The Winds of Wonder

The problem of the physical’s mind

On 13 December 1960 the Mother recounts: “During these last days, I was face to face with a problem as old as the world which had taken on an extraordinary intensity. It’s what Sri Aurobindo calls disbelief, and it’s located in the most material physical consciousness—it isn’t doubt (which mainly belongs to the mind), it is almost like a refusal to accept the obvious as soon as it doesn’t belong to the little daily routine of ordinary sensations and reactions—a sort of incapacity to accept and recognize the exceptional.”

It is a defeatist consciousness, right at the bottom, in the material rock itself. With it all bad things are going to happen, the coarsest of things. “It’s quite a nasty habit, for it keeps the most material state in a condition of disharmony, disorder, ugliness and difficulty.”

She continues: “For the last several days, I’ve been at grips fighting with it. How can I stop this idiotic, coarse and above all defeatist automatism from constantly manifesting? I’m deep in the problem. For me, ‘the problem’ doesn’t mean explaining the thing (it’s easy to explain), but controlling, mastering and transforming it. That will take some time.”

The Mother says this disbelief is “located in the most material physical consciousness”. Could this be the physical’s mind not open to the action of light and force? In a letter Sri Aurobindo writes: “The physical mind is technically placed below the vital and yet it is a prolongation of the mind proper and one that can act in its own sphere by direct touch with the higher mental intelligence. And there is too an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles. Haeckel, the German materialist, spoke somewhere of the will in the atom, and recent science, dealing with the incalculable individual variation in the activity of the electrons, comes near to perceiving that this is not a figure but the shadow thrown by a secret reality. This body-mind is a very tangible truth; owing to its obscurity and mechanical clinging to past movements and facile oblivion and rejection of the new, we find in it one of the chief obstacles to permeation by the supermind Force and the transformation of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilisation of the supramental Light and Force in material Nature.”

The whole problem therefore gets focused on making this “physical mind”, id est, the mind of the physical, the physical’s mind receptive to the higher powers, to the light and force of the supramental. The entire Yoga-Tapasyā of Sri Aurobindo during the last twelve years, during 1938-50, was seeing that this does happen. This physical’s mind opening to the supramental light and force is what Sri Aurobindo calls as the Mind of Light, an aspect of the Supermind itself, ontologically present here below the physical.

To further the work, after having established the Mind of Light in his body, it had to enter into the dynamics of evolutionary manifold, into the universal manifestation. That was the work of the Mother. Therefore, there was his necessary withdrawal from the present body and operate from another station, the subtle-physical, the work here being carried out by the Mother. At the time of his withdrawal he passed on the Mind of Light to the Mother, she experiencing the friction of its passage in her physical body. We have her realisations revealed in her essential Conversations to be found in the Agenda.