(b) The older paradigms themselves carry hints, cues, pointers that initiate creative search for newer paradigms. The already existing knowledge-base carries the potentiality of being surpassed itself. This is not as drawback of the older paradigms but a victory of pregnant potentialities.

(c) The older paradigms not only carry creative hints for future paradigms, they also carry processes and techniques which can be developed further, accentuated and even generalized. That is how the simple magnifying glass became the sophisticated microscope.

Sri Aurobindo’s development of the Supermind concept also emerges from a background, which has these three characteristics, mentioned above:

 1. The relation between the Absolute and the relativity (the creation) was a dual and irreconcilable antithesis. How the multiplicity symbolizing the manifestation could be ‘created’ from the Absolute which was beyond manifestation, could never be satisfactorily explained from the level of the mind. This was more so because the ‘Unitarian’ nature of the Absolute was not statistical and mathematical – it belonged to a dimension diametrically different from the multiplicity. Unlike the Absolute, the multiplicity is bound by space and time, translatable in statistical and mathematical constructs, and thus partly accessible to a mental knowledge like science. The Absolute was beyond any mental knowledge and inaccessible to a cognition based knowledge base like science. The theory of Maya was brought in to explain creation but it actually exaggerated the contradiction between the Absolute and the creation. Sri Aurobindo had to develop the concept of ‘Supermind’ as a creative principle that mediated between the Absolute and the relativity.

2. The forces of suffering, ignorance, falsehood and destruction are so strong that conceiving a paradise on earth has remained a chimera. Moreover, the Inconscience is a submerged plane of consciousness where all our past sinks to raise its hydra-head again and again to stall and negate all attempts to progress in earthly life.  In Islam and Christianity the solution to life’s problems is in heaven if one qualifies for it. In India, we had the Shankaracharya notion that denounced the world of human transactions as false while the Absolute was the sole truth. Buddhists concurred with the idea of world being false but extended this perception of falsehood to the domain of the Absolute too. For both Shankarites and Buddhists, the solution to life’s problems lay in ceasing to be born again! For the first time in the history of spirituality, Sri Aurobindo initiated the possibility of constructing an actual paradise an earth. He however did not negate the earlier concepts. He ventured to open a new pathway. This pathway was devised to activate the creative ‘Supermind-principle’ in earth. Such an endeavor necessitated an evolution of consciousness beyond the biological evolution of forms so that higher models of human being could emerge. The mind-principle with its limitations can than be upgraded and transformed to manifest the unlimited possibilities of the Supermind-principle. Nothing short of manifesting this creative Supermind principle could build a paradise an earth by fully conquering the forces of adversity and the pull of the Inconscience.

 (B) The Hints

The hints of a creative-principle are present in Indian tradition through symbolisms that are difficult to decipher. Sri Aurobindo has the humility to acknowledge that the hints are ‘concealed’ in ‘the cryptic verses’ of the Vedas. But we should also acknowledge that it is only a genius and prophet like Sri Aurobindo who could decipher the hidden significances, decode their implications, and foresee their potentialities.

Sri Aurobindo writes: ‘ The idea of the supermind, the Truth-Consciousness is there in the Rig Veda according to Sri Aurobindo’s interpretation and in one or two passages of the Upanishads, but in the Upanishads it is a there only in seed in the conception of the being of knowledge, Vijnanmaya Purusa, exceeding the mental, vital and physical being; in the Rig Veda the idea is there but in principle only, it is not developed and even the principle of it has disappeared from the Hindu tradition’ (Letters on Yoga, Tome One, pg. 66)

In fact, Sri Aurobindo discerns the hints of the Supermind from two seed-ideas in the Vedas:

(1) A ‘vastness’ that is all-comprehensive, luminous and harmonious, ‘a vastness beyond the ordinary firmaments of our consciousness in which truth of being is luminously one with all that expresses it and assures inevitably truth of vision, formulation, arrangement, word, act and movement and therefore truth also of result of movement, result of action and expression, infallible ordinance and law’ and

 (2) The expression of harmony through a synthesis of ‘Light’ and ‘Force’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘will’; through a divine Nature that has a double power, ‘ a spontaneous self-formulation and self-arrangement which wells naturally out of the essence of the thing manifested and expresses its original truth, and a self-force of light inherent in the thing itself and the source of its spontaneous and inevitable self-arrangement’ (The Life Divine, pg. 135)

(C) The Processes

The Supermind as a Creative-Principle permitted the differentiation, de-linking and individuation of all that was concentrated in an undifferentiated essence. This is how the multiplicity got manifested but each differentiated aspect holds the seed-essence of the Supermind – principle. This makes it possible to reconstruct an unity even in the world of differentiation without negating the differentiation. Sri Aurobindo argues that if the Mind-Principle has been created out of the Supermind, it must be ‘therefore be capable of resolving itself back into it through a reverse development by expansion’ (Ibid, pg133). This ‘reverse’ movement has two important connotations;

A sketch confused of a supernal plan,

A preface to the epic of the Supreme