The Effect of Supramental Powers on the Mental Consciousness

The seeker does not make a sudden leap, generally, from the mental consciousness to the supramental.  There are long periods of transition, during which the supramental exerts influence on the mental consciousness, until there is sufficient capacity to shift the standpoint more generally to a higher platform, intermediate to the process.  Sri Aurobindo describes the influence of the supramental powers on the mental consciousness as follows:

“A mental intuitive vision or a spiritualised mental sight, a psychic vision, an emotional vision of the heart, a vision in the sense mind are parts of the Yogic experience.  If these seeings are purely mental, then they may but need not be true, for the mind is capable of both truth and error, both of a true and of a false representation.  But as the mind becomes intuitivised and supramentalised, these powers are purified and corrected by the more luminous action of the supermind and become themselves forms of a supramental and a true seeing.  The supramental vision, it may be noted, brings with it a supplementary and completing experience that might be called a spiritual hearing and touch of the truth,– of its essence and through that of its significance,– that is to say, there is a seizing of its movement, vibration, rhythm and a seizing of its close presence and contact and substance.  All these powers prepare us to become one with that which has thus grown near to us through knowledge.”

Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, Part Four: The Yoga of Self-Perfection, Chapter 22, The Supramental Thought and Knowledge, pg. 804