ALL the instruments, all the
activities of the mind have their corresponding powers
in the action of the supra-mental energy and are there
exalted and transfigured, but have there a reverse order
of priority and necessary importance. As there is a
supramental thought and essential consciousness, so
too there is a supramental sense. Sense is fundamentally
not the action of certain physical organs, but the contact
of consciousness with its objects, samjnäna.
When
the consciousness of the being is withdrawn wholly into
itself, it is aware only of itself, of its own being,
its own consciousness, its own delight of existence,
its own concentrated force of being, and of these things
not in their forms but in their essence. When it comes
out of this self-immersion, it becomes aware of or it
releases or develops out of its self-immersion its activities
and forms of being, of consciousness, of delight and
force. Then too, on the supramental plane, its primary
awareness still remains of a kind native to and entirely
characteristic of the self-awareness of the spirit,
the self-knowledge of the one and infinite; it is a
knowledge that knows all its objects, forms and activities
comprehensively by being aware of them in its own infinite
self, intimately by being aware in them as their self,
absolutely by being aware of them as one in self with
its own being. All its other ways of knowledge are projected
from this knowledge by identity, are parts or movements
of it, or at the lowest depend on it for their truth
and light, are touched and supported by it even in their
own separate way of action and refer back to it overtly
or implicitly as their authority and origin.
The
activity which is nearest to this essential knowledge
by identity is the large embracing consciousness, especially
characteristic of the supramental energy, which takes
into itself all truth and idea and object of knowledge
and sees them at once in their essence, totality and
parts or aspects,—vijnäna. Its movement
is a total seeing and seizing; it is a comprehension
and possession in the self of knowledge; and it holds
the object of consciousness as a part of the self or
one with it, the unity being spontaneously and directly
realised in the act of knowledge. Another supramental
activity puts the knowledge by identity more into the
background and stresses more the objectivity of the
thing known. Its characteristic movement, descending
into the mind, becomes the source of the peculiar nature
of our mental knowledge, intelligence, prajäna.
In the mind the action of intelligence involves, at
the outset, separation and otherness between the knower,
knowledge and the known; but in the supermind its movement
still takes place in the infinite identity or at least
in the cosmic oneness. Only, the self of knowledge indulges
the delight of putting the object of consciousness away
from the more immediate nearness of the original and
eternal unity, but always in itself, and of knowing
it again in another way so as to I establish with it
a variety of relations of interaction which are so many
minor chords in the harmony of the play of the consciousness.
The movement of this supramental intelligence, prajnäna,
becomes a subordinate, a tertiary action of the supra-mental
for the fullness of which thought and word are needed.
The primary action, because it is of the nature of knowledge
by identity or of a comprehensive seizing in the consciousness,
is complete in itself and has no need of these means
of formulation. The supramental intelligence is of the
nature of a truth-seeing, truth-hearing and truth-remembering
and, though capable of being sufficient to itself in
a certain way, still feels itself more richly fulfilled
by the thought and word that give it a body of expression.
Finally,
a fourth action of the supramental consciousness completes
the various possibilities of the supramental knowledge.
This still farther accentuates the objectivity of the
thing known, puts it away from the station of experiencing
consciousness and again brings it to nearness by a uniting
contact effected either in a direct nearness, touch,
union or less closely across the bridge or through the
connecting stream of consciousness of which there has
already been mention. It is a contacting of existence,
presences, things, forms, forces, activities, but a
contacting of them in the stuff of the supramental being
and energy, not in the divisions of matter and through
the physical instruments, that creates the supramental
sense, samjnäna.
It
is a little difficult to make the nature of the supramental
sense understood to a mentality not yet familiar with
it by enlarged experience, because our idea of sense
action is governed by the limiting experience of the
physical mind and we suppose that the fundamental thing
in it is the impression made by an external object on
the physical organ of sight, hearing, smell, touch,
taste, and that the business of the mind, the present
central organ of our consciousness, is only to receive
the physical impression and its nervous translation
and so become intelligently conscious of the object.
In order to understand the supramental change we have
to realise first that the mind is the only real sense
even in the physical process: its dependence on the
physical impressions is the result of the conditions
of the material evolution, but not a thing fundamental
and indispensable. Mind is capable of a sight that is
independent of the physical eye, a hearing that is independent
of the physical ear, and so with the action of all the
other senses. It is capable too of an awareness, operating
by what appears to us as mental impressions, of things
not conveyed or even suggested by the agency of the
physical organs,—an opening to relations, happenings,
forms even and the action of forces to which the physical
organs could not have borne evidence. Then, becoming
aware of these rarer powers, we speak of the mind as
a sixth sense; but in fact it is the only true sense
organ and the rest are no more than its outer conveniences
and secondary instruments, although by its dependence
on them they have become its limitations and its too
imperative and exclusive conveyors. Again we have to
realise—and this is more difficult to admit for
our normal ideas in the matter—that the mind itself
is only the characteristic instrument of sense, but
the thing itself, sense in its purity, samjnäna,
exists behind and beyond the mind it uses and is a movement
of the self, a direct and original activity of the infinite
power of its consciousness. The pure action of sense
is a spiritual action and pure sense is itself a power
of the spirit.
The
spiritual sense is capable of knowing in its own characteristic
way, which is other than that of supramental thought
or of the intelligence or spiritual comprehension, vijnäna,
or knowledge by identity, all things whatsoever, things
material and what is to us immaterial, all forms and
that which is formless. For all is spiritual substance
of being, substance of consciousness and force, substance
of delight; and the spiritual sense, pure Sanjnana,
is the conscious being's contactual, substantial awareness
of its own extended substance of self and in it of all
that is of the infinite or universal substance. It is
possible for us not only to know by conscious identity,
by a spiritual comprehension of self, of principles
and aspects, force, play and action, by a direct spiritual,
supramental and intuitive thought knowledge, by the
heart's spiritually and supramentally illumined feeling,
love, delight, but also to have in a very literal significance
the sense — sense-knowledge or sensation —
of the spirit, the self, the Divine, the Infinite. The
state described by the Upanishad in which one sees,
hears, feels, touches, senses in every way the Brahman
and the Brahman only, for all things have become to
the consciousness only that and have no other, separate
or independent existence, is not a mere figure of speech,
but the exact description of the fundamental action
of the pure sense, the spiritual object of the pure
Sanjnana. And in this original action,—to our
experience a transfigured, glorified, infinitely blissful
action of the sense, a direct feeling out inward, around,
everywhere of the self to embrace and touch and be sensible
of all that is in its universal being,—we can
become aware in a most moving and delightful way of
the Infinite and of all that is in it, cognizant, by
intimate contact of our being with all being, of whatever
is in the universe.
The
action of the supramental sense is founded on this true
truth of sense; it is an organisation of this pure,
spiritual, infinite, absolute, samjnäna.
The supermind acting through sense feels all as God
and in God, all as the manifest touch, sight, hearing,
taste, perfume, all as the felt, seen, directly experienced
substance and power and energy and movement, play, penetration,
vibration, form, nearness, pressure, substantial interchange
of the Infinite. Nothing exists independently to its
sense, but all is felt as one being and movement and
each thing as indivisible from the rest and as having
in it all the Infinite, all the Divine. This supramental
sense has the direct feeling and experience, not only
of forms, but of forces and of the energy and the quality
in things and of a divine substance and presence which
is within them and round them and into which they open
and expand themselves in their secret subtle self and
elements, extending themselves in oneness into the illimitable.
Nothing to the supramental sense is really finite: it
is founded on a feeling of all in each and of each in
all: its sense definition, although more precise and
complete than the mental, creates no walls of limitation;
it is an oceanic and ethereal sense in which all particular
sense knowledge and sensation is a wave or movement
or spray or drop that is yet a concentration of the
whole ocean inseparable from the ocean. Its action is
a result of the extension and vibration of being and
consciousness in a supra-ethereal ether of light, ether
of power, ether of bliss, the Ananda Akasha of the Upanishads,
which is the matrix and continent of the universal expression
of the Self,—here in body and mind experienced
only in limited extensions and vibrations,—and
the medium of its true experience. This sense even at
its lowest power is luminous with a revealing light
that carries in it the secret of the thing it experiences
and can therefore be a starting-point and basis of all
the rest of the supra-mental knowledge,—the supramental
thought, spiritual intelligence and comprehension, conscious
identity,—and on its highest plane or at its fullest
intensity of action it opens into or contains and at
once liberates these things. It is strong with a luminous
power that carries in it the force of self-realisation
and an intense or infinite effectiveness, and this sense-experience
can therefore be the starting-point of impulsion for
a creative or fulfilling action of the spiritual and
supramental will and knowledge. It is rapturous with
a powerful and luminous delight that makes of it, makes
of all sense and sensation a key to or a vessel of the
divine and infinite Ananda.
The
supramental sense can act in its own power and is independent
of the body and the physical life and outer mind and
it is above too the inner mind and its experiences.
It can be aware of all things in whatever world, on
whatever plane, in whatever formation of universal consciousness.
It can be aware of the things of the material universe
even in the trance of Samadhi, aware of them as they
are or appear to the physical sense, even as it is of
other states of experience, of the pure vital, the mental,
the psychical, the supramental presentation of things.
It can in the waking state of the physical consciousness
present to us the things concealed from the limited
receptivity or beyond the range of the physical organs,
distant forms, scenes and happenings, things that have
passed out of physical existence or that are not yet
in physical existence, scenes, forms, happenings, symbols
of the vital, psychical, mental, supramental, spiritual
worlds and all these in their real or significant truth
as well as their appearance. It can use all the other
states of sense consciousness and their appropriate
senses and organs adding to them what they have not,
setting right their errors and supplying their deficiencies
: for it is the source of the others and they are only
inferior derivations from this higher sense, this true
and illimitable saihjnäna.
-Sri
Aurobindo
