Preparing for the Miraculous

preparing for the miraculous 53a contribution to the Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo InternationalCentre of Education which she had newly founded. Thereforehe dictated eight articles between 30 December 1948and the time he left his body, on 5 December 1950.What started as an encouragement of the students’ ideals,and therefore a reminder to them of his and the Mother’sWork, suddenly took another turn: for the first time SriAurobindo spoke about the necessity of intermediary beingsbetween the existing species of Homo sapiens and thecoming species of supermen, Homo supramentalis. This transitionalbeing he gave no name, but called it “a new humanity.”“It would not be the total transformation, the fullnessof a divine life in a divine body. There would be a body stillhuman and indeed animal in its origin and fundamentalcharacter, and this would impose its own inevitable limitationson the higher parts of the embodied being.”All the same, “its mentality would be an instrument ofthe Light and no longer of the Ignorance. At its highest itwould be capable of passing into the supermind and fromthe new race would be recruited the race of supramentalbeings, who would appear as the leaders of the evolution inearth nature. Even, the highest manifestations of a mind ofLight would be an instrumentality of the supermind, a partof or a projection from it, a stepping beyond humanity intothe superhumanity of the supramental principle. Above all,its possession would enable the human being to rise beyondinto those highest powers of the mind in its self-exceedingswhich intervene between our mentality and supermind,and can be regarded as steps leading towards the greaterand more luminous principle [i.e. Supermind].” 8In April 1958 the Mother said: “It can be confirmedwith certainty that there will be an intermediate specimen8 Sri Aurobindo: Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, pp. 537 and 585.