ALL being, consciousness, knowledge
moves, secretly for our present surface awareness, openly
when we rise beyond it to the spiritual and supramental
ranges, between two states and powers of existence,
that of the timeless Infinite and that of the Infinite
deploying in itself and organising all things in time.
These two states are opposed to and incompatible with
each other only for our mental logic with its constant
embarrassed stumbling around a false conception of contradictions
and a confronting of eternal opposites. In reality,
as we find when we see things with a knowledge founded
on the supramental identity and vision and think with
the great, profound and flexible logic proper to that
knowledge, the two are only coexistent and concurrent
status and movement of the same truth of the Infinite.
The timeless Infinite holds in itself, in its eternal
truth of being, beyond this manifestation, all that
it manifests in Time. Its time consciousness too is
itself infinite and maintains in itself at once in a
vision of totalities and of particularities, of mobile
succession or moment sight and of total stabilising
vision or abiding whole sight what appears to us as
the past of things, their present and their future.
The
consciousness of the timeless Infinite can be brought
home to us in various ways, but is most ordinarily imposed
on our mentality by a reflection of it and a powerful
impression or else made present to us as something above
the mind, something of which it is aware, towards which
it lifts, but into which it cannot enter because itself
lives only in the time sense and in the succession of
the moments. If our present mind untransformed by the
supramental influence tries to enter into the timeless,
it must either disappear and be lost in the trance of
Samadhi or else, remaining awake, it feels itself diffused
in an Infinite where there is perhaps a sense of supra-physical
space, a vastness, a boundless extension of consciousness,
but no time self, time movement or time order. And if
then the mental being is still mechanically aware of
things in time, it is yet unable to deal with them in
its own manner, unable to establish a truth relation
between the timeless and things in time and unable to
act and will out of its indefinite Infinite. The action
that then remains possible to the mental Purusha is
the mechanical action of the instruments of the Prakriti
continuing by force of old impulsion and habit or continued
initiation of past energy, prärabdha,
or else an action chaotic, unregulated, uncoordinated,
a confused precipitate from an energy which has no longer
a conscious centre.
The
supramental consciousness, on the other hand, is founded
upon the supreme consciousness of the timeless Infinite,
but has too the secret of the deployment of the infinite
Energy in time. It can either take its station in the
time consciousness and keep the timeless infinite as
its background of supreme and original being from which
it receives all its organising knowledge, will and action,
or it can, centred in its essential being, live in the
timeless but live too in a manifestation in time which
it feels and sees as infinite and as the same Infinite,
and can bring out, sustain and develop in the one what
it holds supernally in the other. Its time consciousness
therefore will be different from that of the mental
being, not swept helplessly on the stream of the moments
and clutching at each moment as a stay and a swiftly
disappearing standpoint, but founded first on its eternal
identity beyond the changes of time, secondly on a simultaneous
eternity of Time in which past, present and future exist
together for ever in the self-knowledge and self-power
of the Eternal, thirdly, in a total view of the three
times as one movement singly and indivisibly seen even
in their succession of stages, periods, cycles, last—and
that only in the instrumental consciousness—in
the step-by-step evolution of the moments. It will therefore
have the knowledge of the three times, trikäladrsti,—held
of old to be a supreme sign of the seer and the Rishi,—not
as an abnormal power, but as its normal way of time
knowledge.
This
unified and infinite time consciousness and this vision
and knowledge are the possession of the supramental
being in its own supreme region of light and are complete
only on the highest levels of the supramental nature.
But in the ascent of the human consciousness through
the uplifting and transmuting evolutionary—that
is to say, self-unveiling, self-developing, progressively
self-perfecting—process of Yoga, we have to take
account of three successive conditions all of which
have to be overpassed before we are able to move on
the highest levels. The first condition of our consciousness,
that in which we now move, is this mind of ignorance
that has arisen out of the inconscience and nescience
of material Nature,—ignorant but capable of seeking
for knowledge and finding it at least in a series of
mental representations which may be made clues to the
true truth and, more and more refined and illuminated
and rendered transparent by the influence, the infiltration
and the descent of the light from above, prepare the
intelligence for opening to the capacity of true knowledge.
All truth is to this mind a thing it originally had
not and has had to acquire or has still to acquire,
a thing external to it and to be gathered by experience
or by following certain ascertained methods and rules
of enquiry, calculation, application of discovered law,
interpretation of signs and indices. Its very knowledge
implies an antecedent nescience; it is the instrument
of Avidya.
The
second condition of consciousness is potential only
to the human being and gained by an inner enlightening
and transformation of the mind of ignorance; it is that
in which the mind seeks for its source of knowledge
rather within than without and becomes to its own feeling
and self-experience, by whatever means, a mind, not
of original ignorance, but of self-forgetful knowledge.
This mind is conscious that the knowledge of all things
is hidden within it or at least somewhere in the being,
but as if veiled and forgotten, and the knowledge comes
to it not as a thing acquired from outside, but always
secretly there and now remembered and known at once
to be true,—each thing in its own place, degree,
manner and measure. This is its attitude to knowledge
even when the occasion of knowing is some external experience,
sign or indication, because that is to it only the occasion
and its reliance for the truth of the knowledge is not
on the external indication or evidence but on the inner
confirming witness. The true mind is the universal within
us and the individual is only a projection on the surface,
and therefore this second state of consciousness we
have either when the individual mind goes more and more
inward and is always consciously or subconsciously near
and sensitive to the touches of the universal mentality
in which all is contained, received, capable of being
made manifest, or, still more powerfully, when we live
in the consciousness of universal mind with the personal
mentality only as a projection, a marking board or a
communicating switch on the surface.
The
third state of consciousness is that of the mind of
knowledge in which all things and all truths are perceived
and experienced as already present and known and immediately
available by merely turning the inner light upon it,
as when one turns the eye upon things in a room already
known and familiar,—though not always present
to the vision because that is not attentive,—and
notes them as objects of a pre-existent knowledge. The
difference from the second self-forgetful state of consciousness
is that there is here no effort or seeking needed but
simply a turning or opening of the inner light on whatever
field of knowledge, and therefore it is not a recalling
of things forgotten and self-hidden from the mind, but
a luminous presentation of things already present, ready
and available. This last condition is only possible
by a partial supramentalising of the intuitive mentality
and its full openness to any and every communication
from the supramental ranges. This mind of knowledge
is in its essentiality a power of potential omnipotence,
but in its actual working on the level of mind it is
limited in its range and province. The character of
limitation applies to the supermind itself when it descends
into the mental level and works in the lesser substance
of mentality, though in its own manner and body of power
and light, and it persists even in the action of the
supramental reason. It is only the higher supramental
Shakti acting on its own ranges whose will and knowledge
work always in a boundless light or with a free capacity
of illimitable extension of knowledge subject only to
such limitations as are self-imposed for its own purposes
and at its own will by the spirit.
The
human mind developing into supermind has to pass through
all these stages and in its ascent and expansion it
may experience many changes and various dispositions
of the powers and possibilities of its time consciousness
and time knowledge. At first man in the mind of ignorance
can neither live in the infinite time consciousness
nor command any direct and real power of the triple
time knowledge. The mind of ignorance lives, not in
the indivisible continuity of time, but successively
in each moment. It has a vague sense of the continuity
of self and of an essential continuity of experience,
a sense of which the source is the deeper self within
us, but as it does not live in that self, also it does
not live in a true time continuity, but only uses this
vague but still insistent awareness as a background,
support and assurance in what would otherwise be to
it a constant baseless flux of its being. In its practical
action its only support other than its station in the
present is the line left behind by the past and preserved
in memory, the mass of impressions deposited by previous
experience and, for the future, an assurance of the
regularity of experience and a power of uncertain forecast
founded partly upon repeated experience and well-founded
inference and partly on imaginative construction and
conjecture. The mind of ignorance relies on a certain
foundation or element of relative or moral certainties,
but for the rest a dealing with probabilities and possibilities
is its chief resource.
This
is because the mind in the Ignorance lives in the moment
and moves from hour to hour like a traveller who sees
only what is near and visible around his immediate standpoint
and remembers imperfectly what he has passed through
before, but all in front beyond his immediate view is
the unseen and unknown of which he has yet to have experience.
Therefore man in his self-ignorance moving in time exists,
as the Buddhists saw, only in the succession of thoughts
and sensations and of the external forms present to
his thought and sense. His present momentary self is
alone real to him, his past self is dead or vanishing
or only preserved in memory, result and impression,
his future self is entirely non-existent or only in
process of creation or preparation of birth. And the
world around him is subject to the same rule of perception.
Only its actual form and sum of happenings and phenomena
is present and quite real to him, its past is no longer
in existence or abides only in memory and record and
in so much of it as has left its dead monuments or still
survives into the present, the future is not yet at
all in existence.
It
must be noted, however, that if our knowledge of the
present were not limited by our dependence on the physical
mind and sense, this result would not be altogether
inevitable. If we could be aware of all the present,
all the action of physical, vital, mental energies at
work in the moment, it is conceivable that we would
be able to see their past too involved in them and their
latent future or at least to proceed from present to
past and future knowledge. And under certain conditions
this might create a sense of real and ever-present time
continuity, a living in the behind and the front as
well as the immediate, and a step farther might carry
us into an ever present sense of our existence in infinite
time and in our timeless self, and its manifestation
in eternal time might then become real to us and also
we might feel the timeless Self behind the worlds and
the reality of his eternal world manifestation. In any
case, the possibility of another kind of time consciousness
than we have at present and of a triple time knowledge
rests upon the possibility of developing another consciousness
than that proper to the physical mind and sense and
breaking our imprisonment in the moment and in the mind
of ignorance with its limitation to sensation, memory,
inference and conjecture.
Actually
man is not content solely with living in the present,
though it is that he does with the most pressing vividness
and insistence: he is moved to look before and after,
to know as much as he can of the past and try to penetrate
as far as he can, however obscurely, into the future.
And he has certain aids towards this endeavour of which
some depend on his surface mind, while others open to
intimations from another subliminal or super-conscient
self which has a greater, subtler and more certain knowledge.
His first aid is that of the reason proceeding forward
from cause to effect and backward from effect to cause,
discovering the law of energies and their assured mechanic
process, assuming the perpetual sameness of the movements
of Nature, fixing her time measures and thus calculating
on the basis of a science of general lines and assured
results the past and the future. A certain measure of
limited but sufficiently striking success has been gained
by this method in the province of physical Nature and
it might seem that the same process might eventually
be applied to the movements of mind and life and that
at any rate this alone is man's one reliable means in
any field of looking with precision back and forwards.
But as a matter of i fact, the happenings of vital and
still more of mental nature escape to a very great degree
the means of inference and calculation from assured
law that apply in the field of physical knowledge: it
can apply there only to a limited range of regularised
happenings and phenomena and for the rest leaves us
where we were amid a mixed mass of relative certainties,
uncertain probabilities and incalculable possibilities.
This
is because mind and life bring in a great subtlety and
intricacy of movement, each realised movement carries
in it a complex of forces, and even if we could disengage
all these, all, that is to say, that are simply actualised
and on or near the surface, we should still be baffled
by all the rest that is obscure or latent,—concealed
and yet potent contributory causes, hidden motion and
motive force, undeployed possibilities, uncalculated
and incalculable chances of variation. It ceases to
be practicable here for our limited intelligence to
calculate accurately and with certitude as in the physical
field from precise cause to precise effect, that is
to say, from a given apparent set of existing conditions
to an inevitable resultant of subsequent or a necessary
precedence of antecedent conditions. It is for this
reason that the predictions and previsions of the human
intelligence are constantly baffled and contradicted
by the event, even when largest in their view of the
data and most careful in their survey of possible consequence.
Life and mind are a constant flux of possibles intervening
between spirit and matter and at each step bring in,
if not an infinite, at least an indefinite of possibles,
and this would be enough to make all logical calculation
uncertain and relative. But in addition there reigns
behind them a supreme factor incalculable by human mind,
the will of the soul and secret spirit, the first indefinitely
variable, fluid and elusive, the second infinite and
inscrutably imperative, bound, if at all, only by itself
and the Will in the Infinite. It is therefore only by
going back from the surface physical mind to the psychic
and spiritual consciousness that a vision and knowledge
of the triple time, a transcendence of our limitation
to the standpoint and view range of the moment, can
be wholly possible.
Meanwhile
there are certain doors opening from the inner on to
the outer consciousness which make an occasional but
insufficient power of direct retro-vision of the past,
circumvision of the present, prevision of the future
even in the physical mind at least potentially feasible.
First, there are certain movements of the mind sense
and the vital consciousness that are of this character—of
which one kind, that which has most struck our perceptions,
has been called presentiment. These movements are instinctive
perceptions, obscure intuitions of the sense mind and
the vital being, and like all that is instinctive in
man have been suppressed, rendered rare or discredited
as unreliable by the engrossing activity of the mental
intelligence. If allowed a free scope, these could develop
and supply data not available to the ordinary reason
and the senses. But still they would not be of themselves
perfectly useful or reliable indices unless their obscurity
were enlightened by an interpretation and guidance which
the ordinary intelligence cannot give, but a higher
intuition could provide. Intuition, then, is the second
and more important possible means available to us, and
actually intuition can and does sometimes give us in
this difficult field an occasional light and guidance.
But acting in our present mentality it is subject to
the disadvantage that it is uncertain in operation,
imperfect in its functioning, obscured by false imitative
movements of the imagination and fallible mental judgment
and continually seized on and alloyed and distorted
by the normal action of mind with its constant liability
to error. The formation of an organised intuitive mentality
purified from these deficiencies would be needed to
enlarge and assure this possibility of the functioning
of a higher luminous intelligence.
Man,
confronted by this incapacity of the intelligence and
yet avid of the knowledge of the future, has fallen
back on other and external means, omens, sortileges,
dreams, astrology and many other alleged data for a
past and future knowledge that have been in less sceptical
times formulated as veridical sciences. Challenged and
discredited by the sceptical reason these still persist
in atttracting our minds and hold their own, supported
by desire and credulity and superstition, but also by
the frequent though imperfect evidence we get of a certain
measure of truth in their pretensions. A higher psychical
knowledge shows us that in fact the world is full of
many systems of correspondences and indices and that
these things, however much misused by the human intelligence,
can in their place and under right conditions give us
real data of a supraphysical knowledge. It is evident,
however, that it is only an intuitive knowledge that
can discover and formulate them,—as it was in
fact the psychical and intuitive mind that originally
formulated these ways of veridical knowledge,—and
it will be found in practice that only an intuitive
knowledge, not the mere use either of a traditional
or a haphazard interpretation or of mechanical rule
and formula, can ensure a right employment of these
indices. Otherwise, handled by the surface intelligence,
they are liable to be converted into a thick jungle
of error.
The
true and direct knowledge or vision of past, present
and future begins with the opening of the psychical
consciousness and the psychical faculties. The psychical
consciousness is that of what is now often called the
subliminal self, the subtle or dream self of Indian
psychology, and its range of potential knowledge, almost
infinite as has been pointed out in the last chapter,
includes a very large power and many forms of insight
into both the possibilities and the definite actualities
of past, present and future. Its first faculty, that
which most readily attracts attention, is its power
of seeing by the psychical sense images of all things
in time and space. As exercised by clairvoyants, mediums
and others this is often, and indeed usually, a specialised
faculty limited though often precise and accurate in
action, and implies no development of the inner soul
or the spiritual being or the higher intelligence. It
is a door opened by chance or by an innate gift or by
some kind of pressure between the waking and the subliminal
mind and admitting only to the surface or the outskirts
of the latter. All things in a certain power and action
of the secret universal mind are represented by images,—not
only visual but, if one may use the phrase, auditory
and other images,—and a certain development of
the subtle or psychical senses makes it possible,—if
there is no interference of the constructing mind and
its imaginations, if, that is to say, artificial or
falsifying mental images do not intervene, if the psychical
sense is free, sincere and passive,—to receive
these representations or transcriptions with a perfect
accuracy and not so much predict as see in its correct
images the present beyond the range of the physical
sense, the past and the future. The accuracy of this
kind of seeing depends on its being confined to a statement
of the thing seen and the attempt to infer, interpret
or otherwise go beyond the visual knowledge may lead
to much error unless there is at the same time a strong
psychical intuition fine, subtle and pure or a high
development of the luminous intuitive intelligence.
-Sri
Aurobindo
