A companion volume to 'The Destiny of the Body,' this explores man as a species, his past beginnings, present achievements & failures, his evolutionary future.
V
SIGHT, MORE SIGHT...
(The Ascent of Sight as a Faculty of Knowledge)
"His is a search of darkness for the light.
A progress leap from sight to greater sight"
(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Savitri, Part One, pp. 65, 161.)
"All this she saw and inly felt and knew
Not by some thought of mind but by the self.
A light not born of sun or moon nor fire,
A light that dwelt within and saw within
Shedding an intimate visibility,
Made secrecy more revealing than the word:
Our sight and sense are a fallible gaze and touch
And only the spirit's vision is wholly true."
(Savitri, Bk. VII, Canto V, p. 525.)
"Out of our thoughts we must leap up to sight"1: such, indeed, is the command on all those who would aspire after the pristine glory and the absolute inevitability of true Knowledge; for, then alone, when the
"Mind motionless sleeps waiting Light's birth,2
in that "seeing silence"3
"...the Unmanifest reflects his form
In the still mind as in a living glass."4
As a matter of fact, since the earliest dawn of his awakened
1.Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Bk. II, Canto XI, p. 276.
2.Ibid., Book IV, Canto IV, p. 383.
3.Ibid., Book I, Canto III, p. 32.
4.Ibid., Book II, Canto XI, p. 276.
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thought, in all ages and climes, the call has gone forth from the heart of man for light - the true light, ṛtaṁ jyotiḥ5 - and for sight and more of sight, dṛṣṭaye.6 The supreme aspiration of the Upani-shadic Rishis was to be ever asuptadṛk, "with the eyes unclosed"; and Patanjali went so far as to declare that the fullness of Selfhood lies in the fullness of untrammelled vision, dṛgeva ātmā.
Indeed, a deeper perceptive probe is apt to reveal to us that in this world of evolving manifestation, all manifesting units are 'seeing' all the time, in various ways and measures and on various levels. This is what is meant by the cryptic Upanishadic utterance: sarvaṁ paśyati, sarvaḥ paśyati7 ("Everybody is the seer and everybody the seen"). But the clarity, the intensity, the quality and the reach and range of this sight are evidently dependent upon the stage of manifestation so far attained. All are not yet endowed with the 'divinely perceptive regard', pracetaḥ in the words of the Vedic mystics. Some are awake, some half awake; some are dreaming and some else are in slumber (cf. Kāni svapanti kānyas-miñjāgrati katara eṣa devaḥ svapnān paśyati8).
As a matter of fact, the totality of manifestation, both in its involutionary and in its evolutionary phases, can be adequately viewed and interpreted in terms of the two cardinal concepts of Light and Sight. What is after all the basic nature of this manifestation? In the epigrammatic words of Sri Aurobindo:
"In a sense, the whole of creation may be said to be a movement between two involutions, Spirit in which all is involved and out of which all evolves downward to the other pole of Matter, Matter in which also all is involved and out of which all evolves upwards to the other pole of Spirit."9
Now, these two phases have been respectively imaged as the 'closing in' (nimīlana) and the 'opening out' (unmīlana) of the Eyes of the Supreme. At other times these have been represented as the processes of 'looking in' and 'looking out' (parāgdṛṣṭirun-meṣaḥ pratyagāgdṛṣṭirnimeṣaḥ10). Indeed, the universe is nothing but a self-creative process of the supreme Reality. But the present
5.Rig-Veda.
6.Isha Upanishad, 15.
7.Prashna Upanishad, 4.5.
8.Ibid., 4.1.
9.The Life Divine, p. 129.
10. Tripādvibhūti-mahānārāyana Upaniṣad.
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cosmic manifestation with the evolving terrestrial cycle as its central and significant element, has for its goal the self-finding of Sachchidananda, of Existence-Consciousness-Bliss absolute, in other conditions than the transcendent supracosmic, and even in the apparent opposites of His being, occasioned by an embodied material existence.
Thus, for divine Sachchidananda to trace the cycle of self-oblivion and self-discovery, the manifestation has taken the shape of a double movement, a prior involution of the spirit followed by a process of evolutionary ascension. Involution is the process of self-limitation by which the universal Consciousness-Force has veiled herself by stages until she assumes the appearance of a dense cosmic Inconscience. We feel tempted at this point to reproduce in full a magnificent passage by Sri Aurobindo, wherein he describes in terms of light and sight and sleep this involutionary plunge of Sachchidananda into the 'vast involved trance' of Matter:
"The supreme and universal Supermind is the active Light and Tapas of the supreme and universal Self as the Lord and Creator, that which we come to know in Yoga as the divine Wisdom and Power, the eternal knowledge and will of the Ishwara.... As we descend nearer to what we are in this world, the presence and action of this self-knowledge narrows but retains always the essence and character when not the fullness of the supramental nature and its way of knowing and willing and acting, because it still lives in the essence and body of the spirit. The mind, when we trace the descent of the self towards matter, we see as a derivation which travels away from the fullness of self, the fullness of its light and being and which lives in a division and diversion, not in the body of the sun, but first in its nearer and then in its far-off rays. There is a highest intuitive mind which receives more nearly the supramental truth, but even this is a formation which conceals the direct and greater real knowledge. There is an intellectual mind which is a luminous half-opaque lid which intercepts and reflects in a radiantly distorting and suppressively modifying atmosphere the truth known to the supermind. There is a still lower mind built on the foundation of the senses between which and the sun of knowledge there is a thick cloud, an emotional and a sensational mist and vapour with here and there lightnings and illuminations. There is a vital mind which is shut away even from the light of
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intellectual truth, and lower still in submental life and matter the spirit involves itself entirely as if in a sleep and a night, a sleep plunged in a dim and yet poignant nervous dream, the night of a mechanical somnambulist energy.""
Now, following this purposeful involutionary self-withdrawal of Sachchidananda into "the Inconscient's boundless sleep"12, when Sachchidananda lay self-shrouded in "the inconscient swoon of things", there commenced the obverse manifestation, the inevitable process of evolution, by which the divine Consciousness-Force involved in the form and activity of inert material substance gradually started waking again to bring out by slow degrees all the hidden powers and splendours inherent in "the original self-existent spiritual Awareness."13 For, a progressive rarefaction of the sleep of consciousness, a gradual unclosing of the lids drooping over the orbs of the spirit dreaming in its body of Matter, resulting in the manifestation of growing intensities of self-awareness and world-awareness, — is this not what the process of evolution signifies in its most fundamental aspect?
Thus the cardinal difference between diverse forms in existence, between plants and animals and men, between inert and inanimate Matter, living physical bodies and a creature like man in whom the mind consciousness has emerged into the open to look around and wonder, lies in the fact of "the more or less involved or more or less evolved condition of consciousness."14 As a matter of fact, consciousness is quite involved and asleep in a state of self-oblivious absorption in the bosom of the inconscient Matter, "hesitating on the verge between involution and conscious evolution,"15 between a state of profound sleep and "a dim unclosing of the eyes," in the first non-animal forms of life, half-awake and somewhat consciously evolving in "mind housed in a living body,"16 and ultimately destined to be fully evolved and awake "by the awakening of the Supermind in the embodied mental being and nature."17
It is amply evident that this progressive awakening of consciousness from out of the original nescience, the starting-point of the
11.The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 763-64.
12.The expressions put within quotation marks but bearing no specific references are all taken from Sri Aurobindo's Savitri.
13.The Life Divine, p. 552.
14.15, 16, 17. The Life Divine, p. 630.
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evolutionary ascent, has not yet arrived at its noontide effulgence. The cosmic sleep and the somnambulist dream-state of the waking soul has by no means terminated with man and mind-consciousness. As a matter of fact, man's present status is at best a state of half-sleep and a half-waking, a state of veritable somnambulist torpor with "the inconstant blink of mortal sight."18 For, from the spiritual point of view, sleep denotes a poise of consciousnes in which we are completely ignorant of the fundamental truths of existence, — of existence individual, cosmic or transcendent, — and of the Reality that is at the basis of all things; while the dream-state signifies that particular status in which we may be aware of this "reality" but only in a distorted, disfigured and topsy-turvy way.19 Man, thus, proves to be a creature asleep in most parts of his being and dreaming in the little in which he has managed to gain partial awakening. Indeed,
"Our mind lives far from the authentic Light
Catching at little fragments of the Truth,"20
and our normal human awareness which is really no better than "a bright body of ignorance" is, because of the very circumstance of a separative ego-centred existence in a material, spatial and temporal universe, reducible to a state of sevenfold blindness.
Mind-consciousness is thus seen to be only an intermediate stage
"...through which we pass On our road from Matter to eternal Self, To the Light that made the worlds, the Cause of things."21
"...through which we pass
On our road from Matter to eternal Self,
To the Light that made the worlds, the Cause of things."21
The evolutionary awakening of consciousness has thus still to proceed until the divine Supermind or Gnosis, the Power of Truth-Consciousness (ṛta-cii) of Sachchidananda, emerges in terrestrial evolution to become the overtly governing principle of embodied material existence. For, then, the manifested being will be in secure possession of an integral consciousness and an integral
18.Savitri, Book III, Canto IV, p. 343.
19.Cf. anvathā gṛhṇaṭaḥ svapno nidrā tattvamajānataḥ (Gaudapadacharya, Māṇ-dukya-Karikā, 1.15).
20.Savitri, Book II, Canto V, p. 161.
21.Savitri, Book II, Canto V, p. 166.
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Sight and "dwell in the unwalled light of a divine knowledge.22 Sachchidananda will in that everlasting Day stand fully revealed in His robe of Matter and
"...Nature steps into the eternal Light.
Then only ends the dream of nether Life."23
But that Golden Dawn, the overt emergence of the Supramental Sun, heralding the annulment of the nescient sleep of Night, is still lying in the womb of the future, although the crimson signs of its imminent advent are already caught by the discerning eyes. But, in the meantime, for the individual pilgrims the journey continues along "the road that winds towards the Sun"; for,
"Night is not our beginning nor our end;
We came to her from a supernal Light,
By Light we live and to the Light we go."24
And in this adventure of the Apocalypse to discard our present "time-born eyes" and their "small moment look" and instead grow into divine vision with the divine Eye, divyaṁ cakṣuḥ,25 every single experience on the way is "a long march towards Light."
In this ascent towards the Sun, consciousness and vision grow together, and at each plateau of this ascent, on each level of the hill of our being (adreḥ sānu), new vistas of light open to the sight of the aspiring soul. Evidently this light is no ordinary light nor is this sight the mortal vision of the sense-bound mind. It is the supernal light, jyotiṣāṣ jyotiḥ, and the divine perception, daivya ketu.
The Vedic seers have always sought and eulogised this faculty of constant awakening and growing perceptive vision which they termed as ketu in order to distinguish it from the eye of sense or even of reason (cakṣuḥ). This supramental light and sight can be
22.Synthesis of Yoga, p. 456.
23.Savitri, Book 11, Canto V, p. 154.
24.Savitri, Book X, Canto I, p. 601.
25.Gita, XI, 8.
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attained only when we transcend the boundaries of our thought-mind (mano javiṣṭham26 matīnārh pārāya27). It is through the fulfilment of this divine vision (ketu) alone that we can expect to be possessed of the happy truths of existence (cikitvit sunṛtāvari28) and tranścend the iron-grip of mortality (amṛtamasnute29), for this indeed is the vision of the immortality (amṛtasya ketuḥ30). With the opening of this Supernal Sight, one acquires the perception of the Oneness of all beings (ekatvam anupaśyataḥ 31): one sees no more anything as not-self (nekṣate pṛthak32).
To the Vedic mystics (otherwise called the Seers or the Rishis, for they did not think out the truth but rather 'saw' it33), Light and Sight stood thus for supreme powers of manifestation of the Spirit.34 In particular, light (jyotiḥ) symbolised for them all the splendour and glory of the highest reaches of our being. And what about the Sight, the goal of achievement for the Vedic seers? It is, in the esoteric meaning of the Veda, the self-revelatory knowledge of Surya, the Sun-God. "...The Sun-God represents the divine Illumination of the Kavi which exceeds mind and forms the pure self-luminous Truth of things.... His realm is described as the Truth, the Law, the Vast (satyam, ṛtam, bṛhai). He is the Fosterer or Increaser (puṣan), for he enlarges and opens man's dark and limited being into a luminous and infinite consciousness. He is the sole Seer (ekarṣe35), Seer of Oneness and knower of the self, and leads him to the highest Sight... The result of this inner process is the perception of the oneness of all in the divine Soul of the Universe"36.
What is important to note here is the spiritual fact that this Sight
26 Rig-Veda, VI. 9-5.
27.Ibid., I. 46-7.
28.Rig-Veda, IV. 52-4.
29.Isha Upanishad, 14.
30.Rig-Veda, III. 61-3.
31.ISha Upanishad, 7.
32.Brihadaranyaka Upanishad.
33.Cf. 'Rṣir darśanāt' (Yaska's Nirukta, II. 3.3).
34.Compare: "...All creation is an act of light" (Savitri, Book II, Canto XV). "...all-knowing Light." (Savitri, Book II, Canto III).
"A knowledge which became what it perceived" (Ibid., Book III).
"This seeing was identical with the seen" (Ibid., Book VII, Canto VI).
"The Knowledge by which the knower is the Known" (Ibid., Book II, Canto XV.)
35.Isha Upanishad, 16.
36.Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad (1951 ed.), pp. 12, 13.
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at its highest is not only revelatory, it is supremely creative at the same time. It is Sight-Will or rather Seer-Will (Kavi-Kratu) in the language of the Vedic mystics. For at that supreme elevation, Will is not divorced from Sight and the effectivity of this Will-Sight is nothing but omnipotent and immediate.
According to the ancient Revelation of the Semitic mystics, "God said, Let there be light: and there was light"37. Thus Speech, the Logos, becomes the original determinant. All speech no doubt possesses some creative power and the supreme Speech, the vāk brahma of the Indian mystics, is without question supremely creative. For, in the words of Sri Aurobindo, "the Supermind using the Word is the creative Logos"38. And what is "this all-containing, all-originating, all-consummating Supermind"39 if not "the nature of the Divine Being, not indeed in its absolute self-existence, but in its action as the Lord and Creator of its own worlds"?40
It is because of this all-determining power of the primal speech (vāk) that the 'Creator of the Worlds' (Prajāpati) has been termed in the Rig Veda as the 'Lord of Speech, the ordainer of everything' (vācaspatiṁ viśvakarmānam41); for 'Speech' is verily His power of creation: Speech is no other than Brahman Himself (yāvad brahma viṣṭhitam tāvatī vāk42.)
It needs no pointing out that this supreme Speech is not the speech as we ordinarily understand by the term As a matter of fact, according to the Vedic seers, vāk or speech has four statuses (catvāri vāk parimitā padāni43) of which the first three are concealed from human awareness (guhā trīṇi nihitā nehgayanti44) and it is only the lowest and the fourth45 that has come to our ken. The supreme Vak bares Her self only to the inmost perception of the highest seer (uta tasmai tanvaṁ vi sasre46) and then reveals Herself
37.Genesis, 1,3.
38.Sri Aurobindo, Kena Upanishad (1952 ed.), p. 39.
39.The Life Divine, p. 132.
40.Ibid., p. 132.
41.Rig-Veda, X. 81. 7.
42.Ibid., X. 114. 8.
43.Ibid., I. 164. 45.
44.Ibid., 164. 45.
45.The Vaikhari Vāk of the Tantrik lore.
46.Rig-Veda, X, 71. 4.
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in his awakened consciousness as the mantra (dhīra manasā vācamakratah47).
And what is this mantra! A mantra indicates a word of power and light, born out of the profound depths and the sublimest heights of the Rishi's being and consciousness, that proceeds to the inevitable realisation of the truth it symbolises.
This then is the supreme divine Word, the divya vāk or Gauri of the Rig-Veda, that is reputed to be the original creative Power that builds up the universe of manifestation from out of the nameless Silence. For "it is out of this Silence that the Word which creates the worlds for ever proceeds; for the Word expresses that which is self-hidden in the Silence."48 It is about this primal vāk that the apostle speaks when he says that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."49
But a deeper probe shows that the really primal originative power of the infinite and omnipotent consciousness is not this vāk or Word but the Power of Sight-Will. For, as Sri Aurobindo has so well put it, "when we say, 'God said, Let there be Light,' we assume the fact of a power of consciousness which determines Light out of everything else that is not light; and when we say 'and there was Light' we presume a directing faculty, an active power corresponding to the original perceptive power, which brings out the phenomenon and, working out Light according to the line of the original perception, prevents it from being overpowered by all the infinite possibilities that are other than itself."50 (Italics ours) It is this primal Vision of the Supreme, termed in the Veda as ikṣā or 'the Power of Sight,' that is the real determinant of the worlds. And this Sight, as we have pointed out before, is one with Will: ikṣā is at the same time the Truth-Will (satyasaṁkalpa) and the Will-perception (samkalpadarśana). It is thus that the Upanishadic seers, while describing the very first act of creation undertaken by the Supreme, have used the expression sa aikṣata, seyaṁ devatā aikṣata51: the Spirit 'looked' and the creation arose with the
47.Ibid., X. 71. 2.
48.The Life Divine, p. 26.
49.St. John. I. 1.
Compare the Upanishadic revelation:
Vāk brahma ("The Word is brahman").
50.The Life Divine, p. 108.
51.Chhandogya Upanishad.
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primal splendours of Light (jyotirupakramā tu.52)
About this supremely creative self-vision of the "all-creating Eye"53 that presides over the worlds of manifestation, Sri Aurobindo writes:
"Every seed of things... is the truth of its own being which this Self-Existence sees in itself, the resultant of that seed of self-vision is the truth of self-action, the natural law of development, formation and functioning which follows inevitably upon the self-vision and keeps to the processes involved in the original Truth. All Nature is simply, then, the Seer-Will, the Knowledge-Force of the Conscious-Being..."54
Thus, "the world expresses a foreseen truth, obeys a predetermining Will, realises an original formative self-vision, — it is the growing image of a divine creation."55 (Italics ours)
Such is then the primal Sight, parā dṛk, the original self-creative Knowledge-Vision of sachchidananda. It is "the intense original Flame"56, the "Fire that is the beginning of the world" (lokādim agnim57), that is the fundamental power of the Supermind or divine Gnosis. For, it is the Supermind, otherwise termed by Sri Aurobindo as the 'Real-Idea', which represents the nodus of the self-determining creative truth-action and the direct power of manifestation of the All-Existent Transcendence. It is in Supermind that we find "a divine Knowledge one with self-existence and self-awareness and a substantial Will which is in perfect unison with that knowledge, because it is itself in its substance and nature that self-conscious self-existence dynamic in illumined action."58
But this Self-Existent Sachchidananda is not merely a transcendent supra-cosmic Creator: He Himself has become this universe,
52.Vyasa, Brahma-Sutra, 14.9. Compare:
"The world is but a spark-burst from its light,
All moments flashes from its Timelessness,
All objects glimmerings of the Bodiless"
(Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book VII, Canto VI, p. 184.)
Also: Katha Upanishad, V. 15:
"tasya bhāsā sarvam idam vibhāti" ("By His shining all this shines'")
53.Savitri, Book VII, Canto VI.
54.The Life Divine, p. 129.
55.Ibid., p. 120.
56.Savitri, Book I, Canto II.
57.Katha Upanishad, 1.1.15.
58.The Life Divine, p. 262.
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for He is in the language of the Isha Upanishad paribhuḥ59, "the One who has become everywhere". The Mundaka Upanishad has this to say about this "Luminous One who is at once smaller than the minutest particle and in whom are set all the worlds and their peoples"60:
"That [is] the invisible, that the unseizable,... that which is...eternal, pervading, which is in all things and impalpable, that which is Imperishable, that which is the womb of creatures..."61
"...This is the mighty foundation and into it is consigned all that moves and breathes and sees. This that is that great foundation here, know, as the Is and Is-not,...greatest and the Most High..."62
Thus, the one and the only Light that is the source, the content and the continent of everything (jyotirekaṃ bahubhyaḥ63) is ever shining even in the blind darkness of Matter (andhecit tamasi jyotiḥ64) and to the eyes of intimate vision
"The world quivers with a God-light at its core."65
But how is it then that our eyes do not ordinarily meet this hidden Light (guḍham jyotiḥ66) — the Light that is at all time the unique sustainer of everything in this manifest universe? How is it that we, human beings, fail to discover the one Form behind all forms, indeed "the Form that is the One to look on everywhere" (tad asya rūpaṁ praticakṣaṇāya67), for even as one Fire, entering the world, shapes itself to the various forms it meets, so likewise there is one Spirit within all creatures, but it has shaped itself to form and form (rūparh rupaṁ pratirūpo babhūva68).
This incapacity on our part to vision "the Lustre that is the most
59.Isha Upanishad, 8.
60.Mundaka Upanishad, II.2.2:
"yadarcimad yadaṇubhyo'ṇu ca yasmin lokā nihitā lokinaśca."
61 & 62. Ibid., 1.1.6. II.2.1 (In Sri Aurobindo's translation).
63.Ibid., Rig-Veda, I.93.4.
64.Ibid., I.100.8.
65.Savitri, Book II, Canto V, p. 168.
66.Rig-Veda, VII.76.4.
67.Ibid., VI.47.18.
68.Katha Upanishad, II.2.9.
"Agniryathaiko bhūvanaṁ praviṣto rupaṁ rūpaṁ pratirūpo babhūva, ekastathd sarvabhūtāntarātmā rūpaṁ rūpaṁ pratirūpo bahiśca."
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blessed form of all" (rūpaṁ kalyāṇatamam69), that is the supremely desirable of all things (vareṇyam70), lies in the fact that He who is the Luminous, being manifested, has set Himself "close within, moving in the secret heart" (āviḥ sannihitaṁ guhācaram71) beyond the ken of mortal eyes.
Thus, to be able to see this Splendour of splendours, we are in need of another Light and of another Sight than the ones that we possess at present. For, as the Katha Upanishad says, His abode (dhāma) is a station "where the sun cannot shine and the moon has no lustre: all the stars are blind: there our lightnings flash not, neither any earthly fire. For all that is bright is but the shadow of His brightness".72
And what about the faculty of sight? It is almost self-evident by now that to look at Him in His glory of supernal Light (parājyotih) our normal gaze that is turned outward (parāk-dṛṣti) proves to be utterly inadequate to the task. Hence the Rishis of the Upanishads did never tire in pointing out the insufficiency of our mortal sight in the matter of apprehending the supreme Truths of existence. Thus, the Katha declares that the Purusha "has not set His body within the ken of seeing, neither does any man with the eye behold Him.73 [Indeed], He is by no means attainable by the mortal eye."74 And the Mundaka says that "Eye cannot seize... Him,...only when the inner being is purified by a glad serenity of Knowledge, then indeed, with the eye of meditation, one can behold the Spirit indivisible."75
69.Isha Upanishad, 16.
70.Mundaka Upanishad, II.2.1.
71.Ibid., II.2.1.
72.Katha Upanishad, II.2.15 (in Sri Aurobindo's translation).
Cf.Sri Aurobindo's Ilion, p. 108:
"There our sun cannot shine and our moon
has no place for her lustres,
There our lightnings flash not, nor fire
of these spaces is suffered."
73.Katha Upanishad, II.3.9.:
"No saṁdṛśe tiṣṭhati rūpamasya na cakṣuṣā paśyati kaścanainam."
74.Ibid., II.3.12:
"Prāptum śakyo na cakṣuṣā."
75.Mundaka Upanishad, II.2.8.
"Na cakṣuṣā gṛhyate...jñāna-prasādena viśuddha-sattaḥ taṁ paśyate dhyāyamānaḥ."
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Indeed, in order to have a vision of the Golden Purusha (Hiraṇmaya Puruṣa) who is seated in the heart of every single created object, we have to have our eyes turned inward and upward (avṛttacakṣuḥ76, ūrdha-netraḥ) and plunge our regard into 'the Blue Infinity' (nilaṁ parakṛṣṇam).77
For it is only in this way, when the veil has been lifted from before our eyes,78 when we are blessed with the gift of 'divine Sight' as was Arjuna by the Charioteer of Life79, when we become paśyaḥ80 or 'seers' in the language of the Mundaka Upanishad, that we can expect to have the luminously direct and absolute knowledge of the spiritual verities.
This luminous seizing and contact, this internal spiritual sight, dṛṣti or dṛk-śakti, "is to the spirit what the eyes are to the physical mind and one has the sense of having passed through a subtly analogous process. As the physical sight can present to us the actual body of things of which the thought had only possessed an indication or mental description and they become to us at once real and evident, pratyakṣa, so the spiritual sight surpasses the indications or representations of thought and can make the self and truth of all things present to us and directly evident, pratyakṣa."81
It is under the stress of such a supernal sight that the Dravida saint Parakala could exclaim in his hymnal Periya-Tirumozhi: "I have seen, I have seen!" ("Nān kan ḍu-k-koṇḍen!") and the Sufi mystic Abu Said, could throw the challenge: "Of what use is hearsay to one who knows by vision?"
As a matter of fact, this seer-knowledge is always much more authentic than the thinking knowledge; for, a consciousness proceeding by sight has a much greater and more direct access to the truth of things than the consciousness relying on the crutches of thought alone. Indeed, different modes of cognition derive in various degrees from what Sri Aurobindo has called 'a fourfold
76.Katha Upanishad, II. 1.1.
77.Chhandogya Upanishad, 1.6.6.
78.Cf: "We have stripped the veil from thine eyes, and thy sight to-day is keen" (The Holy Koran).
79.Gita, XI.8:
Divyaṁ dadāmi te cakṣuḥ
paśya me yogamaiśvaram."
80.Mundaka Upanishad, III.1.3.
81.Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 803.
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power 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 secret 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."82 The true knowledge, the essential knowledge, is thus seen to be not merely an intellectual conception of the truth; it is above everything else a "realisation", in the complete sense of the term, - a knowledge by absolute identity, tādātmya-jñāna.
Thus the commanding word to the jijñāsu, the seeker after true knowledge, on his upward journey to the Vedic 'Sun of Gnosis', has always been to replace his "seeking Mind" by the "seeing Soul" and to acquire a cognitive status in which "sight was a flame-throw from identity."83 For then alone will man be made a Rishi or Kavi and no longer a mere thinker, - a Rishi or Seer who "does not need the aid of thought" as "a means of knowledge, but only as a means of representation and expression, -...If a further extension of knowledge is required, he can come at it by new seeing without the slower thought processes..."84
But in his present normal status, man, the mental being, cannot at all command this supreme vision, "the lucent clarity of a pure regard."85 Instead, the human mind, in its search and feeling out for truth, relies at its highest on the staff of support of conceptual thought. And hence
"Our range is fixed within the crowded arc
82.The Life Divine, pp. 524-25.
83.Savitri, Book II, Canto XIV.
84.The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 803.
85.Savitri, Book II, Canto I.
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Of what we observe and touch and thought can guess
And rarely dawns the light of the Unknown
Waking in us the prophet and the seer."86
But whether we consciously know it or not, we are, let us repeat, 'sons of Light' (jyotiṣāṁ putrāḥ). Our evolutionary ascent has apparently commenced from the blind immensity of the Incon-scient's Night; but in reality,
By Light we live and to the Light we go."87
And we are in the inevitability of the destined process
"To eternal light and knowledge meant to rise."88
Thus the 'Pilgrim's Progress' cannot stop short with the vision-less mind's circumscribed gaze and sooner or later, today or tomorrow, we must come out of
"...the confines of thought
To where Mind motionless sleeps waiting Light's birth."89
And once we outgrow the "mortal mind's half-look on things",90 we are sure to encounter on our ascending climb a series of hierarchised luminous planes of consciousness that offer the pilgrim soul an ever hightening and deepening power of sight. These planes, "Exposed to the lustre of Infinity,"91 are in the ascending order:
(i) the Higher Mind, whose action, in terms of the Vedic image of the Sun of Truth, is of the nature of "a composed and steady sunshine"92,
86.Savitri, Book I, Canto IV, p. 53.
87.Ibid., Book X, Canto I, p. 601.
88.Ibid., Book II. Canto X, p. 240.
89.Ibid., Book IV, Canto IV, p. 383.
90.Ibid.', Book I, Canto III.
91.Ibid., Book X, Canto IV.
92.The Life Divine p. 278.
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(ii)the Illumined Mind, that has for its characteristic action an "outpouring of massive lightnings of flaming sun-stuff'93;
(iii)the Intuition, which with its faculty of Truth-vision acts as "a projecting blade, edge or point of a far-off supermind light"94;
(iv)Overmind, which is characterized by an authentic universal gaze but somehow covers with its luminous corona, with its brilliant golden lid (hiraṇmayena pātreṇa95), the face of the supreme Truth;
(v)and finally the Supermind or Gnosis, the plane of absolute Light and Sight, that transcends altogether the aparārdha or the lower hemisphere of existence.
It is only with the attainment of this divine Supermind that the ascent of Sight can come to its integral fulfilment. For, the supramental or gnostic being, the vijñānamaya puruṣa, "lives in the Sun itself, in the very body and blaze of the true light; he knows this light to be his own self-luminous being and he sees the whole truth of the lower triplicity and each thing that is in it. He sees it not by reflection in a mental organ of vision, but with the Sun of gnosis itself as his eye, — for the Sun, says the Veda, is the eye of the gods."96
We have thus come to the end of the elaboration of our chosen theme: the Growth of Light and the Ascent of Sight. We have sought to trace the cycle of the involution of the Sight of Sachchidananda (the nimīlana or the 'closing in' of the eyes of Lord Shiva according to Indian Puranic mysticism) down to the abysmal Sleep of Matter, followed in its turn by the slow evolutionary ascension of sight and light from Matter to half-lit and half-blind mind of man (the unmīlana or the 'opening out' of the eyes of Shiva). We have noted that we are only half way through this ascending march and our climb has to continue till we reach the Solar Supermind and embody its effulgence and power of Sight, even in this material world of ours, even in this very earthly body. The goal set before the seekers of Truth-Light is thus to shoot out of the bounds of mind and rise in consciousness on to the aforesaid
93.Ibid, p. 278.
94.Ibid., p. 948
95.Isha Upanishad, 15.
96.The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 462.
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"radiant altitudes" of the Spirit that are the
"Outskirts and dependencies of the house of Truth,
Upraised estates of Mind and measureless.
There man can visit but there he cannot live."97
But the time has come when the representative men of the age have to consciously make these successive ascents and dwell permanently upon the summit-altitude in the full blaze and glory of the Sun. And who can make us glimpse, even in the gloom of our present cabined consciousness, the splendour that we are to meet when we happen to climb to these supernal planes? It is only a poet, a supreme Poet, who can fulfil this heavenly role. For, "the essential power of the poetic word is to make us see, not to make us think or feel; ... Sight is the essential poetic gift. The archetypal poet in a world of original ideas is, we may say, a Soul that sees in itself intimately this world and all the others and God and Nature and the life of beings and sets flowing from its centre a surge of creative rhythm and word-images which become the expressive body of the vision..."98
Such being the case, the veritable poets in the Vedic sense of the term being the seers and the hearers of the truth (kavayaḥ satyaśrutayaḥ), can there be any better way of concluding our present discussion than to cite a few mantric utterances made by the greatest Seer-Poet of the age? These revelatory verses, characterizing the sight-attributes of the supernal supra-mental planes of the Being, are taken from his Savitri, the spiritual epic of the birth and the growth and the consummating fulfilment of the divine Flame, an epic which, in the words of the Mother, enshrines the "prophetic vision of the world's history, including the announcement of the earth's future..."99
"Out of the narrow scope of finite thought
At last he wakes into spiritual mind;
97.Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, p. 659.
98.Sri Aurobindo, The Future Poetry, pp. 33, 41.
99.The Foreword in facsimile to Meditations on Savitri (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, 1962).
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A high liberty begins and luminous room:
He glimpses eternity, touches the infinite,
....
To join the heights and depths of being in light,
In the heart's cave speaks secretly with God.
But these are touches and high moments lived;
Fragments of Truth supreme have lit his soul,
Reflections of the Sun in waters still.
A few have dared the last supreme ascent
And break through borders of blinding light above,
And feel a breath around of mightier air,
Receive a vaster being's messages
And bathe in its immense intuitive Ray.
On summit Mind are radiant altitudes
Exposed to the lustre of infinity,
Outskirts and dependences of the house of truth,
A cosmic Thought spreads out its vastitudes;
Its smallest parts are here philosophies
Challenging with their detailed immensity,
Each figuring an omniscient scheme of things.
But higher still can climb the ascending light;
There are vasts of vision and eternal suns,
Oceans of an immortal luminousness,
Flame-hills assaulting heaven with their peaks,
There dwelling all becomes a blaze of sight;
A burning head of vision leads the mind,
Thought trails behind it its long comet tail;
The heart glows, an illuminate and seer,
And sense is kindled into identity.
A highest flight climbs to a deepest view:
In a wide opening of its native sky
Intuition's lightnings range in a bright pack
Hunting all hidden truths out of their lairs,
Its fiery edge of seeing absolute
Cleaves into locked unknown retreats of self,
Rummages the sky-recesses of the brain,
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Lights up the occult chambers of the heart;
Its spear-point ictus of discovery
Pressed on the cover of name, the screen of form,
Strips bare the secret soul of all that is.
Thought there has revelation's sun-bright eyes;
The Word, a mighty and inspiring Voice,
Enters Truth's inmost cabin of privacy
And tears away the veil from God and life.
Then stretches the boundless finite's last expanse,
The cosmic empire of the Overmind,
Time's buffer state bordering Eternity,
Too vast for the experience of man's soul:
All here gathers beneath one golden sky:
Thought crowds in masses seized by one regard;
All Time is one body, Space a single book:
There is the Godhead's universal gaze
And there the boundaries of immortal Mind:
Above the stretch and blaze of cosmic Sight,
Above the silence of the wordless Thought,
There is a world of everlasting Light,
In the realms of the immortal Supermind
Truth who hides here her head in mystery,
Her riddle deemed by reason impossible
In the stark structure of material form,
Unenigmaed lives, unmasked her face and there
A cosmic vision, a spiritual sense
Feels all the Infinite lodged in finite form
And seen through a quivering ecstasy of light
Discovers the bright face of the Bodiless"100
**
100. Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, pp. 659-652.
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"A mightier race shall inhabit the mortal world.
On Nature's luminous tops, on the spirit's ground,
The superman will reign as king of life,
Make earth almost the mate and peer of heaven
Life's tops shall flame with the Immortal's thoughts,
Light shall invade the darkness of its base.
The supermind shall claim the world for Light
And thrill with love of God the enamoured heart
And place Light's crown on Nature's lifted head
And found Light's reign on her unshaking base.
A greater truth than earth's shall roof-in earth
And shed its sunlight on the roads of mind;
A power infallible shall lead the thought,
A seeing puissance govern life and act,
In earthly hearts kindle the Immortal's fire.
A soul shall wake in the Inconscient's house;
The mind shall be God-vision's tabernacle,
The body intuition's instrument,
And life a channel for God's visible power.
The spirit's eyes shall look through Nature's eyes,
The Spirit's force shall occupy Nature's force.
The Spirit shall be the master of his world
Lurking no more in form's obscurity
And Nature shall reverse her action's rule,
The outward world disclose the Truth it veils;
All things shall manifest the covert God,
All shall reveal the Spirit's light and might
And move to its destiny of felicity.
This too shall be; for a new life shall come,
A body of the Superconscient's truth,
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A native field of Supernature's mights:
It shall make earth's nescient ground Truth's colony,
Make even the Ignorance a transparent robe
Through which shall shine the brilliant limbs of Truth
And Truth shall be a sun on Nature's head
And Truth shall be the guide of Nature's steps
And Truth shall gaze out of her nether deeps."101
101. Savitri, Book XI, Canto I, pp. 706-713.
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