This
mind of pure intelligence has behind it our inner or subliminal mind
which senses directly all the things of the mind-plane, is open to the
action of a world of mental forces, and can feel the ideative and other
imponderable influences which act upon the material world and the life-plane
but which at present we can only infer and cannot directly experience:
these intangibles and imponderables are to the mental man real and patent
and he regards them as truths demanding to be realised in our or the
earth's nature. On the inner plane mind and mind-soul independent of
the body can become to us an entire reality, and we can consciously
live in them as much as in the body. Thus to live in mind and the things
of the mind, to be an intelligence rather than a life and a body, is
our highest position, short of spirituality, in the degrees of Nature.
The mental man, the man of a self-dominating and self-formative mind
and will conscious of an ideal and turned towards its realisation, the
high intellect, the thinker, the sage, less kinetic and immediately
effective than the vital man, who is the man of action and outer swift
life-fulfilment, but as powerful and eventually even more powerful to
open new vistas to the race, is the normal summit of Nature's evolutionary
formation on the human plane. These three degrees of mentality, clear
in themselves, but most often mixed in our composition, are to our ordinary
intelligence only psychological types that happen to have developed,
and we do not discover any other significance in them; but in fact they
are full of significance, for they are the steps of Nature's evolution
of mental being towards its self-exceeding, and, as thinking mind is
the highest step she can now attain, the perfected mental man is the
rarest and highest of her normal human creatures. To go farther she
has to bring into the mind and make active in mind, life and body the
spiritual principle.
For
these are her evolutionary figures built out of the surface mentality;
to do more she has to use more amply the unseen material hidden below
our surface, to dive inwards and bring out the secret soul, the psyche,
or to ascend above our normal mental level into planes of intuitive
consciousness dense with light derived from the spiritual gnosis, ascending
planes of pure spiritual mind in which we are in direct contact with
the infinite, in touch with the self and highest reality of things,
Sachchidananda. In ourselves, behind our surface natural being,
there is a soul, an inner mind, an inner life-part which can open to
these heights as well as to the occult spirit within us, and this double
opening is the secret of a new evolution; by that breaking of lids and
walls and boundaries the consciousness rises to a greater ascent and
a larger integration which, as the evolution of mind has mentalised,
so will by this new evolution spiritualise all the powers of our nature.
For the mental man has not been Nature's last effort or highest reach,—though
he has been, in general, more fully evolved in his own nature than those
who have achieved themselves below or aspired above
him; she has pointed man to a yet higher and more difficult level, inspired
him with the ideal of a spiritual living, begun the evolution in him
of a spiritual being. The spiritual man is her supreme supernormal effort
of human creation; for, having evolved the mental creator, thinker,
sage, prophet of an ideal, the self-controlled, self-disciplined, harmonised
mental being, she has tried to go higher and deeper within and call
out into the front the soul and inner mind and heart, call down from
above the forces of the spiritual mind and higher mind and overmind
and create under their light and by their influence the spiritual sage,
seer, prophet, God-lover, Yogin, gnostic, Sufi, mystic.
This
is man's only way of true self-exceeding: for so long as we live in
the surface being or found ourselves wholly on Matter, it is impossible
to go higher and vain to expect that there can be any new transition
of a radical character in our evolutionary being. The vital man, the
mental man have had an immense effect upon the earth-life, they have
carried humanity forward from the mere human animal to what it is now.
But it is only within the bounds of the already established evolutionary
formula of the human being that they can act; they can enlarge the human
circle but not change or transform the principle of consciousness or
its characteristic operation. Any attempt to heighten inordinately the
mental or exaggerate inordinately the vital man,—a Nietzschean
supermanhood, for example,—can only colossalise the human creature,
it cannot transform or divinise him. A different possibility opens if
we can live within in the inner being and make it the direct ruler of
life or station ourselves on the spiritual and intuitive planes of being
and from there and by their power transmute our nature.
The
spiritual man is the sign of this new evolution, this new and higher
endeavour of Nature. But this evolution differs from the past process
of the evolutionary Energy in two respects: it is conducted by a conscious
effort of the human mind, and it is not confined to a conscious progression
of the surface nature, but is accompanied by an attempt to break the
walls of the Ignorance and extend ourselves inward into the secret principle
of our present being and outward into cosmic being as well as upward
towards a higher principle. Up till now what Nature had achieved was
an enlarging of the bounds of our surface Knowledge-Ignorance; what
it attempted in the spiritual endeavour is to abolish the Ignorance,
to go inwards and discover the soul and to become united in consciousness
with God and with all existence. This is the final aim of the mental
stage of evolutionary Nature in man; it is the initial step towards
a radical transmutation of the Ignorance into the Knowledge. The spiritual
change begins by an influence of the inner being and the higher spiritual
mind, an action felt and
accepted on the surface; but this by itself can lead only to an illumined
mental idealism or to the growth of a religious mind, a religious temperament
and some devotion in the heart and piety in the conduct; it is a first
approach of mind to spirit, but it cannot make a radical change: more
has to be done, we have to live deeper within, we have to exceed our
present consciousness and surpass our present status of Nature.
-
Sri Aurobindo
