The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Chapter XXIII
The Supramental Instruments —
Thought-Process
THE SUPERMIND, the divine gnosis, is not something
entirely alien to our present consciousness: it is a superior
instrumentation of the spirit and all the operations of our
normal consciousness are limited and inferior derivations from
the supramental, because these are tentatives and constructions,
that the true and perfect, the spontaneous and harmonious nature
and action of the spirit. Accordingly when we rise from
mind to supermind, the new power of consciousness does not
reject, but uplifts, enlarges and transfigures the operations of
our soul and mind and life. It exalts and gives to them an ever
greater reality of their power and performance. It does not limit
itself either to the transformation of the superficial powers and
action of the mind and psychic parts and the life, but it manifests
and transforms also those rarer powers and that larger
force and knowledge proper to our subliminal self that appear
now to us as things occult, curiously psychic, abnormal. These
things become in the supramental nature not at all abnormal
but perfectly natural and normal, not separately psychic but
spiritual, not occult and strange, but a direct, simple, inherent
and spontaneous action. The spirit is not limited like the waking
material consciousness, and the supermind when it takes possession
of the waking consciousness, dematerialises it, delivers
it from its limits, converts the material and the psychic into the
nature of the spiritual being.
The mental activity that can be most readily organised is, as
has been already indicated, that of pure ideative knowledge. This
is transformed on the higher level to the true jñāna, supramental
thought, supramental vision, the supramental knowledge by
identity. The essential action of this supramental knowledge has