Chapter 5April 23, 1965

It is true. Basically, once there is a body formed, precisely, by an ideal and an increasing development, a body with sufficient stuff and capacities, sufficient potential, there may very well be a rapid Descent of a supramental form, just as there was one with the human form. Because I know that (I know it from having lived it), I know that when the transition – a very obscure transition – from the animal to man (of which they have found fairly convincing traces) was sufficient, when the result was plastic enough, there was a Descent – there was a mental descent of the human creation. And they were beings (there was a double descent; it was in fact particular in that it was double, male and female: it wasn't the descent of a single being, it was the descent of two beings), they were beings who lived in Nature an animal life, but with a mental consciousness; but there was no conflict with the general harmony. All the memories are absolutely clear of a spontaneous, animal life, perfectly natural, in Nature. A marvelously beautiful Nature that strangely resembles the nature in Ceylon and tropical countries: water, trees, fruits, flowers.... And a life in harmony with animals: there was no sense of fear or difference. It was a very luminous, very harmonious, and very NATURAL life, in Nature.

And strangely, the story of Paradise would seem to be a mental distortion of what really happened. Of course, it all became ridiculous, and also with a tendency... it gives you the feeling that a hostile will or an Asuric being tried to use that to make it the basis for a religion and to keep man under his thumb. But that's another matter.

But that spontaneous, natural, harmonious life – very harmonious, extremely beautiful and luminous and easy!... A harmonious rhythm in Nature. A luminous animality, in fact.

That's how we began, and it began that way because there was a descent of the higher human mental consciousness into the form that existed. The phenomenon may recur in the same way, with the difference that it can be more conscious and willed – there may be the intervention of a conscious will. It would, or it could happen through an occult process – well, I don't know, there are all sorts of possibilities, one of which could be the conscious passage of a being who has used the old human body for his development and his yoga, and who would leave that form once it became unnecessary in order to enter a form capable of adapting to the new growth.

Here, the two possibilities meet.

But for the time being, there is no question of that because although the development of physical training is extremely rapid, it's still clear that it may take hundreds of years.

There is a quotation from Sri Aurobindo in which he says that the first point to be acquired is prolongation of life at will – it isn't directly immortality: it is prolongation of life at will. He wrote it in the articles on The Supramental Manifestation.

Every night now, almost without exception, I spend a part of the night in someone else, who seems to