The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo

Aurobindonian Viewpoints

TWO LETTERS

[These letters are to the same English author to whom the preceding

one was written and they form a sequel to it.]

1

You say that it is not in the mind alone that endless contradiction can happen. I concur with you. It is not only philosophers who keep disagreeing. Yogis also take up positions poles apart from one another on the basis of their actual spiritual experiences. This is possible because reality can be spiritually experienced, no less than intellectually reconstructed, in various aspects. But we are naturally led to inquire what should be considered the ultimate truth of which so many aspects are possible. You suggest that to ascertain that truth we require a new faculty which you call "insight" - a faculty "which, if its possession is gained, will function in precisely the same manner in all persons." And you add the important remark: "Such a faculty was, I believe, used by sages like Krishna and Buddha."

Two implications I read in your belief. One is indirect - namely, that reality has been "insighted" in past ages and that all we can do is to repeat their performance: the new faculty is in fact old and is new only for those who have not developed it. The other and direct implication is that Sri Krishna and Buddha had the same insight into reality. I hope you will excuse me if to neither implication I can give a fervent Yea. I don't think that except on very general grounds we can speak of Buddha's insight and Sri Krishna's as the same. As soon as we probe into the matter we come upon a big difference. And the difference serves to indicate the line of progress which, despite my acknowledging the grandeur of past spirituality, I consider to be beckoning us beyond everything the past has achieved.

Buddha made an ultimate dichotomy between the world and reality. The world he regarded as an illusion to be discarded at

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last for a formless and featureless and impersonal beatific acosmism which he named Nirvana. Before the final dropping of the world there goes on a strange concomitance of reality and illusion, Nirvana and embodied nature. During that prelude Nirvana throws a luminous quiescence on our mind, vitality and body. Rather, since it is itself actionless, we should say our mind, vitality and body reflect the luminous quiescence of Nirvana. This quiescence means a lot of wonderful change in our nature - a change dynamic as well as static since our nature or Prakriti is a dynamism and unavoidably puts whatever light it catches to active uses. But the change due to Nirvana is not all that is involved in the Gita nor is Nirvana there the summum bonum. Though Sri Krishna in the Gita speaks of Nirvana - Brahma-Nirvana he terms it, suggesting a difference from the utterly negative shade given by Buddha - it is for him one aspect of Brahman, an aspect we cannot do without, yet not all-fulfilling. Brahman is Purushottama, the Transcendental Being who is not limited by His own static eternity and who dynamically manifests our universe and acts as its Lord. And Purushottama manifests our universe through His Para-Prakriti or Super-Nature. Super-Nature is marked out from Nature here which is a derivation or veiled play of it: it is that which is divine and has the power of divinising all that is below. Its dynamism is the perfect original of the lower one which is the sole dynamism Buddha deals with and which catches illumination from Nirvana. Towards the Supreme Being who is both impersonal and personal and towards His divinising Super-Nature we with our instruments of mind, vitality and body have to move by the Krishnaesque insight: in our experience in the cosmos we have to manifest them. The ideal of divinising the person in us and our embodied existence is involved in Sri Krishna's pronouncements as it certainly is not in Buddha's, for it is clear that in Nirvana there can be no divine counterpart of the varied complexity that is active in Nature.

In the works of Sri Aurobindo the ideal is brought out in its clearest fullness. His Yoga is founded on his experience of a Consciousness which, over and above combining all that Yogis in the past have known, holds the secret of satisfying and fulfilling on earth our whole embodied existence. Such a Consciousness seems to me, because of its integral character, the ultimate Reality - and "insight", therefore, is in my opinion developable

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with utter completeness only through the Aurobindonian Yoga.

The conditions mentioned by you for developing it are very good indeed, but, as formulated by you, are they not liable to appear somewhat one-sided, since they are, in your words, "a ruthless self-pruning"? "Only by this ruthless self-pruning," you write, "can we respond utterly impersonally to reality and not falsify it." One may suggest that self-pruning is necessary and impersonality is necessary, yet there is the fact of a diverse personality in us. By self-pruning and impersonality we rise above personality's defects, but, if carried to an exclusive extreme, they might throw personality entirely into the shade and move finally to submerge it in some Beyond which takes us for good out of the manifested universe. Personality is an important fact of our existence and for manifestation it is indispensable. It wants fulfilment in the Divine and not just to be transcended until it can be annulled. Reality must answer to its impassioned many-toned appeal. So, except at the risk of one-sidedness, "insight" cannot be developed by paying scarce heed to the essence of personality and to personality's complex richness. We must not grow bare in growing pure.

I don't think you actually mean "bareness" by your "purity". Manifestation to the utmost is not outside your path. Yet, I may say, your utmost does not reach far enough because you believe we can do nothing save ring appropriate changes of application on the spiritual possibilities revealed in the past. I do not wish to sound cocky. I have a deep reverence for the rishis and masters and prophets whose souls shine from the past like everlasting torches upon our troubled ways and I see that we cannot throw aside the core of their realisations. But I can't help seeing too that the evolution Sri Aurobindo is bent on accomplishing has no exact precedent.

Taking up the synthesis Sri Krishna made of the Yoga of Knowledge, Works and Devotion, he goes forward to a spiritual integrality exceeding even that splendid synthesis. He says that liberation is not enough; nor is it enough to let our embodied nature be influenced by the light of the Divine, not even the dynamic light that was displayed by the synthesis à la Sri Krishna. If everything came originally from the Divine, there must be in the Divine the archetypal truth of everything, a truth not lying idle in the Transcendental but ever pressing for

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manifestation. And the manifestation of it would be a divine person with a divinised mind, vitality and body. So Sri Aurobindo speaks of a descent into us of what he designates as Gnosis or Supermind as well as of an ascent to it. The descent will mean an embodied existence of a divine order in every respect and no longer of an order that is flawed by the human and the mortal. Yes, in every respect there must be Godhead and immortality: even our physical stuff must be entirely transformed! A new apocalypse is here beyond the visions of the past - divinisation has, in Sri Aurobindo's vocabulary, a novel significance¹ - and yet we feel that the unprecedented is most logical. Anything short of the Aurobindonian divinising leaves Nature without sufficient justification of her being: as an emanation of the Divine she must be capable of divinisation in every inch of her when her whole principle is a progressive evolution.

Because she is capable we have the thirst for perfection. The thirst has been recognised since the dawn of history, but up to now the integral logic of it has not been grasped. Until it is grasped we shall never be satisfied: always a clash will take place in our psychology and under various guises we shall have "the refusal of the ascetic" and "the denial of the materialist." No compromise will be lasting: every apparent equilibrium will collapse. For, there is an imperative in man's constitution driving him towards the spiritual integrality insisted on by Sri Aurobindo. Without our openly feeling that imperative, there will never be a common "insight" for all persons. How can we reach in the sphere of spiritual experience a common insight unless we envisage with unblurred eyes our total constitution's bedrock need? The bedrock need shows itself in our thirst for perfection - and the common origin, in God, of everything denotes the integral range of the need and the integral range of its satisfaction. You say you believe with me that the thirst for perfection is a pointer to its eventual slaking in the Spirit. But you erect a certain barrier: "there is," you write, "no necessary implication that this will be attained whilst we are here in the flesh and on a level of existence where everything is doomed, as Buddha points out, to decay and death. It is more likely to be done on a higher

¹ The novelty, of course, is not restricted to body-transforming. The latter is a sign of the utter integrality of the divinising process and the integrality extends also a transforming to mind and vitality beyond anything done before.

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level where such limitations could not exist." If you attend closely to the words "thirst for perfection" you will seize Sri Aurobindo's view. Can our thirst be for perfection if the cry of the physical being is left without an answer from God? Our physical being has its innate demand for joy, for luminous effectivity, for healthy perpetuation. These demands are summed up in the agelong quest for the elixir vitae. Can you ignore the intensity of such a quest?

The misery of an imperfectly constituted body open to attack on every side and gravitating towards dissolution is not due simply to our attachment to material things: it is due also to our innate sense of a great lack - a lack of what our body is hungering after. We try and try to appease its hunger. Blind alleys meet us everywhere because we do not turn to "the secret path" of mysticism for the body's fulfilment. Our failure leaves us frustrated: we may detach our attention from the failure but deep in our subconscious there lurks a brooding dangerous sadness packed with resistance to spirituality if spirituality finds no means to justify earth in terms of earth itself. Not to see in bodily life the thirst for perfection is to close our eyes to a mighty fact. To seek its appeasement outside the Divine is to keep groping for ever. To hold that it will never be slaked in the Divine is to give up aiming at integral realisation of Him, for that realisation must consist in His descent on all the levels of our nature as well as in our ascent to Him in the Gnosis. If we admit that matter has come originally from God and if we admit that matter cries out for fulfilment, there can be no getting away from the conclusion that our body can be divinised and should be divinised. Perfection would not be perfect without fulfilment on our level of flesh no less than on every other level.

By acquiescing in Buddha's doctrine of the doom of the body we erroneously take a present condition for an everlasting one. It is quite obvious that the body as at present inhabited by us decays and dies. But Sri Aurobindo discerns no inevitability of decay and death. What is the doom Buddha speaks of? Who or what has fixed the doom? The doom, to Buddha, is consequent on the body's being compounded of parts. The compounded lust fall asunder: that is his logic. It is, however, conceivable that a force counteracting the tendency of a compound to break up can hold together the parts indefinitely. It is all an affair of

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balance. The mere compounding need bring no decomposition and disintegration. So the real cause must lie deeper. The real cause is that no force in Nature is able to maintain the body for good, much less to keep it up at a pitch of perfect health. Must we accept this inability in Nature as final? We must if our attitude is, like Buddha's, illusionist. Buddha's logic is binding only if our attitude argues no support or archetype of the body in the Spirit. Give up illusionism and the logic crumbles down. Declare that it is the Spirit that has become all things immediately we unchain ourselves from Buddha's dictum. For then there must be, unknown to us, a connection between incorruptible substance of Spirit and matter's corruptible substance. Not only this, but, as the Spirit must be one-yet-multiple to manifest a multiple universe, there is a spiritual formation connected with the material formation that is our body. A spiritual body, whose substance and form are in absolute tune with the light and perpetuity that are proper to the Spirit, is all the time behind our unstable aggregate of elements and waits to manifest itself in it. Indian Yogas have often spoken of a causal body - kāraṇa śarīra - governing the gross and the subtle ones from its occult station above in the Spirit's ether. No complete descent, emergence and organisation of the causal in both the gross and the subtle were taught or methodised. Sri Aurobindo is the first to proclaim the necessity and practicableness of making the kāraṇa śarīra totally active in the open. When the substance, form, law and force of that body are brought into play within our present material being, there is no reason why our components, freed from their imperfections, should not perpetually hold together in unmarred health. We are mortal simply because we have not yet discovered how to make our body share in the Spirit's perfect and immortal consciousness. There is no radical gulf between that consciousness and our body, there is only an apparent and pragmatic gulf.

Everything depends on what power of being is in charge. The vital or mental power is unable to bring about a divinisation. Buddha's spirituality, though gigantic in itself, also misses the superb secret. Buddha looked for liberation from the cycle of births, not for divinisation of all that birth involves. The Vedic attempt to establish the Gods in our nature-parts, the Vaishnava attempt to incarnate the personal deity through the love-surge

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of the central person in us, the soul or psyche round which our personal nature is organised, and the Tantric attempt to render the Shakti, the Mother-power, of the Supreme effective in all our chakras come near to it. There has, however, been a general falling short both in idea and practice because the particular dynamism of the Divine which Sri Aurobindo names Supermind or Gnosis was never completely possessed - or, if possessed, it was mostly in the tranced consciousness and seldom in the wide-awake one. In Sri Krishna the wide-awake possession may have been there, but it was not directly operative: the directly operative dynamism was a secondary power of the Supermind - the Overmind. The Overmind is a global and not an integral truth-consciousness: there is in it a well-rounded harmony, on the whole, of the one-yet-multiple Spirit but in detail a penchant for multiplicity and hence for division, while in the Supermind a precise all-balancing and hence all-fulfilling harmony subsists both on the whole and in detail. Under the Overmind's rule we can grow divinised on earth to a considerable extent without being able to preserve ourselves from that outermost dividing-up which is the body's death. Under the sway of the Supermind there can be entire divinisation and no compulsive dragging away from it: we are free to cast aside what we have done, we are not bound to it but we are also able to manifest perfection and preserve it here and now. This capacity and that freedom are the goal of earth: they are the Supermind's prerogatives which Sri Aurobindo wants exercised. Sri Krishna in the Gita heads towards them without overtly disclosing them: while the Supermind seems to be his background the Overmind is his Forefront. If his forefront had been supramental he would have done what Sri Aurobindo has indicated for us today.

But the reason why, where dynamic operation was concerned, the Supermind stayed in the background is not just some individual defect in Sri Krishna. Buddha's a-cosmic extremism is also not traceable to merely a lacuna in him. There are universal Factors no less than individual: the stage of world-evolution, the Zeitgeist and the urgent need of the hour combine to colour the spirituality of leaders like Buddha and Sri Krishna. To deem them altogether myopic and incapable is a mistake, as it is also a mistake to deem them the ne plus ultra and forget new conditions and the new spirituality those conditions must demand. Sri

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Krishna used the Overmind dynamism and could not help doing so because the time was not ripe for the work of the Gnosis, especially on the body. Many ups and downs, many divergent zigzags had to occur before the time could ripen for the Aurobindonian Yoga. It appears that, among several factors, an age of Science had to emerge for such a work to be taken in hand. Nothing save a stress on the physical as blindly strong as at the beginning was Science's could help the psychological moment of an unusual task like laying the Spirit's touch on its old enemy and despised impediment, the body, for integral divinisation. Then there is the subconscious effect of Science's brilliant endeavour to see in the body the cause, function and aim of everything that we are: by. its advances towards proving all spiritual states to be material it also paved the way for a vision of matter as no utterly incommensurate contrary of spiritual states. Further, the development of radio has in a very impressive manner given the human mind a sense of effective wideness and of practical simultaneity of presence everywhere through a sort of physical translation of the Spirit's consciousness. As impressive in diminishing the incubus of unconquerable inertia and grossness associated with matter in opposition to Spirit is dissolving of matter into pure energy - "radiant energy", as the suggestive technical designation goes. Lastly, we have the admission that so far as the science of physics is concerned we do not require to know the nature of the entities we discuss but only their mathematical structure, the way they affect our measuring instruments; physics, indeed, reflects the fluctuations of world qualities but our exact knowledge is of their "pointer-readings", not of the qualities and as a result it leaves us open-minded as to what reality is. Developing out of this open-mindedness there are the celebrated Jeans-Eddington trends: what began as a tremendous stress on the physical has, in an important domain of Science, ended in a doubt in the mind of one scientific school whether the physical universe is its own explanation. The doubt does not remove the stress on the physical which is now an inalienable portion of whatever life-programme we may adopt, but it has robbed of trenchant finality the line once drawn between the actual spatio-temporal phenomena and the hypothetical mystery of God. In addition, it has suggested a change in our idea of Nature's laws. Both in Jeans and Eddington you will

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observe the disposition to consider the nineteenth century's "laws of iron" statistical and nothing more. So the obsession about decay and death is weakened and Buddha's "doom" for the body is found likely to be a statistical law, a generalisation from a large number of past and present cases rather than an absolute inevitability. Thus Science has by many routes co- operated obliquely or straightforwardly with Sri Aurobindo's mission. Apart from the scientific milieu the integral Yoga would be an anachronism. Apart from the integral Yoga the scientific milieu would lose its deepest rationale.

Living in that milieu and wanting to do Yoga, a man is bound to be restless and discontented until he embraces Sri Aurobindo's integrality.

2

It is a pity a genuine traveller like you of the via mystica does not follow to the full the finger of light Sri Aurobindo points ahead of us. Will you pardon my daring to suspect that the "critical intellect", which keeps you dissatisfied and which you wish to keep in action, omits to criticise certain magnificent spiritual philosophies of the past sufficiently and fails to interpret Sri Aurobindo with the requisite piercing through from words to their meaning? How else am I to understand the overweight you give to pronouncements of long ago which come from realisations apt once but not necessarily for all time and "the hurdle of anti-mentalism" you encounter in the Aurobindonian world-view with which you are in sympathy in several respects?

I have touched already on past spiritual systems. I should like now to figure out clearly what your "hurdle" consists in. You urge that metaphysical idealism has been held by a number of leaders in the mystical field and this not merely through intellectual activity but also through mystical experience. Your faith in it seems to be strengthened by Sir James Jeans's exposition of modern physics in his most important book so far, Physics and Philosophy. According to you, Berkeley's view of mentalism was a limited and imperfect one, only a beginning in fact, but a beginning in the right direction, which agrees with the trend of present-day physics.

When you ascribe anti-mentalism to Sri Aurobindo you are at

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once right and wrong. Right if you mean that he does not accept the mental consciousness in any form as the world-creator. Wrong if you mean that he does not accept consciousness at all as the creator of the world. Mind, to Sri Aurobindo, is not a synonym of consciousness: it is just one degree. Are you ascribing anti-mentalism to him by yourself employing the word "mind" broadly to signify consciousness and thinking he assumes for matter an existence outside consciousness altogether? I can quote you passages galore from The Life Divine to demonstrate that when a broad sense is read into the word "mind" Sri Aurobindo is not anti-mental in the least. Here is one: "The world is real precisely because it exists only in consciousness; for it is a Conscious Energy one with Being that creates it. It is the existence of material form in its own right apart from the self- illumined energy which assumes the form, that would be a contradiction of the truth of things, a phantasmagoria, a night- mare, an impossible falsehood." Sri Aurobindo is anti-mental only when the sense is narrowed. Correctly, the sense should be narrowed; else we confuse the issue at stake. I for one act the anti-mentalist with the narrow sense in view, and if I aver that the drift of Science is away from Berkeley I must be taken to mean not that modern physics thinks matter contains its own explanation but that, in the first place, it does not agree to Berkeley's foundational premiss - "matter exists wholly as a percept of our consciousness" - and that in the second place, the term "mentalism" or "idealism" is mal à propos in science as in philosophy.

On page 203 of Physics and Philosophy Jeans says that before mentalism "can be seriously considered some answer must be found to the problem of how objects can continue to exist when they are not being perceived in any human mind". Is it not evident that Berkeley's foundational premiss is negated by Jeans? And once it is negated, what remains of Berkeley? You will argue that Berkeley postulates the mind of God as that in which objects when unperceived in any human mind exist. But this is an arbitrary step on the Bishop's part. If our percepts are sufficient, God's mind is not required; if they are not, why choose God's mind rather than matter's independent externality? Berkeley's final conclusion flatly contradicts his initial premiss. Logically the conclusion should be solipsism: as Hume

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reasoned, we have no right even to speak of many human minds, we must reduce other human beings to the same status as objects and they must be deemed a percept in the experiencing mind: I who perceive am the sole mind: everything I perceive - person or object - is my idea! Surely, Science, assuming both the plurality of scientific observers and the common field in which they work, cannot hold any truck with Berkeley's foundational premiss: it cannot be dubbed Berkeleyan in its tendencies.

Can it be dubbed mentalist or idealist at all, even though in an un-Berkeleyan way? In my opinion, whatever holds matter's explanation cannot be described as "mentality" or "ideas" if by these things we mean, as we strictly should, either the contents of our own small consciousness or anything akin to their peculiarity on a large scale. I therefore maintain further that for Science, as for any other branch of knowledge, no mind of any sort can be the fons et origo of the universe. Science may be drifting away from materialism and it may be legitimately doing so, though the legitimacy is not granted by all scientists; nonetheless, Jeans is not justified in his mentalist inferences. Perhaps I am puzzling you by blowing hot and cold. Let me state my view in some detail, also glancing en passant at Jeans's philosophical position.

According to Physics and Philosophy, in order to explain what happens in space and time to the world of "matter and radiation" that we know, we have to construct mathematical formulas which are such that they imply a substratum in which our perceptual experience of matter and radiation in space and time do not apply at all. What kind of substratum is this? Jeans argues that since all mechanical models of it based on perceptual experience fail us and since the new mathematics is the only representation we can make and since this mathematics is mental, the universe's substratum is likely to be one of thought in a universal mind existing free of the phenomenal world but acting as the origin of it. To such an argument certain scientists retort by asking us to understand that the new mathematics is purely a conceptual scheme by which we connect phenomena and that to speak of its corresponding to any substratum-reality existing as a universal mind, is misleading: an abstract device within our own minds, correlating phenomena, is all that we can regard as existing besides those phenomena themselves with their queer character which puzzles the model-making

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engineer beloved of classical physics.

I do not want at the moment to cast my vote for or against the retort. My own point in the discussion is that, even if our present mathematics and the hypothesis underlying it are correct and serve as a sign towards an originative reality immaterial and free of the phenomenal world, it is hopelessly inadequate to consider it a universal mind instead of a consciousness higher than the mind. The universe's substratum must be such as would be able to produce the world of phenomena which we name physical, it must be able to hold the origin of matter and radiation in space and time. Jeans seems to think a universal mind fulfils this condition. You agree with him. Of course I must not forget you have mentioned not only Jeans but also mystics as bearing you out. Mystical evidence is certainly to be given importance. Yet I make bold to submit that if mystics have spoken of a universal mind as holding in its mental stuff a full and final origin of matter and radiation they have ill-chosen their language as much as Jeans has done. A simple consideration will elucidate my point.

Mentalism can describe a universal mind only by analogy with the nature of mind known to us. What is that nature? A universal mind would differ in many respects from the individual mind. Suppose we grant that, unlike the individual mentality, it does not labour under the defect of perceiving in matter and radiation an objectivity beyond itself, an objectivity which cannot be equated with its own perceiving. Would it even then be adequate? If it is still to be a mind and not a higher form of consciousness it must have some characteristic affinity to our mode of being, to something in our awareness of the subjective world if not of the objective. The utmost we can do is to concede the universal mind an experience of the so-called objective world as though that world were subjective to it, so that it knows objectsas its own stuff put out for play. In that case, as long as its stuff is mental, it must hold physical objects in the way we hold what we name our mind's subjective contents. As we develop and arrange and order our conceptions and feel them to be emanations of our own self, the universal or cosmic mind would deal with matter and radiation. But just as we are aware of a background of which our self appears to be a projection and our thoughts a semi-mysterious substance which we do not feel to be entirely

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controlled by us as our own, so too the cosmic mind would be conscious of a secret background and the physical objects which are its substance would be a half-mystery which it cannot master and shape to integral perfection. The cosmic mind would not escape the dim sense that it is working out what it receives from it-knows-not-where and that, while its working out is as if it were acting in itself and by its own right, it is being used by some power vaguely present behind it. Its own triumph of unity would be a harmony of arranged accords and discords - it would have an organised equilibrium haunted by an internal incapacity for a perfect ordering and out-flowering of things. As we individuals are conscious of depths unplumbed within us, of a check upon our subjective life from backgrounds unknown, of a limited sway over our own thoughts, of a bound to our creativity and our will, even so the cosmic mind must feel in its consciousness of matter and radiation as its own mental stuff an inherent absence of fullness and finality.

If we assert that there is no such absence we are talking of a status of consciousness to which it is illicit to apply the name "mind". An infinite consciousness, omniscient and omnipotent, limiting itself freely and without the least ignorance or incapacity, may be spoken of as mind in the broadest of senses, but then the term we employ loses all meaning. It becomes a synonym of consciousness in any and every degree. In the West the tendency to "mentalise" everything is habitual. But when we cast about to examine consciousness in the world around, we discern several degrees. The animal's is one degree, the plant's is another, the metal's as shown by Bose's detection of a power of response to stimuli is a third. We may generalise beyond the metal and say that a hidden consciousness resides in the atom itself. But it would not be proper to class all these degrees as mental: they are obviously sub-mental. On our own level we may conceive an extension, a universality. We may go on conceiving a diminution of many defects, but we cannot blot out every resemblance to the ideative stuff and self that is mind as experienced by us. Remove every shade of likeness and you will have only consciousness in common and nothing mental.

Indeed we may aver that the sub-mental is really the mental concealed or involved, but when we reach the mental stage and widen and intensify it to the furthest, do we come to the

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ultimate? Are we not obliged to overpass the mental frontier if we speak of an omniscient and omnipotent consciousness? Are we not compelled to speak of mind at even its widest and intensest as the Beyond-mind concealed or involved? I think we are, unless both psychology and language are to be amorphous and inaccurate. No mind, universal or cosmic though it may be, can possess the essentials of being the first and last reality. It must always be an intermediate light. No doubt, a universal mind exists and mystics have experienced it, but if they have not experienced a greater reality which puts it forth as an instrument, they have not found an all-containing, all-constituting, all penetrating, all-creative consciousness. Neither by physics, metaphysics nor mysticism can we ever hope to make mentalism adequate to a consciousness absolutely and ultimately originative of spatio-temporal phenomena from a poise free of constraint by space and time.

The cosmic mind can only be a particular mode of action adopted by a far superior consciousness which is spiritual and not mental. The principle of all mind is endlessly to divide and endlessly to aggregate: to measure off, limit and depiece, then put the pieces together and keep adding up to arrive at a whole. Evidently such a principle must be there for the Spirit to originate the physical universe of divisibility into infinitesimal units and diverse heaping up of those units to make objects. Evidently such a principle is also responsible for the ignorance which shuts us off from the Spirit's light, for ignorance means the fragmentation of the Infinite, in which the fragments stand apart, forgetting the Infinite that makes them one and striving to reach it by being added up. Division and fragmentation, however, do not per se cause ignorance. At their root, they are just the Spirit's self-play of multiplicity. As long as the basic unity is not lost, there is no lapse from knowledge. The dividing and fragmenting mind, therefore, is in essence a movement of the Spirit: the creative Gnosis, following its one-yet-multiple trend, brings about the divine archetype of mentality. In that archetype there is no ignorance, since the mind-movement is fully aware of itself as formulated by the Spirit and undivided from the Spirit. This mind-movement is not self-sufficient as would be by definition the universal mind which mentalism supposes to be final: it is part and parcel of a supra-mental reality. A new

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projection from the archetypal mind which is in union with the supra-mental blaze of knowledge is needed to render ignorance possible. That projection is the cosmic or universal mind - mentality unliaisoned with the omniscient and omnipotent Spirit. The lack of liaison does not affect the archetype with ignorance, it affects only the projection. Ignorance occurs when, though the archetype is aware of the mental cosmicity it has formulated as an instrument, the instrument becomes oblivious of the power formulating it, even as one side of a man's personality sometimes forgets the many-sided whole of which it is a portion and becomes exclusively concentrated in itself.

The ignorance that is ours would not be there without the cosmic mind becoming ignorant. Of course the cosmic mind is not completely ignorant, the complete ignorance takes place when a total plunge is made by the Spirit into a self-formulation at the opposite pole of its supreme knowledge. We physical beings are "evolutes" out of the total plunge: we rise, as the Vedic hymn of creation has it, out of a darkness that is wrapped in darkness, we are emergents from a sea of the "unconscious", a formidable abysm of black self-loss. So our ignorance is a special one. Behind our individual mentality there is a purer individualisation which is less ignorant, a standpoint of the cosmic mind. Experiencing that standpoint and breaking from it into the cosmic mentality we reduce our ignorance as much as we can without exceeding the mind-formula divided from the Beyond-mind. Yet the true knowledge is not there until the division between us and the Spirit is destroyed. The integral destroying is in the Sun of consciousness which is the Vedic and Upanishadic description of the Gnosis. There are lower grades of mystical experience in which, despite the division not being there, the dynamic use of the Spirit's knowledge is less intense, less luminous, less effective. It is these grades that mystics mostly attain, grades from the Overmind downwards to the frontier where the cosmic ignorance starts on that descensus Averno ending in the terrible catastrophe of the "unconscious" from which our world evolves. At even the lowest grade above that frontier something more intense, more luminous, more effective than any universal mind is attained. The first country of the cosmic ignorance is the universal mind itself, cut off as it is from its spiritual and supramental source. Consequently, I rate mentalism an error for its

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failure to look further than this mind and to discern as inevitable to this mind the vague feeling of a profundity and a puissance hidden behind and above.

I may, in justice to Jeans, remark that he uses the terms "mind" and "mentalism" about the universe's substratum when what he actually intends is, as he phrases it in one place, "a consciousness superior to our own". So my quarrel with him resolves at bottom to one of terminology. My quarrel would be of more than terminology if he were a Berkeleyan, which he surely is not in his present book, believing as he does that things in the universe "cannot be mere constructs of our individual minds and must have existences of their own." He differs from the materialists inasmuch as he opines that the way we can best understand in physics the course of events creates the likelihood of a universal substratum analogous in character to mathematical knowledge - that is, a substratum of consciousness. His argument may be right or wrong; but I agree with his central thesis about consciousness and differ only from his use of the word "mind" to cover "spirit".

I think my quarrel with you is also due to the same reason. If you drop "mind" and "mentalism" and urge that the physical world has no reality independent of and outside a basic consciousness, every Aurobindonian will shake hands with you and say "Right-O!" According to Sri Aurobindo it is a spiritual and supramental Gnostic consciousness that has originally emanated the physical world as one particular infinity of its multi-infinitied substance and force, knows it with complete identity both static and dynamic and is working out divine possibilities in what it has emanated as apparently the very opposite of all that is divine.

1941

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