This book for sadhaks or seekers of Integral Yoga is based on the writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. It is a practical guide for sadhana of Integral Yoga.
On Yoga
THEME/S
XXI
Mind , Life and Matter, the mental . the vita l and the physical. arc the three instrument s of manifestation o f the Spirit in the field of embodied existence up on earth. But all these three instrument s arein their present normal functioning very much flawed and imperfect.. Each one o f them confronts a genuine sadhaka with its own specific brand of difficulties and resistances at e very step of sadhana. Yet. on that account. we cannot feel disgusted with them and seek to reject or even annul them as far as possible. all though many of the adherents of traditional ascetic spirituality would prescribe that method of total rejection in their pure elan for an unburdened flight to the naked splendours of the Spirit.
But that cannot be our method of sadhana in the practice of the Integral Yoga. As the Mot her has reminded us:
"When you need to run aw ay from a thing in order not to experience it. it mean s that you are not above it. you arc still on the same level. Any thing that suppresses, diminishes or lessens can not bring freedom. Freedom ha s to be experienced in the who le of life an d in all sensations .' (Me w, Vol. 10. p. 1% )
So we have to be clear a t the very outset that. in spite o f all the serious obstacles they put on the sadhaka ' s Path . we must not try to bypass in an y way the mental , vita l and physical instruments o f our being but seek to remedy their defects. purify their functioning . and finally transform them into fit vehicles of divine manifestation here upon earth itself. For, is that not the aim of the Integral Yoga ')
Our Yoga is not an escapist one nor are we enamored of Nirvanic non-manifestation . Also , we do not want to remain content with experiencing the bliss of the Di vine Presence in the depths of our inn e r being . We aim at the full establishment o f the divine Light. Consciousness. Power, Love and Ananda even in the entire field of our outer dynamic nature. In Sri Aurobindo' s luminous words : "Life is the field of a divine manifestation not yet com-
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plete: here, in life, on earth, in the body,... we have to unveil the Godhead; here we must make its transcendent greatness, light and sweetness real to our consciousness, here possess and, as far as may be, express it." (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 68)
If that be so, we have to squarely face the difficulties presented by our Mind, and Life and Body, successfully tackle them and turn these instruments into joyous and capable collaborators in the Supreme's manifestation upon earth. Hence we propose to devote three successive chapters to a succinct delineation of the sadhana-procedure concerning the mental, the vital and the physical parts of our complex being. First with the Mind.
Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita piteously complained to Lord Krishna about the intractable difficulties faced by him in his mental part. He said: "Restless indeed is the mind, O Krishna; it is vehement, strong and unconquerable; I deem it as hard to control as the wind." (VI. 34)
But what are the very common normal difficulties faced by the sadhaka in his mind so far as the building up of his spiritual life is concerned? To cite only a few of them: (i) many types of doubts and misgivings are the habitual contributions of Mind, disconcerting the sadhaka at every step; (ii) Mind is very clever in the art of fallacious reasoning bringing confusion to the sadhaka' s consciousness; (iii) Mind has an inveterate tendency to show the white as something black and the black as something white, thus derailing the forward march of the sadhaka; (iv) Mind is over-prompt to offer a 'plausible' explanation to anything and every-thing even when that surpasses its reach or capability; (v) Mind misses the globality of truth, concentrates only on a fraction of it, and then seeks by all means to project it as the whole of the truth, thus leading to the blocking of the sadhaka' s forward movement towards the discovery of the genuine Truth; (vi) etc.
Now all these and allied difficulties presented by Mind arise out of a basic trait of its nature. If the sadhaka would like to turn his mind from being an enemy as at present to a friend in sadhana, he has to carefully recognise this trait, disentangle the knots, and disengage its true role as a harbinger of truth.
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Mind : The What and the How of It
Mind is that principle in our being which is eager to know, understand, discriminate, imagine and play with ideas. It seeks to discover an underlying thread of harmony which interlinks events and objects and phenomena apparently disparate and disjointed.
The second principal characteristic of Mind is that it possesses the necessary capability and skill of organization which helps to 'realise' in fact all that initially remains as abstract ideas, ideals and mere concepts.
All these traits Mind has received from its most fundamental character. To elucidate this basic character Sri Aurobindo writes:
"Mind... is a reflective mirror which receives presentations or images of a pre-existent Truth or Fact, either external to or at least vaster than itself. It represents to itself from moment to moment the phenomenon that is or has been. It possesses also the faculty of constructing in itself possible images other than those of the actual fact presented to it; that is to say, it represents to itself not only phenomenon that has been but also phenomenon that may be: ... It has, finally, the faculty of forecasting new modifications which it seeks to construct out of the meeting of what has been and what may be, out of the fulfilled possibility and the unfulfilled, some-thing that it sometimes succeeds in constructing more or less exactly, sometimes fails to realise, but usually finds cast into other forms than it forecasted and turned to other ends than it desired or intended." (The Life Divine, pp. 118-19)
."Mind in its essence is a consciousness which measures, limlist, cuts out forms of things from the indivisible whole and con-ins them as if each were a separate integer. Even with what exists only as obvious parts and fractions, Mind establishes this fiction of its ordinary commerce that they are things with which it can deal separately and not merely as aspects of a whole.... It is this essential characteristic of Mind which conditions the workings of all its operative powers, whether conception, perception, sensation or the dealings of creative thought. It conceives, perceives
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senses things as if rigidly cut out from a background or a mass and employs them as fixed units of the material given to it for creation or possession.... Mind may divide, multiply, add, subtract, but it cannot get beyond the limits of this mathematics. If it goes beyond and tries to conceive a real whole, it loses itself in a foreign element ; it falls from its own firm ground into the ocean of the intangible , into the abysms of the infinite where it can neither perceive, conceive, sense nor deal with its subject for creation and enjoyment." (Ibid., pp. 162-63)
Thus we see that the basic traits of the operations of our ordinary mind are (i) to treat the indivisible as something divisible; (ii)miss the vision of the Truth in its entirety; but, instead, (iii)manipulate truth's numerous shadow-formations; and, finally, (iv)to construct wider and wider circles on the same plane, never being able to transcend it, and considering this movement alone as the progression in knowledge and power.
Now, whenever and wherever Mind becomes operative, these basic features of its functioning cannot but manifest in one form or another, overtly or in a clandestine way behind many deceiving masks. And this deplorable fact gives rise to many problems in the sadhana-life of the aspirant. We give below a short list of the defects, disabilities and wrong tendencies of the impure mind of man. The perusal of this list will make abundantly clear to our readers why a proper sadhana of the mind becomes so very essential for a serious sadhaka.
What a Sadhaka Should Know about His Mind
(1)The habitual mind of normal man is always in movement: it does not know how to stop. It is in a constant motion of going and coming, vibrating and running — but it does not know why so or to what destination. It is because of this characteristic phenomenon that the Mother has compared the ordinary mind to a restless squirrel caught in a cage.
(2)Our mental field is like a busy crossroads where a thou-sand unwanted thoughts and suggestions are constantly streaming
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in and going away from. As Sri Aurobindo has trenchantly put it:
"... we do not really live apart in an inner privacy or solitude, our mind is a receiving, developing and modifying machine into which there is being constantly passed from moment to moment a ceaseless foreign flux, a streaming mass of disparate materials from above, from below, from outside. Much more than half our thoughts and feelings are not our own in the sense that they take form out of ourselves; of hardly anything can it be said that it is truly original to our nature." (The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 69)
(3) All spiritual truth is in its nature very complex and beyond the grasp of the ordinary intelligence of man. But mind has got an inveterate tendency to seize it in a simplistic manner. It tries to force a multidimensional truth into the confines of a two-dimensional space and makes a futile attempt to explain it in that impossible way. This cannot but lead to various types of self-contradictions. And mind wonders confusedly how to reconcile the pairs of apparently 'irreconcilable' opposite truths; such as, personal effort and the action of Grace; free-will and determinism; law and miracles; causality and finalism; etc.
(4)Mind is by nature exclusive in its tendency. It fails to hold all the facets of a truth in the bosom of a harmonised synthesis. Hence its intolerant declaration: "Both cannot be true at the same time; either A or B but surely not A and B; if P is possible, Q is bound to be impossible."
In this way mind becomes the progenitor of numerous dogmas and inflexible opinions.
(5)Mind moves from the known to the unknown. It has no pure hold on the truth of the future. Hence its faith in that truth is highly deficient. It seeks to test the possibilities of the future on the anvil of the ascertained facts of the present; it cannot visualise the realisation of the present as but precursor and aid to the already predetermined realisation of the future.
The consequence is that our mind is always afflicted with a strong sense of doubt and disbelief, hesitation and cynicism. It arbitrarily fixes a limit to the future's possibilities: 'Thus far and
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no farther" is its loud and self-confident assertion.
A sadhaka who falls under the spell of such a doubting mind walks on the path of his sadhana with faltering steps; he cannot run to the future unknown, buoyed by the all-daring spirit of a confident faith.
(6)Our normal mind can never act as an instrument for the secure possession of any truth. It has perforce to move forward basing itself at every step on the fallible crutches of hypotheses and inferences. Let us listen to what Sri Aurobindo has to say on this basic insufficiency of mind:
"... a mere mental activity will not bring a change of conscious-ness, it can only bring a change of mind. And if your mind is sufficiently mobile, it will go on changing from one thing to another till the end without arriving at any sure way or any spiritual harbour. The mind can think and doubt and question and accept and withdraw its acceptance, make formations and unmake them, pass decisions and revoke them, judging always on the surface and by surface indications and therefore never coming to any deep and firm experience of Truth, but by itself it can do no more." (Letters on Yoga, Part One, p. 161)
(7)When confronted with different alternative courses of action at any moment of one's life, it becomes very difficult for the mind of the sadhaka to come to any sure decision. Man has lost the surity of the species-instinct of sub-human creatures but at the same time has not gained the far greater certainty of spiritual in-tuition. Hence is the sadhaka' s mind always in a state of vacillation . For his mind can, with its so-called logical dexterity, furnish equally cogent reasons for and against any idea, any position or any course of action. Therefore mental 'proof is no proof at all nor is any mental decision infallible in content.
(8)Man's mind greatly contributes to his miserable state of constant worries and anxieties vis-à-vis the unfolding of his future. Animals are wrapped in a fold of blind darkness; they move from moment to moment; hence they are exempt from any tendency to unnecessary and irrational brooding anxiety.
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But man ' s mind lives in half-lights and darkness, amid probabilities and possibilities, and is hence totally uncertain about what is going to happen to him even in the very near future. Thus mind has become for man the great harasser and the most potent agent for the creation in him of a state of disabling anxiety-neuroses. In the words of the Mother :
"With man there has begun this perpetual worrying about what is going to happen, and this worry is the principal, if not the sole cause of his torment. With this objectivising consciousness there has begun anxiety, painful imaginations, worry, torment, anticipation of future catastrophes.... Man is too conscious to be indifferent, he is not conscious enough to know what will happen... of all earth's creatures he is the most miserable." (M C W, Vol. 9, p. 303)
Such being the nature of the defects and disabilities and the malign influences of the mind of man , the sadhaka of the Integral Yoga may get puzzled and come to his wit 's end. But , instead of feeling unduly discouraged , he should adopt a course of sadhana which will neutralise much of the backward and downward drag exercised by his mind on the progress of his sadhana-life.
But this sadhana has a few distinct parts and stages covering a wide-ranging programme of action. Some of the elements of this programme are applicable to the preparatory stag e of sadhana; a few others pertain to the intermediate stage of development; while the rest can be successfully undertaken only by the advanced sadhakas.
( 1) Acquisition of the Power of Concentration: The mind of man is habitually dispersed in various directions, and occupied and preoccupied with a host of pull s and pushes and varying interest s. Mind does not know how to sit still even for a short while. In the Buddhist tradition our mind has been compared to a restless monkey which has developed some itching and oozing skin-eruption all over its body and, to cap it all, someone has sprinkled ex
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tra-hot chilli powder over these skin-sores. How quiet will the monkey be under these constraining conditions? So is the case with the normal functioning of our mind. And no sadhana is possible with such a restless dispersed state of our mind. The sadhaka must have to acquire sufficient power of concentration such that his mind' may remain steady and settled, as long as he wants, on one chosen field or object or idea already determined by the sadhaka' s will
(2)To Make the Mind Plastic: A common weakness of our mental being is that it is very much one-sided, and stubborn in its personal opinion. As a result we lose the plasticity so much needed for genuine progress on the Path. In the absence of this plasticity, new light from above cannot enter into our conscious field. The absence of plasticity leads to the diminution of receptivity; and lacking in receptivity, we remain stagnant as "frogs in the well".
As a help to the acquirement of necessary plasticity, the sadhaka should train his mind to defend any 'thesis' and its 'antithesis' in turn with equally valid argumentation and then pass on to the formulation of a 'synthesis' which will harmonise the two first propositions by integrating the partial truths contained in them.
In practical terms, whenever the sadhaka is faced with another person's opinion, however contrary in nature it may appear to be to his own, he should not rush forward impetuously to impose his own view on the other; instead, he should try to place himself in — the interlocutor's position, seek to understand his view with great sympathy. This will help him to widen his mental consciousness instead of keeping it confined in a narrow bound. This will immensely help in the reception of newer and newer light from above and within.
(3)Harmonious Ordering of the Mental Field:One of the most deplorable conditions - but quite a common one at that of man's functioning consciousness is that almost everything there seems to be cloudy and obscure; nothing is quite clear and distinct. There is no well-ordered organisation there.
Our thoughts and feelings and ideas and imaginations, at times blatantly opposed to each other, are allowed to dwell there in utter confusion in a state of uneasy co-existence. This state of affairs has to be remedied. A properly integrated organisation has to
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built up there. Only those thoughts and feelings and ideas and urges which are in alignment with the central goal of the sadhaka should
be allowed to have their permitted places there: the door should be slammed in the face of all discordant elements.
(4)Building up the Mental Individuality: The Mother has always insisted that a sadhaka should patiently disengage his own truenature from the opaque covering of foreign influences pouring in upon him all the time from outside. He should be his own self and not the spurious one with which he identifies himself without even knowing it. The Mother has referred on many an occasion to the absolute necessity of this process of "individualisation", Here is, for instance, one passage from her Talk of 28 July 1954:
"... at least ninety-nine parts of an individual's character are made of soft butter... on which if one presses one's thumb, an imprint is made. Now, everything is a 'thumb': an expressed thought, a sentence read, an object looked at, an observation of what some-One else does, and of one's neighbour's will. And all these... are... intermingled, each one trying to get the uppermost and causing a kind of perpetual conflict within..." (M C W, Vol. 6, pp. 256-57)
Hence arises the necessity on the part of every sadhaka to discern his true nature and essential individuality which can stand as a rock of self-defence against all undesirable invading influences.
(5) To be governed by the Enlightened Reason: Many people live mostly by their impulses; they are not "reasonable" at all. But a sadhaka has to be careful so that he may successfully control all the imperious urges of his impulses and instincts and obey only those inspirations which are in conformity with his deepest aspiration and his luminous ideals in sadhana.
For this the sadhaka has to develop in himself a kind of mental discernment whose role it will be to govern the rest of his being. Of course, in the further development towards spiritual illumination, the reason itself has to be transcended and be replaced by intuition. But that is still miles and miles away. In the meantime the sadhaka has to make the enlightened reason, the liberated in
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telligence, — freed from the slavery to vital impulses and physical appetites,— the governor of his life. Here is a relevant passage from the Mother's writings:
"Of course, it is well understood that reason is not the supreme capacity of man and must be surpassed, but it is quite obvious that if you don't have it, you will live an altogether incoherent life .... The least thing will upset you completely and you won 't even know why, and still less how to remedy it. While someone who has established within himself a state of active, clear reasoning, can face attacks of all kinds , emotional attacks or any trials whatever.... Well, reason can stand back a little, look at all that , smile and say, 'Oh! no, one must not make a fuss over such a small thing.' If you do not have reason, you will be like a cork on a stormy sea ." (M C W Vol. 8, p. 184)
(6) To Establish Mastery over One's Thought and Imagination: We commonly believe that our subjective thoughts and feelings are absolutely innocuous in their bearings. We think and feel and then forget; the matter should end there: such is our habitual conviction. But the fact is otherwise.
Everyone of our thoughts and feelings is very much creative in nature. As soon as it is indulged in, it becomes an independent formation, leaves the mental field of the person, and gets into the environing atmosphere of the universal mind. It then invariably goes on its errand of fulfilling the object which was the subject-matter of the thought. When a strong feeling or will is added to the thought, the latter's creative potency gets increased many fold.
Not only that. The habitual thoughts and feelings and imaginations that are normally indulged in by the sadhaka, create a corresponding atmosphere around his being. This ambience, depending on its quality, may bring about beneficial results to the sadhaka' s life, or give rise to undesirable happenings or even serious disasters. The sadhaka should therefore be vigilant that he fills his mental arena with those thoughts and feelings and imaginations which are luminous, beneficial and positively creative; he must, on the other hand, scrupulously avoid all thoughts and feelings that are
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baneful, malign and pessimistically negative.
This mastery over the thought-apparatus of his mental field is a very important element of the sadhaka' s sadhana of the mind.
(7) Making and Breaking of the Principles of Action: Man is a mental being. He cannot sacrifice the dignity of his mental status and act under the blind impulsions of his physical instincts and vital urges. He has to erect some well-considered principles and direct all his actions under their guidance.
But all principles are relative and are in the nature of discardable scaffolding. Each principle may help the sadhaka temporarily at appropriate time and place. But with the further progress of the being the same principle may act as a chain of bondage when it becomes anachronistic and hampers further progression. Therefore, as soon as its utility is over, the sadhaka should not hesitate to discard it mercilessly and adopt instead a still higher principle which will help the sadhaka make a new lease of progress.
This capacity of making and breaking of rules and principles wenever a genuine need is felt for this operation, is a very important part of the sadhana of the mind. As the Mother has pointed out:
"... the more mental activity one has, the more does one indulge in this little game. And there are ideas to which one clings! hooked on to them as though all life depended upon that! I have known people who had fixed upon one central idea in their formation and said, 'All the rest may go to pieces, I don't care, but this idea will stand: this is the truth.' And when they come to yoga, amusingly enough it is this idea which is constantly battered, all the time! All events, all circumstances come and strike at it until it begins to totter, and then one fine day they say in despair, 'Ah, my idea has gone.'
"Someone has said rather poetically, 'One must know how to lose all to win all.' And it is true, especially for the mind, for if you do not know how to lose everything, you can gain nothing." (M C W, Vol. 4, pp. 202-03)
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(8)Discouragement of the Attitude of the Doubting Thomas: One of the greatest stumbling blocks presented by the mind is that it is by its very nature suspicious and disbelieving. It is prone to indulging in doubting everything and in every field. Many a sadhaka' s sadhana-life has been shattered because of this doubting mania. The Mother has warned the aspirants on the spiritual path about this crafty enemy and advised them what to do in this regard. Let us listen to her:
"... when faith has been granted, when one has had this sudden inner illumination, in order to preserve it constantly in the active consciousness individual effort is altogether indispensable. One must hold on to one's faith, will one's faith; one must seek it cultivate it, protect it.
"In the human mind there is a morbid and deplorable habit of doubt, argument, secepticism. This is where human effort must be put in: the refusal to admit them, the refusal to listen to them and still more the refusal to follow them. No game is more dangerous than playing mentally with doubt and secepticism. They are not only enemies, they are terrible pitfalls, and once one falls into them, it becomes tremendously difficult to pull oneself out." (M C W, Vol. 9, p. 351)
(9)To Break the Misalliance between the Vital and the Mental: Man's mind often acts as the misguided advocate of the impure vital. It tries to legitimise and rationalise all the weaknesses and the wrong movements of the unregenerate vital. Instead of acting as the enlightened leader and guide of the beguiled physical and vital parts of man, mind itself loses its freedom by and by and becomes a bond-slave of the two lower parts of our being. The disastrous consequences that then follow in the sadhaka' s sadhana-life have been graphically described by Sri Aurobindo in the following telling passage of The Life Divine:
"Man is a mental being and the mind is the leader of his life and body; but this is a leader who is much led by his followers and has sometimes no other will than what they impose on him. Mind
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in spite of its power is often impotent before the inconscient and subconscient which obscure its clarity and carry it away on the tide of instinct or impulse; in spite of its clarity it is fooled by vital and emotional suggestions into giving sanction to ignorance and error, to wrong thought and to wrong action, or it is obliged to look on while the nature follows what it knows to be wrong, dangerous or evil." (pp. 899-900)
The sadhaka of the Integral Yoga has to assiduously guard against this disastrous eventuality and resolutely restrain his mind from dittoing the wrong action and reaction of the errant vital even when it actually fails to bar the vital and the physical from going astray. Mind must keep its light steadily burning, sending the message loud and strong to the unregenerate vital: "Yet I know, what you are doing is wrong!"
This sort of luminous admonition persistently administered to the erring vital will sooner or later bring sense to the vital itself.
(10) Enthronement of the Highest Level of Mind: Our mind is not a simple unidimensional faculty. There are many stages in its ascending movement, many a level in its dynamic functioning. The sadhaka has to mount step by step the stair of its upward ascension.
Starting with the lowest and most fallible level, the 'physical mentality', he has to pass through the next higher stage, the 'life mentality', to reach at last what Sri Aurobindo has termed as 'pure reflective mentality' of which the 'true intellectual understanding' is a very important function. Sri Aurobindo characterises it as follows:
"... it should not be involved in [the] lower movements, but stand back from the object, and observe disinterestedly, put it in its right place in the whole by force of comparison, contrast, analogy, reason from its rightly observed data by deduction, induction, inference and holding all its gains in memory and supplementing them by a chastened and rightly-guided imagination view all in the light of a trained and disciplined judgment. Such isthe pure intellectual understanding of which disinterested observation, judg-
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ment and reasoning are the law and characterising action." (The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 296-97)
The sadhaka has to see that, in his normal life-functionings and in his dealings with other men, he habitually take s recourse to this pure intellectual mentality.
(I I) Equality of the Thinking Mind: This is the last limb of mental sadhana, apparently most difficult for man the mental creature who is passionately proud of his mental possession.
The fact is that the mind of man, because of its inherent nature, is always engaged in a mental activity whose different element s are ideations, imaginations, beliefs, judgments, opinions, and many others. Now, in its undisciplined functioning the mind of man is stubbornly attached to all these mental formations and cannot look at anything, be that a person, situation or happening, except through the coloured distorting glass of these tightly-held personal possessions of the individual man. But this is a serious obstacle to the reception of truth and the progressing march of sadhana. Hence the sadhaka of the integral Yoga has to make every effort to establish in his mental field a perfectly disinterested equality vis-à-vis all the already-cherished formations. The indispensability of this sadhana has been clearly brought out by Sri Aurobindo in the following passage of The Synthesis of Yoga:
"The equality of the thinking mind will be a part and a very important part of the perfection of the instrument s in the nature. Our present attractive self-justifying attachment to our intellectual preferences, our judgments, opinions, imaginations,... to the current repetitions of our habitual mind , to the insistence of our pragmatic mind, to the limitations eve n of our intellectual truth-mind, must go the way of other attachments and yield to the impartiality of an equal vision. The equal thought-mind will... not hold itself bound and limited by its knowledge or forbidden by it to proceed
to fresh illumination, nor lay too fierce a grasp on truth , eve n when using it to the full, or tyranneously chain it to its present formulations. This perfect equality of the thinking mind is indispensable
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because the objective of this progress is the greater light which belongs to a higher plane of spiritual cognizance." (p. 679)
Here ends our essay on the sadhana of the Mind. There are, of course, two other stages: (i) Establishment of mental silence; and (ii) Ascent of consciousness beyond normal mind into the 'spiritual mind planes'; and, then, further on to Supramental Gnosis and beyond. But these sadhana s are not meant for us who are just pygmies and tyros on the spiritual Path.
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