The perfection of the new creation is brought home to
us by the poet-essayist with the help of a few recognizable examples. These
give us some idea about its nature and its excellence. Very methodically and in
a step by step lucid manner the revelatory thesis develops the theme with these
few illustrations. The first example is regarding the mind that can open itself
to the thoughts and visions of the spirit, the operation of the superior divine
mind. In contrast to this, our mind is greatly limited in its working.
Mind for us, and in its very nature, is an instrument of analysis, and not an
instrument of synthesis. All our present faculties of cognition also come more
or less from its analytical functioning. Our mind is not an instrument of
synthesis for arriving at the integral view of existence. Thus while it breaks
the sunlight into a spectral range, it cannot give us back its white purity in
the right proportions of its components. It breaks up water into hydrogen and
oxygen, but does not know where the properties of water have disappeared; or,
in the reverse, it cannot know how, from a certain chemical combination, the
new properties appear. For it, it is a creation out of nothing, ex nihilo, something mysterious,
inexplicable. Nor is there any hope of getting knowledge of the whole from the
components. It has a functional utility in a certain domain of human pursuit,
and there is no doubt about it; but by its success in that domain it cannot be
assertive everywhere, cannot abrogate for itself the right of integral
knowledge. This has been the great pitfall for enthusiastic men of reason, to
claim everything for themselves, admit only the rational and dismiss all that
is mystic and occult and spiritual. There are ranges beyond mind, the higher,
the illumined, the intuitive and the highest spiritual, the Overmind, and these
have to come into extensive operation before the very potentialities of the
reasoning but not reasonable mind can properly emerge. There is the
irresolvable dichotomy between the subject and the object, making even the
material world an illusion. There is not only a mind in matter, but there is
also the mind of matter and unless that becomes luminous the power of the
highest cannot transform it into its kind, make it develop and use its true
faculties, make matter a substance of the spirit. But in the new creation the
true mind is a splendid sun of vision’s rays and it is that mind which, by the
glory of its thoughts, shapes the substance, and gives to it the dreams of a
new grandeur, opens to make it possible to receive the premier light that has
no darkness in it. This mind of the physical opening to the higher light prepares
matter to become a willing instrument of the spirit; it is that which can
effect true transformation of matter, making it luminous.
In The Life Divine we have the
following passage which might give us some idea about some of its aspects: (pp.
982-84)
The supramental transformation, the supramental
evolution must carry with it a lifting of mind, life and body out of themselves
into a greater way of being in which yet their own ways and powers would be,
not suppressed or abolished, but perfected and fulfilled by the self-exceeding.
For in the Ignorance all paths are the paths of the Spirit seeking for itself
blindly or with a growing light; the gnostic being and life would be the
Spirit's self-discovery and its seeing and reaching of the aims of all these
paths but in the greater way of its own revealed and conscious truth of being.
Mind seeks for light, for knowledge,—for knowledge of the one truth basing all,
an essential truth of self and things, but also of all truth of diversity of
that oneness, all its detail, circumstance, manifold way of action, form, law
of movement and happening, various manifestation and creation; for thinking
mind the joy of existence is discovery and the penetration of the mystery of
creation that comes with knowledge. This the gnostic change will fulfil in an
ample measure; but it will give it a new character. It will act not by the
discovery of the unknown, but by the bringing out of the known; all will be the
finding “of the self by the self in the self”. For the self of the gnostic
being will not be the mental ego but the Spirit that is one in all; he will see
the world as a universe of the Spirit. The finding of the one truth underlying
all things will be the Identical discovering identity and identical truth everywhere
and discovering too the power and workings and relations of that identity. The
revelation of the detail, the circumstance, the abundant ways and forms of the
manifestation will be the unveiling of the endless opulence of the truths of
that identity, its forms and powers of self, its curious manifoldness and
multiplicity of form bringing out infinitely its oneness. This knowledge will
proceed by identification with all, by entering into all, by a contact bringing
with it a leap of self-discovery and a flame of recognition, a greater and
surer intuition of truth than the mind can reach; there will be an intuition
too of the means of embodying and utilising the truth seen, an operative
intuition of its dynamic processes, a direct intimate awareness guiding the
life and the physical senses in every step of their action and service to the
Spirit when they have to be called in as instruments for the effectuation of
process in Life and Matter. A replacement of intellectual seeking by
supramental identity and gnostic intuition of the contents of the identity, an
omnipresence of Spirit with its light penetrating the whole process of
knowledge and all its use,—so that there is an integration between the knower,
knowledge and the thing known, between the operating consciousness, the
instrumentation and the thing done, while the single self watches over the
whole integrated movement and fulfils itself intimately in it, making it a
flawless unit of self-effectuation,—will be the character of each gnostic
movement of knowledge and action of knowledge. Mind, observing and reasoning,
labours to detach itself and see objectively and truly what it has to know; it
tries to know it as not-self, independent other-reality not affected by process
of personal thinking or by any presence of self: the gnostic consciousness will
at once intimately and exactly know its object by a comprehending and
penetrating identification with it. It will overpass what it has to know, but
it will include it in itself; it will know the object as part of itself as it
might know any part or movement of its own being, without any narrowing of
itself by the identification or snaring of its thought in it so as to be bound
or limited in knowledge. There will be the intimacy, accuracy, fullness of a
direct internal knowledge, but not that misleading by personal mind by which we
constantly err, because the consciousness will be that of a universal and not a
restricted and ego-bound person. It will proceed towards all knowledge, not
setting truth against truth to see which will stand and survive, but completing
truth by truth in the light of the one Truth of which all are the aspects. All
idea and vision and perception will have this character of an inner seeing, an
intimate extended self-perception, a large self-integrating knowledge, an
indivisible whole working itself out by light acting upon light in a
self-executing harmony of truth-being. There will be an unfolding, not as a
delivery of light out of darkness, but as a delivery of light out of itself;
for if an evolving supramental Consciousness holds back part of its contents of
self-awareness behind in itself, it does this not as a step or by an act of
Ignorance, but as the movement of a deliberate bringing out of its timeless
knowledge into a process of Time-manifestation. A self-illumination, a
revelation of light out of light will be the method of cognition of this
evolutionary supramental Nature.
In a letter about the physical’s mind, Sri Aurobindo writes: (Letters on Yoga,
p. 340)
Mind… is everywhere. The physical mind is technically
placed below the vital and yet it is a prolongation of the mind proper and one
that can act in its own sphere by direct touch with the higher mental
intelligence. And there is too an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells,
molecules, corpuscles. Haeckel, the German materialist, spoke somewhere of the
will in the atom, and recent science, dealing with the incalculable individual
variation in the activity of the electrons, comes near to perceiving that this
is not a figure but the shadow thrown by a secret reality. This body-mind is a
very tangible truth; owing to its obscurity and mechanical clinging to past
movements and facile oblivion and rejection of the new, we find in it one of
the chief obstacles to permeation by the supermind Force and the transformation
of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted,
it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilisation of the
supramental Light and Force in material Nature.
The action of the Divine Mind may not be fully successful on the mind of the
physical to bring about this transformation, but in the ranges of mind proper
it will prepare the necessary mental faculties to effect this process. It is
only the direct action of the supermind on the physical mind that can make
happen the decisive change. The Mother’s Yoga of the Cells was chiefly
concerned with this, and it had progressed to the extent that the cells
themselves had started opening to the supramental light and force, experiencing
the harmonious self-perfection in the Will of the Divine.