CHAPTER
XXVI
The Ascent towards
Supermind
Masters of the
Truth-Light who make the Truth grow by the
Truth.
Rig Veda.1
Three powers of Speech
that carry the Light in their front ... a
triple house of peace, a triple way
of the Light.
Rig Veda.2
Four other worlds of
beauty he creates as his form when he has
grown by the Truths.
Rig Veda.3
He is born a seer with
the mind of discernment; an offspring of the
Truth, a birth set within in the
secrecy, half arisen into manifestation.
Rig Veda.4
Possessed of a vast
inspired wisdom, creators of the Light, con-
scious all-knowers,
growing in the Truth.
Rig Veda.5
Beholding the higher
Light beyond the darkness we came to the
divine Sun in the Godhead, to the
highest Light of all.
Rig Veda.6
The psychic transformation and the first stages of
the spiritual transformation are well within our conception; their perfection
would be the perfection, wholeness, consummated unity of a knowledge and
experience which is already part of things realised,
though only by a small number of human beings. But the 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 would be difficult for the
normal unillumined or untransformed mental conception
to express or enter into something
1 I. 23. 5.
2 VII. 101. 1, 2. 3 IX. 70. 1.
4
IX. 68. 5.
5 X. 66. 1. 6
I. 50. 10.
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that is based on so different a consciousness
with 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 seizable
by us. As the summits of human mind are beyond animal perception, so the
movements of Supermind are beyond the ordinary human
mental conception: 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; for then, having
experienced something akin to what is described, we could translate an
inadequate language into a figure of what we knew. If the mind cannot enter
into the nature of Supermind, it can look towards it
through these high and luminous approaches and catch some reflected impression
of the Truth, the Right, the Vast which is the native kingdom of the free
Spirit.
But even what can be
said about the intermediate consciousness must perforce be inadequate; only
certain abstract generalisations can be hazarded
which may serve for an initial light of guidance. The one enabling circumstance
here is that, however different in constitution and principle, the higher
consciousness is still, in its evolutionary form, in what we can first achieve
of it here, a supreme development of elements which are already present in ours
in however rudimentary and diminished a figure and power of themselves. It is
also a helpful fact that the logic of the process of evolutionary Nature continues,
greatly modified in some of the rules of its working but essentially the same,
in the ascension of the highest heights as in the lower beginnings; thus we can
discover and follow to a certain extent the lines of her supreme procedure. For
we have seen something of the nature and law of the transition from
intellectual to spiritual mind; from that achieved starting-point we can begin
to trace the passage to a higher dynamic degree of the new consciousness and
the farther transition from spiritual mind towards Supermind.
The indications must necessarily be very imperfect, for it is only some initial
representations of an abstract and general character that can be arrived at by
the
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method of metaphysical inquiry: the true
knowledge and description must be left to the language of the mystic and the figures,
at once more vivid and more recondite, of a direct and concrete experience.
The transition to Supermind through Overmind is a
passage from Nature as we know it into Supernature.
It is by that very fact impossible for any effort of the mere Mind to achieve;
our unaided personal aspiration and endeavour cannot reach
it: our effort belongs to the inferior power of Nature; a power of the
Ignorance cannot achieve by its own strength or characteristic or available
methods what is beyond its own domain of Nature. All the previous ascensions
have been effectuated by a secret Consciousness-Force operating first in Inconscience and then in the Ignorance: it has worked by an
emergence of its involved powers to the surface, powers concealed behind the
veil and superior to the past formulations of Nature, but even so there is
needed a pressure of the same superior powers already formulated in their full
natural force on their own planes; these superior planes create their own
foundation in our subliminal parts and from there are able to influence the
evolutionary process on the surface. Overmind and Supermind are also involved and occult in earth-Nature, but
they have no formations on the accessible levels of our subliminal inner
consciousness; there is as yet no overmind being or organised overmind nature, no supramental being or organised supermind nature acting either on our surface or in our normal
subliminal parts: for these greater powers of consciousness are superconscient to the level of our ignorance. In order that
the involved principles of Overmind and Supermind should emerge from their veiled secrecy, the
being and powers of the Superconscience must descend
into us and uplift us and formulate themselves in our being and powers; this
descent is a sine qua non of the transition and transformation.
It is conceivable indeed
that, without the descent, by a secret pressure from above, by a long
evolution, our terrestrial Nature might succeed in entering into a close
contact with the higher now superconscient planes and
a formation of subliminal Overmind might take place
behind the veil; as a result a slow
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emergence of the consciousness proper to these
higher planes might awake on our surface. It is conceivable that in this way there
might appear a race of mental beings thinking and acting not by the intellect
or reasoning and reflecting intelligence, or not mainly by it, but by an
intuitive mentality which would be the first step of an ascending change; this
might be followed by an overmentalisation which would
carry us to the borders beyond which lies the Supermind
or divine Gnosis. But this process would inevitably be a long and toilsome endeavour of Nature. There is a possibility too that what
would be achieved might only be an imperfect superior mentalisation;
the new higher elements might strongly dominate the consciousness, but they
would be still subjected to a modification of their action by the principle of
an inferior mentality: there would be a greater expanded and illuminating
knowledge, a cognition of a higher order; but it would still undergo a mixture
subjecting it to the law of the Ignorance, as Mind undergoes
limitation by the law of Life and Matter. For a real transformation there must
be a direct and unveiled intervention from above; there would be necessary too
a total submission and surrender of the lower consciousness, a cessation of its
insistence, a will in it for its separate law of action to be completely
annulled by transformation and lose all rights over our being. If these two
conditions can be achieved even now by a conscious call and will in the spirit
and a participation of our whole manifested and inner being in its change and
elevation, the evolution, the transformation can take place by a comparatively
swift conscious change; the supramental
Consciousness-Force from above and the evolving Consciousness-Force from behind
the veil acting on the awakened awareness and will of the mental human being
would accomplish by their united power the momentous transition. There would be
no farther need of a slow evolution counting many millenniums for each step,
the halting and difficult evolution operated by Nature in the past in the unconscious
creatures of the Ignorance.
It is a first condition
of this change that the mental Man we now are should become inwardly aware and
in possession of his own deeper law of being and its processes; he must become
the psychic and inner mental being master of his energies, no longer
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a slave of the movements of the lower Prakriti, in control of it, seated securely in a free
harmony with a higher law of Nature. An increasing control of the individual
over his own action of nature, a more and more conscious participation in the action
of universal Nature, is a marked character, it is indeed a logical consequence,
of the evolutionary principle and process. All action, all mental, vital,
physical activities in the world are the operation of a universal Energy, a Consciousness-Force
which is the power of the Cosmic Spirit working out the cosmic and individual
truth of things. But since this creative Consciousness assumes in Matter a mask
of inconscience and puts on the surface appearance of
a blind universal Force executing a plan or organisation
of things without seeming to know what it is doing, the first result is kin to this
appearance; it is the phenomenon of an inconscient
physical individualisation, a creation not of beings
but of objects. These are formed existences with their own qualities,
properties, power of being, character of being; but Nature's plan in them and organisation of them have to be worked out mechanically
without any beginning of participation, initiation or conscious awareness in
the individual object which emerges as the first dumb result and inanimate
field of her action and creation. In animal life the Force begins to become
slowly conscious on the surface and puts forth the form, no longer of an object,
but of an individual being; but this imperfectly conscious individual, although
it participates, senses, feels, yet only works out what the Force does in it
without any clear intelligence or observation of what is being done; it seems
to have no other choice or will than that which is imposed on it by its formed
nature. In human mind there is the first appearance of an observing
intelligence that regards what is being done and of a will and choice that have
become conscious; but the consciousness is still limited and superficial: the
knowledge also is limited and imperfect, it is a partial intelligence, a half understanding,
groping and empirical in great part or, if rational, then rational by
constructions, theories, formulas. There is not as yet a luminous seeing which
knows things by a direct grasp and arranges them with a spontaneous precision according
to the seeing, according to the scheme of their inherent truth; although
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there is a certain element of instinct and
intuition and insight which has some beginning of this power, the normal
character of human intelligence is an inquiring reason or reflective thought
which observes, supposes, infers, concludes, arrives by labour
at a constructed truth, a constructed scheme of knowledge, a deliberately
arranged action of its own making. Or rather this is what it strives to be and
partly is; for its knowledge and will are constantly invaded, darkened or
frustrated by forces of the being which are half-blind instruments of the
mechanism of Nature.
This is evidently not
the utmost of which consciousness is capable, not its last evolution and
highest summit. A greater and more intimate intuition must be possible which
would enter into the heart of things, be in luminous identity with the movements
of Nature, assure to the being a clear control of his life or at least a
harmony with his universe. It is only a free and entire intuitive consciousness
which would be able to see and to grasp things by direct contact and
penetrating vision or a spontaneous truth-sense born of an underlying unity or
identity and arrange an action of Nature according to the truth of Nature. This
would be a real participation by the individual in the working of the universal
Consciousness-Force; the individual Purusha would
become the master of his own executive energy and at the same time a conscious
partner, agent, instrument of the Cosmic Spirit in the working of the universal
Energy: the universal Energy would work through him, but he also would work
through her and the harmony of the intuitive truth would make this double
working a single action. A growing conscious participation of this higher and
more intimate kind must be one accompaniment of the transition from our present
state of being to a state of Supernature.
A harmonious other-world
in which an intuitive mental intelligence of this kind and its control would be
the rule, is conceivable; but in our plane of being, owing to the original
intention and past history of the evolutionary plan, such a rule and control
could with difficulty be stabilised and it is not
likely that it could be complete, final and definitive. For an intuitive mentality
intervening in a mixed mental, vital, physical consciousness would normally be
forced to undergo a mixture with the inferior
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stuff of consciousness already evolved; in order
to act on it, it would have to enter into it and, entering in it, would get entangled
in it, penetrated by it, affected by the separative
and partial character of our mind's action and the limitation and restricted
force of the Ignorance. The action of intuitive intelligence is keen and
luminous enough to penetrate and modify, but not large and whole enough to
swallow up into itself and abolish the mass of the Ignorance and Inconscience; it could not effect an entire transformation
of the whole consciousness into its own stuff and power. Still, even in our
present state, a participation of a kind is there and our normal intelligence
is sufficiently awake for the universal Conscious-Force to work through it and
allow the intelligence and will to exercise a certain amount of direction of
inner and outer circumstance, fumbling enough and at every moment dogged by
error, capable only of a limited effect and power, not commensurate with the
larger totality of her vast operations. In the evolution towards Supernature, this initial power of conscious participation
in the universal working would enlarge in the individual into a more and more
intimate and extended vision of her workings in himself, a sensitive perception
of the course she was taking, a growing understanding or intuitive idea of the
methods that had to be followed for a more rapid and more conscious
self-evolution. As his inner psychic or occult inner mental being came more to
the front, there would be a strengthened power of choice, of sanction, a beginning
of authentic free will which would grow more and more effective. But this free
will would be mostly in relation to his own workings of Nature; it would mean
only a freer, fuller and more immediately perceptive control of the motions of
his own being: even there it could not be at first completely free, so long as
it was imprisoned in the limits created by its own formations or combated by
imperfection due to a mixture of the old and the new consciousness. Still there
would be an increasing mastery and knowledge and an opening to a higher being
and a higher nature.
Our notion of free will
is apt to be tainted with the excessive individualism of the human ego and to
assume the figure of an independent will acting on its own isolated account, in
a complete liberty without any determination other than its own choice and
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single unrelated movement. This idea ignores the
fact that our natural being is a part of cosmic Nature and our spiritual being
exists only by the supreme Transcendence. Our total being can rise out of
subjection to fact of present Nature only by an identification with a greater
Truth and a greater Nature. The will of the individual, even when completely
free, could not act in an isolated independence, because the individual being
and nature are included in the universal Being and Nature and dependent on the
all-overruling Transcendence. There could indeed be in the ascent a dual line.
On one line the being could feel and behave as an independent self-existence
uniting itself with its own impersonal Reality; it could, so self-conceived, act
with a great force, but either this action would be still within an enlarged
frame of its past and present self-formation of power of Nature or else it
would be the cosmic or supreme Force that acted in it and there would be no
personal initiation of action, no sense therefore of individual free will but
only of an impersonal cosmic or supreme Will or Energy at its work. On the
other line the being would feel itself a spiritual instrument and so act as a
power of the Supreme Being, limited in its workings only by the potencies of
the Supernature, which are without bounds or any
restriction except its own Truth and self-law, and by the Will in her. But in
either case there would be, as the condition of a freedom from the control of a
mechanical action of Nature-forces, a submission to a greater conscious Power
or an acquiescent unity of the individual being with its intention and movement
in his own and in the world's existence.
For the action of a new
power of being in a higher range of consciousness might, even in its control on
outer Nature, be extraordinarily effective, but only because of its light of
vision and a consequent harmony or identification with the cosmic and transcendent
Will; for it is when it becomes an instrumentation of a higher instead of a
lower Power that the will of the being becomes free from a mechanical
determinism by action and process of cosmic Mind-Energy, Life-Energy,
Matter-Energy and an ignorant subjection to the
drive of this inferior Nature. A power of initiation, even of an individual overseeing
of world-forces could be there; but it would be an instrumental initiation, a
delegated
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overseeing: the choice of the individual would
receive the sanction of the Infinite because it was itself an expression of
some truth of the Infinite. Thus the individuality would become more and more
powerful and effective in proportion as it realized itself as a centre and
formation of the universal and transcendent Being and Nature. For as the
progression of the change proceeded, the energy of the liberated individual
would be no longer the limited energy of mind, life and body, with which it started;
the being would emerge into and put on,—even as there would emerge in him and
descend into him, assuming him into it,—a greater light of Consciousness and a
greater action of Force: his natural existence would be the instrumentation of a
superior Power, an overmental and supramental
Consciousness-Force, the power of the original Divine Shakti.
All the processes of the evolution would be felt as the action of a supreme and
universal Consciousness, a supreme and universal Force working in whatever way
it chose, on whatever level, within whatever self-determined limits, a
conscious working of the transcendent and cosmic Being, the action of the
omnipotent and omniscient World-Mother raising the being into herself, into her
Supernature. In place of the Nature of Ignorance with
the individual as its closed field and unconscious or half-conscious
instrument, there would be a Supernature of the
divine Gnosis and the individual soul would be its conscious, open and free
field and instrument, a participant in its action, aware of its purpose and
process, aware too of its own greater Self, the universal, the transcendent
Reality, and of its own Person as illimitably one with that and yet an
individual being of Its being, an instrument and a spiritual centre.
A first opening towards
this participation in an action of Supernature is a
condition of the turn towards the last, the supramental
transformation: for this transformation is the completion of a passage from the
obscure harmony of a blind automatism with which Nature sets out to the
luminous authentic spontaneity, the infallible motion of the self-existent
truth of the Spirit. The evolution begins with the automatism of Matter and of
a lower life in which all obeys implicitly the drive of Nature, fulfils
mechanically its law of being and therefore succeeds in
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maintaining a harmony of its limited type of
existence and action; it proceeds through the pregnant confusion of the mind
and life of a humanity driven by this inferior Nature but struggling to escape
from her limitations, to master and drive and use her; it emerges into a
greater spontaneous harmony and automatic self-fulfilling action founded on the
spiritual Truth of things. In this higher state the consciousness will see that
Truth and follow the line of its energies with a full knowledge, with a strong
participation and instrumental mastery, a complete delight in action and
existence. There will be a luminous and enjoyed perfection of unity with all
instead of a blind and suffered subjection of the individual to the universal,
and at every moment the action of the universal in the individual and the
individual in the universal will be enlightened and governed by the rule of the
transcendent Supernature.
But this highest
condition is difficult and must evidently take long to bring about; for the
participation and consent of the Purusha to the
transition is not sufficient, there must be also the consent and participation
of the Prakriti. It is not only the central thought
and will that have to acquiesce, but all the parts of our being must assent and
surrender to the law of the spiritual Truth; all has to learn to obey the
government of the conscious Divine Power in the members. There are obstinate difficulties
in our being, born of its evolutionary constitution, which militate against
this 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 the 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
the natural man, the old functionings 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
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desire, the mind is attached to its own formed
movements, and both are willingly obedient to the inferior law of the Ignorance.
And yet the law of participation and the law of surrender are imperative; at
each step of the transition the assent of the Purusha
is needed and there must be too the consent of each part of the nature to the
action of the higher power for its change. There must be then a conscious
self-direction of the mental being in us towards this change, this substitution
of Supernature for the old nature, this
transcendence. The rule of conscious obedience to the higher truth of the
spirit, the surrender of the whole being to the light and power that come from
the Supernature, is a second condition which has to
be accomplished slowly and with difficulty by the being itself before the supramental transformation can become at all possible.
It
follows that the psychic and the spiritual transformation must be far advanced,
even as complete as may be, before there can be any beginning of the third and
consummating supramental change; for it is only by
this double transmutation that the self-will of the Ignorance can be totally
altered into a spiritual obedience to the remoulding
truth and will of the greater Consciousness of the Infinite. A long, difficult stage
of constant effort, energism, austerity of the
personal will, tapasyā,
has ordinarily to be traversed before a more decisive stage can be reached in
which a state of self-giving of all the being to the Supreme Being and the
Supreme Nature can become total and absolute. There has to be a preliminary
stage of seeking and effort with a central offering or self-giving of the heart
and soul and mind to the Highest and a later mediate stage of total conscious
reliance on its greater Power aiding the personal endeavour;
that integral reliance again must grow into a final complete abandonment of
oneself in every part and every movement to the working of the higher Truth in
the nature. The totality of this abandonment can only come if the psychic
change has been complete or the spiritual transformation has reached a very
high state of achievement. For it implies a giving up by the mind of all its
moulds, ideas, mental formations, of all opinion, of all its habits of
intellectual observation and judgment to be replaced first by an intuitive and
then by an overmind or supramental
functioning
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which inaugurates the action of a direct
Truth-Consciousness, Truth-sight, Truth-discernment, a new consciousness which
is in all its ways quite foreign to our mind's present nature. There is
demanded too a similar giving up by the vital of its cherished desires,
emotions, feelings, impulses, grooves of sensation, forceful mechanism of
action and reaction to be replaced by a luminous, desireless,
free and yet automatically self-determining force, the force of a centralised universal and impersonal knowledge, power,
delight of which the life must become an instrument and an epiphany, but of
which it has at present no inkling and no sense of its greater joy and strength
for fulfilment. Our physical part has to give up its
instincts, needs, blind conservative attachments, settled grooves of nature,
its doubt and disbelief in all that is beyond itself, its faith in the
inevitability of the fixed functionings of the
physical mind, the physical life and the body, that they may be replaced by a new
power which establishes its own greater law and functioning in form and force
of Matter. Even the inconscient and subconscient have to become conscient
in us, susceptible to the higher light, no longer obstructive to the fulfilling
action of the Consciousness-Force, but more and more a mould and lower basis of
the Spirit. These things cannot be done so long as either mind, life or
physical consciousness are the leading powers of being or have any dominance.
The admission of such a
change can only be brought about by a full
emergence of the soul and inner being, the dominance of the psychic and
spiritual will and a long working of their light and power on the parts of the
being, a psychic and spiritual remoulding of the
whole nature.
A 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,—is another
necessary condition for the supramental change. It
would be chimerical to hope that the supreme Truth-Consciousness can establish
itself in the narrow formulation of our surface mind and heart and life,
however turned towards spirituality. All the inner
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centres must have burst open
and released into action their capacities; the psychic entity must be unveiled
and in control. If this first change establishing the being in the inner and
larger, a Yogic in place of an ordinary consciousness has not been done, the
greater transmutation is impossible. Moreover the individual must have
sufficiently universalised himself, he must have
recast his individual mind in the boundlessness of a cosmic mentality, enlarged
and vivified his individual life into the immediate sense and direct experience
of the dynamic motion of the universal life, opened up the communications of
his body with the forces of universal Nature, before he can be capable of a
change which transcends the present cosmic formulation and lifts him beyond the
lower hemisphere of universality into a consciousness belonging to its
spiritual upper hemisphere. Besides he must have already become aware of what
is now to him superconscient; he must be already a being
conscious of the higher spiritual Light, Power, Knowledge, Ananda,
penetrated by its descending influences, new-made by a spiritual change. It is
possible for the spiritual opening to take place and its action to proceed
before the psychic is far advanced or complete; for the spiritual influence
from above can awaken, assist and complete the psychic transmutation: all that
is necessary is that there should be a sufficient stress of the psychic entity
for the spiritual higher overture to take place. But the third, the supramental change does not admit of any premature descent
of the highest Light; for it can only commence when the supramental
Force begins to act directly, and this it does not do if the nature is not ready.
For there is too great a disparity between the power of the supreme Force and
the capacity of the ordinary nature; the inferior nature would either be unable
to bear or, bearing, unable to respond and receive or, receiving, unable to assimilate.
Till Nature is ready, 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.
The spiritual evolution
obeys the logic of a successive unfolding; it can take a new decisive main step
only when the previous main step has been sufficiently conquered: even if
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certain minor stages can be swallowed up or
leaped over by a rapid and brusque ascension, the consciousness has to turn back
to assure itself that the ground passed over is securely annexed to the new
condition. It is true that the conquest of the Spirit supposes the execution in
one life or a few lives of a process that in the ordinary course of Nature
would involve a slow and uncertain procedure of centuries or even of
millenniums: but this is a question of the speed with which the steps are
traversed; a greater or concentrated speed does not eliminate the steps
themselves or the necessity of their successive surmounting. The increased
rapidity is possible only because the conscious participation of the inner
being is there and the power of the Supernature is
already at work in the half-transformed lower nature, so that the steps which
would otherwise have had to be taken tentatively in the night of Inconscience or Ignorance can now be taken in an increasing
light and power of Knowledge. The first obscure material movement of the
evolutionary Force is marked by an aeonic graduality; the movement of life-progress proceeds slowly
but still with a quicker step, it is concentrated into the figure of
millenniums; mind can still further compress the tardy leisureliness of Time
and make long paces of the centuries; but when the conscious Spirit intervenes,
a supremely concentrated pace of evolutionary swiftness becomes possible.
Still, an involved rapidity of the evolutionary course swallowing up the stages
can only come in when the power of the conscious Spirit has prepared the field
and the supramental Force has begun to use its direct
influence. All Nature's transformations do indeed wear the appearance of a
miracle, but it is a miracle with a method: her largest strides are taken over
an assured ground, her swiftest leaps are from a base that gives security and
certainty to the evolutionary saltus; a secret
all-wisdom governs everything in her, even the steps and processes that seem to
be most unaccountable.
This law of Nature's
procedure brings in the necessity of a gradation in the last transitional
process, a climbing of degrees, an unfolding of higher and higher states that
lead us from the spiritualised mind to Supermind,—a steep passage that could not be accomplished
otherwise. There are above us, we have
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seen, successive states, levels or graded powers
of being overtopping our normal mind, hidden in our own superconscient
parts, higher ranges of Mind, degrees of spiritual consciousness and
experience; without them there would be no links, no helpful intervening spaces
to make the immense ascension possible. It is indeed from these higher sources
that the secret spiritual Power acts upon the being and by its pressure brings
about the psychic transformation or the spiritual change; but in the early stages of our growth this action
is not apparent, it remains occult and unseizable. At
first what is necessary is that the pure touch of the spiritual force must
intervene in mental nature: that awakening pressure must stamp itself upon mind
and heart and life and give them their upward orientation; a subtle light or a
great transmuting power must purify, refine and uplift their motions and
suffuse them with a higher consciousness that does not belong to their own
normal capacity and character. This can be done from within by an invisible
action through the psychic entity and the psychic personality; a consciously
felt descent from above is not indispensable. The presence of the Spirit 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. The necessary turn or 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 graduality or steps or method
intervenes, the rupture with Nature can be decisive: for the law of departure,
once it is made possible, is not or need not be the same as the law of the evolutionary
transformation and perfection; it is or can be a leap, a breaking
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933
out of bonds rapid or immediate,—the spiritual
evasion is secured and its only remaining sanction is the destined fall of the body.
But if the transformation of earth life is intended, the first touch of spiritualisation must be followed by an awakening to the
higher sources and energies, a seeking for them and an enlargement and
heightening of the being into their characteristic status and a conversion of
the consciousness to their greater law and dynamic nature. This change must go step
by step, till the stair of the ascension is transcended and there is an
emergence to those greatest wide-open spaces of which the Veda speaks, the
native spaces of a consciousness which is supremely luminous and infinite.
For here there is the
same process of evolution as in the rest of the movement of Nature; there is a
heightening and widening of the consciousness, an ascent to a new level and a
taking up of the lower levels, an assumption and new integration of the existence
by a superior power of Being which imposes its own way of action and its
character and force of substance-energy on as much as it can reach of the
previously evolved parts of nature. The demand for integration becomes at this
highest stage of Nature's workings a point of cardinal importance. In the lower
grades of the ascension the new assumption, the integration into a higher
principle of consciousness, remains incomplete: the mind cannot wholly mentalise life and matter; there are considerable parts of
the life-being and the body which remain in the realm of the submental and the subconscient or
inconscient. This is one serious obstacle to the
mind's endeavour towards the perfection of the
nature; for the continued share of the submental, the
subconscient and inconscient
in the government of the activities, by bringing in another law than that of
the mental being, enables the conscious vital and the physical consciousness
also to reject the law laid upon them by the mind and to follow their own
impulses and instincts in defiance of the mental reason and the rational will
of the developed intelligence. This makes it difficult for the mind to go
beyond itself, to exceed its own level and spiritualise
the nature; for what it cannot even make fully conscious, cannot securely mentalise and rationalise, it
cannot spiritualise, since
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934
spiritualisation is a greater and more
difficult integration. No doubt, by calling in the spiritual force, it can
establish an influence and a preliminary change in some parts of the nature,
especially in the thinking mind itself and in the heart which is nearest to its
own province: but this change is not often a total perfection even within
limits and what it does achieve is rare and difficult. The spiritual
consciousness using the mind is employing an inferior means and, even though it
brings in a divine light into the mind, a divine purity, passion, ardour into the heart or imposes a spiritual law upon the
life, this new consciousness has to work within restrictions; for the most part
it can only regulate or check the lower action of the life and rigorously
control the body, but these members, even if refined or mastered, do not
receive their spiritual fulfilment or undergo a
perfection and transformation. For that it is necessary to bring in a higher
dynamic principle which is native to the spiritual consciousness and by which,
therefore, it can act in its own law and completer natural light and power and
impose them upon the members.
But even this
intervention of a new dynamic principle and this powerful imposition may take
long to succeed; for the lower parts of the being have their own rights and, if
they are to be truly transformed, they must be made to consent to their own
transformation. This is difficult to bring about because the natural propensity
of each part of us is to prefer its own self-law, its dharma, however inferior,
to a superior law or dharma which it feels to be not its own; it clings to its
own consciousness or unconsciousness, its own impulsions and reactions, its own
dynamisation of being, its own way of the delight of
existence. It clings to them all the more obstinately if that way be a
contradiction of delight, a way of darkness and sorrow and pain and suffering; for
that too has acquired its own perverse and opposite taste, rasa,
its pleasure of darkness and sorrow, its sadistic or masochistic interest in
pain and suffering. Even if this part of our being seeks better things, it is often
obliged to follow the worse because they are its own, natural to its energy,
natural to its substance. A complete and radical change can only be brought
about by bringing in
Page 935
persistently the spiritual light and intimate
experience of the spiritual truth, power, bliss into the recalcitrant elements
until they too recognise that their own way of fulfilment lies there, that they are themselves a
diminished power of the Spirit and can recover by this new way of being their
own truth and integral nature. This illumination is constantly opposed by the Forces
of the lower nature and still more by the adverse Forces that live and reign by
the world's imperfections and have laid down their formidable foundation on the
black rock of the Inconscience.
An indispensable step towards
overcoming this difficulty is the opening up of the inner being and its centres of action; for there the task that the surface mind
could not achieve begins to be more possible. The inner mind, the inner life-consciousness
and life-mind, the subtle-physical consciousness and its subtle-physical
mentality, once liberated into action, create a larger, finer, greater
mediating awareness able to communicate with the universal and with what is
above them, able also to bring to bear their power on the whole range of the
being, on the submental, on the subconscient
mind, on the subconscient life, even on the subconscience of the body: they can, though not wholly
enlighten, yet to some extent open, penetrate, work upon the fundamental Inconscience. The spiritual Light, Power, Knowledge,
Delight from above can then descend beyond the mind and heart, which are always
the easiest to reach and illumine; occupying the whole nature from top to
bottom, they can pervade more fully the life and the body and by a still
profounder impact shake the foundations of the Inconscience.
But even this larger mentalisation and vitalisation from within is still an inferior illumination:
it can lessen but it does not get rid of the Ignorance; it assails and compels
to recede but it does not overcome the powers and forces that maintain the
subtle and secret rule of the Inconscience. The
spiritual forces acting through this larger mentalisation
and vitalisation can bring in a higher light,
strength and joy; but the full spiritualisation, the completest new integration of consciousness, is at this
stage still impossible. If the inmost being, the psychic, takes charge, then
indeed a deeper mutation,
Page
936
not mental, can make the descent of spiritual
force more effective; for the totality of the conscious being will have undergone
a preliminary soul-change which emancipates mind, life, body from the snare of
their own imperfections and impurities. At this point, a greater spiritual dynamisation, the working of the higher powers of the
spiritual Mind and Overmind, can fully intervene:
they may indeed have started their work before, though only as influences; but
under the new conditions they can uplift the central being towards their own
level and commence the last new integration of the nature. These higher powers
work already in the human unspiritualised mind, but
indirectly and in a fragmentary and diminished action; they are changed into
substance and power of mind before they can work, and that substance and power
are illumined and intensified in their vibrations, exalted and ecstasised in some of their movements by this entry, but
not transformed. But when the spiritualisation begins
and, as its greater results manifest themselves,—silence of the mind, the admission
of our being into the cosmic consciousness, the Nirvana of the little ego in
the sense of universal self, the contact with the Divine Reality,—the
interventions of the higher dynamis and our openness
to them can increase, they can assume a fuller, more direct, more
characteristic power of their working, and this progression continues until
some complete and mature action of them is possible. It is then that the
turning of the spiritual towards the supramental
transformation commences; for the heightening of the consciousness to higher
and higher planes builds in us the gradation of the ascent to Supermind, that difficult and supreme passage.
It is not to be supposed
that the circumstances and the lines of the transition would be the same for all,
for here we enter into the domain of the Infinite: but, since there is behind
all of them the unity of a fundamental truth, the scrutiny of a given line of
ascent may be expected to throw light on the principle of all ascending
possibilities; such a scrutiny of one line is all that can be attempted. This
line is, as all must be, governed by the natural configuration of the stair of
ascent: there are in it many steps, for it is an incessant gradation and
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937
there is no gap anywhere; but, from the point of
view of the ascent of consciousness from our mind upwards through a rising
series of dynamic powers by which it can sublimate itself, the gradation can be
resolved into a stairway of four main ascents, each with its high level of fulfilment. These gradations may be summarily described as
a series of sublimations of the consciousness through Higher Mind, Illumined
Mind and Intuition into Overmind and beyond it; there
is a succession of self-transmutations at the summit of which lies the Supermind or Divine Gnosis. All these degrees are gnostic in their principle and power; for even at the first
we begin to pass from a consciousness based on an original Inconscience
and acting in a general Ignorance or in a mixed Knowledge-Ignorance to a consciousness
based on a secret self-existent Knowledge and first acted upon and inspired by
that light and power and then itself changed into that substance and using entirely
this new instrumentation. In themselves these grades are grades of energy-substance
of the Spirit: for it must not be supposed, because we distinguish them
according to their leading character, means and potency of knowledge, that they
are merely a method or way of knowing or a faculty or power of cognition; they
are domains of being, grades of the substance and energy of the spiritual
being, fields of existence which are each a level of the universal
Consciousness-Force constituting and organising
itself into a higher status. When the powers of any grade descend completely
into us, it is not only our thought and knowledge that are affected,—the
substance and very grain of our being and consciousness, all its states and
activities are touched and penetrated and can be remoulded
and wholly transmuted. Each stage of this ascent is therefore a general, if not
a total, conversion of the being into a new light and power of a greater
existence.
The gradation itself
depends fundamentally upon a higher or lower substance, potency, intensity of
vibrations of the being, of its self-awareness, of its delight of existence, of
its force of existence. Consciousness, as we descend the scale, becomes more
and more diminished and diluted,—dense indeed by its coarser crudity, but while
that crudity of consistence
Page 938
compacts the stuff of Ignorance, it admits less
and less the substance of light; it becomes thin in pure substance of consciousness
and reduced in power of consciousness, thin in light, thin and weak in capacity
of delight; it has to resort to a grosser thickness of its diminished stuff and
to a strenuous output of its obscurer force to arrive at anything, but this strenuousness
of effort and labour is a sign not of strength but of
weakness. As we ascend, on the contrary, a finer but far stronger and more
truly and spiritually concrete substance emerges, a greater luminosity and
potent stuff of consciousness, a subtler, sweeter, purer and more powerfully
ecstatic energy of delight. In the descent of these higher grades upon us it is
this greater light, force, essence of being and consciousness, energy of
delight that enter into mind, life, body, change and repair their diminished
and diluted and incapable substance, convert it into its own higher and
stronger dynamis of Spirit and intrinsic form and
force of reality. This can happen because all is fundamentally the same
substance, the same consciousness, the same force, but in different forms and
powers and degrees of itself: a taking up of the lower by the higher is
therefore a possible and, but for our second nature of inconscience,
a spiritually natural movement; what was put forth from the superior status is
enveloped and taken up into its own greater being and essence.
Our first decisive step
out of our human intelligence, our normal mentality, is an ascent into a higher
Mind, a mind no onger of mingled light and obscurity
or half-light, but a large clarity of the Spirit. Its basic substance is a unitarian sense of being with a powerful multiple dynamisation capable of the formation of a multitude of
aspects of knowledge, ways of action, forms and significances of becoming, of
all of which there is a spontaneous inherent knowledge. It is therefore a power
that has proceeded from the Overmind,—but with the Supermind as its ulterior origin,—as all these greater
powers have proceeded: but its special character, its activity of consciousness
are dominated by Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of Spirit-born
conceptual knowledge. An all-awareness emerging from the original identity,
carrying the
Page 939
truths the identity held in itself, conceiving
swiftly, victoriously, multitudinously, formulating and by self-power of the
Idea effectually realising its conceptions, is the
character of this greater mind of knowledge. This kind of cognition is the last
that emerges from the original spiritual identity before the initiation of a separative knowledge, base of the Ignorance; it is therefore
the first that meets us when we rise from conceptive and ratiocinative mind,
our best-organised knowledge-power of the Ignorance,
into the realms of the Spirit; it is, indeed, the spiritual parent of our
conceptive mental ideation, and it is natural that this leading power of our
mentality should, when it goes beyond itself, pass into its immediate source.
But here in this greater
Thought there is no need of a seeking and self-critical ratiocination, no
logical motion step by step towards a conclusion, no mechanism of express or
implied deductions and inferences, no building or deliberate concatenation of idea
with idea in order to arrive at an ordered sum or outcome of knowledge; for
this limping action of our reason is a movement of Ignorance searching for
knowledge, obliged to safeguard its steps against error, to erect a selective mental
structure for its temporary shelter and to base it on foundations already laid
and carefully laid but never firm, because it is not supported on a soil of
native awareness but imposed on an original soil of nescience. There is not
here, either, that other way of our mind at its keenest and swiftest, a rapid
hazardous divination and insight, a play of the searchlight of intelligence
probing into the little known or the unknown. This higher consciousness is a
Knowledge formulating itself on a basis of self-existent all-awareness and
manifesting some part of its integrality, a harmony of its significances put
into thought-form. It can freely express itself in single ideas, but its most
characteristic movement is a mass ideation, a system or totality of
truth-seeing at a single view; the relations of idea with idea, of truth with
truth are not established by logic but pre-exist and emerge already self-seen
in the integral whole. There is an initiation into forms of an ever-present but
till now inactive knowledge, not a system of conclusions from premisses or data; this thought is a self-revelation of
eternal Wisdom, not an acquired knowledge. Large aspects of truth
Page 940
come into view in which the ascending Mind, if
it chooses, can dwell with satisfaction and, after its former manner, live in them
as in a structure; but if progress is to be made, these structures can
constantly expand into a larger structure or several of them combine themselves
into a provisional greater whole on the way to a yet unachieved integrality. In
the end there is a great totality of truth known and experienced but still a
totality capable of infinite enlargement because there is no end to the aspects
of knowledge, nāstyanto vistarasya me.
This is the Higher Mind
in its aspect of cognition; but there is also the aspect of will, of dynamic
effectuation of the Truth: here we find that this greater more brilliant Mind
works always on the rest of the being, the mental will, the heart and its
feelings, the life, the body, through the power of thought, through the
idea-force. It seeks to purify through knowledge, to deliver through knowledge,
to create by the innate power of knowledge. The idea is put into the heart or
the life as a force to be accepted and worked out; the heart and life become
conscious of the idea and respond to its dynamisms and their substance begins
to modify itself in that sense, so that the feelings and actions become the
vibrations of this higher wisdom, are informed with it, filled with the emotion
and the sense of it: the will and the life impulses are similarly charged with
its power and its urge of self-effectuation; even in the body the idea works so
that, for example, the potent thought and will of health replaces its faith in
illness and its consent to illness, or the idea1 of strength calls
in the substance, power, motion, vibration of strength; the idea generates the
force and form proper to the idea and imposes it on our substance of Mind, Life
or Matter. It is in this way that the first working proceeds; it charges the whole
being with a new and superior consciousness, lays a foundation of change,
prepares it for a superior truth of existence.
It has here to be emphasised, in order to obviate a natural misconception
which can easily arise when the superior power of the higher forces is first
perceived or experienced, that these higher forces are not in their descent
immediately all-powerful as they
1The word expressin
the idea has the same power if it is
surcharged with the spiritual force; that is the rationale of the Indian use of
the mantra.
Page 941
would naturally be in their own plane of action
and in their own medium. In the evolution in Matter they have to enter into a foreign
and inferior medium and work upon it; they encounter there the incapacities of
our mind and life and body, meet with the unreceptiveness
or blind refusal of the Ignorance, experience the negation and obstruction of
the Inconscience. On their own level they work upon a
basis of luminous consciousness and luminous substance of being and are
automatically effective; but here they have to encounter an already and
strongly formed foundation of Nescience,—not only the complete nescience of
Matter, but the modified nescience of mind and heart and life. Thus the higher
Idea descending into the developed mental intelligence has even there to
overcome the barrage of a mass or system of formed ideas which belong to the
Knowledge-Ignorance and the will to persistence and self-realisation
of these ideas; for all ideas are forces and have a formative or self-effective
faculty greater or less according to the conditions,—even reducible to nil in
practice when they have to deal with inconscient
Matter, but still potential. There is thus ready-formed a power of resistance
which opposes or minimises the effects of the
descending Light, a resistance which may amount to a refusal, a rejection of
the Light, or take the shape of an attempt to impair, subdue, ingeniously
modify or adapt or perversely deform the light in order to suit it to the preconceived
ideas of the Ignorance. If the preconceived or already formed ideas are
dismissed and deprived of their right to persistence, they have still the right
of recurrence, from outside, from their prevalence in universal Mind, or they
may retire downwards into the vital, physical or subconscient
parts and from thence resurge at the least opportunity to repossess their lost
domain: for evolutionary Nature has to give this right of persistence to things
once established by her in order to bring a sufficient steadiness and solidity
to her steps. It is, moreover, the nature and claim of any Force in the
manifestation to be, to survive, to effectuate itself wherever possible and as
long as possible, and it is therefore that in a world of Ignorance all is
achieved not only through a complexus but through a
collision and struggle and intermixture of Forces. But for this highest
evolution it is essential that all mixture of
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942
Ignorance with Knowledge should be abolished;
and action and evolution through strife of forces must be replaced by an action
and evolution through a harmony of forces: but this stage can only be reached
by a last strife and an overcoming of the powers of Ignorance by the powers of
Light and Knowledge. In the lower levels of the being, in the heart and life
and body, the same phenomenon recurs and on a more intense scale; for here it
is not ideas that have to be met but emotions, desires, impulses, sensations,
vital needs and habits of the lower Nature; these, since they are less
conscious than ideas, are blinder in their response and are more obstinately
self-assertive: all have the same or a greater power of resistance and recurrence,
or take refuge in the circumconscient universal
Nature or in our own lower levels or in a seed-state in the subconscient
and from there have the power of new invasion or resurgence. This power of
persistence, recurrence, resistance of established things in Nature is always
the great obstacle which the evolutionary Force has to meet, which it has
indeed itself created in order to prevent a too rapid transmutation even when
that transmutation is its own eventual intention in things.
This obstacle will be
there,—even though it may progressively diminish,—at each stage of this greater
ascent. In order to allow at all to the higher Light an adequate entry and
force of working, it is necessary to acquire a power for quietude of the
nature, to compose, tranquillise, impress a
controlled passivity or even an entire silence on mind and heart, life and
body: but even so a continued opposition, overt and felt in the Force of the
universal Ignorance or subliminal and obscure in the substance-energy of the
individual's make of mind, his form of Life, his body of Matter, an occult
resistance or a revolt or reaffirmation of the controlled or suppressed
energies of the ignorant nature, is always possible and, if anything in the
being consents to them, they can resume dominance. A previously established
psychic control is very desirable as that creates a general responsiveness and
inhibits the revolt of the lower parts against the Light or their consent to
the claims of the Ignorance. A preliminary spiritual transformation will also
reduce the hold of the Ignorance; but neither of these influences altogether
eliminates its obstruction and limita-
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943
tion: for these preliminary
changes do not bring the integral consciousness and knowledge; the original
basis of Nescience proper to the Inconscient will
still be there needing at every turn to be changed, enlightened, diminished in
its extent and in its force of reaction. The power of the spiritual Higher Mind
and its idea-force, modified and diminished as it must be by its entrance into
our mentality, is not sufficient to sweep out all these obstacles and create
the gnostic being, but it can make a first change, a
modification that will capacitate a higher ascent and a more powerful descent
and further prepare an integration of the being in a greater Force of
consciousness and knowledge.
This greater Force is
that of the Illumined Mind, a Mind no longer of higher Thought, but of
spiritual light. Here the clarity of the spiritual intelligence, its tranquil
daylight, gives place or subordinates itself to an intense lustre,
a splendour and illumination of the Spirit: a play of
lightnings of spiritual truth and power breaks from
above into the consciousness and adds to the calm and wide enlightenment and
the vast descent of peace which characterise or accompany
the action of the larger conceptual-spiritual principle, a fiery ardour of realisation and a
rapturous ecstasy of knowledge. A downpour of inwardly visible Light very
usually envelops this action; for it must be noted that, contrary to our ordinary
conceptions, light is not primarily a material creation and the sense or vision
of light accompanying the inner illumination is not merely a subjective visual
image or a symbolic phenomenon: light is primarily a spiritual manifestation of
the Divine Reality illuminative and creative; material light is a subsequent
representation or conversion of it into Matter for the purposes of the material
Energy. There is also in this descent the arrival of a greater dynamic, a
golden drive, a luminous “enthousiasmos” of inner
force and power which replaces the comparatively slow and deliberate process of
the Higher Mind by a swift, sometimes a vehement, almost a violent impetus of
rapid transformation.
The Illumined Mind does
not work primarily by thought, but by vision; thought is here only a
subordinate movement expressive of sight. The human mind, which relies mainly
on thought, conceives that to be the highest or the main process of
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944
knowledge, but in the spiritual order thought is
a secondary and a not indispensable process. In its form of verbal thought, it can
almost be described as a concession made by Knowledge to the Ignorance, because
that Ignorance is incapable of making truth wholly lucid and intelligible to
itself in all its extent and manifold implications except through the
clarifying precision of significant sounds; it cannot do without this device to
give to ideas an exact outline and an expressive body. But it is evident that
this is a device, a machinery; thought in itself, in its origin on the higher
levels of consciousness, is a perception, a cognitive seizing of the object or
of some truth of things which is a powerful but still a minor and secondary result
of spiritual vision, a comparatively external and superficial regard of the
self upon the self, the subject upon itself or something of itself as object:
for all there is a diversity and multiplicity of the self. In mind there is a
surface response of perception to the contact of an observed or
discovered object, fact or truth and a consequent conceptual formulation of it;
but in the spiritual light there is a deeper perceptive response from the very
substance of consciousness and a comprehending formulation in that substance,
an exact figure or revelatory ideograph in the stuff of the being,—nothing more,
no verbal representation is needed for the precision and completeness of this
thought-knowledge. Thought creates a representative image of Truth; it offers
that to the mind as a means of holding Truth and making it an object of
knowledge; but the body itself of Truth is caught and exactly held in the
sunlight of a deeper spiritual sight to which the representative figure created
by thought is secondary and derivative, powerful for communication of
knowledge, but not indispensable for reception or possession of knowledge.
A consciousness that
proceeds by sight, the consciousness of the seer, is a greater power for
knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker. The perceptual power of the
inner sight is greater and more direct than the perceptual power of thought: it
is a spiritual sense that seizes something of the substance of Truth and not
only her figure; but it outlines the figure also and at the same time catches
the significance of the figure, and it can embody her with a finer and bolder revealing
outline and a larger
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945
comprehension and power of totality than
thought-conception can manage. As the Higher Mind brings a greater consciousness
into the being through the spiritual idea and its power of truth, so the
Illumined Mind brings in a still greater consciousness through a Truth-sight
and Truth-light and its seeing and seizing power. It can effect a more powerful
and dynamic integration; it illumines the thought-mind with a direct inner vision
and inspiration, brings a spiritual sight into the heart and a spiritual light
and energy into its feeling and emotion, imparts to the life-force a spiritual
urge, a truth inspiration that dynamises the action
and exalts the life-movements; it infuses into the sense a direct and total
power of spiritual sensation so that our vital and physical being can contact
and meet concretely, quite as intensely as the mind and emotion can conceive
and perceive and feel, the Divine in all things; it throws on the physical mind
a transforming light that breaks its limitations, its conservative inertia,
replaces its narrow thought-power and its doubts by sight and pours luminosity
and consciousness into the very cells of the body. In the transformation by the
Higher Mind the spiritual sage and thinker would find his total and dynamic fulfilment; in the transformation by the Illumined Mind
there would be a similar fulfilment for the seer, the
illumined mystic, those in whom the soul lives in vision and in a direct sense
and experience: for it is from these higher sources that they receive their
light and to rise into that light and live there would be their ascension to
their native empire.
But these two stages of
the ascent enjoy their authority and can get their own united completeness only
by a reference to a third level; for it is from the higher summits where dwells
the intuitional being that they derive the knowledge which they turn into
thought or sight and bring down to us for the mind's transmutation. Intuition
is a power of consciousness nearer and more intimate to the original knowledge
by identity; for it is always something that leaps out direct from a concealed
identity. It is when the consciousness of the subject meets with the
consciousness in the object, penetrates it and sees, feels or vibrates with the
truth of what it contacts, that the intuition leaps out like a spark or
lightning-flash from the shock of the meeting; or when the
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946
consciousness, even without any such meeting,
looks into itself and feels directly and intimately the truth or the truths
that are there or so contacts the hidden forces behind appearances, then also
there is the outbreak of an intuitive light; or, again, when the consciousness
meets the Supreme Reality or the spiritual reality of things and beings and has
a contactual union with it, then the spark, the flash
or the blaze of intimate truth-perception is lit in its depths. This close
perception is more than sight, more than conception: it is the result of
a penetrating and revealing touch which carries in it sight and conception as part
of itself or as its natural consequence. A concealed or slumbering identity,
not yet recovering itself, still remembers or conveys by the intuition its own
contents and the intimacy of its self-feeling and self-vision of things, its
light of truth, its overwhelming and automatic certitude.
In the human mind the
intuition is even such a truth-remembrance or truth-conveyance, or such a
revealing flash or blaze breaking into a great mass of ignorance or through a
veil of nescience: but we have seen that it is subject there to an invading
mixture or a mental coating or an interception and substitution; there is too a
manifold possibility of misinterpretation which comes in the way of the purity
and fullness of its action. Moreover, there are seeming intuitions on all
levels of the being which are communications rather than intuitions, and these
have a very various provenance, value and character. The infrarational
“mystic”, so-styled,—for to be a true mystic it is not sufficient to reject
reason and rely on sources of thought or action of which one has no
understanding,—is often inspired by such communications on the vital level from
a dark and dangerous source. In these circumstances we are driven to rely
mainly on the reason and are disposed even to control the suggestions of the
intuition,—or the pseudo-intuition, which is the more frequent phenomenon,—by
the observing and discriminating intelligence; for we feel in our intellectual
part that we cannot be sure otherwise what is the true thing and what the mixed
or adulterated article or false substitute. But this largely discounts for us
the utility of the intuition: for the reason is not in this field a reliable
arbiter, since its methods are different,
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947
tentative, uncertain, an intellectual seeking;
even though it itself really relies on a camouflaged intuition for its conclusions,—for
without that help it could not choose its course or arrive at any assured
finding,—it hides this dependence from itself under the process of a reasoned
conclusion or a verified conjecture. An intuition passed in judicial review by
the reason ceases to be an intuition and can only have the authority of the
reason for which there is no inner source of direct certitude. But even if the
mind became predominantly an intuitive mind reliant upon its portion of the
higher faculty, the co-ordination of its cognitions and its separated
activities,—for in mind these would always be apt to appear as a series of imperfectly
connected flashes,—would remain difficult so long as this new mentality has not
a conscious liaison with its suprarational source or
a self-uplifting access to a higher plane of consciousness in which an
intuitive action is pure and native.
Intuition is always an
edge or ray or outleap of a superior light; it is in
us a projecting blade, edge or point of a far-off supermind
light entering into and modified by some intermediate truth-mind substance above
us and, so modified, again entering into and very much blinded by our ordinary
or ignorant mind-substance; but on that higher level to which it is native its
light is unmixed and therefore entirely and purely veridical, and its rays are
not separated but connected or massed together in a play of waves of what might
almost be called in the Sanskrit poetic figure a sea or mass of “stable lightnings”. When this original or native Intuition begins
to descend into us in answer to an ascension of our consciousness to its level
or as a result of our finding of a clear way of communication with it, it may
continue to come as a play of lightning-flashes, isolated or in constant
action; but at this stage the judgment of reason becomes quite inapplicable, it
can only act as an observer or registrar understanding or recording the more
luminous intimations, judgments and discriminations of the higher power. To
complete or verify an isolated intuition or discriminate its nature, its
application, its limitations, the receiving consciousness must rely on another
completing intuition or be able to call down a massed intuition capable of
putting all in place. For once the process
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of the change has begun, a complete
transmutation of the stuff and activities of the mind into the substance, form
and power of Intuition is imperative; until then, so long as the process of
consciousness depends upon the lower intelligence serving or helping out or
using the intuition, the result can only be a survival of the mixed
Knowledge-Ignorance uplifted or relieved by a higher light and force acting in
its parts of Knowledge.
Intuition
has a fourfold power. A power of revelatory truth-seeing, a power of
inspiration or truth-hearing, a power of truth-touch or immediate seizing of
significance, which is akin to the ordinary nature of its intervention in our
mental intelligence, a power of true and automatic discrimination of the
orderly and exact relation of truth to truth,—these are the fourfold potencies
of Intuition. Intuition can therefore perform all the action of
reason,—including the function of logical intelligence, which is to work out
the right relation of things and the right relation of idea with idea,—but by
its own superior process and with steps that do not fail or falter. It takes up
also and transforms into its own substance not only the mind of thought, but
the heart and life and the sense and physical consciousness: already all these
have their own peculiar powers of intuition derivative from the hidden Light;
the pure power descending from above can assume them all into itself and impart
to these deeper heart-perceptions and life-perceptions and the divinations of
the body a greater integrality and perfection. It can thus change the whole consciousness
into the stuff of Intuition; for it brings its own greater radiant movement
into the will, into the feelings and emotions, the life-impulses, the action of
sense and sensation, the very workings of the body-consciousness; it recasts
them in the light and power of truth and illumines their knowledge and their
ignorance. A certain integration can thus take place, but whether it is a total
integration must depend on the extent to which the new light is able to take up
the subconscient and penetrate the fundamental Inconscience. Here the intuitive light and power may be hampered
in its task because it is the edge of a delegated and modified Supermind, but does not bring in the whole mass or body of
the identity-knowledge. The basis of Inconscience in
our nature is too vast, deep and
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solid to be altogether penetrated, turned into
light, transformed by an inferior power of the Truth-nature.
The next step of the
ascent brings us to the Overmind; the intuitional
change can only be an introduction to this higher spiritual overture. But we
have seen that the Overmind, even when it is
selective and not total in its action, is still a power of cosmic
consciousness, a principle of global knowledge which carries in it a delegated
light from the supramental Gnosis. It is, therefore,
only by an opening into the cosmic consciousness that the overmind
ascent and descent can be made wholly possible: a high and intense individual
opening upwards is not sufficient,—to that vertical ascent towards summit Light
there must be added a vast horizontal expansion of the consciousness into some
totality of the Spirit. At the least, the inner being must already have
replaced by its deeper and wider awareness the surface mind and its limited
outlook and learned to live in a large universality; for otherwise the overmind view of things and the overmind
dynamism will have no room to move in and effectuate its dynamic operations.
When the Overmind descends, the predominance of the centralising ego-sense is entirely subordinated, lost in
largeness of being and finally abolished; a wide cosmic perception and feeling
of a boundless universal self and movement replaces it: many motions that were
formerly egocentric may still continue, but they occur as currents or ripples
in the cosmic wideness. Thought, for the most part, no longer seems to
originate individually in the body or the person but manifests from above or
comes in upon the cosmic mind-waves: all inner individual sight or intelligence
of things is now a revelation or illumination of what is seen or comprehended,
but the source of the revelation is not in one's separate self but in the
universal knowledge; the feelings, emotions, sensations are similarly felt as
waves from the same cosmic immensity breaking upon the subtle and the gross
body and responded to in kind by the individual centre of the universality; for
the body is only a small support or even less, a point of relation, for the
action of a vast cosmic instrumentation. In this boundless largeness, not only
the separate ego but all sense of individuality, even of a subordinated or instrumental
individuality, may entirely disappear;
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the cosmic existence, the cosmic consciousness,
the cosmic delight, the play of cosmic forces are alone left: if the delight or
the centre of Force is felt in what was the personal mind, life or body, it is
not with a sense of personality but as a field of manifestation, and this sense
of the delight or of the action of Force is not confined to the person or the
body but can be felt at all points in an unlimited consciousness of unity which
pervades everywhere.
But there can be many
formulations of overmind consciousness and
experience; for the Overmind has a great plasticity and
is a field of multiple possibilities. In place of an uncentred
and unplaced diffusion there may be the sense of the universe in oneself or as
oneself: but there too this self is not the ego; it is an extension of a free
and pure essential self-consciousness or it is an identification with the
All,—the extension or the identification constituting a cosmic being, a universal
individual. In one state of the cosmic consciousness there is an individual
included in the cosmos but identifying himself with all in it, with the things
and beings, with the thought and sense, the joy and grief of others; in another
state there is an inclusion of beings in oneself and a reality of their life as
part of one's own being. Often there is no rule or governance of the immense
movement, but a free play of universal Nature to which what was the personal
being responds with a passive acceptance or a dynamic identity, while yet the
spirit remains free and undisturbed by any bondage to the reactions of this
passivity or this universal and impersonal identification and sympathy. But
with a strong influence or full action of the Overmind
a very integral sense of governance, a complete supporting or overruling
presence and direction of the cosmic Self or the Ishwara
can come in and become normal; or a special centre may be revealed or created
overtopping and dominating the physical instrument, individual in fact of
existence, but impersonal in feeling and recognised
by a free cognition as something instrumental to the action of a Transcendent
and Universal Being. In the transition towards the Supermind
this centralising action tends towards the discovery
of a true individual replacing the dead ego, a being who is in his essence one
with the supreme Self, one with the universe in
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extension and yet a cosmic centre and
circumference of the specialised action of the
Infinite.
These are the general
first results and create the normal foundation of the overmind
consciousness in the evolved spiritual being, but its varieties and developments
are innumerable. The consciousness that thus acts is experienced as a consciousness
of Light and Truth, a power, force, action full of Light and Truth, an
aesthesis and sensation of beauty and delight universal and multitudinous in
detail, an illumination in the whole and in all things, in the one movement and
all movements, with a constant extension and play of possibilities which is
infinite, even in its multitude of determinations endless and indeterminable.
If the power of an ordering overmind Gnosis
intervenes, then there is a cosmic structure of the consciousness and action,
but this is not like the rigid mental structures; it is plastic, organic,
something that can grow and develop and stretch into the infinite. All
spiritual experiences are taken up and become habitual and normal to the new nature;
all essential experiences belonging to the mind, life, body are taken up and spiritualised, transmuted and felt as forms of the
consciousness, delight, power of the infinite existence. Intuition, illumined
sight and thought enlarge themselves; their substance assumes a greater
substantiality, mass, energy, their movement is more comprehensive, global,
many-faceted, more wide and potent in its truth-force: the whole nature,
knowledge, aesthesis, sympathy, feeling, dynamism become more catholic,
all-understanding, all-embracing, cosmic, infinite.
The overmind
change is the final consummating movement of the dynamic spiritual
transformation; it is the highest possible status-dynamis
of the Spirit in the spiritual-mind plane. It takes up all that is in the three
steps below it and raises their characteristic workings to their highest and
largest power, adding to them a universal wideness of consciousness and force,
a harmonious concert of knowledge, a more manifold delight of being. But there
are certain reasons arising from its own characteristic status and power that
prevent it from being the final possibility of the spiritual evolution. It is a
power, though the highest power, of the lower hemisphere; although its basis is
a cosmic
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unity, its action is an action of division and
interaction, an action taking its stand on the play of the multiplicity. Its
play is, like that of all Mind, a play of possibilities; although it acts not
in the Ignorance but with the knowledge of the truth of these possibilities,
yet it works them out through their own independent evolution of their powers.
It acts in each cosmic formula according to the fundamental meaning of that
formula and is not a power for a dynamic transcendence. Here in earth-life it has
to work upon a cosmic formula whose basis is the entire nescience which results
from the separation of Mind, Life and Matter from their own source and supreme
origin. Overmind can bridge that division up to the
point at which separative Mind enters into Overmind and becomes a part of its action; it can unite
individual mind with cosmic mind on its highest plane, equate individual self
with cosmic self and give to the nature an action of universality; but it
cannot lead Mind beyond itself, and in this world of original Inconscience it cannot dynamise
the Transcendence: for it is the Supermind alone that
is the supreme self-determining truth-action and the direct power of
manifestation of that Transcendence. If then the action of evolutionary Nature
ended here, the Overmind, having carried the
consciousness to the point of a vast illumined universality and an organised play of this wide and potent spiritual awareness
of utter existence, force-consciousness and delight, could only go farther by
an opening of the gates of the Spirit into the upper hemisphere and a will to
enable the soul to depart out of its cosmic formation into Transcendence.
In the terrestrial
evolution itself the overmind descent would not be
able to transform wholly the Inconscience; all that
it could do would be to transform in each man it touched the whole conscious
being, inner and outer, personal and universally impersonal, into its own stuff
and impose that upon the Ignorance illumining it into cosmic truth and
knowledge. But a basis of Nescience would remain; it would be as if a sun and
its system were to shine out in an original darkness of Space and illumine
everything as far as its rays could reach so that all that dwelt in the light
would feel as if no darkness were there at all in their experience of
existence. But outside that sphere or expanse
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of experience the original darkness would still
be there and, since all things are possible in an overmind
structure, could reinvade the island of light created within its empire.
Moreover, since Overmind deals with different
possibilities, its natural action would be to develop the separate possibility
of one or more or numerous dynamic spiritual formulations to their utmost or
combine or harmonise several possibilities together;
but this would be a creation or a number of creations in the original terrestrial
creation, each complete in its separate existence. The evolved spiritual
individual would be there, there might evolve also a spiritual community or
communities in the same world as mental man and the vital being of the animal,
but each working out its independent existence in a loose relation within the
terrestrial formula. The supreme power of the principle of unity taking all
diversities into itself and controlling them as parts of the unity, which must
be the law of the new evolutionary consciousness, would not as yet be there.
Also by this much evolution there could be no security against the downward
pull or gravitation of the Inconscience which
dissolves all the formations that life and mind build in it, swallows all things
that arise out of it or are imposed upon it and disintegrates them into their
original matter. The liberation from this pull of the Inconscience
and a secured basis for a continuous divine or gnostic
evolution would only be achieved by a descent of the Supermind
into the terrestrial formula, bringing into it the supreme law and light and dynamis of the Spirit and penetrating with it and
transforming the inconscience of the material basis.
A last transition from Overmind to Supermind and a descent of Supermind
must therefore intervene at this stage of evolutionary Nature.
Overmind and its delegated
powers, taking up and penetrating mind and the life and body dependent upon
mind, would subject all to a greatening process; at each step of this process a
greater power and a higher intensity of gnosis less and less mixed with the
loose, diffused, diminishing and diluting stuff of mind could establish itself:
but all gnosis is in its origin power of Supermind,
so that this would mean a greater and greater influx of a half-veiled and
indirect supramental light and power into the nature.
This would continue until the point was reached
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at which Overmind
would begin itself to be transformed into Supermind;
the supramental consciousness and force would take up
the transformation directly into its own hands, reveal to the terrestrial mind,
life, bodily being their own spiritual truth and divinity and, finally, pour
into the whole nature the perfect knowledge, power, significance of the supramental existence. The soul would pass beyond the
borders of the Ignorance and cross its original line of departure from the
supreme Knowledge: it would enter into the integrality of the supramental gnosis; the descent of the gnostic
Light would effectuate a complete transformation of the Ignorance.
This or something more
largely planned on these lines might be regarded as the schematic, logical or
ideal account of the spiritual transformation, a structural map of the ascent
to the supramental summit, looked at as a succession
of separate steps, each accomplished before the passage to the next commences.
It would be as if the soul, putting forth an organized natural individuality,
were a traveller mounting the degrees of
consciousness cut out in universal Nature, each ascent carrying it totally as a
definite integer, as a separate body of conscious being, from one state of its
existence to the next in order. This is so far correct that a sufficient
integration of one status has to be complete before an ascent to the next
higher station can be entirely secure: this clear succession might also be the
course followed by a few even in the early stages of this evolution, and it
might become too a normal process after the whole stair-flight of the evolution
had been built and made safe. But evolutionary Nature is not a logical series
of separate segments; it is a totality of ascending powers of being which interpenetrate
and dovetail and exercise in their action on each other a power of mutual
modification. When the higher descends into the lower consciousness, it alters
the lower but is also modified and diminished by it; when the lower ascends, it
is sublimated but at the same time qualifies the sublimating substance and
power. This interaction creates an abundant number of different intermediate
and interlocked degrees of the force and consciousness of being, but it also
makes it difficult to bring about a complete integration of all the powers
under the full control of any one power. For this reason there is
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not actually a series of simple clear-cut and
successive stages in the individual's evolution; there is instead a complexity
and a partly determinate, partly confused comprehensiveness of the movement.
The soul may still be described as a traveler and climber who presses towards
his high goal by step on step, each of which he has to build up as an integer
but most frequently redescend in order to rebuild and
make sure of the supporting stair so that it may not crumble beneath him: but the
evolution of the whole consciousness has rather the movement of an ascending
ocean of Nature; it can be compared to a tide or a mounting flux, the leading
fringe of which touches the higher degrees of a cliff or hill while the rest is
still below. At each stage the higher parts of the nature may be provisionally
but incompletely organised in the new consciousness
while the lower are in a state of flux or formation, partly moving in the old
way though influenced and beginning to change, partly
belonging to the new kind but still imperfectly
achieved and not yet firm in the change. Another image might be that of an army
advancing in columns which annexes new ground, while the main body is still
behind in a territory overrun but too large to be effectively occupied, so that
there has to be a frequent halt and partial return to the traversed areas for
consolidation and assurance of the hold on the occupied country and
assimilation of its people. A rapid conquest might be possible, but it would be
of the nature of an encampment or a domination established in a foreign
country; it would not be the assumption, total assimilation, integration needed
for the entire supramental change.
This entails certain
consequences which modify the clear successions of the evolution and prevent it
from following the cleanly determined and firmly arranged course which our logical
intelligence demands from Nature but seldom gets from her. As Life and Mind
begin to appear when the organisation of Matter is
sufficient to admit them but the more complex and perfect organisation
of Matter comes with the evolution of Life and Mind, as Mind appears when Life
is sufficiently organised to admit of a developed
vibration of consciousness but Life receives its full organisation
and development only after Mind can act upon it, as the spiritual evolution
begins when man as Mind is
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capable of the movements of spirituality but
Mind also rises to its own highest perfection by the growth of the intensities
and luminosities of the Spirit, so it is with this higher evolution of the
ascending powers of the Spirit. As soon as there is a sufficient spiritual
development, something of intuition, illumination of the being, the movements
of the higher spiritual grades of Consciousness begins to manifest,—sometimes
one, sometimes the other or all together, and they do not wait for each power
in the series to complete itself before a higher power comes into action. An overmind light and power may descend in some sort, create a
partial form of itself in the being and take a leading part or supervise or
intervene while the intuitive and illumining Mind and higher Mind are still
incomplete; these would then remain in the whole, acting along with the greater
Power, often penetrated or sublimated by it or rising into it to form a greater
or overmind Intuition, a greater or overmind Illumination, a greater or overmind
spiritual Thinking. This intricate action takes place because each descending
power by its intensity of pressure on the nature and uplifting effect makes the
being already capable of a still higher invasion before that earlier power
itself is complete in its self-formation; but also it happens because the work
of assumption and transformation of the lower nature can with difficulty be
done if a higher and higher intervention does not take place. The Illumination
and the higher Thought need the help of the Intuition, the Intuition needs the
help of the Overmind to combat the darkness or ignorance
in which they labour and to give them their own
fullness. Still, it is not possible in the end for the overmind
status and integration to be complete until the Higher Mind and the Illumined
Mind have been integrated and taken up into the Intuition and the Intuition
itself subsequently integrated and taken up into the all-enlarging and
all-sublimating overmind energy. The law of the
gradation has to be satisfied even in the complexity of the process of
evolutionary Nature.
A further cause of
complexity arises from the need of integration itself; for the process is not
only an ascent of the soul to a higher status, but a descent of the higher
consciousness so gained to take up and transform the inferior nature. But this nature
has a density of previous formation which resists and obstructs the
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descent; even when the higher power has broken
the barrier and descended and is at work, we have seen that the nature of the
Ignorance resists and obstructs the working, that it either strives to refuse
transformation altogether or tries to modify the new power into some conformity
with its own workings, or even throws itself upon it to seize and degrade and
enslave it to its own way of action and lower purpose. Ordinarily, in their
task of assumption and assimilation of this difficult stuff of Nature, the higher powers descend first into the
mind and occupy the mind-centres because these are
nearest to themselves in intelligence and knowledge-power; if they descend
first into the heart or into the vital being of force and sensation, as they sometimes
do because these happen to be in some individuals more open and call them first,
the results are more mixed and dubious, imperfect and insecure than if things
happen in the logical order. But, even in its normal working when it takes up the
being part by part in the natural order of descent, the descending power is not
able to bring about a total occupation and transformation of each before it
goes farther. It can only effect a general and incomplete occupation, so that
the workings of each remain still partly of the new higher, partly of a mixed,
partly of the old unchanged lower order. All the mind in its whole range cannot
be transmuted at once, for the mind-centres are not a
region isolated from the rest of the being; the mind-action is penetrated by
the action of the vital and physical parts, and in those parts themselves are
lower formations of mind, a vital mind, a physical mind, and these have to be
changed before there can be an entire transformation of the mental being. The
higher transforming power has, therefore, to descend, as soon as may be and
without waiting for an integral mental change, into the heart so as to occupy
and change the emotional nature, and afterwards into the inferior vital centres to occupy and change the whole vital and kinetic
and sensational nature, and, finally, into the physical centres
so as to occupy and change the whole physical nature. But even this finality is
not final, for there are still left the subconscient
parts and the inconscient foundation. The intricacy,
the interwoven action of these powers and parts of the being is so great that
it may almost be said that in this change nothing is accomplished
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until all is accomplished. There is a tide and
ebb, the forces of the old nature receding and again partially occupying their
old dominions, effectuating a slow retreat with rear-line actions and return
attacks and aggressions, the higher influx occupying each time more conquered
territory but imperfectly sure of sovereignty so long as anything is left that
has not become part of its luminous regime.
A third complexity is
brought in by the power of the consciousness to live in more than one status at
a time; especially, a difficulty is created by the division of our being into
an inner and an outer or surface nature and the farther intricacy of a secret circumconscient or environmental consciousness in which are
determined our unseen connections with the world outside us. In the spiritual
opening, it is the awakened inner being that readily receives and assimilates
the higher influences and puts on the higher nature; the external surface self,
more entirely moulded by the forces of the Ignorance
and Inconscience, is slower to awake, slower to
receive, slower to assimilate. There is therefore a long stage in which the
inner being is sufficiently transformed but the outer is still involved in a
mixed and difficult movement of imperfect change. This disparity repeats itself
at each step of the ascent; for in each change the inner being follows more
readily, the outer limps after, reluctant or else incompetent in spite of
its aspiration and desire: this necessitates a constantly repeated labour of assumption, adaptation, orientation, a labour reproduced in new terms always but always the same
in principle. But even when the outer and the inner nature of the individual
are unified in a harmonised spiritual consciousness,
that still more external but occult part of him in which his being mixes with
the being of the outside world and through which the outside world invades his
consciousness remains a field of imperfection. There is necessarily a commerce
here between disparate influences: the inner spiritual influence is met by
quite opposite influences strong in their control of the present world-order; the
new spiritual consciousness has to bear the shock of the dominant and
established unspiritualised powers of the Ignorance.
This creates a difficulty which is of capital importance in all stages of the
spiritual evolution and its urge towards a change of the nature.
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A subjective spirituality can be established
which refuses or minimises commerce with the world or
is content to witness its action and throw back or throw out its invading
influences without allowing any reaction to them or admitting their intrusion:
but if the inner spirituality is to be objectivised
in a free world-action, if the individual has to project himself into the world
and in a sense take the world into himself, this cannot be dynamically done
without receiving the world-influences through one's own circumconscient
or environmental being. The spiritual inner consciousness has then to deal with
these influences in such a way that, as soon as they approach or enter, they
become either obliterated and without result or transformed by their very entry
into its own mode and substance. Or it may force them to receive the spiritual influence
and return with a transforming power on the world they come from, for such a
compulsion on the lower universal Nature is part of a perfect spiritual action.
But for that the circumconscient or environmental
being must be so steeped in the spiritual light and spiritual substance that
nothing can enter into it without undergoing this transformation: the invading external
influences have not to bring in at all their lower awareness, their lower
sight, their lower dynamism. But this is a difficult perfection, because
ordinarily the circumconscient is not wholly our own
formed and realised self but ourself
plus the external world-nature. It is, for this reason, always easier to spiritualise the inner self-sufficient parts than to
transform the outer action; a perfection of introspective, indwelling or
subjective spirituality aloof from the world or self-protected against it is
easier than a perfection of the whole nature in a dynamic, kinetic spirituality
objectivised in the life, embracing the world, master
of its environment, sovereign in its commerce with world-nature. But since the
integral transformation must embrace fully the dynamic being and take up into
it the life of action and the world-self outside us, this completer change is
demanded of the evolving nature.
The essential difficulty
comes from the fact that the substance of our normal being is moulded out of the Inconscience. Our
ignorance is a growth of knowledge in a substance of being which is nescient;
the consciousness it develops, the knowledge it
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establishes are always dogged, penetrated,
enveloped by this nescience. It is this substance of nescience that has to be transformed
into a substance of superconscience, a substance in
which consciousness and a spiritual awareness are always there even when they
are not active, not expressed, not put into form of knowledge. Till that is
done, the nescience invades or encompasses or even swallows up and absorbs into
its oblivious darkness all that enters into it; it compels the descending light
to compromise with the lesser light it enters: there is a mixture, a diminution
and dilution of itself, a diminution, a modification, an incomplete
authenticity of its truth and power. Or, at the least, the nescience limits its
truth and circumscribes its force, segments its applicability and its range;
its truth of principle is barred from a full truth of individual realisation or from an achieved truth of cosmic practice.
Thus love as a law of life can affirm itself practically as an inner active
principle; but unless it occupies the whole substance of being, the entire
individual feeling and action cannot be moulded by
the law of love: even if perfected in the individual, it can be rendered
unilateral and ineffective by the general nescience which is blind to it and
hostile, or it is forced to circumscribe its range of cosmic application. A
full action in harmony with a new law of the being is always difficult in human
nature; for in the substance of the Inconscience
there is a self-protective law of blind imperative Necessity which limits the
play of the possibilities that emerge from it or enter into it and prevents
them from establishing their free action and result or realising
the intensity of their own absolute. A mixed, relative, curbed and diminished
play is all that is conceded to them: otherwise they would cancel the frame of Inconscience and violently perturb without effectively
changing the basis of the world-order; for none of them have in their mental or
vital play the divine power to replace this dark original principle and organise a totally new world-order.
A transformation of
human nature can only be achieved when the substance of the being is so steeped
in the spiritual principle that all its movements are a spontaneous dynamism
and a harmonised process of the Spirit. But even when
the higher powers and their intensities enter into the substance of the
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Inconscience, they are met by this
blind opposing Necessity and are subjected to this circumscribing and
diminishing law of the nescient substance. It opposes them with its strong
titles of an established and inexorable Law, meets always the claim of life
with the law of death, the demand of Light with the need of a relief of shadow
and a background of darkness, the sovereignty and freedom and dynamism of the
Spirit with its own force of adjustment by limitation, demarcation by incapacity,
foundation of energy on the repose of an original Inertia. There is an occult
truth behind its negations which only the Supermind
with its reconciliation of contraries in the original Reality can take up and
so discover the pragmatic solution of the enigma. Only the supramental
Force can entirely overcome this difficulty of the fundamental Nescience; for
with it enters an opposite and luminous imperative Necessity which underlies
all things and is the original and final self-determining truth-force of the
self-existent Infinite. This greater luminous spiritual Necessity and its
sovereign imperative alone can displace or entirely penetrate, transform into
itself and so replace the blind Ananke of the Inconscience.
A supramental
change of the whole substance of the being and therefore necessarily of all its
characters, powers, movements takes place when the involved Supermind
in Nature emerges to meet and join with the supramental
light and power descending from Supernature. The
individual must be the instrument and first field of the transformation; but an
isolated individual transformation is not enough and may not be wholly
feasible. Even when achieved, the individual change will have a permanent and
cosmic significance only if the individual becomes a centre and a sign for the
establishment of the supramental Consciousness-Force
as an overtly operative power in the terrestrial workings of Nature,—in the
same way in which thinking Mind has been established through the human
evolution as an overtly operative power in Life and Matter. This would mean the
appearance in the evolution of a gnostic being or Purusha and a gnostic Prakriti, a gnostic Nature.
There must be an emergent supramental
Consciousness-Force liberated and active within the terrestrial whole and an organised supramental instrumentation
of the Spirit in the
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life and the body,—for the body-consciousness
also must become sufficiently awake to be a fit instrument of the workings of
the new supramental Force and its new order. Till
then any intermediate change could be only partial or insecure; an overmind or intuitive instrumentation of Nature could be
developed, but it would be a luminous formation imposed on a fundamental and
environmental Inconscience. A supramental
principle and its cosmic operation once established permanently on its own
basis, the intervening powers of Overmind and
spiritual Mind could found themselves securely upon it and reach their own
perfection; they would become in the earth-existence a hierarchy of states of
consciousness rising out of Mind and physical life to the supreme spiritual
level. Mind and mental humanity would remain as one step in the spiritual evolution;
but other degrees above it would be there formed and accessible by which the
embodied mental being, as it became ready, could climb into the gnosis and
change into an embodied supramental and spiritual
being. On this basis the principle of a divine life in terrestrial Nature would
be manifested; even the world of ignorance and inconscience
might discover its own submerged secret and begin to realise
in each lower degree its divine significance.
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