Thinking About the Noosphere: Sri Aurobindo, The Overmind,Supermind and the Descent of the Supramental

A basic premise of the Noosphere II Project of the Galactic Research Institute is that thenoosphere represents a major evolutionary alteration of human consciousness. This is ashift from atomized individual consciousness to the consciousness of a vast single entity,what might be referred to as the collective telepathic field of planet Earth. Given this premise, a fundamental purpose of the Noosphere II Project is to identify the qualities of the new evolutionary consciousness and to identify antecedents for this consciousness inthe principles and methods of earlier schools of thought and experimental thinkers. Ingeneral, the elaboration of mystical contemplation of every kind, the definitions andexplorations of cosmic consciousness, and the techniques of yoga and meditation are allconsidered as providing clues as to the nature of the forthcoming evolutionary shift, thenoosphere.When we talk about this shift, the advent of the noosphere, Earth’s mental sheathe or envelope, it is often spoken of as something imminent or inevitable due to various factorsof Earth’s evolution and biogeochemical mutations. Thus, we speak of this change as the

biosphere-noosphere transition

. We can elaborate upon the biosphere-noospheretransition as the mutation of the life system of planet Earth into its next evolutionarystage, the more purely mental level of planetary consciousness. But how are we really tothink about the noosphere, a

planetary mind,

something far beyond each of our littleminds? How can we grasp a consciousness greater than the highest consciousness which

we can experience? How do we, as humans in our individualized consciousness, makethe leap to planetary consciousness? What does it mean, the planetarization of consciousness?If we read Teilhard de Chardin or Vernadsky, the noosphere appears to be something thatis imminent and toward which our biological and terrestrial evolution is inevitablyadvancing us. But this may not be the only way to think about it. We might also think of the noosphere as an increase in synchronicity, and as a participation in a divine descent.The very emergence of the word “noosphere” into the vocabulary of world thoughtoccurred in a synchronic nexus of events indicating that the planetary moment was ripefor the appearance of a complex new thought form,

noosphere

. In other words, thenoosphere needed to make itself conscious at this time, and, partaking of synchronicity asa fundamental aspect of its nature, it manifest itself in a multiple synchronic manner - achronotopology - at a given moment. As we shall see, the notion of the noosphere as anaspect of a divine descent of consciousness was part of this chronotopology or nexus of events. This chronotopology occurring in the Gregorian year 1926, includes thefollowing:First of all, it was in this year, 1926, that a scientist from Marxist Russia, Vladimir Vernadsky, a French Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and a Parisian philosopher and student of noted thinker, Henri Bergson, Jules le Roi, were broughttogether in Paris, France, to coin the word “noosphere”. They needed a word to define thenext critical phase toward which the evolution of the biosphere was tending, a phase inwhich the factors of consciousness would predominate over biological factors to create agreater synthesis of life - hence, noosphere, Earth’s mental sheathe.It was in this very same year that South African statesman and philosopher, Jan Smuts, published his book

Holism and Human Evolution

, the earliest exposition of the principleof holistic philosophy by which life and evolution are defined in terms of a synthesis of whole systems rather than as an analysis of ever more minute parts. While Smuts’ book does not refer to the noosphere as such, it could be stated that without the principle of holism, it is difficult to think about the noosphere. By its very nature the noosphere is awhole system predicated by the holistic perception and philosophy which further statesthat evolution moves in the direction of greater, all-encompassing whole systems whichof necessity embrace an increasingly greater consciousness as well. As the thinking layer of the planet, the noosphere can only reflect the holistic nature of the planet as a wholesystem.Then on November 3, 1926, occurred the death of the French psychomathematician,Charles Henry. Just before he passed away, Henry published a little treatise entitled, “ThePost-mortem Survival of consciousness,” anticipating a transcendence of consciousnessinto a greater whole. Two years before, in 1924. Henry had published the

Generalizationof the Theory of Radiation

, in which he posited the existence of a “psychone,” a “psychicatom” consisting of three mutually coexisting fields. Each of these fields is defined by aresonator: an electromagnetic resonator, a gravitational resonator, and a biopsychicresonator. This is also known as the resonant field model, and is applicable to a

description of a planetary system. As such it is not unrelated to the principle of thenoosphere, which could be defined as the conscious evolutionary unfolding of the biopsychic resonator. Looking ahead to the future, in his “Post-mortem Survival of Consciousness,” Henry declared, “Death is only a physiochemical change. It is only after death that I shall truly begin to amuse myself.”It was on November 24, 1926, exactly three weeks after Henry’s higher consciousnesstransition, that the Indian philosopher and mystic, Sri Aurobindo experienced what iscalled “The Day of Siddhi” (day of victory): The descent of Krishna, an unprecedenteddescent of

overmental consciousness,

into the physical. From that point he retired into aconcentrated sadhana - spiritual practice. This event completed a strategic year for theexpression of the possibilities of a more expanded evolutionary consciousness for humanity. In fact, we could say that having been theoretically construed and placed intothe world consciousness, the noosphere experienced its divine descent and for the firsttime precipitated itself as “overmental consciousness” into a human form through SriAurobindo. All advances in human consciousness must first be manifest in a livinghuman form, else there would be no way really of knowing what is to come. Thisexpresses the principle of the avatar, a descent of a particular principle into human formso it may be exemplified to humanity at large.It matters not that Aurobindo seems to not have been familiar with the word

noosphere

.He died, December 5, 1950. At that time Vernadsky’s work, most of it in Russian, had been translated into English but little, and mostly in American scholarly journals, so mostlikely it would never have found its way to Aurobindo’s retreat on an ashram in SouthIndia, At the same time, Teilhard de Chardin’s work was not published until after hisdeath in 1955, so there is no way Aurobindo could have known about the word

noosphere

. Nonetheless, through the “descent of the overmental” which altered his lifeirrevocably, and his profuse descriptions of consciousness, most specifically of theSupermind, the role of the Overmind, and the principle of supramental descent,Aurobindo gives us some of the best accounts of the noosphere from the higher point of view of the evolution of consciousness. This is a perspective that few other thinkers have been able to provide systematically.Unlike Teilhard de Chardin and Vernadsky, who were more concerned with the biological and biogeochemical aspects of our evolution into the noosphere, Aurobindowas a philosopher mystic whose primary interest was in defining the future evolutionfrom the standpoint of a comprehensive system of evolving states of consciousness.Because his focus was on the evolution of the human Mind of Ignorance into thesupermental realms, accompanied by a simultaneous descent of the DivineConsciousness, his definitions of the next stages of consciousness are as vivid anddescriptive of the actual nature of the

noosphere as a state of consciousness

as any thatexist. For this reason a brief survey of Sri Aurobindo’s thoughts on this issue are mosthelpful to us at this step of the journey as we approach the noosphere’s imminence.Whereas Teilhard de Chardin and Vernadsky saw the noosphere - the planetary mind - asan imminent possibility resulting from inevitable tendencies in biological evolution, for