IF
THERE is to be an active perfection of our being,
the first necessity is a purification of the working
of the instruments which it now uses for a music
of discords. The being itself, the spirit, the divine
Reality in man stands in no need of purification;
it is for ever pure, not affected by the faults
of its instrumentation or the stumblings of mind
and heart and body in their work, as the sun, says
the Upanishad, is not touched or stained by the
faults of the eye of vision. Mind, heart, the soul
of vital desire, the life in the body are the seats
of impurity; it is they that must be set right if
the working of the spirit is to be a perfect working
and not marked by its present greater or less concession
to the devious pleasure of the lower nature. What
is ordinarily called purity of the being, is either
a negative whiteness, a freedom from sin gained
by a constant inhibition of whatever action, feeling,
idea or will we think to be wrong, or else, the
highest negative or passive purity, the entire God-content,
inaction, the complete stilling of the vibrant mind
and the soul of desire, which in quietistic disciplines
leads to a supreme peace; for then the spirit appears
in all the eternal purity of its immaculate essence.
That gained, there would be nothing farther to be
enjoyed or done. But here we have the more difficult
problem of a total, unabated, even an increased
and more powerful action founded on perfect bliss
of the being, the purity of the soul's instrumental
as well as the spirit's essential nature. Mind,
heart, life, body are to do the works of the Divine,
all the works which they do now and yet more, but
to do them divinely, as now they do not do them.
This is the first appearance of the problem before
him on which the seeker of perfection has to lay
hold, that it is not a negative, prohibitory, passive
or quietistic, but a positive, affirmative, active
purity which is his object. A divine quietism discovers
the immaculate eternity of the Spirit, a divine
kinetism adds to it the right pure undeviating action
of the soul, mind and body.
Moreover, it is a total purification of all the
complex instrumentality in all the parts of each
instrument that is demanded of us by the integral
perfection. It is not, ultimately, the narrower
moral purification of the ethical nature. Ethics
deals only with the desire-soul and the active outward
dynamical part of our being; its field is confined
to character and action. It prohibits and inhibits
certain actions, certain desires, impulses, propensities,—it
inculcates certain qualities in the act, such as
truthfulness, love, charity, compassion, chastity.
When it has got this done and assured a base of
virtue, the possession of a purified will and blameless
habit of action, its work is finished. But the Siddha
of the integral perfection has to dwell in a larger
plane of the Spirit's eternal purity beyond good
and evil. By this phrase it is not meant, as the
rash hastily concluding intellect would be prone
to imagine, that he will do good and evil indifferently
and declare that to the spirit there is no difference
between them, which would be in the plane of individual
action an obvious untruth and might serve to cover
a reckless self-indulgence of the imperfect human
nature. Neither is it meant that since good and
evil are in this world inextricably entangled together,
like pain and pleasure,—a proposition which,
however true at the moment and plausible as a generalisation,
need not be true of the human being's greater spiritual
evolution,—the liberated man will live in
the spirit and stand back from the mechanical continued
workings of a necessarily imperfect nature. This,
however possible as a stage towards a final cessation
of all activity, is evidently not a counsel of active
perfection. But it is meant that the Siddha of the
active integral perfection will live dynamically
in the working of the transcendent power of the
divine Spirit as a universal will through the supermind
individualised in him for action. His works will
therefore be the works of an eternal Knowledge,
an eternal Truth, an eternal Might, an eternal Love,
an eternal Ananda; but the truth, knowledge, force,
love, delight will be the whole essential spirit
of whatever work he will do and will not depend
on its form; they will determine his action from
the spirit within and the action will not determine
the spirit or subject it to a fixed standard or
rigid mould of working. He will have no dominant
mere habit of character, but only a spiritual being
and will with at the most a free and flexible temperamental
mould for the action. His life will be a direct
stream from the eternal fountains, not a form cut
to some temporary human pattern. His perfection
will not be a sattwic purity, but a thing uplifted
beyond the gunas of Nature, a perfection of spiritual
knowledge, spiritual power, spiritual delight, unity
and harmony of unity; the outward perfection of
his works will be freely shaped as the self-expression
of this inner spiritual transcendence and universality.
For this change he must make conscient in him that
power of spirit and supermind which is now superconscient
to our mentality. But that cannot work in him so
long as his present mental, vital, physical being
is not liberated from its actual inferior working.
This purification is the first necessity.
In other words, purification must not be understood
in any limited sense of a selection of certain outward
kinetic movements, their regulation, the inhibition
of other action or a liberation of certain forms
of character or particular mental and moral capacities.
These things are secondary signs of our derivative
being, not essential powers and first forces. We
have to take a wider psychological view of the primary
forces of our nature. We have to distinguish the
formed parts of our being, find out their basic
defect of impurity or wrong action and correct that,
sure that the rest will then come right naturally.
We have not to doctor symptoms of impurity, or that
only secondarily, as a minor help,—but to
strike at its roots after a deeper diagnosis. We
then find that there are two forms of impurity which
are at the root of the whole confusion. One is a
defect born of the nature of our past evolution,
which has been a nature of separative ignorance;
this defect is a radically wrong and ignorant form
given to the proper action of each part of our instrumental
being. The other impurity is born of the successive
process of an evolution, where life emerges in and
depends on body, mind emerges in and depends on
life in the body, supermind emerges in and lends
itself to instead of governing mind, soul itself
is apparent only as a circumstance of the bodily
life of the mental being and veils up the spirit
in the lower imperfections. This second defect of
our nature is caused by this dependence of the higher
on the lower parts; it is an immixture of functions
by which the impure working of the lower instrument
gets into the characteristic action of the higher
function and gives to it an added imperfection of
embarrassment, wrong direction and confusion.
Thus the proper function of the life, the vital
force, is enjoyment and possession, both of them
perfectly legitimate, because the Spirit created
the world for Ananda, enjoyment and possession of
the many by the One, of the One by the many and
of the many too by the many; but,—this is
an instance of the first kind of defect,—the
separative ignorance gives to it the wrong form
of desire and craving which vitiates the whole enjoyment
and possession and imposes on it its opposites,
want and suffering. Again, because mind is entangled
in life from which it evolves, this desire and craving
get into the action of the mental will and knowledge;
that makes the will a will of craving, a force of
desire instead of a rational will and a discerning
force of intelligent effectuation, and it distorts
the judgment and reason so that we judge and reason
according to our desires and prepossessions and
not with the disinterested impartiality of a pure
judgment and the rectitude of a reason which seeks
only to distinguish truth and understand rightly
the objects of its workings. That is an example
of immixture. These two kinds of defect, wrong form
of action and illegitimate mixture of action, are
not limited to these signal instances, but belong
to each instrument and to each combination of their
functionings. They pervade the whole economy of
our nature. They are fundamental defects of our
lower instrumental nature, and if we can set them
right, we shall get our instrumental being into
a state of purity, enjoy the clarity of a pure will,
a pure heart of emotion, a pure enjoyment of our
vitality, a pure body. That will be a preliminary,
a human perfection, but it can be made the basis
and open out in its effort of self-attainment into
the greater, the divine perfection.
Mind, life and body are the three powers of our
lower nature. But they cannot be taken quite separately
because the life acts as a link and gives its character
to body and to a great extent to our mentality.
Our body is a living body; the life-force mingles
in and determines all its functionings. Our mind
too is largely620 The Synthesis of Yoga
a mind of life, a mind of physical sensation; only
in its higher functions is it normally capable of
something more than the workings of a physical mentality
subjected to life. We may put it in this ascending
order. We have, first, a body supported by the physical
life-force, the physical Prana which courses through
the whole nervous system and gives its stamp to
our corporeal action, so that all is of the character
of the action of a living and not an inert mechanical
body. Prana and physicality together make the gross
body, sthüla sarira. This is only
the outer instrument, the nervous force of life
acting in the form of body with its gross physical
organs. Then there is the inner instrument, antahkarana,
the conscious mentality. This inner instrument is
divided by the old system into four powers; citta
or basic mental consciousness; manas, the
sense mind; buddhi, the intelligence; ahankara,
the ego-idea. The classification may serve as a
starting-point, though for a greater practicality
we have to make certain farther distinctions. This
mentality is pervaded by the life-force, which becomes
here an instrument for psychic consciousness of
life and psychic action on life. Every fibre of
the sense mind and basic consciousness is shot through
with the action of this psychic Prana, it is a nervous
or vital and physical mentality. Even the Buddhi
and ego are overpowered by it, although they have
the capacity of raising the mind beyond subjection
to this vital, nervous and physical psychology.
This combination creates in us the sensational desire-soul
which is the chief obstacle to a higher human as
well as to the still greater divine perfection.
Finally, above our present conscious mentality is
a secret supermind which is the proper means and
native seat of that perfection.
Chitta, the basic consciousness, is largely subconscient;
it has, open and hidden, two kinds of action, one
passive or receptive, the other active or reactive
and formative. As a passive power it receives all
impacts, even those of which the mind is unaware
or to which it is inattentive, and it stores them
in an immense reserve of passive subconscient memory
on which the mind as an active memory can draw.
But ordinarily the mind draws only what it had observed
and understood at the time,—more easily what
it had observed well and understood carefully, less
easily what it had observed carelessly or ill understood;
at the same time there is a power in consciousness
to send up to the active mind for use what that
mind had not at all observed or attended to or even
consciously experienced. This power only acts observably
in abnormal conditions, when some part of the subconscious
Chitta comes as it were to the surface or when the
subliminal being in us appears on the threshold
and for a time plays some part in the outer chamber
of mentality where the direct intercourse and commerce
with the external world takes place and our inner
dealings with ourselves develop on the surface.
This action of memory is so fundamental to the entire
mental action that it is sometimes said, memory
is the man. Even in the submental action of the
body and life, which is full of this subconscient
Chitta, though not under the control of the conscious
mind, there is a vital and physical memory. The
vital and physical habits are largely formed by
this submental memory. For this reason they can
be changed to an indefinite extent by a more powerful
action of conscious mind and will, when that can
be developed and can find means to communicate to
the subconscient Chitta the will of the spirit for
a new law of vital and physical action. Even, the
whole constitution of our life and body may be described
as a bundle of habits formed by the past evolution
in Nature and held together by the persistent memory
of this secret consciousness. For Chitta, the primary
stuff of consciousness, is like Prana and body universal
in Nature, but is subconscient and mechanical in
nature of Matter.
But in fact all action of the mind or inner instrument
arises out of this Chitta or basic consciousness,
partly conscient, partly subconscient or subliminal
to our active mentality. When it is struck by the
world's impacts from outside or urged by the reflective
powers of the subjective inner being, it throws
up certain habitual activities, the mould of which
has been determined by our evolution. One of these
forms of activity is the emotional mind,—the
heart, as we may call it for the sake of a convenient
brevity. Our emotions are the waves of reaction
and response which rise up from the basic consciousness,
cittavrtti. Their action too is largely
regulated by habit and an emotive memory. They are
not imperative, not laws of Necessity; there is
no really binding law of our emotional being to
which we must submit without remedy; we are not
obliged to give responses of grief to certain impacts
upon the mind, responses of anger to others, to
yet others responses of hatred or dislike, to others
responses of liking or love. All these things are
only habits of our affective mentality; they can
be changed by the conscious will of the spirit;
they can be inhibited; we may even rise entirely
above all subjection to grief, anger, hatred, the
duality of liking and disliking. We are subject
to these things only so long as we persist in subjection
to the mechanical action of the Chitta in the emotive
mentality, a thing difficult to get rid of because
of the power of past habit and especially the importunate
insistence of the vital part of mentality, the nervous
life-mind or psychic Prana. This nature of the emotive
mind as a reaction of Chitta with a certain close
dependence upon the nervous life-sensations and
responses of the psychic Prana is so characteristic
that in some languages it is called Chitta and Prana,
the heart, the life soul; it is indeed the most
directly agitating and powerfully insistent action
of the desire-soul which the immixture of vital
desire and responsive consciousness has created
in us. And yet the true emotive soul, the real psyche
in us, is not a desire-soul, but a soul of pure
love and delight; but that, like the rest of our
true being, can only emerge when the deformation
created by the life of desire is removed from the
surface and is no longer the characteristic action
of our being. To get that done is a necessary part
of our purification, liberation, perfection.
The nervous action of the psychic Prana is most
obvious in our purely sensational mentality. This
nervous mentality pursues indeed all the action
of the inner instrument and seems often to form
the greater part of things other than sensation.
The emotions are especially assailed and have the
pranic stamp; fear is even more of a nervous sensation
than an emotion, anger is largely or often a sensational
response translated into terms of emotion. Other
feelings are more of the heart, more inward, but
they ally themselves to the nervous and physical
longings or outward-going impulses of the psychic
Prana. Love is an emotion of the heart and may be
a pure feeling,—all mentality, since we are
embodied minds, must produce, even thought produces,
some kind of life effect and some response in the
stuff of body, but they need not for that reason
be of a physical nature,—but the heart's love
allies itself readily with a vital desire in the
body. This physical element may be purified of that
subjection to physical desire which is called lust,
it may become love using the body for a physical
as well as a mental and spiritual nearness; but
love may, too, separate itself from all, even the
most innocent physical element, or from all but
a shadow of it, and be a pure movement to union
of soul with soul, psyche with psyche. Still the
proper action of the sensational mind is not emotion,
but conscious nervous response and nervous feeling
and affection, impulse of the use of physical sense
and body for some action, conscious vital craving
and desire. There is a side of receptive response,
a side of dynamic reaction. These things get their
proper normal use when the higher mind is not mechanically
subject to them, but controls and regulates their
action. But a still higher state is when they undergo
a certain transformation by the conscious will of
the spirit which gives its right and no longer its
wrong or desire form of characteristic action to
the psychic Prana.
Manas, the sense mind, depends in our ordinary consciousness
on the physical organs of receptive sense for knowledge
and on the organs of the body for action directed
towards the objects of sense. The superficial and
outward action of the senses is physical and nervous
in its character, and they may easily be thought
to be merely results of nerve-action; they are sometimes
called in the old books pranas, nervous or life
activities. But still the essential thing in them
is not the nervous excitation, but the consciousness,
the action of the Chitta, which makes use of the
organ and of the nervous impact of which it is the
channel. Manas, sense-mind, is the activity, emerging
from the basic consciousness, which makes up the
whole- essentiality of what we call sense. Sight,
hearing, taste, smell, touch are really properties
of the mind, not of the body; but the physical mind
which we ordinarily use, limits itself to a translation
into sense of so much of the outer impacts as it
receives through the nervous system and the physical
organs. But the inner Manas has also a subtle sight,
hearing, power of contact of its own which is not
dependent on the physical organs. And it has, moreover,
a power not only of direct communication of mind
with object,—leading even at a high pitch
of action to a sense of the contents of an object
within or beyond the physical range,—but direct
communication also of mind with mind. Mind is able
too to alter, modify, inhibit the incidence, values,
intensities of sense impacts. These powers of the
mind we do not ordinarily use or develop; they remain
subliminal and emerge sometimes in an irregular
and fitful action, more readily in some minds than
in others, or come to the surface in abnormal states
of the being. They are the basis of clairvoyance,
clairaudience, transference of thought and impulse,
telepathy, most of the more ordinary kinds of occult
powers,—so called, though these are better
described less mystically as powers of the now subliminal
action of the Manas. The phenomena of hypnotism
and many others depend upon the action of this subliminal
sense-mind; not that it alone constitutes all the
elements of the phenomena, but it is the first supporting
means of intercourse, communication and response,
though much of the actual operation belongs to an
inner Buddhi. Mind physical, mind supraphysical,—we
have and can use this double sense mentality.
Buddhi is a construction of conscious being which
quite exceeds its beginnings in the basic Chitta;
it is the intelligence with its power of knowledge
and will. Buddhi takes up and deals with all the
rest of the action of the mind and life and body.
It is in its nature thought-power and will-power
of the Spirit turned into the lower form of a mental
activity. We may distinguish three successive gradations
of the action of this intelligence. There is first
an inferior perceptive understanding which simply
takes up, records, understands and responds to the
communications of the sense-mind, memory, heart
and sensational mentality. It creates by their means
an elementary thinking mind which does not go beyond
their data, but subjects itself to their mould and
rings out their repetitions, runs round and round
in the habitual circle of thought and will suggested
by them or follows, with an obedient subservience
of the reason to the suggestions of life, any fresh
determinations which may be offered to its perception
and conception. Beyond this elementary understanding,
which we all use to an enormous extent, there is
a power of arranging or selecting reason and will-force
of the intelligence which has for its action and
aim an attempt to arrive at a plausible, sufficient,
settled ordering of knowledge and will for the use
of an intellectual conception of life.
In spite of its more purely intellectual character
this secondary or intermediate reason is really
pragmatic in its intention. It creates a certain
kind of intellectual structure, frame, rule into
which it tries to cast the inner and outer life
so as to use it with a certain mastery and government
for the purposes of some kind of rational will.
It is this reason which gives to our normal intellectual
being our set aesthetic and ethical standards, our
structures of opinion and our established norms
of idea and purpose. It is highly developed and
takes the primacy in all men of an at all developed
understanding. But beyond it there is a reason,
a highest action of the Buddhi which concerns itself
disinterestedly with a pursuit of pure truth and
right knowledge; it seeks to discover the real Truth
behind life and things and our apparent selves and
to subject its will to the law of Truth. Few, if
any of us, can use this highest reason with any
purity, but the attempt to do it is the topmost
capacity of the inner instrument, the antahkarana.
Buddhi is really an intermediary between a much
higher Truth-mind not now in our active possession,
which is the direct instrument of Spirit, and the
physical life of the human mind evolved in body.
Its powers of intelligence and will are drawn from
this greater direct Truth-mind or supermind. Buddhi
centres its mental action round the ego-idea, the
idea that I am this mind, life and body or am a
mental being determined by their action. It serves
this ego-idea whether limited by what we call egoism
or extended by sympathy with the life around us.
An ego-sense is created which reposes on the separative
action of the body, of the individualised life,
of the mind-responses, and the ego-idea in the Buddhi
centralises the whole action of this ego's thought,
character, personality. The lower understanding
and the intermediary reason are instruments of its
desire of experience and self-enlargement. But when
the highest reason and will develop, we can turn
towards that which these outward things mean to
the higher spiritual consciousness. The "I"
can then be seen as a mental reflection of the Self,
the Spirit, the Divine, the one existence transcendent,
universal, individual in its multiplicity; the consciousness
in which these things meet, become aspects of one
being and assume their right relations, can then
be unveiled out of all these physical and mental
coverings. When the transition to supermind takes
place, the powers of the Buddhi do not perish, but
have all to be converted to their supramental values.
But consideration of the supermind and the conversion
of the Buddhi belongs to the question of the higher
Siddhi or divine perfection. At present we have
to consider the purification of the normal being
of man, preparatory to any such conversion, which
leads to the liberation from the bonds of our lower
nature.
-Sri
Aurobindo
