Savitri

  III

Overhead Aesthesis

Now all these overhead planes—Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind—can influence, each to the measure of its distinctive or sovereign power, our various activities or preoccupations at the mental or the below-mental—the vital and the material planes. If the resistance from the lower powers—matter, life (or the vital), mind is formidable, as it often is, the influence of the higher powers, the result of a chance or temporary descent of one of them to the lower planes, will be negligible or evanescent. But where the aspiration has been strong enough and sustained enough, the descent will yield more fruitful and lasting results. This is particularly exemplified in the arts, and in poetry most of all. Now 'overhead' poetry is simply poetry that has been thus influenced, whether to a greater or a lesser extent, by the spiritual power of the Overmind or by the other overhead powers, Higher Mind, Illumined Mind or Intuition. The influence may be the result of the higher power acting in one of two ways:

...in one it touches the ordinary modes of mind and deepens,

heightens, intensifies or exquisitely refines their action but without

changing its modes or transforming its normal character; in the

other it brings down into these normal modes something of itself,

something supernormal, something which one at once feels to be

extraordinary and suggestive of a superhuman level.¹⁶

The first way may be compared to a tutor making a few significant changes in a scholar's essay; the second is the essay of the scholar of yesterday who has completed his training and has himself mastered the art of writing. Thus the word "greater" is applied by Sri Aurobindo, "with the necessary qualifications, to the second way and its too rare poetic creation."¹⁷ As regards the Overmind power itself and the divers intermediate powers and the manner in which they express themselves in poetry, what happens is that these overhead or essentially spiritual powers undergo translation in poetical terms; and since poetry involves the idea, the word, and the rhythm, these overhead powers too charge with new or universal significance any or all of them and the result is 'overhead' poetry:

...the Overmind thinks in a mass; its thought, feeling, vision is

high or deep or wide or all these things together...it goes vast

on its way to bring the divine riches, and it has a corresponding

language and rhythm. The Higher Thought has a strong tread

often with bare unsandaled feet and moves in a clear-cut light:

a divine power, measure, dignity is its most frequent character.

The outflow of the Illumined Mind comes in a flood brilliant

with revealing words or a light of crowding images, sometimes

surcharged with its burden of revelations, sometimes with a

luminous sweep. The Intuition is usually a lightning flash showing

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up a single spot or plot of ground or scene with an entire

and miraculous completeness of vision to the surprised ecstasy of the

inner eye; its rhythm has a decisive inevitable sound which leaves

nothing essential unheard, but very commonly is embodied in a

single stroke.¹⁸

Such are the overhead planes and their characteristic powers, which are more or less spiritual in their origin and impulsion. When these powers engage themselves, partly or wholly, in the creation and communication of beauty, overhead aesthesis may be said to have come into play. 'Aesthesis' is normally viewed as the opposite of 'physis', for feelings, thoughts, the tremblings of one's sensibility are subjective whereas facts, actions, the vicissitudes of outer phenomena are objective. Aesthesis is the energising activity, artistic or poetic creation (and enjoyment) is the result:

By aesthesis is meant a reaction of the consciousness, mental and

vital and even bodily, which receives a certain element in things,

something that can be called their taste, Rasa, which, passing

through the mind or sense or both, awakes a vital enjoyment of

the taste, Bhoga, and this can again awaken us, awaken even the

soul in us to something yet deeper and more fundamental than

mere pleasure and enjoyment, to some form of the spirit's

delight of existence, Ananda.¹⁹

Rasa, bhoga, ananda are the three terms in the ascending scale of artistic (and especially poetic) activity, and aesthesis is the functioning of this trinity of powers. There is the rasa, the essential taste, of a word, its sound, its idea; the word may become the starting-point for a sequence of echoes and intimations that may have a global sweep; starting from almost anywhere, any word, any sound, any idea, a vivid sense of the cosmos may surge with overpowering effect, and it is as though one sees with new eyes, hears with new ears, and the surrender to this wonderful experience is the bhoga or enjoyment of it, and results in aesthetic delight or self-forgetful bliss (ananda).

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      Of course, such aesthesis, although ordinarily associated with art and poetry, really derives from the universal ananda, the cosmic ecstasy of the Dance of Shiva, "which multiplies the body of the God numberlessly to the view: it leaves that white existence precisely where and what it was, ever is and ever will be; its sole absolute object is the joy of the dancing."²⁰

      Viewed on this cosmic scale, "Delight is existence, Delight is the secret of creation, Delight is the root of birth, Delight is the cause of remaining in existence, Delight is the end of birth and that into which creation ceases."²¹ Yet the ordinary mentality sees a great deal of pain, which is the reverse of delight, in everyday life; ugliness, hate, and misery seem to contest the ground with beauty, love and happiness, and one almost feels like generalising that all is duhkkha or asukham, all is double, double toil and trouble. Indeed, in our life in the Ignorance, between the extremes of the possibility of the pure Ananda at one end and the actuality of the reign of misery at the other end, there is a middle no-man's-land governed by, "a general tone of neutrality and indifference born from the universal insensibility into which the Ananda sinks in its dark negation in the Inconscient."²²

      It is alone the opening of the overhead planes, the play of the overhead powers, that can effect a cure for this indifference and restore the lost taste for the original Ananda. Behind the Manomaya, the divided limited agonised mental self, there is the Anandamaya, the vast ineffable Bliss-Self of which the former is only "a shadowy image and disturbed reflection".²³ As we penetrate behind the surface or appearance and touch the reality within, this world of Anandamaya, new values replace the values of our lower mental, vital or material consciousness, and our aesthesis too, "shares in this intensification of capacity.. .As it enters the Overhead planes the ordinary aesthesis turns into a pure delight and becomes capable of a high, a large or a deep abiding ecstasy."²⁴

      The ordinary mentality is so deadened by dull routine that it is insensitive alike to pleasure and pain except, perhaps, when it makes

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a direct or personal invasion, and even then it is no more than an instinctive animal reaction, sharp but brief, and untranslated into the higher levels, undistilled as rasa, unassimilated in terms of bhoga, uncrystallised as ananda. A proper aesthesis can turn the experience of pain itself into fine poetry, as in:

      She sat like Patience on a monument,

      Smiling at grief.²⁵

And, besides, overhead aesthesis connotes, not merely greater intensity of experience, but also a greater integrality and universality in its approach and functioning. It is concerned, as all aesthesis is, with beauty, but it is no less concerned with truth, love, delight, power; overhead aesthesis is thus "an essential aesthesis...a fundamental and universal aesthesis", putting truth first, though not by any means ignoring beauty or the other aspects of the cosmic play. What this really means is that, when the overhead aesthesis actively functions, truth ceases to be anything abstract or formless, but is seen to tingle with a life and beauty of its own, and this vision of truth becomes "a splendid discovery, a rapturous revelation, a thing of beauty that is a joy forever" ²⁶; there truth is beauty, beauty truth; and there too dwells and from there "springs the mystery of the inevitable word, the supreme immortal rhythm, the absolute significance and the absolute utterance",²⁷ in short, the mantra.

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