Afterwards, when he left and I had to do the Yoga myself, to be able to take his physical place, I could have adopted the attitude of the sage, which is what I did since I was in an unparalleled state of calm when he left. As he left his body and entered into mine, he told me, 'You will continue, you will go right to the end of the work.' It was then that I imposed a calm upon this body - the calm of total detachment. And I could have remained like that. But in a way, absolute calm implies withdrawal from action, so a choice had to be made between one or the other. I said to myself, 'I am neither exclusively this nor exclusively that.' And actually, to do Sri Aurobindo's work is to realize the Supramental on earth. So I began that work and, as a matter of fact, this was the only thing I asked of my body. I told it, 'Now you shall set right everything which is out of order and gradually realize this intermediate supermanhood between man and the supramental being or, in other words, what I call the superman.' And this is what I have been doing for the last eight years, and even much more during the past two years, since 1956. Now it is the work of each day, each minute. That's where I am. I have renounced the uncontested authority of a god, I have renounced the unshakable calm of the sage ... in order to become the superman. I have concentrated everything upon that. We shall see. I am learning to work. I am only an apprentice, simply an apprentice - I am learning the trade! page 155 , Mother's Agenda , volume - 1, 1st May 1958

If things must follow the movement they've followed till now ... How many centuries and centuries and centuries there have been .... So the superman would only be one more stage, and after him there would be many other more things .... page 209 - Mother's Agenda , volume 10, 31st May , 1969

If things must follow the movement they've followed till now ... How many centuries and centuries and centuries there have been .... So the superman would only be one more stage, and after him there would be many other more things page 209 , Mother's Agenda , volume 10 , 31st May - 1969

All that is certainly the consciousness of what Sri Aurobindo called the supramental: [[On 27 May 1970, Mother will take up again and comment upon this part of the conversation. ]] the being to come after man. How will he be? I haven't yet seen ... I haven't yet seen that. I did see, I did have perceptions of the superman, the intermediary being, but you clearly feel it's only an intermediary being. What will that being be like who will come after the superman? I don't know.... Because we are still much too human; when we visualize the Supreme Consciousness in a form, the Supreme Being and so on - the Supreme - we tend to give it a form similar to the human one, but that's our old habit.... I saw that future being (I saw it many years ago): it was clearly a far more harmonious and expressive form than the human one, but there was a likeness, it was still a human form, that is to say, with a head and arms and legs and ... Will it be that? I don't know. There will necessarily be that as an intermediary - necessarily. There were all those kinds of apes which acted as intermediaries between the animal and man.... But lightness, invulnerability, moving about at will, luminosity at will - all that goes without saying, it's part of supramental qualities, but ... Oh, yes, also clothing at will: it's not something foreign added on, it's the substance that takes on certain forms.... All that I had seen, and I told Sri Aurobindo about it, and Sri Aurobindo himself gave me certain demonstrations (I see him sometimes and he shows me). He simply said what the intermediary step will be. But all descriptions are worthless. And when I see him at night (sometimes I spend hours with him), it's so natural and spontaneous that I am not even observing, "This is like this, that is like that..." - no. In the morning, with a concentration, the impression remains very strong, but as for the details as we here understand them, you can't say. page 23 , Mother's Agenda , volume 11 , 3rd Jan - 1970