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Understanding with the body*

“As plant-life contains in itself the obscure possibility of the conscious animal, as the animal-mind
is astir with the movements of feeling and perception and the rudiments of conception that are the
first ground for man the thinker, so man the mental being is sublimated by the endeavour of the
evolutionary Energy to develop out of him the spiritual man, the fully conscious being, man exceeding
his first material self and discoverer of his true self and highest nature.

“But if this is to be accepted as the intention in Nature, there are two questions that put themselves
at once and call for a definitive answer, — first, the exact nature of the transition from mental to
spiritual being and, when that is given, the process and method of the evolution of the spiritual out
of the mental man. It would at first sight seem evident that as each gradation emerges not only out
of its precedent grade but in it, as Life emerges in Matter and is largely limited and determined in
its self-expression by its material conditions, as Mind emerges in Life-in-Matter and is similarly
limited and determined in its self-expression by life-conditions and material conditions, so Spirit
too must emerge in a Mind embodied in Life-in-Matter and must be largely limited and determined
by the mental conditions in which it has its roots as well as the life-conditions, the material conditions
of its existence here.... “ 1

As the beginnings of the supramental life, which must be the next realisation in the
unfolding of the universe, develop, perhaps not in a very obvious way but very surely, it
becomes more and more obvious that the most difficult way to approach this supramental
life is intellectual activity.

It could be said that it is much more difficult to pass from the mental to the supramental
life than to pass from a certain psychic emotion in life — something that is like a reflection,
a luminous emanation of the divine Presence in matter — to the supramental consciousness;
it is much easier to pass from that into the supramental consciousness than to pass from
the highest intellectual speculation to any supramental vibration. Perhaps it is the word
that misleads us! Perhaps it is because we call it “supramental” that we expect to reach it
through a higher intellectual mental activity? But the fact is very different. With this very
high, very pure, very noble intellectual activity, one seems to move towards a kind of
cold, powerless abstraction, a frozen, an icy light which is surely very remote from life
and still further away from the experience of the supramental reality.

* Heading provided by the Editor.

1 Sri Aurobindo. Birth Centenary Library, Volume 19. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
Trust; 1970, pp. 851-2.

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