In the Mother's Light

The Mind

WHAT is the proper place and function of the mind in spiritual life ? Is it a help or a hindrance ? Can spiritual illumination come by mere intellectual development ? How should one deal with the mind in order to make it aid and subserve one's spiritual end?

The mind is the pride, power and highest possession of man until he rises into the skies of the Spirit. It is by his developed mind that he can achieve a certain amount of control over his unruly desires and passions, train his body to be a docile beast of burden and, perceiving a higher goal than mere sense-gratification, create a centre of gravity above to counteract the constant pull of that which is below him. It is his mind that can give him a sense of inner freedom, purity and peace, absolutely independent of outer conditions and circumstances and, though his life and its normal working run counter to this new sense and perception, he can enlighten and modify them by his mind and, sooner or later, succeed in persuading them to seek and surrender to the Light. The mind can purify itself by renouncing its obsession with material objects, detaching itself from selfish vital interests and restraining its own discursive and desultory habits of thought and random vagrancy. Though not a possessor of knowledge, the mind is a seeker of it, and can greatly help man's progress towards the Truth by the sustained intensity of its spiritual seeking. "This intellectual faculty which makes man vain and leads him into error, is the very faculty which can also, once enlightened and purified, lead him farther, higher than the universal Nature, to the direct and conscious communion with the Lord of us all. He who is beyond all manifestation. This dividing intelligence, which enables him to separate himself from me (the Divine), enables him also to scale the heights to be climbed, without his advance being enchained and retarded by the totality of the universe, which in its immensity and complexity can- w achieve so prompt an ascent.”¹ A clear light in the intelligence

¹ Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.

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is a great asset in spiritual life. A wide sweep of perception, a penetrating discernment, a calm and balanced judgment and a constant uplook are the best mental safeguard against the insidious attacks of the lower nature.

But the mind does not always act for the harmonious development of the individual and his progress towards freedom and mastery. A creation and tool of the lower nature, it panders to the gratification of the ego and becomes a bar to the individual's spiritual advancement. If it seeks knowledge, it is only because the ego takes a delight in intellectual knowledge, even as the vital ego takes a delight in vital power and the physical ego in material possession and comfort. But the knowledge it usually seeks is intellectually informative and not spiritually illuminative —flashy scraps and snippets, culled from various sources, which it can proudly store and trot out at will. The egoistic drive is always for self-gratification, whether it is on the physical level or the vital or the mental, and so long as this drive is not detected and stopped, the soul cannot come forward and assume the reins of the nature. "Reason was the helper; Reason is the bar.”¹

Let us first pass in brief and rapid review the characteristic traits of the human mind before we proceed to consider how we ought to deal with it in spiritual life. The mind is an instrument of analysis and synthesis. It cuts up things from the whole and deals with them as if they were separate integers. It takes an obvious parcel of a whole and dissects it in order to study its structure and function, and then puts together the constituents to arrive at an aggregate or what it believes to be an independent whole. All its operations move on the basis of division, differentiation and distinction. It can deal successfully with finite objects or a conglomeration of finite objects, but it can never conceive or perceive the infinite. If it tries to do that, it finds itself at sea, and has to content itself with mere symbols and images and figures of speech.

It is then evident that the mind is constitutionally incapable of apprehending the infinite, and has, therefore, to be transcended,

¹ Thoughts and Glimpses by. Sri Aurobindo.

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if a flight to the infinite is the primary object of our spiritual life. But a flight may be an irrevocable one, entailing, as it has done up to now, an increasing renunciation of life in the world and culminating in the final disappearance of the soul in the immobile Infinite. That is an eventuality which the Mother does not envisage in her teachings, for it arbitrarily cuts up the unity of existence into two. Light and Life, and ignoring God's purpose in the world, lures the soul away from the field of its divine perfection and creative self-expression in Nature. "Even he who might have arrived, at perfect contemplation in silence and solitude, could only have done so by extracting himself from the body, by making an abstraction of himself; and thus the substance of which the body is constituted would remain as impure, as imperfect as before, since he would have abandoned it to itself; by a misguided mysticism, by the attraction of supraphysical splendours, by the egoistic desire of being united with Thee for his personal satisfaction, he would have turned his back upon the reason of his earthly existence, he would have refused cowardlike to accomplish his mission to redeem and purify Matter. To know that a part of our being is perfectly pure, to commune with that purity, to be identified with it, can be useful only if we subsequently utilise this knowledge for hastening the earthly transfiguration, for accomplishing Thy sublime work.”¹ If we take a flight to the Infinite, it is not to merge in but to be united with It, and to return to the world with Its force and benediction in order to conquer and transform our material life for Its self- revelation. We cannot, therefore, afford to coerce the mind into a complete inaction and impose upon it a progressive atrophy in order to transcend it. The mind has its essential, indispensable function in the economy of our triple nature and must be developed to its highest perfection, so that with all its faculties quickened, widened and illumined, it may serve the soul in its work of divine manifestation.

What is the essential and indispensable function of the mind in the hierarchy of the instrumental nature of man ? The mind is "an instrument of formation, organisation and action. And. it

¹Prayers and Meditations of the Mother.

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is in these functions that it attains its full value and real utility.”¹ "It is not an instrument of knowledge—it is incapable of finding knowledge—but it must be moved by knowledge. Knowledge belongs to a region much higher than that of the human mind, even beyond the region of pure ideas.”² The mind forms thoughts, that is to say, partial and, in most cases, dwarfed and distorted representations of Truth, and transmits them to the vital (prāṇa) which infuses them with its own energy and passes them on to the physical being for materialisation in life. If we follow the ascetic way, we shall reduce the mind to a blank and let its faculties starve and languish or be paralysed by a long disuse; but in a dynamic spirituality they have to be fully awakened, trained and developed to their utmost perfection. Instead of forming thoughts from its dim perception of the remote shadowy aspects of Truth, the mind can receive, in silence and in in a growing light, the messages, intimations and revelations of Truth and employ its organised faculties to give them the right forms for life-effectuation.

But in spiritual life, though we instinctively feel the necessity of imposing a purificatory discipline on the vital (prāṇa) and the body, we usually neglect the mind and, except during meditation or short spells of concentration, let it roam and browse just as it pleases, and do not think that it too needs a scrupulous discipline of restraint and renunciation, if it is to be transformed, and if our consciousness is to transcend it. No transcendence is possible without renunciation. If we cling to the normal delights of the mind and its habitual interests, we shall never feel the necessity of climbing to the higher realms of Light an discovering the Truth and its native delight. It is by the renunciation of our absorption in the gross pleasures and preoccupations of the body that we have risen into the tumult and thrill of life's stimulating adventure, and, again, by a renunciation'' of the exclusive goad of desires and the blinding storm of passions, into the partial poise and quiet of the thinking mind. But since we find even this poise precarious and this quiet

¹ The Science of Living by the Mother,

² ibid.

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besieged and obscured by the waves of the vital and the disintegrating inertia of the body, we have to renounce the mind's customary, mechanical movements and its separative tendency, and aspire to ascend to the higher reaches of our consciousness, where alone, away from the dividing and limiting operation of the mind, we shall realise the unity of universal existence and the truth of both our essential and phenomenal being. But the pleasures of reasoning and speculation have so enthralled us that we think we can know everything by means of them, and even if, as in spiritual life, we feel the need of silencing or at least quieting the mind, we cannot easily arrive at a total renunciation of its habitual, hampering activities. Especially, in this age of exaggerated intellectuality, we are apt to confuse spirituality with mental accomplishments and let the power of our pen or the eloquence of our tongue to duty for spiritual experience. It is not unoften that the initial fervour of our heart for spiritual progress is overlaid with a plethora of intellectual activity which revels in the analysis, synthesis, criticism and exposition of spiritual truths of which our mind knows little or nothing by realisation, but everything by imagination, inference and reasoning, or, at second-hand, from books; and many a promising spiritual career is wrecked by this overmastering passion to know and understand and expound, rather than to be and become, which should be the prime objective of spiritual life.

There is a story told of St. Jerome which finely illustrates our point. It is said that, having renounced all other pleasures, he found that he could not renounce the pleasure of reading, and so had to carry his library to the desert, where he repaired for the purpose of penance and purification. "One day, during a fever, he dreamed that, at the Last Judgment, Christ asked him who he was, and he replied that he was a Christian. The answer came : 'Thou liest, thou art a follower of Cicero and not of Christ’ Thereupon he was ordered to be scourged. At length Jerome in his dream cried out: 'Lord, if ever again I possess worldly books, or if ever again I read such, I have denied Thee.’ This, he adds, ' was no sleep or idle dream’.”¹ Here is obviously an extreme case

¹ History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell,

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of ascetic self-denial, but it has, all the same, an unmistakable lesson for those who engross themselves in unremitting mental activities either in the deluded hope of being thereby able to follow the spiritual path better or simply because they cannot overcome the force of habit. One of the reasons why we have so few original and creative thinkers in modern times is this inveterate habit of constant and promiscuous reading and thinking, which keep the surface layers of the mind in a chronic fever of activity and prevent the deeper layers, the deeper faculties from opening and developing. It is not without justice that Whitman characterises the modern mind as "dazed and darkened by reading". A sort of mental indigestion is a prevailing malady of the modern intelligentsia and accounts not only for the catalepsy of its intuitive powers—intuitive thought, intuitive imagination, intuitive perception—but also for its inaptitude and disinclination for the spiritual life, and the fungus growth of doubt and disbelief choking its mind. Every part of human nature has, unquestionably, a right to autonomy, but it must be an autonomy respecting and conforming to the organic unity of the whole, and not exclusive and subversive of it. Besides, as we have already said, in the scale of life's values, the higher must always be given a greater emphasis of attention and an ampler scope of development than the lower; for, it is on the perfection of the higher that depend the perfection and secure fulfilment of the lower; it is, indeed, the higher and the highest that explain and justify the lower and the lowest in the scale of life's values. No part of our nature has to be neglected or re-pressed, but each must be developed to its highest perfection and integrated with all around the central truth and substance of our composite being. If the autonomy of a part, even of a dominant part, degenerates into autocracy, oppressing and obstructing the growth and legitimate self-expression of the others, then it is a serious menace to the harmony of the whole. It is from such a tyranny of excessive intellectuality that humanity is suffering today. All its science, politics, economics, sociology—in fact, all its intellectual labour is threatening it more and more with a complete disruption of the balance of

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its life and the harmony of its being. An exclusive emphasis on the material values of existence and their glorification in philosophy, arts and science seems to be the sole pre-occupation of the mind of modem humanity. If it turns, as in a few exceptional individuals, to the ethical values, it gives them a utilitarian bent; if it turns, as in a still fewer exceptional individuals, to spirituality, it reduces it to a code of ethics, trimmed and tabulated by the mechanising intellect, and exults in its summary negation of all that exists beyond its very limited ken. Its vaunted rationalism is a willful exclusion of true knowledge, and it is no wonder that it is paying rather heavily for it. Its brilliant, un- spiritual, egoistic, sense-enmeshed, matter-enslaved intellect is leading its life from problems to predicaments and from predicaments to perils. It is a blind chase—after what ?

What should we do with the mind in order to make it help our spiritual evolution and become a supple and docile instrument of the Divine, which it is meant to be ? The Mother says, "The mind has got to be made silent and attentive in order to receive knowledge from above and manifest it.”¹ For developing the capacity to receive, it has to purify itself of all its preferences, . preconceptions and prejudices, its fixed ideas and rigid principles, its narrow outlook and arrogant dogmatism, its categoric affirmations and negations, and turn in intent and aspiring silence to the Light which broods over it with an infinite motherly solicitude to illumine it. For developing the capacity to manifest knowledge, it has to widen itself by renouncing its attachment to its habitual thoughts and ideas and develop all its faculties to their utmost potentialities of perfection. When the Light descends, the mind, surrendered to it, will be not only lit up with knowledge, but transformed in all its operations, —its thought, reason, imagination, perception, memory,— all changed in their basic stuff and substance. It will become an inspired instrument of a developing concord and harmony, instead of being, as it is now, a confused creator of division and discord. A quiet and aspiring mind is the nursery of intuition.

Let us conclude by quoting at some length from Words of

¹ The Science of Living by the Mother,

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the Mother in which the Mother points out some of the normal defects and limitations of the human mind. "The whole mental world in which you live is limited, even though you may not know or feel its limitations, and something must come and break down this building in which your mind has shut itself and liberate it. For instance, you have some fixed rules, ideas or principles to which you attribute an absolute importance; most often it is an adherence to certain moral principles or precepts, such as the commandment : 'Honour thy father and mother...’ or 'Thou shaft not kill’, and the rest. Each man has some fad or one preferred shibboleth or another, each thinks that he is free from this or that prejudice from which others suffer, and is willing to regard such notions as quite false; but he imagines that his is not like them, it is for him the truth, the real truth. An attachment to a rule of the mind is an indication of a blindness still hiding somewhere. Take, for example, the very universal superstition, prevalent all over the world, that asceticism and spirituality are one and the same thing. If you describe someone as a spiritual man or a spiritual woman, people at once think of one who does not eat or sits all day without moving, one who lives in a hut in great poverty, one who has given away all he had and keeps nothing for himself. This is the picture that immediately arises in the minds of ninety-nine people out of a hundred when you speak of a spiritual man; the one proof of spirituality for them is poverty and abstinence from everything that is pleasant or comfortable. This is a mental construction which must be thrown down if you are to he free to see and follow the spiritual truth. For you come to the spiritual life with a sincere aspiration and you want to meet the Divine and realise the Divine in your consciousness and in your life; and then what happens is that you arrive in a place which is not at all a hut and meet a Divine One who is living a comfortable life, eating freely, surrounded by beautiful and luxurious things, not distributing what he has to the poor, but accepting and enjoying all that people give him. At once with your fixed mental rule you are bewildered and cry, 'Why, what is this ? I thought I was to meet a spiritual man.’ This false conception has to be broken down and disappear. Once it is gone, you find something that is much higher than your narrow ascetic rule,

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a complete openness that leaves the being free. If you are to get something, you accept it, and if you are to give up the very same thing, you, with an equal willingness, leave it. Things come and you take them up; things go and you let them pass, with the same smile of equanimity in the taking or the leaving.

"Or, again, you have adopted as your golden rule, 'Thou shah not kill’ and have a horror for cruelty and slaughter. Do not be surprised if you are immediately put in the presence of killing, not only once but repeatedly, until you understand that your ideal is no more than a mental principle and that a seeker of the spiritual truth should not be bound and attached to a mental rule. And when once you are free from it, you will find perhaps that all these scenes which troubled you—and were indeed sent in order to trouble you and shake you out of your mental building —have, singularly enough, ceased altogether to happen in your presence.”¹

It will have been clear from the above consideration that, in spiritual life, the best discipline for the mind is its rejection of all egoistic interests and habits of thought and reasoning, and a growing surrender, in serenity and silence, to the divine Light. None of its essential functions have to be suppressed, but all have to be offered and polarised to the Infinite. "When we have passed beyond knowings, then we shall have knowledge.”² "Transform reason into ordered intuition; let all thyself be light. This is thy goal ”³. A regular practice of a constant and loving concentration on the Divine and an unfailing reference of all mental movements to His Light is the surest means of making the mind "receive and manifest knowledge."

¹ Words of the Mother.

² Thoughts and Glimpses by Sri Aurobindo,

³ ibid,

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