Eckhart Tolle and Sri Aurobindo

Mind and the Spiritual Life

There are similarities as well as differences in the perspectives of Eckhart and Sri Aurobindo regarding the role of mind in the spiritual life. To Eckhart, mind, from the spiritual viewpoint, is the absence of consciousness. To be identified with mind is to be unconscious; it is to be not present. The one aim of the spiritual life is to liberate oneself from the unconscious state of identification with mind. Eckhart does concede that mind is a form of intelligence or consciousness; it is only a tiny aspect of the vast Intelligence that operates in the universe. Mind, Eckhart says, is a wonderful tool for practical purposes, but in spiritual life it has no helpful role. On the contrary, it is the greatest hindrance to be overcome because one tends to identify with it and mistake it for the self. Therefore, Eckhart employs only a few mental concepts and regards the "information" in the form of concepts and ideas as the least important part of his teachings. The function of a spiritual teacher, he says, is to awaken Presence by contagion through words that are charged with Presence, and which have a dimension far greater than that of the mental content conveyed by the words. Spiritual teaching, says Eckhart, consists in a transmission of Presence rather than the imparting of ideas.¹⁸

Sri Aurobindo similarly describes mind as an "ignorance-consciousness" which he distinguishes from the Truth- Consciousness, or what he calls the Supermind. The Supermind is nor, as the term may suggest, a magnified form of the ordinary mind but a reality that is supramental, that is, beyond mind, and radically different from it. However, mind, Sri Aurobindo says, is the highest level of

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consciousness that has yet emerged in the process of evolution, and represents a higher level of consciousness than the levels below it, namely, the vital, the physical, the subconscient, and the inconscient. In all the millennia of the world's spiritual history up to the present, only a relatively very small number of individuals have evolved beyond mind. According to Sri Aurobindo, even mind itself has not yet, except in a small minority of humanity, fully emerged; most human beings are still governed by the vital consciousness that is characteristic of the animal stage of evolution. As he states:

Most people live in the vital. That means that they live in their desires, sensations, emotional feelings, vital imaginations and see and experience and judge everything from that point of view. It is the vital that moves them, the mind being at its service, not its master. ... It is only the minority of men who live in the mind or in the psychic¹⁹ or try to live in the spiritual plane.²⁰

... most men live in their physical mind²¹ and vital, except a few saints and a rather larger number of intellectuals. That is why, as it is now discovered, humanity has made little progress in the last three thousand years, except in information and material equipment.²²

Because mental consciousness represents a higher or more evolved level of consciousness than that of the vital, which human beings have still not fully outgrown, the mind is regarded in yoga as not only a useful but also, in some respects, an indispensable tool until it can be replaced by a higher or deeper consciousness. Thus, in

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various spiritual disciplines, mind has generally been used to serve two chief functions in the spiritual life. First, mind is utilized to acquire a mental understanding of the human makeup and of the processes and principles by which one's ordinary nature can be transformed so as to manifest a higher level of consciousness. The reader may recall the four aids on the spiritual path mentioned in the Mahabharata alluded to earlier (p. 20). The first of the four aids—Shastra—which consists of "the knowledge of the truths, principles, powers, and processes that govern the realization"—is usually the mental knowledge that one acquires from books and reacher. Almost all spiritual teaching starts with some mental concepts. Thus, the exposition of the Gita begins with the chapter on "Buddhi²³ Yoga," the "Yoga of the Intelligent Will," containing

... the first necessary rays of light on the path, directed not like that to the soul, but to the intellect. ... Not the Friend and Lover of man speaks first, but the Guide and Teacher who has to remove from him his ignorance of his true self and of the nature of the world and of the springs of his own action.²⁴

Sri Aurobindo's view regarding mental knowledge is that it is helpful, especially in the early stage, though not indispensable, for "there are two kinds of understanding—understanding by the intellect and understanding in the consciousness. It is good to have the former if it is accurate, but it is not indispensable."²⁵

It is not enough to devote ourselves by the reading of Scriptures or by the stress of philosophic reasoning to an intellectual understanding of the Divine; for at the end of our long mental labour we might know all that has been said of the Eternal, possess all that can be thought about the Infinite and yet we might not know him at all. This intellectual preparation can indeed be the first stage in a powerful Yoga,

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but it is not indispensable: it is not a step which all need or can be called upon to take. Yoga would be impossible, except for a very few, if the intellectual figure of knowledge arrived at by the speculative or meditative Reason were its indispensable condition or a binding preliminary.²⁶

Mental knowledge is of little use except sometimes as an introduction pointing towards the real knowledge which comes from a direct consciousness of things.²⁷

You have to learn by experience. Mental information (badly understood, as it always is without experience) might rather hamper than help. In fact there is no fixed mental knowledge about these things, which vary infinitely. You must learn to go beyond the hankering for mental information and open to the true way of knowledge.²⁸

What the sadhak²⁹ has to be specially warned against in the wrong processes of the intellect is, first, any mistaking of mental ideas and impressions or intellectual conclusions for realisation; secondly, the restless activity of the mere mind which disturbs the spontaneous accuracy of psychic³⁰ and spiritual experience and gives no room for the descent of the true illuminating knowledge or else deforms it as soon as it touches or even before it fully touches the human mental plane.³¹

Eckhart attaches little importance to mental knowledge in spiritual teaching, whereas Sri Aurobindo regards an intellectual preparation as a possible "first step in a powerful Yoga" in spiritual life. This is probably because Eckhart had a transformative experience

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without any prior acquisition of mental knowledge about spiritual life. The mental understanding of his experience, as he says, came to him considerably later when he read spiritual books and visited teachers. It was only after his experience that he came to understand ir in terms of such concepts as "cessation of thought," "Presence," and "thoughtless awareness."

There is indeed an advantage in having a spiritual experience without prior mental knowledge about it. As the Mother remarks:

Always the most interesting cases for me have been those of people who had read nothing but had a very ardent aspiration and came to me saying, "Something funny has happened to me, I had this extraordinary experience, what can it mean truly?" And then they describe a movement, a vibration, a force, a light, whatever it might be, it depends on each one, and they describe this, that it happened like that and came like that, and then this happened and then that, and what does it all mean, all this? Then here one is on the right side. One knows that it is not an imagined experience, that it is a sincere, spontaneous one, and this always has a power of transformation much greater than the experience that was brought about by a mental knowledge.³²

But there is also a disadvantage in experiencing something without previous mental understanding of it. As Sri Aurobindo writes:

The disadvantage of the one who does not know mentally is that he gets the experience without understanding it and this may be a hindrance or at least retardarory to development while he would not get so easily out of a mistake as one more mentally enlighrened.³³

A mistake often made by spiritual seekers pertains to inner experiences. Sri Aurobindo regards the mind as a useful instrument in

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the spiritual life for discriminating between pseudo experiences and genuinely spiritual experiences. As Sri Aurobindo wrote to a disciple:

There are imitation higher experiences when the mind or vital catches hold of an idea or suggestion and turns it into a feeling, and while there is a rush of forces, a feeling of exultation and power ere. All sorts of "imperatives" come, visions, perhaps "voices". There is nothing more dangerous than these voices—when I hear from somebody that he has a "voice", I always feel uneasy, though there can be genuine and helpful voices, and feel inclined to say "No voices please—silence, silence and a clear discriminating brain". I have hired about this region of imitation experiences, false inspirations, false voices into which hundreds of yogin's enter and some never get out of it in my letter about the intermediate zone.³⁴ If a man has a strong clear head and a certain kind of spiritual scepticism, he can go through and does—but people without discrimination like Y or Z get lost.³⁵

Thus, Sri Aurobindo points to the need for using one's mind ("discriminating brain," "clear head") in order to not be misled by pseudo-spiritual experiences.

Another difference in the perspectives of the two teachers regarding the role of the mind in spiritual life seems from the fact that, whereas Eckhart regards what Sri Aurobindo calls the vital as part of the mind-identified self, Sri Aurobindo makes a clear distinction between the mind and the vital. Explaining the distinction, he writes:

... in the language of this yoga the words "mind" and "mental" are used to connote specially the part of the nature

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which has to do with cognition and intelligence, with ideas, with mental or thought perceptions. ... The vital has to be carefully distinguished from mind, even though it has a mind element transfused into it; the vital is the Life-nature made up of desires, sensations, feelings, passions, energies of action, will of desire, reactions of the desire-soul in man and of all that play of possessive and other related instincts, anger, fear, greed, lust, etc., that belong to this field of the nature. Mind and vital are mixed up on the surface of the consciousness, but they are quite separate forces in themselves and as soon as one gets behind the ordinary surface consciousness one sees them as separate, discovers their distinction and can with the aid of this knowledge analyse their surface mixtures.³⁶

Because mind is, as previously stated, from the evolutionary point of view, a higher level of consciousness in relation to the vital, Sri Aurobindo regards the mind as having a useful and indispensable function in growing out of the vital consciousness. For mind, according to yogic psychology, is endowed not only with intelligence but also with will power. Just as mental intelligence, despite its extreme limitations, is a useful tool for growth towards spiritual knowledge, so the mental will, despite its extremely limited power, serves an indispensable function in dealing with the vital not only in ordinary life but also in spiritual life. As Sri Aurobindo states:

The will is a part of the consciousness and ought to be in human beings the chief agent in controlling the activities of the nature.³⁷

Even apart from yoga, in ordinary life, only those are considered ro have full manhood or are likely to succeed in their life, their ideals or their undertakings who take in hand this restless vital, concentrate and control it and subject it to discipline. It is by the use of the mental will that they

discipline it, compelling it to do not what it wants but what the reason or the will sees to be right or desirable. In yoga one uses the inner will and compels the vital to submit itself to tapasya³⁸ so that it may become calm, strong, obedient—or else one calls down the calm from above obliging the vital to renounce desire and become quiet and receptive.³⁹

So long as there is not a constant action of the Force'⁴⁰ from above or else of a deeper will from within, the mental will is necessary.⁴¹

Both Sri Aurobindo and Eckhart say that mental will cannot transform the desire nature; it can only exercise a certain control over impulses and desires. But whereas Sri Aurobindo regards such a control of the vital by exercise of the mental will or the will of the inner being as indispensable until one can call down the Divine Force, Eckhart's message is simply to bring Presence into whatever arises in one's nature. People who come to him, he says, seem to be ready for the arising of Presence.

In Sri Aurobindo's yoga, as in Eckhart's teaching, there is no mental code of conduct like the Yama—Niyama (do's and don'ts) of Patanjali or the Eightfold Path of Buddhism for the preparation and purification of the ordinary nature.

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