When we look at the stages and the necessary changes that come about in these stages, it is clear that there are two distinct movements that need to be reviewed. The first is the development of the current mind, life and body capacities, beyond their current limitations, based on the efforts to perfect them from their own level as well as the influence of the supramental consciousness to enhance and potentially add latent capacities to their action, what we may consider to be an optimized form of homo sapiens. The second is a more complete transformation of the physical-vital-mental basis through the advent of the supramental consciousness and its need to create new powers and foundations for its direct action. The first is incremental; the second is a more substantial change that could be called the advent of the supramental being, which we may term homo supramentalis” to distinguish it from our current homo sapiens.
Sri Aurobindo notes: “In any case these would be beginnings only and could not constitute the fullness of the divine life upon earth; it would be a new orientation of the earthly life but not the consummation of its change. For that there must be the sovereign reign of a supramental truth-consciousness to which all other forms of life would be subordinated and depend upon it as the master principle and supreme power to which they could look up as the goal, profit by its influences, be moved and upraised by something of its illumination and penetrating force. Especially, as the human body had to come into existence with its modification of the previous animal form and its erect figure of a new power of life and its expressive movements and activities serviceable and necessary to the principle of mind and the life of a mental being, so too a body must be developed with new powers, activities or degrees of a divine action expressive of a truth-conscious being and proper to a supramental consciousness and manifesting a conscious spirit. While the capacity for taking up and sublimating all the activities of the earth-life capable of being spiritualised must be there, a transcendence of the original animality and the actions incurably tainted by it or at least some saving transformation of them, some spiritualising or psychicising of the consciousness and motives animating them and the shedding of whatever could not be so transformed, even a change of what might be called its instrumental structure, its functioning and organisation, a complete and hitherto unprecedented control of these things must be the consequence or incidental to this total change..”
Sri Aurobindo, The Mind of Light, The Divine Body, pp. 45-46
Sri Aurobindo Studies 