What are these senses? how are they formed? and how do they work in us and for us as instruments of knowledge and cognition? If mind is the original sense, the only real sense, then by what process are other faculties produced, faculties of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing? If they are aspects of our mental personality, the question will be: can they become the outlets of the soul? If they do so, then the question is: how? In Savitri we have the phrase “sense-formed ear”, suggesting that the organs of cognition are the products of the senses, that the faculties develop or give rise to the necessary instruments; first comes the sense and then the organ. It is not the ear that hears, but it is the sense of hearing, behind it the mind or manas, that hears which is then understood in mental terms; it is that sense which creates the ear, the organ for hearing. The ear is only a receiving, a mechanical instrument, with a diaphragm or a vibrating disc, which on impingement of pressure waves causes the appearance of nervous signals; it is an end product of the sense of hearing. First the Spirit brooded over the Purusha and, thus brooded, the ears broke forth and from the ears Hearing, and from Hearing the regions were born. When the mental being arrived, the quarters or the regions became Hearing and entered into the ears. This is how the Aitereya Upanishad explains the process of formation of the instruments of knowledge, the physical organ or instrument coming into existence as a result of the faculty of the manifesting spirit.

We shall presently see only the aspect of cognition and not of formation which involves the Sankhya working out the details through Nature or Prakriti. In The Synthesis of Yoga Sri Aurobindo explains that the supermind is a superior instrumentation of the spirit and all the operations of our normal consciousness are its limited and inferior derivations. But this is a fulfilling power which does not reject the possibilities we possess; rather it uplifts them. When we organise our mental activity around it we enter into the world of pure ideative knowledge. At the higher level this ideative knowledge gets transformed into supramental thought, supramental vision, the supramental knowledge by identity; it becomes the true jñāna. (pp. 841-61)This is knowledge of a superior kind than what is obtained from samyama in the Patanjali Yoga. About this knowledge or Vijnana he writes that it “takes up our sense action and illumines it even in its ordinary field so that we get a true sense of things. But also it enables the mind-sense to have a direct perception of the inner as well as the outer phenomenon, to feel and receive or perceive, for instance, the thoughts, feelings, sensations, the nervous reactions of the object on which it is turned.” (p. 493) Then, in the footnote, he says: This power, according to Patanjali, comes by samyama on an object; but in the gnosis there is no need of samyama, because “this kind of perception is the natural action of the Vijnana.” And, then, samyama is “a concentration, directing or dwelling of the consciousness, by which one can become aware of all that is in the object. But the necessity of concentration becomes slight or nil when the active oneness grows; the luminous consciousness of the object and its contents becomes more spontaneous, normal, facile.” (p. 858)

The thought-action of our mind is constituted of a triple motion: Habitual thought-mind basing its ideas upon the data given by the senses and by the surface experiences of the nervous and emotional being; the pragmatic idea-mind that lifts itself above life and acts creatively as a mediator between the idea and the life-power, between truth of life and truth of the idea; the pure ideative-mind lives in truth of the idea apart from any necessary dependence on its value for action and experience. Its preoccupation is with knowledge, its whole object to have the delight of ideation. This ideative-mind is the highest reach of the intellect acting for itself.

We could perhaps see some examples of the pure ideative mind in Plato, Kant, Descartes, Einstein; of the pragmatic idea-mind in Aristotle, Newton, Karl Marx, Rutherford, Niels Bohr of the recent years; there are plenty of people with the habitual thought-mind, with a kind of horse-sense, who are successful in life, like Henry Ford, Bill Gates, even fine academic theoreticians such as Adam Smith, Chomsky, Hawking, with most of the present-day professionals in various fields, including management gurus and Nobel scientists falling more or less in this category. But people like Tagore, Gandhi, Vivekananda, even Gorbachev, belong to another category where the touch of the higher mind climbing to the world of intuition is perceptibly active.

But our real difficulty is to combine these three movements of the intelligence, the movements of the habitual thought-mind, the pragmatic idea-mind, and the pure ideative-mind. Thus the pure ideative mentality of Einstein was absorbed in the construction of an abstract system for the hard physical world around us, and he was happy with it, with his idea-system bothering, we might say, least about experimentation and verification, the laboratory tests; in fact, he considered it to be the crudeness of our mind to impose the condition of experimental verification if the idea is fundamentally logical and sound, intrinsically correct, that one should want to apply the test of experimental verification. For him internal consistency of formulation rather than observation was enough; he went even to the extent of saying that if an idea is genuine, then it must be also observationally correct; that want of laboratory verification today is no proof for its incorrectness. Bohr insisted on the empirical foundation. But this is a deep and harsh dichotomy which cannot be resolved by remaining in the world of thought alone. Perhaps it is here that the pragmatic idea-mind must prevail, keeping itself open to the other which might materialise in the course of long or short development, that it might acquire meaning or sense with the advance of human thought.

Until then any conclusion about human destinies based on such provisionality must be taken with great caution. It will be always subject to revision, lacking the certitude of a higher mode of knowledge. The truest certitude can come only from Vijnan.

In the House of Perfection one doesn’t resolve the issues,—if at all they do arise—in the analytical-discursive way. There is the idea-force and there is the truth-force, both ‘understanding’ each other well, in perfect harmony with each other. If in a particular case one stands out more prominently than the other, the other is also present without any diminution in the background. The problem or difficulty arises in the lower manifestation. The new creation established in the House of the Spirit, poised for manifestation, will be free of it.