The
characteristic power of the reason in its fullness is
a logical movement assuring itself first of all available
materials and data by observation and arrangement, then
acting upon them for a resultant knowledge gained, assured
and enlarged by a first use of the reflective powers,
and lastly assuring itself of the correctness of its
results by a more careful and formal action, more vigilant,
deliberate, severely logical which tests, rejects or
confirms them according to certain secure standards
and processes developed by reflection and experience.
The first business of the logical reason is therefore
a right, careful and complete observation of its available
material and data. The first and easiest field of data
open to our knowledge is the world of Nature, of the
physical objects made external to it by the separative
action of mind,, things not ourself and therefore only
indirectly knowable by an interpreting of our sense
perceptions, by observation, accumulated experience,
inference and reflective thinking. Another field is
our own internal being and its movements which one knows
naturally by an internally acting mental sense, by intuitive
perception and constant experience and by reflective
thought on the evidences of our nature. The reason with
regard even to these inner movements acts best and knows
the most correctly by detaching itself and regarding
them quite impersonally and objectively, a movement
which in the Yoga of knowledge ends in viewing our own
active being too as not self, a mechanism of Nature
like the rest of the world-existence. The knowledge
of other thinking and conscious beings stands between
these two fields, but is gained, too, indirectly by
observation, by experience, by various means of communication
and, acting on these, by reflection and inference largely
founded on analogy from our knowledge of our own nature.
Another field of data which the reason has to observe
is its own action and the action of the whole human
intelligence, for without that study it cannot be assured
of the correctness of its knowledge or of right method
and process. Finally, there are other fields of knowledge
for which the data are not so easily available and which
need the development of abnormal faculties,—the
discovery of things and ranges of existence behind the
appearances of the physical world and the discovery
of the secret self or principle of being of man and
of Nature. The first the logical reason can attempt
to deal with, accepting subject to its scrutiny whatever
data become available, in the same way as it deals with
the physical world, but ordinarily it is little disposed
to deal with them, finding it more easy to question
and deny, and its action here is seldom assured or effective.
The second it usually attempts to discover by a constructive
metaphysical logic founded on its analytic and synthetic
observation of the phenomena of life, mind and matter.
The
operation of the logical reason is the same in all these
fields of its data. At first the intelligence amasses
a store of observations, associations, percepts, recepts,
concepts, makes a more or less obvious arrangement and
classification of relations and of things according
to their likenesses and differences, and works upon
them by an accumulating store and a constant addition
of ideas, memories, imaginations, judgments; these make
up primarily the nature of activity of our knowledge.
There is a kind of natural enlargement of this intelligent
activity of the mind progressing by its own momentum,
an evolution aided more and more by a deliberate culture,
the increase of faculties gained by the culture becoming
in its turn a part of the nature as they settle into
a more spontaneous action,—the result a progression
not of the character and essential power of the intelligence,
but of its degree of power, flexibility, variety of
capacity, fineness. There is a correction of errors,
an accumulating of assured ideas and judgments, a reception
or formation of fresh knowledge. At the same time a
necessity arises for a more precise and assured action
of the intelligence which will get rid of the superficiality
of this ordinary method of the intelligence, test every
step, scrutinise severely every conclusion and reduce
the mind's action to a well-founded system and order.
This
movement develops the complete logical mind and raises
to its acme the acuteness and power of the intelligence.
The rougher and more superficial observation is replaced
or supplemented by a scrutinising analysis of all the
processes, properties, constituents, energies making
up or related to the object and a synthetic construction
of it as a whole which is added to or in great part
substituted for the mind's natural conception of it.
The object is more precisely distinguished from all
others and at the same time there is a completer discovery
of its relations with others. There is a fixing of sameness
or likeness and kinship and also of divergences and
differences resulting on one side in the perception
of the fundamental unity of being and Nature and the
similarity and continuity of their processes, on the
other in a clear precision and classification of different
energies and kinds of beings and objects. The amassing
and ordering of the materials and data of knowledge
are carried to perfection as far as is possible to the
logical intelligence.
Memory
is the indispensable aid of the mind to preserve its
past observations, the memory of the individual but
also of the race, whether in the artificial form of
accumulated records or the general race memory preserving
its gains with a sort of constant repetition and renewal
and, an element not sufficiently appreciated, a latent
memory that can under the pressure of various kinds
of stimulation repeat under new conditions past movements
of knowledge for judgment by the increased information
and intelligence. The developed logical mind puts into
order the action and resources of the human memory and
trains it to make the utmost use of its materials. The
human judgment naturally works on these materials in
two ways, by a more or less rapid and summary combination
of observation, inference, creative or critical conclusion,
insight, immediate idea,—this is largely an attempt
of the mind to work in a spontaneous manner with the
directness that can only be securely achieved by the
higher faculty of the intuition, for in the mind it
produces much false confidence and unreliable certitude,—and
a slower but in the end intellectually surer seeking,
considering and testing judgment that develops into
the careful logical action.
The
memory and judgment are both aided by the imagination
which, as a function of knowledge, suggests possibilities
not actually presented or justified by the other powers
and opens the doors to fresh vistas. The developed logical
intelligence uses the imagination for suggesting new
discovery and hypothesis, but is careful to test its
suggestions fully by observation and a sceptical or
scrupulous judgment. It insists too on testing, as far
as may be, all the action of the judgment itself, rejects
hasty inference in favour of an ordered system of deduction
and induction and makes sure of all its steps and of
the justice, continuity, compatibility, cohesion of
its conclusions. A too formalised logical mind discourages,
but a free use of the whole action of the logical intelligence
may rather heighten a certain action of immediate insight,
the mind's nearest approach to the higher intuition,
but it does not place on it an unqualified reliance.
The endeavour of the logical reason is always by a detached,
disinterested and carefully founded method to get rid
of error, of prejudgment, of the mind's false confidence
and arrive at reliable certitudes.
And
if this elaborated method of the mind were really sufficient
for truth, there would be no need of any higher step
in the evolution of knowledge. In fact, it increases
the mind's hold on itself and on the world around it
and serves great and undeniable utilities: but it can
never be sure whether its data supply it with the frame
of a real knowledge or only a frame useful and necessary
for the human mind and will in its own present form
of action. It is more and more perceived that the knowledge
of phenomena increases, but the knowledge of reality
escapes this laborious process. A time must come, is
already coming when the mind perceives the necessity
of calling to its aid and developing fully the intuition
and all the great range of powers that lie concealed
behind our vague use of the word and uncertain perception
of its significance. In the end it must discover that
these powers can not only aid and complete but even
replace its own proper action. That will be the beginning
of the discovery of the supramental energy of the spirit.
The
supermind, as we have seen, lifts up the action of the
mental consciousness towards and into the intuition,
creates an intermediate intuitive mentality insufficient
in itself but greater in power than the logical intelligence,
and then lifts up and transforms that too into the true
supramental action. The first well-organised action
of the supermind in the ascending order is the supramental
reason, not a higher logical intellect, but a directly
luminous organisation of intimately subjective and intimately
objective knowledge, the higher buddhi, the logical
or rather the logos, Vijnana. The supramental reason
does all the work of the reasoning intelligence and
does much more, but with a greater power and in a different
fashion. It is then itself taken up into a higher range
of the power of knowledge and in that too nothing is
lost, but all farther heightened, enlarged in scope,
transformed in power of action.
The
ordinary language of the intellect is not sufficient
to describe this action, for the same words have to
be used, indicating a certain correspondence, but actually
to connote inadequately a different thing. Thus the
supermind uses a certain sense action, employing but
not limited by the physical organs, a thing which is
in its nature a form consciousness and a contact consciousness,
but the mental idea and experience of sense can give
no conception of the essential and characteristic action
of this supramentalised sense consciousness. Thought
too in the supramental action is a different thing from
the thought of the mental intelligence. The supramental
thinking is felt at its basis as a conscious contact
or union or identity of the substance of being of the
knower with the substance of being of the thing known
and its figure of thought as the power of awareness
of the self revealing through the meeting or the oneness,
because carrying in itself, a certain knowledge form
of the object's content, action, significance. Therefore
observation, memory, judgment too mean each a different
thing in the supermind from what it is in the process
of the mental intelligence.
The
supramental reason observes all that the intelligence
observes—and much more; it makes, that is to say,
the thing to be known the field of a perceptual action,
in a certain way objective, that causes to emerge its
nature, character, quality, action. But this is not
that artificial objectivity by which the reason in its
observation tries to extrude the element of personal
or subjective error. The supermind sees everything in
the self and its observation must therefore be subjectively
objective and much nearer to, though not the same as
the observation of our own internal movements regarded
as an object of knowledge. It is not in the separatively
personal self or by its power that it sees and therefore
it has not to be on guard against the element of personal
error: that interferes only while a mental substratum
or environing atmosphere yet remains and can still throw
in its influence or while the supermind is still acting
by descent into the mind to change it. And the supramental
method with error is to eliminate it, not by any other
device, but by an increasing spontaneity of the supramental
discrimination and a constant heightening of its own
energy. The consciousness of supermind is a cosmic consciousness
and it is in this self of universal consciousness, in
which the individual knower lives and with which he
is more or less closely united, that it holds before
him the object of knowledge.
The
knower is in his observation a witness and this relation
would seem to imply an otherness and difference, but
the point is that it is not an entirely separative difference
and does not bring an excluding idea of the thing observed
as completely not self, as in the mental seeing of an
external object. There is always a basic feeling of
oneness with the thing known, for without this oneness
there can be no supramental knowledge. The knower carrying
the object in his universalised self of consciousness
as a thing held before his station of witness vision
includes it in his own wider being. The supramental
observation is of things with which we are one in the
being and consciousness and are capable of knowing them
even as we know ourselves by the force of that oneness:
the act of observation is a movement towards bringing
out the latent knowledge.
There
is, then, first a fundamental unity of consciousness
that is greater or less in its power, more or less completely
and immediately revelatory of its contents of knowledge
according to our progress and elevation and intensity
of living, feeling and seeing in the supramental ranges.
There is set up between the knower and the object of
knowledge, as a result of this fundamental unity, a
stream or bridge of conscious connection—one is
obliged to use images, however inadequate—and
as a consequence a contact or active union enabling
one to see, feel, sense supramentally what is to be
known in the object or about it. Sometimes this stream
or bridge of connection is not sensibly felt at the
moment, only the results of the contact are noted, but
it is always really there and an after memory can always
make us aware that it was really all the time present:
as we grow in supra-mentality, it becomes an abiding
factor. The necessity of this stream or this bridge
of connection ceases when the fundamental oneness becomes
a complete active oneness. This process is the basis
of what Patanjali calls samyama, a concentration,
directing or dwelling of the consciousness, by which,
he says, one can become aware of all that is in the
object. But the necessity of concentration becomes slight
or nil when the active oneness grows; the luminous consciousness
of the object and its contents becomes more spontaneous,
normal, facile.
There
are three possible movements of this kind of supra-mental
observation. First, the knower may project himself in
consciousness on the object, feel his cognition in contact
or enveloping or penetrating it and there, as it were
in the object itself, become aware of what he has to
know. Or he may by the contact become aware of that
which is in it or belongs to it, as for example, the
thought or feeling of another, coming from it and entering
into himself where he stands in his station of the witness.
Or he may simply know in himself by a sort of supramental
cognition in his own witness station without any such
projection or entrance. The starting-point and apparent
basis of the observation may be the presence of the
object to the physical or other senses, but to the supermind
this is not indispensable. It may be instead an inner
image or simply the idea of the object. The simple will
to know may bring to the supramental consciousness the
needed knowledge—or, it may be, the will to be
known or communicate itself of the object of knowledge.
The
elaborate process of analytical observation and synthetical
construction adopted by the logical intelligence is
not the method of the supermind and yet there is a corresponding
action. The supermind distinguishes by a direct seeing
and without any mental process of taking to pieces the
particularities of the thing, form, energy, action,
quality, mind, soul that it has in view, and it sees
too with an equal directness and without any process
of construction the significant totality of which these
particularities are the incidents. It sees also the
essentiality, the Swabhava, of the thing in itself of
which the totality and the particularities are the manifestation.
And again it sees, whether apart from or through the
essentiality or Swabhava, the one self, the one existence,
consciousness, power, force of which it is the basic
expression. It may be observing at the time only the
particularities, but the whole is implied, and vice
versa,—as for an example, the total state
of mind out of which a thought or a feeling arises,—and
the cognition may start from one or the other and proceed
at once by immediate suggestion to the implied knowledge.
The essentiality is similarly implied in the whole and
in each or all of the particulars and there may be the
same rapid or immediate alternative or alternate process.
The logic of the supermind is different from that of
the mind: it sees always the self as what is, the essentiality
of the thing as a fundamental expression of the being
and power of the self, and the whole and particulars
as a consequent manifestation of this power and its
active expression. In the fullness of the supramental
consciousness and cognition this is the constant order.
All perception of unity, similarity, difference, kind,
uniqueness arrived at by the supramental reason is consonant
with and depends on this order.
This
observing action of supermind applies to all things.
Its view of physical objects is not and cannot be only
a surface or outward view, even when concentrated on
the externals. It sees the form, action, properties,
but it is aware at the same time of the qualities or
energies, guna, sakti, of which the form is
a translation and it sees them not as an inference or
deduction from the form or action, but feels and sees
them directly in the being of the object and quite as
vividly,—one might say, with a subtle concreteness
and fine substantiality,—as the form or sensible
action. It is aware too of the consciousness that manifests
itself in quality, energy, form. It can feel, know,
observe, see forces, tendencies, impulsions, things
abstract to us quite as directly and vividly as the
things we now call visible and sensible. It observes
in just the same way persons and beings. It can take
as its starting-point or first indication the speech,
action, outward signs, but it is not limited by or dependent
on them. It can know and feel and observe the very self
and consciousness of another, can either proceed to
that directly through the sign or can in its more powerful
action begin with it and at once instead of seeking
to know the inner being through the evidence of the
outer expression, understand rather all the outer expression
in the light of the inner being. Even so, completely,
the supramental being knows his own inner being and
nature. The supermind can too act with equal power and
observe with direct experience what is hidden behind
the physical order; it can move in other planes than
the material universe. It knows the self and reality
of things by identity, by experience of oneness or contact
of oneness and a vision, a seeing and realising ideation
and knowledge dependent on or derived from these things,
and its thought presentation of the truths of the spirit
is an expression of this kind of sight and experience.
The
supramental memory is different from the mental, not
a storing up of past knowledge and experience, but an
abiding presence of knowledge that can be brought forward
or, more characteristically, offers itself, when it
is needed: it is not dependent on attention or on conscious
reception, for the things of the past not known actually
or not observed can be called up from latency by an
action which is yet essentially a remembrance. Especially
on a certain level all knowledge presents itself as
a remembering, because all is latent or inherent in
the self of supermind. The future like the past presents
itself to knowledge in the supermind as a memory of
the preknown. The imagination transformed in the supermind
acts on one side as a power of true image and symbol,
always an image or index of some value or significance
or other truth of being, on the other as an inspiration
or interpretative seeing of possibilities and potentialities
not less true than actual or realised things. These
are put in their place either by an attendant intuitive
or interpretative judgment or by one inherent in the
vision of the image, symbol or potentiality, or by a
supereminent revelation of that which is behind the
image or symbol or which determines the potential and
the actual and their relations and, it may be, overrides
and overpasses them, imposing ultimate truths and supreme
certitudes.
The
supramental judgment acts inseparably from the supra-mental
observation or memory, inherent in it as a direct seeing
or cognition of values, significances, antecedents,
consequences, relations, etc.; or it supervenes on the
observation as a luminous disclosing idea or suggestion;
or it may go before, independent of any observation,
and then the object called up and observed confirms
visibly the truth of the idea. But in each case it is
sufficient in itself for its own purpose, is its own
evidence and does not really depend for its truth on
any aid or confirmation. There is a logic of the supramental
reason, but its function is not to test or scrutinise,
to support and prove or to detect and eliminate error.
Its function is simply to link knowledge with knowledge,
to discover and utilise harmonies and arrangement and
relations, to organise the movement of the supramental
knowledge. This it does not by any formal rule or construction
of inferences but by a direct, living and immediate
seeing and placing of connection and relation. All thought
in the supermind is in the nature of intuition, inspiration
or revelation and all deficiency of knowledge is to
be supplied by a farther action of these powers; error
is prevented by the action of a spontaneous and luminous
discrimination; the movement is always from knowledge
to knowledge. It is not rational in our sense but suprarational,—it
does sovereignly what is sought to be done stumblingly
and imperfectly by the mental reason.
The
ranges of knowledge above the supramental reason, taking
it up and exceeding it, cannot well be described, nor
is it necessary here to make the endeavour. It is sufficient
to say that the process here is more sufficient, intense
and large in light, imperative, instantaneous, the scope
of the active knowledge larger, the way nearer to the
knowledge by identity, the thought more packed with
the luminous substance of self-awareness and all-vision
and more evidently independent of any other inferior
support or assistance.
These
characteristics, it must be remembered, do not fully
apply even to the strongest action of the intuitive
mentality, but are there seen only in their first glimpses.
Nor can they be entirely or unmixedly evident so long
as supramentality is only forming with an undercurrent,
a mixture or an environment of mental action. It is
only when mentality is overpassed and drops away into
a passive silence that there can be the full disclosure
and the sovereign and integral action of the supramental
gnosis.
-Sri
Aurobindo
