THE object of Yoga is to raise
the human being from the consciousness of the ordinary
mind subject to the control of vital and material Nature
and limited wholly by birth and death and Time and the
needs and desires of the mind, life and body to the
consciousness of the spirit free in its self and using
the circumstances of mind, life and body as admitted
or self-chosen and self-figuring determinations of the
spirit, using them in a free self-knowledge, a free
will and power of being, a free delight of being. This
is the essential difference between the ordinary mortal
mind in which we live and the spiritual consciousness
of our divine and immortal being which is the highest
result of Yoga. It is a radical conversion as great
as and greater than the change which we suppose evolutionary
Nature to have made in its transition from the vital
animal to the fully mentalised human consciousness.
The animal has the conscious vital mind, but whatever
beginnings there are in it of anything higher are only
a primary glimpse, a crude hint of the intelligence
which in man becomes the splendour of the mental understanding,
will, emotion, aesthesis and reason. Man elevated in
the heights and deepened by the intensities of the mind
becomes aware of something great and divine in himself
towards which all this tends, something he is in possibility
but which he has not yet become, and he turns the powers
of his mind, his power of knowledge, his power of will,
his power of emotion and aesthesis to seek out this,
to seize and comprehend all that it may be, to become
it and to exist wholly in its greater consciousness,
delight, being and power of highest becoming. But what
he gets of this higher state in his normal mind is only
an intimation, a primary glimpse, a crude hint of the
splendour, the light, the glory and divinity of the
spirit within him. A complete conversion of all the
parts of his being into moulds and instruments of the
spiritual consciousness is demanded of him before he
can make quite real, constant, present to himself this
greater thing that he can be and entirely live in what
is now to him at the best a luminous aspiration. He
must seek to develop and grow altogether into a greater
divine consciousness by an integral Yoga.
The
Yoga of perfection necessary to this change has, so
far as we have been considering it, consisted in a preparatory
purification of the mental, vital and physical nature,
a liberation from the knots of the lower Prakriti, a
consequent replacement of the egoistic state always
subject to the ignorant and troubled action of the desire-soul
by a large and luminous static equality which quiets
the reason, the emotional mind, the life mind and the
physical nature and brings into us the peace and freedom
of the spirit, and a dynamical substitution of the action
of the supreme and universal divine Shakti under the
control of the Ishwara for that of the lower Prakriti,—an
action whose complete operation must be preceded by
the perfection of the natural instruments. And all these
things together, though not as yet the whole Yoga, constitute
already a much greater than the present normal consciousness,
spiritual in its basis and moved by a greater light,
power and bliss, and it might be easy to rest satisfied
with so much accomplished and think that all has been
done that was needed for the divine conversion.
A
momentous question however arises as light grows, the
question, through what medium is the divine Shakti to
act in the human being? Is it to be always through the
mind only and on the mind plane or in some greater supramental
formulation which is more proper to a divine action
and which will take up and replace the mental functions?
If the mind is to be always the instrument, then although
we shall be conscious of a diviner Power initiating
and conducting all our inner and outer human action,
yet it will have to formulate its knowledge, will, Ananda
and all things else in the mental figure, and that means
to translate them into an inferior kind of functioning
other than the supreme workings native to the divine
consciousness and its Shakti. The mind spiritualised,
purified, liberated, perfected within its own limits
may come as near as possible to a faithful mental translation,
but we shall find that this is after all a relative
fidelity and an imperfect perfection. The mind by its
very nature cannot render with an entirely right rightness
or act in the unified completeness of the divine knowledge,
will and Ananda because it is an instrument for dealing
with the divisions of the finite on the basis of division,
a secondary instrument therefore and a sort of delegate
for the lower movement in which we live. The mind can
reflect the Infinite, it can dissolve itself into it,
it can live in it by a large passivity, it can take
its suggestions and act them out in its own way, a way
always fragmentary, derivative and subject to a greater
or less deformation, but it cannot be itself the direct
and perfect instrument of the infinite Spirit acting
in its own knowledge. The divine Will and Wisdom organising
the action of the infinite consciousness and determining
all things according to the truth of the spirit and
the law of its manifestation is not mental but supramental
and even in its formulation nearest to mind as much
above the mental consciousness in its light and power
as the mental consciousness of man above the vital mind
of the lower creation. The question is how far the perfected
human being can raise himself above mind, enter into
some kind of fusing union with the supramental and build
up in himself a level of supermind, a developed gnosis
by the form and power of which the divine Shakti can
directly act, not through a mental translation, but
organically in her supramental nature.
It
is here necessary in a matter so remote from the ordinary
lines of our thought and experience to state first what
is the universal gnosis or divine supermind, how it
is represented in the actual movement of the universe
and what are its relations to the present psychology
of the human being. It will then be evident that though
the supermind is suprarational to our intelligence and
its workings occult to our apprehension, it is nothing
irrationally mystic, but rather its existence and emergence
is a logical necessity of the nature of existence, always
provided we grant that not matter or mind alone but
spirit is the fundamental reality and everywhere a universal
presence. All things are a manifestation of the infinite
spirit out of its own being, out of its own consciousness
and by the self-realising, self-determining, self-fulfilling
power of that consciousness. The Infinite, we may say,
organises by the power of its self-knowledge the law
of its own manifestation of being in the universe, not
only the material universe present to our senses, but
whatever lies behind it on whatever planes of existence.
All is organised by it not under any inconscient compulsion,
not according to a mental fantasy or caprice, but in
its own infinite spiritual freedom according to the
self-truth of its being, its infinite potentialities
and its will of self-creation out of those potentialities,
and the law of this self-truth is the necessity that
compels created things to act and evolve each according
to its own nature. The Intelligence—to give it
an inadequate name—the Logos that thus organises
its own manifestation is evidently something infinitely
greater, more extended in knowledge, compelling in self-power,
larger both in the delight of its self-existence and
the delight of its active being and works than the mental
intelligence which is to us the highest realised degree
and expression of consciousness. It is to this intelligence
infinite in itself but freely organising and self-determiningly
organic in its self-creation and its works that we may
give for our present purpose the name of the divine
supermind or gnosis.
The
fundamental nature of this supermind is that all its
knowledge is originally a knowledge by identity and
oneness and even when it makes numberless apparent divisions
and discriminating modifications in itself, still all
the knowledge that operates in its workings even in
these divisions, is founded upon and sustained and lit
and guided by this perfect knowledge by identity and
oneness. The Spirit is one everywhere and it knows all
things as itself and in itself, so sees them always
and therefore knows them intimately, completely, in
their reality as well as their appearance, in their
truth, their law, the entire spirit and sense and figure
of their nature and their workings. When it sees anything
as an object of knowledge, it yet sees it as itself
and in itself, and not as a thing other than or divided
from it about which therefore it would at first be ignorant
of the nature, constitution and workings and have to
learn about them, as the mind is at first ignorant of
its object and has to learn about it because the mind
is separated from its object and regards and senses
and meets it as something other than itself and external
to its own being. The mental awareness we have of our
own subjective existence and its movements, though it
may point to, is not the same thing as this identity
and self-knowledge, because what it sees are mental
figures of our being and not the inmost or the whole
and it is only a partial, derivative and superficial
action of our self that appears to us while the largest
and most secretly determining parts of our own existence
are occult to our mentality. The supramental Spirit
has, unlike the mental being, the real because the inmost
and total knowledge of itself and of all its universe
and of all things that are its creations and self-figurings
in the universe.
This
is the second character of the supreme Supermind that
its knowledge is a real because a total knowledge. It
has in the first place a transcendental vision and sees
the universe not only in the universal terms, but in
its right relation to the supreme and eternal reality
from which it proceeds and of which it is an expression.
It knows the spirit and truth and whole sense of the
universal expression because it knows all the essentiality
and all the infinite reality and all the consequent
constant potentiality of that which in part it expresses.
It knows rightly the relative because it knows the Absolute
and all its absolutes to which the relatives refer back
and of which they are the partial or modified or suppressed
figures. It is in the second place universal and sees
all that is individual in the terms of the universal
as well as in its own individual terms and holds all
these individual figures in their right and complete
relation to the universe. It is in the third place,
separately with regard to individual things, total in
its view because it knows each in its inmost essence
of which all else is the resultant, in its totality
which is its complete figure and in its parts and their
connections and dependences,—as well as in its
connections with and its dependences upon other things
and its nexus with the total implications and the explicits
of the universe.
The
mind on the contrary is limited and incapable in all
these directions. Mind cannot arrive at identity with
the Absolute even when by a stretch of the intellect
it conceives the idea, but can only disappear into it
in a swoon or extinction: it can only have a kind of
sense or an intimation of certain absolutes which it
puts by the mental idea into a relative figure. It cannot
grasp the universal, but only arrives at some idea of
it through an extension of the individual or a combination
of apparently separate things and so sees it either
as a vague infinite or indeterminate or a half determined
largeness or else only in an external scheme or constructed
figure. The indivisible being and action of the universal,
which is its real truth, escapes the apprehension of
the mind, because the mind thinks it out analytically
by taking its own divisions for units and synthetically
by combinations of these units, but cannot seize on
and think entirely in the terms, though it may get at
the idea and certain secondary results, of the essential
oneness. It cannot, either, know truly and thoroughly
even the individual and apparently separate thing, because
it proceeds in the same way, by an analysis of parts
and constituents and properties and a combination by
which it erects a scheme of it which is only its external
figure. It can get an intimation of the essential inmost
truth of its object, but cannot live constantly and
luminously in that essential knowledge and work out
on the rest from within outward so that the outward
circumstances appear in their intimate reality and meaning
as inevitable result and expression and form and action
of the spiritual something which is the reality of the
object. And all this which is impossible for the mind
to do, but possible only to strive towards and figure,
is inherent and natural to the supramental knowledge.
The
third characteristic of the supermind arising from this
difference, which brings us to the practical distinction
between the two kinds of knowledge, is that it is directly
truth-conscious, a divine power of immediate, inherent
and spontaneous knowledge, an Idea holding luminously
all realities and not depending on indications and logical
or other steps from the known to the unknown like the
mind which is a power of the Ignorance. The supermind
contains all its knowledge in itself, is in its highest
divine wisdom in eternal possession of all truth and
even in its lower, limited or individualised forms has
only to bring the latent truth out of itself,—the
perception which the old thinkers tried to express when
they said that all knowing was in its real origin and
nature only a memory of inwardly existing knowledge.
The supermind is eternally and on all levels truth-conscious
and exists secretly even in mental and material being,
surveys and knows the things, even obscurest, of the
mental ignorance and understands and is behind and governs
its processes, because everything in the mind derives
from the supermind—and must do so because everything
derives from the spirit. All that is mental is but a
partial, a modified, a suppressed or half suppressed
figure of the supramental truth, a deformation or a
derived and imperfect figure of its greater knowledge.
The mind begins with ignorance and proceeds towards
knowledge. As an actual fact, in the material universe,
it appears out of an initial and universal inconscience
which is really an involution of the all-conscient spirit
in its own absorbed self-oblivious force of action;
and it appears therefore as part of an evolutionary
process, first a vital feeling towards overt sensation,
then an emergence of a vital mind capable of sensation
and, evolving out of it, a mind of emotion and desire,
a conscious will, a growing intelligence. And each stage
is an emergence of a greater suppressed power of the
secret supermind and spirit.
The
mind of man, capable of reflection and a coordinated
investigation and understanding of itself and its basis
and surroundings, arrives at truth but against a background
of original ignorance, a truth distressed by a constant
surrounding mist of incertitude and error. Its certitudes
are relative and for the most part precarious certainties
or else are the assured fragmentary certitudes only
of an imperfect, incomplete and not an essential experience.
It makes discovery after discovery, gets idea after
idea, adds experience to experience and experiment to
experiment,—but losing and rejecting and forgetting
and having to recover much as it proceeds,—and
it tries to establish a relation between all that it
knows by setting up logical and other sequences, a series
of principles and their dependences, generalisations
and their application, and makes out of its devices
a structure in which mentally it can live, move and
act and enjoy and labour. This mental knowledge is always
limited in extent: not only so, but in addition the
mind even sets up other willed barriers, admitting by
the mental device of opinion certain parts and sides
of truth and excluding all the rest, because if it gave
free admission and play to all ideas, if it suffered
truth's infinities, it would lose itself in an unreconciled
variety, an undetermined immensity and would be unable
to act and proceed to practical consequences and an
effective creation. And even when it is widest and most
complete, mental knowing is still an indirect knowledge,
a knowledge not of the thing in itself but of its figures,
a system of representations, a scheme of indices,—except
indeed when in certain movements it goes beyond itself,
beyond the mental idea to spiritual identity, but it
finds it extremely difficult to go here beyond a few
isolated and intense spiritual realisations or to draw
or work out or organise the right practical consequences
of these rare identities of knowledge. A greater power
than the reason is needed for the spiritual comprehension
and effectuation of this deepest knowledge.
This
is what the supermind, intimate with the Infinite, alone
can do. The supermind sees directly the spirit and essence,
the face and body, the result and action, the principles
and dependences of the truth as one indivisible whole
and therefore can work out the circumstantial results
in the power of the essential knowledge, the variations
of the spirit in the light of its identities, its apparent
divisions in the truth of its oneness. The supermind
is a knower and creator of its own truth, the mind of
man only a knower and creator in the half light and
half darkness of a mingled truth and error, and creator
too of a thing which it derives altered, translated,
lessened from something greater than and beyond it.
Man lives in a mental consciousness between a vast subconscient
which is to his seeing a dark inconscience and a vaster
superconscient which he is apt to take for another but
a luminous inconscience, because his idea of consciousness
is confined to his own middle term of mental sensation
and intelligence. It is in that luminous superconscience
that there lie the ranges of the supermind and the spirit.
The
supermind is again, because it acts and creates as well
as knows, not only a direct truth-consciousness, but
an illumined, direct and spontaneous truth-will. There
is not and cannot be in the will of the self-knowing
spirit any contradiction, division or difference between
its will and its knowledge. The spiritual will is the
Tapas or enlightened force of the conscious being of
the spirit effecting infallibly what is there within
it, and it is this infallible operation of things acting
according to their own nature, of energy producing result
and event according to the force within it, of action
bearing the fruit and event involved in its own character
and intention which we call variously in its different
aspects law of Nature, Karma, Necessity and Fate. These
things are to mind the workings of a power outside or
above it in which it is involved and intervenes only
with a contributory personal effort which partly arrives
and succeeds, partly fails and stumbles and which even
in succeeding is largely overruled for issues different
from or at any rate greater and more far-reaching than
its own intention. The will of man works in the ignorance
by a partial light or more often flickerings of light
which mislead as much as they illuminate. His mind is
an ignorance striving to erect standards of knowledge,
his will an ignorance striving to erect standards of
right, and his whole mentality as a result very much
a house divided against itself, idea in conflict with
idea, the will often in conflict with the ideal of right
or the intellectual knowledge. The will itself takes
different shapes, the will of the intelligence, the
wishes of the emotional mind, the desires of the passion
and the vital being, the impulsions and blind or half-blind
compulsions of the nervous and the subconscient nature,
and all these make by no means a harmony, but at best
a precarious concord among discords. The will of the
mind and life is a stumbling about in search of right
force, right Tapas which can wholly be attained in its
true and complete light and direction only by oneness
with the spiritual and supramental being.
The
supramental nature on the contrary is just, harmonious
and one, will and knowledge there only light of the
spirit and power of the spirit, the power effecting
the light, the light illumining the power. In the highest
supramentality they are intimately fused together and
do not even wait upon each other but are one movement,
will illumining itself, knowledge fulfilling itself,
both together a single jet of the being. The mind knows
only the present and lives in an isolated movement of
it though it tries to remember and retain the past and
forecast and compel the future. The supermind has the
vision of the three times, trikalädrsti;
it sees them as an indivisible movement and sees too
each containing the others. It is aware of all tendencies,
energies and forces as the diverse play of unity and
knows their relation to each other in the single movement
of the one spirit. The supramental will and action are
therefore a will and action of the spontaneous self-fulfilling
truth of the spirit, the right and at the highest the
infallible movement of a direct and total knowledge.
The
supreme and universal Supermind is the active Light
and Tapas of the supreme and universal Self as the Lord
and Creator, that which we come to know in Yoga as the
divine Wisdom and Power, the eternal knowledge and will
of the Ishwara. On the highest planes of Being where
all is known and all manifests as existences of the
one existence, consciousnesses of the one consciousness,
delight's self-creations of the one Ananda, many truths
and powers of the one Truth, there is the intact and
integral display of its spiritual and supramental knowledge.
And in the corresponding planes of our own being the
Jiva shares in the spiritual and supramental nature
and lives in its light and power and bliss. As we descend
nearer to what we are in this world, the presence and
action of this self-knowledge narrows but retains always
the essence and character when not the fullness of the
supramental nature and its way of knowing and willing
and acting, because it still lives in the essence and
body of the spirit. The mind, when we trace the descent
of the self towards matter, we see as a derivation which
travels away from the fullness of self, the fullness
of its light and being and which lives in a division
and diversion, not in the body of the sun, but first
in its nearer and then in its far-off rays. There is
a highest intuitive mind which receives more nearly
the supramental truth, but even this is a formation
which conceals the direct and greater real knowledge.
There is an intellectual mind which is a luminous half-opaque
lid which intercepts and reflects in a radiantly distorting
and suppressively modifying atmosphere the truth known
to the supermind. There is a still lower mind built
on the foundation of the senses between which and the
sun of knowledge there is a thick cloud, an emotional
and a sensational mist and vapour with here and there
lightnings and illuminations. There is a vital mind
which is shut away even from the light of intellectual
truth, and lower still in submental life and matter
the spirit involves itself entirely as if in a sleep
and a night, a sleep plunged in a dim and yet poignant
nervous dream, the night of a mechanical somnambulist
energy. It is a re-evolution of the spirit out of this
lowest state in which we find ourselves at a height
above the lower creation, having taken it up all in
us and reaching so far in our ascent only the light
of the well-developed mental reason. The full powers
of self-knowledge and the illumined will of the spirit
are still beyond us above the mind and reason in supramental
Nature.
If
the spirit is everywhere, even in matter—in fact
matter itself is only an obscure form of the spirit
and if the supermind is the universal power of the spirit's
omnipresent self-knowledge organising all the manifestation
of the being, then in matter and everywhere there must
be present a supramental action and, however concealed
it may be by another, lower and obscurer kind of operation,
yet when we look close we shall find that it is really
the supermind which organises matter, life, mind and
reason. And this actually is the knowledge towards which
we are now moving. There is even a quite visible intimate
action of the consciousness, persistent in life, matter
and mind, which is clearly a supramental action subdued
to the character and need of the lower medium and to
which we now give the name of intuition from its most
evident characteristics of direct vision and self-acting
knowledge, really a vision born of some secret identity
with the object of the knowledge. What we call the intuition
is however only a partial indication of the presence
of the supermind, and if we take this presence and power
in its widest character, we shall see that it is a concealed
supramental force with a self-conscient knowledge in
it which informs the whole action of material energy.
It is that which determines what we call law of nature,
maintains the action of each thing according to its
own nature and harmonises and evolves the whole, which
would otherwise be a fortuitous creation apt at any
moment to collapse into chaos. All the law of nature
is a thing precise in its necessities of process, but
is yet in the cause of that necessity and of its constancy
of rule, measure, combination, adaptation, result a
thing inexplicable, meeting us at every step with a
mystery and a miracle, and this must be either because
it is irrational and accidental even in its regularities
or because it is suprarational, because the truth of
it belongs to a principle greater than that of our intelligence.
That principle is the supramental; that is to say, the
hidden secret of Nature is the organisation of something
out of the infinite potentialities of the self-existent
truth of the spirit the nature of which is wholly evident
only to an original knowledge born of and proceeding
by a fundamental identity, the spirit's constant self-perception.
All the action of life too is of this character and
all the action of mind and reason,—reason which
is the first to perceive everywhere the action of a
greater reason and law of being and try to render it
by its own conceptional structures, though it does not
always perceive that it is something other than a mental
Intelligence which is at work, other than an intellectual
Logos. All these processes are actually spiritual and
supramental in their secret government, but mental,
vital and physical in their overt process.
The
outward matter, life, mind do not possess this occult
action of the supermind, even while possessed and compelled
by the necessity it imposes on their workings. There
is what we are sometimes moved to call an intelligence
and will operating in the material force and the atom
(although the words ring false because it is not actually
the same thing as our own will and intelligence),—let
us say, a covert intuition of self-existence at work,—but
the atom and force are not aware of it and are only
the obscure body of matter and of power created by its
first effort of self-manifestation. The presence of
such an intuition becomes more evident to us in all
the action of life because that is nearer to our own
scale. And as life develops overt sense and mind, as
in the animal creation, we can speak more confidently
of a vital intuition which is behind its operations
and which emerges in the animal mind in the clear form
of instinct,—instinct, an automatic knowledge
implanted in the animal, sure, direct, self-existent,
self-guided, which implies somewhere in its being an
accurate knowing of purpose, relation and the thing
or object. It acts in the life force and mind, but yet
the surface life and mind do not possess it and cannot
give an account of what it does or control or extend
the power at its will and pleasure. Here we observe
two things, first, that the overt intuition acts only
for a limited necessity and purpose, and that in the
rest of the operations of the nature there is a double
action, one uncertain and ignorant of the surface consciousness
and the other subliminal, implying a secret subconscient
direction. The surface consciousness is full of a groping
and seeking which increases rather than diminishes as
life rises in its scale and widens in the scope of its
conscious powers; but the secret self within assures
in spite of the groping of the vital mind, the action
of the nature and the result needed for the necessity,
the purpose and the destiny of the being. This continues
on a higher and higher scale up to the human reason
and intelligence.
The
being of man also is full of physical, vital, emotional,
psychical and dynamic instincts and intuitions, but
he does not rely on them as the animal does,—though
they are capable in him of a far larger scope and greater
action than in the animal and lower creation by reason
of his greater actual evolutionary development and his
yet greater potentiality of development of the being.
He has suppressed them, discontinued their full and
overt action by atrophy,—not that these capacities
are destroyed but rather held back or cast back into
the subliminal consciousness,—and consequently
this lower part of his being is much less sure of itself,
much less confident of the directions of his nature,
much more groping, errant and fallible in its larger
scope than that of the animal in his lesser limits.
This happens because man's real Dharma and law of being
is to seek for a greater self-aware existence, a self-manifestation
no longer obscure and governed by an ununderstood necessity,
but illumined, conscious of that which is expressing
itself and able to give it a fuller and more perfect
expression. And finally his culmination must be to identify
himself with his greatest and real self and act or rather
let it act (his natural existence being an instrumental
form of the expression of the spirit) in its spontaneous
perfect will and knowledge. His first instrument for
this transition is the reason and the will of the rational
intelligence and he is moved to depend upon that to
the extent of its development for his knowledge and
guidance and give it the control of the rest of his
being. And if the reason were the highest thing and
the greatest all-sufficient means of the self and spirit,
he could by it know perfectly and guide perfectly all
the movements of his nature. This he cannot do entirely
because his self is a larger thing than his reason and
if he limits himself by the rational will and intelligence,
he imposes an arbitrary restriction both in extent and
in kind on his self-development, self-expression, knowledge,
action, Ananda. The other parts of his being demand
too a complete expression in the largeness and perfection
of the self and cannot have it if their expression is
changed in kind and carved, cut down and arbitrarily
shaped and mechanised in action by the inflexible machinery
of the rational intelligence. The godhead of the reason,
the intellectual Logos, is only a partial representative
and substitute for the greater supramental Logos, and
its function is to impose a preliminary partial knowledge
and order upon the life of the creature, but the real,
final and integral order can only be founded by the
spiritual supermind in its emergence.
The
supermind in the lower nature is present most strongly
as intuition and it is therefore by a development of
an intuitive mind that we can make the first step towards
the self-existent spontaneous and direct supramental
knowledge. All the physical, vital, emotional, psychic,
dynamic nature of man is a surface seizing of suggestions
which rise out of a subliminal intuitive self-being
of these parts, and an attempt usually groping and often
circuitous to work them out in the action of a superficial
embodiment and power of the nature which is not overtly
enlightened by the inner power and knowledge. An increasingly
intuitive mind has the best chance of discovering what
they are seeking for and leading them to the desired
perfection of their self-expression. The reason itself
is only a special kind of application, made by a surface
regulating intelligence, of suggestions which actually
come from a concealed, but sometimes partially overt
and active power of the intuitive spirit. In all its
action there is at the covered or half-covered point
of origination something which is not the creation of
the reason, but given to it either directly by the intuition
or indirectly through some other part of the mind for
it to shape into intellectual form and process. The
rational judgment in its decisions and the mechanical
process of the logical intelligence, whether in its
more summary or in its more developed operations, conceals
while it develops the true origin and native substance
of our will and thinking. The greatest minds are those
in which this veil wears thin and there is the largest
part of intuitive thinking, which often no doubt but
not always brings with it a great accompanying display
of intellectual action. The intuitive intelligence is
however never quite pure and complete in the present
mind of man, because it works in the medium of mind
and is at once seized on and coated over with a mixed
stuff of mentality. It is as yet not brought out, not
developed and perfected so as to be sufficient for all
the operations now performed by the other mental instruments,
not trained to take them up and change them into or
replace them by its own fullest, most direct, assured
and sufficient workings. This can indeed only be done
if we make the intuitive mind a transitional means for
bringing out the secret supermind itself of which it
is a mental figure and forming in our frontal consciousness
a body and instrument of supermind which will make it
possible for the self and spirit to display itself in
its own largeness and splendour.
It
must be remembered that there is always a difference
between the supreme Supermind of the omniscient and
omnipotent Ishwara and that which can be attained by
the Jiva. The human being is climbing out of the ignorance
and when he ascends into the supramental nature, he
will find in it grades of its ascension, and he must
first form the lower grades and limited steps before
he rises to higher summits. He will enjoy there the
full essential light, power, Ananda of the infinite
self by oneness with the Spirit, but in the dynamical
expression it must determine and individualise itself
according to the nature of the self-expression which
the transcendent and universal Spirit seeks in the Jiva.
It is God-realisation and God-expression which is the
object of our Yoga and more especially of its dynamic
side; it is a divine self-expression in us of the Ishwara,
but under the conditions of humanity and through the
divinised human nature.
-Sri
Aurobindo
