The Task of Integral Education
"It may be said that from the very first days, even the first hours of his life, the child should undergo the first part of this programme as far as food, sleep, evacuation, etc. are concerned. If the child, from the very beginning of his existence, learns good habits, it will save him a good deal of trouble and inconvenience for the rest of his life; and besides, those who have the responsibility of caring for him during his first years will find their task very much easier."
The Mother
TMCW-12/On Education/p-12
"The second idea arises from the fact that a fundamental change of character demands an almost complete mastery over the subconscient and a very rigorous disciplining of whatever comes up from the inconscient, which, in ordinary natures, expresses itself as the effects of atavism and of the environment in which one was born. Only an almost abnormal growth of consciousness and the constant help of Grace can achieve this Herculean task. That is why this task has rarely been attempted and many famous teachers have declared it to be unrealisable and chimerical. Yet it is not unrealisable. The transformation of character has in fact been realised by means of a clear-sighted discipline and a perseverance so obstinate that nothing, not even the most persistent failures, can discourage it."
The Mother
TMCW-12/On Education/p-19
The Task of Integral Education
The task before Integral Education is to explore the multiple planes⁴ of consciousness and call down their influence on the objective surface world. Integral Education is the utilitarian aspect of Integral Yoga whose doctrine can be constantly relived, renewed and reshaped in the inner life of developing humanity. A Sadhak of integral Yoga is primarily⁷ a student of integral Education and secondarily a teacher who is accountable for his persuasion of learning to himself and world through the accumulation of the power of concentration in order to arrive initially at individual perfection and finally a contributary to the world perfection. This process of learning is identified as an adventure into the unknown multiple planes of consciousness which will continue through successive births known as all life and he will not be satisfied till all the lines of subjective and objective perfections are gathered together to experience endless growth, endless unfolding of Truth and endless total fulfilment.
Similarly, a Sadhaka of integral Yoga is primarily preoccupied with Self-concentration and secondarily preoccupied with self-expansion where the latter is identified as the outcome of the rigorous self-disciplines of the former. Thus he primarily emerges as seven-fold indispensable self-concentration that of follower, seeker of truth, disciple, servant, slave, instrument and child of Their limitless Divine Consciousness and the Divine demands from him ‘subordination and service.’⁵ He secondarily experiences union with Divine’s sevenfold personality of the Creator Father, Creatrix Mother, all-embracing Lover, hidden Master of all works, evolving as child God, the inner Guide and compassionate Friend of all creatures. And his tertiary objective culminates in becoming above self-expansive sevenfold Divine personalities.
All objective research in the field of modern Science, Arts, Literature, Technology, Commerce and Economics can be reinforced by entry into subjective Research of the Soul, by discovering tenfold Selves and their interpenetration into tenfold Sheaths. We have to reconcile the full account of one-tenth ‘potent though limited revelations of modern knowledge and seeking’² with nine-tenth unlimited subjective Spiritual wisdom by constantly updating, renovating, renewing and regenerating the existing wisdom from tenfold Selves.
Integral Education proposes that the greatest unity of all Science, all Religion, all Philosophy, and all Tradition are possible through a most conscious individual when he is perfectly capable of every kind of Material and Spiritual experience, embraces the whole universe in his cosmic Consciousness, possesses the highest Integral Knowledge³ and ‘gathers together all experience in the truth of a supreme and all-reconciling oneness.’¹ That ‘knowledge is likely to be the highest knowledge which illumines, integrates, harmonises the significance of all knowledge.’¹ And he calls down the ultimate Divine Truth and absolute Delight to elevate the things and creatures to their highest, profoundest and widest Divine manifestation. For him, ‘general and ultimate solution is likely to be the best which includes and accounts for all so that each truth of experience takes its place in the whole.’¹
The difficult task of integral Education is identified as opening of Psychic and Spiritual being through the gate of pure intellect and subsequently opening of Supramental being or ‘Ordinarily the supramental knowledge will be organised (1) first and with the most ease in the processes of pure thought and knowledge, jnana, (Purified intellect) because here the human mind has already the upward tendency and is the most free.’⁶
The more difficult task of integral Education is the transformation of three Gunas or ‘(2) Next and with less ease it (Supramental Knowledge) will be organised in the processes of applied thought and knowledge (tamasic, rajasic and sattwic mind) because there the mind of man is at once most active and most bound and wedded to its inferior methods.’⁶
The most difficult task of integral Education is activation of triple time through opening of Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental Being and Spirit has the capacity to travel back and ahead of time covering all Time of all Life for the purpose of Subconscient and Inconscient transformation or ‘(3) The last and most difficult conquest, because this is now to his mind a field of conjecture or a blank, will be the knowledge of the three times, trikaladristi.’⁶
OM TAT SAT
References:
1: “As in Science, so in metaphysical thought, that general and ultimate solution is likely to be the best which includes and accounts for all so that each truth of experience takes its place in the whole: that knowledge is likely to be the highest knowledge which illumines, integralises, harmonises the significance of all knowledge and accounts for, finds the basic and, one might almost say, the justifying reason of our ignorance and illusion while it cures them; this is the supreme experience which gathers together all experience in the truth of a supreme and all-reconciling oneness. Illusionism unifies by elimination; it deprives all knowledge and experience, except the one supreme merger, of reality and significance.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-485,
2: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-10,
3: “We realise now what the Upanishad meant when it spoke of Brahman as being both the Knowledge and the Ignorance and of the simultaneous knowledge of Brahman in both as the way to immortality. Knowledge is the inherent power of consciousness of the timeless, spaceless, unconditioned Self which shows itself in its essence as a unity of being; it is this consciousness that alone is real and complete knowledge because it is an eternal transcendence which is not only self-aware but holds in itself, manifests, originates, determines, knows the temporally eternal successions of the universe. Ignorance is the consciousness of being in the successions of Time, divided in its knowledge by dwelling in the moment, divided in its conception of self-being by dwelling in the divisions of Space and the relations of circumstance, self-prisoned in the multiple working of the unity. It is called the Ignorance because it has put behind it the knowledge of unity and by that very fact is unable to know truly or completely either itself or the world, either the transcendent or the universal reality. Living within the Ignorance, from moment to moment, from field to field, from relation to relation, the conscious soul stumbles on in the error of a fragmentary knowledge. It is not a nescience, but a view and experience of the reality which is partly true and partly false, as all knowledge must be which ignores the essence and sees only fugitive parts of the phenomenon. On the other hand, to be shut up in a featureless consciousness of unity, ignorant of the manifest Brahman, is described as itself also a blind darkness. In truth, neither is precisely darkness, but one is the dazzling by a concentrated Light, the other the illusive proportions of things seen in a dispersed, hazy and broken light, half mist, half seeing. The divine consciousness is not shut up in either, but holds the immutable One and the mutable Many in one eternal all-relating, all-uniting self-knowledge.” CWSA-21/The Life Divine/p-524-25,
4: “This earth is not alone our teacher and nurse;
The powers of all the worlds have entrance here.” Savitri-153,
5: “The acceptance of the law of sacrifice is a practical recognition by the ego that it is neither alone in the world nor chief in the world. It is its admission that, even in this much fragmented existence, there is beyond itself and behind that which is not its own egoistic person, something greater and completer, a diviner All which demands from it subordination and service.” CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-106, “Action is demanded of man by the Master of the world who is the master of all his works and whose world is a field of action, whether done through the ego and in the ignorance or partial light of limited human reason or initiated from a higher and more largely seeing plane of vision and motive.” Essays on the Gita/SABCL/Vol-13/P-436, “The Master of the worlds who in the Gita demands of his servant, the bhakta, to be nothing more in life than his instrument, makes this claim as the friend, the guide, the higher Self, and describes himself as the Lord of all the worlds who is the friend of all creatures, sarvalokamahesvaram suhrudam sarvabhutanam; the two relations in fact must go together and neither can be perfect without the other.” CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-565,
6: "Ordinarily the supramental knowledge will be organised (1) first and with the most ease in the processes of pure thought and knowledge, jnana, (Purified intellect) because here the human mind has already the upward tendency and is the most free. (2) Next and with less ease it will be organised in the processes of applied thought and knowledge (tamasic, rajasic and sattwic mind) because there the mind of man is at once most active and most bound and wedded to its inferior methods. (3) The last and most difficult conquest, because this is now to his mind a field of conjecture or a blank, will be the knowledge of the three times, trikaladristi.” Sri Aurobindo/CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-839,
7: “These (conversations of the Mother’s Agenda) are the first stammerings of a novice (The Mother felt Herself as beginner in the path of the eternal unfolding of the Spirit).”4 “It would be better to wait till we have reached the end (of The Mother’s Agenda), wouldn’t it?” The Mother/The Mother's Agenda/6/322, 7/104, “I am learning to work. I am only an apprentice, simply an apprentice – I am learning the trade!” The Mother/The Mother’s Agenda/ May 1, 1958,
The Difficult Task of Integral Education
“The psychic and the spiritual opening with their experiences and consequences can lead away from life or to a Nirvana (of traditional Yoga); but they are here (in Integral Yoga) being considered solely as steps in a transformation of the nature.”²¹
Sri Aurobindo
“In men, says the Upanishad, the Self-Existent has cut the doors of consciousness outward, but a few turn the eye inward and it is these who see and know the Spirit and develop the spiritual being. Thus to look into ourselves and see and enter into ourselves and live within is the first necessity for transformation of nature and for the divine life.”¹⁶
Sri Aurobindo
“The (Katha) Upanishad tells us that the Self-existent has so set the doors of the soul that they turn outwards and most men look outward into the appearances of things; only the rare soul that is ripe for a calm thought and steady wisdom turns its eye inward, sees the Self and attains to immortality. To this turning of the eye inward psychological self observation and analysis is a great and effective introduction.”¹⁷
Sri Aurobindo
“We find that it progresses towards a greater completeness in proportion as we arrive at two kinds of perfection; (1) first, a greater and greater detachment from the control of the lower suggestions; (2) secondly, an increasing discovery of a self-existent Being, Light, Power and Ananda which surpasses normal humanity…The movement of perfection is (1) away from all domination by the lower nature and (2) towards a pure and powerful reflection of the being, power, knowledge and delight of the Spirit and Self in the buddhi. The Yoga of self-perfection is to make this double movement as absolute as possible.”¹⁸
Sri Aurobindo
“The universal and infinite consciousness can always seize on and surround the mind and it is when it does so with a certain continuity, frequency or persistence that the mind can most easily transform itself into the intuitive mentality and that again into the supramental movement.”¹⁹
Sri Aurobindo
"When external difficulties subside, when the body becomes passive and quiet, when it is not constantly demanding attention, then you can LIVE in this supramental consciousness and it does not seem so difficult; you feel it is so victorious in its essence that it will end all difficulties." The Mother’s Agenda/ December 13, 1960,
The Mother
“And actually, to do Sri Aurobindo’s work is to realize the Supramental on earth.”²⁰
The Mother
In order to collaborate the Divine Mother, the difficult task before an individual Soul seeker is to discover his Personal Psychic Being, saguna Brahman, in the heart and Impersonal Spiritual Being, Nirguna Brahman, above the head and transcend both of them to discover the still higher Transcendent Supramental Being.
Psychic Science:
Kshara Purusha or Psychic Being:
“But the real soul, the real psychic entity which for the most part we see little of and only a small minority in mankind has developed, is an instrument of pure love, joy and the luminous reaching out to fusion and unity with God and our fellow-creatures. This psychic entity is covered up by the play of the mentalised Prana or desire-mind which we mistake for the soul; the emotional mind is unable to mirror the real soul in us, the Divine in our hearts, and is obliged instead to mirror the desire-mind.”¹²
Sri Aurobindo
“It is one of the decisive moments of the integral Yoga when this psychic being, liberated, brought out from the veil to the front, can pour the full flood of its divinations, seeings and impulsions on the mind, life and body of man and begins to prepare the upbuilding of divinity in the earthly nature.”¹⁵
Sri Aurobindo
“All (the seven-fold personal) relations known to human personality are there in the soul’s contact with the Divine; but they rise towards superhuman levels and compel him towards a divine nature.”⁷
Sri Aurobindo
“As the psychic change has to call in the spiritual to complete it, so the first spiritual change has to call in the supramental transformation to complete it.”¹³
Sri Aurobindo
We generally live in apparent surface mind, apparent surface vital and apparent surface physical behind which there is large ocean of inner subtle mental, inner subtle vital and inner subtle physical sheaths which govern, control and transform our surface workings. Inside these sheaths there are truth mind, true vital and true physical being, the immutable and imperishable godhead has occupied those centres. Similarly, we have double Psychic entity, one is the apparent surface desire soul which works in our vital cravings, emotions, aesthetic faculty and mental seeking for power, knowledge and happiness and the other is our subliminal Psychic entity or our true Soul which is a pure power of light, love, joy and beauty. The subliminal mind in us is open to the universal knowledge of the cosmic Mind, the subliminal vital in us is open towards the universal force of cosmic Life, the subliminal physicality in us is open towards the universal force-formation of cosmic Matter. So also the subliminal Soul in us is open towards the universal Delight of the cosmic Soul. The surface Soul is cut off by egoistic wall of great thickness from true Soul and when the Divine delight tries to penetrate the surface Soul it becomes dwarfed, distorted or have to come in masked as their own opposites. The true Psychic Soul is the flame of the Godhead, always alight within us, inextinguishable even by that dense unconsciousness which obscures our outward life. It is the flame born out of the luminous Divine inhabitant of the Ignorance, grows in it till it is able to turn the being towards the Knowledge of Self and the Divine, towards the supreme Truth, the supreme Good, the Divine heights and largeness; this is the inner light and voice of the mystic, the witness and the Guide. It is that which endures the pain and suffering and is imperishable in us from birth to birth, untouched by death, decay and corruption and an indestructible spark of the Divine. It is the individual Soul, the Chaitya Purusha, supporting Mind, Life and Body and standing behind the subtle mental, vital and physical being, watching and profiting by their development in us. This inmost Psychic entity puts forward a Psychic personality which flowers as the saint, the sage and the seer and it changes, grows and develops from life to life; for this is also the traveller from the birth to death and from death to birth and our nature parts are its manifold changing vesture. Initially it works indirectly through mind, life and body, since these parts have to be sufficiently developed as instruments of self-expression.
The mental part in us recognises the imperfection as the law of life to which the Psychic being in us rejects. The Soul is dissatisfied towards earthly imperfection and aspires towards elimination of all imperfections from our nature; it is this which struggle in Ignorance and points always towards evolutionary perfection of Truth, Right, Beauty, Love and Harmony and all that is a Divine possibility in us, and persists till these things become the major need of our nature. That is the law of our being which is a Divine dissatisfaction and a Divine aspiration with inherent Light of Power which unfolds gradually in the process of evolution from the hidden Reality of the spiritual secrecies. The real sign of finding a Psychic key is that to admit all works perfectly towards a Divine end and an elevation towards the Spiritual knowledge and power which will transform the law and phenomena of the external forms of our life nearer to a true image of Imperishable Spirit. It is right and reasonable to endure with equanimity towards all suffering and defects as immediate will of the God, an outcome of present transitional law of imperfection, a starting point, an opportunity for achieving higher status and the final will of the God is to transcend all evil and suffering, to transform all imperfection into perfection and to rise into higher law of the Divine Nature. It is the Psychic being which pushes to throw off the disguise of undivine life and reveal the Godhead in the manifest mind, life and body.
The Psychic transformation is one necessary condition of the total and largest transformation of our existence. It can open to the hidden Diviner ranges of our being and receive and reflect their light and power and experience, but another, a Spiritual transformation from above is needed for us to possess our Self in its universality and transcendence. The Psychic transformation after rising into the Spiritual change has then to be completed, integralised, exceeded and uplifted by a Supramental transformation which lifts it to the summit of ascending endeavour. The fulfilment and integral completeness of our Psychic being comes by intervention of Supermind; for it is through the Supermind that the higher hemisphere is linked with the lower hemisphere. The Psychic being, uplifted by that Supramental Light and Force can unite itself with the original Delight of existence and overcomes the dualities of pain and pleasure and delivers us from all fear and shrinking of the mind life and body.
Thus, through these Soul experiences our mind, life and body grow out of Inconscience towards the supreme Consciousness, out of the division of the Ignorance into the integralising Consciousness and Knowledge. If consciousness has become sufficiently Psychic, then the ascent of Consciousness is possible in the concentration of waking trance without the need of passive and unconscious trance. The ultimate mission of the Psychic being is to lose its individuality in its Source or it might return to the Source where there is no sense of separative Will and separative Power. Or a small nucleus, no bigger than the man’s thumb, in the mass of ignorant Nature enlarges itself to embrace the whole world with intimate communion of oneness or it may experience the most intense in beauty and rapture through imperishable union and oneness as the eternal Lover with the eternal Beloved. Still more Spiritual experiences are possible in our quest of self-finding driving us towards the last and entire consummation.
The Gita hints that a desire Soul surrounds the true Soul or Psychic being. This Psychic Science is best developed in Savitri book and through it, Savitri, systematically unravels the Divine stationed in the heart by breaking the barrier of multiple layers of desire Soul and transcending the attraction of fine and subtle lure of multiple inner worlds which can enrich our life with intermediate opulence, glory and fame.
“By the (true inner) self thou shouldst deliver the (surface desire) self, thou shouldst not depress and cast down the (surface desire) self (whether by self-indulgence or suppression); for the (true inner) self is the friend of the (surface desire) self and (surface desire) self is the enemy (if it is not in contact with the true inner self). To the man is his (true inner) self a friend in whom the (surface desire) self has been conquered by the (true inner) self, but to him who is not in possession of his (true inner) self, the (surface desire) self is as if an enemy and it acts as an enemy.” (The Gita-6.5, 6)
The preliminary training to open the Psychic being is to remember first why our Soul came to earth; in silence seek the God’s meaning in our depth; open God’s door and enter into trance through meditation; in God’s tremendous hush still our brain to wake the vast truth within that can directly know and see; cast from our life the sense that veils the Spirit’s vision; in the enormous emptiness of mind we shall see the Eternal’s subtle body and hear His subtle voice and in world’s contact meet the Divine’s single touch.
Before finding Psychic being Savitri came across tenfold Desire Souls and was able to go beyond their lures in order to trace the Psychic being. We find some hint about it in Sri Aurobindo’s letter, “Even if there is much darkness — and this world is full of it and the physical nature of man also — yet a ray of the true Light can prevail eventually against a tenfold darkness. Believe that and cleave to (hold on to) it always.”²²
Man’s house of life unfolds subtle worlds. There are occult shadows, tenebrous powers, dangerous forces, Titans, Fury, Goblins and Djinns who are inhabitant of life’s nether rooms of Subconscient pit. They touch all with perverting breath, discolour the walls of upper mind and invite instincts of forbidden joy. His lower nature hides these awful guests. Into earth-ways they break out from all doors to slay, massacre, torture, invade with blood-lust and fill with horror and carnage the God’s fair world. Old rejected nature, slain thoughts, old longings and acts, dead passions live again to recur in sleep, dream and waking.
She strove to find the inner vital self concealed behind the world of sense during her forced journey from body to the Soul through passages of inner Time. Here life deeps into the Subconscient dusk or struggles from matter to chaos of mind and cries of life, in which no light, no joy and no peace can come. Her vital godhead wakes within to lift the life to Supernal’s touch. Out of the dreadful press she dragged her will and fixed her thought on the Name Divine. Then all grew still, empty and free; a large deliverance and vast calm came and she moved awhile through a blank tranquillity of naked Light from the invisible sun.
Then after silencing of the vital mind she met the physical mind or the material mind. It is an aimless thought and will, a deaf force, a torrent that carries life’s hope and fear, a forbidden delight of honey-sweet poison-wine of lust and death, the bottomless danger-pits and swallowing gulfs. It could mingle poison with the wine of God, all contraries meet in the life’s nether room and Ignorance is Wisdom’s patron here. The Souls trapped in the physical mind can never escape.
Then journeying forward beyond the physical mind she reached a space where the schoolman mind has captured life’s large domain. There, her servant mind and sense governed the house. The Spirit’s almighty freedom was not there in reason’s small limiting ideals. The reason’s diplomatic balanced reign kept order and peace, disciplined beauty and harmonic smooth life and she lived in the closed adamant walls of law, ethic’s rule and fixed pillars of thought. Its rational religion dries the heart, meditation muses on a narrow seat, worship turns to an exclusive God, prays the God in the chapel whose doors are shut against the universe and offers a cold and flameless sacrifice.
Then she arrived at the quiet country of fixed mind, fixed faith and ordered knowledge of apparent things. Mind claims to be the spirit, sole creator of the apparent world and the Soul and Spirit sees itself as form of mind and loses itself in the glory of the thought and reach the brilliant air flaming with thought’s supreme finality. The few are admitted and register their name in the book of elite. It claims the safety of the ultimate wall, the clarity of the sword of Light, victory of a single Truth, diamond of flawless bliss, bright contented world and lives as favourite of Heaven and Nature.
Savitri did not want to stay there and came to a road thronged with an ardent crowd of outer mind where no mystic voice and Light can come. She mingled with the crowd and her mind hastened like them to save the God’s world and yearned for the Spiritual light they bore. She reined back the high passion of her heart as she knew that she must discover her Soul and only those who save themselves can save others. So by realising the hurrying time of the outer world she turns her eyes towards the eternal source to find the birth place of occult Fire.
Savitri met three untransformed Soul forces or untransformed Psychic Sheaths of tamasic Compassion, rajasic Strength and sattwic Light, which limit her universal world action and high Mission and they are to be transformed into the Divine Nature or pure Divine Shakti reflecting the Psychic Being. These three untransformed Soul forces are present in all man to guide and help him bear the difficult journey of his life and evolution within a limited circle.
Savitri came to a narrow path to tread the rare wounded pilgrim feet of the first ascent in inner mind and met the Mother of seven sorrows,2 the untransformed Soul force, who projected herself as pessimist and experienced the suffering of this creation wrongly. A patient prayer has risen in vain from her breast to change this great hard world of pain. She comes to share the suffering of this world, draws the children’s pangs into her breast. God has given her love and power to solace but not his force and power to save; she has seen the slashed corpse of the slaughtered child, heard the woman’s cry ravished and stripped, shared the toil of the yoked animal drudge; she shared the daily life of common man, the unwanted tedious labour without joy, the burden of misery and the strokes of fate and lived with the prisoner in the dungeon cell. In her shoulders she weighs the yoke of Time, watched the nature’s cruelty to suffering things without God’s help. She hoped to look towards her God who never came to her. When the mother of seven sorrows is transformed into the mother of seven Anandas, then misery shall be abolished from earth, and everywhere there will be peace and joy and all-embracing Divine love and compassion.
Then Savitri recognised the Mother of seven sorrows, an incarnation of pity as first desire soul of tamasic force and passed ahead in her Spirit’s upward route. Next, she met the Mother of Might, an incarnation of some intermediate egoistic Power, the second desire Soul, the ambitious rajasic force, who sat in a gold and purple sheen, her feet on a couchant lion’s back. A formidable smile curled round her lips, heaven-fire laughed in the corners of her eyes, her body a mass of courage and heavenly strength her speech is like a war cry and her word is of luminous command. She came down into the human world with a faculty which seems to be Almighty to help the unfortunate and save the doomed. She smites the Titan who bestrides the world, slays the ogre in the blood-stained den and tramples the corpses of the demon hordes and guards man from the red wolf and snake. She has the power to guide, save and help the few and the mass falls back unsaved. She imitates the Overmental goddess who seems to be proud and strong Durga, fair and fortunate Laksmi, and wears the face of Kali when kills. When the Mother of Might8 is transformed, hate, fear and weakness will no longer dwell in the human heart. Wisdom will be combined with power to give the sense of Omnipotence and Omniscience and all shall be might, bliss and happy force.
Savitri still ascended to find her Soul’s upward route and arrived into a high and happy space, a wide tower of vision to see all, a clear and crystal light; there she met the Mother of Light, an incarnation of some intermediate sattwic wisdom, the third desire Soul whose mission is to lift the human Soul slowly towards the light through error and sin. She represents charity, silence, knowledge, peace, courage, a power that labours towards the best and her smile could persuade a dead lacerated heart to live again and feel the hands of calm sweetness. She brings strength and solace to man’s struggling life, a figure, imagination and dream of God, and draws harmony and peace of a higher sphere. She represents a limited charity, silence and knowledge in human life. She is the glad resignation of the Saint, indifferent courage to the wounds of Time, and the hero’s might that wrestles with death and fate. Man can be free from himself and live with God only when Eternity takes time by hand and infinity weds the finite’s thought. With her help the man’s mind will admit the sovereignty of Truth; heart will at last hold the Divine Love and the body can bear the immense Divine descent. The intellect’s hard and rocky soil is difficult to transform by the pressure of the Divine force and the mind of the man restricts the flow of intuition’s ray. So she must nurse hunger for the Eternal in the human heart, and fill his yearning heart with heaven’s fire and bring down God into the life and body. One day the Mother of Light shall see the face of the Absolute, then shall the holy marriage between the Matter and Spirit be achieved and a Divinely transformed family will be born and there shall be light and peace in all the ten worlds or all the ten planes of Consciousness.
Onward she moved seeking the mystic cave of the Soul. The mind abolished all its thought and in a simple purity of emptiness she knelt down before the Unknowable. At first, she stepped into a night of God and crossed the fathomless impersonal Night in silence. A last change and the Truth’s last retreat came with the breaking of the mental emptiness and the blissful inner self became her space. Then she came across the land of marvellous twilight and holy stillness of voiceless space. The two golden serpents curled round the lintel of her body and enveloped it with the pure dreadful strength and wisdom. Across the threshold of sleep state she entered in the land with great figure of Gods who are conscious in stone and live without breath. In climbing the planes of consciousness she met numberless worlds and faces of beings representing that world. She reached a point, the meeting place of all the worlds where there was no step of breathing men, no sound and living nearness of Soul and unimaginable bliss. She met a light which is not born of sun or moon or fire, a light that dwelt within and saw within and made secrecy more revealing than word and there, the spirit’s vision is wholly true. Thus she passed in that mysterious place through rooms and rock-hewn doors. A sealed identity in her woke to give the experience of utter Oneness of twin Godheads, God and Goddess, the Master and the Mother, the Krishna and Radha, and Adorer and Adored. Then she came to the last chamber of golden seat where one sat whose shape no vision can define, formless, pure, bare, only one feels the world’s unattainable fount and Power of which she is a straying Force. Then she dug the tunnel of the last rock and came out where there is shone a deathless sun. A house was there and all is made of flame and light. And crossing the wall of doorless living fire where she suddenly met her Soul, the Psychic being.
Through this Spiritual experience of Psychic being, the Supreme Mother or Supramental Mother has chosen to live permanently⁹ in her heart. This may be compared with the Gita’s Spiritual Experience of Purushottama Consciousness choosing permanently¹⁰ to reside in the heart Centre. Thus Savitri gives message of the complete union of Psychic Sheath with Supreme Mother, Para Prakriti and the Gita gives the message of complete union of Psychic being with Purushottama Consciousness. These two experiences culminate with the Spiritual experience of realising the dual Godhead in the heart centre as hinted in Savitri, “The incarnate dual Power shall open God’s door, Eternal Supermind touch earthly Time.”¹¹
Spiritual Science:
Akshara Purusha or Spiritual Being:
“For the methods of the integral Yoga must be mainly spiritual, and dependence on physical methods or fixed psychic or psycho-physical processes on a large scale would be the substitution of a lower for a higher action.”⁴
Sri Aurobindo
“…there must be a bridge between the spirit and the intellectual reason: the light of a spiritual or at least a spiritualized intelligence is necessary for the fullness of our total inner evolution, and without it, if another deeper guidance is lacking, the inner movement may be erratic and undisciplined, turbid and mixed with unspiritual elements or one-sided or incomplete in its catholicity.”⁵
Sri Aurobindo
“It is not indeed possible, so long as we are compelled to use reason as our main support, for it to abdicate altogether in favour of an undeveloped or half-organised intuition; but it is imperative on us in a consideration of the Infinite and its being and action to enforce on our reason an utmost plasticity and open it to an awareness of the larger states and possibilities of that which we are striving to consider.”⁶
Sri Aurobindo
Since integral Yoga foresees the Spiritual evolution of the race, it insists on the development of Spiritual being of the individual through a more difficult, complex, wholly powerful method of Karma, Jnana and Bhakti Yoga on the three lines together as a triple wheel of Soul-power. In Integral Evolution, the three Purushas, that of Body, Vital and Mind are brought to the front by silencing the Surface physical substance, surface vital and surface mind or by silencing the volition, emotion and intellect through rejection of lower desire and practice of equality and surrender through the above three methods of Yoga. Similarly it is possible to be aware of the Self of the body, Self of vital and Self of mind by separating the Prakriti from Purusha as per Sankhya doctrine; first to watch the activities of Prakriti as witness and then to withdraw support and become the Lord of Prakriti, thus Purusha pours down its Divinity on the Prakriti. During the continuation of all these activities of nature successively or together, it is possible to realise one’s inner being, the Psychic Purusha, who is behind the Annamaya Purusha, Pranamaya Purusha and Manamaya Purusha, and with the emergence of the Psychic being, Psychic transformation can resume its action. From the above exercises, one can also open concurrently to the Spiritual being above the head and can resume the Spiritual transformation of nature.
But if the Mother-nature’s intention is a comprehensive Spiritual transformation, then the double evolution, that of (1) evolution of outward nature and (2) evolution of inner being, occult subliminal and Spiritual nature, is indispensable. This imposes three difficulties in unfolding the pure Spiritual consciousness; (1) for, first, the Spiritual emergence has to wait at each step of evolution for the instruments of mind, life and body to be ready; (2) secondly, as the Spiritual formation emerges it is inextricably mixed with the inferior powers, narrow motives and downward impulses of the instruments which hangs back and prevents farther evolution and (3) finally the very character of mind is exclusive and it compels the emerging Spiritual light and power to move by segments, to follow one or another line of Spiritual experience to the exclusion of the total Spiritual achievement.
After the discovery of Psychic being the second Spiritual possibility is the discovery of the Spiritual being. The most ordinary result of this experience is the discovery of a vast static and silent Self which we feel as our real basic existence. Secondly, we realise of our extinction, a Nirvana both of our active being and of the sense of Self into a Reality that is indefinable and inexpressible. Thirdly, we can realise that this Self is not only our Spiritual being but the true self of all others or cosmic Self. Fourthly, it is possible to pass into some supreme, immobile and immutable status beyond the universe. Fifthly, there takes place a large dynamic descent of Light, Knowledge, Power, Bliss or other supernormal energies into untransformed Nature, and we can ascend too into higher regions of the Spirit where its immobile status is the foundation of those great and luminous energies, Shaktis. Sixthly, for the full Spiritual transformation, more is needed: a permanent ascension from the lower into the higher consciousness and an effectual permanent descent of the higher Shakti into the lower nature. And lastly, the highest achievement of Spiritual quest is the attainment of Overmind consciousness which is having three distinct character; firstly, it carries in itself the direct and masterful cognition of the cosmic truth by which we can hope to understand the original working of things, get some insight into the fundamental movement of the cosmic nature; secondly, mind and life of the individual being is in its nature a partial self-expression of the cosmic Being and both individual and cosmic Being are self-expression of the Transcendent Reality; thirdly, what we can in our nature receive, assimilate, formulate, the portion of the cosmic Being or of the Reality, can find shape in our mind, life and physical parts, an expression is in the terms of our own nature.
The methods proposed for opening of Spiritual being are: (1) the method of detachment from the insistence of all mental and vital and physical claims and calls and impulses, (2) concentration in the heart, (3) austerity of personal will, tapasya, (4) self-purification. (5) There are obstinate difficulties in our being born of its evolutionary constitution, which militate against the Divine assent. For some of these parts are still subject to the Inconscience and Subconscience and to the lower automatism of habit or so-called law of nature, mechanical habit of mind, habit of life, habit of instinct, habit of personality, habit of character, the ingrained mental, vital, physical needs, impulses, desires of natural man, the old functioning of all kinds that are rooted there so deep that it would seem as if we had to dig to abysmal foundations in order to get them out: these parts refuse to give up their response to the lower law founded in the Inconscient; they continually send up to the conscious mind and life the old reactions and seek to reaffirm them there as the eternal rule of Nature. Other parts of the being are less obscure and mechanical and rooted in Inconscience, but all are imperfect and attached to their imperfection and have their own obstinate reactions; the vital part is wedded to the law of self-affirmation and desire, the mind is attached to its own formed movements, and both are willingly obedient to the inferior law of the Ignorance. Rejection of the old mind movements and life movements, rejection of the ego of desire, rejection of false needs and false habits, are all useful aids to this difficult passage. (6) The strongest and the most central way is to find all such or other methods on a self-offering and surrender of ourselves and of our parts of nature to the Divine Being, the Ishwara. All the parts of our being must assent and surrender to the law of Spiritual Truth; all have to learn to obey the government of the conscious Divine Power in the members. (7) A strict obedience to the wise and intuitive leading of a Guide is also normal and necessary for all the beginners of Yoga, except a few specially gifted seekers. (8) For a real transformation there must be (a) the Law of Participation or ascent of Purusha, (b) the Law of Descent or a direct and unveiled intervention from above; (c) the Law of Surrender or there would be necessary too a total submission and surrender of lower consciousness, (d) a cessation of its insistence, (e) a will in it for its separate law of action to be completely annulled by transformation.
The Spiritual Consciousness initially may confine itself to a status of being separate from the action of our ignorant surface nature, observing and limiting itself to knowledge and developing a Spiritual sense and vision towards existence. For action it may depend on the physical, vital and mental instruments but it may also and usually does exercise a certain authority, governance, influence on thought, life movement, physical action, a purifying uplifting control compelling them to move in a higher and purer truth of themselves or receive the inspiration or command of greater Self, the Ishwara. The Spiritual being, once inwardly liberated, can lift mind to higher states of Consciousness and bring down Supramental Energy, Creation, Ananda and Action.
Supramental Science:
Purushottama or Uttama Purusha or Supramental Self:
“It must also be kept in mind that the supramental change is difficult, distant and ultimate stage; it must be regarded as the end of a far-off vista; it cannot be and must not be turned into a first aim, a constantly envisaged goal or an immediate objective. For it can only come into the view of possibility after much arduous self-conquest and self-exceeding, at the end of many long and trying stages of difficult self-evolution of the nature. One must first acquire an inner Yogic consciousness and replace by it our ordinary view of things, natural movements, motives of life; one must revolutionise the whole present build of our being. Next, we have to go still deeper, discover our veiled psychic entity and in its light and under its government Psychicise our inner and outer parts, turn mind-nature, life-nature, body-nature and all our mental, vital, physical action and states and movements into a conscious instrumentation of the soul. Afterwards or concurrently we have to spiritualise the being in its entirety by a descent of a divine Light, Force, Purity, Knowledge, freedom and wideness. It is necessary to break down the limits of the personal mind, life and physicality, dissolve the ego, enter into the cosmic consciousness, realise the self, and acquire a spiritualised and universalised mind and heart, life-force, physical consciousness. Then only the passage into supramental consciousness begins to become possible, and even then there is a difficult ascent to make each stage of which is a separate arduous achievement.”³
Sri Aurobindo
Supramental Science evolves after Supermind gives its consent to descent into the mind and transforms it. As, for instance, Mind throws itself into various forms of mind-power, such as judgment, observation, memory, sympathy, proper to its own being, so must the Truth-consciousness or Supermind effect the relations by forces, faculties, functionings proper to Supramental being; otherwise, there would be no play of differentiation, no Supramental command of unity in diversity. It has to be kept in mind that Supramental change is a difficult, distant and ultimate stage of spiritual growth and it should not be turned into the first or immediate objective. Till Nature is ready through prolonged Psychic and Spiritual transformation, the Supramental Force has to act indirectly; it puts the intermediary powers of Overmind or Intuition in front, or it works through a modification of itself to which the already half-transformed being can be wholly or partially responsive. For there is too great a disparity between the power of the supreme Force and the capacity of the ordinary nature; (1) the inferior nature would either be unable to bear or, (2) bearing, unable to respond and receive or, (3) receiving, unable to assimilate. ‘It is only when we have already had experience of a higher intermediate consciousness that any terms attempting to describe Supramental being could convey a true meaning to our intelligence.’1 Other necessary condition for arriving at the Supermind are unification of the entire being by a breaking down of the wall between the inner and outer nature, a shifting of the position and centration of the consciousness from the outer to the inner self, a firm foundation on this new basis, a habitual action from this inner self and its will and vision and an opening up of the individual into the cosmic Consciousness.
The stages through which one can ascend to Supermind are that one must first acquire inner Yogic consciousness by silencing the mind, life and body and changing the centre of living from surface to something within; next one has to go still deeper within to discover the one’s Psychic being and under its influence Psychicise the outer and inner nature; then afterwards or concurrently one can contact the Spiritual being above the head and experience the descent of Divine Light, Force, Purity, Knowledge, Love, Beauty and Ananda etc., and the consciousness is to be universalised. When the Consciousness moves between Psychic and Spiritual plane for a long period then it is possible to enter Supramental consciousness. So Supermind must be established here on a basis of Knowledge growing into its own greater Light. But this cannot be so long as the Spiritual-mental being has not risen fully to Supermind and brought down its powers into terrestrial existence.
Supramental method¹⁴ is not related with any support of outer aid rather here consciousness is pushed to experience the third reversal consciousness. First, the reversal of consciousness is experienced in Purusha-Prakriti union in the Ignorance, second reversal of consciousness is experienced in Ishwara-Shakti union in the Spiritual or Overmental plane; the third reversal of consciousness is experienced in the Brahman-Maya union in the Supramental plane and this reversal of Consciousness has universal repercussion. This Supramental change in its process carries us into less explored regions; it initiates a vision of heights of consciousness which have indeed been glimpsed and visited, but have yet to be discovered and mapped in their completeness. The highest of these peaks or elevated plateaus of Consciousness, the Supramental, lies far beyond the possibility of any satisfying mental scheme or map of it or any grasp of mental seeing and description. It asks a radically different awareness of things; even if they were seen or conceived by some enlightenment or opening of vision, another language than the poor abstract counters used by our mind would be needed to translate them into terms by which their reality could become at all sizeable by us.
Isha Upanishad has given the hint that a bright golden lid has separated the Supramental world from the Overmental world, that lid has to be broken by movement of Consciousness in order to enter Supramental kingdom. For such action to be practicable one must learn the movement of Consciousness in both ascending and descending order and this ascension and descent of Consciousness integralises the whole being and widens the base, which means the capacity of subtle body, subtle mind and subtle vital increases considerably and prepares the ground of higher ascent. And those who are preoccupied with this movement of Consciousness in ascending and descending order can discover and pierce into Supramental plane through successive stages of Consciousness and methods shall evolve, either one or many, are left in the hand of the Divine Shakti that has taken the whole responsibility of Sadhana. There are also certain reversals of Consciousness which need not wait for ascension in stages but an evolutionary leap is experienced by bypassing all intermediate stages of development. In addition to it, there are also other movements of Supramental experience without undergoing any consciously felt descent of Divine force. All these experiences develop methods, which are inner movement of Consciousness and are related with activation of six or seven Occult centres as per Indian tradition or twelve occult centres as experienced by The Mother which are three more above the head and two more centres below the feet in addition to seven traditional centres. These twelve centres we identify as Sat, Chit, Ananda or Bliss Self, Supramental Self, Universal Self, Spiritual or higher Mental Self, Psychic Self, Truth mind, True vital, True physical, Subconscient Self and Inconscient Self. In Integral Yoga, higher two selves of Sat and Chit are not taken into consideration, as they are too far and remote from the present scope of development. All these ten selves are having their respective sheaths or koshas or subtle body which develops, concretizes and widens in the process of Spiritual evolution. One can have Supramental transformation by either of any of the following experiences:-
1) By unveiling of Supramental Self and Bliss Self through ascension of Consciousness beyond Spiritual Self and by corresponding descent of Forces to all the sheaths including the last Inconscient sheath.
2) By its pressure in addition to already opened selves of Universal, Spiritual and Psychic, all other Selves begin to unveil themselves and transformation or building of respective sheaths develop during their interpenetration.
3) Supramental force can invade and purify and densify the mental, vital, physical, Subconscient and inconscient sheaths by unveiling the Inconscient Self below the feet and the assimilation of force can also build the formation of Universal, Spiritual and Psychic sheaths. This experience gives the sensation of Divine descent in opposite direction.
4) As Supramental force is all pervading, present everywhere so it can be activated by opening and Supramentalising any of the ten Selves and each Self can resume Supramental action in the respective sheath and the adjacent sheaths. The presence of the Supramental is there in every living being, on every level, in all things, and because it is there, the experience of Sachchidananda, of the pure Spiritual Existence and Consciousness, of the Delight of a Divine presence, closeness, contact can be acquired through the mind or the heart or the life-sense or even through the physical consciousness; if the inner doors are flung sufficiently open, the Light from the sanctuary can suffuse the nearest and the farthest chambers of the outer Being.
5) The necessary Supramental change can also be brought about by an Occult descent of the Spiritual force from above, in which the influx, the influence, the Spiritual consequence is felt, but the higher Source is unknown and ‘the actual feeling of a descent is not there.’ A Consciousness so touched may be so much uplifted that the being turns to an immediate union with the Self or with the Divine by departure from the evolution and, if that is sanctioned, no question of gradual steps or method intervenes, the rupture with Nature can be decisive.
6) Supramental force can work by activation of any one Self or more than one Self or all the ten Selves at a time. For such action of greater magnitude the subtle body or sheaths must be sufficiently transparent, pure and wide in order to hold the Divine nectar.
7) Psycho-physical exercises like Japa, breathing exercises and cataleptic trance can be utilised to accelerate the already resumed experiences in these realms.
OM TAT SAT
References:
1: CWSA/22/The Life Divine-954,
2: Savitri-502
3: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/281-282,
4: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga/542,
5: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/913,
6: CWSA-21/The Life Divine/345,
7: CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-129,
8: Savitri-508,
9: “Calling the mighty Mother of the worlds
To make this earthly tenement her house.” Savitri-528
10: “He is indivisible and the One, but seems to divide himself in forms and creatures and appears as all the separate existences. All things are eternally born from him, upborne in his eternity, taken eternally back into his oneness…He is the light of all lights and luminous beyond all the darkness of our ignorance. He is knowledge and the object of knowledge. He is seated in the hearts of all.” The Gita-13.17, 18,
11: Savitri-705,
12: CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-351,
13: CWSA/22/The Life Divine-951.
14: “It is not in the separatively personal self or by its power that it sees and therefore it has not to be on guard against the element of personal error: that interferes only while a mental substratum or environing atmosphere yet remains and can still throw in its influence or while the Supermind is still acting by descent into the mind to change it. And the supramental method with error is to eliminate it, not by any other device, but by an increasing spontaneity of the supramental discrimination and a constant heightening of its own energy. The consciousness of Supermind is a cosmic consciousness and it is in this self of universal consciousness, in which the individual knower lives and with which he is more or less closely united, that it holds before him the object of knowledge.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga- 856-57
15: CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-150,
16: CWSA/22/The Life Divine-1064
17: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga-303
18: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga-668-69
19: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga-824
20: The Mother’s Agenda-10th May, 1958,
21: CWSA-22/The Life Divine/p-943,
22: CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-II/p-102,
The More Difficult Task of Integral Education
“Our passion heaves to wed the Eternal’s calm,
Our dwarf-search mind to meet the Omniscient’s light,
Our helpless hearts to enshrine the Omnipotent’s force.”
Savitri-58
“A dwarf three-bodied trinity was her serf.
First, smallest of the three, but strong of limb,
A low-brow with a square and heavy jowl,
A pigmy Thought needing to live in bounds
For ever stooped to hammer fact and form…
A fiery spirit came, next of the three.
A hunchback rider of the red Wild-Ass,
A rash Intelligence leaped down lion-maned
From the great mystic Flame that rings the worlds
And with its dire edge eats at being’s heart…
Of all these Powers the greatest was the last.
Arriving late from a far plane of thought
Into a packed irrational world of Chance
Where all was grossly felt and blindly done,
Yet the haphazard seemed the inevitable,
Came Reason, the squat godhead artisan,
To her narrow house upon a ridge in Time.”
Savitri-245 to 249
“Above in a high breathless stratosphere,
Overshadowing the dwarfish trinity,
Lived, aspirants to a limitless Beyond,
Captives of Space, walled by the limiting heavens,
In the unceasing circuit of the hours
Yearning for the straight paths of eternity,
And from their high station looked down on this world
Two sun-gaze Daemons witnessing all that is.”
Savitri-258
“Only if God assumes the human mind
And puts on mortal ignorance for his cloak
And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride,
Can he help man to grow into the God.”
Savitri-488
(Death said) “All by Death’s mercy breathe and live awhile,
All think and act by the Inconscient’s grace.”
Savitri-616
“There is not an entity, either on the earth or again in heaven among the gods, that is not subject to the workings of these three qualities (Gunas), born of nature.”
The Gita-18.40
“He has in him not a single mentality, but a double and a triple, the mind material and nervous, the pure intellectual mind which liberates itself from the illusions of the body and the senses, and a divine mind above intellect which in its turn liberates itself from the imperfect modes of the logically discriminative and imaginative reason.”²⁷
Sri Aurobindo
“But the whole difference between man and the animal is that the animal mind, as we know it, cannot get for one moment away from its origins, cannot break out from the covering, the close chrysalis which the bodily life has spun round the soul, and become something greater than its present self, a more free, magnificent and noble being; but in man mind reveals itself as a greater energy escaping from the restrictions of the vital and physical formula of being.”²⁸
Sri Aurobindo
“As our physical instrumental mind has the illusion of the body, so this subconscious dynamic mind has the illusion of life. In that it is absorbed and concentrated, by that it is limited, with that it identifies its being. Here we do not yet get back to the meeting-place of mind and supermind and the point at which they originally separated.”²⁹
Sri Aurobindo
“The transcendence of the three modes of Nature is the first condition, their transformation the decisive step of this change by which the Way of Works climbs out of the pit of narrowness of our darkened human nature into the unwalled wideness of the Truth and Light above us.”³⁰
Sri Aurobindo
“In the light of gnosis the many mental idols, constructed principles and systems, conflicting ideals which man has created in all domains of his mind and life, could command no acceptance or reverence; only the truth, if any, which these specious images conceal, could have a chance of entry as elements of a harmony founded on a much wider basis.”³¹
Sri Aurobindo
The action of three modes of nature,³² gunas, is identified in The Gita and Savitri as subjection to three asuras⁸ and three dwarfs⁹ respectively and these modes are conscious of this life and oblivious of all life and bound to the perishable law of Death. ‘It is a triple stair that stumbles upward towards the divine light but cannot reach it.’⁵³ The Divine Mother’s rebel children are tamasic, rajasic and sattwic in Nature and all their action and thought process of impatience, error, limited knowledge, unconsciousness, ignorance, defect and evil wait for their Divine hour of transformation.48 Most of the human beings act and think by the pressure of three gunas, physical mind, vital mind and sattwic mind and these three are Inconscient negative energies. ‘The mind moves under the limiting compulsion of the triple lower nature, it erects its standards in obedience to the tamasic, rajasic or at highest the sattwic qualities; but the destiny of the soul is a divine perfection and liberation and that can only be based in the freedom of our highest self, can only be found by passing through its vast impersonality and universality beyond mind into the integral light of the immeasurable Godhead and supreme Infinite who is beyond all dharmas.’¹⁵
A traditional Sadhaka, after realisation of Kshara, Akshara and Purushottama consciousness feels that this realisation cannot be reconciled⁶ with untransformed nature of three Gunas. So, he has no unfinished task left and hence his blissful enjoyment of existence concentrates on the issue of freedom from rebirth and escapes into supreme abode of param dham through the passage of Purushottama state. In integral Yoga, after realisation of Kshara, Akshara and Purushottama consciousness or after realisation Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental Being, a Sadhaka’s difficult task prohibits blissful enjoyment of the fruit of discovery of his triple Selves but begins of reconciling static Matter with dynamic Spirit and thus Divine Shakti pours into the material vessel and confronts with Subconscient dark forces, diseases, decay and death. His Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental purification, transformation and perfection resumes action from firmly established Psychic heart centre and from firmly established Karma Yoga where Divine Will, Knowledge and Love are perfectly reconciled.
Limitation of Mind:
“Impotent to share in Nature’s mystic tact,
Inapt to feel the pulse and core of things,
Our reason cannot sound life’s mighty sea
And only counts its waves and scans its foam;
It knows not whence these motions touch and pass,
It sees not whither sweeps the hurrying flood:
Only it (reason) strives to canalise its powers
And hopes to turn its course to human ends:”
Savitri-161
“Our mind lives far off from the authentic Light
Catching at little fragments of the Truth
In a small corner of infinity,
Our lives are inlets of an ocean’s force.”
Savitri-161
“Yet was this only a provisional scheme,
A false appearance sketched by limiting sense,
Mind’s insufficient self-discovery,
An early attempt, a first experiment.”
Savitri-167-68
“There is a deeper seeing from within
And, when we have left these small purlieus of mind,
A greater vision meets us on the heights
In the luminous wideness of the spirit’s gaze.
At last there wakes in us a witness Soul
That looks at truths unseen and scans the Unknown;
Then all assumes a new and marvellous face:”
Savitri-168
“Our human thought, servant of Ignorance.
An exile, labourer on this unsure globe
Captured and driven in Life’s nescient grasp,
Hampered by obscure cell and treacherous nerve,
It dreams of happier states and nobler powers,
The natural privilege of unfallen gods,
Recalling still its old lost sovereignty.”
Savitri-262
“In our thinking’s close and narrow lamp-lit house
The vanity of our shut mortal mind
Dreams that the chains of thought have made her ours;
But only we play with our own brilliant bonds;
Tying her down, it is ourselves we tie.”
Savitri-276
“Afar from all that makes the measured world,
Plunging to hidden eternities it withdrew
Back from mind’s foaming surface to the Vasts
Voiceless within us in omniscient sleep.”
Savitri-320
“A mind impotent to reconcile heaven and earth
And tied to Matter with a thousand bonds,”
Savitri-338
“The mind of mortal man is led by words,
His sight retires behind the walls of Thought
And looks out only through half-opened doors.”
Savitri-457
“This mind no silence knows nor dreamless sleep,
In the incessant circling of its steps
Thoughts tread for ever through the listening brain;
It toils like a machine and cannot stop.”
Savitri-478
“But for the mortal prisoned in outward mind
All must present their passports at its door;
Disguised they must don the official cap and mask
Or pass as manufactures of the brain,
Unknown their secret truth and hidden source.”
Savitri-540
“This too she saw that all in outer mind
Is made, not born, a product perishable,
Forged in the body’s factory by earth-force.
This mind is a dynamic small machine
Producing ceaselessly, till it wears out,
With raw material drawn from the outside world,
The patterns sketched out by an artist God.”
Savitri-541
“His mind is pent in circling boundaries:
For mind is man, beyond thought he cannot soar.
If he could leave his limits he would be safe:”
Savitri-643
“For knowledge shall pour down in radiant streams
And even darkened mind quiver with new life
And kindle and burn with the Ideal’s fire
And turn to escape from mortal ignorance.”
Savitri-710
The lower mental faculty of Physical (tamasic) mind, Vital (rajasic) mind and Intellect (sattwic mind) are entirely absorbed, limited, obsessed and concentrated in the illusion and disintegration of body, death of life and falling back of mind into Inconscience respectively and they are identified as three dwarf and separatists who miserably restrict and long prevent our growing relation with the Supreme. There is a period of prolonged internal effort in which individual has to reject mental energies, heart’s emotion, vital desires and physical rigidity of lower nature and put themselves resolutely on the side of Divine truth and compel them to answer to the right influence. If we can educate, train, purify, transform and perfect these three faculties by surrender¹³ of lower to the higher Nature, then the capacity of our vessel can increase indefinitely to open, receive and hold the Divine Will, the Divine Love and the Divine Knowledge and their self-development is translated physically as imperishability of Matter, vitally as instinct of self-preservation and mentally as sense of immortality.
Education of dwarf and pigmy Physical Mind:
“Even his first steps broke our small earth-bounds
And loitered in a vaster freer air.”
Savitri-26
“An old pull of subconscious cords renews;
It draws the unwilling spirit from the heights,
Or a dull gravitation drags us down
To the blind driven inertia of our base.”
Savitri-34
“When darkness deepens strangling the earth’s breast
And man’s corporeal mind is the only lamp,
As a thief’s in the night shall be the covert tread
Of one who steps unseen into his house.
A Voice ill-heard shall speak, the soul obey, (Voice of the Divine)
A Power into mind’s inner chamber steal, (A Spiritual Power)
A charm and sweetness open life’s closed doors
And beauty conquer the resisting world,
The Truth-Light capture Nature by surprise,
A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss
And earth grow unexpectedly divine.”
Savitri-55
“Even in the littleness of our mortal state,
Even in this prison-house of outer form,
A brilliant passage for the infallible Flame
Is driven through gross walls of nerve and brain,
A Splendour presses or a Power breaks through,
Earth’s great dull barrier (physical mind) is removed awhile,
The inconscient seal is lifted from our eyes
And we grow vessels of creative might.”
Savitri-108
“At its low extremity held difficult sway
A mind that hardly saw and slowly found;
Its nature to our earthly nature close
And kin to our precarious mortal thought
That looks from soil to sky and sky to soil
But knows not the below nor the beyond, [Physical mind is not aware of the sea of Light above the head and below the feet.]
It only sensed itself and outward things.”
Savitri-239
“The slow process of a material mind
Which serves the body it should rule and use
And needs to lean upon an erring sense,
Was born in that luminous obscurity.”
Savitri-240
“A twilight sage whose shadow seems to him self,”
Savitri-240
“One sees it (physical mind) circling faithful to its task,
Tireless in an assigned tradition’s round;
In decayed and crumbling offices of Time
It keeps close guard in front of custom’s wall,
Or in an ancient Night’s dim environs
It dozes on a little courtyard’s stones
And barks at every unfamiliar light
As at a foe who would break up its home,
A watch-dog of the spirit’s sense-railed house
Against intruders from the Invisible,
Nourished on scraps of life and Matter’s bones
In its kennel of objective certitude.”
Savitri-246
“But our dwarf will and cold pragmatic sense
Admit not the celestial visitants:”
Savitri-263
“In man a dim disturbing somewhat lives; (Physical and vital mind)
It knows but turns away from divine Light
Preferring the dark ignorance of the fall.” (Spiritual fall)
Savitri-366
“His instrument the dim corporeal mind,
Of celestial insight now forgetful grown,
He seizes on some sign of outward charm
To guide him mid the throng of Nature’s hints,
Reads heavenly truths into earth’s semblances,
Desires the image for the godhead’s sake,
Divines the immortalities of form
And takes the body for the sculptured soul.”
Savitri-398
“A whisper lures to evil the human heart,
It seals up wisdom’s eyes, the soul’s regard,
It is the origin of our suffering here,
It binds earth to calamity and pain.
This all must conquer who would bring down God’s peace.
This hidden foe lodged in the human breast
Man must overcome or miss his higher fate.
This is the inner war without escape.”
Savitri-448
“At the dim portal of the inner life
That bars out from our depths the body’s mind
And all that lives but by the body’s breath,
She knocked and pressed against the ebony gate.
The living portal groaned with sullen hinge:
Heavily reluctant it (tamasic mind) complained inert
Against the tyranny of the spirit’s touch.”
Savitri-489
“But now a mightier danger’s front drew near:
The press of bodily mind, the Inconscient’s brood
Of aimless thought and will had fallen from her.”
Savitri-491
“Her body’s thoughts climbed from her conscious limbs
And carried their yearnings to its mystic crown
Where Nature’s murmurs meet the Ineffable.”
Savitri-540
“A sceptic facing Light with adamant No…
It makes a cloud of the interpreting mind
And intercepts the oracles of the Sun.”
Savitri-626
"From the negative point of view – I mean the difficulties to be overcome – one of the most serious obstacles is that the ignorant and falsifying outer consciousness, the ordinary consciousness legitimizes all the so-called physical laws, causes, effects and consequences, all that science has discovered physically and materially (laws of the body, for example, its needs, its health, its nourishment, all those things – they have such a solid, compact, established and concrete reality that it appears absolutely unquestionable.). All this is an unquestionable reality to the consciousness, a reality that remains independent and absolute even in the face of the eternal divine Reality...Well, to be able to cure that, which of all the obstacles is the greatest (I mean the habit of putting spiritual life on one side and material life on the other, of acknowledging the right of material laws to exist), one must make a resolution never to legitimize any of these movements, at any cost."
The Mother
The Mother's Agenda/01.05.1958
The normal waking state is dominated by the physical mind, which is the assured base, close to earthly nature, the first status of slow ascent and the lowest sub-plane of intellect, the starting point of the educational movement of that apparent material world. It contradicts³⁷ and opposes the vital mind by inertia, indolence and dullness and intellect by narrowness, precarious thought, ignorance and obscurity. The modern man strives to establish equilibrium between a fully active intellect, vital and body. The task of Integral Education is to link these three lower mental planes fully with the Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental planes, which throw on the physical mind a transforming light that breaks conservative inertia, replaces its narrow thought-power and doubts by Knowledge and pours luminosity and Divine Consciousness into the very cells of the body. So those who want to escape from the defeatist domination of physical mind and its repetition of old familiar pessimist action, for them the centre of living must shift above the head, so that they can separate and disentangle lower habitual action of physical mind from the action of a clearer and more potent self-knowledge and pure Divine will. If they can think no longer from the brain but above and outside the head in the subtle body, then it is a clear indication that they have escaped from the limitation of the physical mind. Through trance,41 Samadhi, they can also enter dream and sleep Selves or consciousness corresponding to the subtle life-plane and the Supramental plane, free from the subjection and limitation of the physical mind. The trained physical mind is a passive field and instrument of greater force and light; it responds to every demand and need of the Spirit’s force and holds and assimilates every kind, variety and diversity of Spiritual experience. So, we must erase the settled imprint of the physical mind slowly by Divine Contact. Japa or repetition of Divine Word is a very good mechanical means of contradicting pessimism and entering Divine contact to which the cells of the body value a lot.
The physical mind lives content with the common, known, old memories and loves to live with the past. It accepts the empiric fact of physical laws like gravity, disease and decay as settled law and does not see the occult, universal law behind them. It believes in no Divinity other than the narrow earth-bound gods, abhors transformation of Nature, distrustful of discovery of new worlds, fears the Unknowable as deadly abyss, shrinks from the adventure of Consciousness, loses its conviction of objective certitude and enters into an agnosticism which questions all its own standards of life and knowledge, doubts whether all this is real or else whether all, even if real, is not futile. It creates in him a habit of believing entirely the physical facts as the sole truth and of doubting or challenging all that does not come into accord with his own experience or his own scope of understanding or square with his own standard or sum of established knowledge. It affirms that an objective Reality is the only entire self-evident truth beyond question and an objective knowledge as the sole entirely reliable knowledge and constructs always its frail house of thought; it looks at only one side of existence, even only one province or district of existence, and leaves all the rest unexplained, without inherent reality, without significance and without integrality and whatever is not actual, not physical, not objective it regards as unreal or unrealised, and it can accept a thing as entirely real when it has succeeded in becoming actual, becoming a physical fact and becoming objective.
The crude physical mind is a slave of a fixed mass of absolute rule and trades its gain to meet the moment’s call, moves from moment to brief moment, shuts into succession of moments, labours for an hour, so is the creator of impatience because it cannot tolerate and wait the Divine Mother’s eternal labour, for whom the present existing world which She has built is an interim report and half found truth in things, who works out the distorting Maya through wisdom which went forth since the beginning of creation. A breaking of our imprisonment in moment and a transcendence of limitation of sensation and subjection of physical mind is possible by evolving another state of consciousness and of vision and knowledge of triple time consciousness.
The normal sleep⁴² is completely different from trance state and in the former physical mind is active in the dream which is an incoherent jumble of vague touches from the surface world, wandering phantasy of the reason, disordered associations from brain memory, widely distorted and mixed up confusedly with other dream elements and fantastic responses to any sensory touch of the surface vital world. Where trance is a subtle action of higher consciousness of dream self, free from immixture of physical and vital mentality, liberated from the bounds of surface consciousness and is open towards perennial source of pure inner sense.
Physical mind rejects the thought process of logically discriminative and imaginative reason, its disturbances and its tensions and does not like any upliftment of Consciousness, Spiritual deliverance, descent of Divine force and ‘barks at every unfamiliar’³⁹ Superconscient light. Any ‘large or intense or continuous enjoyments’⁴⁰ are almost intolerable to the physical mind. It is formed under the pressure of difficulties, obstacles, suffering and struggle and does not believe that behind all the difficulties there is Divine Grace, behind all the failures there is success and ‘inability to look beyond its own apparent self-formation.’¹⁸ It treasures the changeless doctrine of negation, earthward look, disease, decay and death and obedient to the tyranny of gross matter. All inner and outer revolutions sink into physical mind’s inertia and in a new dress, the old habit resumes its guardian role. Fear, doubt and impatience are the original character and habit of the physical mind and bind one to the bodily consciousness. It always aspires for greater comfort,³⁶ constructed order, short-lived enjoyments, easily secured life and is oblivious of whole truth of existence.
The education of physical mind needs very tangible and repeated Spiritual experience and it must break all its heavy smallness and asks giving up of its instincts, needs, blind conservative attachment, settled grooves of nature, doubt, disbeliefs in all that is beyond itself, its faith of inevitability of fixed functioning of mind, life and body. These are replaced by new power which establishes its own greater law and functioning in the form and force of Matter. By the pressure of the higher light even the Subconscient and Inconscient below the physical mind have to become conscient, susceptible to higher light,³⁸ no longer obstructive to fulfilling the creative action of the Consciousness force, but more and more a mould and basis of the Spiritual Force. The admission of such a radical change and the remoulding of the whole nature are possible by the full emergence and dominance of the Psychic and Spiritual fire and long working of their light and power on the parts of the nature.
The Gita prescribes a new method of self-discipline through which the golden chain of three gunas can be broken. “It is to stand back in oneself from the action and the modes and observe this unsteady flux as the Witness seated above the surge of the forces of Nature. He is one who watches but is impartial and indifferent, aloof from them on their own level and in his native posture high above them. As they rise and fall in their waves, the Witness looks, observes, but neither accepts nor for the moment interferes with their course. First there must be the freedom of the impersonal Witness; afterwards there can be the control of the Master, the Ishwara.”⁷
The Synthesis of Yoga book proposes another method in addition to the Gita’s method, by which one can go beyond three gunas. “There is nothing to be done with this fickle, restless, violent and disturbing factor but to get rid of it (physical mind) whether (1) by detaching it and then reducing it to stillness or (2) by giving a concentration and singleness to the thought by which it will of itself reject this alien and confusing element.’⁸ Or ‘as the calm of equality increases, deepens, becomes more essential and compact, ghana,’⁴³ the influence of physical mind becomes weak and its appearance at the outer gates of mind ceases.
“This body-mind is a very tangible truth; owing to its obscurity and mechanical clinging to past movements and facile oblivion and rejection of the new, we find in it one of the chief obstacles to permeation by the supermind Force and the transformation of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilisation of the supramental Light and Force in material Nature.” CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I/p-189
“…the ordinary activity of the physical mind which is full of ordinary habitual and constantly recurrent thoughts and is always busy with external objects and activities…the vital mind which is different, — for that is always occupied with emotions, passions, desires, reactions of all kinds to the contacts of life and the behaviour of others. The physical mind also can be responsive to these things but in a different way— its nature is less that of desire than of habitual activity, small common interests, pains and pleasures. If one tries to control or suppress it (physical mind), it becomes more active.
To deal with this mind two things are necessary, (1) not so much to try to control or fight with or suppress it as to stand back from it: one looks at it and sees what it is but refuses to follow its thoughts or run about among the objects it pursues, remaining at the back of the mind quiet and separate; (2) to practice quietude and concentration in this separateness, until the habit of quiet takes hold of the physical mind and replaces the habit of these small activities. This of course takes time and can only come by practice…”¹⁰
“Tamas in the spiritual being becomes a divine calm, which is not an inertia and incapacity of action, but a perfect power, sakti, holding in itself all its capacity and capable of controlling and subjecting to the law of calm even the most stupendous and enormous activity: rajas becomes a self-effecting initiating sheer Will of the spirit, which is not desire, endeavour, striving passion, but the same perfect power of being, sakti, capable of an infinite, imperturbable and blissful action. Sattwa becomes not the modified mental light, prakasa, but the self-existent light of the divine being, jyotih, which is the soul of the perfect power of being and illumines in their unity the divine quietude and the divine will of action.”⁹
“A thought was there that planned, a will that strove,
But for small aims within a narrow scope,
Wasting unmeasured toil on transient things.
It knew itself a creature of the mud;
It asked no larger law, no loftier aim;
It had no inward look, no upward gaze.”
Savitri-149
“Only it hoped for greatness in its den
And pleasure and victory in small fields of power
And conquest of life-room for self and kin,
An animal limited by its feeding-space.
It knew not the Immortal in its house;
It had no greater deeper cause to live.”
Savitri-149
“A whisper falls into life’s inner ear
And echoes from the dun subconscient caves,
Speech leaps, thought quivers, the heart vibrates, the will
Answers and tissue and nerve obey the call.
Our lives translate these subtle intimacies;
All is the commerce of a secret Power.”
Savitri-162
“A thinking puppet is the mind of life:
Its choice is the work of elemental strengths
That know not their own birth and end and cause
And glimpse not the immense intent they serve.”
Savitri-162
“Insignificant architects of low-built lives
And engineers of interest and desire,
Out of crude earthiness and muddy thrills
And coarse reactions of material nerve
They build our huddled structures of self-will
And the ill-lighted mansions of our thought,
Or with the ego’s factories and marts
Surround the beautiful temple of the soul.”
Savitri-163
“All dulls down to convention and routine
Or a fierce excitement brings him vivid joys:
His days are tinged with the red hue of strife
And lust’s hot glare and passion’s crimson stain;
Battle and murder are his tribal game.”
Savitri-165
“Its (rajasic mind’s) power could deform divinest things.
A wind of sorrow breathed upon the world;
All thought with falsehood was besieged, all act
Stamped with defect or with frustration’s sign,
All high attempt with failure or vain success,
But none could know the reason of his fall.”
Savitri-203
“Thence sprang the burning vision of Desire.
A thousand shapes it wore, took numberless names:
A need of multitude and uncertainty
Pricks it for ever to pursue the One
On countless roads across the vasts of Time
Through circuits of unending difference.
It burns all breasts with an ambiguous fire.”
Savitri-247
“The hurried servant senses answer apace
To every knock upon the outer doors,
Bring in time’s visitors, report each call,
Admit the thousand queries and the calls
And the messages of communicating minds
And the heavy business of unnumbered lives
And all the thousandfold commerce of the world.”
Savitri-478-479
“There is a joy in all that meets the sense,
A joy in all experience of the soul,
A joy in evil and a joy in good,
A joy in virtue and a joy in sin:
Indifferent to the threat of Karmic law,
Joy dares to grow upon forbidden soil,
Its sap runs through the plant and flowers of Pain:”
Savitri-630
“Studies strengthen the mind and turn its concentration away from the impulses and desires of the vital. Concentrating on study is one of the most powerful ways of controlling the mind and the vital; that is why it is so important to study.”⁵²
The Mother
“Rajas contributes our normal active nature with all its good and evil; when unchastened by a sufficient element of sattwa, it turns to egoism, self-will and violence, the perverse, obstinate or exaggerating action of the reason, prejudice, attachment to opinion, clinging to error, the subservience of the intelligence to our desires and preferences and not to the truth, the fanatic or the sectarian mind, self-will, pride, arrogance, selfishness, ambition, lust, greed, cruelty, hatred, jealousy, the egoisms of love, all the vices and passions, the exaggerations of the aesthesis, the morbidities and perversions of the sensational and vital being. Tamas in its own right produces the coarse, dull and ignorant type of human nature, rajas the vivid, restless, kinetic man, driven by the breath of action, passion and desire.”¹⁷
Sri Aurobindo
The man’s vital mind is an instrument of desire, the troubled seed of things, which hunts after unrealised possibilities, burns all hearts with ambiguous fire, enlarges always passion and craving, creates dissatisfaction, an unrest, a seeking for something more than what life seems able to give it, a constant demand for more and always more, a quest for new worlds to conquer, an incessant drive towards an exceeding of the bounds of circumstance and a self-exceeding. It is not satisfied with physical and objective enjoyment only but seeks to a subjective, imaginative, a purely emotive satisfaction, enjoyment and pleasure, which are dependent on external things, external sense contacts and concerned with the practical, the immediately realizable and possible events, the habitual, the common and average.
‘Mostly however the constant recurrence of depression and despair or of doubt and revolt is due to a mental or vital formation which takes hold of the vital mind and makes it run round always in the same circle at the slightest provoking cause or even without cause. It is like an illness to which the body consents from habit and from belief in the illness even though it suffers from it, and once started the illness runs its habitual course unless it is cut short by some strong counteracting force. If once the body can withdraw its consent, the illness immediately or quickly ceases — that was the secret of the Coue´ system. So too if the vital mind withdraws its consent, refuses to be dominated by the habitual suggestions and the habitual movements, these recurrences of depression and despair can be made soon to cease. But it is not easy for this (vital) mind, once it has got into the habit of consent, even a quite passive and suffering and reluctant consent, to cancel the habit and get rid of the black circle. It can be done easily only when the mind refuses any longer to believe in the suggestions or accept the ideas or feelings that start the circle.’¹²
Desire⁴⁹ is the outcome of incompleteness, of insufficiency and that of not yet sufficiently possessed or enjoyed which the being seeks for possession. It creates confusion, throws discord and brings impurity which is the whole evil of our psychological existence. If the vital mind is deprived of its natural urge of enjoyment, which is the whole object of desire then it recoils into subjection of physical mind and man would live like the animal, accepting his first actual physical life and its limits as his whole possibility, moving the material Nature’s established order and asking for nothing beyond it.
The human emotions are governed by egoistic passion, self-satisfied perversions, blind instinctive affections, cruelty and beast wrath of violence,⁴⁵ a heart besieged and given over to lust, treachery and rapacity, little and narrow greed, mean pettiness of an obscure and fallen life-force, bottomless ingratitude and debased by slavery to any and every lower impulse. So, it is the mixture of the emotive heart and the sense bound hungering vital that creates a false desire Soul³³ which the reason and intellect in man rightly distrust and disbelieve; ‘for the nature of the vital mind is always to cloud the true mind’s perception and drive it towards action. Neither the vital mind nor the physical mind are things that have to be got rid of, but they must be quietened, purified, controlled and transformed. That will take place fully when the thinking mind becomes fully conscious and when the psychic comes forward and leads and governs both it and the vital and physical being.’¹¹
So, a great sincerity is asked of a Sadhaka while searching the true Soul through entry into the subliminal vital nature⁴⁴ which is an incurable pretender and actor. As the calm equality of the Soul increases and deepens, he is able and far advanced in entire elimination of falsity and dangerous crudity of life and becomes aware of the true inmost being, manifests true life in the power of Godhead and joy of Infinite. His vigilant eye must keep constant watch on deceits of ego and ambushes of misleading powers of Darkness and they often take the appearance of the divine form in order to capture the soul of a Sadhaka. The vital being must be trained to right enjoyment of life in obedience to the working of the Divine Will and get rid of all human craving and attachment. Similarly, heart must be trained to the right joy and laughter of the Soul in obedience to the working of the Divine Love and get rid of all wrong emotions of fear, wrath, hatred and lust.
The vital mind or Psychic prana³⁴ is baffled by life and frustrated or else dissatisfied with all its satisfactions, overtaken by a deep disgust and disappointment, finds that all is vanity and vexation of Spirit and is ready to reject life and existence as an unreality, all that it hunted after as an illusion, Maya. It flames violently towards the heaven but sinks engulfed into mire of hell; climbs above to drag down high truth into the Subconscient abyss but does not succeed; its brilliant forces rush towards muddy ends.
The education of the vital mind asks giving up of its cherished desires,³⁵ falsity of senses, emotions, feelings, impulses, forceful mechanism of action and reaction and they will be replaced by a luminous, desireless, free and yet automatically self-determining pure sense, pure enjoyment,47 limitless passion and yearning for the Infinite force. Life must be an instrument of universal and impersonal knowledge, power, delight, love and beauty and fulfilled through its greater joy and strength. And finally, vital mind must be elevated to Supermind which is the native seat of all perfection.
“A fearless will for knowledge dared to erase
The lines of safety Reason draws that bar
Mind’s soar, soul’s dive into the Infinite.”
Savitri-26
“The mind learns and knows not, turning its back to truth;
It studies surface laws by surface thought,…
Adds purposeful figures to her purposeless sum,”
Savitri-160
“Our mind lives far off from the authentic Light
Catching at little fragments of the Truth”
Savitri-161
“As long as intellect’s outward-gazing sight
Serves earthy interest and creature joys,
An incurable littleness pursues his days.”
Savitri-164
“Transfigured were the fixed scheme of reasoning Thought.”
Savitri-232
“In her high works of pure intelligence,
In her withdrawal from the senses’ trap,
There comes no breaking of the walls of mind,
There leaps no rending flash of absolute power,
There dawns no light of heavenly certitude.”
Savitri-251
“In this small mould of infant mind and sense
Desire is a child-heart’s cry crying for bliss,
Our reason only a toys’ artificer,
A rule-maker in a strange stumbling game.
But she her dwarf aides knew whose confident sight
A bounded prospect took for the far goal.”
Savitri-257
“Reason cannot tear off that glimmering mask,
Her efforts only make it glimmer more;
In packets she ties up the Indivisible;
Finding her hands too small to hold vast Truth
She breaks up knowledge into alien parts
Or peers through cloud-rack for a vanished sun:”
Savitri-257
“Upraised the earth-mind to superhuman heights.”
Savitri-360
“A mind daring heavenly experiment,
Growing towards some largeness they felt near,
Testing the unknown’s bound with eager touch
They still were prisoned by their human grain:
They could not keep up with her tireless step;
Too small and eager for her large-paced will,
Too narrow to look with the unborn Infinite’s gaze
Their nature weary grew of things too great.”
Savitri-363
“Attuned to Silence and to the world-rhyme,
They loosened the knot of the imprisoning mind;
Achieved was the wide untroubled witness gaze,
Unsealed was Nature’s great spiritual eye;
To the height of heights rose now their daily climb:”
Savitri-481-82
“Thus slowly I (Mother of Light) lift man’s soul nearer the Light.
But human mind clings to its ignorance
And to its littleness the human heart
And to its right to grief the earthly life.”
Savitri-516
“There came into mind’s little frontal room
Thoughts that enlarged our limited human range,
Lifted the ideal’s half-quenched or sinking torch
Or peered through the finite at the infinite.”
Savitri-540
“Impersonal, signless, featureless, void of forms
A blank pure consciousness had replaced the mind.”
Savitri-545
“The mind develops into the mind of the sage, at first the high mental thinker, then the spiritual sage who has gone beyond the abstractions of thought to the beginnings of a direct experience.”¹⁹
Sri Aurobindo
Supermind, mind, life and body are the four instruments which the Spirit uses for its manifestation in the workings of Nature. Supermind is Spiritual Consciousness acting as self-luminous Knowledge, Will and Delight. Mind is essentially the faculty of Supermind, which measures and limits and fixes a particular centre for cosmic movement and action and only very indirectly and partially illumined and it can look upward and receive the Supramental communication and passes it on to the other lower members. And since man is a mental being, so thought is at least his most constant, normal and effective means for enlightening his Ignorance.
The normal thought action of the mind is divided into a triple⁵ movement; (1) first and the lowest is the habitual thought mind whose ideas are based on the available data given by the senses and by surface experiences of nervous and emotional being and on the customary notions formed by the education and outward life and environment; it can think nothing as entirely true and all its formulations break down under the test of new suggestions from the infinite; (2) the second grade of thinking activity of the creative pragmatic mind which can link the truth of life and the truth of idea not yet manifested in life; the thinking mind finds its most clear, precise, effective principle of organisation and characteristic satisfaction in the reasoning and logical intelligence; a more precise and assured action of the intelligence will get rid of the superficiality of this ordinary method of the mind, test every step, scrutinize severely every conclusion, efficiently guard against error and reduce the mind’s action to a well-founded system, synthesis and order; (3) the last gradation of thinking opens in us the pure, subtle, flexible ideative outer mind which lives disinterestedly in the truth of idea for Divine action and yearns to bear the Spiritual Light and lives far from the ordinary mental habit which turns truth into purveyors of error and hurriedly carries light to suffering men and outer world. .
The limitation of mind is that firstly, fear, desire and sorrow are recognised as diseases of the mind, born of its sense of division and limitation; it is an inveterate divider of the Indivisible and its observation and understanding is always incomplete, uncertain, relative, partial and inconclusive, and it’s out going action and creation is still more confused, narrow, inferior and imperfect; the error of practical reason is an excessive subjection to apparent facts of existence and makes life artificial and rationally mechanical, deprives it of its spontaneity and vitality, prevents the freedom and expansion of the Spirit and not courageous enough to carry the profounder facts of potentiality to their logical conclusion; secondly, mental activity is restricted to this life, limited in time, space, scope and form, life that is death, hunger and incapacity attempting to become life that is immortality, satisfied delight and omnipotence; so long as there is a mixed action and the mental constructions and imaginations are allowed to operate, this passivity of 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; thirdly, mental consciousness is rescued from a sleep of Inconscience, subjected to the means it uses, limited by body and ego; it finds its relation negatively with others by various means of hostile contact and antipathy and positively by various means of uniting contact and sympathy; fourthly, mind seeks for the delight and the self-luminous Divine Consciousness and finds only the apparent negations of pleasure, pain, grief, indifference and the dualities which is again merely a certain trick of false reception of our divided mental being; it is not our true state at all but only a fragmentary formulation or discoloured spray of conscious-force tossed up by the infinite sea of our self-existence; fifthly, the veil or lid created by mind prevents the attainment and realization of the Divine; mind with its exclusive concentration cannot bridge the gulf between the passive and active Brahman and it builds a wall of non-communication between the two and puts itself away from the dynamic aspect of Consciousness; sixthly, mind is a power of ignorance and acts always partially and by limitation, it may even forget itself in a complete Inconscience, or Nescience, awaken from it to the ignorance of a partial knowledge and move from the ignorance towards a complete knowledge; and even if it arrived at integral knowledge, it would still be by a sort of putting together, a mental and intellectual arrangement, an artificial unity, a surface manipulation of things and not an essential and real oneness and not the spiritual change of consciousness; seventhly, mental truth is always an intellectual, emotional and sensational representation and not the direct truth, not the truth itself in its body and essence; eighthly, the mental man thinks and sees on the level of present life and is oblivious of past and future lives or all life; his main basis of knowledge is the present moment with a ill grasped glimpse into the past and blind look towards the future, he bases himself on actual appearance of outward things and oblivious of the vast domain of inner living; and ninthly, when the intellectual reason is applied to the disciplining of infra-rational life, it constantly forces on life a control, a measure, an artificial procrustean rule that succeeds either by hardening life or killing it or constrains it into rigid forms and conventions that ends by a revolt of life, a decay or disruption of systems and imprisons its capacity; or our nature is shaped rigidly by the practice of the ideals constructed by human mind and to limit ourselves by it is to restrict the growth of our larger Self; it is still more difficult for the reason to understand and handle with the suprarational life and the reason is lost in the largeness, subtlety, profundity and complexity of intuitive movement and guidance. And falsity of thought with all its mental constructions can be eliminated by intervention of greater felicity of Knowledge, Truth, Self and Nature.
The advantage of progressive mind is that firstly, it aims at perfecting itself as well as the house in which it dwells and the means of life that it uses, and is capable of awaking by a progressive self-realisation to its own true nature as a form of the Spirit; secondly, the characteristic energy of pure Mind is change through self-enlargement and self-improvement and moves continually from a smaller and simpler to a larger and more complex perfection; thirdly, the fullness of mental life, the suppleness, plasticity, flexibility and wide capacity of intellect to open itself towards its Source, receive the light from above, the ordered richness of emotion and sensibility, largeness and harmonized action of the will are passages towards the development of more powerful faculties and higher life; the reason can become an intermediary between the Subconscient power of the Spirit organizing the life of the animal and the Superconscient power of the Spirit which becoming conscient can organize the existence and life of a spiritual Supermanhood; fourthly, mind can stand on the top as the leader of the journey towards the innermost door of consciousness through its functioning of gathering and reflection, meditation, fixed contemplation, the absorbed dwelling of the mind on its object; fifthly, it is not a seer of occult imperatives that necessitate the movement of creation but a half-light thrown from the Infinite, a half view taken for the whole, a pale refracted light idealized as the burning body of the Sun and its splendour; its idealized vision does not arrive at the essence of Being but it is only an inferior mode of Nature; sixthly, from ordinary point of view its knowledge is an intellectual appreciation of the facts of life, mind and matter and the laws that govern them and it is undertaken partly for the pure satisfaction of the intellect, partly for practical efficiency and is used in helping, saving and liberating or hurting, oppressing and destroying others; seventhly, in proportion as we become more mental, we attain to a subtler action of our whole nature which becomes more apt to reflect and receive higher thoughts, a purer will, more inward influences, striving to enlarge itself and pressing against the concealed body of true gnosis; initially mind is satisfied with first Spiritual enlightenment, then afterwards it finds that to rest satisfied here would be to rest in partial knowledge and realises subsequently that it has to go on heightening and enlarging the consciousness indefinitely; eighthly, if its passage is through crooked ways of error, ignorance and falsehood still its impulse is disinterested truth seeking, truth finding and truth creation and finally its goal is always Integral Knowledge; ninthly, mind has to learn to awaken to the true seeking of the Soul veiled within itself, to the Reality from which all things hold their truth, to the Consciousness of which all consciousness are multiple entities, to the Power from which all get what force of being they have within them, to Delight to which all delight are partial figures.
The first difficulty is that all action of mind is a derivation of secret Supermind and such a truth is diminished in scope, degraded into lower movement and even when it is widest and most complete, mental knowing is still an indirect knowledge; secondly, it is a habituated divider of the Indivisible and its whole nature is to dwell on one thing at a time to the exclusion of others or to stress it to the subordination of others. To train the mind as a pure, clear and passive reflector of the Divine is identified as an important exercise in Integral Education. So thirdly, the preliminary need is a right thought which can be effective and established by liberating oneself from the negative habit of sense-error, desire, old association, intellectual prejudgment, exclusiveness, systematizing and attachment to its own constructions and followed by positive opening towards vision, spiritual experience and realisation. The last difficulty of the mind is identified as its inability to hold at once the unity and multiplicity of the existence and realisation of all this as Sachchidananda is its great difficulty and its supreme difficulty is to unify without losing and integralise without rejecting.
Mind indeed can never be a perfect instrument of the Spirit; a supreme self-expression is not possible in its movements because to separate, divide, limit is its very character and its nature is reflected, diluted and diffused or a narrowly intensive light and sets up willed barriers against higher faculties; it cannot give free admission to the vast and comprehensive self-existent luminosity and joy of the Spirit and all Truth’s infinities because by that it would lose itself in an un-reconciled variety, an undetermined immensity and would be unable to act and proceed to practical consequences and an effective creation.
“If once it met the intense original Flame,
An answering touch might shatter all measures made
And earth sink down with the weight of the Infinite.”
Savitri-18
“Awake not the immeasurable descent,
Speak not my secret name to hostile Time;
Man is too weak to bear the Infinite’s weight.
Truth born too soon might break the imperfect earth.”
Savitri-335
At first when the Supramental pressure falls on the unpurified mind a contrary phenomenon may for a time appear. That is due to several causes. First, there may be a disturbance, even a derangement created by impact of the greater hardly measurable power on an inferior consciousness which is not capable of responding to it organically or even perhaps of bearing the pressure; secondly, the very fact of the simultaneous and yet uncoordinated activity of two quite different forces, especially if the mind insists on its own way, if it tries obstinately or violently to profit by the Supermind instead of giving itself up to it and its purpose and acting as a transmitting channel, if it is not sufficiently passive and obedient to the higher guidance, may lead to a great excitation of power but also an increased disorder and obstructer of power and light that comes from above; there is a disparateness between the Supramental consciousness in which the Purusha now stands, thinks and wills and the mental, vital and physical consciousness through which he has to effectuate its light and knowledge; he lives and sees with an ideal consciousness, but he has yet in his lower self to make it entirely practical and effective; otherwise he can only act with a greater or less Spiritual effectiveness through an internal communication with others on the Spiritual level and on the higher mental level that is most easily affected by it, but the effect is diminished and is retarded by the inferiority or lack of the integral play of the being; this can only be remedied by the Supramental taking hold of and Supramentalising the mental, the vital and the physical consciousness, --transforming them, that is to say, into moulds of the Supramental nature; thirdly, mind can be qualified for the transmission of Supramental force much more easily if there is a previous Yogic preparation and long purification of lower nature, a passivity of the mind calmly and strongly open to the Spirit and reason’s plasticity towards all sides and all aspects of self-development; otherwise there will be much difficulty in getting rid of the discord or disparateness between the ideal Supramentality and the mental transmitting instruments, the mind channel, the heart, the sense, the nervous and the physical being. Lastly, King Aswapati was able to slay/transform the desire Soul represented by tamasic, rajasic and sattwic mind by elevating his consciousness to Bliss Self and dynamising it.
“The soul’s ignorance (desire Soul) is slain but not the soul:”
Savitri-311
“The covering Nescience was unmasked and slain;”
Savitri-313,
“To err no more was natural to mind;
Wrong could not come where all was light and love.”
Savitri-313-14
“All that denies (Supreme Love) must be torn out and slain
And crushed the many longings (of desire) for whose sake
We lose the One (Divine) for whom our lives were made.”
Savitri-316
“Now other claims (of desire Soul) had hushed in him their cry:"
Savitri-316,
“All seemed to have perished that was undivine:”
Savitri-318,
“Overpowered were form and memory’s limiting line;
The covering mind was seized and torn apart;
It was dissolved and now no more could be,”
Savitri-319
By the Pressure of Savitri’s Viswarupa, Death experienced following partial transformation of Nature:
“A pressure of intolerable force
Weighed on his (Death’s) unbowed head and stubborn breast;
Light like a burning tongue licked up his thoughts,
Light was a luminous torture in his heart,
Light coursed, a splendid agony, through his nerves;
His darkness muttered perishing in her blaze.”
Savitri-667,
Recapitulation:
“The Supermind had descended long ago—very long ago—into the mind and even into the vital: it was working in the physical also but indirectly through those intermediaries. The question was about the direct action of the Supermind in the physical. Sri Aurobindo said it could be possible only if the physical mind received the supramental light: the physical mind was the instrument for direct action upon the most material. This physical mind receiving the supramental light Sri Aurobindo called the Mind of Light… As soon as Sri Aurobindo withdrew from his body, what he has called the Mind of Light got realised in me.”²⁰
The Mother
29 June 1953
“All strong natures have the rajasik active outgoing force in them and if that were sufficient to unfit for the Yoga, very few of us would have had a chance. As for the doubt of the physical mind as to whether the thing is possible, who has not had it? In my own case it pursued me years and years and it is only in the last two years (written on 16th April 1923) that the last shadow of doubt, not latterly of its theoretical feasibility, but of the practical certainty of its achievement in the present state of the world and of the human nature, entirely left me.”²¹
Sri Aurobindo
“This is a difficult lesson to learn (rejection of revolt and impatience), but you must learn it. I do not find fault with you for taking long over it, I myself took full twelve years to learn it thoroughly, (written in the year1919) and even after I knew the principle well enough, it took me quite four years and more to master my lower nature in this respect. But you have the advantage of my experience and my help; you will be able to do it more rapidly, if you consciously and fully assist me, by not associating yourself with the enemy Desire; jahi kamam durasadam, remember that utterance of the Gita, it is a keyword of our Yoga.”⁵⁰
Sri Aurobindo
“It was in 1910 that I had this sort of reversal of consciousness about which I spoke the other evening – that is, the first contact with the higher Divine – and it completely changed my life.
From that moment on, I was conscious that all one does is the expression of the indwelling Divine Will. But it is the Divine Will AT THE VERY CENTER of oneself, although for a while there remained an activity in the physical mind. But this was stilled two or three days after I saw Sri Aurobindo for the first time in 1914, and it (physical mind) never started up again. Silence settled. And the consciousness was established above the head.”²⁶
The Mother
“And it is part of any integral yoga: you discipline this physical mind. I have done it for more than sixty years.”⁵¹
The Mother
“And this physical mind of which Sri Aurobindo said that it was an impossibility, that it was something that turns round and round and will always turn round and round, precisely without consciousness, like a kind of machine, that mind has been converted, has become silent, and in the silence it has received the inspiration of the Consciousness. And it has begun again to pray: the same prayers that were there before in the mind.”²²
The Mother
22 November-1967
“It is only when the Supramental manifests in the body-mind that its presence can be permanent.”²³
Sri Aurobindo
“It is only when, awaking from its immersion in Prakriti, it perceives its oneness with the One and its oneness with all existences that it can become free from these things and found its right relation to this executive world-Nature.”²⁴
Sri Aurobindo
“But it is also possible to make this silence of the mind and ability to suspend the habits of the lower nature a first step towards the discovery of a superior formulation, a higher grade of the status and energy of our being and pass by an ascent and transformation into the supramental power of the spirit. And this may even, though with more difficulty, be done without resorting to the complete state of quietude of the normal mind by a persistent and progressive transformation of all the mental into their greater corresponding supramental powers and activities.”²⁵
Sri Aurobindo
All human problems would move harmoniously to their right solution if physical mind, vital mind and intellect could act free from all impurity,46 perversion and intrusions of Subconscient and surrounding life energy and if that energy could be made to obey their right command, adesh, from subliminal and Subconscient plane. The task of integral Yoga is to link these three lower mental planes fully with the Supra-physical, Supra-vital and Supra-mental and to transform the physical sense organ of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch dominated by physical and vital mind into the nature of something subtler, freer, greater truth, more spiritually concrete substance and more plastic Subliminal, Psychic, Spiritual and Supramental sense which seem to be the most difficult task and if the last and lowest physical mind is transformed then it will be the greatest instrument for holding the Supramental in the Physical consciousness.
OM TAT SAT
1: CWSA/21/ The Life Divine-429-30,
2: CWSA/22/The Life Divine-746,
3: CWSA/22/The Life Divine-800,
4: CWSA/22/The Life Divine-915-16,
5: “It is difficult for the human mind to combine rightly and harmonise these three movements of the intelligence. (1) The ordinary man lives mainly in the habitual, has a comparatively feeble action of the creative and pragmatic and experiences a great difficulty in using at all or entering into the movement of the pure ideative mentality. (2) The creative pragmatic mind is commonly too much preoccupied with its own motion to move freely and disinterestedly in the atmosphere of pure ideative order and on the other hand has often an insufficient grasp on the actualities imposed by the habitual mentality and the obstacles it imposes as also on other movements of pragmatic thought and action than that which it is itself interested in building. (3) The pure ideative mentality tends to construct abstract and arbitrary systems of truth, intellectual sections and ideative edifices, and either misses the pragmatic movement necessary to life and lives only or mainly in ideas, or cannot act with sufficient power and directness in the life field and is in danger of being divorced from or weak in the world of the practical and habitual mentality. An accommodation of some kind is made, but the tyranny of the predominant tendency interferes with the wholeness and unity of the thinking being. Mind fails to be assured master even of its own totality, because the secret of that totality lies beyond it in the free unity of the self, free and therefore capable of an infinite multiplicity and diversity, and in the Supramental power that can alone bring out in a natural perfection the organic multiple movement of the self’s unity.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-843-44
6: Matter cannot be reconciled with the Spirit is understood from following verse: “They who with the eye of knowledge perceive this irreconcilable difference between the Matter, kshetra, and the Spirit, Kshetrajna, and the liberation of Being from Nature, they escape into supreme abode of Param Dham.” The Gita-13.35, In the Gita Matter can be reconciled with the Spirit is hinted but not developed: ‘Earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, reason and ego is My eightfold divided Nature, apara-prakriti. Know too My other Divine Nature, Para-prakriti, different from this Apara Prakriti; this Supreme Nature or the Supreme Mother which becomes the Jiva in the heart and by which this world is upheld. This ‘upholding of the world,’ jagat dharayate, means Para-Prakriti also penetrates into Apara Prakriti by which this world can be purified, transformed and perfected.” The Gita -7.4, 5,
7: CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-238,
8: CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-314, “The problem appeared again to me very intensely when I read Sri Aurobindo’s The Yoga of Self-Perfection. I was confronted with a whole formidable world to be transformed – to transform what is already luminous is quite easy, but to transform that! ... ugh – this stuff of life, so low and so coarse, so ordinary ... it’s much more difficult.’ ” The Mother’s Agenda/ December 13, 1960,
9: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga-689,
10: CWSA-31/Letters on Yoga-IV/p-30,
11: CWSA-30/Letters on Yoga-III/p-358,
12: CWSA-30/Letters on Yoga-III/p-365,
13: CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-60,
14: “To the physical mind only the words and facts and acts of a man matter; to the inner mind it is the spiritual happenings in him that matter.” CWSA-28/Letters on Yoga-I-479,
15: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita-570,
16: “All strong natures have the rajasik active outgoing force in them and if that were sufficient to unfit for the Yoga, very few of us would have had a chance. As for the doubt of the physical mind as to whether the thing is possible, who has not had it? In my own case it pursued me years and years and it is only in the last two years (written on 16th April 1923) that the last shadow of doubt, not latterly of its theoretical feasibility, but of the practical certainty of its achievement in the present state of the world and of the human nature, entirely left me.” CWSA-36/Autobiographical Notes-360,
17: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga-686
18: “This brings us another element of the ordinary conception of rebirth which is not acceptable, since it is an obvious error of the physical mind, --the idea of the soul itself as a limited personality which survives unchanged from one birth to another. This too simple and superficial idea of the soul and personality is born of the physical mind’s inability to look beyond its own apparent self-formation in this single existence. In its conception, what returns in the reincarnation must be not only the same spiritual being, the same psychic entity, but the same formation of nature that inhabited the body of the last birth; the body changes, the circumstances are different, but the form of the being, the mind, the character, the disposition, temperament, tendencies are same…” CWSA-22/The Life Divine-847-48
19: CWSA-22/ The Life Divine- 935,
20: The Mother’s Centenary Works/13/62-63,
21: CWSA-36/Autobiographical Notes-360,
22: The Mother’s Centenary Works/11/93,
23: TMCW-11/Notes on the Way/p-293,
24: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga-100,
25: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga-758-759,
26: “It was in 1910 that I had this sort of reversal of consciousness about which I spoke the other evening – that is, the first contact with the higher Divine – and it completely changed my life.
From that moment on, I was conscious that all one does is the expression of the indwelling Divine Will. But it is the Divine Will AT THE VERY CENTER of oneself, although for a while there remained an activity in the physical mind. But this was stilled two or three days after I saw Sri Aurobindo for the first time in 1914, and it never started up again. Silence settled. And the consciousness was established above the head.
In the first experience [of 1910], the consciousness was established in the psychic depths of the being, and from that poise issued the feeling of no longer doing anything but what the Divine wanted – it was the consciousness that the divine Will was all-powerful and that there was no longer any personal will, although there was still some mental activity and everything had to be made silent. In 1914, it was silenced, and the consciousness was established above the head. Here (the heart) and here (above the head), the connection is constant.
Does one exclude the other?
They exist simultaneously; it’s the same thing. When you start becoming truly conscious, you realize that it depends upon the kinds of activities you have to do. When you do a certain kind of work, it is in the heart that the Force gathers to radiate outwards, and when you do another kind of work, it is above the head that the Force concentrates to radiate outwards, but the two are not separate: the center of activity is here or there depending upon what you have to do.” The Mother’s Agenda-6.6.1958
27: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga-12,
28: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga-624,
29: CWSA-21/The Life Divine-181,
30: CWSA-23/The Synthesis of Yoga-242,
31: CWSA-22/The Life Divine-1103,
32: “He has in him not a single mentality, but a double and a triple, (1) the mind material (physical mind) and nervous (vital mind), (2) the pure intellectual mind which liberates itself from the illusions of body and senses, and (3) a divine mind above intellect which in its turn liberates itself from the imperfect modes of the logically discriminative and imaginative reason.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-12, “The true human existence, therefore, only begins when the intellectual mentality emerges out of the material (physical mind) and we begin more and more to live in the mind independent of the nervous and physical obsession and in the measure of that liberty are able to accept rightly and rightly to use the life and body.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-12, “The sign is that the fine and full equilibrium of vitality and matter, the sane, robust, long-lived human body is ordinarily found only in races or classes of men who reject the effort of thought, its disturbances, its tensions, or think only with the material mind (physical mind). Civilised man has yet to establish an equilibrium between the fully active mind and body; he does not normally possess it.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-13, “She has harmonized the bodily life with the material mind (physical mind), she is harmonizing it with the play of the intellectual mentality; for that, although it tends to a depression of the full animal and vital vigour, need not produce active disturbances.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-13,
“Nevertheless it is possible to make the material man and his life moderately progressive by imprinting on the material mind (physical mind) the custom of progress, the habit of conscious change, the fixed idea of progression as a law of life… It is possible to give the material man and his life a moderate spirituality by accustoming him to regard in a religious spirit all the institutions of life and its customary activities.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-23,
33: “Every fibre of the sense mind and basic consciousness is shot through with the action of the 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.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-647 “This nature of emotive mind as a reaction of chitta with a certain close dependence upon the nervous life sensations and the 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 is 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, life 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.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-649 “There are however two different kinds of action of these inner ranges of consciousness. (1) 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 (2) vitiated in spite of its wider range of experience and powers 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 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 the 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 spiritualization and light. The complete power and truth, however, can only come by the opening of the supermind and the supramentalizing of the mental and psychical experience.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-874-75, “Chitta, the basic consciousness, is largely subconscient; it has, open and hidden, two kinds of action, (1) one passive or receptive, (2) the other active or reactive and formative. As 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.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-647-48
34: “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 and desire form of characteristic action to the psychic prana.” 650
“The deformation which enters in and prevents the purity, is a form of vital craving; the grand deformation which the psychic prana contributes to our being, is desire. The root of desire is the vital craving to seize upon that which we feel we have not, it is the limited life’s instinct for possession and satisfaction. It creates the sense of want, --first the simpler vital craving of hunger, thirst, lust, then these psychical hungers, thirsts, lusts of the mind which are a much greater and more instant and pervading affliction of our being, the hunger which is infinite because it is the hunger of the infinite being, the thirst which is only temporarily lulled by satisfaction, but is in its nature insatiable. The psychic prana invades the sensational mind and brings into it the unquiet thirst of sensations, invades the dynamic mind with the lust of control, having, domination, success, fulfillment of every impulse, fills the emotional mind with the desire for the satisfaction of liking and disliking, for the wreaking of love and hate, brings the shrinkings and panics of fear and the strainings and disappointments of hope, imposes the tortures of grief and the brief fevers and excitements of joy, makes the intelligence and intelligent will the accomplices of all these things and turns them in their own kind into deformed and lame instruments, the will into a will of craving and the intelligence into a partial, a stumbling and an eager pursuer of limited, impatient, militant prejudgment and opinion. Desire is the root of all sorrow, disappointment, affliction, for though it has a feverish joy of pursuit and satisfaction, yet because it is always a straining of the being, it carries into its pursuit and its getting a labour, hunger, struggle, a rapid subjection to fatigue, a sense of limitation, dissatisfaction and early disappointment with all its gains, a ceaseless morbid stimulation, trouble, disquiet, asanti. To get rid of desire is one firm indispensable purification of the psychical prana, -- for so we can replace the soul of desire with its pervading immiscence in all our instruments by a mental soul of calm delight and its clear and limpid possession of ourselves and world and Nature which is the crystal basis of the mental life and its perfection.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-656-57
“The psychical prana interferes in all the higher operations to deform them, but its defect is itself due to its being interfered with and deformed by the nature of physical workings in the body (probably physical mind) which Life has evolved in its emergence from matter. It is that (physical mind) which has created the separation of the individual life in the body from the life of the universe and stamped on it the character of want, limitation, hunger, thirst, craving for what it has not, a long groping after enjoyment and a hampered and baffled need of possession. Easily regulated and limited in the purely physical order of things, it (physical mind) extends itself in the psychical prana immensely and becomes, as mind grows, a thing with difficulty limited, insatiable, irregular, a busy creator of disorder and disease. Moreover, the psychical prana leans on the physical life, limits itself by the nervous force of the physical being, limits there by the operations of the mind and becomes the link of its dependence on the body and its subjection to fatigue, incapacity, disease, disorder, insanity, the pettiness, the precariousness and even the possible dissolution of the workings of the physical mentality. Our mind instead of being a thing powerful in its own strength, a clear instrument of conscious spirit, free and able to control, use and perfect the life and body, appears in the result a mixed construction; it is a predominantly the physical mentality limited by its physical organs and subject to the demands and to the obstructions of the life in the body. This can only be got rid of by a sort of practical, inward psychological operation of analysis by which we become aware of the mentality as a separate power, isolate it (physical mind) for a free working, distinguish too the psychical and the physical prana and make them no longer a link for dependence, but a transmitting channel for the Idea and Will in the buddhi, obedient to its suggestions and commands; the prana then becomes a passive means of effectuation for mind’s direct control of the physical life. This control, however abnormal to our habitual poise of action, is not only possible,--it appears to some extent in the phenomena of hypnosis, though these are unhealthy abnormal, because there it is a foreign will which suggests and commands, --but must become the normal action when the higher Self within takes up the direct command of the whole being. This control can be exercised perfectly, however from the supramental level, for it is there that the true effective Idea and Will reside and the mental thought-mind, even spiritualised, is only a limited, though it may be made a very powerful deputy.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-657-58,
35: “Desire, it is thought, is the real motive power of human living and to cast it out would be to stop the springs of life, satisfaction of desire is man’s only enjoyment and to eliminate it would be to extinguish the impulse of life by a quietistic asceticism. But the real motive power of the life of the soul is Will; desire is only a deformation of will in the dominant bodily life and physical mind.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-658 “This desire is essential to the ordinary man; he cannot live or act as an individual without knotting up all his action into the service of some kind of lower or higher craving, preference or passion.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-675, “All immiscence of desire in the buddhi is an impurity. The intelligence coloured by desire is an impure intelligence and it distorts the Truth; the will coloured by desire is an impure will and it puts a stamp of distortion, pain and imperfection upon the soul’s activity. All immiscence of the emotions of the soul of desire is an impurity and similarly distorts both the knowledge and the action. All subjection of the buddhi to the sensations and impulses is an impurity. The thought and will have to stand back detached from desire, troubling emotion, distracting or mastering impulse and to act in their own right until they can discover a greater guide, a Will, Tapas or divine Shakti which will take the place of desire and mental will and impulse, an Ananda or pure delight of the spirit and an illumined spiritual knowledge which will express themselves in the action of that Shakti.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-669, “The seat of the ego is said to be in the buddhi; it is an ignorance of the discriminating mind and reason which discriminate wrongly and take the individuation of mind, life and body for a truth of separative existence and are turned away from the greater reconciling truth of the oneness of all existence. At any rate in man it is the ego idea which chiefly supports the falsehood of a separative existence; to get rid of this idea; to dwell on the opposite idea of unity, of the one self, the one spirit, the one being of nature is therefore an effective remedy; but it is not by itself absolutely effective. For the ego, though it supports itself by this ego idea, aham-buddhi, finds its most powerful means for a certain obstinacy or passion of persistence in the normal action of the sense-mind, the prana and the body. To cast out of us the ego idea is not entirely possible or not entirely effective until these instruments have undergone purification; for their action being persistently egoistic and separative, the buddhi is carried away by them, --as a boat by winds on the sea, says the Gita, --the knowledge in the intelligence is being constantly obscured or lost temporarily and has to be restored again, a very labour of Sisyphus. But if the lower instruments have been purified of egoistic desire, wish, will, egoistic passion, egoistic emotion and the buddhi itself of egoistic idea and preference, then the knowledge of the spiritual truth of oneness can find a firm foundation. Till then, the ego takes all sorts of subtle forms and we imagine ourselves to be free from it, when we are really acting as its instruments and all we have attained is a certain intellectual poise which is not the true spiritual liberation.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-677
36: “For Knowledge and Love are pure in their essence and become mixed and embarrassed, corrupted and degraded only when they enter into the ambiguous movement of the life forces and are seized by them for the outward life’s crude movements and obstinately inferior motives. Alone of the three powers Life or at least a certain predominant Will-in-Life has the appearance of something impure, accursed or fallen in its very essence. At its contact, wrapped in its dull sheaths or caught in its iridescent quagmires, the divinities themselves become common and muddy and hardly escape from being dragged downwards into its perversions and disastrously assimilated to the demon and Asura. A principle of dark and dull inertia is at its base; all are tied down by the body and its needs and desires to trivial mind, petty desires and emotions, an insignificant repetition of small worthless functionings, needs, cares and occupations, pains, pleasures that lead to nothing beyond themselves and bear the stamp of an ignorance that knows not its own why and whither. The physical mind of inertia believes in no divinity other than its own small earth-gods; it aspires perhaps to a greater comfort, order, pleasure, but asks for no uplifting and no spiritual deliverance.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-170-71,
37: “For tamas is a double principle; (1) it contradicts rajas by inertia, (2) it contradicts sattwa by narrowness, obscurity and ignorance and, if either is depressed, it pours in to occupy its place.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-237,
38: “The body conditioning the physical mind insists no longer on its tamasic inertia that repeats always the same ignorant movement: it becomes a passive field and instrument of a greater force and light, it responds to every demand of the spirit’s force, holds and supports every variety and intensity of new divine experience.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-240, “When we break out from ego and physical mind into the infinity of the spirit, we still see the world and others as the mind has accustomed us to see them, as name and forms; only in our new experience of the direct and superior reality of spirit, they lose that direct objective reality and that indirect subjective reality of their own which they had to the mind. they seem to be quite opposite of the truer reality we now experience; our mentality, stilled and indifferent, no longer strives to know and make real to itself those intermediate terms which exist in them as in us and the knowledge of which has for its utility to bridge over the gulf between the spiritual self and the objective phenomena of the world.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-442, “Equally, his consciousness is a mentality emerging in a body and in a sharply individualized life; it is therefore limited in its workings and capacities and dependent on bodily organs of no great competence and on a very restricted vital force; it is separated from the rest of cosmic mind and shut out from the thoughts of other mental beings whose inner workings are a sealed book to man’s physical mind except in so far as he can read them by the analogy of his own mentality and by their insufficient bodily signs and self-expressions. His consciousness is always falling back towards the inconscience in which a large part of it is always involved, his life towards death, his physical being towards disaggregation.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-450,
39: Savitri-246,
40: “Again, enjoyment of one kind or another being the whole object of desire, that must be the trend of the desire-world; but since wherever the soul is not free, --and it cannot be free when subject to desire, --there must be the negative as well as the positive of all its experience, this world contains not only the possibility of large or intense or continuous enjoyments almost inconceivable to the physical mind, but also the possibility of equally enormous sufferings. It is here therefore that there are situated the lowest heavens and all the hells with the tradition and imagination of which the human mind has lured and terrified itself since the earliest ages. All human imaginations indeed correspond to some reality or real possibility, though they may in themselves be a quite inaccurate representation or couched in too physical images and therefore inapt to express the truth of supraphysical realities.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-452-453,
41: “If we examine the phraseology of the old books, we shall find that the waking state is consciousness of the material universe which we normally possess in this embodied existence dominated by the physical mind. The dream state is the consciousness corresponding to the subtler life-plane and mind-plane behind, which to us, even when we get intimations of them, have not the same concrete reality as the things of the physical existence. The sleep-state is the consciousness corresponding to the Supramental plane proper to the gnosis, which is beyond our experience because our causal body or envelope of gnosis is not developed in us, its faculties not active, and therefore we are in relation to that plane in a condition of dreamless sleep. The Turiya beyond is the consciousness of our pure self-existence or our absolute being with which we have no direct relations at all, whatever mental reflection we may receive in our dream or our waking or even, irrecoverably, in our sleep consciousness. This fourfold scale corresponds to the degree of the ladder of being by which we climb back towards the absolute Divine. Normally therefore we cannot get back from the physical mind to the higher planes or degrees of consciousness without receding from the waking state, without going in and away from it and losing touch with the material world. Hence to those who desire to have the experience of these higher degrees, trance becomes a desirable thing, a means of escape from the limitations of the physical mind and nature.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-520,
42: “There is a complete difference between Samadhi and normal sleep, between the dream-state of Yoga and the physical state of dream. The latter belongs to the physical mind; in the former the mind proper and subtle is at work liberated from the immixture of the physical mentality. The dreams of the physical mind are an incoherent jumble made up partly of responses to vague touches from the physical world round which the lower mind-faculties disconnected from the will and reason, the buddhi, weave a web of wandering phantasy, partly of disordered associations from the brain memory, partly of reflections from the soul travelling on the mental plane, reflections which are, ordinarily, received without intelligence, widely distorted in the reception and mixed up confusedly with the other dream elements, with brain memories and fantastic responses to any sensory touch from the physical world.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-521-522,
43: “But it loses its disturbing aspect of strong egoistic will, intolerant desire, obstinate liking. These appearances may remain for a while in a diminished form, but as the calm of equality increases, deepens, becomes more essential and compact, ghana, they disappear, cease to colour the mental and vital substance or occur only as touches on the most external physical mind, are unable to penetrate within, and at last even that recurrence, that appearance at the outer gates of mind ceases.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-724-725, “The soul flows into whatever moulds of intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, dynamic, vital and physical mind and type the developing nature takes and can act only in the way this formed Prakriti lays on it and move in its narrow groove or relative wider circle.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-741
44: “A great sincerity is asked for and has to be imposed not only on the conscious mind but still more in the subliminal part of us which is full of hidden movements. For there is there, especially in our subliminal vital nature, an incorrigible charlatan and actor. The sadhaka must first have advanced far in the elimination of desire and in the firm equality of his soul towards all workings and all happenings before he can utterly lay down the burden of his works on the Divine. At every moment he must proceed with a vigilant eye upon the deceits of the ego and the ambushes of the misleading Powers of Darkness who ever represent themselves as the one Source of Light and Truth and take on them a simulacrum of divine forms in order to capture the soul of the seeker.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-230
45 “The arrogant ignorance of the human mind and its self-satisfied perversions and presumptuous errors, the pride and vanity and ambition, the cruelty and tyranny of beast wrath and violence, the selfishness and baseness and hypocrisy and treachery and vile meanness, the lust and greed and rapacity, the jealousy, envy and bottomless ingratitude that disfigure the earth-nature are the natural children of this indispensable but strong and dangerous turn of Nature.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-234, “The wise are not always or wholly wise, the intelligent are intelligent only in patches; the saint suppresses in himself many unsaintly movements and the evil are not entirely evil: the dullest has his unexpressed or unused and undeveloped capacities, the most timorous his moments or his way of courage, the helpless and the weakling a latent part of strength in his nature.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-235
46: “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. (1) 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 proper action of each part of our instrumental being. (2) 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 higher function and gives to it an added imperfection of embarrassment, wrong direction and confusion.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-645-46, “All impurity is a confusion of working, a departure from the dharma, the just and inherently right action of things which in that right action are pure and helpful to our perfection and this departure is usually the result of an ignorant confusion of dharmas in which the function lends itself to the demand of other tendencies than those which are properly its own.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-312, “The first cause of impurity in the understanding is the intermiscence of desire in the thinking functions, and desire itself is an impurity of the Will involved in the vital and emotional parts of our being. When the vital and emotional desires interfere with the pure will-to-know, the thought function becomes subservient to them, pursues ends other than those proper to itself and its perceptions are clogged and deranged. The understanding must lift itself beyond the siege of desire and emotion and, in order that it may have perfect immunity, it must get the vital parts and the emotions themselves purified. The will to enjoy is proper to the vital being but not the choice or the reaching after the enjoyment which must be determined and acquired by higher functions; therefore the vital being must be trained to accept whatever gain or enjoyment comes to it in the right functioning of life in obedience to the working of the divine Will and to rid itself of craving and attachment. Similarly the heart must be freed from subjection to the cravings of the life-principle and the senses and thus rid itself of the false emotions of fear, wrath, hatred, lust, etc. which constitute the chief impurity of the heart.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-313
47: “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, -- (1) 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. (2) 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, (1) wrong form of action and (2) 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.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-646
48: “The way of integral knowledge supposes that we are intended to arrive at an integral self-fulfilment and the only thing that is to be eliminated is our unconsciousness, the Ignorance and the results of Ignorance. Eliminate the falsity of the being which figures as the ego; then our true being can manifest in us. Eliminate the falsity of the life which figures as mere vital craving and the mechanical round of our corporeal existence; our true life in the power of the Godhead and the joy of the Infinite will appear. Eliminate the falsity of the senses with their subjection to material shows and to dual sensations; there is a greater sense in us that can open through these to the Divine in things and divinely reply to it. Eliminate the falsity of the heart with its turbid passions and desires and its dual emotions; a deeper heart in us can open with its divine love for all creatures and its infinite passion and yearning for the responses of the Infinite. Eliminate the falsity of thought with its imperfect mental constructions, its arrogant assertions and denials, its limited and exclusive concentrations; a greater felicity of knowledge is behind that can open to the true Truth of God and the soul and Nature and the universe.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-291-92
49: “Desire is at once (1) the motive of our actions, (2) our lever of accomplishment and (3) the bane of our existence. If our sense-mind, emotional mind, thought mind could act free from the intrusions and importations of the life-energy, if that energy could be made to obey their right action instead of imposing its own yoke on our existence, all human problems would move harmoniously to their right solution. The proper function of the life-energy is to do what it is bidden by the divine principle in us, to reach to and enjoy what is given to it by that indwelling Divine and not the desire at all.” CWSA/23/The Synthesis of Yoga-350-51,
50: CWSA-36/Autobiographical Notes/p-229,
51: The Mother’s Agenda /August-31/1965,
52: TMCW-12/On Education/p-133,
53: CWSA-19/Essays on the Gita/p-544,
The Most Difficult Task of Integral Education
“Her task no ending knows; she serves no aim
But labours driven by a nameless Will
That came from some unknowable formless Vast.
This is her secret and impossible task
To catch the boundless in a net of birth,
To cast the spirit into the physical form,
To lend speech and thought to the ineffable ;
She is pushed to reveal the ever Unmanifest.
Yet by her skill the impossible has been done:”
Savitri-177
“(1) Ordinarily the supramental knowledge will be organised first and with the most ease in the processes of pure thought and knowledge, jnana, because here the human mind has already the upward tendency and is the most free. (2) Next and with less ease it will be organised in the processes of applied thought and knowledge because there the mind of man is at once most active and most bound and wedded to its inferior methods. (3) The last and most difficult conquest, because this is now to his mind a field of conjecture or a blank, will be the knowledge of the three times, trikaladristi.”¹
Sri Aurobindo
“But it is also possible to make this silence of the mind and ability to suspend the habits of the lower nature a first step towards the discovery of a superior formulation, a higher grade of the status and energy of our being and pass by an ascent and transformation into the supramental power of the spirit. And this may even, though with more difficulty, be done without resorting to the complete state of quietude of the normal mind by a persistent and progressive transformation of all the mental into their greater corresponding supramental powers and activities.”⁹
Sri Aurobindo
The relatively easier task of a Supramental man and difficult task of mental men is permanent ascent of Consciousness to highest Sachchidananda state; his more difficult task is permanent descent of highest Sachchidananda Consciousness to physical life and earth and liberating the material vessel from the influence of tamasic, rajasic and sattwic mind; his most difficult task is the penetration of this highest Consciousness to triple time extending from beginning of creation of Subconscient plane to the period of complete Divinisation of earth life in Superconscient plane, known as All Life. Spirit has the capacity to travel ahead and back of All Time; it has the capacity of illumine the dark and twilight corners of past births and it has capacity to travel forward thousand years ahead and call down all the future Spiritual possibilities to present moment. Thus, the pace of evolution is accelerated. So to lay bare the obscurity of past of this birth and of previous many births before a Superconscient Light is identified as the most difficult task.
“A secret spirit in the Inconscient’s sleep,
A shapeless Energy, a voiceless Word,
He (Inconscient Self) was here before the elements could emerge,
Before there was light of mind (sattwic mind) or life could breathe.”
Savitri-60
“All the deep cosmic murmur falling still,
He (King Aswapati) lives in the hush before the world was born,
His soul left naked to the timeless One.”
Savitri-80
“Thus fallen, inconscient, frustrate, dense, inert,
Sunk into inanimate and torpid drowse
Earth lay, a drudge of sleep, forced to create
By a subconscient yearning memory
Left from a happiness dead before she (earth) was born,
An alien wonder on her senseless breast.”
Savitri-107
“Here mingling in man’s heart their tones and hues
Have woven his being’s mutable design,
His life a forward-rippling stream in Time,
His nature’s constant fixed mobility,
His soul a moving picture’s changeful film,
His cosmos-chaos of personality.”
Savitri-122
“It (Mystic Presence) summons the spirit’s sleeping memories
Up from subconscient depths beneath Time’s foam;
Oblivious of their flame of happy truth,
Arriving with heavy eyes that hardly see,
They come disguised as feelings and desires,
Like weeds upon the surface float awhile
And rise and sink on a somnambulist tide.”
Savitri-138-139
“Instinct was formed; in memory’s crowded sleep
The past lived on as in a bottomless sea:
Inverting into half-thought the quickened sense
She felt around for truth with fumbling hands,
Clutched to her the little she could reach and seize
And put aside in her subconscient cave.”
Savitri-145-146
“All once perceived and lived was far away;
Himself was to himself his only scene.”
Savitri-297
“A vast subliminal is man’s measureless part.
The dim Subconscient is his cavern base.
Abolished vainly in the walks of Time
Our past lives still in our unconscious selves
And by the weight of its hidden influences
Is shaped our future’s self-discovery.”
Savitri-483
“His (Avatar’s) soul must be wider than the universe
And feel eternity as its very stuff,
Rejecting the moment’s personality
Know itself older than the birth of Time,
Creation an incident in its consciousness,
Arcturus and Belphegor grains of fire
Circling in a corner of its boundless self,
The world’s destruction a small transient storm
In the calm infinity it has become.”
Savitri-537
“This independent (Soul), once a power supreme,
Self-born before the universe was made,
Accepting cosmos, binds himself Nature’s serf
Till he becomes her freedman — or God’s slave.”
Savitri-542
“In her beginningless infinity
Through her soul’s reaches unconfined she gazed;
She saw the undying fountains of her life,
She knew herself eternal without birth.”
Savitri-586
“She climbs to the summits where the unborn Idea
Remembering the future that must be
Looks down upon the works of labouring Force,
Immutable above the world it made.”
Savitri-632
The special privilege of an integral Yogi or the most difficult task of a Supramental man is to experience Subconscient transformation and its preliminary experiences are the purification of the past by the Spirit traveling backward. Through this journey, he will discover ‘the secret code of the history of the world’⁷ and ‘the cosmic past.’⁸ He will also travel a thousand years ahead in Superconscient plane and calls all the future possibilities to the present moment. A few such Spiritual experiences are hinted at in Savitri: -
“Her strong far-winging spirit travelled back,
Back to the yoke of ignorance and fate,
Back to the labour and stress of mortal days,
Lighting a pathway through strange symbol dreams
Across the ebbing of the seas of sleep.”
Savitri-9
“Her mind moved in a many-imaged past”
Savitri-11
“Her witness spirit stood reviewing Time.”
Savitri-11
“She must disrupt, dislodge by her soul’s force
Her past, a block on the Immortal’s road,
Make a rased ground and shape anew her fate.”
Savitri-12
“For him mind’s limiting firmament ceased above.
In the griffin forefront of the Night and Day
A gap was rent in the all-concealing vault (of King Aswapati);
The conscious ends of being went rolling back:
The landmarks of the little person fell,
The island ego joined its continent….
All the grey inhibitions were torn off
And broken the intellect’s hard and lustrous lid;
Truth unpartitioned found immense sky-room;”
Savitri-25,
“He abode at rest in indivisible Time.
As if a story long written but acted now,
In his present he held his future and his past,
Felt in the seconds the uncounted years
And saw the hours like dots upon a page.”
Savitri-33
“A fire that seemed the body of a god
Consumed the limiting figures of the past”
Savitri-81
“All we attempt in this imperfect world,
Looks forward or looks back beyond Time’s gloss
To its pure idea and firm inviolate type
In an absolute creation’s flawless skill.”
Savitri-108
“A mighty Hand then rolls the mind’s firmaments back”
Savitri-154
“Transmuted are past suffering’s memories”
Savitri-193
“Our being must move eternally through Time;
Death helps us not, vain is the hope to cease;
A secret Will compels us to endure…
Our souls are dragged as with a hidden leash,
Carried from birth to birth, from world to world,
Our acts prolong after the body’s fall
The old perpetual journey without pause.”
Savitri-197
“There is no end of seeking and of birth,
There is no end of dying and return;
The life that wins its aim asks greater aims,
The life that fails and dies must live again;
Till it has found itself it cannot cease.
All must be done for which life and death were made.”
Savitri-200
“There (Subconscient sheath) waiting its hour the future lay unknown,
There is the record of the vanished stars.”
Savitri-231
“An insect crawl preludes our glorious flight;
Our human state cradles the future god,
Our mortal frailty an immortal force.”
Savitri-240
“As far as its self-winged air-planes could fly,
Visiting the future in great brilliant raids
It reconnoitred vistas of dream-fate.”
Savitri-259
“Our spirits break free from their environment;
The future brings its face of miracle near,
Its godhead looks at us with present eyes;
Acts deemed impossible grow natural;
We feel the hero’s immortality;
The courage and the strength death cannot touch
Awake in limbs that are mortal, hearts that fail;
We move by the rapid impulse of a will
That scorns the tardy trudge of mortal time.”
Savitri-262
“Awaiting us on the Ideal’s peaks
Or guarded in our secret self unseen
Yet flashed sometimes across the awakened soul,
Hide from our lives their greatness, beauty, power.
Our present feels sometimes their regal touch,
Our future strives towards their luminous thrones:”
Savitri-263
“Untired of sameness and untired of change,
Endlessly she unrolled her moving act,”
Savitri-328
“Omnipotence, girdle with the power of God
Movements and moments of a mortal will,
Pack with the eternal might one human hour
And with one gesture change all future time.”
Savitri-345
“They felt a larger future meet their walk;
She held their hands, she chose for them their paths:”
Savitri-364
“Some lost to the person and his strip of thought
In a motionless ocean of impersonal Power,
Sat mighty, visioned with the Infinite’s light,
Or, comrades of the everlasting Will,
Surveyed the plan of past and future Time.”
Savitri-384
“He met in her regard his future’s gaze,”
Savitri-396
“The lovers met upon their different paths,
Travellers across the limitless plains of Time
Together drawn from fate-led journeyings
In the self-closed solitude of their human past,
To a swift rapturous dream of future joy
And the unexpected present of these eyes.”
Savitri-399
“Then down the narrow path where their lives had met
He led and showed to her her future world,
Love’s refuge and corner of happy solitude.
At the path’s end through a green cleft in the trees
She saw a clustering line of hermit-roofs
And looked now first on her heart’s future home,
The thatch that covered the life of Satyavan.”
Savitri-411
“The future’s road is hid from mortal sight:
He moves towards a veiled and secret face.
To light one step in front is all his hope
And only for a little strength he asks
To meet the riddle of his shrouded fate.”
Savitri-425
“And Narad slowly answered to the queen:
“What help is in prevision to the driven?
Safe doors cry opening near, the doomed pass on.
A future knowledge is an added pain,
A torturing burden and a fruitless light
On the enormous scene that Fate has built.”
Savitri-426-427
“A growing register of calamities
Is the past’s account, the future’s book of Fate:”
Savitri-440
“Carrying the world’s future on her lonely breast,”
Savitri-461,
“The past receded and the future neared:
Far now behind lay Madra’s spacious halls,”
Savitri-466
“A dream disclosed to her the cosmic past,
The crypt-seed and the mystic origins,
The shadowy beginnings of world-fate:”
Savitri-477
“All the world’s possibilities in man
Are waiting as the tree waits in its seed:
His past lives in him; it drives his future’s pace;
His present’s acts fashion his coming fate.”
Savitri-482
“Abolished vainly in the walks of Time
Our past lives still in our unconscious selves
And by the weight of its hidden influences
Is shaped our future’s self-discovery.”
Savitri-483
“Our dead past round our future’s ankles clings
And drags back the new nature’s glorious stride,”
Savitri-483
“The occult seeker into the open came:
He heard the far and touched the intangible,
He gazed into the future and the unseen;
He used the powers earth-instruments cannot use,
A pastime made of the impossible;
He caught up fragments of the Omniscient’s thought,
He scattered formulas of omnipotence.”
Savitri-486,
“The beings of the subtle realms appeared (Savitri met forces of Subliminal planes)
And scenes concealed behind our earthly scene;
She saw the life of remote continents
And distance deafened not to voices far;
She felt the movements crossing unknown minds;
The past’s events occurred before her eyes.” (Spirit travelling backward.)
Savitri-541
“So she beheld the many births of thought,
If births can be of what eternal is;
For the Eternal’s powers are like himself,
Timeless in the Timeless, in Time ever born.”
Savitri-541
“An impersonal emptiness walked and spoke in her,
Something perhaps unfelt, unseen, unknown
Guarded the body for its future work,
Or Nature moved in her old stream of force.”
Savitri-552
“The rock-gate’s heavy walls were left behind;
As if through passages of receding time
Present and past into the Timeless lapsed;
Arrested upon dim adventure’s brink,
The future ended drowned in nothingness.”
Savitri-582-583
“All things the past has made and slain were there,
Its lost forgotten forms that once had lived,
And all the present loves as new-revealed
And all the hopes the future brings had failed
Already, caught and spent in efforts vain,
Repeated fruitlessly age after age.”
Savitri-643
“Her spirit the unending future felt
And lived with all the unbeginning past.”
Savitri-716
The mind cannot travel back¹⁰ and ahead of the Present time. The traveling back of the Spirit is the swift illumination and transformation of life’s dark and obscure rooms. It will not only memorise the past events of this life and purify them but also travel back to past successive lives in which all the past negative energies/memories/events are stored preventing any Spiritual adventure ahead. These are his immediate task of Subconscient purification and transformation. This Subconscient change proceeds back with King Aswapati who ‘lives in the hush before the world was born,’³ and repeats with Satyavan, who as the ‘day bringer must walk in darkest night’⁴ and must ‘Know itself older than the birth of Time.’4 King Aswapati proceeds ahead in Superconscient world and ‘foresees the coming god’² in the worm, These going backward of the Spirit to the beginning of creation and forward to the end of perfect creation are Timeless Spirit’s capacity to manifest Divine Life in all Time. Thus, All Life becomes conscious Yoga of Nature.
OM TAT SAT
References:
1: CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-839, “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.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-892, “Behind the common idea that a Yogi can know all things and answer all questions is the actual fact that there is a plane in the mind where the memory of everything is stored and remains always in existence. All mental movements that belong to the life of the earth are memorised and registered in this plane. Those who are capable of going there and care to take the trouble, can read in it and learn anything they choose. But this region must not be mistaken for the supramental levels. And yet to reach even there you must be able to silence the movements of the material or physical mind; you must be able to leave aside all your sensations and put a stop to your ordinary mental movements, whatever they are; you must get out of the vital; you must become free from the slavery of the body. Then only you can enter into that region and see. But if you are sufficiently interested to make this effort, you can arrive there and read what is written in the earth’s memory.” TMCW-3/Questions and Answers-1929-1931/p- 94,
2: Savitri-23,
3: Savitri-80,
4: Savitri-537,
5: “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.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga-890, "In a certain state of consciousness (I no longer remember what he calls it – I think it’s in the ‘Yoga of Self-Perfection’), one is perfectly identified with the Supreme, not in his static but in his dynamic aspect, the state of becoming. In this state, everything is already there from all eternity, even though here it gives us the impression of a becoming. And Sri Aurobindo says that if you are capable of maintaining this state,127 then you know everything: all that has been, all that is and all that will be – in an absolutely simultaneous way... But you must have a firm head on your shoulders! Reading some of these chapters in ‘Self-Perfection,’ I thought it would be better if it didn’t fall into just anyone’s hands... Anyway, in this state the feeling of uncertainty completely disappears (he explains it very well)." The Mother's Agenda/April 18, 1961,
6: “His being is not shut into the succession of the moments, but has the full power of the past and ranges seeingly through the future: not shut in the limiting ego and personal mind, but lives in the freedom of the universal, in God and in all beings and all things; not in the dull density of the physical mind, but in the light of the self and the infinity of the spirit. He sees soul and mind only as a power and a movement and matter only as a resultant form of the spirit. All his thought will be of a kind that proceeds from knowledge. He perceives and enacts the things of the phenomenal life in the light of the reality of the spiritual being and the power of the dynamic spiritual essence.” CWSA/24/The Synthesis of Yoga/p-839,
7: Savitri-74,
8: Savitri-477,
9: CWSA-24/The Synthesis of Yoga-758-759,
10: “The more organised the being, the more consciously lasting it becomes. We can say in a general way that each person brings into his present life the consequences of his previous lives, without, however, preserving the memory of these lives. Apart from a few very rare exceptions, only when you are united with your psychic being and become fully conscious of it do you obtain, at the same time, the memory of past lives, which the psychic preserves in its consciousness.” The Mother/TMCW-10/On Thoughts and Aphorisms/p-97, "From a documentary standpoint, my nights are getting quite interesting. In the Yoga of Self-Perfection, Sri Aurobindo describes precisely this state you reach in which all things assume meaning and a quality of inner significance, clarification of various points, and help. From this point of view, my nights have become extraordinary. I see infinitely more things than I saw before. Before, it was very limited to a personal contact with people. Now ... In my nights, each thing and each person has the appearance, the gesture, the word or the action that describes EXACTLY his condition. It’s becoming quite interesting" The Mother's Agenda/October 2, 1960,
"In our Yoga (Integral Yoga) very often the Power descends from above and opens the Ajnachakra first, then the others in order. But it is perhaps the safest to open by concentration the heart-lotus first so as to have the psychic influence from the beginning... The psychic cannot lose its consciousness in the enjoyment of experiences; when it is in free action, it has the unfailing discrimination of which you speak. It has besides no push to outward enjoyment, though it has Ananda. It is the vital that is carried away by enjoyment and carries away with it the mind and other lower parts — and it can also cover up the psychic; but then what happens is not that the psychic loses its own.”
Sri Aurobindo
CWSA-30/Letters on Yoga-III/p-350-351
"The goal of Yoga is always hard to reach, but this one (integral Yoga) is more difficult than any other, and it is only for those who have the call, the capacity, the willingness to face everything and every risk, even the risk of failure, and the will to progress towards an entire selflessness, desirelessness and surrender."
Sri Aurobindo
CWSA-29/Letters on Yoga-27
“There is one divine Force which acts in the universe and in the individual and is also beyond the individual and the universe. The Mother stands for all these, but She is working here in the body to bring down something not yet expressed in this material world so as to transform life here—it is so that you should regard her as the Divine Shakti working here for that purpose.”
Sri Aurobindo
CWSA-32/The Mother with Letters on the Mother/-p-50
"Austerity is usually confused with self-mortification, and when someone speaks of austerities, we think of the discipline of the ascetic who, in order to avoid the arduous task of spiritualising the physical, vital and mental life, declares it incapable of transformation and casts it away ruthlessly as a useless encumbrance, as a bondage and an impediment to all spiritual progress, in any case as something incorrigible, as a load that has to be borne more or less cheerfully until Nature, or divine Grace, delivers you from it by death. At best, life on earth is a field for progress and one should take advantage of it as best one can in order to reach as soon as possible the degree of perfection which will put an end to the ordeal by making it unnecessary."
The Mother
The Mother’s Centenary Works/Vol-12/p-48
"In work too there is an austerity. It consists in not having any preferences and in doing everything one does with interest. For one who wants to grow in self-perfection, there are no great or small tasks, none that are important or unimportant; all are equally useful for one who aspires for progress and self-mastery... Whatever occupation or task falls to your lot, you must do it with a will to progress; whatever one does, one must not only do it as best one can but strive to do it better and better in a constant effort for perfection. In this way everything without exception becomes interesting, from the most material chore to the most artistic and intellectual work. The scope for progress is infinite and can be applied to the smallest thing."
The Mother
The Mother’s Centenary Works/Vol-12/p-53