EWS #65 Planes of Consciousness (2) Higher kinds of knowledge
Jan 18, 2020
Topics:
Narad (0:01:03):
Namaste and welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhap. Shall we pick up from where we left off in the first conversation? There is so much to cover. There were a few questions that you can share with us.
Sraddhalu (0:01:28):
Just briefly to recapitulate, last time we discussed the big picture of involution forming planes of consciousness and worlds and then the emergence of the evolutionary movement with all of those higher planes and grades of consciousness as if locked up into matter pushing their way out and therefore taking the sequence layer by layer and we developed a kind of a full picture of how the evolution takes place and explained many of the anomalies of evolution which make people question if at all evolution is possible and also explained many phenomena associated with evolution which otherwise have no satisfying explanation and we take a few questions.
Audience (0:02:15):
It was more just an observation of a study done with salamanders, I believe, where the arm was cut off it was replaced by a few legs from the cell and it regrew exactly in the composition of the arm saying that the electrical blueprint was already in the electrical field.
Sraddhalu (0:02:39):
So salamanders are one of the most interesting creatures from the laboratory perspective because what we find is you can cut off any part of it and it will regrow okay that's still not as surprising because other species like lizards can regrow their tail but this one can regrow any part including the brain so you're made to question what is it that is carrying the knowledge that allows you to rebuild and more interestingly not only you can regrow any part you can cut out any part and plug it into any other part and it will join and grow and function. So one of the things they do and it sounds crazy, but they'll cut off a leg attach it on another part cut off the tail attaches on another part and grows a new tail while the other tail continues and so you can create a creature out of this element with multiple legs, multiple heads, multiple tails, plugging it into any part of the body and it's as if the piece of the leg let's say, knows how to join itself with the body, the body knows how to join itself with the leg on any part. So imagine as if from your shoulder you could grow a leg, from your stomach you could grow another arm. But the internal tissue organisation and the organs and the veins and nerves all of them adapt to the necessity of the leg where the leg knows how to plug itself in. It shows an extraordinary flexibility of organisation that makes this creature be able to become almost any kind of creature plug and join anything into into anywhere, it shows you that this is possible for a living form. But not all living forms have developed this specialisation or plasticity of consciousness.
Now why is this important? Because you notice every creature, every species has some distinctive characteristic that it has developed So we often take that as a metaphor to highlight a specialised capacity. For example, you will see eagle-eyed vision. Why? Because the eagle's eye, physically about, let's say, the size, maybe a centimetre in diameter or less, flying at an extraordinary height, approaching low-flying aeroplanes, let's say, is able to look down and see the full expanse of the ground and yet narrow down to a particular mouse that's running on the ground and see everything and identify the mouse with enough clarity that it's able to recognize the mouse and then dive, pick it up, catch and fly off. That kind of sight and that kind of specialisation of width and depth or resolution at a great distance in something so small is not specialised in any other creature. Or owl's vision specialising for the night. Or you'll see a lion-eyed heart. What is it about the lion that we associate with a generous or heroic character. It's a certain aspect of energy or the horse which seems to have the sense of power or the gazelle which leaps with grace or the wolf which has this ability to seize and grasp and tear and so there are distinctive characteristics associated with every species. It's almost as if the divine one consciousness with all psychological powers that it could express has developed specialised forms to fill and develop to give form to each of these aspects. And if for some reason one species becomes extinct, it's as if another will take its place to express that quality. If you see the totality of nature, it's as if the emergent consciousness wants to be able to play out all its possibilities in different forms of species. But there's one thing important. The human being seems as if to contain the capacities of all of them. If nothing else, in our voice we can imitate all the sounds of all the animals. And the way we move our body, we are able to imitate to some degree at least all of these animals. And so the suggestion perhaps is that in the fullness of the human evolution, which is the most plastic or most complex form so far developed, as it grows to its diviner potential, maybe all these powers will be, to whatever extent we choose, more and more developed within us. and the power of the salamander to regenerate its limbs or flexibly adapt should be a part of our physical body's potential also and could be developed perhaps. Or would be naturally part of a more developed human species consciousness. Isn't it? So observing special features in the animals shows you that there is something waiting that's not yet been developed in our bodies.
Narad (0:08:05):
Or that we have made a different movement in the evolution that didn't allow for those.
Sraddhalu (0:08:14):
Yes, every time there has been an evolutionary push forward the strength of the past was lost in favour of the new movement the Mother gives this very clear form she says the greatest strength of the previous stage is lost to give way for a new possibility so emergent from the ape form the greatest feature of the ape is its strength flexibility ability to leap from branch to branch with surety and immunity to illness it's a very strong in physical health and in the mind's emergence it's as if all this was dropped and what you have is a body which is much more fragile, less flexible, less strong and so on but if you had asked the ape what would the future evolution of the ape consciousness be? It would say, it would have a stronger tail, it would be able to jump from one forest to the next, it would only exaggerate its own powers thinking that's the future. But the future is something totally different involving the loss of your current greatest strength. And so the Mother points out, the same happens in the human evolution arising from your power of intellect to a new grade of consciousness which is completely different even, you can say your intellect will weaken because you'll have a different way of knowing which is so much more direct that you won't need to use the intellect and we will call that an intuitive consciousness. So in the intuitive consciousness you can know something with precision, without error, with limitation perhaps but without error, within those limitations and directly without needing to go through thinking process. And when you start exercising this power, your ability to think and go through steps of logic will become irrelevant and so you will tend to let it fall into disuse. Like the human lost the ability to swing from trees or the tail. And one has to wonder what that means, what human beings will be like in a more evolved consciousness and how they will relate to the human intellectual species and say oh those guys they're thinking so hard, poor fellows. <laughs>
Narad (0:10:34):
You mentioned the vital worlds and these creatures whose basis is in the vitalworlds. How this one access them, from the subtle physical?
Sraddhalu (0:10:47):
So in the... we spoke of the species consciousness and that the species itself is a physical expression of an equivalent creature, let's say animal, in the vital worlds. And so everything that exists in the vital world is as if trying to push to find the possibility of manifestation. If you go back to the dinosaur age, we had all kinds of unusual birds and large creatures. Most of them died out. But they still exist in the vital worlds. When you see them, you call them dragons. You've heard stories of dragons? They could fly, they could as if breathe fire and they could do all kinds of things. They seem very similar to the dinosaur birds which we call pterodactyls for example in even in the way you draw sketch them of course they may not have breathed fire in the physical world, but in the vital world they may have the equivalent experience of some heat that is put out from the mouth and even a fire perhaps. Which would may not be possible to replicate on the biological level. But energetically, it is replicated. So in its form of breathing you might have a strong force or warmth or some form. So the moment a vital species takes form in the physical domain, it is fundamentally changed by the very nature of the material where it takes form, but still retains the same vital template or vital body underlying. And so that species consciousness is what holds it and one can enter in relation with that, if one develops the ability to enter the vital worlds consciously. This can be done either by developing the power of going out of the body projecting the something of the vital consciousness and entering that world or being able to disengage from the physical body sufficiently that you begin to experience the vital world in itself and then experience things there directly. Or it can be done by entering in relation with those beings in a state of temporary dissociation from the physical body through drugs or in dream state or some other means, which is what they use in many shamanic traditions. But whatever way you do, once you can feel them or perceive them, you can enter in relation, develop a contract, a friendship whatever form.
Narad (0:13:27):
Is the human species there?
Sraddhalu (0:13:29):
There is of course the template of the human type not in the vital world, in the mental world and in the mental again you will have many gradations of humanity corresponding to many degrees of development of the mental consciousness and the same we will see in the human species. But the general template of the human being is in the mental or slightly above even, because that's the direction we have to grow into. It's the common, we mentioned this earlier in our discussions about extraterrestrial life, that everywhere in the universe, wherever mind evolves it tends to take on this star-shaped form, two arms, two legs, head and with a common torso. Variations of proportions, variations of how much is put in them, for example, you could have a torso which becomes less and less extended becomes almost squeezed into a little thing or the legs becoming smaller or the neck becoming longer and all variations of it but the overall five-pointed shape is common to all mental beings. But the emergence of mind could take place in many different ways. We briefly discussed this in the discussion on the extraterrestrial life but here it is worth repeating in our case the human form grew out of the ape using the most developed ape consciousness through a series of rapid steps the inner consciousness pushes out and then transitions into a reasonably changed human species and then the link breaks down and that's why we don't find evidence for it. Because it took place in a few in a relatively short time and so it's difficult to find those bones. It was not widespread. But once that transition is made, the new being which is now distinctly human as a species has its own variations and builds many different subtypes lets say.
So the emergence from ape is not the only way nature could have done it. She could have picked any of the other species which was close enough to mind and pushed through that to develop mind awareness. And as a result the biological template also would be modified to acquire something closer to the star-shaped form. For example, on earth currently we know of at least four or five species which have self-awareness to some degree, rudimentary degree. Any of these could have been emergent points for thinking human type to come, Homo Sapiens. We know for example the elephant, dolphin and some of the more developed chimpanzees or apes and few other recently I had seen which had the degree of this. How do we know they have self-awareness? And it's done with a very simple objective experiment. You place them in front of a mirror with a mark on the forehead which they cannot see on their own skin but they can see in the mirror and those who don't have self-awareness, they see the other one in the mirror and think it's someone else. Those who have self-awareness notice the mark and immediately try to do something to remove the mark. They are able to reflect awareness back to themselves. It's a very simple test. Human babies sometimes get disoriented in front of the mirror. But the more evolved ones because they have come into their self-awareness much more, they are very comfortable with the mirror image and even stare at it and start preening before the mirror. So any of these species could have been a starting point for nature. The dolphin for example could have evolved into a human-like thinking being. It would be a very different one because dolphins have a stronger collective awareness. Or even out of elephants you could have had something. Out of dogs, many dogs today especially those who are close to the human contact develop the higher ranges of the mind awareness except they can't speak. And if the dog could somehow grow and make that rapid transition you'd have a dog faced human being, they would look at us humans and say, oh these ape-faced ones, they look so ugly. Look at the dogs, we are so handsome. Right? The skin, the fur would be different. And of course the fur would tend to reduce, but still the overall shape might remain dog-like.
Narad (0:18:20):
How close has science fiction come to some of these?
Sraddhalu (0:18:24):
And that's the beauty of the human imagination. Every time we try to imagine something which has not been thought of by others, we tend to reach out and pick some perception from the mental worlds or the vital worlds. So we are actually picking species which exist there and we think we have imagined it. So a lot of science fiction is actually capturing realities of other worlds which have not yet manifested on the physical domain or are trying to manifest, so they are as if reaching down while you are reaching up, so you meet them. Which is the reason why a lot of science fiction tends to anticipate events just before they occur, because you are reaching out to something which is coming towards you.
Audience (0:19:11):
I was just thinking, but Avatar comes to mind.
[Sraddhalu] Yes.
Narad (0:19:22):
You had a question, sir? Yes.
Audience (0:19:23):
Yeah, so I was saying that, you mentioned transfer of knowledge or information or resources is happening at a physical level, but then at the same time it can also happen in other gradations of consciousness. But as if we just study the human consciousness, we can immediately get the physical exchange, but any sort of mental exchange through telepathy or anything of that sort is slower. And even beyond that, we don't even know what is possible so what do you see how can we actually get to a faster emergence.
Sraddhalu (0:20:10):
Yes. So in the emergence of evolution each level of consciousness tries to explore all of its possibilities and including communication and senses on that level within those limitations which is why you see among trees communication through their roots but also communication through their leaves and then communication through the, what's the equivalent of pheromones at the tree level, they put out smells by which they communicate. Okay, and so they respond to each other's smells and there's a whole complex system there. As the animal emerges communication takes on more overt forms through sounds or through body language and so on. But there are still subtler levels of communication which are energetic that we see in trees very distinctly but in animals becomes less overt when the awareness of mind grows and there is a greater reliance on mentalized form of communication rather than an instinctive life energy communication. But that is also happening, as among human beings. We see all these levels are present. We have a communication of pheromones, which is there at a completely subliminal level. We don't even consciously smell it but we respond to it on some instinctive level. We have a whole exchange of life energies which takes place among us with which before we see a person we sense that we're going to like the person or not like the person and that's because the energy body has already made a contact and we felt the comfort or discomfort. We have a whole communication which is telepathic. Somebody is thinking to do something and you sense their intention to be not so good and you distrust them instinctively, because you sense that intention or even you know they're lying. When everything on the biological level shows that they're telling the truth you can sense their lie.
And all of this corresponds to finer sensitivities and perceptions which we all have, but have not developed. A big part of the blame will be given to an educational system which tends to exaggerate the exteriorization of awareness and tends to discredit these deeper sensitivities. You're told, ‘oh that's your imagination, ignore it’, ‘oh, that's only a dream’, ‘that's a hallucination, don't imagine things’ and then we dull it down, in favour of an education which is always asking you to be active outward. Whereas if you go back 50 years or 100 years, every child had lots of time to be daydreaming. And so exploring their own inner sensitivities and worlds and with that there was a whole range of other things which developed. But having come to this level, let's say we have not dulled ourselves, the capacity should actually be greater to communicate. In fact it is one of the things which we are able to do. Living in mind we are able to lean to a lower grade of, let's say life force impulse, communicate there, draw from it, we can widen out at the level of mind transfer information or communicate what we will call telepathy conscious or implied and we are able to reach above mind to higher ranges of mind and access knowledge or communicate there. So I'll just touch upon a few of these as examples, because what I'll describe is possible for all of us but is one of those latent powers which we never use. At some point in the 1960s, the Mother took interest in the use of mantras for working on the body consciousness of the cells. At that time my teacher's teacher Kapali Shastriyar he had passed away in 1954. And of him the Mother had said that he was generally watching, participating from a certain level from a certain plane. And at that time she said to my teacher that Kapalai Shastriyar had approached her and said, ‘I'm very happy to see that you're interested in these mantras, if you like, I can give you my knowledge’, because he was the master of the whole range of traditional knowledge and then Mother says, ‘I opened my mind and he poured all his knowledge into me’. Isn't that amazing?
Sraddhalu (0:24:33):
You know she had all that he knew. Direct imprinting and a transfer of knowledge. It needs two things; (1) on the part of the person who transmits a well-organised and knowledge within him. It's not vague patches of hints which are somehow patched on and largely informational. I learnt those things by heart. I remember it by heart. That's not knowledge. That's information. Knowledge which you transmit cannot be transmitted of that grade. Knowledge which you transmit has to be what you experience and is a part of you in your consciousness that which has been internalised and lived. That's what you transmit, consciousness to consciousness by an imprint of your consciousness joining with the other. And so (2) on the other side should be the capacity to receive and the flexibility and a plasticity without bias into which you can receive that imprint of identification and that's it. Now all that you have is in me implicit and of course as I apply it, I can draw out elements which are already there but now I make more explicit to my own surface layers. So it means your surface part and the inner part must have been sufficiently bridged to be able to receive and make use of it. Otherwise what often happens you may be given that knowledge, it is in your inner layer but it pops up in bits as you need it, you don't have conscious access to it. So many people have dreams in which they are given something and it often represents knowledge or power. They wake up and say, I don't know, but it was as if I was given something, I felt, I still feel something within me, but I don't know what it is. But if the gap between the outer and inner is bridged, what is given to you becomes an active power that you can exercise right now. So these are all parts, aspects of our capacity which are undeveloped and which we should be developing. And a good, complete education would consciously take up the training of all these things.
Audience (0:26:43):
Life as we know it, can reach a conscious point that communication is only useful because like someone else doesn't know something that we know. Absolutely. But can we reach a point that everyone knows everything basically it's a fully observed.
Sraddhalu (0:26:59):
Yes, absolutely possible and even inevitable in our successive stages of evolution. As we grow in consciousness, the access to consciousness and knowledge of in consciousness also grows. So with the intuitive mind already have aspects that you can catch at will of whatever knowledge you want and as that grows wider you have access to almost large-scale cosmic scale knowledge but with a bias, etc. We'll discuss those levels of consciousness in a subsequent session. But with that growth, the access to knowledge grows, power of exercise of knowledge grows, but also across, horizontally between us, we are able to share much more directly because we perceive what is in another's mind, heart or inner layers without it being explicitly stated. So a dog for example, feels an emotion, how does it express? By that quality of the sound and the force he puts in his sound. He goes woof woof and you're supposed to catch the quality of energy. It's not like human speech where he woofed twice or three times means this or that. It's not a mentalized idea. It's the quality of energy thrown out in the woof that he made. And so you have to learn to tune in on a emotional energetic level and then you can sense what they're speaking. But there's a transmission which is telepathic or tele-empathic, empathic more than mentalized communication. But in the human you can have a more mentalized communication equally in the human you can receive from a higher realm a knowledge in the knowledge.
In the Indian tradition, a lot of the revealed knowledge was thus. So they made a distinction between knowledge which was communicated by teaching through words and knowledge which was revealed. And the revealed knowledge is as if received directly from above and received as a body and then encapsulated in some very condensed or compressed forms which we call sutras because what you've got is a whole realm of which there is an essence and you articulate the essence which then in the receiver can decompress into the full realm of experience. And so that was the value they gave to the sutra. The moment you've made explicit, you've reduced it to the form of the explicitness. When you have held essential, then it is able to decompress into varied forms according to your mind temperament. So the attempt was not only to receive but then to be able to transmit, although in the domain of form, but in this way. So often it was associated with an initiation, where the content of energy was given along with the words and then you dwelt on the words and the energy given to you now made explicit in the words. There is also a very interesting thing which happens now. Once you have understood this is possible that a lot of communication that takes place between us actually takes place in contact of consciousness with consciousness although at a reduced level.
So a little child, for example, is watching intently its parents and absorbs, drinks something of their consciousness instinctively. The child instinctively looks for a hero symbol from whom to absorb. In the absence of the hero symbol he is undeveloped. And it need not be parents it can be anybody that they instinctively feel represents what resonates with them. But the same thing happens as a baby, you're sick, you embrace your mother to absorb fresh energy or in the mother's embrace she absorbs your sickness and after that you are free of the sickness, she gets the sickness but she is a bigger body stronger body she gets rid of it within a few hours. And that kind of a transfer takes place. In that transfer a lot of tendencies of consciousness are also transferred. So if the parents have a strong violent or temper or some tendencies psychological that also can be infected into the child but instinctively in the child there is an attempt to absorb only that which they adore. So the absorption is of the higher and less of the lower. But this can continue to through our adult life and we're doing this all the time amongst ourselves.
Sraddhalu (0:31:48):
In any communication of an explanation of a new idea, there is a part of the mind which leans into the other, joins and there's a flash of identification of insight where you say, ah yes, I know what you're talking about. And if not for that you have not actually transmitted the knowledge, you have not actually understood if there has not been that flash. In every awakening of insight there is that experience of flash and all this points to the fact that the flash is your primary transmission of knowledge. Words are your vehicle to assist the minds to align so that there can be the contact and the flash of the actual transmission which takes place in that moment. So this all points to a higher grade of cognition which is intuition. The flash is a momentary spark of intuition in which the character of knowledge is you are identified with what you know. In the mental consciousness you are always creating representations. So as we, let's say, remember the place you went to for your holiday. What do you have in your remembrance? A picture or a feeling or a smell or an event. But they are representative of the thing. The thing itself is not in you. So you are thinking of the world or you want to represent the world, you draw a picture on paper and you say this is the world. No it's not the world, this is a paper with colour painted on it. But we have to represent and the same thing happens in our mind. All of our thoughts and words are symbols representing an idea. So we speak of so many things. If they do not have a corresponding experience within us, they are just symbols with which you have accumulated something out there. So you look at a person and you say, oh that person with the name and in your mind you hold the name or a picture of that person you say, yes I know that person, but do you really know them? And that's the difference now, the child will say my mother, I know her. You say, yes I know her also. But the child says, no you don't know her like I know her. What's the difference? In the child's consciousness, there has been an identification in which when I say my Mother, I know, I feel she's with me. She's even in me at that moment but the other person who knows her knows a picture or a name or an experience they had which is represented. It's not a real knowing.
So this difference in knowing is the fundamental difference between the intellect representing and the intuition identifying. In the intellect there is a knower, a process of knowing and then the thing which you will know which is therefore represented by a picture or a symbol and always when you represent you have reduced. So big complex map is reduced to a generalisation. You see, you always need to generalise and then you pick up a piece and then elaborate, pick up another piece, elaborate, always handling pieces but you can never hold the full thing in its entire complexity as a whole. Your mind is unable to contain, you have to generalise, to reduce or cut up to reduce.
Sraddhalu (0:35:15):
In the intuitive consciousness, the knowing is not by separation. It is an identity what I know I am a good example will be, when you are told and you know and you understand that you're a bundle of cells which fell into place by chance some millions of years ago and your thoughts are electrical signals in your brain and your emotions are hormones fluctuating in your body, you know you understand, but what's your experience? I know I'm thinking, I know I'm feeling, I know I'm not here by chance. That's the intuitive knowing because I am one with what I know. And so that is what you are, that is what you stay with, that is what you become in your expression. So the power of the intuitive knowing as distinct from the intellectual knowing is that in an intuitive knowing, because you are what you know, it changes you. Your action is spontaneously expressive of what you know. Whereas in the mental knowing I know I should do this, but I'm sorry I can't do it. I feel so much resistance. I know I want to get up every morning, but the flesh is weak. There's a gap between knowing and the doing. When there is an intuitive flash, I know, and in the freshness of that knowing, I start doing, I exercise what I know, because it acts in the same movement. The knowing is not separate from the doing or being. And so in the transmission of the intuitive knowledge, in the very act of receiving, you become and you are changed, and it stays with you because that's you and this is increasingly going to be more and more explicit in the way human beings communicate. Right now this intuitive transmission is taking place in that momentary flash. In a one hour discussion, you have had two or three flashes where you caught certain elements and that stayed with you. But in the intuitive transmission, you will not need so many words. You will say, well, you know, I am talking about this and as you are describing in a few words, there is a contact, transmission, ah yes, I got it. No words needed. It's as if what would have taken a whole paragraph to describe is condensed into a single sentence or even a single word. So in the pure intuitive transmission, we will say, yes it is good, and the person receiving says, ah I have all the energy needed to accomplish it. So yes that will happen. There will be a change in the way we communicate more and more. And it is in this direction that Sri Aurobindo pointed to as the development of the future poetry. In the future poetry, the character is not just embellishments of forms and sounds and interesting ideas, but it has the mantric quality of this transmission of an experience. So you read the poetry and it deeply resonates, evokes within you the experience and you are changed.
Narad (0:38:31):
When the Mother puts something into you and you experienced it, it never leaves. [Sraddhalu]Yes.
[Narad] Where is that, intuitive?
Sraddhalu (0:38:44):
That's the nature of the intuitive transmission. So the Mother would do that with the disciples when they came to see her and sometimes it was with a question or a problem and she would maybe say a single word or sometimes she would put her hand in blessing or give a blessing packet or a flower as a way of transmitting the content of the knowledge, power bundle which is intuitive or even higher as a force that if the person is receptive, enters you and gives you all that you need to be able to accomplish or resolve that problem. And even a whole domain of knowledge can be transmitted like this in a single burst and this is the way it is taught even in some of the very old stories, when for example the whole knowledge of Indian grammar of Sanskrit grammar is reducible to sutras, combinations of a few words or a few letters in a sequence which is like a computer program you take any sentence in Sanskrit, apply sutra 1 sutra 2 sutra 3 and whenever there's a conflict, the later one overrides the previous. So it's like a computer program you pass it through and it decomposes the sentence into its meaning and if there are multiple meanings possible it decomposes into multiple meanings. It's described as the first software even in certain ways. But how were they revealed? They were not thought out by somebody who arranged it. So they'll say Pandini was a genius. Yes of course he was a genius but not because he thought it out. He himself describes this emergence of the sutra as Shiva's dance and as He dances, He plays his drum and from the rhythms of his drum emerge these sutras and he is only recording what comes. Now you could say it appeared in a state of an exalted consciousness where he had this revelation that came or he sees it this way or he enters a state of consciousness in which the dance of Shiva is the dance of the universe, the movement, the flow of the universe and the drum playing is the rhythms unfolding in that movement and it captures the essential rhythms which are then caught in the sequence.
And so you could even say this and this is the character of the Sanskrit language. Each sound corresponds to a quality of consciousness and so anywhere in the universe if a sentient species tried to express a quality of consciousness it would tend towards expression in that sound and the natural rhythms described are in fact the natural rhythms in which anywhere in the universe, you would unfold that expression. And that's why Sanskrit is called the language of the gods. It's not just of the earth, it is the domain across the universe, across planes even. Of course it becomes less and less vocal, physical sound, more and more the essential vibration of sound as you go up the planes. But it's the same everywhere. It is the closest we can say to a universal language. And I would suggest that if other species develop a mentalized language, there would be strong correlations on that level of the Sanskrit root sounds and their psychological correspondences, as we see of course on earth. But the point being that this kind of knowledge is poured out, revealed and captured and because it holds so much in that essential form out of this entire theses have been developed and the rules although stated in sutras each has such wide and rich applications and implications.
Narad (0:42:40):
But it's received directly.
Sraddhalu (0:42:43):
Yes, and sometimes in a single burst a single revelation and then your mind decompresses or unfolds what has come. But imagine communicating amongst ourselves. So I come from a long journey and you say, so how was your journey? And I say, wonderful! And the full experience of the journey, whoo, is transmitted to you and you receive it and you see, experience, smell all the at least essential learning of that journey and experience and you say, yes I can really enjoy that, I have learned so much, thank you for sharing, right? But this is actually done among a few very highly evolved human beings. The words are spoken and then there's a whole transmission taking place on another level.
[Narad] And you have met some of these?
[Sraddhalu] Yes, I have experiences of some of that.
[Narad] So back to the intuitive now.
Sraddhalu (0:43:48):
So the important point here is amongst ourselves we are always in printing and sharing. And especially when it comes to spiritual experiences, you don't have words to describe. It can only be transmission of experience received. Words as if lead you and then the experience follows through. And that's why the nature of spiritual writing, the content is not so much in the word, but the words are vehicles for the force that is in the words and if you are conscious of it as you read you can feel the experience pouring through the words. This is how we find in Sri Aurobindo's writings or in the Mother's talks, the nature of the transmission. If you are, if you remain very quiet and align yourself to the consciousness behind the writing, as you read you can feel the emergence of the experiential content and the dawning of fine nuances and rich facets of the experience and it's imprinted, given to you.
Narad (0:45:04):
Mother does speak about Savitri and how we should not try to attempt to understand it with mind but allow it to flow into us and repeated reading and repeated reading makes it become clearer and clearer.
Sraddhalu (0:45:24):
So in with a text like that of course there's a content that you can understand and you have to participate in that flow also, but there's a whole content that you sense and that's the nature of the future poetry. A whole content that you sense behind the word, because the word is almost like a symbol and the metaphor holds something else and sometimes it's not just a metaphor, it is a powerful symbol with a living character of it. We have all experienced that. There are certain words sometimes, a single sentence and as you read suddenly you feel overwhelmed and you cannot read more. You have to stop and let the whole imprint soak in and it settles in you and it as if opens layers. Afterwards you continue, you come back you re-read the same passage and this time it's as if something more came and I didn't understand this. And now, it's something more that I've understood more profoundly. And so, the first layer of influence shaped you, prepared you from within which made you capable of receiving the next layer of the experience and often multiple layers that open out.
When you read also Sri Aurobindo's more structured writings, where there's a logical structure in description the same thing happens. When you read, you say, ah, this is important and you highlight a few words. The second time you read, you find, my God, I missed this completely. There is a whole other thing which is there. You highlight those words. And so I know people, they had their book on which they had highlighted in blue and red and green. Every single line and every single word had been highlighted at some time or other in their journey. But still the mind is only caching pieces, after a while you recognize your mind grows larger and you are conscious of a structure across several pages with sub-structures and sub-sub-structures within those and sub-sub-sub-structures. It makes your mind more large, more flexible and rich. In the normal human mental capacity, they say and I don't accept what they say because what they say is the lowest common denominator, they say we can hold seven words at a time in our mind buffer. So as we read a sentence, we have the last seven words, you cross into the eighth or ninth and you lose the first two words and so your sentences should be as short as possible. So that the full import of the sentence remains with you. They say this because it's true, but it's true because they made you like that, by giving you short sentences. Right? That's why I reject the ‘they say’ part. It's not like that. It's just you were never allowed to grow your buffer.
Sraddhalu (0:43:13):
But when you reach Sri Aurobindo, you have a sentence which goes across, sometimes worst case, an entire page. And you can't understand the sentence if you have not developed the buffer in mind to hold not words so much, but the ideas, which are structured in that string and when you are able to do that, you see the beauty of this complex, it's like a huge edifice like a monument of complex architecture with nuances within nuances within nuances and you see it all and that's one sentence, because that's one punch of that experience with all these facets. And then you dwell on each you appreciate this, you appreciate that, and then you appreciate the way they are arranged and their relationships. And once you've got that one sentence, okay let's not take the one page but a couple of lines at least, you realize in the next sentence and the next, there are things which resonate. And then somewhere along the way he'll say, similarly, and the similarly is like three pages back he had said something. Similarly, so there's this whole structure across the whole chapter and it takes a while for the mind to come to that level of largeness and then you see the trend of structure across chapters and then you see across the books because he was writing six books at the same time, one chapter at a time with no notes. So in his mind it was this huge infinity of the knowledge which is experienced in the intuitive or higher realm. He's one with what he knows, he doesn't need notes, he knows what he has said, what do I want to say next, well I continue from here, where I was. You don't need notes then, but he's writing different books, one chapter at a time and so it's as if my left side and my front side and my right side in the consciousness, it's this highlight that highlight, that approach and so when you read them like this, it's like he is tapping so many different aspects of you. And when you read them across or when you have this big picture of the experience, you say wow, this was the experience he lived in, the way he lived the world and experienced everything, all knowledge.
So if you approach in this way and do not reduce into mental terms, you will find your container of mind and power of mind and ability to hold is not only lifted out of the narrow intellectual thought process into a more intuitivized mind, but also it is made large, the container becomes so big until the whole thing can be received. And even then there are layers implied which unfold over time. So it's one of the greatest gifts he has given us and when people complain he is difficult, that's only your starting point. It's difficult because you're meeting something which is an ocean, difficult to capture ocean, fine. Just start and the capacity to understand will grow in you and the intuitivization will grow in you and everything just grows, if you don't give up in the beginning. Then he develops the power in you. Start with the things which interest you and then re-read sometimes you've read a little bit, get back and restart after having read a few or read through to get the sense of the summary and then go back and re-read now for the details and nuances. There are ways we can do this. So as a tool, it really comes to this question of where is our mind going to, in its evolutionary potential. As a tool, this is the single most powerful tool we have today. There is no other text you will find in the world in which this kind of depth and complexity and richness of structure and very logical, very structured and yet depth of content is there. You read a single sentence or a paragraph in him, you will find people write whole books on that single idea. But having read a few paragraphs, you look at those books and you say, okay, I know that, I am familiar with that, no big deal. All he has done is use lots of words to say something which is very simple really.
There is a person I had met, his name is, what was the name of the author of the book that you gave me? Peter Kingsley. He has written extensively on the mystical roots of Western traditions and the spirituality in the Greek tradition and shamanic now. When I met him and he said, he heard I was from Sri Aurobindo Ashram, he said, ah yes Sri Aurobindo, that man, he ruined it all for me. What happened? So when he was studying in Oxford he would want to retire from people to study on his own and he discovered there was a little room somewhere in a corner which happened to be the room where Sri Aurobindo lived and which subsequently was made into a library of Sri Aurobindo's books. So he didn't know that background. He said there's a room where no one will disturb me. He went there. He discovered books by Sri Aurobindo and he began to read them. He found them fascinating and then he got addicted to reading it and then he said, Sri Aurobindo messed it up for me because after that I can't appreciate any other author. Because they use so many words, they have so little content and here it is like every sentence goes deep, deep, with so much use. And after that you read (other books), it looks so fickle, so shallow. Interesting!
[Narad] So we have to summarise.
Sraddhalu (0:54:03):
Yes, so we have dwelt on, last time we began with the whole evolutionary emergence and we saw the big picture of the psychology of worlds and evolutionary movement emerging, processes of evolution, understood the deeper nuances and phenomena which are otherwise unexplainable. And this time we focused much more on the mind and the powers of our consciousness with a hint of where this evolution is moving towards. All these powers are already within our reach, all that we have discussed today. But there are still higher and deeper powers which are not yet fully developed or which await, glimpses of which exist in us. In the same way as you will see the power of intellect in some of the greater apes or in some of the dogs. And I want to just take a moment to highlight this because this is important. The domesticated dogs often have an intelligence which comes close to the human. And for two reasons; because they are intelligent they are drawn to the human, but because they're close to the human they absorb our intelligence. Remember the power of transmission. As we can transmit a consciousness bundle amongst ourselves, we are transmitting this to dogs also or other pets that we keep. And every time that you hug your dog, your consciousness and your intelligence is being infused into his. And he absorbs a little bit and grows in capacity and power of intelligence. And if we are doing this with the dog, we can also receive this from higher beings, right? So there is a whole higher grade of consciousness we can receive and infuse into ourselves, but also share with others in this way.
And so this points to a potential that we as conscious beings can turn to a higher range of consciousness and be hugged by it as we would hug our dogs. Receive it and allow it to infuse in us and organise these higher faculties in us rapidly. The example we took of Sri Aurobindo's books and reading from Sri Aurobindo, you don't necessarily need to read or in reading you may read a few lines and enter into immersion in the presence which is held from the source that the lines are articulating from and remain immersed in that and you feel the hug of his consciousness, embrace of the Divine Mother, infusing in you those higher gradations of consciousness and lifting you into them to the extent that you allow yourself. And especially if you consciously open all of yourself and receive into all of you and contain and hold and cherish and allow it to develop then there is an enormous acceleration. Just as the dog from companionship with the human can enormously accelerate his development of intelligence so we can enormously accelerate the potential of the higher levels of consciousness which are still flashing briefly in the way you see intelligence in dogs briefly initially glimmering or even in smaller, less developed animals, flashes of intelligence. Here the higher ranges not only begin to flash, they begin to glow and sustain and grow. And so we can accelerate our own evolution in this way to our higher spiritual possibilities and the power of knowledge, cognition also growing accordingly. What those stages are and what are the corresponding powers of cognition and in what way they reflect in our current capacity of knowledge and that relationship we will explore in the next discussion.
Narad (0:58:00):
Namaste.
[Sraddhalu] Namaste.