Savitri

      II

      THE OVERHEAD PLANES OF CONSCIOUSNESS

At the present stage of the evolutionary advance, man has a body, certain vital instincts and passions, and a directing and controlling mind. Mental man is a great improvement on the mere animal, but he is also a prey to various dissatisfactions. What is the reason? Sri Aurobindo's diagnosis is pointed and clear: the mind of man, a helper in many ways, a gleaner of bits of truth and partial fragments of knowledge, is nevertheless rooted in a basic Ignorance, functions from behind a veil that separates it from the source of the Truth-consciousness, and hence commits error upon error and piles up misery upon misery. As Sri Aurobindo writes in The Synthesis of Yoga:

...the mind in the ignorance lives in the moment and moves

from hour to hour like a traveller who sees only what is

near and visible around his immediate standpoint and

remembers imperfectly what he has passed through before, but

all in front beyond his immediate view is the unseen and

unknown of which he has yet to have experience.⁵

It is a purblind vision, the vision of a man who strives to find his

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bearings in darkness; a walled-up agonised vision, vaguely apprehensive of everything and everybody. The mental man has no sense of community or communion, he is as it were by himself and for himself. Mind the efficient servant upto a point is also a weakening and defeating power, a power that divorces us from our environment and even the ultimate sources of our strength. This is because, to quote Sri Aurobindo again, the mind has lost,

...the truth of indivisibility of Time, the indivisibility of Force

and Substance. It has lost sight even of the obvious fact that all

minds are one Mind taking many standpoints, all lives one Life

developing many currents of activity, all body and form one

substance of Force and Consciousness concentrating into many

apparent stabilities of force and consciousness; but in truth all

these stabilities are really only a constant whorl of movement

repeating a form while it modifies it...⁶

How is this "lost Sun" to be recovered? How is the Ignorance to be superceded? The transition has to be effected, from the Mind, through the Overmind, to the Supermind. On the other hand, Sri Aurobindo warns us in unambiguous terms that, "the supramental change is difficult, distant, an ultimate stage; it must be regarded as the end of a far-off vista."⁷ Figuratively it may be said that there is but a veil, a gulf, between the mental and the supramental levels of life, between Nature and Super-Nature. Rending of the veil, bridging the gulf—these too are only mentalised constructions. The real change is spiritual, not physical, and while figures of speech are convenient, they can also seriously mislead us.

      While the Ignorance no doubt envelops us as a thick veil (to relapse into simile again), its reign is by no means absolute. There are transparent patches through which light trickles in. Messiahs have been our beacon lights. The ideal of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man has been repeatedly placed before us. Many a man and woman has transcended in the past the limiting ego and claimed the larger freedom of a more universal consciousness.

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But these exceptions have nevertheless failed to effect a basic or total revolution in the mental consciousness. The mass of humanity has remained largely unaffected by the example of these great leaders of humanity. What Sri Aurobindo has called the 'lower' knowledge, in other words the knowledge of the apparent world gained through sensuous and mental processes, through the techniques of science, has to be matched—and more than matched—by the 'higher' knowledge, the knowledge of the truth of existence gained through an inner spiritual discipline. Although called, again for convenience, the 'lower' and the 'higher' knowledge, they are really but the reverse and the obverse of the same arc of integral knowledge:

All knowledge is ultimately the knowledge of God, through

himself, through Nature, through her works. Mankind has first

to seek this knowledge through the external life; for until its

mentality is sufficiently developed, spiritual knowledge is not

really possible, and in proportion as it is developed, the possibilities

of spiritual knowledge become richer and fuller.⁸

To cultivate the spiritual life is not to turn away from everyday life; it is not an escape from life but rather a steady confrontation of life and seeing it in its cosmic context. The little stream of life is seen lost in the ocean, the little bird of one's individuality is seen lost in the universality of the blue sky. The radical inner change, the profound spiritual transformation takes place when man the mental being aspires with his whole heart and soul to the 'higher' knowledge, and is seized and overwhelmed by it:

The possession of the Infinite cannot come except by an ascent

to those supramental planes, nor the knowledge of it except by

an inert submission of Mind to the descending messages of the

Truth-conscious Reality.⁹

Or, as the same process is described in the terms of yoga:

There are two powers that alone can effect in their conjunction

the great and difficult thing which is the aim of our endeavour, a

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fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below and a supreme

Grace from above that answers.¹⁰

Ascent, descent, integration; aspiration, response, realisation: such are the classic terms of the Aurobindonian dialectic of spiritual evolution. Once spiritually awakened, mental man strives to exceed himself, and as he explores the ascending possibilities, he reaches stage after stage of the overhead—or above mind—consciousness: Higher Mind, Illumined Mind, Intuition, Overmind, and beyond it—"at the end of a far-off vista"—Supermind. Sri Aurobindo devotes several pages in The Life Divine ¹¹ and the whole canto in Savitri entitled 'The Kingdoms and Godheads of the Greater Mind' to a vivid or luxuriously picturesque description of these spiritual resting-houses between Mind and Supermind. The advance, the progress, really implies an increasing capacity for comprehension, the emergence of a new power of direct vision, the play of puissant truth-consciousness and truth-effectuation:

As the Higher Mind brings a greater consciousness into the

being through the spiritual idea and its power of truth, so

the Illumined Mind brings in a still greater consciousness through

a Truth sight and Truth Light and its seeing and seizing power.. .¹²

Intuition is always an edge or ray or outleap of a superior light;

it is in us a projecting blade, edge or point of a far-off supermind

light...¹³

      Less analysis, more comprehension; less uncertainty and the confusing play of light and shade, more sureness and the luminous glow of a steady light; less division and isolation, more universality and the consciousness of unity: these are the symptoms of the higher thought and the illumined thought. But intuitive thought is like a momentary streak of lightning; an instantaneous flash, a sudden—an almost blinding—revelation; presently all is dark again, only the memory of the brilliant moment remains.

      The next stage takes us still nearer the supramental level of consciousness:

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When the overmind descends, the predominance of the

centralising ego-sense is entirely subordinated, lost in largeness of

being and finally abolished; a wide cosmic perception and feeling

of a boundless universal self and movement replaces it: many

motions that were formerly ego-centric may still continue, but

they occur as currents or ripples in the cosmic wideness. Thought,

for the most part, no longer seems to originate individually in the

body or the person but manifests from above or comes in upon

the cosmic mind-waves...¹⁴

It is like a man drinking from a flowing stream, basking in the Sun's bright rays, or losing his thoughts in eternity; in other words, it is a basic change in the quality of his consciousness that enables him to be in the world but not of it, to think, speak and act but from "a vast cosmic instrumentation'. This is the utmost change that man can hope for while still remaining man, for, "the overmind change is the final consummating movement of the dynamic spiritual transformation; it is the highest possible status dynamis of the spirit in the spiritual-mind plane."¹⁵

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