Supermind - a force not to be taken lightly

- Michael Miovic, M.D.

... Yet even with all these spiritual boons - the revelation of the Divine Mother and a Darshan of Sri Aurobindo on the subtle physical plane, as well as many smaller reminders along the way that I shall not detail here - there remained a doubt lurking in the back of my mind. Like so many others who have read about Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, or perhaps even lived in their Ashram for some time, I was still perplexed by this thing called the "Supermind." What exactly is that? And how is it different from what the great saints and sages of India have already said about Nirvana, Moksha, Self-realization, Atman, and so on. Are all these high-sounding words just different terms for the same thing? Or was Sri Aurobindo's attempt to bring the Supermind down to earth in fact novel? In short, are we dealing with new words for old experiences, or a truly new experience of the Divine?

These questions were answered for me during a visit to the Ashram in January, 1997. One afternoon I went to visit the Matrimandir and entered the sanctum sanctorum with no particular expectations, sat down on the white cushions as usual, and slowly settled into meditation. Whereupon some dark, magnetic force started to pull my whole awareness down into my body. My consciousness went down past the level of blood and organs, down into the trillions of cells circulating through this thing called "me", and down even further through the soup of intracellular proteins that I had studied in medical school, right through the nuclear shell (which, incidentally, in electron micrographs looks like the Matrimandir). When my awareness finally came to rest on the DNA itself, that remarkable double helix that Watson and Crick

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mapped in 1953, suddenly everything turned pulsating golden-orange. A brilliant ray of aureate light shot through the dark passage behind me, up through every level of the physical body and above into the supra-physical planes of existence, and my whole being became pure sunshine. The whole body morphed into a sea of fire to the inner eye, and solar lava of absolute Bliss engulfed every cell, every protein, every minute arc of DNA. Inert matter suddenly became the living power and substance of transcendent God. The ananda (bliss) was so complete and all-consuming that the body sat transfixed, barely breathing, barely moving. And yet I was perfectly aware of being in this so-called "physical" world. I could open and close my eyes and look at the people around me, just as before, but now all was entirely different. Even though the meditation ended at 5 pm as usual and I left the Matrimandir, that golden-orange liquid bliss kept pouring through my body. I went to dinner with my friends in the Ashram and had a few bites to eat, but lost interest because the liquid bliss was more fulfilling. I went up to my room in the Cottage Guest House and lay on the cot, entirely shot-through with solar sunshine; it felt as if I were sitting in the middle of a physical sun, and somehow surviving it. I tried to read, but the bliss was too intense. All I could do was just sit there, pulsating golden-orange bliss and feeling that every physical object around me was also me, that we were all one, gigantic, holy Fire.

The experience went on like that for hours, late into the night. I tried to sleep, but the liquid bliss running in my blood couldn't sleep. So I lay transfixed on the bed until dawn, starting to feel a little feverish. In the morning I went for a jog around town, and still the solar Fire was burning in every cell of my body. I began to feel physically unstable, as if my nervous system were going to collapse. I went to breakfast with my friends at the Ashram's dining hall, and couldn't focus on anything. I was feeling weak and tremulous now, and beginning to wonder, if the infusion of bliss from the Matrimandir might actually kill me. I went back to the room at the Cottage to lie down, but still the solar reaction kept

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burning inside me. Finally, recognizing that I would soon either go mad or die, I prayed to the Mother to end the experience because I simply couldn't bear it anymore. No sooner had I prayed to her than a cool, liberating breeze wafted down on me from above, and I settled into a deep sleep. When I awoke, it was night again, and the solar fire in my cells was gone. I breathed a sigh of relief: thank God it was over. So that was the famous Supermind - a force not to be taken lightly.

In the following week, I visited Auroville a few times, and whenever I set foot there I could feel the golden-orange bliss shooting up from the earth and descending into me from above, and once again I would become a walking, talking, center of buzzing ecstasy connected physically to every object around me by millions of radiating little threads of ananda. Thankfully the experience ceased whenever I left Auroville, as I would not have been able to survive otherwise. But it repeated itself enough times before I returned to the United States that all of my mental doubts about the Supermind were incinerated.

From the Book "INITIATION" Chapter I, Pg 62-64

Courtesy : Sri Aurobindo Society, Hyderabad

(Dr. Michael Miovic. M.D., since completing a fellowship in Psychosocial Oncology at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, has been working as an attending psychiatrist there, and has a small private practice as well. He has worked closely with colleagues in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, India, to develop the field of integral health and consciousness studies.)

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