Shri Aurobindo was educated in England. He belonged to a rich family and was going to become an ICS, a member of the Indian civil service, which was the topmost bureaucracy in India, created by the Britishers. To be an ICS one had to pass many examinations in England, and naturally it was very difficult for Indians to pass those examinations. The examinations were such that Indians were not accustomed to them.
For example, Aurobindo failed only in one subject -- horse riding. Indians are not interested in horseriding; English people are. But Indians are not interested at all in horse riding, nobody thinks it of some great value; in fact Jainas prohibit it because to ride on a horse is to be violent. Who are you to ride on the horse? If horses start riding on you would you like the idea? Jainas are averse to it. And in India nobody is interested the way Britishers are interested in horse riding.
So of course Aurobindo was not a good horse rider compared with British students, but in all other subjects he passed. One wonders what an ICS officer has to do with horse riding, but you don't know the ways of imperialism. The ICS officer had a certain purpose for horse riding. In India, the moment you saw a white man dressed in army uniform with a gun on a beautiful horse... that was the symbol of imperialism and its power.
Aurobindo was very shocked because he came back having failed, and to be an ICS was his ambition. Someone with an inferiority complex always has great ambitions; the inferiority complex is the base of all ambition. Now, to be an ICS officer was the greatest ambition any Indian could have in the British regime because that was the topmost position you could reach; more than that was not available to Indians. And rarely, out of thousands of ICS officers, one Indian might succeed in reaching it, so it was really something superior.
Aurobindo came back frustrated, with great anger, jealousy, rage; and he joined the Indian National Congress -- the party that was trying to throw the British Empire. Just look at the facts. He had gone to join the British Empire, and if only he had succeeded in horse riding he would have been a supporter of the British Empire; he would have been killing these people whom he was now joining. Now he wanted to destroy the British Empire. Can you see people's minds, how they work?
And he was not a non-violent revolutionary, no. He did not believe in Gandhi, he was not a follower of Gandhi. He was a believer in violence: he wanted the British people to be killed, burned, destroyed. He was trying to make bombs and he was caught redhanded creating bombs and he suffered a few years in jail.
It is very interesting to look into people's lives. If you have an unprejudiced mind then strange facts start coming up. When Aurobindo was in jail he suddenly became a religious man. From being thrown out -- the ambition that he was trying to fulfill, frustrated -- he moved to the opposite extreme: he wanted to take revenge, but now in the name of revolution. Then, when he was put into jail, he saw the whole thing, that it is not so easy to overthrow this great empire by simply creating hand bombs; it is just befooling yourself You may kill one person or two persons or you may destroy one bridge, but that is not going to destroy the empire; it is not possible. The empire has tremendous power.
Then how to fulfill the ambition? He had seen he could not succeed in Britain in becoming an ICS officer; he had seen that he could not become the great leader of the Indian revolution. He turned to religion. He could become a great saint; at least nobody could prevent him doing that. That is the cheapest way in the whole world. Who can prevent you? There is no competition either.
Aurobindo became a religious person. He started writing a commentary on the SHRIMAD BHAGAVAD GITA in jail. When he was released, the first thing he did was to escape from the British Empire. Pondicherry was not part of British India; it was a small place under the French empire. It is part of India -- now it is part of India -- but three hundred years ago, when all European powers were struggling to capture India, Britain succeeded in capturing the whole of India. France could only succeed in capturing a small place, Pondicherry, and Spain could succeed in having only one small place, Goa, and two small islands, Daman and Diu.
Why did Aurobindo escape to Pondicherry? It was just close to Bengal. He was a coward; now he was afraid to face his revolutionary friends. He could not say to them that now he was no longer a revolutionary, that he wanted to become a saint -- which is the safest way to fulfill your ambition to become respectable, honorable and great. In Pondicherry he created his ashram.
He was immensely interested in the idea of the superman. In fact he made it his life's ambition. He said, "I am going to bring the superman into myself. The superman will descend from heaven into my body, so I am trying to purify my body so that the superman will descend."
For thirty years he remained in a closed house, and his followers believed that he was purifying his body. Now, if you look at his literature you can see perfectly well that for all those thirty years he was continually writing, because that literature is not spoken, it is written. And the volume of literature is so big that I suspect he had no time left to purify his body. And what purification? -- the body is pure. What can you do with it? What is wrong with the body? For anything that is wrong you need medical science to help you. In a closed room how are you going to purify your body?
He became fatter and fatter, that's all. He had been a very lean and thin young man, but just reading and writing, reading and writing.... And his writing is just the worst possible. One sentence will continue for almost the whole page. You will forget about the beginning of the sentence by the time you have reached the end. By the end of the page you will have to go back again to the beginning to see what words the sentence had started with.
Aurobindo's books are unreadable, pedantic, verbose. He uses big words because he thinks the bigger the word, the more unused it is by people, the more mystified they will be. And it happened -- people were mystified. People are very strange: they get impressed by things which they cannot understand. If they can understand, they don't get impressed. Simple is their logic: "If I can understand it there is nothing in it." Unless they feel "I cannot understand it," they cannot believe that something higher, something of the beyond, is there. The way he has written is just to mystify. There is no need to write one paragraph or one page as one sentence. It is simply ridiculous if you want your word to reach to people. But no, he wanted to mystify.
In those books there is nothing. You dig up a whole mountain and you don't find even a rat! But they are big volumes, one thousand pages; and there are big words. And he was clever enough to make and create big words, for example, "supramental." And he would create categories....
For the superman to arrive, first you have to create the state of supramental, and for that you have to purify your body. And he declared that he was going to be immortal physically. Up to now Mahavira, Buddha, Krishna, Christ, Mohammed -- they have all said that the soul is eternal. Aurobindo said, "I am going to prove that only an eternal body can contain an eternal soul. My body is going to live forever, it is immortal."
Now this kind of thing is simple nonsense. But there is one thing good about it, about such statements; you can never prove such statements wrong, because if the man dies, to whom are you going to prove he is wrong? And if he lives, of course he is immortal. This is the trick behind the statement, "I am going to be immortal. I have purified my body, and the superman is descending, slowly, slowly coming into this body. This body is going to be immortal, and then I will teach my disciples to be immortal."
Hundreds of people, hoping to be immortal physically, followed Shri Aurobindo their whole life.
The body cannot be immortal, it is made of mortal things. Perhaps one can live a little longer, but to live eternally...! You can see the body is continually changing: the child is becoming a young man, the young man is becoming old, the old man is becoming older. Death does not come suddenly, it is coming from the very day you were born. Somebody who says his body is going to be immortal has to prove that his body has stopped changing.
Aurobindo used to see his disciples only one time a year, and that too was simply darshan. He would not talk, he would not answer; he would simply sit there and people would pass by him in a line -- just for a moment you could see him.
The woman who was in charge of the ashram was called "the Mother." People have completely forgotten her name, they have forgotten even her profession. She was a film actress who just fell in love with Shri Aurobindo. She dropped her husband and became a disciple... because the idea of physical immortality will appeal to women more than to men, obviously.
Women are more physical, more grounded, and have more of a sense of their body. Women don't believe much in the soul, because they cannot see any soul in the mirror. What they cannot see in the mirror is just stupid men's idea. And all women know that these men all go on playing with words and philosophy and religion. The woman is not interested in these things. She is more interested in the gossip, in juicy things; what is happening in the neighborhood, who has purchased a new car and who has purchased new clothes and who has made a new house.
They are not worried about God at all. It is not their concern. If they become concerned it is because of men. Because men are continually worried about God and soul and heaven and hell, the woman thinks, "perhaps there is something in it; and if so many men are interested in it, who knows? It is better at least to keep quiet about it, not to say anything." But I know every woman feels that all this is simply jargon.
This French actress became interested in the idea of physical immortality. She was a powerful woman and really capable of organizing, so Aurobindo had a good organizer at hand -- he could withdraw. He wanted his whole time to write. He was trying to create the whole philosophy of the superman: all the stages, methodologies to purify the body and the mind, what stages you will reach, what lights you will see and what colors will appear at what stage. If you read him you will think, "perhaps this man is talking sense, because he talks like somebody talking about geography. Everything on the map he can show you."
But looking at his books, he was a good linguist and knew how to play with words and language. For thirty years he was in isolation. Nothing was being purified; it was just that he needed time to study and to write. And his voluminous literature is proof enough -- nobody could produce that much literature if he were not continually working at least twelve or fourteen hours a day. The sheer volume is proof enough.
When you see a person every day you cannot detect that he is becoming older. But if you see him after a gap of one year you can immediately see how much change has happened, how much his hair has gone grey, how much his face has wrinkled, how much older he is looking.
So if he cannot prevent old age, then be certain that he cannot prevent death, because old age is just a preparation for death. And that's what happened: one day Aurobindo died. When he died it was a great shock to his disciples who lived there in his ashram and to his followers who were all around the earth, because who does not want to be physically immortal?
There are people in America, at least ten of them, whose dead bodies are preserved -- those bodies belong to multi-millionaires -- in the hope that within the coming of ten to fifteen years, science will be able to revive a dead man. So those people have put all their money in a trust -- that their bodies should be preserved exactly as they were when they died. So if, after ten or fifteen years, science becomes capable of reviving the body, their bodies will be revived.
Do you see man's ambitions, his poverty, his inferiority, his fear of death, his lust for life?
Even after death they are hoping...! And millions of dollars are being wasted on their bodies because they have a trust; it is their money. They are being preserved, frozen, completely frozen. And even if after fifteen years they come back, what are they going to do? They won't see anybody around whom they had left. Their wives may have gone, their children may have died. And who will want them -- even if the children are there? Who would like to have them back? Just think: your father comes after fifteen years of being a ghost; one day he suddenly comes home. You may die just with the shock of seeing your father standing before you.
And a fifteen-year gap.... People are talking about generation gaps -- have you thought about the gap between dead and the living? If after fifteen years a person comes back to life, he will not find anything recognizable, everything will be different. Perhaps he will not find the same world at all; perhaps the third world war will have happened and he may wake up to start the whole game again... to go in search... where is Eve? And if by chance he finds some Eve, then they both will have to think twice before they take the jump: should we start that whole thing again? If they have any intelligence they won't because once was enough -- and what happened to it!
But people are interested in immortality. Aurobindo exploited the idea of the superman; and physical immortality was his contribution to the idea of the superman. Nietzsche was not thinking of that; neither Bernard Shaw was thinking of that nor was Adolf Hitler. But Aurobindo, being an Indian, contributed to the idea. He was not very original because the immortality of the soul has always been talked about. He simply transferred it to the body: immortality of the body.
When he died, for three days they kept it a secret because the Mother, the organizer of the ashram, said, "He cannot die, that is impossible. It must be a certain stage when he is getting out of the body, and the superman is getting into the body -- just the interim stage, the interval.
"Of course if somebody is getting out of a house he has to take his luggage and furniture and mattresses; and so many things are there to get out of the house. Then the other will bring his own mattresses, his own furniture. And who knows what kinds of things that superman needs? He will bring his own paraphernalia. So it is just an interval." And people are so foolish. What kind of humanity have we got that they believed in this? -- that it was an interval.
The body was kept in secret, and they were praying and waiting for superman to descend. They were rejoicing because they were thinking, "Now it is happening" -- and all that was happening was that the body was deteriorating; it started stinking. Then the Mother became afraid that this is going to.... So the Mother said, "It seems it will take a longer time for the superman to descend, so we have to preserve the body inside a marble grave." You will not believe it: there are still people in Aurobindo's ashram who are waiting, thinking that one day he will knock inside the grave and say, "Now please open up: and superman has arrived."
The man died; then the Mother started pretending -- the same role -- that her body has become immortal. Of course she lived long, almost a century, but if you had seen her face before she died, you would have thought this face could only be of a ghost: she was just a skeleton, with wrinkled skin. You could count, even from a photograph, how many bones there were in her neck, and how many blood vessels in her neck were collapsing. There was no need for any X-ray, just seeing her was enough. You could have seen everything that was in her -- nothing was left.
People started believing that she was immortal, the same people who had been seeing Aurobindo dying. then she died, and again the same stupidity: three days' interval, then the stinking body, then again another Grave -- and waiting. And people are still waiting.
The idea of superman is basically rooted in your feeling of inferiority, of fear, of death. But the new nan has nothing to do with all this.
The new man is the very ordinary man:
Nothing special, nothing superior, supramental.
The new man is the first man who recognizes that it is enough to be human.
There is no need to be a superman.
There is no need to become gods and goddesses
It is so fulfilling just to be an ordinary human being.

There is nothing above human consciousness.
Everything that is possible is within you.
You are not to become special, superior.
You have to become absolutely simple, ordinary just nobodies.