SECTION TWO
Transformation of the Mind
THERE is no reason why one should not
receive through the āhinking mind, as one receives through the vital, the
emotional and the body. The thinking mind is as capable of receiving as these
are, and, since it has to be transformed as well as the rest, it must be
trained to receive, otherwise no transformation of it could take place.
It is the ordinary unenlightened activity of the intellect
that is an obstacle to spiritual experience, just as the ordinary unregenerated
activity of the vital or the obscure stupidly obstructive consciousness of the
body is an obstacle. What the sadhak has to be specially warned against in the
wrong processes of the intellect is, first, any mistaking of mental ideas and
impressions or intellectual conclusions for realisation; secondly, the restless
activity of the mere mind which disturbs the spontaneous accuracy of psychic
and spiritual experience and gives no room for the descent of the true illuminating
knowledge or else deforms it as soon as it touches or even before it fully
touches the human mental plane. There are also of course the usual vices of the
intellect, – its leaning towards sterile doubt instead of luminous reception
and calm enlightened discrimination; its arrogance claiming to judge things
that are beyond it, unknown to it, too deep for it by standards drawn from its
own limited experience; its attempts to explain the supraphysical by the
physical or its demand for the proof of higher and occult things by the
criteria proper to Matter and mind in Matter; others also too many to enumerate
here. Always it is substituting its own representations and constructions and
opinions for the true knowledge. But if the intellect is surrendered, open,
quiet, receptive, there is no reason why it should not be a means of reception
of the Light or an aid to the experience of spiritual states and to the
fullness of an inner change.
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To
have a developed intellect is always helpful if one can enlighten it from above
and turn it to a divine use.
The
turmoil of mental (intellectual) activity has also to be silenced like the
vital activity of desire in order that the calm and peace may be complete.
Knowledge has to come but from above. In this calm the ordinary mental
activities like the ordinary vital activities become surface movements with
which the silent inner self is not connected. It is the liberation necessary in
order that the true knowledge and the true life-activity may replace or
transform the activities of the Ignorance.
Intellectual
activities are not part of the inner being – the intellect is the outer mind.
The
intellect can be as great an obstacle as the vital when it chooses to prefer
its own constructions to the Truth.
Intellect
is part of Mind and an instrument of half-truth like the rest of the Mind.
What
you have said is perfectly right. To see the Truth does not depend on a big
intellect or a small intellect. It depends on being in contact with the Truth
and the mind silent and quiet to receive it. The biggest intellects can make
errors of the worst kind and confuse Truth and Falsehood, if they have not the
contact with the Truth or the direct experience.
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Its
[the intellect's] function is to reason from the perceptions of the mind and
senses, to form conclusions and to put things in logical relation with each
other. A well-trained intellect is a good preparation of the mind for greater
knowledge, but it cannot itself give the yogic knowledge or know the Divine –
it can only have ideas about the Divine, but having ideas is not knowledge. In
the course of the sadhana intellect has to be transformed into the higher mind
which is itself a passage towards the true knowledge.
The
intellect of most men is extremely imperfect, ill-trained, half-developed –
therefore in most the conclusions of the intellect are hasty, ill-founded and
erroneous or, if right, right more by chance than by merit or right working.
The conclusions are formed without knowing the facts or the correct or
sufficient data, merely by a rapid inference and the process by which it comes
from the premisses to the conclusions is usually illogical or faulty – the
process being unsound by which the conclusion is arrived at, the conclusion is
also likely to be fallacious. At the same time the intellect is usually
arrogant and presumptuous, confidently asserting its imperfect conclusions as
the truth and setting down as mistaken, stupid or foolish those who differ from
them. Even when fully trained and developed, the intellect cannot arrive at
absolute certitude or complete truth, but it can arrive at one aspect or side
of it and make a reasonable or probable affirmation; but untrained, it is a
quite insufficient instrument, at once hasty and peremptory and unsafe and
unreliable.
The
mind does not record things as they are, but as they appear to it. It catches
parts, omits others; afterwards the memory and imagination mix together and
make a quite different representation of it.
It
is not any weakness of the will or the result of passivity, but an
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overhaste
of decision upon a mental impulse. That is the usual movement of the mind – and
it is sometimes the fruit of a certain kind of sattwic zeal. But owing to the
haste there is not sufficient time taken to see the opposite side, the defects
of the decision taken, or the possible objection that might be made. Peace is
the basis, but into it must come the action of a certain Light from above which
shows each thing in its right proportions as a whole – for the mind at its best
is incomplete and usually one-sided in its perceptions without the guidance of
such a higher Light.
Most
people who have not knowledge are apt to be opinionated – they have their ideas
and don't want them to be changed or their fixity disturbed.
The
point is that people take no trouble to see whether their intellect is giving
them right thoughts, right conclusions, right views on things and persons,
right indications about their conduct or course of action. They have their idea
and accept it as truth or follow it simply because it is their idea. Even when
they recognise that they have made mistakes of the mind, they do not consider
it of any importance nor do they try to be more careful mentally than before.
In the vital field people know that they must not follow their desires or
impulses without check or control, they know that they ought to have a
conscience or a moral sense which discriminates what they can or should do and
what they cannot or should not do; in the field of intellect no such care is taken.
Men are supposed to follow their intellect, to have and assert their own ideas
right or wrong without any control; the intellect, it is said, is man's highest
instrument and he must think and act according to its ideas. But this is not
true; the intellect needs an inner light to guide, check and control it quite
as much as the vital. There is something above the intellect which one has to
discover and the intellect should be only an intermediary for the action of
that source of true Knowledge.
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For
the human thinking mind there are always many sides to everything and it
decides according to its own bent or preference or to its habitual ideas or
some reason that presents itself to the intellect as the best. It gets the real
truth only when something else puts a higher light into it – when the psychic
or the intuition touches it and makes it feel or see.
Many
things are bad only in the way people look at them. Things which you consider
all right, other people call bad; what you think to be bad, others find quite
natural.
The
proper thing is to see all with an unmoved calm, both the “good” and “bad” as a
movement of Nature on the surface. But to do this truly without error or egoism
or wrong reactions needs a consciousness and knowledge that is not personal and
limited.
It
is very usual for intuitive suggestions to come like that and the mind to
disregard them. It is because the mind is accustomed to follow its own process
and cannot recognise or have confidence in the intuition when it comes. The
mind has to learn to look at these things when they come and give them value if
experience confirms their truth.
In
the sphere of the Spirit are only the eternal truths – all is eternally itself
there, there is no development, nothing unrealized or striving to be fulfilled.
There are no such things as possibilities therefore. In life, on the other
hand, all is a play of possibilities – nothing is realised, all is seeking to
be realised – or if not yet seeking, then waiting behind the veil for that.
Nothing is realised
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in
its highest form, in its truth or completeness, but all is possible. All these
possibilities are derived from the truths above, e.g., the possibility of
knowledge, the possibility of love, the possibility of joy, etc.
Intellect, will, etc. are intermediaries which try to catch
something of the hidden higher truths and bring them into life or else raise
life to them so that the possibilities of life here may become the complete
realities that are already there above.
The
intellect is made up of imaginations, perceptions, inferences. The pure reason
is quite another thing, but only a few are able to use it. As for knowledge in
yoga, it comes first from the higher mind, but even that does not see the whole
Truth, only sides of it.
Pure
reason deals with things in themselves, ideas, concepts, the essential nature
of things. It lives in the world of ideas. It is philosophic and metaphysical
in its nature.
All
depends on the meaning you attach to words used; it is a matter of
nomenclature. Ordinarily, one says a man has intellect if he can think well;
the nature and process and field of the thought do not matter. If you take
intellect in that sense, then you can say that intellect has different strata,
and Ford belongs to one stratum of intellect, Einstein to another – Ford has a
practical and executive business intellect, Einstein a scientific discovering
and theorising intellect. But Ford too in his own field theorises, invents,
discovers. Yet would you call Ford an intellectual or a man of intellect? I
would prefer to use for the general faculty of mind the word intelligence. Ford
has a great and forceful practical intelligence, keen, quick, successful,
dynamic. He has a brain that can deal with thoughts also, but even there his
drive is towards practicality. He believes in rebirth
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(metempsychosis),
for instance, not for any philosophic reason, but because it explains life as a
school of experience in which one gathers more and more experience and develops
by it. Einstein has, on the other hand, a great discovering scientific
intellect, not, like Marconi, a powerful practical inventive intelligence for
the application of scientific discovery. All men have, of course, an
“intellect” of a kind; all, for instance, can discuss and debate (for which you
say rightly intellect is needed); but it is only when one rises to the realm of
ideas and moves freely in it that you say, “This man has an intellect.” Address
an assembly of peasants, you will find, if you give them scope, that they can
put to you points and questions which may often leave the parliamentary debater
panting. But we are content to say that these peasants have much practical
intelligence.
The power to discuss and debate is, as I say, a common human
faculty – and habit. Perhaps it is here that man begins to diverge from the
animal; for animals have much intelligence, many animals and even insects have
some rudimentary power of practical reasoning, but so far as we know, they do
not meet and put their ideas about things side by side or sling them at each
other in a debate,¹ as even the most
ignorant human can do and very animatedly does.
But this, though a general faculty of the race, is very
often specialised, so much so that a man whom it is dangerous to cross in
debate in the field of literature or of science or of philosophy may yet make a
fool of himself and wallow contentedly in a quagmire of blunders and fallacies
if he discusses politics or economics or, let us say, spirituality or yoga. His
only salvation is the blissful depth of his ignorance which prevents him from
seeing what a mess he has made. Again, a man may be a keen legal or political
debater, the two very commonly go together, yet no intellectual. I admit that a
man must have some logical intellect to debate well. But, after all, the object
of debate is to win, to make your point, and you may do that even if your point
is false; success, not truth, is the aim of debate. So I admit what you say
with reservations.
I agree also that labels, even when applied to less
developed
¹ Perhaps the crows do in the
crow-Parliament sometimes!
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persons,
are unsatisfactory. What we really do is to pick out something prominent and
label with that as if it were all the person. But classification is impossible
without that and man's intellect is driven always to classify, fix
distinctions, set apart with a label. The philosophers have pointed out that
Science does it too rigidly and in doing so cuts falsely across the truth of
Nature. But if we do not do that, we cannot have any Science.
If
the intellectual will always have a greater wideness and vastness, how can we
be sure that he will have an equal fervour, depth and sweetness with the
emotional man?
It may be that homo
intellectualis will remain wider and homo
psychicus will remain deeper in heart (even when the latter's inner mind
opens up).
Do not confuse the higher knowledge and the mental
knowledge. The intellectual man will be able to give a wider and more orderly
expression to what higher knowledge he gets than the homo psychicus; but it does not follow he will have more of it. He
will have that only if he rises to an equal width and plasticity and
comprehensiveness of the higher knowledge planes. In that case he will replace his
mental by his above-mental capacity. But for many intellectuals, so-called,
their intellectuality may be a stumbling-block as they bind themselves with
mental conceptions or stifle their psychic fire under the heavy weight of
rational thought. On the other hand, I have seen comparatively uneducated
people expressing higher knowledge with an astonishing fullness and depth and
accuracy which the stumbling movements of their brain could never have allowed
one to suppose possible. Therefore, why fix beforehand by the mind what will or
will not be possible when the above-mind reigns? What the mind conceives as
“must be” need not be the measure of the “will be”. Such and such a homo intellectualis may turn out to be a
more fervent God-lover than the effervescent emotional man; such and such an
emotionalist may receive and express a wider knowledge than his intellect or
even the intellect of the intellectual man could have harboured or organised.
Let
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us
not bind the phenomena of the higher consciousness by the possibilities and
probabilities of a lower plane.
An
unintellectual mind cannot bring down the Knowledge? What then about
Ramakrishna? Do you mean to say that the majority of the sadhaks here who have
not learned logic and are ignorant of philosophy will never get Knowledge?
If
one has faith and openness that is enough. Besides there are two kinds of
understanding – understanding by the intellect and understanding in the
consciousness. It is good to have the former if it is accurate, but it is not
indispensable. Understanding by the consciousness comes if there is faith and
openness, though it may come only gradually and through steps of experience.
But I have seen people without education or intellectuality understand in this
way perfectly well the course of the yoga in themselves, while intellectual men
make big mistakes, e.g. take a neutral mental quietude for the spiritual peace
and refuse to come out of it in order to go farther.
Yes,
the active mind in people with a very intellectual turn can be an obstacle to
the deeper more silent spiritual movement. Afterwards when it is turned into
the higher thought (intuitive, or overmental) it becomes on the contrary a
great force.
The
thinking mind has to learn how to be entirely silent. It is only then that true
knowledge can come.
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Good;
cessation of thought and other vibrations is the climax of the inner silence.
When once one has got that, it is easier for the true knowledge to come from
above in place of the mental thought.
It
is necessary to curb the mind's impatience a little. Knowledge is progressive –
if it tries to leap up to the top at once, it may make a hasty construction
which it will have afterwards to undo. The knowledge and experience must come
by degrees and step by step.
In
the mind there is always a certain haste to seize quickly at what is presented
to it as the highest Truth. That is unavoidable, but the more one is stilled in
mind the less it will distort things.
That
is always the difficulty with the mind. It must learn to be silent and let the
knowledge come without trying to catch hold of it for its own play.
The
attempt of the mind and vital to seize on the experience is always one of the
chief obstacles.
An
experience should be allowed its full time to develop or have its full effect.
It should not be interrupted except in case of necessity or, of course, if it
is not a good experience.
During
the experience the mind should be quiet. After the
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experience
is over it can be active. If it is active while it is there, the experience may
stop altogether.
To
think and question about an experience when it is happening is the wrong thing
to do; it stops it or diminishes it. Let the experience have its full play – if
it is something like this “new life force” or peace or Force or anything else
helpful. When it is over, you can think about it – not while it is proceeding.
For these experiences are spiritual and not mental and the mind has to be quiet
and not interfere.
There
is something in you that does want to stick to the habit of mentalising about
everything. So long as you were not having real experiences it did not matter.
But once real experiences begin you have to learn to approach them in the right
way.
You
have to learn by experience. Mental information (badly understood, as it always
is without experience) might rather hamper than help. In fact there is no fixed
mental knowledge about these things, which vary infinitely. You must learn to
go beyond the hankering for mental information and open to the true way of
knowledge.
There
are two centres or parts of the consciousness – one is a witness, sākşi
and
observes, the other consciousness is active and it is this active consciousness
that you felt going down deep into the vital being. If your mind had not become
active, you would have known where it went and what it went there to experience
or do. When there is an experience, you should not begin to think about it, for
that is of no use at all and it only
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stops
the experience – you should remain silent, observe and let it go on to its end.
It
was not an imagination, but an experience. When such an experience occurs, the
attempt to take hold of it mentally and continue it may on the contrary
interrupt it. It is best to let it continue of itself; if it ceases, it is
likely to recur.
Aspiration
during the period of experience is not so necessary. It is in the intervals
that it should be there.
When
the personal mind is still, whatever mental action is needed is taken up and
done by the Force itself which does all the necessary thinking and
progressively transforms it by bringing down into it a higher and higher plane
of perception and knowledge.
It
is perfectly possible to do work in an entire emptiness without any
interference or activity of the lower parts of the consciousness.
It
is in the silence of the mind that the strongest and freest action can come,
e.g., the writing of a book, poetry, inspired speech, etc. When the mind is
active it interferes with the inspiration, puts in its own small ideas which get
mixed up with the inspiration or starts something from a lower level or simply
stops the inspiration altogether by bubbling up with all sorts of mere mental
suggestions. So also intuitions or action, etc. can come more easily when the
ordinary inferior movement of the mind is not there. It is also in the silence
of the mind that it is easiest for
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knowledge
to come from within or above, from the psychic or from the higher
consciousness.
The
absence of thought is quite the right thing – for the true inner consciousness
is a silent consciousness which has not to think out things, but gets the right
perception, understanding and knowledge in a spontaneous way from within and
speaks or acts according to that. It is the outer consciousness which has to
depend on outside things and to think about them because it has not this
spontaneous guidance. When one is fixed in this inner consciousness, then one
can indeed go back to the old action by an effort of will, but it is no longer
a natural movement and, if long maintained, becomes fatiguing. As for the
dreams, that is different. Dreams about old bygone things come up from the
subconscient which retains the old impressions and the seeds of the old
movements and habits long after the waking consciousness has dropped them.
Abandoned by the waking consciousness, they still come up in dream; for in
sleep the outer physical consciousness goes down into the subconscient or
towards it and many dreams come up from there.
The silence in which all is quiet and one remains as a
witness while something in the consciousness spontaneously calls down the higher
things is the complete silence which comes when the full force of the higher
consciousness is upon mind and vital and body.
The
pure inspiration and conception is something quite different – it comes from
deep within or from high above. This is the lower vital mind at work making
formations. When the calmness is there, all sorts of things may rise on the
surface – they have not to be accepted, but simply looked at. In time the
calmness will be so developed as to quell the vital and outer mind also and in
that complete quietude the true perceptions will come.
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Not
to allow the mind to bubble up with all sorts of ideas and feelings etc. but to
remain quiet and learn to think and feel only what is true and right.
The
danger of the mental forces is when the higher consciousness descends they tend
(unless there is a deep silence) to become active in the consciousness for
forming ideas of a mental type which can always be misapplied. First there
should be a basis of entire calm, peace and silence – if there is activity, it
should be that of a knowledge coming down and the mind silent receiving it
accurately. This you can easily have, provided the mind is quiet.
The danger of the vital is that of taking hold of love, Ananda,
the sense of Beauty and using it for its own purposes, for vital human
relations or interchange or else some kind of mere enjoyment of its own.
In
the West the physical mind is too dominant, so that the psychic does not so
easily get a chance – except of course in exceptional people.
After
all India with
her mentality and method has done a hundred times more in the spiritual field
than Europe with her intellectual doubts and
questionings. Even when a European overcomes the doubt and questioning, he does
not find it as easy to go as fast and far as an Indian with the same force of
personality because the stir of mind is still greater. It is only when he can
get beyond that that he arrives, but for him it is not so easy.
On the other hand however your statement is correct. It is
“natural considering the times” and the occidental mentality prevalent
everywhere. It is also probably necessary that this should be faced and
overcome before any Supramental realisation is
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possible
in the earth-consciousness – for it is the attitude of the physical mind to
spiritual things and as it is in the physical that the resistance has to be
overcome before the mind can be overpassed in the way required for this yoga,
the strongest possible representation of its difficulties was indispensable.
To
reject doubts means control of one's thoughts – very certainly so. But the
control of one's thoughts is as necessary as the control of one's vital desires
and passions or the control of the movements of one's body – for the yoga, and
not for the yoga only. One cannot be a fully developed mental being even, if
one has not a control of the thoughts, is not their observer, judge, master, –
the mental Purusha, manomaya puruşa, sākşī, anumantā, īśvara. It is no more proper for the mental being to be
the tennis-ball of unruly and uncontrollable thoughts than to be a rudderless
ship in the storm of the desires and passions or a slave of either the inertia
or the impulses of the body. I know it is more difficult because man being
primarily a creature of mental Prakriti identifies himself with the movements
of his mind and cannot at once dissociate himself and stand free from the swirl
and eddies of the mind whirlpool. It is comparatively easy for him to put a
control on his body, at least on a certain part of its movements; it is less
easy but still very possible after a struggle to put a mental control on his
vital impulsions and desires; but to sit like the Tantric yogi on the river,
above the whirlpool of his thoughts, is less facile. Nevertheless, it can be
done; all developed mental men, those who get beyond the average, have in one
way or other or at least at certain times and for certain purposes to separate
the two parts of the mind, the active part which is a factory of thoughts and
the quiet masterful part which is at once a Witness and a Will, observing them,
judging, rejecting, eliminating, accepting, ordering corrections and changes,
the Master in the House of Mind, capable of self-empire, sāmrājya.
The yogi goes still farther; he is not only a master there,
but even while in mind in a way, he gets out of it as it were and stands above
or quite back from it and free. For him the image of the
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factory
of thoughts is no longer quite valid; for he sees that thoughts come from
outside, from the universal Mind or universal Nature, sometimes formed and
distinct, sometimes unformed and then they are given shape somewhere in us. The
principal business of our mind is either a response of acceptance or a refusal
to these thought-waves (as also vital waves, subtle physical energy waves) or
this giving a personal-mental form to thought-stuff (or vital movements) from
the environing Nature-Force. It was my great debt to Lele that he showed me
this. “Sit in meditation,” he said, “but do not think, look only at your mind;
you will see thoughts coming into it;
before they can enter throw these away from your mind till your mind is capable
of entire silence.” I had never heard before of thoughts coming visibly into
the mind from outside, but I did not think either of questioning the truth or
the possibility, I simply sat down and did it. In a moment my mind became
silent as a windless air on a high mountain summit and then I saw one thought
and then another coming in a concrete way from outside; I flung them away
before they could enter and take hold of the brain and in three days I was
free. From that
moment,
in principle, the mental being in me became a free Intelligence, a universal
Mind, not limited to the narrow circle of personal thought as a labourer in a
thought factory, but a receiver of knowledge from all the hundred realms of
being and free to choose what it willed in this vast sight-empire and
thought-empire. I mention this only to emphasise that the possibilities of the
mental being are not limited and that it can be the free Witness and Master in
its own house. It is not to say that everybody can do it in the way I did it
and with the same rapidity of the decisive movement (for, of course, the latter
fullest developments of this new untrammelled mental power took time, many
years) but a progressive freedom and mastery of one's mind is perfectly within
the possibilities of anyone who has the faith and the will to undertake it.
The
error comes from thinking that your thoughts are your own and that you are
their maker and if you do not create thoughts (i.e. think), there will be none.
A little observation ought to show
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that
you are not manufacturing your own thoughts, but rather thoughts occur in you.
Thoughts are born, not made – like poets, according to the proverb. Of course,
there is a sort of labour and effort when you try to produce or else to think
on a certain subject, but that is a concentration for making thoughts come up,
come in, come down, as the case may be, and fit themselves together. The idea
that you are shaping the thoughts or fitting them together is an egoistic
delusion. They are doing it themselves, or Nature is doing it for you, only
under a certain compulsion; you have to beat her often in order to make her do
it, and the beating is not always successful. But the mind or nature or mental
energy – whatever you like to call it – does this in a certain way and carries
on with a certain order of thoughts, haphazard intelligentialities (excuse the
barbarism) or asininities, rigidly ordered or imperfectly ordered
intellectualities, logical sequences and logical inconsequences, etc., etc. How
is an intuition to get in in the midst of that waltzing and colliding crowd? It
does sometimes; in some minds often intuitions do come in, but immediately the
ordinary thoughts surround it and eat it up alive, and then with some fragment
of the murdered intuition shining through their non-intuitive stomachs they
look up smiling at you and say, “I am an intuition, sir.” But they are only
intellect, intelligence or ordinary thought with part of a dismembered and
therefore misleading intuition inside them. Now in a vacant mind, vacant but
not inert, (that is important) intuitions have a chance of getting in alive and
whole. But don't run away with the idea that all that comes into an empty mind
will be intuitive. Anything, any blessed kind of idea can come in. One has to
be vigilant and examine the credentials of the visitor. In other words, the
mental being must be there, silent but vigilant, impartial but discriminating.
That is, however, when you are in search of truth. For poetry, so much is not
necessary. There it is only the poetic quality of the visitor that has to be
scrutinised and that can be done after he has left his packet – by results.
That
is the way things come, only one does not notice. Thoughts,
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ideas,
happy inventions etc., etc., are always wandering about (in thought-waves or
otherwise), seeking a mind that may embody them. One mind takes, looks, rejects
– another takes, looks, accepts. Two different minds catch the same
thought-form or thought-wave, but the mental activities being different, make
different results out of them. Or it comes to one and he does nothing, then it
walks off saying, “O this unready animal!” and goes to another who promptly
welcomes it and it settles into expression with a joyous bubble of inspiration,
illumination or enthusiasm of original discovery or creation and the recipient
cries proudly, “I, I have done this.” Ego, sir! ego! You are the recipient, the
conditioning medium, if you like – nothing more.
First
of all, these thought-waves, thought-seeds or thought-forms or whatever they
are, are of different values and come from different planes of consciousness.
The same thought-substance can take higher or lower vibrations according to the
plane of consciousness through which the thoughts come in (e.g., thinking mind,
vital mind, physical mind, subconscient mind) or the power of consciousness
which catches them and pushes them into one man or another. Moreover, there is
a stuff of mind in each man and the incoming thought uses that for shaping
itself or translating itself (transcribing we usually call it), but the stuff
is finer or coarser, stronger or weaker, etc., etc., in one mind than in
another. Also, there is a mind-energy actual or potential in each which differs
and this mind-energy in its recipience of the thought can be luminous or
obscure, sattwic, rajasic or tamasic with consequences that vary in each case.
They
[the ideas in the universal Mind] take word-form in the mind when they enter
into it – unless they come from beings, not as mere idea-forces.
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This
is a wrong psychology. Thought is quite possible without words. Children have
thoughts, animals too – thoughts can take another form than words. Thought
perceptions come first – language comes to express the perceptions and itself
leads to fresh thoughts.
II
Mental
knowledge is of little use except sometimes as an introduction pointing towards
the real knowledge which comes from a direct consciousness of things.
Is
getting knowledge from above and getting it by the mind in its own capacity the
same thing? If the mind is capable then there is no need of knowledge from
above, it can do the getting of knowledge by its own greatness.
It
is not a mental knowledge that is necessary, but a psychic perception or a
direct perception in the consciousness. A mental knowledge can always be
blinded by the tricks of the vital.
It
[greater perfection in knowledge] can come only by further development and the
activity of another kind of knowledge communicating itself to the physical and
taking up gradually the functions of the mind in all its parts.
Knowledge
is always better than ignorance. It makes things
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possible
hereafter if not at the moment, while ignorance actively obstructs and
misleads.
There
are different kinds of knowledge. One is inspiration, i.e. something that comes
out of the knowledge planes like a flash and opens up the mind to the Truth in
a moment. That is inspiration. It easily takes the form of words as when a poet
writes or a speaker speaks, as people say, from inspiration.
The
idea is not enough. It gives only a half-light – you must get to all the Truth
that lies behind the idea and the object together. Being, consciousness, force
– that is the triple secret.
There
is a power in the idea – a force of which the idea is a shape. Again, behind
the idea and force and word there is what is called the spirit, – a
consciousness which generates the force.
All
consciousness comes from the one Consciousness – Knowledge is one aspect of the
Divine Consciousness.
It
[spiritual knowledge] is the conscious experience of the Truth, seen, felt,
lived within and it is also a spiritual perception (more direct and concrete
than the intellectual) of the true significance of things which may express
itself in thought and speech, but is independent of them in itself.
I
was speaking of your experiences of the higher consciousness,
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─ 1262
of
your seeing the Mother in all things – these are what are called spiritual
realisations, spiritual knowledge. Realisations are the essence of knowledge;
thoughts about them, expression of them in words are a lesser knowledge and if
the thoughts are merely mental without experience or realisation, they are not
regarded as Jnana in the spiritual sense at all.
The
mind in its higher part is aware of being one with the Divine, in all ways, in
all things – having that supreme knowledge, it is not disturbed by its own
ignorance and impotence in its lower instrumental parts; it looks on all that
with a smile and remains happy and luminous with the light of the supreme
knowledge.
The consciousness of union with the Divine is for the
spiritual seeker the supreme knowledge.
Yes,
it happens like that. A touch of realisation is enough to set the higher mind
knowledge or the illumined mind knowledge flowing.
Such
questions should not be allowed to stop the flow [of higher knowledge].
Afterwards one can consider them and get the answer. The knowledge that comes
is not necessarily complete or perfect in expression; but it must be allowed to
come freely and amplifications or corrections can be made afterwards.
Neither
knowledge nor anything else is constant at first – and even when it is there
one cannot expect it to be always active. That comes afterwards.
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What
is to be left out is the ego. Limitation of knowledge will necessarily be there
so long as there is not the fullest wideness from above; that does not matter.
Your
mind is too active. If it were more quiet and less questioning and
argumentative and restlessly wanting to find devices it seems to me that there
would be more chance of knowledge coming down and of intuitive,
non-intellectual consciousness developing within you.
So
long as the outer mind is not quiet, it is impossible for the intuition to
develop. So if you want to go on asking intellectual questions about what is
beyond the intellect until the intuition develops in spite of this activity,
you will have to go on for ever.
It
is the physical mind that raises all these questions and cannot understand or
give the right answer. The real knowledge and understanding can only come if
you stop questioning with the small physical mind and allow a deeper and wider
consciousness which is there within you to come out and grow. You would then
get automatically the true answer and the true guidance. Your mistake is to
attach so much importance to the external mind and its ideas and perceptions
instead of concentrating on the growth of the inner consciousness.
A
thousand questions can be asked about anything whatsoever, but to answer would
require a volume, and even then the mind would understand nothing. It is only
by a growth in the consciousness itself that you can get some direct perception
of these
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things.
But for that the mind must be quiet and a direct feeling and intuition take its
place.
When
you get the true intuitive plane, there will be no need for instructions or
questions as to how to do sadhana. The sadhana will do itself under the light
of the intuition.
That
is always the case. Things said of sadhana – or any kind of real truth – always
give more meaning with the growth of consciousness and experience. That is why
when one rises in the level of consciousness the truth seen before in the mind
becomes a new and vastly deeper thing always.
The
one thing always is to let the Peace and Power work and not allow the mind to
seek after things and get disturbed. All the values of the mind are
constructions of ignorance – it is only when your psychic being comes forward
that you have the true knowledge – for your psychic being knows.
Yes,
that is the point. The ordinary mind governed by the vital desires and its own
mental formations cannot understand – it must fall quiet and allow the Peace
and Force to work so as to bring another consciousness with the true Light in
it. When that is done, these questionings and their reactions will have no
place.
You
have only to allow the consciousness to develop – at first there will be
mistakes as well as true ideas, but when there is sufficient development and
the Mother's force and knowledge
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directly
working in you, things will become more and more right – not only so, but you will have the certitude.
At present there is still too much of the old physical mind for perceptions to
be always right. As the Peace and Force take direct and complete possession of
the physical consciousness, this will change and the consciousness develop more
surely and with a greater light.
Get
back to the true feeling of the Force
and Peace – the understanding will grow with the growth of that feeling and
experience. For with the Force and Peace comes always something of the Light
and it is the Light illumining the mind that brings the understanding. So long
as you try to understand with the unillumined mind, mistakes and
non-understanding are inevitable.
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─ 1266
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