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The trouble with having an open mind is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. Your mind can make a heaven out of hell and a hell out of heaven. The choice is yours. The age of travel and conquests is over. Even if we reach the seventh galaxy, we will go there helmeted and mechanized.
We will find ourselves exactly as we are now. Helpless children in the face of death. living beings who are not too sure how they live, why they are alive, or where they are going. One and the same pervasive mechanism stifles us. The trap is closing inexurably. But as always, it turns out that our bleakest adversities are also our most promising opportunities and that the dark passage is only a passage leading to a greater light.
Hence, with our backs against the wall, we are facing the last territory left for us to explore. the ultimate adventure, ourselves. The value of an experience is measured by its capacity to transform life. Otherwise, it is simply an empty dream or a hallucination. If we proceed calmly, patiently, and with sincerity, bravely facing the difficulties of the road, and boy is it rugged enough, there is no reason that the window should not open at some point and let the sun shine on us forever.
Actually, it is not one but several windows that open one after another, each time on a wider perspective, new dimension of our own kingdom. And each time it means a change of consciousness as radical as going from sleep to the waking state. We are going to outline the main stages of these changes of consciousness in this video.
All developed mental men, those who get beyond the average have in one way or other or at least at certain times and for certain purposes separated the two parts of their mind. the active part which is a factory of thoughts and the quiet masterful part which is at once a witness. The yogi goes still further. He or she is not only a master there but even while in mind in a way gets out of it and stands above or quite back from it and free.
For them the image of the factory of thoughts is no longer quite valid. For they seize that thoughts come from outside from the universal mind or universal nature, sometimes formed and distinct, sometimes unformed and then they are given shapes somewhere in us. It is quite a landscape to see minds working once we can see it.
It feels as good as watching sunset in Hawaii. The principal business of our mind is either a response of acceptance or a refusal to these thought waves. First lesson is to understand that mental consciousness is only the human range which no more exhausts all the possible ranges of consciousness than human sight exhausts all the gradations of color or human hearing all the gradations of sound.
For there is much above or below that is to man invisible and inaudible. So there are ranges of consciousness above and below the human range with which the normal human has no contact and they seem to be invisible. Let's call them supermental or overmental ranges. What we call unconsciousness is simply other consciousness. We are really no more unconscious when we are asleep or stunned or drugged or dead or in any other state than when we are plunged in inner thought oblivious of our physical selves and our surroundings.
For anyone who has advanced even a little way in self- knowing, this is a most elementary proposition. As we progress and awaken to the soul in us and things, we shall realize that there is a consciousness also in the plant, in the metal, in the atom, in electricity, in everything that belongs to physical nature.
We shall find even that it is not really in all respects a lower or more limited mode than the mental. On the contrary, it is in many inanimate forms more intense, rapid, poignant, though less evolved towards the surface. The task of the beginning self-reflection student is therefore to become conscious in every way at all the levels of his being and all the degrees of universal existence, not just mentally.
become conscious in herself and in others and in all things while awake and in sleep and finally to learn to become conscious in what people call death because to the extent that we have been conscious in our life we shall be conscious in our death. There was one yogi who confided to his disciples that the capital period of his intellectual development was when he could see clearly that what the intellect said might be correct and not correct.
That what the intellect justified was true and its opposite also was true. He never admitted a truth in the mind without simultaneously keeping it open to the contrary of it. And the first result was that the prestige of the intellect was gone. Every argument constructs its twin. Assertions birth its counter assertion.
The mind becomes a craftsman of miragages capable of building palaces out of one material and immediately erecting an inverted palace out of the same blocks. Truth no longer appears as a single flame, but as a fire with two tongues. The experience carries an almost alchemical shock. Intellect, once the sovereign organ of certainty, now performs as a juggler, tossing contraries into the air.
One can ride its rhythm without mistaking it for bedrock. By recognizing the twinborn nature of ideas, we can step beyond the illusion of single truths and enter the theater where consciousness itself stages its endless play. This is a world of slow evolution in which man has emerged out of the beast and is still not out of it.
Light out of darkness and a higher consciousness out of first a dead and then a struggling and troubled unconsciousness. If you are a curious mind and want to know how AI can recognize images and generate ideas, I found the course on Brilliant that is super insightful. This course teaches how machines learn, recognize patterns, and make decisions through neural networks and algorithms.
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It is because people do not understand what the supermind is or realize the significance of the emergence of consciousness in a world of inconscious matter that they are unable to realize this inevitability. I suppose a matter-of-act observer, if there had been one at the time of the unrelieved reign of inanimate matter in the earth's beginning, would have criticized any promise of the emergence of life in a world of dead earth and rock and mineral as an absurdity and a chimera.
So too, afterwards he would have repeated this mistake and regarded the emergence of thought and reason in an animal world as an absurdity and a chimera. It is the same now with the appearance of supermind in the stumbling mentality of this world of human consciousness and its reasoning ignorance. The supermental evolution does not mean that humanity as a whole will become supermental.
What is more likely to happen is that the supermental principle will be established in the evolution by the descent just as the mental principle was established by the appearance of thinking mind and man in earthly life. There will be a race of supermental beings on the earth just as now there is a race of mental beings.
Man himself will find a greater possibility of rising to the plains intermediary between his mind and super mind and making their powers effective in his life which will mean a great change in humanity on earth. But it is not likely that the mental stage will disappear from the ascending ladder. And if so, the continued existence of a mental race will be necessary so as to form a stage between the vital and the supplemental in the evolutionary movement of the spirit.
Such a descent of higher beings may be envisaged as a part of the process of the change. But the main part of the change will be the appearance of the supermental being and the organization of a supermental nature. here as a mental being has appeared and the mental nature organized itself during the last stage of the evolution.
I prefer nowadays not to speak of the descent of the higher beings because my experience is that it leads to a vain and often egoistic romanticism which distracts the attention from the real work that of the realization of the self and the transformation of nature. [Music] We do not believe in transformation because mind, life and body are an ignorance, an illusion.
The only reality is the featureless relationless self. Life is a thing of relations. In the pure self, all life and relations disappear. It is not intended to supermentalize humanity at large, but to establish the principle of the supermental consciousness in the earth evolution. If that is done, all that is needed will be evolved by the superental power itself.
It is not therefore important that the mission should be widespread. What is important is that the thing should be done at all in however small a number. That is the only difficulty. If the transformation of the body is complete, that means no subjection to death. It does not mean that one will be bound to keep the same body for all time.
One creates a new body for oneself when one wants to change. But how it will be done cannot be said now. The present method is by physical birth. Some occultists suppose that a time will come when that will not be necessary. But the question must be left for the supermental evolution to decide. The questions about the supermind cannot be answered profitably.
Supermind cannot be described in terms that the mind will understand because the terms will be mental and mind will understand them in a mental way and mental sense and miss their true import. If one has to get a new consciousness which surpasses the reasoning intellect, can one do it on lines which are to be judged and understood by the reasoning intellect? If one does that, will one ever get out of the range of the reasoning intelligence into what is beyond it? And if one does, how shall others judge what one is doing by the
intellectual measure? How can one judge what is beyond the ordinary consciousness when one is oneself in the ordinary consciousness? Is it not only by exceeding yourself that you can feel, experience, judge what exceeds you? What is the value of a judgment without the feeling and experience? What the superal will do, the mind cannot foresee or lay down.
The mind is ignorant seeking for the truth. The supermental by its very definition is the truth consciousness. Truth in possession of itself and fulfilling itself by its own power. The whole of humanity cannot be changed at once. What has to be done is to bring the higher consciousness down into the earth consciousness and establish it there as a constant realized force.
Just as mind and life have been established and embodied in matter, so to establish and embody the supermental force. Opening from below means that the supermental force descending awakes a response from below in the earth consciousness so that it is possible for a supermental activity to be formed in the material itself.
It is only the very highest supermental force descending from above and the opening from below that can victoriously handle the physical nature and annihilate its difficulties says Shri Orurabindo. It is only when life force descended from the life plane into the material that active and conscious organized life was possible. So it was only when the mind descended that the latent mind in matter awoke and could be organized.
The supermental descent must create the same kind of opening from below. Super mind can be seen biologically as an extension of the same force that shaped molecules into living cells and cells into nervous systems now carrying thought into a new bandwidth. From this perspective, Supermind functions like a latent organ of perception, waiting for the right evolutionary pressure to activate.
Just as Sai transformed the range of early organisms, Supermind promises to transform the range of the human species, reorganizing how meaning itself is processed. All renaissances before carry a trace of this wider intelligence breaking through. When mathematics discovers symmetry principles that mirror mystical cosmologies or when poetry anticipates discoveries in physics, we glimpse a collective mind that is already operating above the level of isolated rational thought.
Supermind expresses itself in these convergences where different domains suddenly resonate with one another, producing coherence that feels both inevitable and alive. Psychologically, supermental evolution appears as a shift in the structure of awareness. Mind normally organizes through comparison, sequence, and contrast.
Supermind organizes through simultaneity. Instead of perceiving fragments and stitching them together, consciousness experiences holes unfolding in real time. In this mode, intuition is a default operation of thought. Imagination ceases to be fantasy and becomes a working faculty of reality making. A direct participation in the architecture of existence.
Spiritually, supermental evolution is described as the moment when life itself recognizes its divinity without needing to escape the material plane. It is not a rejection of Earth, but a flowering of Earth into its higher potential. While humanity debates endlessly about politics, economies, and technological trends, the real project may be this silent rewiring of consciousness.
One morning, what once required decades of study and meditation may begin to surface spontaneously, as if the species were suddenly handed a new instrument.