unceasing Play or līlā and indeed there is no issue to bother him.
The entire I-ness is dissolved, the name and the form,—as does a river flowing into the vastness of the ocean loses its distinctness.
then it is for the first time that we witness the possibility of this cave becoming a place of habitation for that Light itself. We begin to see a new beginning.
The sine qua non for a complete transformation to take place is that, at first, the supermind must manifest itself in the body-mind. This body-mind or the mind of the living matter, the very cells of the body must receive the supermind in them, in the body, and fix it in it.
It is actually the psychic quality, the psychic stuff, which gives immortality to things in the evolutionary world and therefore the psychic transformation of the physical has to precede any further progress towards the completer transformation. Going one step farther, unless physicalisation of the psychic occurs, unless this groundwork is kept fully ready, there is no question of the higher supramental transformation occurring. That would be metaphysically as well as occult-spiritually wrong.
Establishing the Mind of Light is therefore the prerequisite for the work of transformation proper to commence. Without this prerequisite the attempt would be a failure.
the Spirit’s luminous and all-pervasive calm, and was in possession of the vast immobile bliss of the Being. Soon his rooms would get lit with an endless Light, and rapture would be coursing through his nerves, and through every cell of his body. In a mute blaze of ecstasy, and preserving the “living sense of the Imperishable”, even in the bodily existence, he would proceed towards his goal. That was great indeed, that was absolutely marvellous. If the bodily existence was set ablaze in this way, it meant that there was the breathtaking realisation or the siddhi of the Mind of Light in him, that the physical had started receiving the supramental. Sri
It is said that Pythagoras had a thigh of gold, and that Rishi Vamadeva, after crossing the hundredth year, lived in a golden body for sixteen full years. Surely something golden had happened in that far past, though on an individual level, but now the Mind of Light has made the body its permanent base, permanent home.
we have his magnum opus Savitri,—the epic which embraces all the siddhis achieved by him, achieved up to 15 November 1950 when around that time he had formally stopped working on it: Savitri is the most complete Record of Yoga of his yoga-tapasya—and
Thy golden Light came down into my brain And the grey rooms of mind sun-touched became A bright reply to Wisdom’s occult plane, A calm illumination and a flame. Thy golden Light came down into my throat, And all my speech is now a tune divine, A paean song of thee my single note; My words are drunk with the Immortal’s wine. Thy golden Light came down into my heart Smiting my life with Thy eternity; Now has it grown a temple where Thou art And all its passions point towards only Thee. Thy golden Light came down into my feet: My earth is now thy playfield and thy seat. The last line of the earlier draft was The earth is now thy playfield, O my sweet
A little later, around 1942, we have a line in Savitri about this realisation: The primal Energy took him in its arms; His brain was wrapped in overwhelming Light, An all-embracing knowledge seized his heart: Thoughts rose in him no earthly mind can hold, Mights played that never coursed through mortal nerves: He scanned the secrets of the Overmind, He bore the rapture of the Oversoul.
We have a detailed account of these developments in Savitri. Its Protagonist has based his life upon Eternity. He knows the source from which his spirit came, but he has accepted the body of the earth. The cosmic past weighs heavily in it, and there is sloth and tamas of the physical, there is the reaction and revolt of the vital, and there is the mind’s incapacity to soar with thoughts into the blue empyrean. It is in this mould that the powers and possibilities of the spirit have to enter in and work. There is a degree of receptivity but the members feel tired soon. There is the constant pull of the subconscient cords, there is the earthly gravitation dragging down the sense of joy, the free and deep-ranging perception of intuition, the perfection of the careful and skilled worker.
The imperative is all here must learn to obey the higher law, must move in the happy swift rhythms of the expressive Truth. The body’s cells must hold the Immortal’s flame. This has happened. The Mother reveals: “As for the body, it is being trained to live only through the Divine, on the Divine, for everything—everything, everything, everything without exception. It is only when the consciousness is linked as much as it can be with the Divine Consciousness that there comes the sense of existence. It has now an extraordinary intensity. When the physical will get converted, it will be a solid thing, you know, which does not move—and complete. And so concrete… The difference between being in the Divine, existing only through Him and in Him, and then being in the consciousness (not the ordinary, naturally, but the human consciousness) is so great that the one seems to be death beside the other, so much is it… That is to say, the physical realisation is truly a concrete realisation.
… It was very white. It was very slim (slender)—it was pretty. Truly a harmonious form. So it was the first time. I did not know at all, I had no idea of what it would be like, none at all, and I saw—I was like that, I had become like that… The supramental world exists in a permanent way, and I am there permanently in a supramental body.
When I am on ‘this’ side—that is, in the realm of the physical consciousness—and I see the supramental power, the supramental light and substance constantly permeating matter, I am seeing and participating in the construction of this zone.”
Part One: Excerpts from Savitri
Her will must cancel her body’s destiny An absolute supernatural darkness falls On man sometimes when he draws near to God: An hour comes when fail all Nature’s means; Forced out from the protecting Ignorance And flung back on his naked primal need, He at length must cast from him his surface soul And be the ungarbed entity within: That hour had fallen now on Savitri. A point she had reached where life must be in vain Or, in her unborn element awake, Her will must cancel her body’s destiny. For only the unborn spirit’s timeless power Can lift the yoke imposed by birth in time.
His soul and body take that splendid stamp In the transient symbol of humanity draped, He feels his substance of undying self And loses his kinship to mortality. A beam of the Eternal smites his heart, His thought stretches into infinitude: All in him turns to spirit vastnesses. His soul breaks out to join the Oversoul, His life is oceaned by that superlife. He has drunk from the breasts of the Mother of the worlds; A topless supernature fills his frame… Then is revealed in man the overt Divine. A static Oneness and dynamic Power Descend in him, the integral Godhead’s seals; His soul and body take that splendid stamp. A long dim preparation is man’s life.
A heavenlier function with a finer mode Lit with its grace man’s outward earthliness; The soul’s experience of its deeper sheaths No more slept drugged by Matter’s dominance.
All here must learn to obey a higher law, Our body’s cells must hold the Immortal’s flame.
A genius heightened in his body’s cells A genius heightened in his body’s cells That knew the meaning of his fate-hedged works Akin to the march of unaccomplished Powers Beyond life’s arc in spirit’s immensities.
A brighter heavenlier sun must soon illume This dusk room with its dark internal stair, The infant soul in its small nursery school Mid objects meant for a lesson hardly learned Outgrow its early grammar of intellect And its imitation of Earth-Nature’s art, Its earthly dialect to God-language change, In living symbols study Reality And learn the logic of the Infinite. The Ideal must be Nature’s common truth, The body illumined with the indwelling God, The heart and mind feel one with all that is, A conscious soul live in a conscious world.
Aware of his occult omnipotent Source, Allured by the omniscient Ecstasy, A living centre of the Illimitable Widened to equate with the world’s circumference, He turned to his immense spiritual fate… Death lay beneath him like a gate of sleep.