The starting point for this paper is the premise that "alternatives to modern episte-mology can hardly come from modern (Western) epistemology itself." This idea has been voiced quite forcefully in recent thinking, by scholars such as Walter D. Mignolo from whose book Local Histories/Global Designs the above phrase is taken. But even if we were to agree with such a premise, it still begs the question of where to look for these alternatives. For critics such a Mignolo, the challenge is to rehabilitate subaltern knowledge systems so as to bring about, to invoke a phrase from Foucault, "an insurrection of subjected knowledges." "Gnosis," "gnoseology" and "border thinking" have been used to describe those knowledge systems that are on the margins of or outside the world colonized by Western modernity. My project is to oppose the dominance of rationality (or, more recently, irrationality) in modern and postmodern philosophy by invoking ideas of the supra-rational from Classical as well as modern traditions of thinking, especially in India. These traditions, for lack of a better word, may be called "wisdom traditions." That they share something with gnosticism should be obvious. I would like to focus on the work of one modern Indian thinker, Sri Aurobindo, particularly his idea of the Supermind, to suggest a slightly different way of conceiving postcolonial futures. Sri Aurobindo's thought has important implications for the discipline of consciousness studies because it posits the naturalization of a higher conscious than the mental. Is there, I ask, a bridge somewhere between the 'secular" critics of Western modernity or colonial discourse, on the one hand, and their rather more "mystical" counterparts, on the other? If this missing link were to be discovered, it might contribute to a critical step forward in conversations on planetary futures and actually pave the way for a new global renaissance.