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The
Mother Answers on Supermind and Mind of Light - II
"Even
in the material world which seems to us a world of ignorance,
a world of the workings of a blind and inconscient Force
starting from inconscience and proceeding through Ignorance
and reaching with difficulty towards an imperfect Light
and Knowledge, there is still a secret Truth in things which
arranges all, guides towards the Self many contrary powers
of being and rises towards its own heights where it can
manifest its own highest truth and fulfil the secret purpose
of the universe. Even this material world of existence is
built upon a pattern of the truth in things which we call
Law of Nature, a truth from which we climb to a greater
truth until we emerge in the Light of the Supreme. This
world is not really created by a blind force of Nature:
even in the Inconscient the presence of the supreme Truth
is at work; there is a seeing Power behind it which acts
infallibly and the steps of the Ignorance itself are guided
even when they seem to stumble; for, what we call the Ignorance
is a cloaked Knowledge, a Knowledge at work in a body not
its own but moving towards its own supreme self-discovery.
This Knowledge is the covert Supermind which is the support
of the creation and is leading all towards itself and guides
behind this multitude of minds and creatures and objects
which seem each to be following its own law of nature; in
this vast and apparently confused mass of existence there
is a law, a one truth of being, a guiding and fulfilling
purpose of the world-existence. The Supermind is veiled
here and does not work according to its characteristic law
of being and self-knowledge, but without it nothing could
reach its aim. A world governed by an ignorant mind would
soon drift into a chaos; it could not in fact come into
existence or remain in existence unless supported by the
secret Omniscience of which it is the cover; a world governed
by a blind inconscient force might repeat constantly the
same mechanical workings but it would mean nothing and arrive
nowhere. This could not be the cause of an evolution that
creates life out of Matter, out of life mind, and a gradation
of planes of Matter, Life and Mind culminating in the emergence
of Supermind. The secret truth that emerges in Supermind
has been there all the time, but now it manifests itself
and the truth in things and the meaning of our existence."
-
Supermind and Mind of Light
In fact this was not finished. It stopped short there. There
were others to come...
(Silence)
So,
we are going to finish without questions?
Mother, about the last paragraph here, there is a question:
If the Supermind is hidden behind things, why is it so difficult
to find it?
Because it is hidden! (Laughter)
Even
in the Ignorance it is working, it leads to the Truth...
Sri
Aurobindo explains that if the supramental truth had not been
there behind things, the world could never have been organised,
even as it is organised now. We have the feeling of a consciousness
with a very enlightened will which has organised everything
in accordance with a very precise plan, which cannot be the
result either of ignorance or of unconsciousness. In fact,
your difficulty in perceiving the Supermind or the Truth-Consciousness
behind things indicates the exact measure of your personal
ignorance and unconsciousness; for those who have come out
of this ignorance and unconsciousness see it very clearly.
The difficulty depends on the state of unconsciousness one
is in. But for one who has gone beyond this state of unconsciousness
it is not at all difficult to find the Supermind; it is very
perceptible.
(Silence)
If
one enters into a somewhat philosophical, psychological and
subjective consciousness, one can very easily become aware
of a sort of "objective unreality" of things; and
the one thing which is real, tangible, concrete, measurable,
so to speak, for the ordinary consciousness becomes so fluid,
almost unsubstantial, and has a reality only in the consciousness
that perceives it—an absolutely variable reality and
at times quite contradictory according to the perception of
the consciousness. If we put before us the different explanations
that have been given about the world, the different ways in
which it has been expressed, we shall have a series of notions
that are sometimes absolutely contradictory, which are nevertheless
perceptions of one identical thing by different consciousnesses.
In fact, with this last paragraph, we have an extreme point
which is the affirmation that all that is, is the total and
complete expression of the Divine Will—there is what
could be called a certain school of thinkers who, on the basis
of their personal experience, have asserted that everything
is the expression of the Divine Will in a perfect way—and
then, at the other extreme, the affirmation that the world
is a sort of chaos without rhyme or reason, which has come
into being one doesn't know how or why, which is going one
doesn't know where, which has no logic, no reason, no coordination—it
is just chance. It happens to be like this, one doesn't know
why. Well, if you take these two extremes and put before you
all that has been said, written, taught, thought about the
world from one end to the other, and if you can see all that
together, you will realise that, since it is all about the
same world and yet the explanations are so totally different,
this world exists, so to say, only in the consciousness of
the one who sees it... There must indeed be "something"
there, but that something must be beyond what men think about
it—far beyond, very different. And so the whole feeling
is of an elusive unreality.
And
in fact, the reality of the world is entirely subjective for
each person's consciousness. The world has no objective reality,
for in one case it can be said that it is the result of the
supremely conscious, supreme Will and that all is ruled by
that, and in the other case, it may be said that it is something
without any reason for existence except an elusive chance—and
yet, these two notions apply to one and the same thing.
Have
you never thought about that?
Everyone has his own idea which is more or less clear, more
or less organised, more or less precise, and this idea he
calls the world. Everyone has his own way of seeing, his own
way of feeling and his particular relationship with everything
else, and this he calls the world. He naturally puts himself
at the centre, and then everybody is organised around him,
according to the way in which he sees it, feels it, understands
and desires it, according to his own reaction, but since for
each consciousness, individually, it is different, this means
that what we call the world—the thing in itself—escapes
our perception completely. It must be something else. And
we must come out of our individual consciousness to be able
to understand what it is; and this is what Sri Aurobindo calls
the passage from the lower to the higher hemisphere. In the
lower hemisphere there are as many universes as individuals,
and in the higher hemisphere there is "something"—which
is what it is—in which all consciousnesses must meet.
This is what he calls the "Truth-Consciousness".
As
the human consciousness progresses, it has a greater and greater
sense of this relativity, and at the same time a sort of feeling,
it could be said, a vague impression that there is a Truth,
which is not perceptible by ordinary means but must be perceptible
in some way or other.
That
is all. So I hope that with our next book, The Life Divine,
we shall find the key to the problem.
9
October 1957
- The Mother
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