The Ascent of Sight in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

Section IV:

Elements Involved in the Act of "Seeing"

There is much that we are going to say in the present Section and in the two or three Sections hereafter which may meet with derisive cynicism in the minds of those who have been brought up in the atmosphere of contemporary rational-scientific education. We make no attempt to convince these sceptics about the validity of the affirmations we are going to make in the course of our discussion. For the present essay is not a polemical one: it does not want to indulge in any sterile debate in its rather limited span. All that we are going to say is meant solely for those amongst our readers who want to know the truth in this matter with an open mind and unbiased disposition. We cannot but recall in this connection the witty prayer uttered by the ancients and quoted in the title page of Dr. Leslie D. Weatherhead's book Psychology, Religion and Healing:

From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth, From the laziness that is content with half-truths, From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth,

O God of Truth, deliver us.

Before we commence our discussion on the complex issue of the possibility of having different kinds of visions all valid and objectively real, we may very well cite a portion of a relevant letter of Sri Aurobindo addressed to the rather doubting mind of one of his beloved disciples:

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"...all this is not fancy or delusion, it is part of an occult science... [and is] not merely auto-suggestive or hallucinatory in its results, but, if one can get the key, veridical and verifiable. Your scepticism may be natural in a 'modem' man... natural but not justifiable, because very obviously inadequate to the facts observed; but once you have seen, the first thing you should do is to throw all this vapid pseudo-science behind you, this vain attempt to stick physical explanations on supraphysical things, and take the only rational course. Develop the power, get more and more experience, develop the consciousness by which these things come; as the consciousness develops, you will begin to understand and get the intuition of the significance." (Letters on Yoga, p. 938)

Enough for the prelude: let us now come to the discussion proper of our present thesis which affirms the almost infinite variability of supraphysical visions depending on the changes effected in the composition of the eight essential elements involved in any process of "seeing". These elements, as we have mentioned in Section III, are in brief: (1) the object; (2) the space; (3) the illuminating light; (4) any obstruction; (5) the sense organ; (6) sense action; (7) sense mind; and (8) the receiving consciousness. Now, none of these constitutive elements are at all simple belying the facile assumption of most men. Each of these eight constituents admits of many possible variations giving rise to many a kind of sights and visions through the mere permutation and combination of the widely varying constitutive elements. Element by element, we are now going to mention in brief a few possible alternative variations in each case.

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