A companion volume to 'The Destiny of the Body,' this explores man as a species, his past beginnings, present achievements & failures, his evolutionary future.
VII
"In a complete silence only is the Silence heard; in a pure peace only is its Being revealed. Therefore to us the name of That is the Silence and the Peace." (Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 302.) "There sight attains not, nor speech attains, nor the mind... That which remains unexpressed by the word, that by which the word is expressed, know that indeed to be the Brahman..." (na tatra cakṣur gacchati na vāg gacchati no mano... yad vācānabhyuditaṁ yena vāg abhyudyate tadeva brahma tvaṁ viddhi...) (Kena Upanishad, 3, 4: Sri Aurobindo's translation.) "The man who findeth God loseth his speech.... Only the Unconscious knoweth this Consciousness." (Man a'rafa Rab-ba-hū kal-lā lesānuhū.... Mahramé īn hosh juz bé- hosh n-īsṭ.) (See Bhagavan Das, The Essential Unity of All Religions, pp. 160-61.)
"In a complete silence only is the Silence heard; in a pure peace only is its Being revealed. Therefore to us the name of That is the Silence and the Peace."
(Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 302.)
"There sight attains not, nor speech attains, nor the mind... That which remains unexpressed by the word, that by which the word is expressed, know that indeed to be the Brahman..." (na tatra cakṣur gacchati na vāg gacchati no mano... yad vācānabhyuditaṁ yena vāg abhyudyate tadeva brahma tvaṁ viddhi...)
(Kena Upanishad, 3, 4: Sri Aurobindo's translation.)
"The man who findeth God loseth his speech.... Only the Unconscious knoweth this Consciousness." (Man a'rafa Rab-ba-hū kal-lā lesānuhū.... Mahramé īn hosh juz bé- hosh n-īsṭ.) (See Bhagavan Das, The Essential Unity of All Religions, pp. 160-61.)
The truths of the Infinite are not easy to put into words which are finite and coined by a consciousness that blinks with its mortal gaze. It is no wonder that Teachers like Buddha became silent when questioned on the ultimate mysteries by persons psychologically and spiritually ill-equipped to pierce through the quasi-opaque veil of words and comprehend the ineffable X to which these words are but suggestive pointers. Indeed, in all ages and climes men of genuinely high spiritual experiences have again and again avowed their inability to express adequately through man-made speech the contents of their supernormal experience and knowledge. A dumb man seeking to convey through articulate sound the felicity that he enjoys while partaking of honey, mūkāsvādanavat; this is how many of them have expressed their sense of discomfiture, face to face with the problem of an adequate verbal communication of their spiritual knowledge. Thus the Indian
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mystic Dadu repeatedly avers that a veritable spiritual experience defies all formulation in the conceptual framework of our limited speech-mode, and since there is no commensurability between that and the normal experience of average humanity, spiritual knowledge must be by its very nature ineffable, kahyā nā jāi,1 In the delectable words of the great poet-mystic Tulsi Das:
Girā a-naina, naina binu bānī,
Kehi bidhi anupama jāi bakhānī!2
"Sightless the tongue is, voiceless are the eyes;
How then describe that Experience, all uniquel"
This is indeed the dilemma: When the direct spiritual Sight is operative in its full potency, the human tongue proves its utter inadequacy to convey the glory and opulence of the Vision; on the contrary, any attempt at mental formulation brings the consciousness headlong down with the inevitable result that the Vision and the original Experience vanish in the process!
This almost absolute incompatibility of our normal mentality with the highest ranges of spiritual consciousness is strikingly brought out in the following very interesting account of Sri Ramakrishna's repeated failures to remain physically awake on the summits of realisation, far be it to express what he realised. Swami Saradananda, one of the closest direct disciples of Sri Ramakrishna and the writer of his authoritative biography, is reporting:
"In how simple terms the Thakur [Sri Ramakrishna] used to explain to us these abstruse truths of spiritual life:
" 'Well, something rises from my feet and climbs towards the head. So long as it does not reach the head, I retain consciousness; but as soon as it reaches there, an utter forgetfulness overtakes me — then there is no more seeing or hearing, far be it to speak of talking. Who would speak then? — The very sense of I and 'Thou' vanishes altogether! I often decide to speak everything to you, all about the visions and experiences that accompany this ascension. So long as that has reached so far [pointing to his heart]
1.See Kshitimohan Sen (Editor), Dadu.
2.Vinaya Patrika (See Bhagavan Das, The Essential Unity of All Religions, p. 161).
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or even so far [pointing to his throat], reporting is possible and in fact I report; but as soon as that transcends this region [pointing to his throat], it seems somebody shuts my mouth and I fail to control my forgetfulness! [Pointing to his throat] When one ascends still farther than this level, no sooner than I contemplate for a moment to speak of the visions and experiences there, the mind immediately shoots upwards and no reporting becomes any more possible!'
"Oh, innumerable are the occasions when the Thakur sought to exercise the utmost control over himself so that he could report to us about the types of experiences that one has when the mind transcends the throat-centre but each time he failed! ...one day he emphatically stated:
" 'Today I must speak to you everything, not a bit would I hide' — and he started to speak. He could very well speak all about the centres up to the heart and the throat, and pointing to the junction of his eye-brows he said, "Whenever the mind ascends here, the embodied soul has a vision of the supreme Self and goes into Samadhi. Then there exists but a thin transparent veil between the individual Self and the Supreme. And there the soul experiences in this way —' Speaking so far, as soon as he started detailing the realisation of the Supreme, he went into the Samadhi state. After coming out of his trance state, he recommenced reporting again, but again went into Samadhi. After such repeated attempts and failures he spoke to us with tears in his eyes:
" 'My sons, my intention is to report to you everything without hiding the least bit of it: but the Mother3 won't allow me to speak -She completely shuts my mouth!'
"We wondered at this and thought: 'How strange! It is apparent that he is trying to report and that he is even suffering because of his failure to do so, but he seems to be altogether helpless in this matter- Surely the Mother must have been very naughty indeed! He wants to speak about holy things, about the vision of God, and it is surely odd that She should shut his mouth!'
"We did not know at that time that the mind's range is indeed very much limited and that, unless one proceeds farther than its farthest reach, one cannot expect to have the realisation of the Supreme! In our innocence we could not understand at that time
3. The 'Mother' refers to the Supreme addressed as the Divine Mother.
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that out of sheer love for us the Thakur was attempting the impossible!"4 (Italics ours.)
Indeed, mystics are universally agreed on the point that with the progressive deepening and heightening of spiritual consciousness the seeker after supernal knowledge honestly feels the total inaptitude of all verbal communication and thus falls mute and speechless. Sri Ramakrishna himself expresses this indubitable fact of all true spiritual experience in the two following parables;
"In the Kirtan the devotee first sings 'Netāi āmār mātā hãti ('My Netai dances like a mad elephant'). As the devotional mood deepens, he simply sings, 'Hāti! Hāti!' Next, all he can sing is 'Hāti!' And last of all he simply sings, 'Hā!' and goes into samadhi. The man who has been singing all the while then becomes speechless."5
"Again, at a feast given to the Brahmins, one at first hears much noise of talking. When the guests sit on the floor with the leaf-plates in front of them, much of the noise ceases. Then one hears only the cry, 'Bring some luchi!' As they partake of the luchi and other dishes, three quarters of the noise subsides. When the curd, the last course, appears, one hears only the sound 'soup! soup!' as the guests eat the curd with their fingers. Then there is practically no noise. Afterwards all retire to sleep and absolute silence reigns."6
Here at this point a question may be pertinently mooted: How to know whether the supposed inexpressibility of spiritual experience is not entirely due to the linguistic incompetence of the individual mystic? Is it not conceivable that with greater command over the language-appartus some other mystic will be in a position to offer us a perfect verbal transcription of the same experience? And, be it noted, by language we do not mean at all the restricted and totally inapt speech-mode of common discourse; we envisage for this purpose any specialized language that might be invented and brought into use in order to mirror faithfully the contents of spiritual knowledge. For, do we not know that there is -no such thing as the Language? Indeed, it is rational to admit of the possibility of different types of languages to correspond to different
4. Swami Saradananda, Sri Ramakrishna Lila-Prasanga (Gurubhava, Purv-ardha), pp. 64-66.
5.& 6. Swami Nikhilananda (Translator), The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, p. 81'.
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segments of human experience and activity. Philosophy including Metaphysics, the various Sciences, Mathematics, etc., have thus their particular languages of discourse and investigation; and we know, for example, that "the physicist quickly gives up English as the language of his scientific work, and the change from what might be called the Newtonian language to the language of quantum physics occurred because certain things could not be said about physical events in the former which could be said in the latter, and many things that could be said in the Newtonian language turned out to be unverifiable at the sub-atomic level."7
Thus the contention is: all spiritual experience and knowledge may be after all linguistically represented in favourable conditions, although the choice of the language may be determined by the necessity of the situation.
But, no, when the mystics refer to the ineffable, inexpressible and unformulable, they do not use the terms in any such relative sense. They do stand by the absolute ineffability of the highest and deepest ranges of spiritual experience. Indeed, as Maurice Mehauden has so trenchantly put it:
"The 'Ineffable,' that is to say, the Unutterable, the totally and absolutely Inexpressible, which is therefore 'Incommunicable' in whatever language spoken or not, in whatever expression-mode, philosophical, poetical, aesthetic or symbolic, and that, whatever the potency, the finesse or the acuity of expression attained by the subject who by hypothesis would be the perfect master of all these languages and all these various modes of expression."8
But this view is contested by a significant number of thinkers who would vehemently deny the possibility of any direct and immediate non-symbolic knowledge of the reality, distinct from all other types of normal human knowledge. Thus, in the words of W.M. Urban: "All knowledge to be knowledge must be expressible. That which cannot be expressed cannot be said to be either true or false. All adequate expression, however, must, I shall maintain, be linguistic, for only linguistic communication is ultimately intelligible."9 Elsewhere the same author states:
7.L.O. Kattsoff, "Ontology and the Choice of Languages" in Actes du Xlème Congrès International de Philosophie (Bruxelles, 1953), p. 28.
8.Actes du Xlème Congrès International de Philosophie, Vol. XI, p. 91.
9.W.M. Urban, Language and Reality (George Allen and Unwin: New York), p. 264.
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"Truth, in the last analysis, is immanent in discourse - the sum total of intelligible discourse is the truth. Veritas in dicto, non in re consistit."10
Before we disscuss the points raised by Mr. Urban and offer our comments thereupon it would be better if we state in the first instance the principal arguments that are generally advanced against the notion of the ineffability of mystic-spiritual knowledge.
The 'Myth' of Ineffability
"The limits of my language are the limits of my world."
(Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. )
"Il n'y pas d'expérience sans paroles." ("There is no experience without speech.")
Quoted by Yvon Bellaval in Les Philosophes et Leur Langage (Gallimard: Paris, p. 146).
"There is no knowledge without expression. Expression is part of the knowing process."
(W.M. Urban, Language and Reality, p . 348.)
Here are the main arguments, summarised in their briefest outline, that are supposed to invalidate the claim of verbal inexpressibility and incommunicability of the lofty and profound spiritual experiences:
(i) For all human knowledge, verifiability and communicability are two interlinked and inseparable processes. Whatever cannot be verbally communicated to fellow human beings remains outside the pale of verification and thus ceases to be necessarily true or even meaningfully significant: to speak of the ineffability of spiritual truths is almost to speak of something unsubstantial and otiose. In the words of Prof. Urban:
"The limits of my language are the limits of my world. This does not necessarily mean the dogmatic denial of anything beyond that which we can express, but it does mean - and indeed must mean -that it is only about that which can be expressed that questions of truth and falsity can be significantly raised. That being the case, it
10. W.M. Urban, op. cit., p. 394.
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is in discourse — and discourse alone - that intelligibility and truth alike can ultimately be found. The totality of intelligible discourse is the truth."11
(ii) We know that to Plato language seemed to be a veil interposed between us and reality, which has to be torn away and cast aside if we would see reality face to face. And in our time Bergson has emphatically put forward the view that our language is by no means moulded on reality and therefore to know reality we must perforce abandon language and the categories generated by language. And since "language, by reason of its lowly origin and nature, is incapable of apprehending and expressing reality... [it] may be used in another way, not to represent, but to bring the hearer to a point where he himself may transcend language and pass to incommunicable insight."12 Indeed, for Bergson, reality has to be known by a direct intuition in some sort of a "pure experience" discovered by the stripping off of the veil of speech.
But this intuitional knowledge of which Bergson speaks, this "knowledge by pure acquaintance - pure presentational immediacy" is altogether denied any status of knowledge by the philosophers of language we have been discussing in our essay. Ernst Cassirer dubs it 'a mythical phase of knowledge' and others scoff at it as arising from "that crepuscular depth of mind where 'intuitions' are supposed to be born, without any midwifery of symbols, without due process of thought."13
For, according to them, there is no such thing as an intuitional knowledge devoid of all expression: intuition is, indeed, impossible without expression. This thesis of the identity of intuition and expression was first developed by Benedetto Croce in his well-known work Aesthetic or General Linguistic, primarily in connection with aesthetics, but he extended it to cover the entire range of knowledge.
Prof. Urban, amongst others, has taken up the same theme and postulated the principle of the inseparability of language and knowledge. Thus, according to him, "Knowing in any significant sense of the word is inseparable from language; in a very real sense, language creates the world of cognitive meanings.... One
11.W.M. Urban, op, cit., p. 729.
12.Ibid., p. 55.
13.Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (The New American Library: New York, 1953), p. 79.
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does not first possess an object in knowing and then expresses the nature of that object in terms of arbitrary and conventional signs, but the expression is a constituitive part of the knowing itself. It is this thesis that we wish to maintain.'14
(iii)All true knowledge must be at its bottom rational knowledge; for, "rationality is the essence of mind, and symbolic transformation its elementary process.... The very idea of a non-rational source of any knowledge vitiates the concept of mind as an organ of understanding. And the sort of 'intuitive' knowledge which Bergson extols above all rational knowledge because it is supposedly not mediated by any formulating (and hence deforming) symbol is itself perfectly rational.... For rationality is embodied in every mental act.... It permeates the peripheral activities of the human nervous system, just as truly as the cortical functions."15
Thus, reality being in its nature rational (lé reel est rationnel: Hegel) and rationality being the essence of mind the cognitive medium and, finally, symbolic transformation being the intrinsic process of this rationality, it follows ipso facto that all significant knowledge of reality must be expressible through adequate symbols and the system of these symbols will itself constitute the language of discourse. For, after all, what is a language if not the symbolic "representation, Darstellung, of one element of experience through another— the bi-polar relation between the sign or symbol and the thing signified or symbolized, and the consciousness of this relation."16
(iv)Because of the principle of symbolic translatibility, an adequate symbolization of reality in any particular form must be capable of being transcribed in the framework of conceptual symbolism, that is to say, of being expressed in conceptual thought. And thought is essentially inseparable from language (Worthaftigkeit des Denkens17 ). "When this principle is denied the denial is," so is it contended, "founded upon certain equivocations and errors. It is undeniable that we can think with geometric figures, algebraic signs, and ideographic symbols - in short, without any words - but we forgot that these are also languages,
14.W.M. Urban, op, cit.,p. 347.
15.S.K. Langer, op. cit., p. 80.
16.W.M. Urban, op. cit., p. 66.
17.See W.M. Urban, op. cit., p. 347.
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and that if we seek to communicate what we think we cannot do so without resorting at some points to ordinary language."18 (Was it not Leibnitz who advised to consider as null and chimerical all that could not be ultimately reduced to ordinary language and that, too, in the clearest possible way?)19
This attitude, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, arises from the fact that "the intellect does not consider that it knows a thing until it has reduced its awareness of it to the terms of thought, not, that is to say, until it has put it into a system of representative mental concepts, and this kind of knowledge gets its most decisive completeness when it can be put into clear, precise and defining speech."20
(v) Wherever there is any valid fact to report, there must be existent a suitable language to clothe it symbolically. Impossibility of linguistic representation cannot but imply vague and confused awareness. For, as Wittgenstein has put it: "Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly."21
And what is more, all that cannot be put in the form of well-defined concepts allowing of systematic handling cannot, in truth, possess any validity of cognitive expressiveness; they are to be treated as 'symptomatic expressions' of the subject's emotions, feelings, desires, and what not. Indeed, "everything that is not speakable thought is feeling..."22 They cannot be subjected to the symbolization of thought: they can but convey the "symptoms of the inner life, like tears and laughter, crooning, or profanity."23 Has not the well-known linguistic philosopher Rudolf Carnap declared: "Many linguistic utterances are analogous to laughing in that they have only an expressive function, no representative function.... Metaphysical propositions - lyrical verse - have only an expressive function, but no representative function; metaphysical propositions are neither true nor false, because they assert nothing.... But they are, like laughing, lyrics and music, expressive."24
18.Ibid., pp. 347-48.
19.See Yvon Bellaval, Les Philosophes et leur Langage, p. 178.
20.Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 801.
21.Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 116.
22.Susanne K. Langer, op. cit., p. 70.
23.Ibid., p. 67.
24.Rudolf Carnap, Philosophy and Logical Syntax (London, 1935), p. 28.
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Consequently, according to logicians who investigate the limits of linguistic expression, "the knowable is a clearly defined field, governed by the requirement of what they call 'discursive projecti-bility'.... Nothing that cannot be 'projected' in discursive form is accessible to the human mind at all, and any attempt to understand anything but demonstrable fact is bootless ambition.... Outside this domain is the inexpressible realm of feeling, of formless desires and satisfactions,... forever incognito and incommunicado.... From the ineffable sphere nothing but nonsense can be conveyed...."25
(vi)Another objection that is raised against the notion of ineffability of mystic-spiritual knowledge is based on the idea of the uniqueness of mind as an instrument of cognition. Since all human knowledge as knowledge, - so is it argued, - has to come through the instrumentality of mind and since mind-consciousness, whether already developed or as yet undeveloped, is essentially the same for all human beings, any knowledge clearly grasped by one subject must be potentially formulable and communicable to all other human beings. For, as has been asserted by Maurice Mehauden:
"The unity of the constitution and functioning of human mind as also that of the human Person stands against the situation that there could be two different types of human knowledge altogether disparate, and which would be:
"On the one hand, the knowledge of what can be expressed and communicated to others...
"and on the other, the knowledge of what has to be excluded from communicability and expression: the so-called ineffable knowledge.
"The notion of 'the Ineffable' carries thus in itself a fundamental internal contradiction which would invalidate it whether in relation to the knowledge or to the object of knowledge."26
(vii)But, then, how to explain the fact that the mystics always refer to their experiences and spiritual knowledge as something escaping expression and verbal communication?
The explanation, according to these thinkers, is not far to seek.
25.See Susanne K. Langer, op. cit.. p. 69.
26.Maurice Mehauden. "La Notion d'Ineffable et la Psychologie Comparée des Religions" in Actes du Xlème Congrès International de Philosophie (Bruxelles, 1953), pp. 92-93. (Translated from the original French.)
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The predicament of the mystics arises uniquely from the fact that the knowledge they are referring to is still in a chaotic immature state; with maturation this knowledge is sure to cross the threshold of ineffability and be accessible to proper formulation and communication. Thus, in the words of M. Mehauden:
"The true nature of the Ineffable is revealed in the fact that its incommunicability is linked to a state as yet chaotic: the 'Ineffable' is another name for the psychic lacking in maturity, which, for this very reason, escapes conceptual transcription, without proving in the least that this Ineffable, this Unutterable, this Inexpressible whether partially or totally, temporarily or definitively, would be by nature supernatural and essentially different from other psychic manifestations which, being themselves sufficiently ripe, escape the chaos of fermenting subconscience and thus become communicable."27
And the author concludes: "The 'Ineffable' is nothing but the unripe psychic, the amorphous psychic."28
Now this non-maturity of the psychic states, which imprisons the subject within the confines of inexpressibility and incommunicability, may be, according to Maurice Mehauden, due to three contingencies:
(a)Either it is just a temporary chaos that reigns amongst the various constitutive elements of the experience;
(b)or, perhaps, the subtlety of the experience transcends the linguistic capability of the particular subject;
(c)or, finally, there is some inherent logical contradiction vitiating any clear formulation of the experience.
In the first case, the inexpressibility is provisional and eliminable with time; in the second case, the ineffability is altogether extrinsic and will vanish with another subject possessing greater expres-sional competence; and in the third case, inherent logical contradiction turns it into a pseudo-problem. For "the contradictory nature of the constitutive elements would not allow of any clarification or of any precise communication: these elements remain fundamentally irreducible and would end in mutual cancellation if they are pressed to precision."29
The sum and substance of all the arguments that have gone
27.Maurice Mehauden, op. cit., p. 94.
28.Maurice Mehauden, op. cit., p. 94.
29.Ibid., p. 95.
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before may be trenchantly put in the following words of Maurice Mehauden:
"There is no veritable 'Ineffable' in the sense of any supernormal, supra-mental knowledge: there is only some sort of illusion which might be termed the 'Ineffable-Pseudo-knowledge', an illusion that blends in the complacent mystic into what might be called the 'Ineffable-Fairydom,' in order to characterise the soul-state of the subject who decorates this state with the epithet 'Ineffable' simply because he believes that, thanks to it, he would be able to rise to a supernatural level, or perhaps because he has the actual feeling that he has really risen to that level."30
Such, then, is the critique, formidable in appearance, raised against the very notion of ineffability of any spiritual experience however lofty or profound it may be. But yet the indubitable fact remains that representative mystics of all ages and climes, beginning with the master-mystics of the Rig-Veda and the Upanishads and coming down to those of our own day have repeatedly asserted the utter impotence of man-made words before the problem of expressing the supreme spiritual experiences. They -and some of them are intellectual giants themselves - are all of one accord in declaring that there are orders of mystical knowledge, perfectly cogent and clear in themselves, which would defy all attempts at formulation in any known or unknown or even imaginable human speech, yato vāco nivartante aprāpya manasā saha31 ("from where the Speech along with Mind returns baffled.")
How to reconcile and heal this dichotomy of positions? For that we have to successively explore the questions:
What is the essential nature of a language? Can thought exist without the clothing of words? Does conceptual thought represent the supreme process of knowledge? Is there any possibility of knowledge without concepts? What is the relation between logic and reality? Does ineffability imply at the same time unknowabi-lity? And is the avowal of ineffability synonymous with vague and confused awareness? etc., etc.
30.Maurice Mehauden, op. cit., p. 96.
31.Taittiriya Upanishad, II. 4.
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The Ineffable Knowledge
"There is then a supreme Reality eternal, absolute and infinite. .. It is indefinable and inconceivable by finite and defining Mind; it is ineffable by a mind-created speech... And yet, though in this way unknowable to us, it is not altogether and in every way unknowable; it is self-evident to itself and, although inexpressible, yet self-evident to a knowledge by identity of which the spiritual being in us must be capable..." (Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 322)
"There is then a supreme Reality eternal, absolute and infinite. .. It is indefinable and inconceivable by finite and defining Mind; it is ineffable by a mind-created speech... And yet, though in this way unknowable to us, it is not altogether and in every way unknowable; it is self-evident to itself and, although inexpressible, yet self-evident to a knowledge by identity of which the spiritual being in us must be capable..."
(Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 322)
"Mind is that which does not know, which tries to know and which never knows except as in a glass darkly. (Ibid., p. 118.) "Mind is a passage, not a culmination." (Ibid., p. 128.)
"Mind is that which does not know, which tries to know and which never knows except as in a glass darkly.
(Ibid., p. 118.)
"Mind is a passage, not a culmination."
(Ibid., p. 128.)
At the very outset we would like to make one point clear. When the mystics refer to the ineffability of their experience, they do not avow by that any obscure, amorphous or confused state of their knowledge. Far from it: the genuinely spiritual knowledge is the surest of all knowledge and the mystic possessing it harbours not the slightest confusion as regards its status or content. As Sri Aurobindo has so forcefully and beautifully put it:
"The Divine must be... a certitude not only as concrete but more concrete than anything sensed by ear or eye or touch in the world of Matter... When the Peace of God descends on you, when the Divine Presence is there within you, when the Ananda rushes on you like a sea, when you are driven like a leaf before the wind by the breath of the Divine Force, when Love flowers out from you on all creation, when Divine Knowledge floods you with a Light which illumines and transforms in a moment all that was before dark, sorrowful and obscure, when all that is becomes part of the One Reality, when the Reality is all around you, you feel at once by the spiritual contact, by the inner vision, by the illumined and seeing thought, by the vital sensation and even by the very physical sense, everywhere you see, hear, touch only the Divine. Then you can much less doubt it or deny it than you can deny or doubt daylight or air or the sun in heaven - for of these physical
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things you cannot be sure but they are what your senses represent them to be; but in the concrete experiences of the Divine, doubt is impossible,"32 [Italics ours.]
And yet the mystics frankly admit their predicament when they are asked to offer an adequate verbal or conceptual representation of the nature and content of their spiritual knowledge. But this is, be it noted, not because of any lack in precision or clarity of their knowledge, but uniquely due to the insufficiency of mind-made speech as a proper or adequate medium of expression.
But wherein lies this inadequacy and inaptitude? We shall presently discuss this question. But, for the moment, let us tersely specify that the core-problem is the incompatibility of normal mind-consciousness and its constructions with the spiritual order of reality; every other difficulty issues forth from this basic insufficiency, as a necessary consequence. And those thinkers who fail to appreciate the mystics' position do so because of certain erroneous assumptions, e.g.,
(i)consciousness must be synonymous with mind;
(ii)mind is the only possible cognitive instrument available to man;
(iii)any valid knowledge and conceptual thought-process are inseparable one from the other;
(iv)there can be no thought without the accompanying correlate of verbal expression;
(v)anything to be considered as reality must submit to the norms of mental logic.
Let us examine these assumptions one by one and find out where they stray from the actual reality.
All cognitive consciousness appears to us to be mental at its bottom. But this identification of consciousness with mentality and mental awareness is, to say the least, a most unfortunate misplaced exaggeration creating much confusion of values. Consciousness indicates a self-aWare force of existence and our mentality is but an intermediary term of this cit-śakti or the universally operative Consciousness-Force. Below mind, consciousness sinks into vital or even physical movements which appear to us as subconscient; it then emerges in mind constituting the specific consciousness of
32. Letters on Yoga, p. 168.
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man the mental being; but that is not its farthest limit or the highest height. Above mentality it ascends into yet greater supra-mental forms which thus remain for the normal awareness of man altogether superconscient. In the words of Sri Aurobindo:
"In us consciousness is Mind, and our mind is ignorant and imperfect, an intermediate power that has grown and is still growing towards something beyond itself: there were lower levels of consciousness that came before it and out of which it arose, there must very evidently be higher levels to which it is itself arising. Before our thinking, reasoning, reflecting mind there was a consciousness unthinking but living and sentient, and before that there was the subconscious and the unconscious; after us or in our yet unevolved selves there is likely to be waiting a greater consciousness, self-luminous, not dependent on constructive thought: our imperfect and ignorant thought-mind is certainly not the last word of consciousness, its ultimate possibility. For the essence of consciousness is the power to be aware of itself and its objects, and in its true nature this power must be direct, self-fulfilled and complete..."" [Italics ours]
And since in man, in his normal status of awareness, the consciousness is still uncertain, indirect and incomplete, mind cannot be considered to be the instrument of knowledge. As a matter of fact, mind has to remain content with knowing things only by their signs and forms, their properties and functionings, and their relations to other things, but it can never expect to grasp 'the occult essence and self-being of things'. For, essentially, mind is not a faculty of knowledge, it is an instrument of analysis and synthesis, but never of essential knowledge. It is, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, a faculty for the seeking of knowledge without ever attaining it, a faculty for expressing as much as it can manage to gain of it in forms of relative thought. But "If we would have a greater, a profounder and a real knowledge, - a knowledge and not an intense but formless sentiment such as comes sometimes to certain deep but inarticulate parts of our mentality, - Mind has to make room for another consciousness which will fulfil Mind by transcending it or reverse and so rectify its operations after leaping beyond it: the summit of mental knowledge is only a vaulting-board from which that leap can be taken. The utmost mission of
33. The Life Divine, pp. 1016-17.
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Mind is to train our obscure consciousness... to enlighten its blind instincts, random intuitions, vague perceptions till it shall become capable of this greater light and this higher ascension."34
We thus see that mind represents but a preparatory term of consciousness and the main significance of the whole process of man's highest intellectual activity lies in the fact that it leads him through the mental discrimination to the crucial point where the veil is lifted and he acquires the sight to see.
Thus, to assert that what is not known by mind is by nature unknowable or that there can be no knowledge except what is acquired through the agency of mind, is to speak utter nonsense. To quote again Sri Aurobindo:
"The Unknown is not the Unknowable; it need not remain the unknown for us, unless we choose ignorance or persist in our first limitations. For to all things that are not unknowable, all things in the universe, there correspond in that universe faculties .which can take cognisance of them, and in man, the microcosm, these faculties are always existent and at a certain stage capable of development. We may choose not to develop them; where they are partially developed, we may discourage and impose on them a kind of atrophy. But, fundamentally, all possible knowledge is knowledge within the power of humanity."35
Yes, 'within the power of humanity', but not necessarily within the grasp of mind. Indeed, to consider the thought-process to be the highest means of acquiring any valid knowledge and to believe that all knowledge to be brought within the ken of man must have to be reduced to the conceptual form, is, as we shall presently see, one of the besetting superstitions of the rational mind. As a matter of fact, all true knowledge is essentially seer-knowledge; beyond that, knowledge by intimate internal experience; and finally a knowledge by sheer identity.
Thought-Knowledge and Spiritual Knowledge
"Knowledge waits seated beyond mind and intellectual reasoning, throned in the luminous vast of illimitable self-vision."
(Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, p. 121.)
34.The Life Divine, p. 127.
35.Ibid., p. 13.
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"A concrete ever deepening wisdom waiting on more and more riches of infinite experience and not the confident abstract logic of the narrow and incompetent human mind is likely to be the key to a divine supra-human knowledge." (Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 277.) "The final test of truths... is not reason but spiritual illumination verified by abiding fact of spirit; a single decisive spiritual experience may undo a whole edifice of reasonings and conclusions erected by the logical intelligence." (The Life Divine, p. 469.)
"A concrete ever deepening wisdom waiting on more and more riches of infinite experience and not the confident abstract logic of the narrow and incompetent human mind is likely to be the key to a divine supra-human knowledge."
(Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 277.)
"The final test of truths... is not reason but spiritual illumination verified by abiding fact of spirit; a single decisive spiritual experience may undo a whole edifice of reasonings and conclusions erected by the logical intelligence."
(The Life Divine, p. 469.)
The human mind, which relies mainly on thought for the acquirement and holding of knowledge, considers that to be its highest operation: conceptual thought-process is the very staff of support of the mental search after truth. The thought labouring in the logical intellect seems best to fulfil the role of a guide and governor of mental action and thus gives to the mind 'a sense of sure definiteness, security and completeness in its knowledge'. But, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out: "Mental knowledge is not an integral but always a partial knowledge. It adds constantly detail to detail, but has a difficulty in relating them aright; its wholes too are not real but incomplete wholes which it tends to substitute for the more real and integral knowledge. And even if it arrived at a kind of integral knowledge, it would still be by a sort of putting together, a mental and intellectual arrangement, an artificial unity and not an essential and real oneness. If that were all, the mind might conceivably arrive at some kind of half reflection half translation of an integral knowledge, but the radical malady would still be that it would not be the real thing, only at best an intellectual representation. That the mental truth must always be, an intellectual, emotional and sensational representation, not the direct truth, not truth itself in its body and essence."36
If, then, there is a spiritual order of reality not obvious to the senses and reason, atīndriyam, it must be sought and known by other means than our intellectual scrutiny. For, in itself, intellectual
36. The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 796-97.
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analysis and synthesis cannot go beyond the stage of ordering of conceptions, - perhaps, at its best, of rightly arranging some true conceptions. But this is not the kind of knowledge aimed at by the men of the spirit. We may even go so far as to state, following the injunction of Sri Krishna in the Gita, that a complete intellectual passivity, the power of dismissing all thought, the power of the mind not to think at all, is demanded of all those who would like to possess the truths of the self. But this luminous mental silence should not be confounded with the subject's incapacity for thought. To quote Sri Aurobindo:
"This power of silence is a capacity and not an incapacity, a power and not a weakness. It is a profound and pregnant stillness. Only when the mind is thus entirely still, like clear, motionless and level water, in a perfect purity and peace of the whole being, and the soul transcends thought, can the Self which exceeds and originates all activities and becomings, the Silence from which all words are born, the Absolute of which all relativities are partial reflections, manifest itself in the pure essence of our being."37
A genuine spiritual knowledge - and we cannot but insist on this point again and again - is not to be arrived at through a ratioci-native process of thinking or by a logomachy of the logical mind. For it is not a very subtle and opulent conceptual thought, whose other name is spiritual awareness. "The essence of spiritual knowledge is an intrinsic self-existent consciousness; all its action of knowledge, indeed all its action of any kind, must be that consciousness formulating itself. All other knowledge is consciousness oblivious of itself and striving to return to its own awareness of itself and its contents; it is self-ignorance labouring to transform itself back into self-knowledge."38
We thus see that spiritual knowledge, as distinguished from mental knowledge, is not made up of conceptual thoughts or adroitly formulated ideas; it arises clear and precise from a spiritual intuition, from a spiritual experience in the very substance of our consciousness. For, this kind of knowledge is fundamentally a consciousness. Thus knowledge without concepts is perfectly possible and that is a higher type of knowledge into the bargain. To substantiate our point we should like to cite here what the Master-Mystic Sri Aurobindo has written reporting one of his
37.The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 302.
38.The Life Divine, p. 1024.
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major experiences:
"My first major experience - radical and overwhelming, though not, as it turned out, final and exhaustive - came after and by the exclusion and silencing of all thought - there was, first, what might be called a spiritually substantial or concrete consciousness of stillness and silence, then the awareness of some sole and supreme Reality in whose presence things existed only as forms, but forms not at all substantial or real or concrete; but this was all apparent to a spiritual perception and essential or impersonal sense and there was not the least concept or idea of reality or unreality or any other notion, for all concept or idea was hushed or rather entirely absent in the absolute stillness. These things were known directly through the pure consciousness and not through the mind, so there was no need of concepts or words or names."39 (Italics ours)
It is, we repeat, illusive to consider that the thought-knowledge gained through the mediation of reason can ever embody any definitive truth of things: it has neither any access to the root of things nor for that matter can it embrace the totality of their secret mysteries. In reality, if we examine carefully, we shall find that intuition and not reason is always our first guide. "Intuition always stands veiled behind our mental operations. Intuition brings to man those brilliant messages from the Unknown which are the beginning of his higher knowledge. Reason only comes in afterwards to see what profit it can have of the shining harvest."40
For essentially true knowledge we have to step back from the arena of conceptual thought and rely instead more and more on revelatory vision and luminous insight. For
"There is a deeper seeing from within
And when we have left these small purlieus of mind,
A greater vision meets us on the heights
In the iuminous wideness of the Spirit's gaze."
(Savitri, Book II, Canto V, p. 168.)
Also:
"Mental knowledge is not true knowledge; true knowledge is that which is based on the true sight, the sight of the Seer, of Surya, of the Kavi. Mental thought is not knowledge, it is a golden
39.Letters on Yoga, p. 176.
40.The Life Divine, p. 67.
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lid placed over the face of the Truth, the Sight, the divine Ideation, the Truth Consciousness. When that is removed, sight replaces mental thought; the all-embracing truth-ideation, Mahas, Veda, Dṛṣṭi, replaces the fragmentary mental activity."41
The Vedic mystics (otherwise called the Rishis or the Seers, for they did not think out the Truth but rather 'saw' it) always sought and eulogised this supra-mental faculty of constantly growing inner and higher perception which they termed ketu in order to distinguish it from the eye of sense or even of reason (cakṣu). This luminous seizing of truths, this internal spiritual sight, Dṛṣṭi or dṛksakti, far surpasses the indications or representations of thought and makes the truth of all things directly evident to us, pratyakṣa.
As a matter of fact, this seer-knowledge is always much more * authentic than the thought-knowledge; 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 order of knowledge'42: (i) a knowledge by identity, which is the original and fundamental way of knowing; (ii) a knowledge by direct intimate contact; (iii) a knowledge by separative direct contact; and (iv) a wholly separative knowledge by indirect contact. The true knowledge, the essential knowledge in its pristine purity and potency is thus seen to be not merely an intellectual ideation of the truth; it is above everything else a "realisation", in the completest sense of the term, — a knowledge by absolute identity, tādātmya-jñāna.
And, at bottom, this is the nature of spiritual knowledge, transcending the cannons of mental reason and surpassing the reach of finite thought.
We are now in a position to consider the question of the relation of knowledge and language and show why the content of any major spiritual experience is basically ineffable in any mind-made speech.
Why Ineffable?
"He sees the secret things no words can speak... The idea, the speech that labels more than it lights" (Savitri, Book I, Canto IV , p. 50.)
"He sees the secret things no words can speak...
The idea, the speech that labels more than it lights"
(Savitri, Book I, Canto IV , p. 50.)
41.Sri Aurobindo, Isha Upanishad (1951 ed.), pp. 166-67.
42.The Life Divine, p. 524.
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"All words belong to the world of appearance. (The Mother, Bulletin, August 1964, p. 91.) "There are a hundred ways of approaching the Supreme Reality and, as is the nature of the way taken, so will be the nature of the ultimate experience by which one passes into That which is ineffable, That of which no report can be given to the mind or expressed by any utterance." (The Life Divine, p. 470.)
"All words belong to the world of appearance.
(The Mother, Bulletin, August 1964, p. 91.)
"There are a hundred ways of approaching the Supreme Reality and, as is the nature of the way taken, so will be the nature of the ultimate experience by which one passes into That which is ineffable, That of which no report can be given to the mind or expressed by any utterance."
(The Life Divine, p. 470.)
Spiritual knowledge, we have had occasion to mention before, is in itself self-luminous, perfectly self-possessed and knowable by a supernormal, suprasensuous and supra-mental way of cognition; but the mystics invariably aver that it is by its very nature * unthinkable and ineffable. Thus, the Upanishadic Rishis are never tired of asserting that so far as the ultimate truth is concerned, "speech cannot reach there nor can the mind arrive at it", "avāṅmanasogocaram", "not with the mind has man the power to seize the Truth, no, nor with the words", "naiva vācā na manasā prāptum śakyo".43 For, the Goal the spiritual seekers aspire after is "unseen and incommunicable, unseizable, featureless, unthinkable, and unnameable," "adṛṣṭamavyavahāryam agrāhyam alakṣa-ṇam acintyam avyapadeśyam,"44 It is indeed "the Letterless", "amdtrah"45 utterly beyond the grasp of man-made speech.
But why this sentence of impotency passed against all mind-constructed language as a vehicle of communication of spiritual experience? Let us state in brief a few salient factors — the principal amongst them - responsible for this ineffability of mystic knowledge.
(A) Reality is not exhausted by the domain of objective external solidities seized by our normal senses and erroneously considered by our physical mind to be the only order of reality possible. There are different orders of reality of which the so-called objective and physical is only one and a most minor one at that. Our subjective spiritual experiences belong to a domain of happenings as real as - and in a true sense much more real than -the field of outward physical events. Simply because this realm of
43.Katha Vpanishad, II. 3.12.
44.Mandukya Upanishad, 7.
45.Ibid., 12
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spiritual reality is beyond the reach of man's normal experience and the grasp of his surface external perception and cognition, this should not be deemed a mere figment of the mystic's illusive imagination. But the knowledge of the truths of this domain, otherwise called 'spiritual knowledge', has to be gained by other means than the conceptual discursive process of mind: discursive knowledge fails as an organ for grasping reality. It is only by the progressive opening of the consciousness towards spiritual experience and by breaking through the immured confines of our mind that we can expect to attain to these truths of the spiritual and normally superconscient reality. For, "these experiences... are not mental constructions, nor vital movements; they are essential things, not things merely thought but realities, not mentally felt but felt in our very underlying substance and essence."46
And, hence, it is quite easy to comprehend that those who have not, through the vertical leap of their consciousness, received these spiritual verities in their realised knowledge, can never be given any adequate representation of these things, however wide and far they might horizontally stretch their mental awareness. We remember in this connection the witty remark of E. Rosenstock: "He who has never prayed, to him the meaning of the name of God is for ever closed, even if he would search through all the dictionaries!"47
Indeed, the content of a spiritual experience cannot be verbally communicated to one who has not lived it. As the Katha Upanishad has so long ago declared:
"The self-born has set the doors of the body to face outwards, therefore the soul of a man gazes outward and not at the self within: hardly a wise man here and there, desiring immortality, turns his eyes inward and sees the self within him."48
(B) Our mind-consciousness suffers from some intrinsic limitations which make it absolutely incompetent to understand the nature or operations of spiritual perception and reception of knowledge. For example, mind as a cognitive medium is basically
46. Letters on Yoga, p. 169. 47. See Samuel Hugo Bergman, "Philosophy and Religion" in Actes du Xlème Congrès International de Philosophie (Bruxelles, 1953), p. 13.
48. "parāñci khāni vyatṛṇat svayaṁbhustasmāt parāṅ paśyati nāntarātman, kaścitdhiraḥ pratyagātmanamaikṣad āvṛttacakṣuramṛtatvam icchan."
(Katha Upanishad, II, I.I: Sri Aurobindo's translation.)
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analytic and divisive in its nature. The idea of measure and separation and distinction is inherent in all its operations. Unity and Infinity, the hall-mark of genuinely profound spiritual knowledge, are shadowy to its vision and conception, and hence, as far as the mind consciousness is concerned, what is spiritually perceived as Unity and Infinity remains ipso facto indescribable and incommunicable. As Sri Aurobindo has pointed out:
"Mind can conceive with precision divisions as real; it can conceive a synthetic totality or the finite extending itself indefinitely; it can grasp aggregates of divided things and the sameness underlying them; but the ultimate unity and absolute infinity are to its consciousness of things abstract notions and unseizable quantities, not something that is real to its grasp."49
How then, through the miraculous agency of what kind of mind-made speech, can the mystic expect to convey to the analytical dividing mental consciousness the true nature of the unitary spiritual consciousness in which he lives?
(C)The Absolute, one of the essential goals of all serious and sincere spiritual pursuit, is in itself indefinable by mental reason, and has to be approached through ever growing and heightening and deepening experience alone. Our mind sees only the relatives, it vaguely surmises the existence of something which has to be the truth, the source and the continent of all relatives, yet exceeding them all, however enlarged and global the relative might be. "We see by reason that such an Absolute must exist; we become by spiritual experience aware of its existence: but even when we are most aware of it, we cannot describe it because our language and thought can deal only with the relative. The Absolute is for us the Ineffable."50
(D)The highest spiritual knowledge is something that self-exists always, one and whole, holding Time in its secure grasp, and seeing past, present and future in a single regard. But this trikāla-darśitā, this impeccable Vision of eternal simultaneity, is, for mind, something impossible even to conceive of, leave aside to realise. Mind has to think out in sequential steps, necessarily separating what are inseparable in the spiritual regard, thus vitiating the proper comprehension of the reality. We may recall here the enigmatic but pregnant utterance of Rishi Pippalada:
49.The Life Divine, p. 126.
50.Ibid., 376.
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"Children of death are the letters when they are used as three, the embracing and the inseparable letters."51
Sri Aurobindo too warns us against the illusion of mind-made speech,52 invented and brought into use by the temporal consciousness of man, when we happen to employ it in order to conceive in terms of Time things that have their origin and spiritual validity only in the Eternal. Indeed, what is meant by 'the awareness of the beginningless, endless, evernew moment,' a fact of capital importance in the supreme spiritual consciousness, cannot be verbally expressed to one who himself has not experienced that realisation.
(E) Our mental nature and mental thought are fundamentally based on a consciousness of the finite; the supreme spiritual perception is, on the contrary, native to a consciousness of the infinite. Thus the standards and forms of mental cognition and thought are altogether insufficient to judge or appreciate the highest spiritual knowledge. It is, for example, beyond the grasp of mental perception or formulation to understand or describe what Sri Aurobindo has called 'supramental nature'. "A mental description of supramental nature could only express itself either in phrases which are too abstract or mental figures which might turn it into something quite different from its reality... mental ideas and formulations cannot decide anything or arrive at any precise definition or determination; because they are not near enough to the law and self-vision of supramental Nature."53
Thus, when the Mother was asked to give an idea of the true perception of the physical world as viewed through the supramental eye, She had to plead inability to do so. Here are Her own words:
"It is just that which one cannot say! When you have the vision and the consciousness of the order of truth Of what is direct, the direct expression of the truth, you have immediately an impression of something inexpressible, because all words belong to the other domain; all images, comparisons, expressions belong to the other domain.
"I had this great difficulty precisely all the time (it was the 29th February) during which I lived in this consciousness of the direct
51.Prashna Upanishad, V.6 (Sri Aurobindo's translation).
52.See The Life Divine, p. 76.
53.Ibid., p. 966.
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manifestation of the Truth, I tried to formulate what I was feeling, what I was seeing - it was impossible. There were no words. And immediately, the mere formula itself caused an instantaneous fallback into the other consciousness...
"I believe one can say nothing. I do not feel myself capable of saying, because whatever one says means only approximations which are not interesting...
"We are obliged to use words,that move, because for us everything moves, but this change of consciousness is not a movement - it is not a movement.. So then how can you speak of that, describe that?...
"Even if we say, 'it is a state taking the place of another', 'take the place of, immediately we introduce movement... all words are like that, what is it we are able to say?"54(Italics ours.)
(F) Another insuperable difficulty that the mystics have to face, while seeking to give expression to their spiritual knowledge, is that the level of consciousness at which any mental formulation of spiritual experience becomes possible, is far, far below the level at which the experience is. actually realised. Thus, our mind-consciousness being as it is at present, - a power and faculty of half-enlightened ignorance, - the very incompatibility of the two levels - the level of experience and that of formulation - renders the mentalisation of spiritual knowledge dead and dry and devoid of all real substance. In one of Her talks with one of Her disciples, the Mother has so beautifully explained this point that we feel tempted to quote from it in extenso:
"All that happens to us in the spiritual world, always we have the tendency to translate mentally.... What Sri Aurobindo calls 'taking mental possession of the experience'... is done, so to say, almost automatically; unfortunately, the best part of the experience escapes always. To keep it intact, one must remain in the state where the experience is not mentalised... But if you want to transform life, if you want the spiritual experience to have an effect on the mind and the vital and the body, upon everyday action, indispensably you have to try to translate it mentally and accept the inevitable diminution until the day when the mind itself will be transformed and be capable of participating in the experience without deforming it....
54. Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, August 1964, pp. 81-83.
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"This transformation is just the most difficult point for the ordinary mind to accept, because it means that almost the faculty itself must be changed. All the functions have to be changed for the transformation to be possible. And we are so much accustomed to identify the faculty with the function that one doubts whether it is at all possible to think except in the manner in which one thinks ordinarily.
"It is only possible when one has the experience of a complete silence in the mental region and when the spiritual force, with its light and power comes down through the mind and makes it act directly without following its usual method of analysis and deduction and reasoning. All these faculties that are considered as the normal activities of the mind must be stopped and the spiritual Light, Consciousness and Power must be able to express themselves directly without the need of going through these means....
"But before we arrive there, all our experiences in order to reach the external consciousness must needs pass through the ordinary mental method of observation, analysis and deduction, and then the very essence of the experience vanishes, there remains only a kind of very dark bark that has lost all its power of realisation — almost, almost lost.
"For people who have a predominant intellectual activity, this is an almost absolute necessity; they must needs seize everything, all inner experiences, and begin to formulate them. If, besides, they have a power of expression, they try to arrange them in words and phrases. But when you have lived these experiences and when you have perceived this fall, this descending line between experience and expression, you see at each step the profound reality of the experience receding, fading away into the background instead of being in front and dominating the whole being. It recedes slowly and what remains outside is only a kind of dry and cold imitation.... And this power to formulate, you pay dearly for if."55 (Italics ours)
(G) Another interesting feature of all deep spiritual experience places it beyond the pale of mental formulation in self-consistent terms. We are referring to the indefinable nature of the Supreme Reality. Because of its nature of supra-rational inalienable Unity, it is absolutely free from all mental formulations, however comprehensive
55. Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, August 1963, pp. 31-35.
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these may be. Thus, when we seek to envisage It by the mind, we have perforce to proceed through an unending succession of separate conceptions and affirmations; yet in the end we come to realise that we have to negate even our largest conceptions and the so-termed most comprehensive experience: the Reality indeed exceeds all definitions.
Thus the ancient sages of India spoke of Brahman, the supreme Reality, both negatively and positively, in apparently contradictory terms. They said of It: 'neti, neti,' 'It is not this, It is not that, It is not anything formulable.' But at the same time they took care to affirm: 'It is this, It is that, It is all', 'iti, iti'. They spoke of it as 'the Eternity that is the all-containing ever-new moment, and 'the Infinity which is the same all-containing all-pervading point, without magnitude.' Speaking about the Atman or Self, the Katha Upanishad nonchalantly affirms in the same breath: "Finer than the fine, huger than the huge... Seated He journeys far off, lying down He goes everywhere."56 The Rishi of the Isha Upanishad also speaks in the same vein: "One unmoving that is swifter than the mind... That, standing, passes beyond others as they run.... That moves and That moves not; That is far and the same is near; That is within all this and That also is outside all this."57
And we cannot fail to recall in this connection the delectable utterance of Sri Aurobindo:
"It is the cosmic and the supracosmic spirit,... the Ever Unborn who is endlessly born, the Infinite who is innumerably finite, the multitudinous One, the complex Simple, the many-sided Single, the Word of the Silence Ineffable, the impersonal omnipresent Person, the Mystery, translucent in highest consciousness to its own spirit, but to a lesser consciousness veiled in its own exceeding light and impenetrable for ever."58
Now, how would the logical mind react to these self-contradictory affirmations about the supreme Reality which is,in fact, untranslatable into intellectual terms? The dimensional mind may
56."aṇoraṇīyān mahato mahīyān... āsino dūraṁ vrajati śayāno yāti sarvataḥ." (Katha Upanishad, 1-2, 20, 21.)
57."anéjadekaṁ manaso javīyo... taddhāvato'nyānatyeti tiṣṭhat... tadejati tannai-jati tad dure ladvantike. Tadantarasya sarvasya tadu sarvasyāsya bāhyataḥ" (Isha Upanishad, 4, 5. Sri Aurobindo's translation.)
58.The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 283.
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very well exclaim: "These so-called statements are no statements of fact at all; they signify nothing but arrant nonesense, a froth of mystifying verbiage meaning nothing. For, these declarations of the mystics contradict an incontrovertible fact of existence formulated in the 'Law of Contradictions' which states: 'Two opposing and conflicting affirmations cannot both be true.' Thus, these irreconciliable opposites constitute but a mass of logical contradictions and are hence intellectually false and impossible in reality."
And, then, perhaps with a wise smile, the rational mentality may declare: "Ah, it is for this element of confused thinking, this blissfully chaotic state of awareness harbouring irreconciliable logical opposites, that the mystics plead the ineffability of their experience! Poor souls! they do not know that they are suffering from an illusion."
As a matter of fact, such is the view forcefully expressed by a thinker in the course of his paper "La Notion d"Ineffable' et la Psychologie Comparée des Religions" submitted to the 21st session of the International Congress of Philosphy, held at Brussells in 1953. (The interested reader may consult pages 91-96 of Volume XI of the published Proceedings of the Congress.)
The men of the spirit will simply smile at the presumptuous claim of the logical mind to judge the validity or otherwise of spiritual experiences with the tiny probe of intellectual reason. For anyone having the genuine spiritual knowledge knows for certain that these conflicts of terms referred to above, although appearing so grotesque to the canons of mental logic, are yet accurately expressive of something that the mystics perceive in their spiritual awareness. In the spiritual knowledge of the Reality, there is no mutual cancellation of the statements, no incompatibility: one group of statements is but complementary to the other; it is, as Sri Aurobindo has pointed out, 'the dual statement of a single inescapable fact by human reason in human language' and this happens, "when mind and speech have passed beyond their natural limits and are striving to express a Reality in which their own conventions and necessary opposition disappear into an ineffable identity."59
Otherwise, what to the dimensional mind are but irreconciliable
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opposites, are "to the constant vision and experience of the supramental Truth-consciousness... so simply and inevitably the intrinsic nature of each other that even to think of them as contraries is an unimaginable violence."60
But how to clothe this vision and experience in man-made speech and how to convey to the mortal mind an adequate representation of this supernal knowledge? That is not possible and, hence, ineffable is its name.
(H) Finally, there is one more factor, perhaps overtopping all others, that makes spiritual knowledge practically ineffable to mind, in the sense of its verbal incommunicability. We are speaking of the disparateness in the fields of experience that the mystics and average men respectively command.
After all, what is a language for? Whatever else language is, one of its principal functions is to establish a meaningful communication between man and man. Now a linguistic communication is evidently a transaction between two parties, who may be conventionally designated as 'speaker' and 'hearer'. Thus the problem of communication resolves itself into two correlative functions of expression and understanding; what the speaker intends to convey and what the hearer interprets to understand.When the intention and the interpretation coincide, the language transaction may be said to be successful.
Now, "a communication or language transaction is nothing but the use of symbols in such a way that acts of reference occur in the hearer which are similar in all relevant respects to those which are symbolized by them in the speaker."61
But this condition is very difficult to satisfy even under ordinary circumstances. Do we not know that all forms of fallacy that are discussed in logic can be reduced to ignorantia elenchi or 'ignorance of terms'? And did not one great physicist feel exasperated when he saw the philosophers interpreting the language of physics in a way in which it was not intended to be, thus leading to various erroneous conclusions which leave the professional physicists flabbergasted.62
60.The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 283.
61.C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (London, 1923), p. 207.
62.See Philipp Frank, Foundation of Physics (Vol. I, No. 7 of The International Encyclopedia of Unified Science).
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Now, even if we consider that the 'speaker' on his part, in order to communicate his experiences, has succeeded in creating an ideal language which contains, in the words of W. Sellars, "a designation for every element in every state of affairs, past, present and future; that, in other words, claims to mirror the world by a complete and systematic one-to-one correspondence of designations",63 how to ensure that the 'hearer' will interpret in the right way the linguistic symbols employed by the 'speaker'?
And this problem of meaning becomes impossible of solution, when we have in view the situation in which the 'speaker' is a mystic reporting about his spiritual experiences and the 'hearer' happens to be a person of normal mental consciousness, having no direct and immediate access to the experiences in question. For, "even when they speak the same language it is a different order of perception to which the language refers, the products of two different grades of consciousness."64
Thus there subsists between the two levels of consciousness a yawning gulf that no verbal communication can ever expect to bridge.
We have so far considered the question of the ineffability of spiritual knowledge from the point of view of the verbal incommunicability of the data of this knowledge to a 'hearer' still hooked to the binding-post of conceptual thought erected by the 'mortal mind'. But a question may be'mooted: Apart from the extrinsic factor of a particular hearer's incapacity, are thought and speech intrinsically barred from becoming the vehicles of expression of the spiritual Reality?
Before we can expect to receive an answer to this question, we must be clear in our mind about what we mean by 'thought' and 'speech'. For, there are thoughts and thoughts, the verbal conceptual thought being no more than a minor form of them; and there are other types of speeches far transcending the capabilities of our ordinary human language.
63.Wilfred Sellars, "Realism and the New Way of Words", H. Feigl and W. Sellars, Readings in Philosophical Analysis (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949), p. 424.
64.Letters on Yoga, p. 191.
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"But most her gaze pursued the birth of thought."
(Savitri, Book VII, Canto VI, p. 538.)
"A wisdom waiting on Omniscience
Sat voiceless in a vast passivity;
It judged not, measured not, nor strove to know,
But listened for the veiled all-seeing Thought"
(Ibid., Book II, Canto XV, p. 300.)
"For Thought transcends the circles of mortal mind,
It is greater than its earthly instrument"
(Ibid., Book II, Canto XI, p. 260.)
The human mind, in its acquisition and deliberation of knowledge, leans so heavily upon the conceptual thought-process that it erroneously considers that to be the highest or at least the main process of knowledge. And so far as the verbal thought is concerned, to many thinkers thought and its corresponding verbal formulation are altogether inseparable - so much are they accustomed to thinking with words. This idea of the all-importance of words ('words' in the broadest sense of the term) in the task of comprehending the reality and giving it a thought-form, has been variously expressed by different philosophers. Thus:
"There is no experience without words."... "There is no such thing as a silent reflection."... "The competent seizes the essence without the mediacy of any figure, simply by pronouncing it."... "We pronounce the Universal."... "The pure Being is uttered."... "A value is discovered only to a speaking consciousness."... "There is no thought outside of words."... "A thought seeking to self-exist, without any accompanying words, would not exist at all."... "Language does not accompany a thought already made, rather accomplishes it."... "The word is not the extrinsic sign of the thought; it constitutes the outer existence of the sense."65
Such, then, is the prime importance attached by the rational intelligence of man to thought and its verbal formulation for the reception and possession of knowledge. But to the mystics' deeper
65. For these expressions, acknowledgement is due to Yvon Bellaval, Les Philosophes et leur Langage, pp. 146, 176, 62, 58, 185, 60.
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vision of things, they appear in quite a different light.
In the spiritual order thought is indeed a secondary and by no means an indispensable process. And in its form of verbal thought, it can almost be considered, as Sri Aurobindo has put it, "a concession made by Knowledge to the Ignorance, because that Ignorance is incapable of making truth wholly lucid and intelligible to itself in all its extent and manifold implications except through the clarifying precision of significant sounds; it cannot do without this device to give to ideas an exact outline and an expressive body."66
But, evidently, this verbal garb is for the essential thought-operation only a useful device and machinery; and, since it is a device, it can be very well dispensed with under favourable circumstances - that is to say, when thought leaves the arena of conceptual formulation and ascends to its own higher forms. For, thought in itself, as distinct from its dispensable verbal trappings, is in its origin on the higher levels of spiritual consciousness, not a conception as such but a perception, a regard of the subject upon itself or something of itself as object. To quote Sri Aurobindo:
"In mind there is a surface response of perception to the contact of an observed or discovered object, fact or truth and a consequent conceptual formulation of it; but in the spiritual light there is a deeper perceptive response from the very substance of consciousness and a comprehending formulation in that substance, an exact figure of the revelatory ideograph in the stuff of the being, -nothing more, no verbal representation is needed for the precision and completeness of this thought knowledge."67 (Italics ours).
But yet, we must point out, this seeing thought is not essential or indispensable for the reception or possession of spiritual knowledge. Thought, however high or however spiritual in character, is but a minor and secondary result or accompaniment of a deeper spiritual sight-cognition, never a means of acquirement of this knowledge. Thought, a comparatively external and superficial regard of the subject upon itself, "creates a representative image of truth; it offers that to the mind as a means of holding Truth and making it an object of knowledge; but the body itself of Truth is caught and exactly held in the sunlight of a deeper spiritual sight to which the representative figure created by thought is secondary
66.The Life Divine, p. 945.
67.ibid, p. 945.
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and derivative, powerful for communication of knowledge, but not indispensable for reception or possession of knowledge."68 (Italics ours).
Thus, we have already noted in the description by Sri Aurobindo of one of his major spiritual experiences69 that there was absolutely no need of concepts or words or of any other thought-appendages; for the knowledge was received directly through the pure consciousness and not through the mind. Not merely that: we have seen, too, that any attempt at formulating the experience in terms of thought brings one back to the level of intellection, losing in the process much of the life of the experience.70
But this difficulty intervenes only when one seeks to clothe the spiritual experience in the garb of intellectual thought. But there is another kind of thought - not intellectual in its character - which "springs out as if it were a body or form of the experience or of the consciousness involved in it - or of a part of that consciousness... It has another light, another power in it, a sense within the sense. It is very clearly so with those thoughts that come without the need of words to embody them, thoughts that are of the nature of a direct seeing in the consciousness, even a kind of intimate sense and contact formulating itself into a precise expression of its awareness."71
As a matter of fact, with each step of our ascension through a graded series of planes and powers of consciousness which lead us through 'the domains of Other-Mind into the Beyond-Mind', we encounter a different kind of thought, different in potency as well as in character. Let us follow in brief this march of the ascending Thought.
The normal thought-action of the mind is constituted of a triple motion. First and lowest is the habitual thought mind which itself has two movements: one, a kind of constant undercurrent of mechanically recurrent thought; the other, more actively working upon all new experience and reducing it to formulas of habitual
68.The Life Divine, p. 945.
69.See p. 156 supra.
70.See the Mother's words quoted on p. 163 supra.
71.Letters on Yoga, pp. 176-77.
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thinking. A second grade of thinking activity is the pragmatic idea mind that acts creatively as a mediator between the idea and the life-power. The thought is only or mainly interesting to the soul on this mental level as a means for a large range of action and experience. A third gradation of thinking opens in us the pure ideative mind whose whole object is to have the delight of ideation, the search for truth, the effort to know itself and the world. This ideative mind is the highest reach of the intellect acting in its own power and for its own purpose.72
Now, once we cross the confines of the ordinary mind of man, we encounter on our ascending climb a series of hierarchised luminous planes of consciousness serving as links and bridges between the now normal waking mind of non-spiritual humanity and the native heights of pure spiritual being. These planes are in the ascending order:
(i) the Higher Mind; (ii) the Illumined Mind; (iii) the Intuitive Mind; (iv) the Overmind; and finally (v) the Supermind or Gnosis, the plane of absolute and everlasting Light, that transcends altogether the aparārdha or the lower hemisphere of existence.
The Higher Mind is the first plane of spiritual mind-consciousness to which the first ascent out of our normal mentalility takes us. This is a Mind of automatic and spontaneous knowledge, knowledge assuming the nature of truth-Thought. For, "its special character, its activity of consciousness are dominated by Thought; it is a luminous thought-mind, a mind of spirit-born conceptual knowledge."73
The kind of cognition characteristic of the Higher Mind, 'the spiritual parent of our conceptive mental ideation,' is the first that we acquire when we rise from the purlieus of conceptive and ratiocinative mind. "But here in this greater Thought there is no need of a seeking and self-critical ratiocination, no logical motion step by step towards a conclusion, no mechanism of express or implied deductions and inferences, no building or deliberate concatenation of idea with idea in order to arrive at an ordered sum or outcome of knowledge.... This higher consciousness is a Knowledge formulating itself on a basis of self-existent all-awareness. ... It can freely express itself in single ideas, but its most
72.This particular paragraph is an adapted version of pages 811 and 812 of Sri Aurobindo's The Synthesis of Yoga.
73.The Life Divine, p. 939.
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characteristic movement is a mass ideation, a system or totality of truth-seeing at a single view; the relations of idea with idea, of truth with truth are not established by logic but are pre-existent and emerge already self-seen in the integral whole.... This Thought is a self-revelation of eternal Wisdom, not an acquired knowledge."74
Beyond the plane of the Higher Mind of Truth-Thought lies the plane of the Illumined Mind of Truth-Sight, which works primarily by spiritual vision and not by thought: thought is here only a subordinate and secondary movement expressive of sight. And we know that "a consciousness that proceeds by sight, the consciousness of the seer, is a greater power for knowledge than the consciousness of the thinker. The perceptual power of the inner sight is greater and more direct than the perceptual power of thought: it is a spiritual sense that seizes something of the substance of Truth and not only her figure; but it outlines the figure also and at the same time catches the significance of the figure, and it can embody her with a finer and bolder revealing outline and a larger comprehension and power of totality than thought-conception can manage."75
Thus the Illumined Mind makes accessible to us, through the agencies of truth-sight and truth-light, a power of cognition far greater than that of the Higher Mind. It is a Mind where
"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."76
Next in the order of ascension is the Intuitive Mind whose characteristic power is an intimate and exact truth-perception which is much more than mere sight or conception: it is the result of a revealing encounter carrying in it as its natural consequence a truth-sight and truth-conception. "It is when the consciousness of
74.The Life Divine, p. 940.
75.Ibid., p. 945.
76.Savitri, Book X, canto IV, p. 660.
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the subject meets with the consciousness in the object, penetrates it and sees, feels or vibrates with the truth of what it contacts, that the intuition leaps out like a spark or lightning-flash from the shock of the meeting; or when the consciousness, even without any such meeting, looks into itself and feels directly and intimately the truth or the truths that are there or so contacts the hidden forces behind appearances, then also there is the outbreak of intuitive light; or, again, when the consciousness meets the Supreme reality or the spiritual reality of things and beings and has a contactual union with it, then the spark, the flash or the blaze of intimate truth perception is lit in its depths."77
The thought, in the Intuitive Mind, is revelatory in character and it proceeds by a fourfold power: "an intuition that suggests its idea, an intuition that discriminates, an inspiration that brings in its word and something of its greater substance, and a revelation that shapes to the sight its very face and body of reality."78
Beyond the plane of the intuitive Mind is a superconscient cosmic Mind which possesses a power of cosmic consciousness, a principle of global knowledge. In the wide cosmic perception of the Overmind
"Ideas are phalanxed like a group of sums;
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."79
In the overmind, thought "no longer seems to originate individually in the body or the person but manifests from above or comes in upon the cosmic mind-waves: all inner individual sight or intelligence of things is now a revelation or illumination of what is seen or comprehended, but the source of the revelation is not in one's separate self but in the universal knowledge."80
The Overmind links the lower hemisphere of knowledge-Ignorance with the supramental Gnosis or Truth-Consciousness, but at the same time veils from our sight the greater Truth of the
77.The Life Divine, pp. 946-47.
78.The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 783.
79.Savitri, Book X, Canto IV, p. 660.
80.The Life Divine, p. 950.
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Supermind. The cosmic Thoughts of this overmental plane of consciousness, proceeding luminously from the truth, constitute the 'golden lid covering the face of the truth' ('hiraṇmayena pātreṇa satyasyāpihitaṁ mukhaṁ: Isha Upanishad, 15.) In order to seize the truth in its unalloyed and unmitigated Glory, we have to make a last supreme ascent in the climb of our spiritual consciousness and break through the shining shield of Overmind into the realm of the immortal Supermind where, to borrow a Vedic image, one does not see the Truth "by reflection in a mental organ of vision, but with the Sun of gnosis itself as his eye."81
An intrinsic and infallible self-illumination, a revelation of light out of itself and not as a delivery out of darkness, a pure awareness of the self-truth of things, not by thought but by identity, a knowledge of the self by the self and in the self, ātmani ātmānam ātmanā: such, then, is the method of cognition of the supramental consciousness.
Now, what is the place or role of thought in the supramental gnosis? Evidently, thought here is merely a derivative movement, not the determining noetic force; an instrument for expression of knowledge, not one for arriving at it. "Thought and speech being representations and not... direct possession in the consciousness are to the supermind a lesser form and, if not filled with the spiritual awareness, thought becomes in fact a diminution of knowledge. For it would be, supposing it to be a supramental thought, only a partial manifestation of a greater knowledge existing in the self but not at the time present to the immediately active consciousness. In the highest ranges of the infinite there need be no thought at all because all would be experienced spiritually, in continuity, in eternal possession and with an absolute directness and completeness. Thought is only one means of partially manifesting and presenting what is hidden in this greater self-existent knowledge."82
We have been discussing the place of thought in the supreme kind of supramental knowing. But before this highest state of cognition is attained, in whose ineffable identity there is no further division between the knower, the knowledge and the known, jñātā, jñānam, jñeyam, thought - and by that we mean of course the supramental thought - plays indeed an important role. For, the
81.The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 462.
82.Ibid., p. 950.
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supramental thought, as Sri Aurobindo has indicated, has three elevations of its intensity: (i) one of direct thought vision; (ii) another of interpretative vision pointing to and preparatory of the revelatory idea-sight; (iii) a third or representative vision. To have a clear grasp of the nature of these levels, let us refer to the words of Sri Aurobindo:
"The supramental thought is a form of the knowledge by identity and a development, in the idea, of the truth presented to the supramental vision. The identity and the vision give the truth in its essence, its body and its parts in a single view: the thought translates this direct consciousness and immediate power of the truth into idea-knowledge and will. It adds or need add otherwise nothing new, but reproduces, articulates, moves round the body of the knowledge.
"Where, however, the identity and the vision are still incomplete, the supramental thought has a larger office and reveals, interprets or recalls as it were to the soul's memory what they are not yet ready to give. And where these greater states and powers are still veiled, the thought comes in front and prepares and to a certain extent effects a partial rending or helps actively in the removal of the veil."83 [Italics ours]
We have followed the ascending march of Thought in its evergrowing capacity of embodying the spiritual vision of things and seen that, even at its supreme elevation, it remains a secondary and derivative power at a certain remove from the corresponding spiritual knowledge. But what about Speech? Has this, too, an analogous ascending march? And how far can it go in its attempt at formulating the ineffable?
The Ascent of Speech
"He is the Wisdom that comes not by thought,
His wordless silence brings the immortal word."
(Savitri, Book XI, Canto I, p. 681.)
83. The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 804.
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"High seers, moved poets saw the eternal thoughts
....
Seized the great words which now are frail sounds caught
By difficult rapture on a mortal tongue."
(ibid., Book XI. Canto I, p. 677.)
"Brahman is not, cannot be expressed by the Word...
Brahman is not expressed by speech, but speech is itself expressed by Brahman."
(Sri Aurobindo, The Upanishads, p. 171.)
Man is the 'Linguistic primate' par excellence. Homo sapiens is indeed Homo loquax. No sub-human biological species, not excluding the infra-human primates, exhibits the power of systematizing vocal symbols, whose other name is speech-making. It is human mind's characteristic tendency to view reality symbolically that has led man first to the stage of concept-formation and then to the actualization of the power to employ vocal symbols to represent these concepts. For, as has been pointed out by A.D. Ritchie, "the essential act of thought is symbolization"84. And, so far as language is concerned, "it is best to admit that language is primarily a vocal actualization of the tendency to see reality symbolically, that it is precisely this quality which renders it a fit instrument for communication."85
Now, man has sought throughout history a progressively better adaptation of verbal processes to the world of reality; for, he has felt that by means of this verbal symbolization, he shall be able to hold in permanent security all the treasures of knowledge he may have gained. For, is it not language fulfilling its function of expression, that "lifts us from the sensible immediacy to the level of the concept; from the antepredicative to the predicative; from the pre-reflexive to the reflexive; and, finally, from the instant to the permanence behind temporality?"86
But the question is: Is man justified in his expectation that he will be able to seize reality in its entirety through the mediation of linguistic symbols properly enriched? How far is the reach of manmade
84.A.D. Ritchie, The Natural History of the Mind (London, 1936), pp. 278-79.
85.Edward Sapir, "Language", Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, p. 159.
86.Yvon Bellaval, op. cit., pp. 198-99
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speech to express all possible knowledge? And what is the status of the vocal symbols in relation to the reality they claim to embody or express? Are they mere tags, arbitrary substitutional signs, extrinsically related to the object of knowledge? Or, on the contrary, do they inviolably inhere in the reality from which they are inseparable? Or, perhaps, they play the role of "insight symbols" that 'do not point to or lead to, but they lead into'.87
Before seeking satisfactory answers to these questions, we would at the very outset clear one possible point of confusion. We know that men of spiritual knowledge, in all lands and at all times, have not altogether remained mute and silent; rather, they have sought to disseminate their knowledge far and wide and for that purpose they have employed the verbal medium as one of the most potent means. They have talked about their experiences and that, too, sometimes quite at length. Then why speak of the so-called ineffability of mystic-spiritual knowledge?
Let us suggest a solution to this apparent paradox. The first thing to note in this connection is that the supreme Reality in Itself is, absolutely and under all possible circumstances, ineffable by a mind-created speech, as it is indefinable and inconceivable by finite and defining mind. Thus no mystic would like to claim for himself the doubtful distinction "of sitting down to speak of the Ineffable, think of the Unthinkable, comprehend the Incommunicable and Unknowable."88
But apart from this 'ultimate realisation of the ultimate Ineffable', which has to be received directly by an unformulable spiritual experience in the very substance of our consciousness, there are penultimate realisations, so to say, of which some sort of an account becomes possible. Thus, Sri Aurobindo, referring to "an experience in a luminous silence of the mind which looks up into the boundlessness of the last illimitable silence into which it is to pass and disappear,"89 remarks:
"Before that unspeakable experience of the Ultimate or disappearance into it, there is possible a descent of at least some Power or Presence of the Reality into the substance of mind along with a
87.For a discussion of the three types of symbols: (a) extrinsic or arbitrary, (b) intrinsic or descriptive, and (c) insight symbols, see W.M. Urban, Language and Reality, pp. 414-16.
88.Letters on Yoga. p. 184.
89.Ibid., p. 183.
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modification of mind-substance, an illumination of it, and of this experience an expression of some kind, a rendering into thought ought to be possible. Or let us suppose the Ineffable and Unknowable may have aspects, presentations of it that are not utterly unthinkable and ineffable."90
We would like to draw the attention of the reader to the underlined portions of the above citation from Sri Aurobindo, which we have ourselves done in order to emphasise the relative nature of the effability.
But, what is more, even this relative effability can be attained only if we agree to the creation of a plastic logic and a plastic speech. In other words, while using mind-made speech, we must take especial care to steer clear of all rigid definitions and petrified idea-associations. We cannot do better than quote in this connection what Sri Aurobindo has said on this point:
"In order to express this experience or this idea with any nearness a language has to be created which is at once intuitively metaphysical and revealingly poetic, admitting significant and living images as the vehicle of a close, suggestive and vivid indication, - a language such as we find hammered out into a subtle and pregnant massiveness in the Veda and the Upanishads. In the ordinary tongue of metaphysical thought we have to be content with a distant indication, an approximation by abstractions.... The intellect must consent to pass out of the bounds of a finite logic and accustom itself to the logic of the infinite. On this condition alone, by this way of seeing and thinking, it ceases to be paradoxical or futile to speak of the ineffable: but if we insist on applying a finite logic to the Infinite, the omnipresent Reality will escape us and we shall grasp instead an abstract shadow, a dead form petrified into speech or a hard incisive graph which speaks of the reality but does not express it."91
But even at its best, with the utmost plasticity imparted to it, human speech used as a vehicle of spiritual verities, can only be considered as suggestive and perhaps evocative but never representative: it can carry clues and not copies, hints and not photographs, signals and not icons.
At this point the discerning reader may feel intrigued and wonder why, referring to the inaptitude of speech, we have taken
90.Letters on Yoga. p. 184.
91.The Life Divine, p. 323.
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care to qualify it with the epithet 'human'. Does it mean, then, that there are forms of super-human speech bearing superior potencies?
Yes, so it is. When the apostle St. John declares that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God",92 he is certainly not speaking of any mind-made word we know of. Similarly, when the Vedic mystic affirms that all world is a creation by the Word, he is referring to some supreme form of Speech, the vāk brahma of Indian esoteric schools.
In the words of Sri Aurobindo, "the Supermind using the Word is the creative Logos"93. And it is because of this all-determining power of the primal Speech (vāk) that the 'Creator of the Worlds' (prajāpati) has been designated in the Rig-Veda as the 'Lord of Speech, the ordainer of everything' (vacaspatiṁ visvakarmā-nam)94; for 'Speech' is verily His power of creation: 'Speech is no other than Brahman Himself (yāvad brahma biṣṭhitam tāvati vāk95).
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 (cātvāri vāk parimitā padāni96) of which the first three are concealed from human awareness (guhā trīṇi niṅitā neṅgayanti") and it is only the lowest and the fourth98 that has come to our ken. The supreme Vak bares herself only to the inmost perception of the highest Seer (uto tvasmai tanvaṁ vi sasre99) and then reveals Herself in his awakened consciousness as the mantra (dhīra manasā vācamakrata100).
And what is this mantra, otherwise called ṛk, gir and ukthal 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.
92.St. John, I. 1.
93.Sri Aurobindo, Kena Upanishad (1952 ed.), p. 39.
94.Rig-Veda, XI, 81.7.
95.Ibid., X. 114.8.
96.Ibid., I. 164. 45.
97.Ibid., I. 164, 45.
98.The vaikhari vāk of the Tantrik lore.
99.Rig-Veda, X. 71.4.
100. Ibid., X. 71.2.
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This then is the supreme divine Word, the divyā vāk or Gauri of the Rig Veda, that is reputed to be the original creative Power that builds up the universe of manifestation 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."101
But are we indulging in unnecessary obfuscation when we speak of the superhuman statuses of speech or of the primal Word of Prajapati being the agency for the creation of the world? Surely not: for a fuller acquaintance with the esoteric theory of sound and speech, the reader may be referred to the Commentary V (pages 35 to 41) of Sri Aurobindo's Kena Upanishad. We content ourselves with offering our readers only a few points along with a few citations taken from the above text.
The Upanishads speak of Brahman as being 'the Speech of our speech'. Evidently, when they do so, they mean a Speech beyond ours, "an absolute expression of which human language is only a shadow and as if an artificial counterfeit.102
In the same way, when the Veda avers that Brahma creates the forms of the universe by the Word, this Word must be taken to be something far, far beyond and above our power of mental construction. Moreover, "human speech at its highest merely attempts to recover by revelation and inspiration an absolute expression of truth which already exists in the Infinite above our mental comprehension."103 The most perfect speech so far evolved by man to embody his mystic experiences - the language of the Veda - is one such, for it is "śruti, a rhythm not composed by the intellect but heard, a divine Word that came vibrating out of the Infinite to the inner audience of the man who had previously made himself fit for the impersonal knowledge. The words themselves, dṛṣṭi and śruti, sight and hearing,... signify, in the esoteric terminology of the hymns, revelatory knowledge and the contents of inspiration.""104
Now, what is meant by the creative puissance of the Word? And what is the relation between sound and speech?
According to the mystics there is a creative vibration of sound
101.The Life Divine p. 26.
102.Sri Aurobindo, Kena Upanishad (1952 ed.), p. 35.
103.Ibid., p. 35.
104.Sri Aurobindo, On the Veda, p. 11.
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behind every formation, to whatever plane of existence it may belong. But this sound may not be necessarily heard by the 'mortal ears' nor may it be uttered by the 'mortal tongue'. As a matter of fact, the sound we ordinarily know of is only the lowest form, on the material plane, of a formative vibration that has its ultimate genesis in the Supreme and which has descended successively through the intervening planes of manifestation. Let us realise then that "a vibration of sound on the material plane presupposes a corresponding vibration on the vital without which it could not have come into play; that, again, presupposes a corresponding originative vibration on the mental; the mental presupposes a corresponding originative vibration on the supramental at the very root of things."105
Thus we may say that there are various modes of speech-vibration existing or manifesting on different planes of consciousness. As we are aware of the material mode of sound and speech, so we may come into contact, through the cultivation of spiritual knowledge, with a vital mode of sound and speech, a mental mode of sound and speech, and so on. Generally we employ the material mode of speech even to clothe knowledge that we may gain on other superior planes of existence and consciousness. But now we see that this attempt is bound to meet with partial success: a perfect transcription of experience and knowledge is possible only with a mode of speech appropriate to the plane of experience.
Thus, to express adequately the supramental knowledge, we have to take recourse to what can be called a 'supramental speech.' In order to make clear what we mean by this term, also to have some idea about the place and function of speech in the supramental cognition, we quote below in extenso from Sri Aurobindo:
"There is also a speech, a supramental word, in which the higher knowledge, vision or thought can clothe itself within us for expression. At first this may come down as a word, a message or an inspiration that descends to us from above or it may even seem a voice of the Self or of the Ishwara, vānī, ādeśa. Afterwards it loses that separate character and becomes the normal form of the th6ught when it expresses itself in the form of an inward speech. The thought may express itself without the aid of any suggestive or
105. Sri Aurobindo, Kena Upanishad (1952 ed,), pp.. 38-39.
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developing word and only - but still quite completely, explicitly and with its full contents - in a luminous substance of supra-mental perception. It may aid itself when it is not so explicit by a suggestive inward speech that attends it to bring out its whole significance. Or the thought may come not as silent perception but as speech self-born out of the truth and complete in its own right and carrying in itself its own vision and knowledge. Then it is the word revelatory, inspired or intuitive or of a yet greater kind capable of bearing the infinite intention or suggestion of the higher supermind and spirit.... The supramental word manifests inwardly with a light, a power, a rhythm of thought and a rhythm of inner sound that make it the natural and living body of the supramental thought and vision."106 [Italics ours]
But the difficulty with this supramental speech is that it is formed and heard in the intuitive mind or supermind itself and need not at first come out easily into human speech and writing. But Sri Aurobindo has assured us that with the supramental transformation of man's life and consciousness, and along with them of man's instrumental potencies, this final hurdle will be crossed, and "this is a part of the needed fullness and power of the integral perfection."107
The problem of knowledge and communication is not the only problem facing man as a species. He is also confronted with the problem of harmonious living. He wants to live in harmony with himself first of all, then with other individuals and with the society at large and finally with the world in general. But it is a patent fact that he has so far miserably failed in his attempt to do so. But why? What is the nature of the basic malady? And how will the New Man solve this problem in his life? The next three chapters are devoted to the consideration of these very important questions.
106.The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 806-07.
107.Ibid., p. 807.
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