THE original nature of supermind
is the self-conscience and all-conscience of the Infinite,
of the universal Spirit and Self in things, organising
on the foundation and according to the character of
a direct self-knowledge its own wisdom and effective
omnipotence for the unfolding and the regulated action
of the universe and of all things in the universe. It
is, we might say, the gnosis of the Spirit, master of
its own cosmos, ätmä, jnätä,
isvarah. As it knows itself, so too it knows all
things—for all are only becomings of itself—directly,
totally and from within outward, spontaneously in detail
and arrangement, each thing in the truth of itself and
its nature and in its relation to all other things.
And it knows similarly all action of its energy in antecedent
or cause and occasion of manifestation and effect or
consequence, all things in infinite and in limited potentiality
and in selection of actuality and in their succession
of past, present and future. The organising supermind
of a divine being in the universe would be a delegation
of this omnipotence and omniscience for the purpose
and within the scope of his own action and nature and
of all that comes into its province. The supermind in
an individual would be a similar delegation on whatever
scale and within whatever province. But while in the
god this would be a direct and an immediate delegation
of a power illimitable in itself and limited only in
action, but otherwise unaltered in operation, natural
to the being and full and free always, in man any emergence
of the supermind must be a gradual and at first an imperfect
creation and to his customary mind the activity of an
exceptional and supernormal will and knowledge. In the
first place it will not be for him a native power always
enjoyed without interruption, but a secret potentiality
which has to be discovered and one for which there are
no organs in his present physical or mental system:
he has either to evolve a new organ for it or else to
adopt or transform existing ones and make them utilisable
for the purpose. He has not merely to uncover the hidden
sun of the supermind in the subliminal cavern of his
secret being or remove the cloud of his mental ignorance
from its face in the spiritual skies so that it shall
at once shine out in all its glory. His task is much
more complex and difficult because he is an evolutionary
being and by the evolution of Nature of which he is
a part he has been constituted with an inferior kind
of knowledge, and this inferior, this mental power of
knowledge forms by its persistent customary action an
obstacle to a new formation greater than its own nature.
A limited mental intelligence enlightening a limited
mind of sense and the capacity not always well used
of a considerable extension of it by the use of the
reason are the powers by which he is at present distinguished
from all other terrestrial creatures. This sense mind,
this intelligence, this reason, however inadequate,
are the instruments in which he has learned to put his
trust and he has erected by their means certain foundations
which he is not over-willing to disturb and has traced
limits outside of which he feels all to be confusion,
uncertainty and a perilous adventure. Moreover the transition
to the higher principle means not only a difficult conversion
of his whole mind and reason and intelligence, but in
a certain sense a reversal of all their methods. The
soul climbing above a certain critical line of change
sees all its former operations as an inferior and ignorant
action and has to effect another kind of working which
sets out from a different starting-point and has quite
another kind of initiation of the energy of the being.
If an animal mind were called upon to leave consciently
the safe ground of sense impulse, sense understanding
and instinct for the perilous adventure of a reasoning
intelligence, it might well turn back alarmed and unwilling
from the effort. The human mind would here be called
upon to make a still greater change and, although self-conscious
and adventurous in the circle of its possibility, might
well hold this to be beyond the circle and reject the
adventure. In fact the change is only possible if there
is first a spiritual development on our present level
of consciousness and it can only be undertaken securely
when the mind has become aware of the greater self within,
enamoured of the Infinite and confident of the presence
and guidance of the Divine and his Shakti.
The
problem of this conversion resolves itself at first
into a passage through a mediary status and by the help
of the one power already at work in the human mind which
we can recognise as something supramental in its nature
or at least in its origin, the faculty of intuition,
a power of which we can feel the presence and the workings
and are impressed, when it acts, by its superior efficiency,
light, direct inspiration and force, but cannot understand
or analyse it as we understand or analyse the workings
of our reason. The reason understands itself, but not
what is beyond it,—of that it can only make a
general figure or representation; the supermind alone
can discern the method of its own workings. The power
of intuition acts in us at present for the most part
in a covert manner secret and involved in or mostly
veiled by the action of the reason and the normal intelligence;
so far as it emerges into a clear separate action, it
is still occasional, partial, fragmentary and of an
intermittent character. It casts a sudden light, it
makes a luminous suggestion or it throws out a solitary
brilliant clue or scatters a small number of isolated
or related intuitions, lustrous discriminations, inspirations
or revelations, and it leaves the reason, will, mental
sense or intelligence to do what each can or pleases
with this seed of succour that has come to them from
the depths or the heights of our being. The mental powers
immediately proceed to lay hold on these things and
to manipulate and utilise them for our mental or vital
purposes, to adapt them to the forms of the inferior
knowledge, to coat them up in or infiltrate them with
the mental stuff and suggestion, often altering their
truth in the process and always limiting their potential
force of enlightenment by these accretions and by this
subdual to the exigencies of the inferior agent, and
almost always they make at once too little and too much
of them, too little by not allowing them time to settle
and extend their full power for illumination, too much
by insisting on them or rather on the form into which
the mentality casts them to the exclusion of the larger
truth that the more consistent use of the intuitive
faculty might have given. Thus the intuition intervening
in the ordinary mental operations acts in lightning
flashes that make lustrous a space of truth, but is
not a steady sunlight illumining securely the whole
reach and kingdom of our thought and will and feeling
and action.
It
appears at once that there are two necesssary lines
of progress which we must follow, and the first is to
extend the action of the intuition and make it more
constant, more persistent and regular and all-embracing
until it is so intimate and normal to our being that
it can take up all the action now done by the ordinary
mind and assume its place in the whole system. This
cannot wholly be done so long as the ordinary mind continues
to assert its power of independent action and intervention
or its habit of seizing on the light of the intuition
and manipulating it for its own purposes. The higher
mentality cannot be complete or secure so long as the
inferior intelligence is able to deform it or even to
bring in any of its own intermixture. And either then
we must silence altogether the intellect and the intellectual
will and the other inferior activities and leave room
only for the intuitive action or we must lay hold on
and transform the lower action by the constant pressure
of the intuition. Or else there must be an alternation
and combination of the two methods if that be the most
natural way or at all possible. The actual process and
experience of Yoga manifests the possibility of several
methods or movements none of which by itself produces
the entire result in practice, however it may seem at
first sight that logically each should or might be adequate.
And when we learn to insist on no particular method
as exclusively the right one and leave the whole movement
to a greater guidance, we find that the divine Lord
of the Yoga commissions his Shakti to use one or the
other at different times and all in combination according
to the need and turn of the being and the nature.
At
first it might seem the straight and right way to silence
the mind altogether, to silence the intellect, the mental
and personal will, the desire mind and the mind of emotion
and sensation, and to allow in that perfect silence
the Self, the Spirit, the Divine to disclose himself
and leave him to illuminate the being by the supramental
light and power and Ananda. And this is indeed a great
and powerful discipline. It is the calm and still mind
much more readily and with a much greater purity than
the mind in agitation and action that opens to the Infinite,
reflects the Spirit, becomes full of the Self and awaits
like a consecrated and purified temple the unveiling
of the Lord of all our being and nature. It is true
also that the freedom of this silence gives a possibility
of a larger play of the intuitive being and admits with
less obstruction and turmoil of mental groping and seizing
the great intuitions, inspirations, revelations which
emerge from within or descend from above. It is therefore
an immense gain if we can acquire the capacity of always
being able at will to command an absolute tranquillity
and silence of the mind free from any necessity of mental
thought or movement and disturbance and, based in that
silence, allow thought and will and feeling to happen
in us only when the Shakti wills it and when it is needful
for the divine purpose. It becomes easier then to change
the manner and character of the thought and will and
feeling. Nevertheless it is not the fact that by this
method the supramental light will immediately replace
the lower mind and reflective reason. When the inner
action proceeds after the silence, even if it be then
a more predominatingly intuitive thought and movement,
the old powers will yet interfere, if not from within,
then by a hundred suggestions from without, and an inferior
mentality will mix in, will question or obstruct or
will try to lay hold on the greater movement and to
lower or darken or distort or minimise it in the process.
Therefore the necessity of a process of elimination
or transformation of the inferior mentality remains
always imperative,—or perhaps both at once, an
elimination of all that is native to the lower being,
its disfiguring accidents, its depreciations of value,
its distortions of substance and all else that the greater
truth cannot harbour, and a transformation of the essential
things our mind derives from the supermind and spirit
but represents in the manner of the mental ignorance.
A
second movement is one which comes naturally to those
who commence the Yoga with the initiative that is proper
to the way of Bhakti. It is natural to them to reject
the intellect and its action and to listen for the voice,
wait for the impulsion or the command, the ädesa,
obey only the idea and will and power of the Lord within
them, the divine Self and Purusha in the heart of the
creature, ïsvarah sarvabhütänäm
hrddese. This is a movement which must tend more
and more to intuitivise the whole nature, for the ideas,
the will, the impulsions, the feelings which come from
the secret Purusha in the heart are of the direct intuitive
character. This method is consonant with a certain truth
of our nature. The secret Self within us is an intuitive
self and this intuitive self is seated in every centre
of our being, the physical, the nervous, the emotional,
the volitional, the conceptual or cognitive and the
higher more directly spiritual centres. And in each
part of our being it exercises a secret intuitive initiation
of our activities which is received and represented
imperfectly by our outer mind and converted into the
movements of the ignorance in the external action of
these parts of our nature. The heart or emotional centre
of the thinking desire-mind is the strongest in the
ordinary man, gathers up or at least affects the presentation
of things to the consciousness and is the capital of
the system. It is from there that the Lord seated in
the heart of all creatures turns them mounted on the
machine of Nature by the Maya of the mental ignorance.
It is possible then by referring back all the initiation
of our action to this secret intuitive Self and Spirit,
the ever-present Godhead within us, and replacing by
its influences the initiations of our personal and mental
nature to get back from the inferior external thought
and action to another, internal and intuitive, of a
highly spiritualised character. Nevertheless the result
of this movement cannot be complete, because the heart
is not the highest centre of our being, is not supramental
nor directly moved from the supramental sources. An
intuitive thought and action directed from it may be
very luminous and intense but is likely to be limited,
even narrow in its intensity, mixed with a lower emotional
action and at the best excited and troubled, rendered
unbalanced or exaggerated by a miraculous or abnormal
character in its action or at least in many of its accompaniments
which is injurious to the harmonised perfection of the
being. The aim of our effort at perfection must be to
make the spiritual and supramental action no longer
a miracle, even if a frequent or constant miracle, or
only a luminous intervention of a greater than our natural
power, but normal to the being and the very nature and
law of all its process.
The
highest organised centre of our embodied being and of
its action in the body is the supreme mental centre
figured by the yogic symbol of the thousand-petalled
lotus, sahasradala, and it is at its top and
summit that there is the direct communication with the
supramental levels. It is then possible to adopt a different
and a more direct method, not to refer all our thought
and action to the Lord secret in the heart-lotus but
to the veiled truth of the Divinity above the mind and
to receive all by a sort of descent from above, a descent
of which we become not only spiritually but physically
conscious. The Siddhi or full accomplishment of this
movement can only come when we are able to lift the
centre of thought and conscious action above the physical
brain and feel it going on in the subtle body. If we
can feel ourselves thinking no longer with the brain
but from above and outside the head in the subtle body,
that is a sure physical sign of a release from the limitations
of the physical mind, and though this will not be complete
at once nor of itself bring the supramental action,
for the subtle body is mental and not supramental, still
it is a subtle and pure mentality and makes an easier
communication with the supramental centres. The lower
movements must still come, but it is then found easier
to arrive at a swift and subtle discrimination telling
us at once the difference, distinguishing the intuitional
thought from the lower intellectual mixture, separating
it from its mental coatings, rejecting the mere rapidities
of the mind which imitate the form of the intuition
without being of its true substance. It will be easier
to discern rapidly the higher planes of the true supramental
being and call down their power to effect the desired
transformation and to refer all the lower action to
the superior power and light that it may reject and
eliminate, purify and transform and select among them
its right material for the Truth that has to be organised
within us. This opening up of a higher level and of
higher and higher planes of it and the consequent re-formation
of our whole consciousness and its action into their
mould and into the substance of their power and luminous
capacity is found in practice to be the greater part
of the natural method used by the divine Shakti.
A
fourth method is one which suggests itself naturally
to the developed intelligence and suits the thinking
man. This is to develop our intellect instead of eliminating
it, but with the will not to cherish its limitations,
but to heighten its capacity, light, intensity, degree
and force of activity until it borders on the thing
that transcends it and can easily be taken up and transformed
into that higher conscious action. This movement also
is founded on the truth of our nature and enters into
the course and movement of the complete Yoga of self-perfection.
That course, as I have described it, included a heightening
and greatening of the action of our natural instruments
and powers till they constitute in their purity and
essential completeness a preparatory perfection of the
present normal movement of the Shakti that acts in us.
The reason and intelligent will, the Buddhi, is the
greatest of these powers and instruments, the natural
leader of the rest in the developed human being, the
most capable of aiding the development of the others.
The ordinary activities of our nature are all of them
of use for the greater perfection we seek, are meant
to be turned into material for them, and the greater
their development, the richer the preparation for the
supramental action. The intellectual being too has to
be taken up by the Shakti in the Yoga and raised to
its fullest and its most heightened powers. The subsequent
transformation of the intellect is possible because
all the action of the intellect derives secretly from
the supermind, each thought and will contains some truth
of it however limited and altered by the inferior action
of the intelligence. The transformation can be brought
about by the removal of the limitation and the elimination
of the distorting or perverting element. This however
cannot be done by the heightening and greatening of
the intellectual activity alone; for that must always
be limited by the original inherent defects of the mental
intelligence. An intervention of the supramental energy
is needed that can light up and get rid of its deficiencies
of thought and will and feeling. This intervention too
cannot be completely effective unless the supramental
plane is manifested and acts above the mind no longer
from behind a lid or veil, however thin the veil may
have grown, but more constantly in an open and luminous
action till there is seen the full sun of Truth with
no cloud to moderate its splendour. It is not necessary,
either, to develop the intellect fully in its separateness
before calling down this intervention or opening up
by it the supramental levels. The intervention may come
in earlier and at once develop the intellectual action
and turn it, as it develops, into the higher intuitive
form and substance.
The
widest natural action of the Shakti combines all these
methods. It creates, sometimes at first, sometimes at
some later, perhaps latest stage, the freedom of the
spiritual silence. It opens the secret intuitive being
within the mind itself and accustoms us to refer all
our thought and our feeling and will and action to the
initiation of the Divine, the Splendour and Power who
is now concealed in the heart of its recesses. It raises,
when we are ready, the centre of its operations to the
mental summit and opens up the supramental levels and
proceeds doubly by an action from above downward filling
and transforming the lower nature and an action from
below upwards raising all the energies to that which
is above them till the transcendence is completed and
the change of the whole system integrally effected.
It takes and develops the intelligence and will and
other natural powers, but brings in constantly the intuitive
mind and afterwards the true supramental energy to change
and enlarge their action. These things it does in no
fixed and mechanically invariable order, such as the
rigidity of the logical intellect might demand, but
freely and flexibly according to the needs of its work
and the demand of the nature.
The first result will not be the creation of the true
supermind, but the organisation of a predominantly or
even a completely intuitive mentality sufficiently developed
to take the place of the ordinary mentality and of the
logical reasoning intellect of the developed human being.
The most prominent change will be the transmutation
of the thought heightened and filled by that substance
of concentrated light, concentrated power, concentrated
joy of the light and the power and that direct accuracy
which are the marks of a true intuitive thinking. It
is not only primary suggestions or rapid conclusions
that this mind will give, but it will conduct too with
the same light, power, joy of sureness and direct spontaneous
seeing of the truth the connecting and developing operations
now conducted by the intellectual reason. The will also
will be changed into this intuitive character, proceed
directly with light and power to the thing to be done,
kartavyam karma, and dispose with a rapid sight
of possibilities and actualities the combinations necessary
to its action and its purpose. The feelings also will
be intuitive, seizing upon right relations, acting with.a
new light and power and a glad sureness, retaining only
right and spontaneous desires and emotions, so long
as these things endure, and, when they pass away, replacing
them by a luminous and spontaneous love and an Ananda
that knows and seizes at once on the right rasa
of its objects. All the other mental movements will
be similarly enlightened and even too the pranic and
sense movements and the consciousness of the body. And
usually there will be some development also of the psychic
faculties, powers and perceptions of the inner mind
and its senses not dependent on the outer sense and
the reason. The intuitive mentality will be not only
a stronger and a more luminous thing, but usually capable
of a much more extensive operation than the ordinary
mind of the same man before this development of the
Yoga.
This
intuitive mentality, if it could be made perfect in
its nature, unmixed with any inferior element and yet
unconscious of its own limitations and of the greatness
of the thing beyond it, might form another definite
status and halting place like the instinctive mind of
the animal or the reasoning mind of man. But the intuitive
mentality cannot be made abidingly perfect and self-sufficient
except by the opening power of the supermind above it
and that at once reveals its limitations and makes of
it a secondary action transitional between the intellectual
mind and the true supramental nature. The intuitive
mentality is still mind and not gnosis. It is indeed
a light from the supermind, but modified and diminished
by the stuff of mind in which it works, and stuff of
mind means always a basis of ignorance. The intuitive
mind is not yet the wide sunlight of truth, but a constant
play of flashes of it keeping lighted up a basic state
of ignorance or of half-knowledge and indirect knowledge.
As long as it is imperfect, it is invaded by a mixture
of ignorant mentality which crosses its truth with a
strain of error. After it has acquired a larger native
action more free from this intermixture, even then so
long as the stuff of mind in which it works is capable
of the old intellectual or lower mental habit, it is
subject to accretion of error, to clouding, to many
kinds of relapse. Moreover, the individual mind does
not live alone and to itself but in the general mind
and all that it has rejected is discharged into the
general mind atmosphere around it and tends to return
upon and invade it with the old suggestions and many
promptings of the old mental character. The intuitive
mind, growing or grown, has therefore to be constantly
on guard against invasion and accretion, on the watch
to reject and eliminate immixtures, busy intuitivising
more and still more the whole stuff of mind, and this
can only end by itself being enlightened, transformed,
lifted up into the full light of the supramental being.
Moreover,
this new mentality is in each man a development of the
present power of his being and, however new and remarkable
its developments, its organisation is within a certain
range of capacity. Adventuring beyond that border,—it
may indeed limit itself to the work in hand and its
present range of realised capacity, but the nature of
a mind opened to the infinite is to progress and change
and enlarge,—it there becomes liable to a return,
however modified by the new intuitive habit, of the
old intellectual seeking in the ignorance,—unless
and until it is constantly overtopped and led by the
manifested action of a fuller supramental luminous energy.
This is indeed its nature that it is a link and transition
between present mind and the supermind and, so long
as the transition is not complete, there is sometimes
a gravitation downward, sometimes a tendency upward,
an oscillation, an invasion and attraction from below,
an invasion and attraction from above, and at best an
uncertain and limited status between the two poles.
As the higher intelligence of man is situated between
his animal and customary human mind below and his evolving
spiritual mind above, so this first spiritual mind is
situated between the intellectualised human mentality
and the greater supramental knowledge.
The
nature of mind is that it lives between half lights
and darkness, amid probabilities and possibilities,
amid partly grasped aspects, amid incertitudes and half
certitudes: it is an ignorance grasping at knowledge
striving to enlarge itself and pressing against the
concealed body of true gnosis. The supermind lives in
the light of spiritual certitudes: it is to man knowledge
opening the actual body of its own native effulgence.
The intuitive mind appears at first a lightening up
of the mind's half-lights, its probabilities and possibilities,
its aspects, its uncertain certitudes, its representations,
and a revealing of the truth concealed or half concealed
and half manifested by these things, and in its higher
action it is a first bringing of the supramental truth
by a nearer directness of seeing, a luminous indication
or memory of the spirit's knowledge, an intuition or
looking in through the gates of the being's secret universal
self-vision and knowledge. It is a first imperfect organisation
of that greater light and power, imperfect because done
in the mind, not based on its own native substance of
consciousness, a constant communication, but not a quite
immediate and constant presence. The perfect perfection
lies beyond on the supramental levels and must be based
on a more decisive and complete transformation of the
mentality and of our whole nature.
-Sri
Aurobindo
