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Comprehending & Apprehending Supermind

The Supermind is described in The Life Divine in very simple terms. Try this exercise. Close your eyes and think of yourself as a single person. Now think of yourself in different roles that you play: son or daughter, husband or wife, mother or father, friend, brother or sister, employer or employee, etc. Now imagine successively all of these different aspects of yourself at the same time. You could add that you are a citizen, a devotee, from a certain caste, or city. Try to see yourself as all these roles simultaneously in your imagination. You can also think of yourself when you were much younger than you are now. You can imagine yourself when you are older. You can do all of these without ceasing to be who you are. You are something more than all of these images. You can even imagine yourself as a baby and old man or old woman at the very same time. Your past and future selves can exist simultaneously in your mind outside the flow of time.

This power of imagination is similar to the power the Divine uses to create forms and personalities out of itself. As mind formulates images and ideas, things that are real to the mind, in Supermind the Divine formulates Real-Ideas that become manifest realities in the universe. Real-Ideas express real Truths and Powers of Sat. All manifest realities are actually different forms of the Divine, expressions of truths and potentialities latent within the unmanifest. No matter what the Divine creates, the Divine still remains what it is and it never exhausts its possibilities since they are infinite. This plane or creative capacity is what Sri Aurobindo calls the Comprehending Supermind, the power of the Divine to create real images, forms of itself. In this plane there is no space or time. All things past, present and future exist simultaneously in consciousness. Supermind is a plane of Knowledge and Truth-Consciousness. Each of the forms created in Supermind is fully conscious that it is an expression of the Divine Consciousness. There is no loss of consciousness or self-forgetfulness. There is no division or Ignorance.

Let us take the experience one step further to see how these forms separate and become individual centers of consciousness. Choose any one of those forms of yourself which you are imagining and look out from its eyes on the other forms of yourself. Think of yourself as a baby, and look out at yourself when you were ten or twenty or getting married. The moment you concentrate through the eyes of one of your personalities, you can get a sense of distance or space between one form and the others. Until you assume the specific viewpoint of one of your forms, there is no sense of space. The moment you concentrate in one of them and look out from that vantage point, the others move to some imaginary distance from it in your mind. This is how the Divine creates the sense of space. Of course, all the time each of the forms is the One, the space between them is the One and the experience of their interrelationship is that One too. He says space is Sachchidananda’s objective self-extension of itself.

Imagine you are yourself as a baby with all your different selves surrounding you. Now have the baby turn around and look at one after the other of your other selves making a full circle. You have just created time, because you have created the perception of change, a change in the experience of your consciousness. One moment you are conscious of one thing and the next moment you are conscious of something else. As long as you are always conscious of everything simultaneously, there is no sense of time because there is no change. Sachchidananda cannot know time because it is the consciousness of the changeless One. But the moment you concentrate through the eyes of one form and watch the changing experience around you, through those eyes you get a sense of past, present and future.

Shakespeare could see in his mind all the characters of his creation at the same time. But that is not enough. He has to identify with each of these characters and feel from their individual point of view in order to give them life. He has to take the individual perspective of each limited form. They are all forms of Shakespeare and all exist only in his mind. When he concentrates on one of the characters and looks out at the world through its eyes, he creates the sense of action and events occurring in time and space. Shakespeare does this by the power of his creative imagination and what he creates are mental images. The Divine does this by the power of what Sri Aurobindo calls the Apprehending Supermind and what the Divine creates are real forms of itself manifest in the universe. 



book | by Dr. Radut