Dear Friends,
Here is a weighty book by RY Deshpande that has been recently published by Savitri Foundation and is available at Amazon:
Apropos of the Divine Body: Tome One: Towards the Intermediate Race
The book has an insightful and wide-sweeping Foreword by Claude Chamberland from Montreal. Its publication is on the significant occasion of 17 November, the Mother’s glorious entry into her newly built supramental body occultly getting ready for manifestation upon earth.
In the following are the introductory pages of Deshpande’s opus with the Author’s Note, Publishers’ Note, and the Foreword by Claude Chamberland. These should inspire every Aurobindonian reader to go to the full text pertaining to the yogic work of the Master and the Mother. One is stupefied with that divine accomplishment of theirs which has brought a new consciousness to us. What tremendous and glorious a thing they have done! All words fail to convey it.
Overman Foundation is glad to introduce this outstanding work by RY Deshpande even as it waits for the other two companion volumes in the process of publication.
With warm regards,
Anurag Banerjee
Founder
Overman Foundation.
***
[A]
Apropos of the Divine Body — A Trilogy
Tome One: Towards the Intermediate Race
Tome Two: Savitri the incarnate Word
Tome Three: The Essential Agenda
This effort is an audacious attempt to get an insight into the Yoga-Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, pertaining to the last phase of their avataric presence here, 1940-50 in the case of the Master-Yogi and 1956-73 of the dynamic Yogini, that is, Savitri and The Agenda as the most precious documents gifted to us by them, a topaz quarry ablaze in superlative intensity.
If Savitri is the final seal of Sri Aurobindo in decreeing the next stage in evolutionary march of time towards supramental manifestation on earth, that the spirit shall take up the human play and make this earthly life the life divine, the Mother’s Agenda sets itself in realising that divine pronouncement and making it an actuality in existence in the accomplishment of the promise. In that sense the Essential Agenda, Agenda decanted of extraneous things that are not concerned with the divine body for a divine life, is a continuation of Savitri itself. One can say that it was dictated by Sri Aurobindo himself for the Mother as an effectuating Word of Action. It means, if the Agenda is an unwritten part of Savitri, Savitri remains incomplete without the Essential Agenda. That is the totality of their Yoga-Work.
Towards the Intermediate Race is the first volume of this avowal tracing its background and history.
RY Deshpande
17 November 2022
[B]
Publishers’ Note
The Mother met Sri Aurobindo on 29 March 1914 for the first time and a resplendent transformative change took place in her, the wonder of direct contact with him. She says she was born to a new life, a life in the Divine ambience.
And Sri Aurobindo?
He saw that surrender to the Divine to the last bit of the physical is possible and it is that surrender which shall be the golden key for the great daunting work of manifestation.
The Yoga of physical transformation had commenced at that very instant. In her diary the Mother wrote, on 25 September 1914, that a new Light would break upon the earth, a new world be born, and the things that were promised be fulfilled.
During that divine Rendezvous the Mother was in prayerful deep concentration. In it she saw things in the Supermind; she was seeing things that were to be but somehow were not manifesting. She narrated to Sri Aurobindo what she saw and asked him if they would manifest. He yogically just said, “Yes.”
And immediately she saw that the Supramental had touched the earth and was beginning to be realised! The Supermind had touched the earth on 29 March 1914. We do not recognise it but yogic tapasyā had now begun to fix it permanently in the deep earth’s physical.
Results started pouring just in three decades of this. And the Supermind entered in the earth’s subtle-physical on 29 February 1956. The promise given ages ago now got fulfilled.
Yet the Mother had to move on. It was for a divine life in a divine body. The Mother in her Yoga of the Cells took it forward.
Mind of Light is Sri Aurobindo’s creation in the pragmatism of his objective, of a divine life in a divine body.
The problem was Death in this mortal world. Death had pinned it down by asserting that it is he who had made man’s body his banquet, man’s life his food. This had to be dissolved.
The Mother had to deal with it by invoking and establishing the divine Will in the very cells of the body. And this is precisely what we have in the Mother’s glorious Agenda.
RY Deshpande’s present book Towards the Intermediate Race races through all these momentous events, even as it asserts triumphs of these avataric achievements. We are happy to present it to the students and professors in the academia of life.
[C]
Foreword
“Today, we see a humanity satiated but not satisfied by victorious analysis of the externalities of Nature preparing to return to its primeval longings. The earliest formula of wisdom promises to be its last, — God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.”
— Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine.
These words were written by Sri Aurobindo in 1914 at a time when neither spaceships, nor television, nor computers enabled science to know “the externalities of Nature”. However, they vibrate powerfully more than a century later, when the great Indian Master would have been 150 years old.
Yesterday, one of our kids, a 26-year-old mason, enthusiastically told us about this Netflix-produced sci-fi series where passengers on a plane get rocked by some kind of cosmic storm and land when everything around them has aged of a few years. The plane had entered a gap in space-time, according to the now widely recognized postulate of the great Albert Einstein, theorized at the same time as the above quote. Human being is an inheritance of the past, a citizen of the present, and a craftsman of the future.
The fact is that this contraction of time in relation to the speed of light is one of the most exhilarating and frustrating postulates that brains evolving since Einstein have had to deal with. Add to this a mass that tends towards infinity and we approach the context of an identification with the universe itself.
The generations of sages having worked towards their own universalization, that is to say, overcoming their phenomenal being to identify themselves with the universe, had they also penetrated a breach in space-time? Identifying themselves entirely with light, maybe they broke in another dimension where, instead of feeling “infinitely heavy”, they undergo a complete reversal and they experiment infinitely lightness? However it is noticeable that in English, the same word, light, is applying to the two concepts!
“Rishi”, in Sanskrit, is a term used to designate both sages and poets. According to their ancient knowledge, poetry was in its true meaning a way to express the truth. The rishis had developed, in their most precious texts, a symbolism which used an esoteric coded language to designate the truths which their powerful inner searches, carried out in a very methodical way, enabled them to attain. For example, in Sanskrit, “go” is the name used to designate cow … and light. Nowadays, it is funny to see that in French, “go” is abbreviation for gigabyte.
Thus, light, “go”, is found at the center of almost all Indian creeds and philosophies (as also evidenced in ancient Egypt by the cult of Ra, the God of light) which still hide so many secrets.
The problem is that in his pride at having developed his knowledge of so many technological processes, applied science, the one that “counts” since it makes it possible to produce ever more “wealth” by exploiting our planet (as slaves once were), still today considers the ancient knowledge developed by thousands of élite beings among our ancestors, as vague superstitions. And their study as the entertainment of a handful of specialized dreamers disconnected from the realities of matter and the contemporary world.
God, Light, Freedom, Immortality.
Can we sincerely look at these terms in the world of 2022 and think that they are not the “be all and end all” that really matters to humans in their understanding of life and matter?
According to Wikipedia, Kāla, the ancient Indian god, means time in Sanskrit and also designates the color black. He is perceived as fate, or as the god of death (Yama in Hinduism or the Vedas), under his aspect of Time. In that case, could a breach in space-time be a breach in Death itself? At the speed of light? Or BY light, a complete identification with it meaning a universalization of being, therefore, an infinite mass?
Why is science so reluctant to revisit these millennial wisdoms and integrate them into its current knowledge to finally answer the fundamental questions of all times?
The author of the book you are about to read is not so reluctant, on the contrary. In fact, it is one of the most powerful synthetic efforts I have seen to reconcile science and spirituality. By the way, Doctor Deshpande has mastered and integrated the most important advancements of both.
“Science has to move on. There has to be the Future Science,” tells us the one who was engaged in particle detectors and crystal growth, that headed several Atomic Energy and Space Projects in Advance Technology and has some fifty research papers published in national and international scientific journals, but who is not reluctant, like a modern-day Rishi, to use the science of the metre measurement in poetry to affine and complete the meaning of his intention.
To return to Kāla and the notion of time, in a beautiful passage of the book related to the departure of Pavitra, the first French disciple of Sri Aurobindo and a realized scientist, the Mother said on 17 May 1969:
Very strangely, it has been given a consciousness that no longer has anything to do with time: you understand, there isn’t “when it was not,” there isn’t “when it will no longer be” (…).
In The Intermediate Race, the author tries to decode, through their masterpieces, Savitri and The Essential Agenda, the most revealing experiences of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the one who continued their work of transformation to the heart of matter. Noteworthy it is to ascertain that Savitri was given by the Master in the form of a poetic work.
What are the keys of these two masterpieces? How they relate together and with the evolutionary movement on earth? What can we observe of their manifestation on earth up to now? Why life is always accompanied by death?
In the author’s own scientific words, “if anti-entropic cause can bring about organized life, what is it that takes away life in the vigour of its activity?”
These questions, and many other ones, are treated here with a meticulous energy, a tireless curiosity and a sense of intuitive insight which are very appealing for the reader. What I love about DrDeshpande’s book is that it goes where others don’t and is unafraid to courageously deal with that aspect of life that so many humans refuse to consider: Death. He observes that “science is adventurously building the theory of biological evolution, but science is mysteriously silent about biological degradation and loss of its breath, and of any recovery at all.”
The book also integrates the branches of knowledge based on mythological-occult comprehension of the universe and traces parallels with the living experiment of the Mother as described in The Essential Agenda.
It offers nothing less than a free diving into death to understand its mechanisms. A diving into these more subtle planes of being, cleared and mapped in the work of Sri Aurobindo and described in all their detail in his sublime epic poem of the conquest of Death by Love: Savitri. But even more, it is suggesting with acuteness what would be the next step of the evolution of nature on Earth, what Sri Aurobindo and the Mother named the “Mind of Light”. For example, the part of the book dedicated to the prototype body of the new being, avant-garde and bold, seems to me full of interest and very convincing.
We are really taken on a journey. First, towards the life of the two masters, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Two in One, or One functionally in Two, always united in the mystery of their same Consciousness. Then towards the whole story of the creation up to the new perspectives of evolution, their occult significance and what can be foreseen of the future, both from a scientific point of view and from a mythological-occult point of view.
And finally, to the next evolutionary step that will eventually allow Nature to overcome Death.
To use the author’s words:
To understand life, it is absolutely necessary to understand death.
And:
In the perspective of evolutionary biology, the question is perhaps not on how humans were created, but on what they are and why they were created.
In the view and experience of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the next stage of evolution, already manifesting, would be the “Intermediate Race” between human beings and the gnostic being of a supermind nature.
Accordingly, this book suggests, through the universe of these two exceptional beings, the keys to understanding death and the transformation of both human beings, life and matter.
Dr Deshpande dreamt of an Indian way of doing science. He certainly has a finger in the pie with this new book.