Mirra Alfassa: Completing Sri Aurobindo’s Vision

Abstract

Mirra Alfassa’s influence, power, and authority are essential to the integral yoga according to Aurobindo Ghose, yet most scholars have so far refused to examine their contours. Aurobindo saw her as the incarnation of the divine mother or Mahāśakti and said her spiritual growth “followed the same course” as his, which radically universalized Rāmakṛṣṇa’s teaching of vijñāna, which he called “supermind” and she “the domain of love”. Aurobindo left key parts of his supramental vision incomplete in his writings; however, Mirra claimed to complete it with new revelations that I call the “Descendant Manonāśa Period” of their practice. Manonāśa or “mental annihilation” is central to what scholars call “Yoga Advaita”. Mirra’s revelations include: 1. a posthuman vision of a sexless supramental humanity that is evolving now and in the future; 2. this evolution is coming with a cost: the mind and vital natures are being destroyed as we are going through an anatomical metamorphosis surpassing the one that yielded homo sapiens 300,000 years ago; 3. this shambolic process centrally involves what Mirra called “the psychic being” or evolving soul, somehow stimulating its materialization into what she called “the glorified body” in her early life in France. Though Aurobindo did not make a direct connection between the psychic being and what he called “the divine body”, he thought from the beginning of their partnership in the 1920s that her body could endure supramentalization better than his, no matter how it unfolded.