The Meaning and Making of Supramental Vision with Reference to the Poetry of Sri Aurobindo

Abstract

As far as Indian thoughts and literature are concerned, Sri Aurobindo stands as a profound yogi, mystic and aesthetician shining brightly and spreading his light in the sky of life and literature. His own yogic experiences were deeply rooted in the Upanishads and the age old Indian aesthetic tradition. As a man of multi faceted literary personality, he occupies an enviable place chiefly as an Indo-Anglican poet of a very high stature yet there is much more to him than meets the eye. He is rightly regarded as one of the most mystic and greatest poets of Indian writing in English. The aim of this paper is to examine briefly the meaning of supramental vision and supermind with its different planes. One gets to see how our mind takes up different flights and how each flight of mind brings about subtle changes in an individual that ultimately leads to final transformation. His poetry is strewn with such references to different planes of mind. Sri Aurobindos poetic output is endlessly enormous like an ocean since the span of his creative activity covers a period of over sixty years, and his poetic output runs to over three thousand pages. He tried his hands at a number of poetic forms, and almost always with great success. He has to his credit lyrics, sonnets, narrative poems, epics, poetic plays, besides numerous translations and adaptations. For the convenience of study, his poetic career can be divided into three stages: The early stage, the middle stage and the last stage. This division is only to study his poetic career in a more lucid manner, for many of his poems composed in the earliest stage were printed at a much later date, and the trends and features of a later stage can also be noticed even in the early stage. His methodology is reminiscent of traditional approach, which is primarily that of introspection, where the way to truth is based upon knowledge which is gained from intense, prolonged to various form of empirical investigations of the mystic elements.