Patterns of the Present

4: Reason on Trial

The Age of Reason is visibly drawing to an end.¹

– Sri Aurobindo

Why, in fact, are we attached to the truth? Why the truth rather than lies? Why the truth rather than myth? Why the truth rather than illusion? ²

– Michel Foucault

“The history of the twenty years after 1973 is that of a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis,”³ writes Eric Hobsbawm, one of the few genuinely great historians of our century. He is not the only intellectual who entered the gates of the Third Millennium in a state of befuddlement; actually, there were and are a few others. Humanity seems to have lost its bearings as early as in “the tumult of the 1960s”, or rather it has lost its head, its reason, its mental capacities of rationalisation, understanding, and concentration.

The mental chaos was to be expected if the view of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and the forces activated by their Work, contain any truth. Man is “the mental being” par excellence, as one finds repeated time and again in their books. If man has to be surpassed by the overman and afterwards by the supramental being, then reason, the mental being’s main means of consciousness, must be surpassed – something painfully traumatic and profoundly puzzling to a being that relies on reason as its principal means of awareness and expression, and that even deems reason to be the highest phenomenon achieved by evolution. How can the highest be surpassed except by what to the mind seems sheer irrationality, chaos, or nothingness?

A transitional period with the eventual aim of the transformation of mankind must of necessity put all certainties into question and do away with most of them to make place for new ones that cannot be imagined. This period of transition the Mother once called, only partly in jest, “the supramental catastrophe”. Humanity, and through it the world, is undergoing a sea change. That reason lost its moorings is one of the consequences, only explainable from the Aurobindonian perspective.

Postmodernism

Culturally speaking, the period that begun in the 1960s and that is still continuing, is known as “postmodernism”. This rather awkward buzzword, “a makeshift word”, actually says nothing about the period we are in as it refers to the previous period, the last of the past. “Postmodernism” is applicable to the present philosophical trend as well as to science, industrialism, art, architecture, literature, and fashion. It evokes something multifaceted, varied, undetermined, unbounded, heterogeneous, chaotic, disordered, improvised, confused, vibrant, colourful, grotesque and even nihilistic. A few definitions by experts may give the reader an idea of the indefinable because not yet overseeable and therefore not apprehendable.

• “We must reconcile ourselves to a paradoxical-sounding thought: namely, the thought that we no longer live in the ‘modern’ world. The ‘modern’ world is now a thing of the past. Our own natural science today is no longer ‘modern’ science. Instead … it is rapidly engaged in becoming ‘postmodern’ science: the science to the ‘postmodern’ world, of ‘postnationalist’ politics and ‘postindustrial’ society – the world that has not yet discovered how to define itself in terms of what is, but only in terms of what it has just-now ceased to be.”⁴ (Stephen Toulmin)

• “Although many at first dismissed the postmodern turn as a fad and have been predicting its demise for years, postmodern discourses continue to proliferate and attract interest, winning fervent advocates and passionate opponents. The term ‘postmodern’ is thus increasingly taken as a synonym for the contemporary social moment and as a marker to describe its novelties and its differences from modern culture and society. Yet there is no agreement on what constitutes the postmodern, on whether we are indeed in a new postmodern era, or on what theories best illuminate the dynamics and experiences of the contemporary moment.”⁵ (Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner)

• “Philosophical opinion regarding the postmodern family [the various disciplines to which the word is applied] is deeply divided. For some, postmodernism connotes the final escape from the stultifying legacy of modern European theology, metaphysics, authoritarianism, colonialism, racism, and domination. To others it represents the attempt by disgruntled left-wing intellectuals to destroy Western civilisation. To yet others it labels a goofy collection of hermetically obscure writers who are really talking about nothing at all …

• “When most philosophers use the word ‘postmodernism’ they mean to refer to a movement that developed in France in the 1960s … along with subsequent and related developments. They have in mind that this movement denies the possibility of objective knowledge of the real world, ‘univocal’ (single or primary) meaning of words and texts, the unity of the human self, the cogency of the distinctions between rational inquiry and political action, literal and metaphorical meaning, science and art, and even the possibility of truth itself.”⁶ (Lawrence Cahoone).

• “Postmodern discourse articulates fin-de-siècle anxieties concerning the end of an era and the demise of certainties, orthodoxies, and positions that have sustained thought and politics over the past three centuries. Shedding of old habits of thought and action is often difficult; thus the postmodern turn evokes threats and challenges that are often anxiety producing, although, as noted, it also contains exciting challenges and experiences. It is curious that apocalyptic thought frequently erupts at the close of a century, and as the 20th century comes to an end there are many who see an entire world order – modernity – dissolving as an uncertain future quickly approaches (or is already here).”⁷ (Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner)

• “Postmodernism is often associated with a revolt against order, representation, narrative, system and signification, and a tendency towards eclecticism, irony, parody, quotation, self-referentiality and indeterminacy … [Its philosophical framework is that of] late-20th-century philosophies of demystification, decanonisation and decentring which move beyond humanist notions of subject and object, nature and being and the ‘modern’ project of the Enlightenment …

• “Indeed, according to Charles Jencks, ‘In the last ten years post-modernism has become more than a social condition and cultural movement, it has become a world view.’ Recent studies have emphasized this, devoting themselves not simply to artistic and cultural phenomena but to the changing paradigm of the age … Frederic Jameson has it that ‘postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good’, creating a world of simulacra, commodity fetishism, narcissism, affectless eroticism, depthless history, and, in cultural expression, ‘the first specifically North American global style’.”⁸ (Malcolm Bradbury)

This might be summarised as follows: the contemporary period in history, provisionally labelled “postmodern”, turns against the “modern” period – Reformation, Enlightenment and 19th century – by which it was engendered, but whose “stultifying legacy” of values proves to be unreliable, misleading and even false; the “certainties” transmitted by the “modern” to the present world turn out to be no longer applicable; postmodern man and woman, therefore, do not possess the intellectual standards to interpret and understand the overwhelming newness of the world that is theirs.

The fundamental problem, however, is that the “modern” period represented “the triumph of reason” and that as the postmoderns found out, reason, i.e. the rational mind, is unable to produce truth and even to comprehend it. The modern period has been unable to provide a ground of truth on which to build one’s personality, one’s society and one’s outlook on the future. As pointed out in the preceding chapter, the whole of the modern period can be seen as a reaction of the human reason against the “unreasonable”, irrational period of faith we call the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages there was a generally accepted system of belief concerning the conception of man, of the world, and of God. This system, the world view of Catholic Christianity in Western Europe, had elementary limitations and flaws which one day would have to be brought to the surface if homo europaeus was to fulfil his destiny, his part in the evolution of humankind. The criticism of the medieval world view started with the reactivation of the rational mind of ancient Greece; its rediscovery created the Renaissance. The 18th century Enlightenment is also called the Age of Reason. The 19th century philosophical and sociological thinkers prided themselves on having cleared the human mind of all remnants of irrationality (Comte’s positivism and Marxism were supposed to be “scientific”). The 20th century proved all of them to be badly mistaken.

That the postmodern kaleidoscopic bedlam is caused by a misvaluation of reason is apparent from the following. Among the themes of postmodernity are, according to Steinar Kvale “a doubt that any human truth is a simple objective representation of reality”, “a focus on the way societies use language to construct their own realities”, and “a belief that reason appears in many guises.”⁹ In other words, reason cannot discover or formulate truth; there is no (general) truth as such, and if there is it cannot be known. “All meanings and truths are never absolute or timeless, but are always framed by socially and historically specific conditions of knowledge.”¹⁰

“Seeing truth as made, not found – seeing reality as socially constructed – doesn’t mean deciding there is nothing ‘out there’. It means understanding that all our stories about what’s out there – all our scientific facts, our religious teachings, our society’s beliefs, even our personal perceptions – are the products of a highly creative interaction between human minds and the cosmos. The cosmos may be found; but the ideas we form about it, and the things we say about it, are made. One of the main themes of postmodern thought is that language is deeply involved in the social construction of reality. [The American philosopher Richard] Rorty says: ‘We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes that do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.’”¹¹ (Walter T. Anderson)

Conclusion: postmodernism says that truth is a human creation, as varied (and partial) as the humans who create it, be they individuals or societies. Consequences: according to postmodernism 1. There is no such thing as a “true self”, the individual does not exist on a ground of being;”¹² 2. There are no “grand narratives” (metanarratives, métarécits), i.e. true philosophical systems, world views, religions. All is relative, a changing part of changing wholes, structures, complex (and accidental) “events”. Small wonder that this way of seeing things easily turns into nihilism on the one hand and extreme subjectivism, now sometimes called “narcissism”, on the other.

This may be shocking to people who believe in essences and in an objective, experienceable truth; yet, it is not amazing considering the philosophical and historical elements of the life and thought of Western man. For wasn’t he presented with one “grand narrative” after the other, with “certainties” shouted from the pulpit and from the mouths of revolutionaries, or whispered from the mouths of dreamers and armchair philosophers, and hadn’t inevitable “progress” been promised to him as the indubitable rationale inbuilt in evolution and in the destiny of humanity? But all that lay bloodily shattered by two great wars and scores of small ones in the 20th century, and the being gifted with reason which man was supposed to be had shown that he was still more barbarian than ever. Heaven, in a hereafter or on the Earth, was guaranteed – how many times by how many religions? – and hell pervaded the world instead.

Mind, Reason, Intellect

A thought is an arrow shot at the truth; it can hit a point, but not cover the whole target …¹³

– Sri Aurobindo

Western thought perished because of its certainties.¹⁴

– Michel Winock

“Reason is the master of the nature of the human species,”¹⁵ said the Mother, thus confirming that man is “the mental being” par excellence. “Reason using the intelligent will for the ordering of the inner and the outer life is undoubtedly the highest developed faculty of man at his present point of evolution; it is the sovereign, because the governing and self-governing faculty in the complexities of our human existence,”¹⁶ wrote Sri Aurobindo. And: “It is a sovereign power by which man has become possessed of himself, student and master of his own forces, the godhead on which the other godheads in him have leaned for help in their ascent; it has been the Prometheus of the mythical parable, the helper, instructor, elevating friend, civiliser of mankind.”¹⁷ Seldom has somebody written more highly (and more beautifully) about reason. And as we have tried to show previously: reason (the mind, the intellect) has played a crucial role in the development of humanity by subjecting the whole civilisation of the Middle Ages to rational examination, by constructing an instrument for the rational investigation of nature,¹⁸ and above all by developing the humanistic values and the realisation of the individual, which have become the foundations of the global “family of man”.

The value and the role of reason are therefore essential to a human humanity and deserve the highest esteem. Then why is reason devalued by all postmodern viewpoints? Why hold reason – once enthroned as the presiding deity of the French revolution as la Déesse de la Raison, the Goddess of Reason – responsible for the evils that befell humankind in the 20th century and for the uncertainty, anxiety and nihilism of the present time? The simple and far-reaching answer is, as already stated above, that the Western image of man and of reality was and remains fatefully defective. The “natural philosophy” of Galileo and Kepler has led to the recognition that Matter is the sole constituent of the universe; man, part of the universe, became nothing else than matter. Then, what is Mind? The high-wire intellectual acrobatics of the Western philosophers to formulate an answer to this question would look spectacularly grotesque – if they did not have such detrimental consequences. The outcome was that the materialists, positivists and reductionists labelled Mind an “epiphenomenon” of Matter. The word is indeed no more than a label and explains nothing. But it was inevitable that such a clown-like distortion of reality and of the image of man would one day have serious consequences and cause the kind of “postmodernist” confusion to which we are now subject.

One dreamed and saw a gland write Hamlet, drink

At the Mermaid, capture immortality;

A committee of hormones on the Aegean’s brink

Composed the Iliad and the Odyssey.

A thyroid, meditating almost nude

Under the Bo-tree, saw the eternal Light

And, rising from its mighty solitude,

Spoke of the Wheel and the eightfold Path all right …¹⁹

“Western philosophies (including everyday common sense)”, writes Glenn Ward, “revolve around an illusory metaphysics of presence. This can be found in myths about ‘essence’, ‘meaning’, ‘cause’, and ‘self’ – But such a presence is never purely present. Essential meanings are not just there: they are put there by the tools, knowledges and assumptions we use to look for them … – All theories, arguments, texts, etc. rest on abstract systems of relationships. So they never touch down on the sure grounds of a preexisting and pure reality. – … For poststructuralism (and so for postmodernism) there are no facts. There are only interpretations.”²⁰ Nothing better than formulations like these, condensing scores of volumes of learned writing, tells us about the void the contemporary thinking Western human is living in. All essences – the Divine, the soul, the occult existences – are declared unknowable; everything is accidental, unexplainable in its origins (which are nothing but “abstract systems and relationships”), and without meaning in its becoming and destiny (for all “metanarratives” have proved to be nothing but hollow abstract systems); “there are no facts, only interpretations” by an epiphenomenon that is called reason, or mind, or the intellect, or the capacity for the human being to understand itself and the world. An epiphenomenon has imagined itself to be immortal. An epiphenomenon has created the airplane and computer. An epiphenomenon has constructed the theory of the Big Bang, the black hole and the Big Crunch. An epiphenomenon has discovered itself to be an epiphenomenon.

We, however, remain convinced that one metanarrative remains standing: the vision and world view of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. If so, then we must also have an alternative explanation of what mind and reason really are. Passages on this theme abound in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother’s writings – as there are also numerous ones on the fact that the mind has been totally misunderstood by the Western philosophers. True, reason was “the master of the human species”. But even then there were gradations of existence below the rational mind as well as above it. Existence is much more than a kind of abstraction, a verbal tool used by philosophers for their mental conjuring tricks. Existence is primarily the All, existent in and by itself; secondarily, existence is the ground of the All’s infinitely varied manifestation as real as It is real, as concrete in the scale of its substances as It is concrete.²¹ And in that picture, on that stair of the worlds, man has his place as a transitional being between the animal and the suprahuman species of the future. Man is the typical mental being, an embodiment on the Earth of the mental gradation in the universal manifestation. Keeping this in mind, let us see how Sri Aurobindo and the Mother defined Mind.

1. “Mind is not a faculty of knowledge”

• “Mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but not of essential knowledge. Its function is to cut out something vaguely from the unknown Thing in itself and call this measurement or delimitation of it the whole, and again to analyse the whole into its parts which it regards as separate mental objects. It is only the parts and accidents that the Mind can see definitely and, after its own fashion, know. Of the whole its only definite idea is an assemblage of parts or a totality of properties and accidents. The whole not seen as a part of something else or in its own parts, properties and accidents is to the mind no more than a vague perception; only when it is analysed and put by itself as a separate constituted object, a totality in a larger totality, can Mind say to itself, ‘This now I know.’ And really it does not know. It knows only its own analysis of the object and the idea it has formed of it by a synthesis of the separate parts and properties that it has seen.”²²

• “Mind by itself is incapable of ultimate certitude; whatever it believes, it can doubt; whatever it can affirm, it can deny; whatever it gets hold of, it can and does let go. That, if you like, is its freedom, noble right, privilege; it may be all you can say in its praise, but by these methods of mind you cannot hope (outside the reach of physical phenomena and hardly even there) to arrive at anything you can call an ultimate certitude. It is for this compelling reason that mentalising or enquiring about the Divine cannot by its own right bring the Divine.”²³

• “Reason is in its nature an imperfect light with a large but still restricted mission and that once it applies itself to life and action it becomes subject to what it studies and the servant and counsellor of the forces in whose obscure and ill-understood struggle it intervenes. It can by its nature be used and has always been used to justify any idea, theory of life, system of society or government, ideal of individual or collective action to which the will of man attaches itself for the moment or through the centuries. In philosophy it gives equally good reasons for monism and pluralism or for any halting-place between them, for the belief in Being or for the belief in Becoming, for optimism and pessimism, for activism and quietism. It can justify the most mystic religionism and the most positive atheism, get rid of God or see nothing else.

• “Ask it not to lean to one idea alone, but to make an eclectic combination or a synthetic harmony and it will satisfy you; only, there being any number of possible combinations or harmonies, it will equally well justify the one or the other and set up or throw down any one of them according as the spirit in man is attracted to or withdraws from it. For it is really that which decides and the reason is only a brilliant servant and minister of this veiled and secret sovereign.”²⁴

• “Mind is in its essence a consciousness which measures, limits, cuts out forms of things from the indivisible whole and contains them as if each were a separate integer. Even with what exists only as obvious parts and fractions, Mind establishes this fiction of its ordinary commerce that they are things with which it can deal separately and not merely as aspects of a whole. For, even when it knows that they are not things in themselves, it is obliged to deal with them as if they were things in themselves; otherwise it could not subject them to its own characteristic activity.

• “It is this essential characteristic of Mind which conditions the workings of all its operative powers, whether conception, perception, sensation or the dealings of creative thought. It conceives, perceives, senses things as if rigidly cut out from a background or a mass and employs them as fixed units of the material given to it for creation or possession. All its action and enjoyment deal thus with wholes that form part of a greater whole, and these subordinate wholes again are broken up into parts which are also treated as wholes for the particular purposes they serve.²⁵ Mind may divide, multiply, add, subtract, but it cannot get beyond the limits of this mathematics. If it goes beyond and tries to conceive a real whole, it loses itself in a foreign element; it falls from its own firm ground into the ocean of the intangible.”²⁶

• “Man is limited in his consciousness by mind and even by a given range or scale of mind; what is below his mind, submental or mental but nether to his scale, readily seems to him subconscious or not distinguishable from complete inconscience; what is above it is to him superconscious and he is almost inclined to regard it as void of awareness, a sort of luminous Inconscience. Just as he is limited to a certain scale of sounds or of colours and what is above or below that scale is to him inaudible and invisible or at least indistinguishable, so is it with his scale of mental consciousness, confined at either extremity by an incapacity which marks his upper and his nether limit.”

• “He has no sufficient means of communication even with the animal who is his mental congener, though not his equal, and he is even capable of denying mind or real consciousness to it because its modes are other and narrower than those with which in himself and his kind he is familiar; he can observe submental being from outside but cannot at all communicate with it or enter intimately into its nature. Equally the superconscious is to him a closed book which may well be filled only with empty pages.”²⁷

Therefore, in the view of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: “First, we affirm an Absolute as the origin and support and secret Reality of all things. The Absolute Reality is indefinable and ineffable by mental thought and mental language; it is self-existent and self-evident to itself, as all absolutes are self-evident, but our mental affirmatives and negatives, whether taken separatively or together, cannot limit or define it. But at the same time there is a spiritual consciousness, a spiritual knowledge, a knowledge by identity which can seize the Reality in its fundamental aspects and its manifested powers and figures. All that comes within this description and, if seen by this knowledge in its own truth or its occult meaning, can be regarded as an expression of the Reality and itself a reality.”²⁸

“The Absolute is in itself indefinable by reason, ineffable to the speech; it has to be approached through experience. It can be approached through an absolute negation of existence, as if it were itself a supreme Non-Existence, a mysterious infinite Nihil. It can be approached through an absolute affirmation of all the fundamentals of our own existence, through an absolute of Light and Knowledge, through an absolute of Love and Beauty, through an absolute of Force, through an absolute of peace or silence. It can be approached through an inexpressible absolute of being or of consciousness, or of power of being, or of delight of being, or through a supreme experience in which these things become inexpressibly one; for we can enter into such an ineffable state and, plunged into it as if into a luminous abyss of existence, we can reach a superconscience which may be described as the gate of the Absolute.”²⁹

In conclusion: “All our illusions and errors arise from a limited separative awareness which creates unrealities or misconceives the Real.” – “It might almost be said that no mental statement of things can be altogether true; it is not Truth bodied, pure and nude, but a draped figure, – often it is only the drapery that is visible.” – “It is always the business of man the thinker to know. He may not be able by mental means to know the essentiality of the Ignorance or of anything in the universe in the sense of defining it, because the mind can only know things in that sense by their signs, characters, forms, properties, functionings, relations to other things, not in their occult self-being and essence. But we can pursue farther and farther, clarify more and more accurately our observation of the phenomenal character and operation of the Ignorance until we get the right revealing word, the right indicating sense of the thing and so come to know it, not by intellect but by vision and experience of the truth, by realising the truth in our own being. The whole process of man’s highest intellectual knowledge is through this mental manipulation and discrimination to the point where the veil is broken and he can see; at the end spiritual knowledge comes in to help us to become what we see, to enter into the light in which there is no Ignorance.”³⁰

2. Mind is Substance, Thoughts are Entities

“The mind is an instrument of formation, of organisation and action. Why? The mind gives a form to the thoughts. This power of formation forms mental entities whose life is independent of the mind that has formed them – they act as beings that are at least semi-independent. One can form a thought which then travels, goes out to someone, spreads the idea it contains. There is a mental substance just as there is a physical substance, and on [its own] plane the mind can emanate innumerable forms.”³¹

• “We regard thought as a thing separate from existence, abstract, unsubstantial, different from reality, something which appears one knows not whence and detaches itself from objective reality in order to observe, understand and judge it; for so it seems and therefore is to our all-dividing, all-analysing mentality. The first business of Mind is to render ‘discrete’, to make fissures much more than to discern, and so it has made this paralysing fissure between thought and reality.”³²

• “For the mind is an instrument of action and formation, not an instrument of knowledge. It is creating forms every moment. Thoughts are forms and have an individual life, independent of their originator; sent out by him into the world, they move in it towards the realisation of their own purpose of existence … If there is a sufficient will-power in your thought-form, if it is a well-built formation, it will arrive at its own realisation. But between the formation and the realisation there is a certain lapse of time … and it happens very often that when the result does come, you have ceased to desire it or care for it.”³³

• “For man’s mentality is also a part of Nature; his mentality is even the most important, if not the largest part of his nature. It is, we may say, Nature become partly conscious of her own laws and forces, conscious of her struggle of progression and inspired with the conscious will to impose a higher and higher law on her own processes of life and being. In subhuman life there is a vital and physical struggle, but no mental conflict. Man is subjected to this mental conflict and is therefore at war not only with others but with himself; and because he is capable of this war with himself, he is also capable of that which is denied to the animal, of an inner evolution, a progression from higher to higher type, a constant self-transcending.”³⁴

• “The error comes from thinking that your thoughts are your own and that you are their maker and if you do not create thoughts (i.e. think), there will be none. A little observation ought to show that you are not manufacturing your own thoughts, but rather thoughts occur in you. Thoughts are born, not made – like poets, according to the proverb. Of course, there is a sort of labour and effort when you try to produce or else to think on a certain subject, but that is a concentration, for making thoughts come up, come in, come down, as the case may be, and fit themselves together. The idea that you are shaping the thoughts or fitting them together is an egoistic delusion …

• “Thoughts, ideas, happy inventions etc., etc., are always wandering about (in thought waves or otherwise) seeking a mind that may embody them. One mind takes, looks, rejects – another takes, looks, accepts. Two different minds catch the same thought-form or thought-wave, but the mental activities being different make different results out of them. Or it comes to one and he does nothing, then it walks off, crying ‘O this unready animal!’ and goes to another who promptly annexes it and it settles into expression with a joyous bubble of inspiration, illumination or enthusiasm of original discovery or creation and the recipient cries proudly, ‘I, I have done this.’ Ego, sir! You are the recipient, the conditioning medium, if you like – nothing more! …”

• “First of all these thought-waves, thought-seeds or thought-forms, or whatever they are, are of different values and come from different planes of consciousness. Even the same thought-substance can take higher or lower vibrations according to the plane of consciousness through which the thoughts come in (e.g. thinking mind, vital mind, physical mind, subconscient mind) or the power of consciousness which catches them and pushes them into one man or another. Moreover there is a stuff of mind in each man and the incoming thought uses that for shaping itself or translating itself (transcribing we usually call it), but the stuff is finer or coarser, stronger or weaker etc., etc., in one mind than in another. Also there is a mind-energy actual or potential in each which differs and this mind-energy in its recipience of the thought can be luminous or obscure, sattwic, rajasic or tamasic with consequences that vary in each case.”³⁵

• “The human mind is like a town square, accessible on all sides, and in this square things come and go, and pass by each other in all directions. Some settle there, and they are not always the best. To obtain control over that crowd is the most difficult kind of control possible. Just try to control the thoughts entering your mind and you will see! You will see to what a degree you have to be watchful, like a sentinel, with the eyes of the mind wide open, and how you have to keep up an extremely clear distinction between the ideas in agreement with your aspirations and those who are not. And you must keep order every minute in that public place where avenues meet from all sides, so that people do not run into each other. It’s a big job.”³⁶

This knowledge of what the Mind really is is based on centuries-old yogic traditions of patient observation and discernment. The difference from the Western epistemological disarray, responsible for the shaky foundations of all Western philosophical schools, is obvious. It is, of course closely connected with the difference in interpretation between the Western and Eastern world view and idea of Reality. Constructions erected on the shaky foundations of the Western philosophical premises had to collapse sooner or later. That it collapses now makes its timing perfectly synchronous with the moment when the world is taking its momentous turn towards a new, divine world order. And not only is the collapse happening at this moment: it is part of the transitional event.

According to the Mother a consciousness higher than the human rational mind has recently been established in the atmosphere of the Earth and is active here. She called it, after Sri Aurobindo, the supramental consciousness and said that it would embody first in the overman and then as the superman. This does not mean that the rational mind is of no use any longer. For a long time to come it will remain the highest attainable consciousness of the human mass; should the rational mind be forsaken, this mass would without doubt fall back into the horrors of its animality, present-day examples of which are not lacking. Besides, a clear mind is necessary to gain access to the realms beyond it, something many practitioners of yoga are unaware of in their ignorance or forget in their premature pride.

“If you do not become perfectly and luminously logical and rational, how can you hope to become a candidate for the next higher stage even?”³⁷ asked Sri Aurobindo. “One has to be reasonable even in spirituality.”³⁸ And the Mother warned: “There are people who try to transform their body even before having transformed their intellect, and this produces a total discrepancy, it unbalances them completely. One must first transform one’s thought, one’s whole mind, one’s whole mental activity, and organise it with the higher knowledge. At the same time one must transform one’s character, all the movements of the vital, all impulses, all vital reactions. Finally, when both these things are done, up to a certain point at least, one can begin to think of transforming the cells of one’s body. But one does not begin at the end: one must begin at the beginnings.”³⁹

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never denigrated the rational mind, the intellect, the element that makes man specifically human. As any other level of the scale of being, the rational mind is an essential element in the total manifestation; constituting the proper characteristic of the human species, it is also the instrument that makes the transition from the lower to the higher hemisphere possible. “The rational or intellectual man is not the last and highest ideal of manhood, nor would a rational society be the last and highest expression of the possibilities of an aggregate human life, – unless indeed we give to the word, reason, a wider meaning than it now possesses and include in it the combined wisdom of all our powers of knowledge, those which stand below and above the understanding and logical mind as well as this strictly rational part of our nature. The Spirit that manifests itself in man and dominates secretly the phases of his development, is greater and profounder than his intellect and drives towards a perfection that cannot be shut in by the arbitrary construction of the human reason. Meanwhile the intellect performs its function; it leads man to the gates of a greater self-consciousness and places him with unbandaged eyes on that wide threshold where a more luminous Angel has to take him by the hand.”⁴⁰ “Mind is not a separate entity”, writes Sri Aurobindo also, “but has all Supermind behind it and it is Supermind that creates with Mind only as its final individualising operation.”⁴¹ It is Supermind – the Truth-Consciousness, the Unity-Consciousness – that manifests the cosmos and that supports it at every moment of its existence and evolution; without this omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent Consciousness behind it, the cosmos could not exist or would be utter chaos.⁴² “This Supermind in its conscious vision not only contains all the forms of itself which its conscious force creates, but it pervades them as an indwelling Presence and a self-revealing Light. It is present, even though concealed, in every form and force of the universe; it is that which determines sovereignly and spontaneously form, force and functioning; it limits the variations it compels; it gathers, disperses, modifies the energy which it uses; and all this is done in accord with the first laws that its self-knowledge has fixed in the very birth of the form, at the very starting-point of the force. It is seated within everything as the Lord in the heart of all existences, – he who turns them on as an engine by the power of his Maya; it is within them and embraces them as the divine Seer who variously disposed and ordained objects, each rightly according to the thing that it is, from years sempiternal.

“Each thing in Nature, therefore, whether animate or inanimate, mentally self-conscious or not self-conscious, is governed in its being and in its operations by an indwelling Vision and Power, to us subconscient or inconscient because we are not conscious of it, but not inconscient to itself, rather profoundly and universally conscient. Therefore each thing seems to do the works of intelligence, even without possessing intelligence, because it obeys, whether subconsciously as in the plant and animal or half-consciously as in man, the real-idea of the divine Supermind within it.”⁴³

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother knew that the Mind could not remain the dominant principle of humanity and that it would be surpassed. Sri Aurobindo saw the first signs of this at the time he was writing the Arya, i.e. during and just after the First World War. “In the present time itself, after an age of triumphant intellectuality and materialism, we can see evidences of this natural process, – a return towards inner self-discovery, an inner seeking and thinking, a new attempt at mystic experience, a groping after the inner self, a reawakening to some sense of the truth and power of the spirit begins to manifest itself; man’s search after his self and soul and a deeper truth of things tends to revive and resume its lost force and to give a fresh life to the old creeds, erect new faiths or develop independently of sectarian religions. The intellect itself, having reached near to the natural limits of the capacity of physical discovery, having touched its bedrock and found that it explains nothing more than the outer process of Nature, has begun, still tentatively and hesitatingly, to direct an eye of research on the deeper secrets of the mind and the life-force and on the domain of the occult which it had rejected a priori, in order to know what there may be in it that is true.”⁴⁴

“At present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is concealed a choice of its destiny; for a stage has been reached in which the human mind has achieved in certain directions an enormous development while in others it stands arrested and bewildered and can no longer find its way”, wrote Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine. “A structure of the external life has been raised up by man’s ever active mind and life-will, a structure of an unmanageable hugeness and complexity, for the service of his mental, vital, physical claims and urges, a complex political, social, administrative, economic, cultural machinery, an organised collective means for his intellectual, sensational, aesthetic and material satisfaction. Man has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited spiritual and moral capacity to utilise and manage, a too dangerous servant of his blundering ego and its appetites. For no greater seeing mind, no intuitive soul of knowledge has yet come to his surface of consciousness which could make this basic fullness of life a condition for the free growth of something that exceeded it.

“This new fullness of the means of life might be, by its power for a release from the incessant unsatisfied stress of his economic and physical needs, an opportunity for the full pursuit of other and greater aims surpassing the material existence, for the discovery of a higher truth and good and beauty, for the discovery of a greater and diviner spirit which would intervene and use life for a higher perfection of the being: but it is being used instead for the multiplication of new wants and an aggressive expansion of the collective ego. At the same time Science has put at his disposal many potencies of the universal Force and has made the life of humanity materially one; but what uses this universal Force is a little human individual or communal ego with nothing universal in its light of knowledge or its movements, no inner sense or power which would create in this physical drawing together of the human world a true life-unity, a mental unity or a spiritual oneness …

“The evolution of the human mind and life must necessarily lead towards an increasing universality; but on a basis of ego and segmenting and dividing mind this opening to the universal can only create a vast pullulation of unaccorded ideas and impulses, a surge of enormous powers and desires, a chaotic mass of unassimilated and intermixed mental, vital and physical material of a larger existence which, because it is not taken up by a creative harmonising light of the Spirit, must welter in a universalised confusion and discord out of which it is impossible to build a greater harmonic life. Man has harmonised life in the past by organised ideation and limitation; he has created societies based on fixed ideas or fixed customs, a fixed cultural system or an organised life-system, each with its own order; the throwing of all these into the melting-pot of a more and more intermingling life and a pouring in of ever new ideas and motives and facts and possibilities call for a new, a greater consciousness to meet and master the increasing potentialities of existence and harmonise them. Reason and Science can only help by standardising, by fixing everything into an artificially arranged and mechanised unity of material life. A greater whole-being, whole-knowledge, whole-power is needed to weld all into a greater unity of whole-life.”⁴⁵