The Ascent of Sight in Sri Aurobindo's Savitri

Seventh Element:

Mind the Only Sense:

That mind is the real determinant in one's sense perception and not the sense organ nor the complex processes going on there was demonstrated by Dr. Leslie Weatherhead before a team of distinguished physicians and surgeons in the course of his experiments on a hypnotised subject Ethel already referred to on p. 5 of this essay. Dr. Weatherhead reports:

"Ethel's senses could all be controlled. If, when she was

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Hypnotised, I told her she would hear nothing, she could not detect a loud noise even close to her ears. If I told her sugar was bitter, she would spit it out, and she could smell several perfumes successively on being told that her handkerchief was drenched with them." (Op. cit., p. 124)

All this was, of course, imposed on the subject from outside by the hypnotist's suggestion and the sceptic may well aver that these sensory experiences of Ethel were merely her subjective constructions and did not in any way correspond to anything objectively real. But we would like to assert on other well-validated grounds that our mind has the inherent capacity of sensing directly something concretely physical existing in the physical space, without the employment of any physical organ or of any physiological process. To quote Sri Aurobindo:

"Mind is... able to assert its true character as the one and all-sufficient sense and free to apply to the objects of sense its pure and sovereign instead of its mixed and dependent action [as at present]." (The Life Divine, p. 63)

Sri Aurobindo has discussed this surprising point in great detail at four different places: in The Life Divine, in The Synthesis of Yoga, in his commentary on the Kena Upanishad, and, of course, in his Letters on Yoga. We quote here only one representative passage from his writings:

"... we have to realise first that the mind is the only real sense even in the physical process: its dependence on the Physical impressions is the result of the conditions of the material evolution, but not a thing fundamental and indis-

pensable. Mind is capable of a sight that is independent of the physical eye, a hearing that is independent of the physical ear, and so with the action of all the other senses." (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 833)

We repeat: our mind's dependence for its sense perception on the elaborate system of physical sense organs considered as its "too imperative and exclusive conveyors" is only habitual and a transitional evolutionary device. In reality, mind is not only the "sixth sense" as it is often called but the only true sense and the other sense organs are no more than its outer conveniences.

Now this direct use of the mind as the only real sense is not a freak or an aberration in the case of some exceptional "mystics": it can be made constant and normal by proper psycho-spiritual training. To quote Sri Aurobindo again:

"Those who have carried the study and experimentation of them to a certain extent, have found that we can sense things known only to the minds of others, things that exist only at a great distance, things that belong to another plane than the terrestrial but have here their effects; we can both sense them in their images and also feel, as it were, all that they are without any definite image proper to the five senses." (SABCL, Vol. 12, pp. 194-95)

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