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Parts
of the Being
...
the
Vital is
the Life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings,
passions, energies of action, will of desire, reactions of
the desire-soul of man and of all that play of possissive
and other relative instincts, anger, greed, lust, ets. that
belong to this field of nature.
...the
words “mind”
and “mental”
are used to connote specially the part of the nature which
has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with
mental or thought perceptions, the reactions of thought to
things, with the truly mental movements and formations, mental
vision and will, etc., that are part of his intelligence.
...
The
physical mind is that part of the mind which is
concerned with the physical things only—it depends on
the sense-mind, sees only objects, external actions, draws
its ideas from the data given by external things, infers from
them only and knows no other Truth until it is enlightened
from above.
The
mind proper is divided into three parts—thinking
Mind, dynamic Mind, externalising
Mind — the former connected with ideas and knowledge
in their own right, the second with the putting out of mental
forces for realisation of the idea, the third with the expression
of them in life (not only by speech, but by any form it can
give).
The
higher mind in man is something other, loftier,
purer, vaster, more powerful than the reason or logical intelligence.
...
the Illumined
Mind, a Mind no longer of higher Thought, but of
spiritual light. Here the clarity of the spiritual intelligence,
its tranquil daylight, gives place or subordinates itself
to an intense lustre, a splendour and illumination of the
Spirit.
There is, indeed, a higher form of the buddhi that can be
called the intuitive
mind or intuitive reason, and this by its intuitions,
its inspirations, its swift revelatory vision, its luminous
insight and discrimination can do the work of the reason with
a higher power, a swifter action, a greater and spontaneous
certitude. It acts in a self-light of the truth which does
not depend upon the torch-flares of the sense-mind and its
limited uncertain percepts; it proceeds not by intelligent
but by visional concepts: it is a kind of truth-vision, truth-hearing,
truth-memory, direct truth-discernment.
By the supermind
is meant the full Truth-Consciousness of the Divine Nature
in which there can be no place for the principle of division
and ignorance; it is always a full light and knowledge superior
to all mental substance or mental movement. Between the supermind
and the human mind are a number of ranges, planes or layers
of consciousness—one can regard it in various ways—in
which the element or substance of mind and consequently its
movements also become more and more illumined and powerful
and wide. The overmind
is the highest of these ranges; it is full of lights and powers;
but from the point of view of what is above it, it is the
line of the soul's turning away from the complete and indivisible
knowledge and its descent towards the Ignorance. For although
it draws from the Truth, it is here that begins the separation
of aspects of the Truth, the forces and their working out
as if they were independent truths and this is a process that
ends, as one descends to ordinary Mind, Life and Matter, in
a complete division, fragmentation, separation from the indivisible
Truth above. There is no longer the essential, total, perfectly
harmonising and unifying knowledge, or rather knowledge for
ever harmonious because for ever one, which is the character
of supermind. In the supermind, mental divisions and oppositions
cease, the problems created by our dividing and fragmenting
mind disappear and Truth is seen as a luminous whole. In the
overmind there is not yet the actual fall into Ignorance,
but the first step is taken which will make the fall inevitable.
- Sri Aurobindo
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