"Supramental Consciousness and Human Evolution"
The gender distinction is really irrelevant in terms of consciousness. The Supramental Transformation involves the rising beyond distinctions of consciousness and limitations of consciousness. It means the full efflorescence of the full power of the Divine Self.
Nature started with distinctions….with specialisations. She developed those specialisations in order to create a rich diversity when they were brought back. The Mother observed that, “Nature has decided now” - this “now” is probably in the fifties - “to bring together all these specialisations and mix them in a huge mix to create a sudden rich diversity.”
The strategy is very interesting. If you take a large number of people and allow diversity, you will get certain diversity, but not much, because people tend to cluster together in common types. But what Nature did, is to extend in different areas of the earth, to the extreme, the specialisations. So, once all the extremes of consciousness have been taken up and then they are brought back and mixed together, it was suddenly a much wider and richer diversity. Since it includes all the extremes now, it’s not a narrow band growing wider, but extremes developed, brought together. This is the strategy. She said at that point, in the fifties, “I believe that Nature has decided to collaborate. There is no end to the wonders of that collaboration.”
One of the changes Nature has done is to bring together now and create this huge mix. So, you will increasingly find inter-cultural, inter-religious and inter-racial marriages becoming more common, which earlier the instinct in humanity felt itself repelled from…now it is drawn to, but it grows in its own way. Equally, we find a change in the fabric of human society, in the family structure, marriages, divorces, and through it all, a kind of grassroots coming together.
Sri Aurobindo lists the various steps that the evolution has taken to create units; starting from the individual, the family, then the tribe, and then the regional and the national identities, and then the human identities, as one humanity. Of all these intermediate steps, and perhaps even other sub-steps,” he says, “Nature has chosen - not sure if he says Nature or the Divine Will, but we can even see both as an equivalent; take it as Nature - to preserve only three. From the individual identity to the group human identity, there are three steps: family, nationality and humanity. All the rest will fade away. Or they may exist subservient to these.
It is interesting to observe, and I suppose we can all do it as our own independent, individual explorations, to see how these three are seen to be stronger somehow, while the others are breaking apart, and where these three are being weakened, there is a reaction and an attempt to consolidate on these levels. But I suppose, this describes a process which will take at least a hundred years and will develop over the coming hundred years.
But through these, we also find a growing interdependence which is more directly the action of the Supramental. Being a Consciousness of Oneness - while it supports the richest diversity - it holds it as facets of its own Oneness. So, the increasing sense of Oneness in humanity is the most concrete and most direct change of the Supramental on the human mind.
Where fifty years ago, we would have said, “my nationality first” today, we speak of “my humanity first”; and the nations have to submit to this larger truth that we feel. The governments are resisting, however human beings at the grassroots are bypassing governments… creating frameworks expressive of the truth that we feel within us - not always mentally formulated but subliminally sensed.
And we create frameworks for this, a kind of interchange, the most concrete of which is the Internet. The Internet was not created by the governments; it emerged from a grassroots process that bypassed the governments. The governments were caught by surprise and tried to regulate it, but could not. Some still do, but they cannot eventually. Being essentially an expression of the commonality of the people in technology, it cannot be controlled by any central agency. We find ways to bypass any control devices. You cannot restrict anything on the Internet. Everybody is able to bypass any restriction, and the change is such that, even if all governments come together and say “together we will restrict our people”, it won’t work.
So, that’s one physical, I will say, ‘organ’ of social expression of this deeper unity. There are others which are also growing…. one of which is the mix of media; the media broadcast itself transcends the national boundaries. It is a satellite broadcast you cannot stop anybody from receiving, and there is a rapid exchange of media across the world.
When a movie is released in one place, it is available all over the world, at least through the Internet if nothing else. It is translated into so many languages; people are interested in watching different cultural values. Where earlier they were seen as oddities, today they are seen with interest. In the human consciousness therefore, there is an urge to reach out, to connect and to absorb the experience of other cultures and values and perhaps their best, which is what the Mother anticipated in Auroville by asking for the pavilions of each culture to be represented here. “Because the future,” she said, “would be for each culture to share its best with the whole world without losing its uniqueness.”
A single space wherein all the cultures are available. Very crudely, this form is now seen all over the world in malls where you get a food court in which five or six different kinds of cuisines are available in one space, and you can pick and choose from any, try them out…mix them… and yet the distinctiveness of each remains. So, a very crude starting-point - catching the most obvious form of greed in the human being - still a good starting-point and it will widen including even the forms of dress. And the most important will be the psychological values that each culture has to share with others.
This growing interdependence has taken on many forms, but ultimately, all the external organised forms, including the economic ones, are expressions of a psychological need felt within us.
- Who made the effort?
- Nobody....no individual, no government, no educational system or book has made a conscious effort to create this sense of wanting to connect with the whole. It emerged from within, from within the heart of humanity….by the pressure of the Supramental Consciousness. Its result has been the creation of educational tools and other technological means, to express what we already feel. But it didn’t start from there. The human species itself, beginning to feel the sense of oneness, can be and often is assisted by problems, difficulties, dangers because it is part of the human makeup that when we face a problem together, we come together most easily.
I find the recent large-scale natural disasters to be an interesting point of observation, in which you see the group suddenly coming together, by-passing differences, and then, when they fall back – after the problem has passed - into their individualities of … whatever level, of unit, of organisation, they are no more the same. There is a connection built during the time of crisis which is not lost and things continue to happen.
There is a rapidity of change … in new ideas, hopes, possibilities, experiments, taking place and all of these are part of that increase of evolutionary pace of growth.
