Eckhart Tolle and Sri Aurobindo

Levels of Spiritual Mind Above the Ordinary Mind

Sri Aurobindo speaks of various levels of mental existence above the ordinary mind. In an ascending order these are:

Higher Mind: A first plane of spiritual consciousness white one becomes constantly aware of the Self. Whereas the ordinary mind is a thought-mind, the Higher Mind is a "luminous thought-mind, a mind of Spirit-born conceptual knowledge."⁴⁷

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Illumined Mind: A mind no longer of higher thought but of spiritual light.

Intuition: A mind that gets the Truth in flashes, which it turns into intuitive ideas.

Overmind: The highest of the planes of mind below That which is beyond mind—the Supermind. Whereas the Supermind is the total Truth-Consciousness, the Overmind breaks up Truth into separated aspects, each of which it is possible to regard as the sole or chief Truth.

Giving a powerful description of these superconscient levels of mind, Sri Aurobindo says:

... we perceive a graduality of ascent, a communication with a more and more deep and immense light and power from above, a scale of intensities which can be regarded as so many stairs in the ascension of Mind or in a descent into Mind from That which is beyond it. We are aware of a sealike downpour of masses of a spontaneous knowledge which assumes the nature of Thought but has a different character from the process of thought to which we are accustomed; for there is nothing here of seeking, no trace of mental construction, no labour of speculation or difficult discovery; ir is an automatic and spontaneous knowledge from a Higher Mind that seems to be in possession of Truth and not in search of hidden and withheld realities. One observes that this Thought is much more capable than the mind of including at once a mass of knowledge in a single view; it has a cosmic character, not the stamp of an individual thinking. Beyond this Truth Thought we can distinguish a greater illumination instinct with an increased power and intensity and driving force, a luminosity of the nature of Truth-Sight with thought formulation as a minor and dependent activity. If we accept the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth—an image which in this experience becomes a reality—we may compare the action of the Higher Mind to a composed and steady sunshine, the energy of the Illumined Mind beyond it

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to an outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff. Still beyond can be met a yet greater power of the Truth-Force, an intimate and exact Truth-vision, Truth thought, Truth-sense, Truth-feeling, Truth-action, to which we can give in a special sense the name of Intuition; for though we have applied that word for want of a better to any supra-intellectual direct way of knowing, yet what we actually know as intuition is only one special movement of self-existent knowledge. This new range is its origin; it imparts to our intuitions something of its own distinct character and is very clearly an intermediary of a greater Truth-Light with which our mind cannot directly communicate. At the source of this Intuition we discover a superconscient cosmic Mind in direct contact with the supramental Truth-Consciousness, an original intensity determinant of all movements below it and all mental energies—not Mind as we know it, but an Overmind that covers as with the wide wings of some creative Oversoul this whole lower hemisphere of Knowledge-Ignorance, links it with that greater Truth-Consciousness while yet at the same time with its brilliant golden Lid it veils the face of the greater Truth from our sight, intervening with its flood of infinite possibilities as at once an obstacle and a passage in our seeking of the spiritual law of our existence, its highest aim, its secret Reality.⁴⁸

Thus, whereas Eckhart regards the consciousness beyond the ordinary mind as a realm of no-mind and a consciousness without thought, Sri Aurobindo distinguishes various superconscient levels of spiritual mind above the ordinary mind and speaks of Higher Thought originating from these superconscient mental levels. It is when the ordinary mind falls silent that Higher Thought and Knowledge manifest from these higher mental levels that are beyond our normal awareness. Regarding the Higher Thought and Knowledge, Sri Aurobindo writes:

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Afterwards [when rhe peace and silence have become massive and complete] knowledge begins to come from the higher planes—the Higher Mind to begin with, and this creates a new action of thought and perception which replaces the ordinary mental. It does that first in the thinking mind, but afterwards also in the vital mind and physical mind, so that all these begin to go through a transformation. This kind of thought is not random and restless, but precise and purposeful—it comes only when needed or called for and does not disturb the silence. Moreover the element of what we call thought there is secondary and what might be called a seeing perception (intuition) takes its place. But so long as the mind does not become capable of a complete silence, this higher knowledge, thought, perception either does not come down or, if partially it does, it is liable to get mixed up with or imitated by the lower, and that is a bother and a hindrance. So the silence is necessary.⁴⁹

As stated in the passage just quoted, the thought from the higher planes of mind does not disturb the silence. For, Sri Aurobindo distinguishes between absolute silence in which there is a complete absence of thought or any other movement, and a fundamental silence in which thought and other movements can take place without disturbing the silence. Sri Aurobindo explains the difference between these two states of silence in a letter to a disciple:

In the entirely silent mind there is usually the static sense of the Divine without any active movement. But there can come into it all the higher thought and aspiration and movements. There is then no absolute silence but one feels a fundamental silence behind which is not disturbed by any movement.⁵⁰

A passage previously quoted (p. 25) states how silence and action can exist and do coexist in the universe.

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It is on the Silence behind the cosmos that all the movement of the universe is supported. ...

In a more outward sense the word Silence is applied to the condition in which there is no movement of thought or feeling, etc., only a great stillness of the mind. But there can be an action in the Silence, undisturbed even as the universal action goes on in the cosmic Silence.⁵¹

Even intellectual thought, which is not based on the intellect but on supra-intellectual knowledge, can take place in a silent mind, says Sri Aurobindo who, after attaining silence in 1908, wrote everything, including his philosophical works, from a silent mind. Regarding the expression of supra-intellectual knowledge through intellectual ideas, Sri Aurobindo writes to a disciple:

... fundamentally, it is not an expression of ideas arrived at by speculative thinking. One has to arrive at spiritual knowledge through experience and a consciousness of things which arises directly out of that experience or else underlies or is involved in it. This kind of knowledge, then, is fundamentally a consciousness and not a thought or formulated idea. For instance, my first major experience⁵²—radical and overwhelming, though not, as it turned out, final and exhaustive—came after and by the exclusion and silencing of all thought—there was, first, what might be called a spiritually substantial or concrete consciousness of stillness and silence, then the awareness of some sole and supreme Reality in whose Presence things existed only as forms, but forms not at all substantial or real or concrete; but this was all apparent to a spiritual perception and essential and impersonal sense and there was not the least concept or idea of reality or unreality or any other notion, for all concept or idea was hushed or rather entirely absent in the absolute stillness. These things

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were known directly through the pure consciousness and not through the mind, so there was no need of concepts or words or names. At the same time this fundamental character of spiritual experience is not absolutely limitative; it can do without thought, but it can do with thought also. Of course, the first idea of the mind would be that the resort to thought brings one back at once to the domain of the intellect—and at first and for a long time it may be so; but it is not my experience that this is unavoidable. It happens so when one tries to make an intellectual statement of what one has experienced; but there is another kind of thought that springs out as if it were a body or form of the experience or of the consciousness involved in it—or of a part of that consciousness—and this does not seem to me to be intellectual in its character. It has another light, another power in it, a sense within the sense. It is very clearly so with those thoughts that come without the need of words to embody them, thoughts that are of the nature of a direct seeing in the consciousness, even a kind of intimate sense or contact formulating itself into a precise expression of its awareness (I hope this is not too mystic or unintelligible); but it might be said that directly the thoughts turn into words they belong to the kingdom of intellect—for words are a coinage of the intellect. But is it so really or inevitably? It has always seemed to me that words came originally from somewhere else than the thinking mind, although the thinking mind secured hold of them, turned them to its use and coined them freely for its purposes.⁵³

Eckhart, too, says that thoughts can be there in the state of Presence, which is a state of stillness, but thoughts no longer have the compulsive quality they have in the normal state of consciousness; thoughts become a servant of a deeper, silent consciousness. Generally, however, Eckhart speaks of stillness as a state that is totally devoid of all mental activity, including the basic mental activity of

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interpreting and labeling in terms of concepts and ideas whatever one perceives. Such a state of absolute stillness seems to be what Sri Aurobindo refers to in describing his first major experience (mentioned in the passage cited a little earlier). It is what he describes as a vacant mind. Distinguishing between the absolute stillness of a vacant mind and a fundamental stillness of a calm mind, he says:

The difference between a vacant mind and a calm mind is this: that when the mind is vacant, there is no thought, no conception, no mental action of any kind, except an essential perception of things without the formed idea; but in the calm mind, it is the substance of the mental being that is still, so still that nothing disturbs it. If thoughts or activities come, they do not rise at all out of the mind, but they come from outside and cross the mind as a flight of birds crosses the sky in a windless air. It passes, disturbs nothing, leaving no trace. Even if a thousand images or the most violent events pass across it, the calm stillness remains as if the very texture of the mind were a substance of eternal and indestructible peace.⁵⁴

In the passage just quoted, Sri Aurobindo speaks of the substance of the mental being that continues to exist even when thoughts cease, for thoughts are simply the activities of the mental being, not part of its substance. As he explains to a disciple:

Thoughts are not the essence of mind-being, they are only an activity of mental nature; if that activity ceases, what appears then as a thought-free existence that manifests in its place is not a blank or void but something very real, substantial, concrete we may say—a mental being that extends itself widely and can be its own field of existence silent or active as well as the Witness, Knower, Master of that field and its action. ... an emptiness there is, but it is an emptiness of the ordinary activities, not a blank of existence.⁵⁵

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Regarding the nature of true knowledge that comes when the mind has become silent, Eckhart and Sri Aurobindo speak in very similar terms. Eckhart distinguishes between two kinds of knowing: knowing about something and knowing of the thing in itself. Mental knowledge, he says, is knowing about something as an object that is separate from oneself as the subject; it is a separative and superficial knowledge of a thing. On the other hand, knowing of a. thing in itself is a unitive knowledge through consciousness, in which the knower and the thing known become one. In a similar way, Sri Aurobindo distinguishes four methods of knowledge:

1. Knowledge by identity: The knower and what is known are one; there is no division between the subject and object, between self and not-self.

2. Knowledge by intimate direct contact: There is an intimate and direct contact of consciousness with the thing that is known, but the contact falls short of full identification and complete self-oblivion.

3. Knowledge by separative direct contact: Here there is a separation between the self and the object of knowledge, but there is a direct contact of consciousness with the object.

4. Completely separative knowledge by indirect contact through the senses.

In Sri Aurobindo's own words:

Our surface cognition, our limited and restricted mental way of looking at our self, at our inner movements and at the world outside us and its objects and happenings, is so constituted that it derives in different degrees from a fourfold order of knowledge. The original and fundamental way of knowing, native to the occult self in things, is a knowledge by identity; the second, derivative, is a knowledge by direct contact associated at its roots with a securer knowledge by identity or starting from it, but actually separated from its source and therefore powerful but incomplete in its cognition; the third is a knowledge by separation from the object of observation, but still with a direct contact as its support or even a partial identity; the fourth is a completely separative knowledge which relies on a machinery of indirect contact, a knowledge by acquisition which is yet, without being conscious of it, a rendering or bringing up of the contents of a pre-existent inner awareness and knowledge. A knowledge by identity, a knowledge by intimate direct contact, a knowledge by separative direct contact, a wholly separative knowledge by indirect contact are the four cognitive methods of Nature.⁵⁶

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