EWS #68 Planes of Consciousness (5) - Intuitive Mind
Feb 24, 2020
Topics:
Narad (0:01:01):
Namaste and welcome all to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. In our last session, Shraddhalu took us into the different levels above the mind and perhaps welcoming you again, could you give us a brief summary?
Sraddhalu (0:01:32):
We made a survey of the different planes of consciousness above the intellect. And the importance of this is central to the integral yoga, it exists only in the integral yoga today. It is not available in any of the existing religions or spiritual lineages or traditions as they survive today. It did exist in the original Vedic teaching but the content of it, the import of it, even the specific knowledge of the continuity of the planes, the intellect and the Divine consciousness are separated by a huge gap. It's as if the whole of evolution rises like a mountain and the peak of the mountain is the intellect and then it's just empty space into some transcendence of the Divinity, but nothing beyond, and so the intellect is obviously insufficient. There is no hope then of a Divine life possible. The transcendence beyond it is so different that the two can never meet, and so the only conclusion is either to withdraw into some transcendence of spirituality, leaving behind life as it is or a little bit of that reflects on the mountain and your mountain peak as it glows in the sunlight which remains still the mountain of hard matter and matter remaining what it is, a domain of suffering, in-conscience and ignorance. Well, life will always be what it is with a little bit of layering of divinity reflected on it.
[Narad] But no transformation is possible
[Sraddhalu] No transformation is possible because the mind is insufficient to transform prana, life energy or the body matter. It's not powerful enough. It is itself, it feels as if it's a product of the body. It's only a higher consciousness greater than the mind, which can liberate mind from its limitations and all the way down to the most material, liberating them from limitations allow them to grow into Divinity or compel them to grow into Divinity. And this was in fact Sri Aurobindo's experience even in the ascent of the levels of consciousness that until he was able to take it all the way to the highest Supramental that matter would yield up to a point and then stop from further change. And only the highest Supramental consciousness of Oneness, which is the origin of all this, that can seize on matter and change it.
[Narad] And break the resistance.
[Sraddhalu] Break the resistance and transform. Yes. So, still the continuity above mind all the way to that supramental and the divine consciousness has to be brought back into the relevance of spirituality and the knowledge of spirituality and nobody else has it today.
Narad (0:05:01):
You told us that you were going to give us some techniques as to how to move in those realms.
Sraddhalu (0:05:11):
So, I just want to summarize this and view it from a different point of view and discuss the planes also. You see in the Tantra there is still a little bit of the knowledge of the possibility of a higher consciousness descending into the lower. Otherwise in all the Vedantic traditions you have only this concept of rising consciousness, losing itself into a transcendence, leaving behind everything. The tantra has this idea that the higher can descend and change something of the lower, but that's about it. It still does not conceive of this power that we call the Supramental, which has the power not merely to fill a little bit and superficially, but actually to change radically. So that's the reason why the knowledge of these levels above is so critical. And the whole, the future evolution of humanity rests on this. We saw also last time that these levels of consciousness are not merely some abstract ideas or some imagined planes. There is in fact a continuity from the mind all the way through to the highest. We saw that the mind cannot function, our mind as it is functioning cannot function if there is not already within, behind or above, somewhere hidden a power of all knowledge. Because even a simple act of remembering something involves something else inside you that knows all and is able to push forward the knowledge that you need. So this is one of the great perceptions or formulations of Sri Aurobindo. He shows you in sequence how your existing powers of mind are so to say a diluted or reduced version of powers of a Divine mind and therefore they can easily get free of their limitations and grow into their own Divinity. This possibility, if this was not true, there would be no possibility of our rising into a Divine consciousness.
So the whole concept that he presents, the whole process he presents is one of a continuous change. Not a sudden leap, not a gap, not some division. So last time we saw the various gradations that he names from our current thinking mind to what he has called the higher mind where the thought itself has the large content. And just that transition from the narrow mind to the higher mind is something so radical that when that banner of thinking changes, you will find you can never again take one piece in isolation from another piece, one thought in conflict or contradiction with another thought. You will recall the example I gave, if you pull a cloth like this, you are pulling a single point but all the threads are being drawn in. This higher mind actually works like this, that you bring a topic to think about and into the topic or through the topic you experience a huge complex network of inter dependent ideas, causes, results and everything is in a blend. So the mind itself is habituated now to thinking in multiple directions, multiple interdependencies, a level of complexity which to your narrow thinking mind is almost impossible to conceive. Because we are used to, we are like a, to use a modern example, a microprocessor, that little thing which is calculating and is busy calculating in one piece. And here what you have in the higher mind is a multiprocessor, not of two cores, not of four cores, not eight cores. I don't know if you follow what that means. In a computer chip, they say they have eight different processors, so eight core chip. This is not eight core, this is not 16 core, it's a hundred fold or a thousand fold. At least as it grows, it can become so many.
Narad (0:09:05):
Is this available, I understand, individually, but is it available in the collective mind also?
Sraddhalu (0:09:16):
Absolutely. And if it was not there, we would not be able to have different perspectives of thought. In a sense, in the cosmic mind, and if we can think of it this way, just as our body is part of a cosmic physical universe, of which this is a special focus, but we're never really cut off from the rest. Purely from a perspective of physics, every subatomic particle of an atom in my body is bouncing around, jumping to other atoms and through other atoms moving around. So an electron, for example, which is in the tip of my finger now, is in the next fraction of a second bouncing around, jumping across other electrons, through the air, through the walls, through each of your bodies, and maybe eventually coming back to some other atom in my body. And if you think about every electron, at least on the peripheral parts of the outer surface of the electron shells of every atom, every electron in all our atoms of the whole body, and the walls, and the ceiling, and the earth, everything is flowing around like a gas, fluid, swimming. If you think in these terms, there is actually no separation between your body and the wall and the earth and our bodies. Isn't it? And when you think of the whole physical world as this gas flowing through, you see only continuity in which there are special forms of repeating whirl which you call your separate electrons or bodies or objects. So if you hold a, let's say in your fist, you hold a stone, it looks like a stone only because the electron passing through it is whirling, moves on and another replaces it and whirls, moves on while another replaces. The persistence of the whirl overall is all that makes for the permanence of the stone. Otherwise everything is fluid and everything is blended and connected to everything else.
And if this is true of the physical world it is even more true of the vital. It is even more true of the mental. So in the mind for example, our mind is only like a special concentration of what is otherwise a very fluid consciousness extending out into the cosmic mind. So everything you're thinking of, you can say is a particular thought of the cosmic mind. Rather, because cosmic mind thinks, your thought forms in this little piece that you call my mind. When in fact it's just an open playground into which cosmic thoughts pass all the time. When they pass through that patch that you're aware of you say I thought. But really it's not your thought. It's cosmic thought that you're sharing in. So in cosmic thought, all these let's say dozens of thoughts that we all have together right now are all simultaneously present. So if you could as if think or share in a larger part of the cosmic thought, you would have awareness of all these thoughts in one whole and that would give you a sense of what the higher mind's working would be like. Only it would be see it all in one continuous, in a continuous whole, a gigantic chunk of one thought with so many facets. So yes, it already exists as a working power in the Cosmic Mind. So higher mind or your awakening into your own higher mind is only becoming aware of a higher grade of working of a Cosmic Mind which was already there and so on for all those levels. So in a sense as you rise through these levels, you're not creating anything new. They already exist. The Divine mind as it forms the world has all these thoughts, and all these experiences, all these states already formed. We are only awakening to our own higher, freer domains.
Sraddhalu (0:13:21):
But this is the big difference. Those planes or those gradations of experience are not organized in our current evolution. They exist in the free operation of Cosmic Mind. They don't exist in you. In the same way as, let's say, if you were still in the ape monkey brain, then while the human mentality exists in the cosmic mind, your biology would not support the experience of the human thought, meaning it is not organized in your current brain operation. So you will say, I can't think, I can only feel impulse of thought, that's what the monkey would have. But as it begins to get organized, we say, oh, I am no more monkey brain, I am now human mind. In the same way, these higher levels, although they exist in their free working in the cosmos, they have to be organized and integrated into your individual mind. And then the rest of you.
[Narad] Is it a more progressive rising up in a leap?
[Sraddhalu] In practice, it is often experienced as a leap. But the leap itself is only because you suddenly have a breakthrough of a progressive gradual change. So, it's like when a monkey is put in close contact with a human being, at first it is only staring dumbly at the power of the human mind, it is surprised and overwhelmed. But after a while there is a kind of an infusion of the human thought power into the monkey consciousness and it begins to get a feel of what it's like and then at some point it's as if something snaps and higher faculty of thought suddenly kicks in and then dies again and then again kicks in and dies again. And then becomes more and more steady and more and more developed. It's something like this when we open to the our own higher ranges of mind. But we saw last time that the higher mind has this great multifaceted thinking but it's still thought. And as a thought it is still labored and it still involves process and it still has ‘I thinking of some things’ and so the whole thing could be wrong. It's full of ignorance inherently because you never know whether what you know is right or not.
Above the higher mind, Sri Aurobindo describes the Illumined mind where increasingly this thought process which is larger and larger gives way to a seeing awareness. Now you dont think in a process anymore, as the consciousness grows or is filled with a kind of a light, you see the thought, you are aware of these different viewpoints, these different complexities, interdependencies and the experience is very similar to, let's say, taking a single thread and then from it becoming aware of the tapestry but seeing as if from far, you see the whole picture of all these different complex thoughts. And then you begin to see more and more from all directions, from all angles. And so in the illumined mind, the thought processing, and let's say your hundred microprocessors, gives way to a light that reveals, and process gives way to direct perception. The result, of course, is another dramatic shift in the way the mind works. No more there is a labored effort, even in the higher mind of course it is so much more plastic, but still there is a direct seeing and in the seeing your awareness can turn to whatever it is you need to see and know more about, widen the scope of the seeing. But in the seeing there is a kind of a directness. I see it because it's already there, it's true, not because I thought it up or created it and at the experience is as if all thoughts are as if forms of the Divine and you see the Divine working and the Divine thinking and obviously at this point you're always aware of the the light itself which reveals is of the Divine knowledge the Divine self which fills everything. This gives way as we saw last time as increasingly you see from all directions from all sides all viewpoints including inside out. You experience yourself in and one with what you know. And this is the first step where you have true knowledge what he calls the Intuitive Mind. Where you are what you know, even if it's limited. There is no more I knowing something. I am, and that's it or it is. And I know because I am one with it and so that's your first ground of sure knowledge without error but with limitation. I know only this much I don't know the rest but I know there is a rest and so inherent to the true intuition is this power of knowing your own limitation even while you know what is right. And so the moment this begins to settle more and more, you know this and you know that there is more, but I don't know what it is. Your mind turns now to that and the intuition kicks in and now you get the element which is missing. Flash, flash, flash, a series of flashes through which your mind knows in identity. But at first again, it is a narrow, narrow identity which widens, it becomes wider. So every plane you will find a similar activity. Something is first developed and then it grows, it becomes more wide, more free.
Sraddhalu (0:19:00):
And in the intuition as it grows wider and freer, the perceptions of flashes of identification become more rapid, more wide, more inclusive, until at some point in their maximum they open out to the infinite. So I take a flower in a flash, the whole universe in relation to flower. In flower is the whole universe backing it. And the whole universe leans to form flower. And you experience because you're not thinking, you're not seeing, you are one with it, you are one with flower, that's whole universe, and you experience the whole. So it is at this level that you have access to all knowledge. And yet, you have ignorance. Because it's one angle, it's the flower's experience of universe or universe as flower, as different from stone, which may have a completely different experience of universe. And each is infinite. And yet they're so totally different.
[Narad] And yet in all these ranges duality still exists.
[Sraddhalu] Duality still exists but less and less vivid, less and less compelling. You are seeing a continuity, you are experiencing continuity but in different ways. And so in this infinity which Sri Aurobindo calls the Overmental consciousness, you can have radically different viewpoints and yet each is full in its infinity. And so it is as if ignorance becomes exaggerated in scale to infinity. And necessarily this has to give way to something else in which all aspects, all experiences, all viewpoints are, so to say, blend into a single one whole. And that's your beginning of the supramental. In the first entry into the supramental, you experience all these infinities as aspects of yourself and then the infinities become conscious of an underlying oneness and so the oneness is behind and the oneness begins to predominate as you rise higher and at some point you live in the oneness with so many infinities as facets of yourself which gives way to final step into the highest Supramental where there is only oneness, there are no facets. There is only oneness infinite and all is one whole Infinite.
And it is that power which has to come down into matter if matter is to be transformed. If you want to transform mind any of those higher gradations is good enough to begin the process. If you want to transform your vitality again things of the higher approaching the Overmental are excellent. And just with an Overmental consciousness filling the vitality, there will be such an extraordinary capacity of the vital consciousness, because it will experience the whole universe as itself. Even the physical body can experience the Overmental, and it would know itself one with the whole, but with a limitation. At that point, different parts of your physical consciousness, your cells might still experience a certain contradiction among each other. And that's when the highest Supramental has to come in, which gives the physical consciousness the true freedom to then begin to experience the divine and become a part of the divine, and that's when you have the physical transformation. So you can see something very interesting. While there is this ascending of consciousness, at each step that higher consciousness fills the lower mind, vital, to some extent the physical and recasts it into its terms.
So in the first shift to the Higher Mind, already your way of thinking has changed so much, that to think serially, to think in lines, to think in process and to not know where you are going, it looks like as primitive as the monkey thinking appears to the human mind. And that's just one little step. And each of those steps looks back at the previous and feels it, oh, that's primitive. So, each of the steps is of a breakthrough of such a high grade that in normal nature's evolution it would have taken whatever million years as it took for the monkey to human in a way.
[Narad] But it would have happened?
[Sraddhalu] Likely, if we had survived. The problem is with the power of the intellect, is so great that we tend to redirect that whole power to conquest, to domination, conflict or a monotone suppression of diversity, all of which prevent the higher possibilities or as has happened also in other civilizations on earth as well as elsewhere, that there is a growth into the spiritual consciousness, but without this link, a kind of a breaking out into higher states and then you live with this three-layered vital mental physical body, living in a spiritual poise and this goes on doing its normal routine of activity and you say nice spiritual life and that's what you see in many of the ascetic traditions. You're busy living your life and there is some kind of a spirituality underlying, but this does not change.
Sraddhalu (0:24:27):
There are even civilizations which as if exaggerated that to such an extent that they lived in the subtle body and abandoned the gross physical body. And so they lived in a kind of a subtle state in which the higher access to consciousness was greater. And so they had their own spiritual civilizations but with practically no material content of it, because it's too dark, too dull, too limiting. And then you have in fact, so the point being this has no value for evolution. Because nature's interest was, in fact, she binds you into matter so deeply that you cannot just escape. Because we are first of all mental beings or spiritual in a sense, to escape should be quite easy. And that's why she makes sure that in the evolution she binds you. She spends much more time in the initial stages of binding so that we don't just jump out. And even when we attempt to make that escape, she uses every possible attraction a temptation to hold you back so that you don't abandon. And that's why the ascetic path is so difficult. Everything in nature is working against you, to pull you back so that you don't just exit the game. Whereas the way of the integral yoga embraces life, takes up all activities to be raised to the Divine and nature says, ah this is what I am looking for and then she turns everything to help in a way, but including what opposes is there to help you to make more perfect and more complete.
Narad (0:26:09):
How has Nature's final acceptance to collaborate with Mother changed things?
Sraddhalu (0:26:19):
Mother said that it would lead to enormous possibilities. She said there is no end to the wonders of nature's collaboration. But one of the results has been that where Nature was tardy, slow, pulling back, and the Mother was trying to push forward, now Nature says, OK, I will participate in this speeding up. So suddenly you find, and this is in the late 50s, early 60s, that 1960s, that suddenly you find everything speeding up and the resistance to forward growth that was there in nature that is gone. And so many things can happen easily. The feeling we have and I think everywhere in the world, everybody feels this, that a sense of urgency that comes because there is in the whole humanity this pressure to move forward. But not everybody is conscious of what it is that this urgency seeks. Some people spontaneously feel the need to go beyond the mind and spontaneously reach out and open. You don't need to have read Sri Aurobindo to have that experience because the experience belongs to evolution, to all humanity. But you don't have clarity of what that experience means if you don't have that background, the explanation that he gives of what this represents. So there are many people who have had glimpses of things above mind and then because it perhaps opens out to something large, they say, ah yes, this is it, now I'm enlightened. There's nothing more to be done. Because they've got this idea which often comes with some of the Zen traditions, Satori, awakening, you awaken into something, and yes, everything is so simple, it's so obvious, it's nice, everything is as it is, I don't need to change, nothing needs to change, we are fine as we are.
Narad (0:28:14):
But also with saints and sages.
Sraddhalu (0:28:18):
Yes. It's very easy, and especially as you approach the Overmental consciousness, it's very easy to experience this breaking out into infinity and it is so overwhelming that it's easy to say this is it. There cannot be anything more and so many have stopped there and that's what Mother calls the beginning of all the religions. It is from here that the great religions are formed. Each had an experience of the Divine and said this is it because it was so complete. You experience the whole universe as yourself. So what more can you want, right? So that's why it's necessary to understand there is always more. In the Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo lists steps, stages of growth and then he ends with, and still there is a beyond. Just when you thought this is it, and still there is a beyond, and he goes on. So infinities, as he describes one after another. All of this again is work already first developed by the Vedic Rishis in themselves to rise into a Supramental consciousness. And they have used vocabulary entering the gates of the Sun or crossing beyond the gates of the Sun and so on.
They have described these experiences of ascent in the Veda. But if you don't have the clue of what they represent, you kind of reduce them to some lower level of understanding. Just for example, we touched upon this last time, the Overmental conscisouness and higher mental has a similarity. What the Higher mental does with many thoughts, the Overmental experiences in infinities of the many thoughts. So the difference between the Higher Mental and Overmental is what was there infinite is just reduced to finiteness but you have this rich multiplicity of thoughts. So you can read an experience of that and think you have reached it when you are actually in the higher mind. If you do not recognize what it means to actually experience infinity. Similarly, in your own current intellectual process, there is a particular operation of your thinking mind where the mind goes very rapidly and puts together, assembles many pieces, because it's a domain that you're familiar with. Everyone who is an expert in some domain can easily assemble pieces and form a complex mix. And you'll say, ah, this is Higher Mind because it fits what you were describing. No, it's not. And so that's why these distinctions are so important.
So the way Sri Aurobindo articulates is not only so complete and allows you to distinguish in your experience, but it's also very practical because all this, it's not enough to understand, we should be able to turn into an actual process of ascent. So, which will be our discussion now for this purpose. But just a couple of ideas before. In the Veda, what they did, what the Vedic Rishis attained, was something so extraordinary and yet it was incomplete. What Sri Aurobindo did is not a repetition of that. It is something fundamentally new and that distinction is important. In the Vedic experience, as the Rishis rose into Supramental consciousness, they experienced it in their individual attainment. They were not at that time plugged into humanity in order to imprint this experience as an evolutionary attainment by humanity. What they experienced, they articulated and as if cut apart, gifted, and did not bridge it to the most material. So in their experience, the body remained as the base on which the mind now sitting, so to say, opens out to these higher possibilities and at best the mind shares in the Supramental experience or some part of it and the body remains only a pedestal on which your mind is sitting. What happens then? The body remains exactly what it was. At best it's filled with a glow and a certain intensity of the experience, but does not change fundamentally.
This difference, or rather the lack of integration with the physical, is the flaw, Sri Aurobindo points out, of the Vedic experience, which led later to complete division between the spiritual and the material. And what Sri Aurobindo has done is to not only ascend to those higher states of the supramental consciousness, but he did it while being connected to humanity, so that whatever he experienced was imprinted into the human collective consciousness as an evolutionary change, but also that he bridged it all the way into his most physical body, physical consciousness. The result being that the physical body now has a potential to be able to experience the Supramental consciousness and therefore life is not cut off from spirit. The bridging has begun. And so, Mother's insistence that Sri Aurobindo is not the culmination of the previous developments, but the beginning of a whole new cycle or a whole new evolutionary movement. So this is just as a background and as a recapitulation of what we discussed. Looking at these higher planes, you notice two broad categories. As your mind turns up, there is this whole range rising all the way higher mind, Illumined mind and Intuitive mind, where all consciousness is finite. And after from intuitive onwards, all consciousness is infinite. And now when you think about it like this, intuition is nothing but the supramental consciousness on a finite level. Ray of the Sun.
Sraddhalu (0:34:31):
So I'm going into this in this very in detail because it's important for the practice. If you can touch the Intuitive mind, it's a ray of the truth consciousness of the Supramental, which is infinite. From here to open to infinity will lead you all the way to the Supramental through whatever intermediate steps and the intuition therefore is the first link point. If you can attain to that and secure yourself there sufficiently from there opening out to the infinity, the rest of the journey is assured. But if you stop short of intuition into the higher mind or illumined mind, you're still in the knowledge which is not true. You're still I, knowing something. My knowing can be defective, the perception of something can be defective, I can be defective as a registration. Everything can be full of errors. But in the intuition, the first time you have real knowledge without error. So any intermediate step is not stable and will not give you a solid base on which the yoga could open out to higher. You could easily get lost in the higher mind into some mental constructions, however complex and rich but stop short of something true, which is what you see in many of the new age revelatory movements. So someone will have channeled something, someone will have written something, they'll say it's not channeling, it is inspired and they are able to access all kinds of knowledge which internally is so cohesive, so consistent. Well, if you go long enough, eventually you will find conflicts, but the mind is able to plastically shape itself to make everything consistent. But you take one teaching and you take another and they don't fit. It's not even over mental. It's almost close to the higher mind but it's still a mental construction and you can make any number of constructions and be so full of it that it feels this is it. But you'd never get to something true and the intuition is our link point.
That's why Sri Aurobindo gives it so much importance. Intuition is what then he focuses on for the practice and yes, we will meanwhile of course develop the higher mind and the illumined mind as intermediate steps but with this reference always. So then he dedicates the whole section in the Synthesis of Yoga which describes how this ascent is to take place and with special special focus on the intuition. There's another important idea that Sri Aurobindo gives, that our thinking, our surface thinking mind and the true, let's say Divine mind, even the Supramental eventually, are not two separate things. There's a continuity. And we began this discussion with that idea. And so there's another way of approaching this whole transition without thinking of planes, but thinking purely of what in your current thinking represents that working. And so to say turn that back to its own origin and amplify the powers of your mind as if turning back to their source. And so it's a different way of looking at it and we'll see in the training of the intuition this becomes one of the practices.
Sraddhalu (0:38:08):
But what it means practically is this, that our current thinking, let's say, he calls it mind of ignorance, as it turns towards mind of knowledge where all knowledge is available, there's an intermediate transition that he calls the mind of self forgetful knowledge. It's a very interesting wording. And the idea is this, every time I learn something, I know something or I understand something. We're not talking about planes of consciousness anymore. I realize that it seems familiar. It's mine because it's as if a part of me already knew it. And when something is wrong, I feel uncomfortable, it doesn't quite fit in me somewhere. Something feels, it's like a piece of puzzle which has been cut out artificially, it doesn't fit in my puzzle, in the backdrop, in my inner parts. So, each time I learn something new and I know what it is and I appreciate it, it's as if somewhere inside me a part says, ah yes, I already knew it, but I had forgotten. But I had forgotten that I forgot. Now that I discover it and I know it, I have a distant resonance that yes, it was something which I knew and I have forgotten. So that's the self-forgetful. This is the beginning of it.
So the practice which we will use in this movement, every time you learn something new, you become very quiet and try to feel that part in you where you already know it, that you always knew it and feels right, just get to awareness of that. And so bit by bit every time you acquire new knowledge, new insight, you begin to turn in, to recall that which corresponds to it, which was already there. You remember the example we had earlier of the memory, when you turn to remember something pops up from inside, meaning it was already there. So when you learn, you now turn in consciously to recall where you knew it. And bit by bit now, more and more the inner, inward turn grows. And when I learn something, I turn in, find its source or the knowledge already in, but now I discover, I already know some more about it, which is not coming from outside. So as you gain knowledge from outside, you turn in from inside, something awakes, which knows more. And you say, oh yes, I am familiar with that. And there is this and that and the other. And the other person says, well, how do you know? But now what happens is, increasingly you rely on the inner part than the outer. The outer is almost like a trigger which awakens the inner, but the inner is more complete, more real. And already what is inner has the intuitive character. You are one with what you know, isn't it?
Narad (0:41:00):
And this can come from a person, it can come from a reading?
Sraddhalu (0:41:05):
Anything. You look at an object, let's say you look at an animal which you have never seen in your whole life, or a flower that you have never seen in your whole life. In the very first glance there is a surprise and then the familiarity of some thinking in, oh yes, of course this is and I already knew it. And in the knowing, I know, ah yes, this has such and such a quality, this is a medicinal power, this is of a particular season, it needs this kind of climate because I already knew it somewhere inside. So now you see the transition. Again, it's very smooth. There's a continuity. Where earlier you were looking for information outside and taking in and creating a picture inside you of the world outside, now as you touch anything outside, it awakes in your inner world the full knowledge of it. And so this is the mind of self-forgetful knowledge. That means it had the knowledge but it has just forgotten and the events are only recalling. Which now gives way to a new phase. Now I don't look outside anymore. I look at the thing which is already within me. There I begin to search and now draw out. That's when the whole mode of learning changes. You draw out from within instead of take in from outside. And the outside is at best a point of support, a reference for drawing out and so that mind of self forgetful knowledge increasingly opens out to the true knowledge of the mind of knowledge and the transition takes place until you begin to live in the mind of knowledge where all knowledge is already.
So he describes this because this is the practical way in which the transition is experienced. Now you see in this vocabulary nowhere we spoke of planes. But implied in this is the whole process, but without the distinction of planes. As the mind of self-forgetful knowledge first begins to, let's say, draw out, things of the higher mind experience, illumined mind experience are included in the way it is represented. It reveals to you as a cluster of thoughts, or as a light that reveals or increasingly it becomes I am what I knew, it becomes intuitive and then from there it can as if open out to the infinity of the mind of knowledge. All of that is implied in this. But as a process it's one single process. Into this then we look at what is to be done. How do we establish ourselves more and more in the intuitive mind and Sri Aurobindo then gives broadly four processes or four methods by which this transition is made. First he explains the rationale. Here is a mind, current consciousness with whatever its evolutionary limitations, always jumping, always seizing. Largely monkey, in the Buddhist tradition they'll speak of monkey mind. Why? Because it's a monkey which is jumping around and restless.
In the yoga tradition, we have a very vivid picture of this working of mind. It is said, if a monkey gets drunk and then becomes mad and is stung by a scorpion, that's the nature of how your mind works. It's very symbolic. So you can think of each of these. First of all, monkey is always restless. It cannot sit quiet. It always needs to be hopping around. That's our first character. And then it has got drunk. So it doesn't really know what's real and what's not. It is living in its own fantasy. And then it has gone mad. And when it has gone mad, it doesn't even know itself. It is lost to its own... it is a vehicle for other forces to fool around and play through them. When all the time you think you are thinking, you are being made to think all kinds of silly things. And then it's stung by a scorpion. The pain of life perhaps, you can give to it whatever interpretation you want. And the pain of life suddenly warps all your priorities and you are busy. I need to make enough money to buy a house, until I buy a house I can't rest and people have all kinds of priorities that they fixate upon and suddenly all reality is warped into that one object. Or my exam, if I don't pass my exam with enough marks, my life is finished. You see how ridiculous it sounds when you hear someone say it. But to that person, that sting is his only reality. So, anyway, this is just a way of looking at the whole problem of the monkey mind.
Narad (0:45:53):
These can be mental, can be vital constructions.
Sraddhalu (0:45:56):
It's all mixed. In the very nature of monkey analogy, it's half animal, so all the vital physical elements are mixed into your mind. So the first thing required is, this thing has to yield to that and its ways. And you see how different they are, they are totally contradictory. How do you do that? How do you even allow your current mind to, for totally different operation to replace it? You can't. The only thing you could think of somehow silence this whole thing. Bring it into as much stillness as possible so that something else can begin to fill it. But on the other hand when that begins to fill it and then it moves or starts let's say a higher thought, immediately in the movement the monkey mind jumps up and seizes and distorts. Which is generally the case, the Mother has a whole lecture on this, she says that people don't realize when an intuition comes, they immediately jump up and get excited and in the process the whole intuition is warped or limited or distorted. She says you have to remain absolutely quiet and when the intuition begins to enter, you have to still wait, allow it to unfold, allow it to develop its own forms. And so it's a training to not get excited, to not get agitated, to remain quiet and yet aware and not fall asleep. So, in a sense, the whole of the base, let's say, of developing higher or opening to higher levels of consciousness is firs tot be able to stop the current habit of mind from overwhelming whatever is above.
So we are starting with this idea that everything which we seek is already there, but on a higher grade, within us, beyond us, in the universe. But it's right there. But your current activity and the exaggeration and habit of your current activity screens and blocks out completely. And so in practice that's what happens. You have an intuition, while you're busy thinking something pops into you and you seize it, warp it into what you like and then say this is my idea. Not realizing it came to you, but you've already distorted what came. Someone else gets the same idea, warps it into his mold and your ideas collide, although you see the similarity of it. Not knowing that there was one intuition that came into several minds. So you have to first completely still this and in awareness turn this awareness up to that which is already above and so this becomes the first basic practice. It takes time and if we have worked on it then all the rest becomes easy. If you have not worked on it, you may get experiences of these higher states, but they don't last or they are very quickly distorted to your container, your ability of containing. And unfortunately, there you have the maximum risk, because when you warp it in to fit your container, the habit becomes so prevalent that the Divine knowledge can no more freely exercise itself. This is often what happens with people who come with a very strong religious formation. They are so used to fitting into their box that you can present something totally different and they will receive only as much as fits into their box and say, oh yes, this is what I have always known, it's the same thing that I was taught and that's it. And you might have said something totally different. They have either not heard it, not registered or warped it to fit their expectation.
Narad (0:49:47):
Once Mother wrote to me about the experiences that were coming down and she said do not try to make any mental construction of them, just be quiet.
Sraddhalu (0:50:01):
Yes, because straight away the mind says, oh what is this, which plane, which consciousness, what does it represent, it breaks everything. It's almost like, as an analogy, if the finger of God, so to say, leans down and in your container of water touches, the water grips the finger and fwoop, twists it in. So you've caught the little piece and you say, now I have reached the Divine mind. No you have not. But if you stay very still, then the finger can come inside and begin to form and change and fill with light and then the real process happens. So in the very core of the whole upward turn is this first requirement of being able to still the mind and train the mind to remain in a quiet, aspiring, receptive state as long as necessary. Then it's possible for that, let's say higher consciousness generally now, whatever range it is, whatever level it is, to slowly infuse itself and then bit by bit form new grooves or new patterns of habit or new ways of thinking. One of the biggest problems you have initially is the need to have to think and without the thought process you suddenly feel empty. Especially if you are trained in an intellectual way, if I am not thinking I feel that I am doing nothing, I am wasting my time. And so the moment such a person is made quiet, after a while they get restless. If at that point the intuition comes, they say, ah, here's something to feed on, and then the thought machinery begins to work. To stay like that and then accept that the knowledge will come, it's almost dangerous for you. It feels.
Sraddhalu (0:51:59):
Imagine you're told, okay, today you have to give a lecture and you go with no preconception, no thoughts, no ideas beforehand and sit there with a quiet mind and allow the knowledge to come through. Okay? You will be scared. Or if initially you begin like this, what comes through will be at best little seizing pieces and pieces will fall into place, maybe or not. To trust in a situation which is so demanding that a higher knowledge will come through, it takes a while. So necessarily, initially, you'll have a little bit of oscillation up and down, and that's okay. You'll have brief glimpses, you'll pull it, you'll form, et cetera. But if you're not sincere in the intention to become completely still and allow it to form you, that intermediate phase can again be a point where you lose the whole effort.
Narad (0:52:53):
It's interesting that I've interviewed and spoken with people who had the silent mind and they said they were going crazy. They could not handle it. It was just nothing was happening.
Sraddhalu (0:53:09):
Yes, and even sometimes people when that silence is imposed on them as a gift, we may say from the Divine, then they say, I think I'm going crazy, I can't think anymore, have I become stupid? It feels like that. I think even Mother makes a comment like this in the Agenda. That she says at some point in her work on the cellular consciousness, remember she already has access to the Supramental consciousness and she's now working to fix it in the physical. So she said at one point, it's as if the Divine took out her mental layer so that it does not interfere. Of course she could think, all that was there, but that as the faculty was removed for this purpose and then she said, you know, if the body doesn't understand, then it doesn't make any sense. But especially for one who has so cherished in their whole life the thought process, to be silent is like you have gone stupid. To not be able to think, it creates panic. So you have an initial process of habituating yourself, and you accept to be stupid for a while. But if you can get through that, then the way the knowledge begins to come is so beautiful that you realize I couldn't have done it. So let's say this person now who has been asked to sit and speak, he receives an insight, he articulates, and then another insight, and another insight, and then suddenly at the end, and exactly at the right time, he was asked to speak, let's say 30 minutes, at exactly the right time, one insight comes and then it links all these as if in a thread and completes the circle. And he says, wow, this is so well planned, so beautifully thought out. And so it happens a few times and then you begin to trust and you begin to depend more and more and rely on it.
But still the holding the state becomes the most important. That receptive state. And it's like cycling. Initially, the moment you say, oh, I've got it, you fall. So the state of cycling is a state of ease where you do not exercise. You allow the body or the cycle to lead. It's something like that. So this initial phase is primarily one of stilling and then opening and allowing the infusion of the higher. Into this Sri Aurobindo brings a dimension which is unique again to the Integral Yoga, the surrender to the Divine Mother. So what is it that is descending? It's not just a higher plane of consciousness. It is Her consciousness, her mind, her light, her knowledge, which is filling and shaping, its literally she's forming herself inside you. Her body of mind is forming in your mind, no more your mind. And again it brings a dimension in and particularly in the context of transformation. You do not find this in any other context. It's not the same as just descent. It is the recasting, reshaping into Her consciousness and Her body formed inside your body or your body replaced by Her body if you look at it that way.
Sraddhalu (0:56:40):
So just to complete this idea, we look at all the planes of consciousness in a completely different way. Now top down from Her point of view; so as you look at it the other way, your intellect as it turns up to higher mind is Her thought or rather infinity thinking as thought. And so infinity has to be concealed behind a finite appearance and that's your higher mind. Your intellect is pieces of that, okay. Illumined mind is Her light revealing. It's just the glow of the Self, glow of Her consciousness, but not yet Her body. It's like dawn, before the Sun rises, the light lights up the sky, but the Sun has not yet come up. So, it is as if in Her approach to fill you, it is Her light that has filled you first. In the intuition, it is the first touch to the body of truth. But the point of contact is tiny, infinitesimal, it's a ray, you cannot even give it a quantity. It's the first point of contact. And then bit by bit through that point of contact, more and more of Her body is beginning to fill you. But at first, inserting, like one finger and another finger and another finger and so you have five fingers, but you don't have the totality of the hand, the rest of the body is still far away. And in the Overmental consciousness, it is Her body now entering. Let's say like this, so all the different but not yet the whole and you could easily stop there and say now it is her body. No it's not yet. And eventually in the Supramental and in the highest Supramental, it is Her body, She that fills, there is no you left anymore.
So already in the Overmental, the sense of I takes two forms. Either it becomes so big that you feel I am cosmos and then your ego has exaggerated or the I is completely dissolved in the immensity of the Infinite, which is the better way. But if you have taken the error of the first, then it's a bit of a difficulty to correct it. And that's what often prevents people from going further. But if you have had this dissolution of your sense of I-ego, then from there the Supramental access becomes easy. So the condition for the full Supramental form to work in us, Sri Aurobindo gives a whole list of criteria: Your ego must be totally gone, your outer consciousness must be entirely unified with your inner and the infinity of the inner and the universality that comes with it in all three bodies, and your mind must be entirely open to the infinity, you must be living in the infinity and so on, and the psychic must have come forward and taken full charge of the personality. Then we can speak of the supramental. But before that, these other steps can easily begin to form.
So, the first requirement we have dwelt on, which is to make the mind silent and hold the silence and in the silence this (open upwards) and allow Her to fill and form in you. See this description is something so distinct, so unique, you will not find it again in any other. The concept of that is there in the Vedic, where you have the gods descending to form inside you their body. And that and you will find this similarly in one of the Judaism, in the tree of life, what's the, Kabbalah, in the Kabbalah, there is a similar concept of the formation of a higher consciousness taking a body, but it stops at a very mentalized level. In the Vedic, it has this intuitive form. But here it is something so much more intimate as the Mother herself forming Mind inside you, the true mind. So we can pause here in our journey as a first step to be established in us. And how would you develop this power of being able to silence the mind. And there are many ways, there are many approaches that Sri Aurobindo suggests, maybe we'll look at some of them next time. But one of the easiest ways is to simply remain in quiet contemplation on the sense of the Divine Presence in all things, or the sense of the presence within you, or your relationship with the Divine Presence. And as you dwell on that, automatically the Divine begins to infuse, or the silence and stillness of the Presence begins to infuse. And with that, the kind of stilling that comes into the mind is the real silence. You could of course take a very mental effort to silence the mind, which is useful, but it won't get you to this kind of stillness. So I will suggest for those who are watching this to spend the next one week in this practice before we come into the next session of how to do this and then the further steps of developing the intuitive mind.
Narad (1:02:15):
Namaste.
[Sraddhalu] Namaste.