A
completer opening of the psychical consciousness leads
us far beyond this faculty of vision by images and admits
us not indeed to a new time consciousness, but to many
ways of the triple time knowledge. The subliminal or psychic
self can bring back or project itself into past states
of consciousness and experience and anticipate or even,
though this is less common, strongly project itself into
future states of consciousness and experience. It does
this by a temporary entering into or identification of
its being or its power of experiencing knowledge with
either permanences or representations of the past and
the future that are maintained in an eternal time consciousness
behind our mentality or thrown up by the eternity of supermind
into an indivisible continuity of time vision. Or it may
receive the impress of these things and construct a transcriptive
experience of them in the subtle ether of psychical being.
Or it may call up the past from the subconscious memory
where it is always latent and give it in itself a living
form and a kind of renewed memorative existence, and equally
it may call up from the depths of latency, where it is
already shaped in the being, and similarly form to itself
and experience the future. It may by a kind of psychical
thought vision or soul intuition—not the same thing
as the subtler and less concrete thought vision of the
luminous intuitive intelligence—foresee or foreknow
the future or flash this soul intuition into the past
that has gone behind the veil and recover it for present
knowledge. It can develop a symbolic seeing which conveys
the past and the future through a vision of the powers
and significances that belong to supraphysical planes
but are powerful for creation in the material universe.
It can feel the intention of the Divine, the mind of the
gods, all things and their signs and indices that descend
upon the soul and determine the complex movement of forces.
It can feel too the movement of forces that represent
or respond to the pressure—as it can perceive the
presence and the action—of the beings of the mental,
vital and other worlds who concern themselves with our
lives. It can gather on all hands all kinds of indications
of happenings in past, present and future time. It can
receive before its sight the etheric writing, äkäsa-lipi,
that keeps the record of all things past, transcribes
all that is in process in the present, writes out the
future.
All
these and a multitude of other powers are concealed
in our subliminal being and with the waking of the psychical
consciousness can be brought to the surface. The knowledge
of our past lives—whether of past soul states
or personalities or scenes, occurrences, relations with
others,—of the past lives of others, of the past
of the world, of the future, of present things that
are beyond the range of our physical senses or the reach
of any means of knowledge open to the surface intelligence,
the intuition and impressions not only of physical things,
but of the working of a past and present and future
mind and life and soul in ourselves and others, the
knowledge not only of this world but of other worlds
or planes of consciousness and their manifestations
in time and of their intervention and workings and effects
on the earth and its embodied souls and their destinies,
lies open to our psychical being, because it is close
to the intimations of the universal, not engrossed only
or mainly with the immediate and not shut up into the
narrow circle of the purely personal and physical experience.
At
the same time these powers are subject to this disadvantage
that they are not by any means free from liability to
confusion and error, and especially the lower ranges
and more outer workings of the psychical consciousness
are subject to dangerous influences, strong illusions,
misleading, perverting and distorting suggestions and
images. A purified mind and heart and a strong and fine
psychical intuition may do much to protect from perversion
and error, but even the most highly developed psychical
consciousness cannot be absolutely safe unless the psychical
is illumined and uplifted by a higher force than itself
and touched and strengthened by the luminous intuitive
mind and that again raised towards the supramental energy
of the spirit. The psychical consciousness does not
derive its time knowledge from a direct living in the
indivisible continuity of the spirit and it has not
to guide it a perfect intuitive discrimination or the
absolute light of the higher truth-consciousness. It
receives its time perceptions, like the mind, only in
part and detail, is open to all kinds of suggestions,
and as its consequent range of truth is wider, more
manifold too are its sources of error. And it is not
only that which was but that which might have been or
tried and failed to be that comes to it out of the past,
not only that which is but that which may be or wishes
to be that crowds on it from the present and not only
things to be but suggestions, intuitions, visions and
images of many kinds of possibility that visit it from
the future. And always too there is the possibility
of mental constructions and mental images interfering
with the true truth of things in the presentations of
the psychical experience.
The
coming of the intimations of the subliminal self to
the surface and the activity of the psychical consciousness
tend to turn the mind of ignorance, with which we begin,
increasingly though not perfectly into a mind of self-forgetful
knowledge constantly illuminated with intimations and
upsurgings from the inner being, antarätman,
rays from the still concealed awareness of its whole
self and infinite contents and from the awareness—representing
itself here as a sort of memory, a recalling or a bringing
out—of an inherent and permanent but hidden knowledge
of past, present and future that is always carried within
itself by the eternal spirit. But embodied as we are
and founded on the physical consciousness, the mind
of ignorance still persists as a conditioning environment,
an intervening power and limiting habitual force obstructing
and mixing with the new formation or, even in moments
of large illumination, at once a boundary wall and a
strong substratum, and it imposes its incapacities and
errors. And to remedy this persistence the first necessity
would seem to be the development of the power of a luminous
intuitive intelligence seeing the truth of time and
its happenings as well as all other truth by intuitive
thought and sense and vision and detecting and extruding
by its native light of discernment the intrusions of
misprision and error.
All
intuitive knowledge comes more or less directly from
the light of the self-aware spirit entering into the
mind, the spirit concealed behind mind and conscious
of all in itself and in all its selves, omniscient and
capable of illumining the ignorant or the self-forgetful
mind whether by rare or constant flashes or by a steady
instreaming light, out of its omniscience. This all
includes all that was, is or will be in time and this
omniscience is not limited, impeded or baffled by our
mental division of the three times and the idea and
experience of a dead and no longer existent and ill-remembered
or forgotten past and a not yet existent and therefore
unknowable future which is so imperative for the mind
in the ignorance. Accordingly the growth of the intuitive
mind can bring with it the capacity of a time knowledge
which comes to it not from outside indices, but from
within the universal soul of things, its eternal memory
of the past, its unlimited holding of things present
and its prevision or, as it has been paradoxically but
suggestively called, its memory of the future. But this
capacity works at first sporadically and uncertainly
and not in an organised manner. As the force of intuitive
knowledge grows, it becomes more possible to command
the use of the capacity and to regularise to a certain
degree its functioning and various movements. An acquired
power can be established of commanding the materials
and the main or the detailed knowledge of things in
the triple time, but this usually forms itself as a
special or abnormal power and the normal action of the
mentality or a large part of it remains still that of
the mind of ignorance. This is obviously an imperfection
and limitation and it is only when the power takes its
place as a normal and natural action of the wholly intuitivised
mind that there can be said to be a perfection of the
capacity of the triple time knowledge so far as that
is possible in the mental being.
It
is by the progressive extrusion of the ordinary action
of the intelligence, the acquiring of a complete and
total reliance on the intuitive self and a consequent
intuitivising of all the parts of the mental being that
the mind of ignorance can be, more successfully, if
not as yet wholly, replaced by the mind of self-contained
knowledge. But,—and especially for this kind of
knowledge,—what is needed is the cessation of
mental constructions built on the foundation of the
mind of ignorance. The difference between the ordinary
mind and the intuitive is that the former, seeking in
the darkness or at most by its own unsteady torchlight,
first, sees things only as they are presented in that
light and, secondly, where it does not know, constructs
by imagination, by uncertain inference, by others of
its aids and makeshifts things which it readily takes
for truth, shadow projections, cloud edifices, unreal
prolongations, deceptive anticipations, possibilities
and probabilities which do duty for certitudes. The
intuitive mind constructs nothing in this artificial
fashion, but makes itself a receiver of the light and
allows the truth to manifest in it and organise its
own constructions. But so long as there is a mixed action
and the mental constructions and imaginations are allowed
to operate, this passivity of the intuitive mind to
the higher light, the truth light, cannot be complete
or securely dominate and there cannot therefore be a
firm organisation of the triple time knowledge. It is
because of this obstruction and mixture that that power
of time vision, of back-sight and around-sight and foresight,
which sometimes marks the illumined mind, is not only
an abnormal power among others rather than part of the
very texture of the mental action, but also occasional,
very partial and marred often by an undetected intermixture
or a self-substituting intervention of error.
The
mental constructions that interfere are mainly of two
kinds, and the first and most powerfully distorting
are those which proceed from the stresses of the will
claiming to see and determine, interfering with knowledge
and not allowing the intuition to be passive to the
truth light and its impartial and pure channel. The
personal will, whether taking the shape of the emotions
and the heart's wishes or of vital desires or of strong
dynamic volitions or the wilful preferences of the intelligence,
is an evident source of distortion when these try, as
they usually do try with success, to impose themselves
on the knowledge and make us take what we desire or
will for the thing that was, is or must be. For either
they prevent the true knowledge from acting or if it
at all presents itself, they seize upon it, twist it
out of shape and make the resultant deformation a justifying
basis for a mass of will-created falsehood. The personal
will must either be put aside or else its suggestions
must be kept in their place until a supreme reference
has been made to the higher impersonal light and then
must be sanctioned or rejected according to the truth
that comes from deeper within than the mind or from
higher above. But even if the personal will is held
in abeyance and the mind passive for reception, it may
be assailed and imposed on by suggestions from all sorts
of forces and possibilities that strive in the world
for realisation and come representing the things cast
up by them on the stream of their will-to-be as the
truth of past, present or future. And if the mind lends
itself to these impostor suggestions, accepts their
self-valuations, does not either put them aside or refer
them to the truth light, the same result of prevention
or distortion of the truth is inevitable. There is a
possibility of the will element being entirely excluded
and the mind being made a silent and passive register
of a higher luminous knowledge, and in that case a much
more accurate reception of time intuitions becomes possible.
The integrality of the being demands, however, a will
action and not only an inactive knowing, and therefore
the larger and more perfect remedy is to replace progressively
the personal by a universalised will which insists on
nothing that is not securely felt by it to be an intuition,
inspiration or revelation of what must be from that
higher light in which will is one with knowledge.
The
second kind of mental construction belongs to the very
nature of our mind and intelligence and its dealing
with things in time. All is seen here by mind as a sum
of realised actualities with their antecedents and natural
consequences, an indeterminate of possibilities and,
conceivably, although of this it is not certain, a determining
something behind, a will, fate or Power, which rejects
some and sanctions or compels others out of many possibles.
Its constructions therefore are made partly of inferences
from the actual, both past and present, partly of a
volitional or an imaginative and conjectural selection
and combining of possibilities and partly of a decisive
reasoning or preferential judgment or insistent creative
will-intelligence that tries to fix among the mass of
actuals and possibles the definitive truth it is labouring
to discover or determine. All this which is indispensable
to our thought and action in mind, has to be excluded
or transformed before the intuitive knowledge can have
a chance of organising itself on a sound basis. A transformation
is possible because the intuitive mind has to do the
same work and cover the same field, but with a different
handling of the materials and another light upon their
significance. An exclusion is possible because all is
really contained in the truth consciousness above and
a silencing of the mind of ignorance and a pregnant
receptivity is not beyond our compass in which the intuitions
descending from the truth-consciousness can be received
with a subtle or strong exactitude and all the materials
of the knowledge seen in their right place and true
proportion. As a matter of practice it will be found
that both methods are used alternatively or together
to effect the transition from the one kind of mentality
to the other.
The
intuitive mind dealing with the triple time movement
has to see rightly in thought sense and vision three
things: actualities, possibles and imperatives. There
is first a primary intuitive action developed which
sees principally the stream of successive actualities
in time, even as the ordinary mind, but with an immediate
directness of truth and spontaneous accuracy of which
the ordinary mind is not capable. It sees them first
by a perception, a thought action, a thought sense,
a thought vision, which at once detects the forces at
work on persons and things, the thoughts, intentions,
impulsions, energies, influences in and around them,
those already formulated in them and those in process
of formation, those too that are coming or about to
come into or upon them from the environment or from
secret sources invisible to the normal mind, distinguishes
by a rapid intuitive analysis free from seeking or labour
or by a synthetic total view the complex of these forces,
discerns the effective from the ineffective or partly
effective and sees too the result that is to emerge.
This is the integral process of the intuitive vision
of actualities, but there are others that are less complete
in their character. For there may be developed a power
of seeing the result without any previous or simultaneous
perception of the forces at work or the latter may be
seen only afterwards and the result alone leap at once
and first into the knowledge. On the other hand, there
may be a partial or complete perception of the complex
of forces, but an incertitude of the definitive result
or only a slowly arriving or relative certitude. These
are stages in the development of the capacity for a
total and unified vision of actualities.
This
kind of intuitive knowledge is not an entirely perfect
instrument of time knowledge. It moves normally in the
stream of the present and sees rightly from moment to
moment only the present, the immediate past and the
immediate future. It may, it is true, project itself
backward and reconstruct correctly by the same power
and process a past action or project itself forward
and reconstruct correctly something in the more distant
future. But this is for the normal power of the thought
vision a more rare and difficult effort and usually
it needs for a freer use of this self-projection the
aid and support of the psychical seeing. Moreover, it
can see only what will arrive in the undisturbed process
of the actualities and its vision no longer applies
if some unforeseen rush of forces or intervening power
comes down from regions of a larger potentiality altering
the complex of conditions, and this is a thing that
constantly happens in the action of forces in the time
movement. It may help itself by the reception of inspirations
that illumine to it these potentialities and of imperative
revelations that indicate what is decisive in them and
its sequences and by these two powers correct the limitations
of the intuitive mind of actuality. But the capacity
of this first intuitive action to deal with these greater
sources of vision is never quite perfect, as must always
be the case with an inferior power in its treatment
of the materials given to it from a greater consciousness.
A considerable limitation of vision by its stress on
the stream of immediate actualities must be always its
character.
It
is possible, however, to develop a mind of luminous
inspiration which will be more at home among the greater
potentialities of the time movement, see more easily
distant things and at the same time take up into itself,
into its more brilliant, wide and powerful light, the
intuitive knowledge of actualities. This inspired mind
will see things in the light of the world's larger potentialities
and note the stream of actuality as a selection and
result from the mass of forceful possibles. It will
be liable, however, if it is not attended with a sufficient
revelatory knowledge of imperatives, to a hesitation
or suspension of determining view as between various
potential lines of the movement or even to a movemenj
away from the line of eventual actuality and following
another not yet applicable sequence. The aid of imperative
revelations from above will help to diminish this limitation,
but here again there will be the difficulty of an inferior
power dealing with the materials given to it from the
treasury of a higher light and force. But it is possible
to develop too a mind of luminous revelation which taking
into itself the two inferior movements sees what is
determined behind the play of potentialities and actualities
and observes these latter as its means of deploying
its imperative decisions. An intuitive mind thus constituted
and aided by an active psychic consciousness may be
in command of a very remarkable power of time knowledge.
At
the same time it will be found that it is still a limited
instrument. In the first place it will represent a superior
knowledge working in the stuff of mind, cast into mental
forms and still subject to mental conditions and limitations.
It will always lean chiefly on the succession of present
moments as a foundation for its steps and successions
of knowledge, however far it may range backward or forward,—it
will move in the stream of Time even in its higher revelatory
action and not see the movement from above or in the
stabilities of eternal time with their large ranges
of vision, and therefore it will always be bound to
a secondary and limited action and to a certain dilution,
qualification and relativity in its activities. Moreover,
its knowing will be not a possession in itself but a
reception of knowledge. It will at most create in place
of the mind of ignorance a mind of self-forgetful knowledge
constantly reminded and illumined from a latent self-awareness
and all-awareness. The range, the extent, the normal
lines of action of the knowledge will vary according
to the development, but it can never be free from very
strong limitations. And this limitation will give a
tendency to the still environing or subconsciously subsisting
mind of ignorance to reassert itself, to rush in or
up, acting where the intuitive knowledge refuses or
is unable to act and bringing in with it again its confusion
and mixture and error. The only security will be a refusal
to attempt to know or at least a suspension of the effort
of knowledge until or unless the higher light descends
and extends its action. This self-restraint is difficult
to mind and, too contentedly exercised, may limit the
growth of the seeker. If, on the other ' hand, the mind
of ignorance is allowed again to emerge and seek in
its own stumbling imperfect force, there may be a constant
oscillation between the two states or a mixed action
of the two powers in place of a definite though relative
perfection.
The
issue out of this dilemma is to a greater perfection
towards which the formation of the intuitive, inspired
and revelatory mind is only a preparatory stage, and
that comes by a constant instreaming and descent of
more and more of the supra-mental light and energy into
the whole mental being and a constant raising of the
intuition and its powers towards their source in the
open glories of the supramental nature. There is then
a double action of the intuitive mind aware of, open
to and referring its knowledge constantly to the light
above it for support and confirmation and of that light
itself creating a highest mind of knowledge,—really
the supramental action itself in a more and more transformed
stuff of mind and a less and less insistent subjection
to mental conditions. There is thus formed a lesser
supramental action, a mind of knowledge tending always
to change into the true supermind of knowledge. The
mind of ignorance is more and more definitely excluded,
its place taken by the mind of self-forgetful knowledge
illumined by the intuition, and the intuition itself
more perfectly organised becomes capable of answering
to a larger and larger call upon it. The increasing
mind of knowledge acts as an intermediary power and,
as it forms itself, it works upon the other, transforms
or replaces it and compels the farther change which
effects the transition from mind to supermind. It is
here that a change begins to take place in the time-consciousness
and time-knowledge which finds its base and complete
reality and significance only on the supramental levels.
It is therefore in relation to the truth of supermind
that its workings can be more effectively elucidated:
for the mind of knowledge is only a projection and a
last step in the ascent towards the supramental nature.
THE
END
-Sri
Aurobindo
