In reviewing the gulf between the Supramental Consciousness and the Mind-Consciousness, Sri Aurobindo points out that there is simply too wide a gap, too much difference for them to represent the next succeeding step, in one direction, toward the involution of consciousness; and in the other direction, as part of the evolutionary outflowering of consciousness. There must be an intermediate stage or gradation between the two. The mind is a power of the Ignorance. It seeks for knowledge by speculation, by extrapolation, by inference and induction. It acquires its knowledge painfully and slowly through accretion of facts and logic. On the other hand, the Supramental Consciousness is a power of knowledge that grasps and contains the reality in its plenitude and oneness without having to undergo this tortuous process of seeking and struggle to acquire knowledge.
While we see gaps between the inconscient, unorganized Energy and the highly organised forms of Matter, and then from inanimate Matter to animate Life Force; and then from subconscious or sub-mental life to the evolution of Mind, these gaps “even when considerable, are to some extent prepared by slow gradations which make them conceivable and feasible.”
It becomes then both clear and inevitable as Sri Aurobindo points out, that “There must be somewhere in the descending and ascending scale of Being an intermediate power and plane of consciousness, perhaps something more than that, something with an original creative force, through which the involutionary transition from Mind in the Knowledge to Mind in the Ignorance was effected and through which again the evolutionary reverse transition becomes intelligible and possible.”
reference: Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Chapter 28, Supermind, Mind and the Overmind Maya
Sri Aurobindo Studies 