"The Longest Story Ever Told"
And still above the overmental level, there is what Sri Aurobindo calls the Supramental – the Truth-Consciousness, a condition which is very difficult to describe in words or understand mentally. It is a state in which the essential truth of everything is perceived, and everything is seen as a manifestation of one truth. There is a complete unity and no division.
In these incredible ranges of consciousness of the mind, we, the common human beings, are somewhere near the intellectual mind and the thought mind. On rare occasions we go into some higher states but then we tend to fall back into our common condition. Evolution has still very far to go.
Thus, in the story of the Avatars, Krishna establishes the Overmental Consciousness upon earth and Kalki establishes the Supramental consciousness.
In this long story that we have been hearing, the coming of the human being has been a capital step in evolution, because now for the first time there is a creature which is aware of itself. And he is aware that he is aware of himself. He is aware of his own consciousness, consciousness of others, consciousness in inanimate things to a certain extent. He is also aware of the levels of consciousness within himself. And for the first time he can consciously direct the process of evolution. Until now it was Nature or that divinity secret within the inconscience, which has been aspiring to higher states of consciousness and driving evolution. But the human being is aware of higher levels of consciousness and can consciously rise into them. And the few who choose to grow in consciousness are called yogis, the yoga is only a conscious process of evolution. Instead of waiting a million years for Nature to drive him and flog him through hard lessons of life, he chooses to skip a few thousand lives and chooses to grow as much as possible within the present life. And that process of conscious growth we call Yoga.
Our story has now reached somewhere near the present period of humanity, and a chapter ends here. What comes next is not just another chapter but a new part altogether. The change taking place today is so radical and so different from the relatively small leaps of consciousness that we have seen before, that nothing that has happened before can compare with it. And the new part of our story is ushered in by the Kalki Avatar.
What does the Kalki do? First, the Kalki establishes a new level of consciousness. Second, he gives a new direction to the whole process of evolution. Third, he builds a stairway which allows the rest of humanity to follow him to that new level of consciousness. To give a simile: if you have to find your way to a lost city in the jungles, someone has to take the initiative, cut the jungle, find the short cuts, the long ways, the detours and traps, the false paths. He must chart out a map of the whole jungle, cut the shortest way through it and in the process face the thorns, bleeding as he goes along, until he reaches the city. And then he has to guide the rest along the way. This is task of the Avatar.
Sri Aurobindo once described how both he and the Mother had to take on incredible difficulties upon themselves, crushing problems and challenges, and they had to fight their own long battles on the physical planes as well as the subtler planes. And this precisely is the task of the Kalki: fighting the darkness, preparing the ground, building the stairway of consciousness which we have to follow, and charting out the realms of the Supramental consciousness. The new consciousness implies, as we have already seen, a change of external form also. And humanity will eventually be superseded by a still higher race of supramental beings.
Further, the Kalki brings in a new principle in the Yoga: the collective yoga. Until now most of the efforts towards higher levels of consciousness were essentially at an individual level. But now with Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga the collective principle is indispensable. No one in this yoga can remain isolated from others for too long. You are bound to the community and with humanity. Sri Aurobindo once said that if it was only a question of his own transformation in isolation, it could have been done long back. But it is because he has to raise the whole of humanity that the process is so hard.
