But
where is the limit of effectuation in the evolutionary being's self-becoming
by self-exceeding? In mind itself there are grades of the series and
each grade again is a series in itself; there are successive elevations
which we may conveniently call planes and sub-planes of the mental consciousness
and the mental being. The development of our mental self is largely
an ascent of this stair; we can take our stand on any one of them, while
yet maintaining a dependence on the lower stages and a power of occasional
ascension to higher levels or of a response to influences from our being's
superior strata. At present we still normally take our first secure
stand on the lowest sub-plane of the intelligence, which we may call
the physical-mental, because it depends for its evidence of fact and
sense of reality on the physical brain, the physical sense-mind, the
physical sense-organs; there we are the physical man who attaches most
importance to objective things and to his outer life, has little intensity
of the subjective or inner existence and subordinates whatever he has
of it to the greater claims of exterior reality. The physical man has
a vital part, but it is mainly made up of the smaller instinctive and
impulsive formations of life-consciousness emerging from the subconscient,
along with a customary crowd or round of sensations, desires, hopes,
feelings, satisfactions which are dependent on external things and external
contacts and concerned with the practical, the immediately realisable
and possible, the habitual, the common and average. He has a mental
part, but this too is customary, traditional, practical, objective,
and respects what belongs to the domain of mind mostly for its utility
for the support, comfort, use, satisfaction and entertainment of his
physical and sensational existence. For the physical mind takes its
stand on matter and the material world, on the body and the bodily life,
on sense-experience and on a normal practical mentality and its experience.
All that is not of this order, the physical mind builds up as a restricted
superstructure dependent upon the external sense-mentality. Even so,
it regards these higher contents of life as either helpful adjuncts
or a superfluous but pleasant luxury of imaginations, feelings and thought-abstractions,
not as inner realities; or, even if it receives them as realities, it
does not feel them
concretely and substantially in their own proper substance, subtler
than the physical substance and its grosser concreteness,—it treats
them as a subjective, less substantial extension from physical realities.
It is inevitable that the human being should thus take his first stand
on Matter and give the external fact and external existence its due
importance; for this is Nature's first provision for our existence,
on which she insists greatly: the physical man is emphasised in us and
is multiplied abundantly in the world by her as her force for conservation
of the secure, if somewhat inert, material basis on which she can maintain
herself while she attempts her higher human developments; but in this
mental formation there is no power for progress or only for a material
progress. It is our first mental status, but the mental being cannot
remain always at this lowest rung of the human evolutionary ladder.
Above
physical mind and deeper within than physical sensation, there is what
we may call an intelligence of the life-mind, dynamic, vital, nervous,
more open, though still obscurely, to the psychic, capable of a first
soul-formation, though only of an obscurer life-soul,—not the psychic
being, but a frontal formation of the vital Purusha. This life-soul
concretely senses and contacts the things of the life-world, and tries
to realise them here; it attaches immense importance to the satisfaction
and fulfilment of the life-being, the life-force, the vital nature:
it looks on physical existence as a field for the life-impulses' self-fulfilment,
for the play of ambition, power, strong character, love, passion, adventure,
for the individual, the collective, the general human seeking and hazard
and venture, for all kinds of life-experiment and new life-experience,
and but for this saving element, this greater power, interest, significance,
the physical existence would have for it no value. This life-mentality
is supported by our secret subliminal vital being and is in veiled contact
with a life-world to which it can easily open and so feel the unseen
dynamic forces and realities behind the material universe. There is
an inner life-mind which does not need for its perceptions the evidence
of the physical senses, is not limited by them; for on this level our
inner life and the inner life of the world become real to us independent
of the body and of the symbols of the physical world which alone we
call natural phenomena, as if Nature had no greater phenomena and no
greater realities than those of gross Matter. The vital man, moulded
consciously or unconsciously by these influences, is the man of desire
and sensation, the man of force and action, the man of passion and emotion,
the kinetic individual: he may and does lay great stress on the material
existence, but he gives it, even when most preoccupied with its present
actualities, a push for life-experience, for force of realisation, for
life-extension, for life-power, for life-affirmation and life-expansion
which is Nature's first impetus towards enlargement of the being; at
a highest intensity of this life-impetus, he becomes the breaker of
bonds, the seeker of new horizons, the disturber of the past and present
in the interest of the future. He has a mental life which is often enslaved
to the vital force and its desires and passions, and it is these he
seeks to satisfy through the mind: but when he interests himself strongly
in mental things, he can become the mental adventurer, the opener of
the way to new mind-formations or the fighter for an idea, the sensitive
type of artist, the dynamic poet of life or the prophet or champion
of a cause. The vital mind is kinetic and therefore a great force in
the working of evolutionary Nature.
Above
this level of vital mentality and yet more inly extended, is a mind-plane
of pure thought and intelligence to which the things of the mental world
are the most important realities; those who are under its influence,
the philosopher, thinker, scientist, intellectual creator, the man of
the idea, the man of the written or spoken word, the idealist and dreamer
are the present mental being at his highest attained summit. This mental
man has his life-part, his life of passions and desires and ambitions
and life-hopes of all kinds and his lower sensational and physical existence,
and this lower part can often equibalance or weigh down his nobler mental
element so that, although it is the highest portion of him, it does
not become dominant and formative in his whole nature: but this is not
typical of him in his greatest development, for there the vital and
physical are controlled and subjected by the thinking will and intelligence.
The mental man cannot transform his nature, but he can control and harmonise
it and lay on it the law of a mental ideal, impose a balance or a sublimating
and refining influence, and give a high consistency to the multipersonal
confusion and conflict or the summary patchwork of our divided and half-constructed
being. He can be the observer and governor of his own mind and life,
can consciously develop them and become to that extent a self-creator.
-
Sri Aurobindo
