The
phenomena of this vital consciousness and sense, this
direct sensation and perception of and response to the
play of subtler forces than the physical, are often
included without distinction under the head of psychical
phenomena. In a certain sense it is an awakening of
the psyche, the inner soul now hidden, clogged wholly
or partially covered up by the superficial activity
of the physical mind and senses that brings to the surface
the submerged or subliminal inner vital consciousness
and also an inner or subliminal mental consciousness
and sense capable of perceiving and experiencing directly,
not only the life forces and their play and results
and phenomena, but the mental and psychical worlds and
all they contain and the mental activities, vibrations,
phenomena, forms, images of this world also and of establishing
a direct communication between mind and mind without
the aid of the physical organs and the limitations they
impose on our consciousness. There are, however, two
different kinds of action of these inner ranges of the
consciousness. The first is a more outer and confused
activity of the awakening subliminal mind and life which
is clogged with and subject to the grosser desires and
illusions of the mind and vital being and vitiated in
spite of its wider range of experience and power and
capacities by an enormous mass of error and deformations
of the will and knowledge, full of false suggestions
and images, false and distorted intuitions and inspirations
and impulses, the latter often even depraved and perverse,
and vitiated too by the interference of the physical
mind and its obscurities. This is an inferior activity
to which clairvoyants, psychists, spiritists, occultists,
seekers of powers and Siddhis are very liable and to
which all the warnings against the dangers and errors
of this kind of seeking are more especially applicable.
The seeker of spiritual perfection has to pass as quickly
as possible, if he cannot altogether avoid, this zone
of danger, and the safe rule here is to be attached
to none of these things, but to make spiritual progress
one's sole real objective and to put no sure confidence
in other things until the mind and life soul are purified
and the light of the spirit and supermind or at least
of the spiritually illumined mind and soul are shed
on these inner ranges of experience. For when the mind
is tranquillised and purified and the pure psyche liberated
from the insistence of the desire soul, these experiences
are free from any serious danger—except indeed
that of limitation and a certain element of error which
cannot be entirely eliminated so long as the soul experiences
and acts on the mental level. For there is then a pure
action of the true psychical consciousness and its powers,
a reception of psychical experience pure in itself of
the worse deformations, although subject to the limitations
of the representing mind, and capable of a high spiritualisation
and light. The complete power and truth, however, can
only come by the opening of the supermind and the supramentalising
of the mental and psychical experience.
The
range of the psychic consciousness and its experiences
is almost illimitable and the variety and complexity
of its phenomena almost infinite. Only some of the broad
lines and main features can be noted here. The first
and most prominent is the activity of the psychic senses
of which the sight is the most developed ordinarily
and the first to manifest itself with any largeness
when the veil of the absorption in the surface consciousness
which prevents the inner vision is broken. But all the
physical senses have their corresponding powers in the
psychical being, there is a psychical hearing, touch,
smell, taste: indeed the physical senses are themselves
in reality only a projection of the inner sense into
limited and externalised operation in and through and
upon the phenomena of gross matter. The psychical sight
receives characteristically the images that are formed
in the subtle matter of the mental or psychical ether,
cittäkäsa. These may be transcriptions
there or impresses of physical things, persons, scenes,
happenings, whatever is, was or will be or may be in
the physical universe. These images are very variously
seen and under all kinds of conditions; in Samadhi or
in the waking state, and in the latter with the bodily
eyes closed or open, projected on or into a physical
object or medium or seen as if materialised in the physical
atmosphere or only in a psychical ether revealing itself
through this grosser physical atmosphere; seen through
the physical eyes themselves as a secondary instrument
and as if under the conditions of the physical vision
or by the psychical vision alone and independently of
the relations of our ordinary sight to space. The real
agent is always the psychical sight and the power indicates
that the consciousness is more or less awake, intermittently
or normally and more or less perfectly, in the psychical
body. It is possible to see in this way the transcriptions
or impressions of things at any distance beyond the
range of the physical vision or the images of the past
or the future.
Besides
these transcriptions or impresses the psychical vision
receives thought images and other forms created by constant
activity of consciousness in ourselves or in other human
beings, and these may be according to the character
of the activity images of truth or falsehood or else
mixed things, partly true, partly false, and may be
too either mere shells and representations or images
inspired with a temporary life and consciousness and,
it may be, carrying in them in one way or another some
kind of beneficent or maleficent action or some willed
or unwilled effectiveness on our minds or vital being
or through them even on the body. These transcriptions,
impresses, thought images, life images, projections
of the consciousness may also be representations or
creations not of the physical world, but of vital, psychic
or mental worlds beyond us, seen in our own minds or
projected from other than human beings. And as there
is this psychical vision of which some of the more external
and ordinary manifestations are well enough known by
the name of clairvoyance, so there is a psychical hearing
and psychical touch, taste, smell,—clairaudience,
clairsentience are the more external manifestations,—with
precisely the same range each in its own kind, the same
fields and manner and conditions and varieties of their
phenomena.
These
and other phenomena create an indirect, a representative
range of psychical experience; but the psychical sense
has also the power of putting us in a more direct communication
with earthly or supra-terrestrial beings through their
psychical selves or their psychical bodies or even with
things, for things also have a psychical reality and
souls or presences supporting them which can communicate
with our psychical consciousness. The most notable of
these more powerful but rarer phenomena are those which
attend the power of exteriorisation of our consciousness
for various kinds of action otherwise and elsewhere
than in the physical body, communication in the psychical
body or some emanation or reproduction of it, oftenest,
though by no means necessarily, during sleep or trance
and the setting up of relations or communication by
various means with the denizens of another plane of
existence.
For
there is a continuous scale of the planes of consciousness,
beginning with the psychical and other belts attached
to and dependent on the earth plane and proceeding through
the true independent vital and psychical worlds to the
worlds of the gods and the highest supramental and spiritual
planes of existence. And these are in fact always acting
upon our subliminal selves unknown to our waking mind
and with considerable effect on our life and nature.
The physical mind is only a little part of us and there
is a much more considerable range of our being in which
the presence, influence and powers of the other planes
are active upon us and help to shape our external being
and its activities. The awakening of the psychical consciousness
enables us to become aware of these powers, presences
and influences in and around us; and while in the impure
or yet ignorant and imperfect mind this unveiled contact
has its dangers, it enables us too, if rightly used
and directed, to be no longer their subject but their
master and to come into conscious and self-controlled
possession of the inner secrets of our nature. The psychical
consciousness reveals this interaction between the inner
and the outer planes, this world and others, partly
by an awareness, which may be very constant, vast and
vivid, of their impacts, suggestions, communications
to our inner thought and conscious being and a capacity
of reaction upon them there, partly also through many
kinds of symbolic, transcriptive or representative images
presented to the different psychical senses. But also
there is the possibility of a more direct, concretely
sensible, almost material, sometimes actively material
communication—a complete though temporary physical
materialisation seems to be possible—with the
powers, forces and beings of other worlds and planes.
There may even be a complete breaking of the limits
of the physical consciousness and the material existence.
The
awakening of the psychical consciousness liberates in
us the direct use of the mind as a sixth sense, and
this power may be made constant and normal. The physical
consciousness can only communicate with the minds of
others or know the happenings of the world around us
through external means and signs and indications, and
it has beyond this limited action only a vague and haphazard
use of the mind's more direct capacities, a poor range
of occasional presentiments, intuitions and messages.
Our minds are indeed constantly acting and acted upon
by the minds of others through hidden currents of which
we are not aware, but we have no knowledge or control
of these agencies. The psychical consciousness, as it
develops, makes us aware of the great mass of thoughts,
feelings, suggestions, wills, impacts, influences of
all kinds that we are receiving from others or sending
to others or imbibing from and throwing into the general
mind atmosphere around us. As it evolves in power, precision
and clearness, we are able to trace these to their source
or feel immediately their origin and transit to us and
direct consciously and with an intelligent will our
own messages. It becomes possible to be aware, more
or less accurately and discerningly, of the activities
of minds whether near to us physically or at a distance,
to understand, feel or identify ourselves with their
temperament, character, thoughts, feelings, reactions,
whether by a psychic sense or a direct mental perception
or by a very sensible and often intensely concrete reception
of them, into our mind or on its recording surface.
At the same time, we can consciously make at least the
inner selves and, if they are sufficiently sensitive,
the surface minds of others aware of our own inner mental
or psychic self and plastic to its thoughts, suggestions,
influences or even cast it or its active image in influence
into their subjective, even into their vital and physical
being to work there as a helping or moulding or dominating
power and presence.
All
these powers of the psychic consciousness need have
and often have no more than a mental utility and significance,
but it can also be used with a spiritual sense and light
and intention in it and for a spiritual purpose. This
can be done by a spiritual meaning and use in our psychical
interchange with others, and it is largely by a psycho-spiritual
interchange of this kind that a master in Yoga helps
his disciple. The knowledge of our inner subliminal
and psychic nature, of the powers and presences and
influences there and the capacity of communication with
other planes and their powers and beings can also be
used for a higher than any mental or mundane object,
for the possession and mastering of our whole nature
and the overpassing of the intermediate planes on the
way to the supreme spiritual heights of being. But the
most direct spiritual use of the psychic consciousness
is to make it an instrument of contact, communication
and union with the Divine. A world of psycho-spiritual
symbols is readily opened up, illuminating and potent
and living forms and instruments, which can be made
a revelation of spiritual significances, a support for
our spiritual growth and the evolution of spiritual
capacity and experience, a means towards spiritual power,
knowledge or Ananda. The Mantra is one of these psycho-spiritual
means, at once a symbol, an instrument and a sound body
for the divine manifestation, and of the same kind are
the images of the Godhead and of its personalities or
powers used in meditation or for adoration in Yoga.
The great forms or bodies of the Divine are revealed
through which he manifests his living presence to us
and we can more easily by their means intimately know,
adore and give ourselves to him and enter into the different
Lokas, worlds of his habitation and presence, where
we can live in the light of his being. His word, command,
Adesha, presence, touch, guidance can come to us through
our spiritualised psychic consciousness and, as a subtly
concrete means of transmission from the spirit, it can
give us a close communication and nearness to him through
all our psychic senses. These and many more are the
spiritual uses of the psychic consciousness and sense
and, although capable of limitation and deformation,—for
all secondary instruments can be also by our mental
capacity of exclusive self-limitation means of a partial
but at the same time hindrances to a more integral realisation,—they
are of the greatest utility on the road to the spiritual
perfection and afterwards, liberated from the limitation
of our minds, transformed and supramentalised, an element
of rich detail in the spiritual Ananda.
As
the physical and vital, the psychical consciousness
and sense also are capable of a supramental transformation
and receive by it their own integral fullness and significance.
The supermind lays hold on the psychical being, descends
into it, changes it into the mould of its own nature
and uplifts it to be a part of the supramental action
and state, the supra-psychic being of the Vijnana Purusha.
The first result of this change is to base the phenomena
of the psychical consciousness on their true foundation
by bringing into it the permanent sense, the complete
realisation, the secure possession of the oneness of
our mind and soul with the minds and souls of others
and the mind and soul of universal Nature. For always
the effect of the supra-mental growth is to universalise
the individual consciousness. As it makes us live, even
in our individual vital movement and its relations with
all around us, with the universal life, so it makes
us think and feel and sense, although through an individual
centre or instrument, with the universal mind and psychical
being. This has two results of great importance.
First,
the phenomena of the psychical sense and mind lose the
fragmentariness and incoherence or else difficult regulation
and often quite artificial order which pursues them
even more than it pursues our more normal mental activities
of the surface, and they become the harmonious play
of the universal inner mind and soul in us, assume their
true law and right forms and relations and reveal their
just significances. Even on the mental plane one can
get by the spiritualising of the mind at some realisation
of soul oneness, but it is never really complete, at
least in its application, and does not acquire this
real and entire law, form, relation, complete and unfailing
truth and accuracy of its significances. And, secondly,
the activity of the psychical consciousness loses all
character of abnormality, of an exceptional, irregular
and even a perilously supernormal action, often bringing
a loss of hold upon life and a disturbance or an injury
to other parts of the being. It not only acquires its
own right order within itself but its right relation
with the physical life on one side and with the spiritual
truth of being on the other and the whole becomes a
harmonious manifestation of the embodied spirit. It
is always the originating supermind that contains within
itself the true values, significances and relations
of the other parts of our being and its unfolding is
the condition of the integral possession of our self
and nature.
The
complete transformation comes on us by a certain change,
not merely of the poise or level of our regarding conscious
self or even of its law and character, but also of the
whole substance of our conscious being. Till that is
done, the supramental consciousness manifests above
the mental and psychical atmosphere of the being,—in
which the physical has already become a subordinate
and to a large extent a dependent method of our self's
expression,—and it sends down its power, light,
and influence into it to illumine it and transfigure.
But only when the substance of the lower consciousness
has been changed, filled potently, wonderfully transformed,
swallowed up as it were into the greater energy and
sense of being. AA, br hat, of which it is
a derivation and projection, do we have the perfected,
entire and constant supramental consciousness. The substance,
the conscious ether of being in which the mental or
psychic consciousness and sense live and see and feel
and experience is something subtler, freer, more plastic
than that of the physical mind and sense. As long as
we are dominated by the latter, psychical phenomena
may seem to us less real, hallucinatory even, but the
more we acclimatize ourselves to the psychical and to
the ether of being which it inhabits, the more we begin
to see the greater truth and to sense the more spiritually
concrete substance of all to which its larger and freer
mode of experience bears witness. Even, the physical
may come to seem to itself unreal and hallucinatory—but
this is an exaggeration and new misleading exclusiveness
due to a shifting of the Centrex and a change of action
of the mind and sense—or else may even seem at
any rate less powerfully real. When, however, the psychical
and physical experiences are well combined in their
true balance, we live at once in two complementary worlds
of our being each with its own reality, but the psychical
revealing all that is behind the physical, the soul
view and experience taking precedence and enlightening
and explaining the physical view and experience. The
supramental transformation again changes the whole substance
of our consciousness; it brings in an ether of greater
being, consciousness, sense, life, which convicts the
psychical also of insufficiency and makes it appear
by itself an incomplete reality and only a partial truth
of all that we are and become and witness.
All
the experiences of the psychical are accepted and held
up indeed in the supramental consciousness and its energy,
but they are filled with the light of a greater truth,
the substance of a greater spirit. The psychical consciousness
is first supported and enlightened, then filled and
occupied with the supramental light and power and the
revealing intensity of its vibrations. Whatever exaggeration,
whatever error born of isolated incidence, insufficiently
illumined impression, personal suggestion, misleading
influence and intention or other cause of limitation
or deformation interferes in the truth of the mental
and psychical experience and knowledge, is revealed
and cured or vanishes, failing to stand in the light
of the self-truth—sat yam, tam—of
things, persons, happenings, indications, representations
proper to this greater largeness. All the psychical
communications, transcriptions, impresses, symbols,
images receive their true value, take their right place,
are put into their proper relations. The psychical intelligence
and sensation are lit up with the supramental sense
and knowledge, their phenomena, intermediate between
the spiritual and material worlds, begin to reveal automatically
their own truth and meaning and also the limitations
of their truth and significance. The images presented
to the inner sight, hearing, sensation of all kinds
are occupied by or held in a larger and more luminous
mass of vibrations, a greater substance of light and
intensity which brings into them the same change as
in the things of the physical sense, a greater totality,
precision, revealing force of sense knowledge carried
in the image. And finally all is lifted up and taken
into the super ming and made a part of the infinitely
luminous consciousness, knowledge and experience of
the supramental being, the Tijuana Perusal.
The
state of then being after this supramental transformation
will be in all its parts of consciousness and knowledge
that of an infinite and cosmic consciousness acting
through the universalized individual Perusal. The fundamental
power will be an awareness of identity, a knowledge
by identity,—an identity of being, of consciousness,
of force of being and consciousness, of delight of being,
an identity with the Infinite, the Divine, and with
all that is in the Infinite, all that is the expression
and manifestation of the Divine. This awareness and
knowledge will use as its means and instruments a spiritual
vision of all that the knowledge by identity can found,
a supramental real idea and thought of the nature of
direct thought vision, thought hearing, thought memory
that reveals, interprets or represents to the awareness
the truth of all things, and an inner truth speech that
expresses it, and finally a supramental sense that provides
a relation of contact in substance of being with all
things and persons and powers and forces in all the
planes of existence.
The
supramental will not depend on the instrumentation,
for example, of the sense, as the physical mind is dependent
on the evidence of our senses, although it will be capable
of making them a starting-point for the higher forms
of knowledge, as it will also be capable of proceeding
directly through these higher forms and making the sense
only a means of formation and objective expression.
The supramental being will transform at the same time
and take up into itself the present thinking of the
mind transfigured into an immensely larger knowledge
by identity, knowledge by total comprehension, knowledge
by intimate perception of detail and relation, all direct,
immediate, spontaneous, all the expression of the self's
already existent eternal knowledge. It will take up,
transform, Supramental the physical sense, the sixth
sense capacities of the mind and the psychic consciousness
and senses and use them as the means of an extreme inner
objectification of experience. Nothing will be really
external to it, for it will experience all in the unity
of the cosmic consciousness which will be its own, the
unity of being of the infinite which will be its own
being. It will experience matter, not only gross matter
but the subtle and the most subtle, as substance and
form of the spirit, experience life and all kinds of
energy as the dynamics of the spirit, Supramental mind
as a means or channel of knowledge of the spirit, supermind
as the infinite self of knowledge and power of knowledge
and Amanda of knowledge of the spirit.
-Sri
Aurobindo
